freedom and reason

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, arguably the man most responsible for the myriad of distortions surrounding the Soviet socialist system, is dead. Anti-communists revere his name and cite as truth his book, The Gulag Archipelago, because the terrifying image of the massive political prison system, found in Solzhenitsyn’s historical fiction and in the really-existing United States, serve a propagandistic function. High schoolers are often required to read The Gulag Archipelago as part of bourgeois indoctrination.

In Blackshirts and Reds, Michael Parenti wonders:

Some Russian anticommunist writers such as Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov, and many U.S. anticommunist liberals, maintain that the gulag existed right down to the last days of communism. If so, where did it disappear to? After Stalins death in 1953, more than half of the gulag inmates were freed, according to the study of the NKVD files previously cited. But if so many others remained incarcerated, why have they not materialized? When the communist states were over- thrown, where were the half-starved hordes pouring out of the internment camps with their tales of travail?

However, the public is never told about Solzhenitsyn’s theory that the Soviet Union was a creation of elite and wicked Jews, anti-Christian outsiders hellbent on world conquest. It’s true: despite his denial that this is not what he meant precisely, Solzhenitsyn’ work is filled with rabid anti-Jewish sentiment that implies that a Jewish cabal lies behind world history. The Gulag Archipelago dwells on the camp guards with Jewish names. His ethnonationalist tract August 1914 exaggerates Jewish influences in Russian history. And his two-volume tome, Two Hundred Years Together, masquerading as an honest account of the historic relationship between Jews and Russians – as if Jews aren’t Russians – is deeply anti-Jewish. He writes, “the population of Russia, as a whole, regarded the new terror as a Jewish terror.”

He exaggerated about many other things, as well, not least amomg them is his claim about leftwing opposition to the Vietnam War: “But members of the US antiwar movement wound up being involved in the betrayal of Far Eastern nations, in a genocide and in the suffering today imposed on 30 million people there.” The US government was responsible for around 3 million deaths in Indo-China alone during this period. Who exactly did the United States betray by not killing more human beings?

His attack on humanism is reprehensible. In a 1978 speech at Harvard (A World Split Apart ), Solzhenitsyn argues, “If humanism were right in declaring that man is born to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to die, his task on earth evidently must be of a more spiritual nature.”

The first part of the argument asserts that, if the purpose of being born is happiness, human beings would be immortal. Why? People are unhappy with the prospect of dying in part because people enjoy living. Life makes people happy and, not wanting to be unhappy, and not being able to imagine the content of annihilation, they don’t want to die. People also are unhappy about the prospect of death because they fear suffering. But not everybody who dies suffers. If I pass away in my sleep tomorrow, or if I cease to exist painlessly, surrounded by friends and family, I cannot say that I am now feeling unhappy about these future possibilities. Are some of those who die peacefully unhappy? It’s an odd question. Nobody is unhappy after they’re dead. The dead feel nothing. Do the deaths of others make us unhappy? Yes, of course. But people find ways to become happy again. And the dead do not wish us to be unhappy. So I wonder how it follows that, if one is born to die, one must be unhappy, or, to put it another way, that happiness requires eternal life. It is possible that eternal life could be very unpleasant? Watching the sun explode or go out?

What about the second part of the argument: “Since his body is doomed to die, his task on earth evidently must be of a more spiritual nature”? How did Solzhenitsyn get to spiritual nature from the problem of happiness? Solzhenitsyn is saying that because a human being is born to die, he must be unhappy. Accepting this argument, are we to assume that spirituality presupposes unhappiness? Solzhenitsyn comes from the school of thought that human beings are born to suffer and part of their suffering is a mortal existence where death looms before them. It would have been tidy if Solzhenitsyn had simply boldly made this argument rather than trying to sneak it in through tortured logic concerning what humanists believe – especially since humanists believe no such thing!

For humanists, death has no purpose beyond the meaning we give it. All organisms die. All matter is transformed. This is merely the way it is. There is no intrinsic purpose in any of it. The universe and all the natural things in it do not exist for a reason or a purpose. They just are. It follows that whatever purpose is said to exist for the mortality of organisms is of human origin. Cats have no transcendent purpose in life nor can they make a purpose for themselves. The chief difference between cats and humans on this score is that the latter can manufacture a purpose for the inevitability of death occurring in both species. Since this is the case, why shouldn’t human beings decide that the purpose of life is secular happiness rather than spiritual suffering? There is nothing in Solzhenitsyn’s formulation that says it cannot be so.

Solzhenitsyn plays a rhetorical game. He projects onto humanism his own belief that there must be a transcendent purpose in corporeal existence so that he can then present to his audience the appearance of logical symmetry in order to legitimate the contrary claim, namely, that since man is born to die, his purpose in life must possess a spiritual character. Even if one accepts the premise that humanists believe that human beings are born with a purpose (to be happy), this belief has no bearing on what humanists believe about the purpose of mortality. For the record, as if this were not obvious enough, we should note that humanists do not believe that there is a purpose to life and death. Solzhenitsyn is wrong from the git-go.

Humanists quite reasonably contend that the human experience should be pleasing to our sensibilities rather than destructive to well-being. Why? Because human beings – like all other animals, and even plants – seek surroundings in which they may thrive. Environs that are destructive to well-being cause the opposite effect to manifest; instead of thriving, organisms suffer and perish under conditions hostile to their well-being. With human beings, as apparently with all animals, suffering is incompatible with thriving and happiness, and the latter are usually sought over the former. Only human beings choose to believe life is suffering and actively seek out manners of living that bring suffering – and religion is one of the principle forces driving this absurd and destructive belief.

Of course, where democracy does not obtain, not every person is in the same position to decide what the purpose of human existence is. In hierarchically-arranged society, the powerful few decide for the rest of us what our purpose is to be. This is especially true in religious systems such as the one Solzhenitsyn advocated during his life. In such religious systems, priests and texts tell human beings what their purpose is. They tell us, circularly, that our purpose is suffering here on earth for the sake of escaping a world beyond the pain of the real, that there is eternal life in an ethereal form freed from our corporeal and tragically mortal bodies. Moreover, they tell us that failing to believe in this transcendent purpose, a purpose that rests entirely on faith belief, will be punished with suffering impossible in the real immediate world. So the loving God has created a special place for impossible suffering: Hell. So it is hell on Earth for all and hell after life for those millions who failed to submit to belief in a loving god, a loving god who made you mortal and will torment you for all eternity if you fail to appreciate it.

What humanists desire above all is returning the human beings to an understanding that human social life is collective, that individuality is a product of collective existence, that the real relation is not a vertical and spiritual one between God and Man, but a horizontal and secular one between human beings, and that for each person to have a say-so in determining the meaning and purpose in life, a democratic form of government must be in place. Being ruled by religion, tradition, and/or an authoritarian state imposes upon human beings a purpose they did no choose, one that is usually beneficial to those few elites defining purpose and detrimental to the many who exist under the thumb of the elite. Since human beings make purpose, the choice is clear: either the few define the purpose for the many, or the everybody collectively defines the purpose for themselves.

Thus, while Solzhenitsyn was embraced by anti-communists proclaiming to believe in democracy (over against the authoritarianism of the Soviet state), the man’s views are fundamentally anti-democratic and authoritarian. He believed in subordinating collective and individual decision to the power of religious hierarchy, ethnic tradition, and the nation-state. He believed that the West was decadent for the same reason the Soviet Union was decadent: it had abandoned religion. Ironically, this alleged champion of freedom’s call for restoring the power of religious control, and his condemnation of secularism and humanism, was a condemnation of individual freedom and a call for authoritarian structures.

Let me cut to the chase: Solzhenitsyn’s books are works of historical fiction – or, more accurately, historical falsification. Solzhenitsyn, a hero to authoritarians and racists, was a literary fraud. However, because of the ideological needs of capitalists, namely to manufacture the illusion that the Soviet Union was worse than Nazi Germany (perhaps the most outrageous lie ever told), and because of the intersection of anti-Jewish hatred and anti-communism before the late-1960s, Solzhenitsyn’s hatred of the Jews was glossed over. What is more, he he peddled religion, arguing that without it human life was meaningless, meaningless because morality is suffering without spiritual opium.

The occasion of Solzhenitsyn’s death, especially since so many obituaries are crediting him with telling us about the gulags, provides an opportunity to tell the truth about him. It’s tragic that so many millions of school children have been told that this sanctimonious ideologue’s writings about Soviet history were accurate and that he represents a figure of moral and a profile in courage.

Dinesh D’Souza was so perplexed by a question put to him by Christopher Hitchens in a debate about the existence of God that he didn’t know how to respond, so, he admits, he ducked it. 

The substance of Hitchens’ question was that, given that Homo sapiens has been on the planet for at least some 100,000 years (and D’Souza implicitly stipulated that the archaeological record should be the basis for the study of prehistory), why did the god of Christians, Jews, and Muslims for 95,000 years do nothing about the miserable conditions of human beings? Why, Hitchens wondered, did only a few thousand years ago this god decided to get involved, revealing himself to a nomadic people in the Middle East? Why then? Why there? D’Souza characterizes Hitchens’ point thusly: “God seems to have been napping for 98 percent of human history, finally getting his act together only for the most recent 2 percent? What kind of a bizarre God acts like this?” 

Before I get to D’Souza’s answer, I have to remark on Hitchens’ point because there is a falsity in it and the purpose of his point needs to be made clear. 

First, the claim that the conditions of human beings were miserable before this god showed up is not supported by the facts. On the contrary, early man lived rather well. Procuring enough to eat was not difficult in most places. One could do this in a few hours a week. The rest of the time was spent engaging in meaningful rituals and story telling. Humankind could hardly have survived as a species if existence was a bad as Hitchens describes. The same is true for other species. They die out where they cannot thrive. Lions spend much of their day lounging about. The world—if unmolested by modern society—is their oyster. This was true with early man. Social class emerged and made life harsh. Did this god bring poverty to us?

Second, Hitchens is being playful here. His argument is a sarcastic one. The premise that there is a god who does or does not intervene is nonsensical. Hitchens’ question is the same as the question: “Why does God hate amputees?” That question is followed by a long discussion about how the Christian god does this and that for people who are sick and distressed but he does nothing for amputees. No amount of prayer will ever restore an amputee’s leg. Since Christians believe in prayer and miracles, it follows that their god has some purpose in not healing amputees, and what could such purpose be that did not depend on their god holding something against them? Is this a loving god?

Now, D’Souza actually took Hitchens’ sarcastic remark as a challenge, went away to research it, and returned with a two-fold response, one that aims to “show that Hitchens has his math precisely inverted” and “reveal how Hitchens’ argument backfires completely on atheism.”  

D’Souza consults Erik Kreps of the Survey Research Center of the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research for the first argument. Kreps argues that the number of years is not really important, but rather it is the number of people that is at issue. D’Souza and Kreps cite the Population Reference Bureau which estimates that the number of people who have ever been born is approximately 105 billion. Of this number, about 2 percent were born in “the 100,000 years before Christ came to earth.”

Kreps concludes from this that “God’s timing couldn’t have been more perfect. If He’d come earlier in human history, how reliable would the records of his relationship with man be? But He showed up just before the exponential explosion in the world’s population, so even though 98 percent of humanity’s timeline had passed, only 2 percent of humanity had previously been born, so 98 percent of us have walked the earth since the Redemption.”

D’Souza further attacks Hitchens’ point by making a convoluted argument about intelligence, civilization, and supernatural intervention. First, D’Souza notes that the “basic frame and brain size [of the species hasn’t] changed throughout [its] terrestrial existence.” This statement is true, by the way. The species hasn’t changed throughout its (terrestrial!) existence. Brain size cannot account for any societal evolution in the species. Next, D’Souza states that “Homo sapiens has been on the planet for 100,000 years, but apparently for 95,000 of those years he accomplished virtually nothing. No real art, no writing, no inventions, no culture, no civilization.” This statement is only partly true. There was art, inventions, and culture for tens of thousands of years before the coming of the Hebrew god. There was no writing for most of this time. As for civilization, it depends on how you define the term. If by civilization you mean large-scale state-level societies with a written language, then, true, that didn’t come about until fairly recently (as time reckoned in this type argument goes). In any case, D’Souza rhetorically ponders, “How is this possible? Were our ancestors, otherwise physically and mentally undistinguishable from us, such blithering idiots that they couldn’t figure out anything other than the arts of primitive warfare?”

He continues: “Then, a few thousand years ago, everything changes. Suddenly savage man gives way to historical man. Suddenly the naked ape gets his act together. We see civilizations sprouting in Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, China, and elsewhere. Suddenly there are wheels and agriculture and art and culture. Soon we have dramatic plays and philosophy and an explosion of inventions and novel forms of government and social organization. So how did Homo sapiens, heretofore such a slacker, suddenly get so smart? Scholars have made strenuous efforts to account for this but no one has offered a persuasive account. If we compare man’s trajectory on earth to an airplane, we see a long, long stretch of the airplane faltering on the ground, and then suddenly, a few thousand years ago, takeoff!”

The train of D’Souza’s argument has jumped the track and is art this point deep in the dark and tangled woods. We do have a persuasive account for how this happened and D’Souza is either willfully ignorant of it or has a gift for writing pose without any knowledge of the scholarly record. This enjoys a consensus among those scholars who study these things. The truth as we know it is simply this: Technology advances more rapidly in larger populations because there are more permutations, greater likelihood of success and transmission of information which, in turn, guarantees that it will be combine with other bodies of technological knowledge to create cultural-societal leaps. If one studies the archaeological and anthropological record one will see a slow accumulation of technological advancements, spread through cultural radiation and combination, then qualitative leaps forward in knowledge. 

So while it is true that intelligence is not the cause of this pattern (but rather is caused by evolving societal organization), D’Souza’s explanation is completely inadequate: “Well, there is one obvious way to account for this historical miracle. It seems as if some transcendent being or force reached down and breathed some kind of a spirit or soul into man, because after accomplishing virtually nothing for 98 percent of our existence, we have in the past 2 percent of human history produced everything from the pyramids to Proust, from Socrates to computer software.”

This is absurd. Look at the last thirty years. Look at the technological leaps forward. Note at the telescoping character of technological advancement, each leap based on previous leaps—dramatic qualitative change from incremental quantitative change, every bit of it created by human beings. Is God helping us out with each passing generation? He certainly didn’t keep us out of WWII, a conflict killing some 50 million people. The devil’s doing? Superstitious nonsense. 

Of course, his pitiful attempt to address Hitchens’ sarcasm to one side, D’Souza has provided no logical proof of this alleged god. Neither has he provided a lick of empirical evidence. There is still zero reason to believe in god.

When I raised this issue on the conservative website Town Hall where D’Souza published his essay, I was met with the predictable: “But you can’t prove God doesn’t exist.” People actually believe they say something intelligent when they make this point. If teachers could teach one thing that would vastly improve the ability of individuals to think for themselves it would be to help them understand why this demand is, well, idiotic. Why idiotic? Because nobody can prove the nonexistence of any supernatural entity. 

To wit, I have a giant invisible purple tiger in my backyard. He has wings. He takes my astral body all around the world while everybody else is sleeping. I have been to London, Paris, Moscow, Stockholm, and Sao Paulo—all on the back of my giant invisible purple winged tiger. My tiger must exist because you cannot prove he doesn’t. I must have flown atop his back to all these destinations because you cannot prove I haven’t. He is real because you can’t prove he’s not.

See how stupid that sounds? Unless I were a child, I would sound crazy for believing this. So why are those who claim that an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything we do and will punish us for not believing in him not considered crazy? Why are people who claim to have been abducted by aliens crazy—since they cannot prove it—but people who believe their loved ones are taken up into the clouds after they die admired for their faith in a place called “Heaven”? Are alien abductions true because we can’t prove they’re not? Why are the ancient Egyptians wrong about the character of god (and the number of them), but the Hebrews are right about “His” character? There is no answer for those who demand that such claims must be disproved. Every and all things supernatural that any individual dreams up are real because none of these things can be proven not to exist. If such logic is to be followed, then the person must believe everything that cannot be disproved.

It is for this simple reason that the demand that one prove the nonexistence of supernatural entities is entirely fallacious. This is why the ones who make claims must prove the truth of those claims beyond reasonable doubt. Claims makers—and only claims makers—shoulder the burden of proof.

Prosecutor Timothy Stone, an officer in the US Navy, told the six-member jury of officers judging the case of Salim Hamdan, bin Laden’s driver, that Hamdan overheard conversations between bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, about the intended targets in the September 11, 2001 attacks. Congress was the fourth target, which makes sense from a strategic point of view. But listen to how Stone put the matter: “If they hadn’t shot down the fourth plane it would’ve hit the dome” (emphasis mine).

I have seen a lot of pictures of the crash site in Shanksville. In every photo I have ever seen of a plane crash, there is a plane. There are seats, luggage, engines, wings, and bodies. But in pictures of the Shanksville “crash” there is no plane. There’s a relatively small dent in the earth and a relatively small amount of tiny debris (or something). We know that, consistent with a shoot down, debris from Flight 93 was scattered over an eight square mile area and fragments of human body were found as far away as three miles. Witness reports in the immediate aftermath were consistent with a shoot down—planes in the sky, a boom, and then a fireball—and witnesses at the crash site reported that, except for a sole engine, any given piece of debris was small enough to fit in a briefcase.

I told friends shortly after 9-11 that it was likely that that the government shot down Flight 93 and that the “let’s roll” story was a propaganda myth. And now there is a Navy officer who appears to confirm what a lot of people have been thinking: the government shot down Flight 93.

Don’t get me wrong. I understand why the government had to shoot down the plane. I wish they had shot down all four planes, to be honest about it. The failure to intercept those planes exposed profound weaknesses in our national defense system. Heads should have rolled after 9-11 and Bush’s should have been the first on the block. Here’s what’s not right: substituting myth for fact. If this is true—if they shot down that plane and covered it or at the very least didn’t come clean about it—then we need another investigation into 9-11. We need to know what happened. The Commission Report is deeply problematic. 

Here’s how Reuters puts it: “United Airlines Flight 93 crashed in a field in rural Pennsylvania. U.S. officials have never stated it was shot down although rumors saying that abound to this day.” Putting it this way, it sounds like lying by omission. “We never said it wasn’t shot down. We just never said it was.” The military has been spinning what Stone said because of the commotion it has caused. The tribunal’s chief prosecutor, Colonel Lawrence Morris, said that Stone was quoting Hamdan in evidence that will be presented at trial. Maybe so. But that’s not what it sounds like. Morris wouldn’t confirm if the “dome” was the US Capitol. How it could is not be?

CNN left out the missile part in their report and followed the quote by saying that the plane crashed in Pennsylvania. The Associated Press did the same. The Washington Post arranged the quote this way: “would have hit the dome…. Virtually no one knew that intended target, but the accused knew.” You should see the Reuters quote for yourself in case they revise it later: Bin Laden driver knew Sept 11 target—prosecutor. They are probably already taking flak for quoting something the rest of the media (at least the several stories I have looked at so far) had the good sense to leave out.

First, the Laugh Factory fining comedians 50 dollars every time they say “nigger” is rather ridiculous. Anybody should be able to say anything at all in the act of speaking for themselves in a forum created to allow you to speak freely—and humorously.

Furthermore, as a fan of the comedic angles pursued by, for example, Bill Hicks, I understand where bits like that are going. The majority of people who heard Michael Richards’ rant didn’t get it because they haven’t spent any time studying that style of humor. It was difficult to watch Richards apologize for what he said on the David Letterman Show because he knew he couldn’t explain the point of the bit.

Whites lined up to make themselves look like dedicated non-racists by holding Richards up in contrast. “I would never say that word,” they chanted their mantra. I criticize Jesse Jackson for condemning Richards. Jackson uses the word. All this fuss over language is excessive on all sides.

Now the owner of the Laugh Factory, Jamie Masada, wants Jackson to pay the fine for saying “nigger” during a break of a interview show on Fox News, Fox and Friends, taped on July 6, 2008. This demand is as ridiculous as the Laugh Factory’s policy on using the word.

First, Jesse Jackson wasn’t speaking at the Laugh Factory. He was speaking in the context of a Fox News program, and however much Fox News makes us laugh with their ideological exuberance, they are not the Laugh Factory.

Second, Jesse wasn’t really speaking in the context of anything public. He said what he said privately to the man sitting next to him, Dr. Reed V. Tuckson, Executive Vice President and Chief of Medical Affairs UnitedHealth Group. Jackson was answering a question Tuckson put to him during a commercial break. They never play that part. Jackson was even whispering, which means that he did not intend to be heard.

Tuckson agreed with Jackson, but nothing has been made of that part either. You can hear Tuckson’s approval of Jackson’s complaint. Then there’s the edit and Jackson repeating what he said.

As a curious person, I would like to see what Tuckson said in the edit, but I am not requesting it because it was a private conversation that I shouldn’t have been privy to in the first place.

Indeed, the whole affair is disturbing not because of what Jackson said—a black man calling black people “niggers” is not unusual—but because Fox News broadcast a private conversation, edited it in a way that was designed to distort the context (even though the context is so clear they couldn’t pull it off), claiming Jackson said worse things in order to drag out the affair, drawing the curiosity of the press and public (and me), and did it all this to tarnish Jackson’s legacy.

Bill O’Reilly saying that he didn’t want to release the rest of the material because it would harm Jackson was comically disingenuous.

I have in the past pursued a strategy of voting for Democrats to keep Republicans out of office. The Democratic Party does not represent my interests and I have never been a member of the party, but they have in the past been better for working people, minorities, and women than have Republicans. At least that is what I have believed to be the case. Of course, I will not vote Republican in 2008. But I have decided that I will not vote Democrat. I am convinced that an Obama presidency will be worse for working people, minorities, and women.

Obama supports restrictions on abortion in a manner contrary to Roe v Wade, even mocking women who pursue abortions out of mental distress as having the blues. Obama agrees with the right-wing Supreme Court justices that there is an individual right to keep and bear arms to be found in the Bill of Rights, thus undermining the ability of state and local governments to defend communities from gun violence. Obama advocates expanding taxpayer funded religious organizations, a violation of the First Amendment, which requires government to remain segregated from religion. Obama defends Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. Obama voted to expand the ability of the Executive branch to spy on Americans, undermining the Fourth Amendment. Obama has made speeches effectively calling for an end to the civil rights movement, blaming the victims of racism for their woes and telling them to pursue strategies that will keep them on the bottom of American society.

The fear that those voting for Obama have of McCain concern war and abortion. They’re afraid McCain will stay the course in Iraq, when we need to get out. And they especially fear that McCain will apppoint justices hostile to abortion rights. I fear these things, too. But, on the question of Iraq, I cannot trust Obama to withdraw the troops. He has made so many claims contradicted by fact or later reversed by his campaign that nothing he says is to be believed. He deceived the south-side Chicago community for years. I expect him to return from Iraq with a different opinion than held before he left. But even if he doesn’t flip-flop on this, he will if he is elected president. He has already stated that he will redeploy troops now in Iraq to Afganistan. His bellicosity on war with Iraq and his uncritical support for right-wing Israel policy in the region tells us that he does not represent a substantial departure from John McCain.

On the matter of abortion, here I have a genuine concern. But there are reasons to not make this election about a single issue. First, Obama has said he supports restrictions on abortion in a manner contrary to Roe v Wade and other federal laws. Abortion is not necessarily safe with this guy. He is insensitive to women’s issues generally. Second, and more important, John McCain, because he is white, male, and pro-life, will face stiff opposition from feminists and other concerned parties if he tries to appoint ideological justices. He may be able to accomplish it, but it will be difficult. Obama, on the other hand, with liberals sacrificing their core principles just to support this man out of a need for a symbolic accomplishment, and with his stated goals to bring Republicans and Democrats together on this and a range of issues, Obama is a risk for putting a centrist justice on the Court.

This brings us to the major reason why I cannot vote for Barack Obama for president: his politics is to erase differences of opinion for the sake of unity. He wants to bring everybody together and find a workable center. But there is no workable center. There is only right and wrong, and centering everything—which is already too far right—allows for a wealth of wrongs to be unloaded on the public and many more to remain. Restricting abortion is wrong. There is no center position on this. Either you support the right of women to be free from state control of their womb or you’re a tyrant who believes the government ought to force women to have babies. It’s an either-or that is clearly attached to a right-wrong. State control over the womb is the most extreme form of tryanny. Mixing church and state is wrong. There is no center position on this, either. Either you support the right of individuals to be free of religious control or you’re a tyrant who believes in forcing religion on people in programs funded by citizens. This is a secular society. Religious societies are tryanny. Religion has too much say-so already.

Take these two together and one can see the danger in Barack Obama. If we allow religious views to mix with state in the degree that he advocates, and if this means that the prevailing religious hegemony takes the leading role in shaping policy, and it will mean this, and that hegemony is Christianity, then abortion rights are immediately in crisis because the more intense a person’s Christianity the more intense is their desire to control women. Christianity as a form of social organization is a patriarchal nightmare for women. Homosexuals are also threatened by this development. 

The Second Amendment only grants states the right to arm men in the context of a well-regulated militia. This meaning of the amendment is unambiguous. It is worded in a way that makes perfectly clear the intentions of the framers. And since militias are ill-prepared to carry out any useful purpose—assuming we mean something different from the National Guard—there is no rational reason that any citizen should have a gun. Individuals own guns because there are no laws forbidding them to. There is no right that allows them to own guns. There is no center position on this. There is no compromising the Bill of Rights.

The same is true for the Fourth Amendment. Our right to privacy is the arguably the single most important right in the entire Constitution. You cannot comprise, as Obama did, on restricting the government from looking into our private lives. Read the amendment. There’s no wiggle room. There are no exceptions for national security. Obama voted away a fundamental right. This is the vote that made it impossible for me to vote for Obama. 

Back in July, Obama slammed the Supreme Court for upholding a ban on late-term abortion. He said it was part of a concerted effort to roll back women’s reproductive freedom. Now he supports a ban on late-term abortion. Feeling good about your endorsement NARAL?

Kerry’s supposed flip-flopping was largely an invention of Republicans. Obama’s flip-flopping is an invention of his desire to win the White House principle be damned. Obama was against the embargo on Cuba before he was for it. Obama was for decriminalizing marijuana before he was against it. Obama was against cracking down on businesses that hired illegal aliens before he was for it. Obama was for Jeremiah Wright before he was against him. Obama was against union contributions to presidential campaigns (calling them “special interests”) before he was for them (when unions started contributing to his campaign). Obama was for the DC gun ban (saying that is was constitutional) before he was against it (after the Supreme Court struck it down). Obama was against immunity for corporate evesdropping before he was for it.  Obama was for public financing of elections before he was against it. Obama was against the death penalty (voting against the death penalty for gang-related murder) before he was for it (for crimes that do not involve murder). Obama was for a gas tax holiday (voting for two of them in Illinois) before he was against it. Obama was against Nafta (said it was bad for workers and that he would force a negotiation) before he was for it (blames heated campaign rhetoric).

In light of these facts, there is no reason to suppose on the range of issues that concern me that McCain would be worse than Obama. Indeed, on some issues, Obama would be worse (the civil rights issue is most disturbing). 

I have been flirting with either the Green Party or the independent run of Ralph Nader. I need to think about it some more. Whatever my choice, if McCain wins, I will have no regrets.

Myrlie Evers-Williams, a leader in the NAACP, the wife of Medgar Evers who was gunned down by white supremacists, said yesterday that Barack and Michelle Obama are the target of a “political lynching” in the media. She told a NAACP luncheon that the news media is portraying the Obamas as unpatriotic radicals. She cited in particular The New Yorker cover spoofing attacks on the Obamas as an example (see below). Sadly, Evers-Williams could not miss the point more widely.

First, the establishment news is running Obama’s campaign. It is hardly lynching the Senator. This has been the most biased coverage in favor of a candidate I have ever seen. The media can hardly bring themselves to criticize him. The idea that Obama is the victim of a racially-motivated attack by the corporate media is—sorry, but there’s no other word to use—delusional. 

All you need to do is read the press accounts in the immediate moments of the release of The New Yorker cover. The establishment media collectively acted as Obama’s campaign spokespersons. They were so worried that it would hurt his chances to be president that they opened fire with both barrels on the magazine. To be sure, they’re trying to make it appear that they jumped the gun a little bit. The reality remains: they frenzied. We all saw it. They will write the moment out of history, but they can’t take it back for those of us who are paying attention. 

This was the same over-the-top reaction we saw when Jesse Jackson said Obama was talking down to black people. They panicked over that one, too, thinking that the black masses might start wondering if Obama was in fact talking down to them. Jesse, the white establishment was thinking, still has some clout. So they had to shout him down—even if he only whispered it near a mic he thought was off. This story is still running on strong legs.

Second, speaking of Obama’s condescension towards black Americans, the candidate is harming the black community with his white conservative personal responsibility rhetoric targeting the black family. He blames the victims of racism—and lynching has been a big part of black victimization—for the consequences of racism. Only blacks obsessed with sucking up to the establishment—Ward Connerly, Walter Williams, Bill Cosby—push that racist angle. Blacks are highly critical of the “Uncle Toms” who push this line. So why, instead of advancing a self-evidently paranoid line, isn’t Evers-Williams criticizing Obama for his racially-motivated attacks on the black family?

I am disappointed by the progressive leadership of the black community. To be sure, much of this stems from uncritical loyalty to the Democratic Party. But there’s more to it than that. It’s the worst type of identity politics when persons of an oppressed group support a perceived member of that group because they share a characteristic such as skin color. Blacks are overwhelmingly supporting Obama because he is perceived as a black man who is not a Republican. But, then again, is it partisanship? Would identity politics cause blacks to support a black Republican?

* * *

If you’re having trouble grasping the point of the New Yorker cover, imagine that its target is the 9-11 Truth movement. Its followers believe Bush and Cheney ran a false flag operation on 9-11 in order to seize control of the government. The towers were brought down by controlled demolition. The planes were remote controlled. So forth. Imagine a cartoon cover on a conservative magazine—let’s make it a cover of the National Review—with Dick Cheney as the carnival barker behind the controls of something like a giant Oz machine, his hands on the dials and levers steering robot-controlled planes into towers. Bush is depicted just leaving the towers with wires and a cable splitter sticking out of his pocket. He’s fresh from having just planted the explosives that will bring down the towers in a controlled demolition. Let’s put a book about a goat in his hand. You could have a split scene with Rumsfeld directing a cruise missile into the side of the Pentagon. Barbara Olsen is being whisked away into another dimension by Men in Black. 

Anybody who sees this cover who believes the premise, well, then, the joke’s on them. Those who believe it’s not true will see it as satire—if they are prepared to play along. People are too sensitive about Obama. They aren’t prepared to play along.

I understand why the establishment media can’t bring itself to use the word. They have to make it so scary that it can’t be uttered, not even in an informative context. It’s like the secret name of God. We have to be reduced to first graders. “He said the ‘N-word.’” So I’ll repeat what Jackson said: “Barack … he’s talking down to black people … telling niggers how to behave.” 

Now, any fair-minded person knows what Jesse means by this. Whites and blacks who blame black people from the problems of poverty, joblessness, crime, and violence see blacks as “niggers” and the place they live as “Niggertown.” We all know the sentiments. Jackson is bringing some truth to the matter when he says that Obama is “telling niggers how to behave.” That is what Obama is doing. I’m sure each of you at some time or another has used the sarcastic angle of putting yourself in the other point of view and using the language from that standpoint. Jesse was speaking from Obama’s point of view. Jesse is being dramatic. It’s something he does.

Remember when the brilliant comedian Bill Hicks, in protesting the verdict in the Rodney King beating case, talked about Officers “Coon,” “Niggerhater,” and “Keepdarkiedown”? It’s called bitter sarcasm and it’s commonplace among those who know the way some people think about black people.

The “niggers down in Niggertown” line was uttered countless times in the South—and often in the Northeast. It’s easy to channel the sentiment if you’re familiar with history: “The niggers need to stop throwing trash out of their car windows, grow lawns, and fix their screen doors if they want white people to bring businesses back to Niggertown.” Etcetera.

The things Obama says about black people (about fried chicken and whatnot) are the things white bigots used to say all the time about black people. I know hundreds of other whites have heard this because when I heard it when they were standing around me—and getting upset when I disagreed with them! 

Jackson is simply switching “black” with “nigger” to make the point—a effective point if you want to get it. Folks need to stop pretending like they don’t know what’s going on here. Feigned outrage is transparent. 

This episode tells us more about how upset it makes Jackson—and I suspect a lot of other black leaders too afraid to say it in public—that Obama is engaging in racist attacks against the black community by blaming the conditions of blacks on black people, and, adding injury to insult, doing it in front of blacks so that whites can hear it and appreciate a black man saying what they wish they could say. They are rooting Obama on in his talking down to black people.

Watch every white journalists and every black person sucking up to Obama deliberately miss the point. Watch them warp the meaning of the word in this context—in reality, there is no ambiguity in Jesse’s usage of the word—to delegitimize Jackson.

Part of killing off the old civil rights movement once and for all is destroying its leaders. The propagandists of the ruling elite are having a field day with this. They have been waiting for years to banish Jackson to the margins of the movement for justice. (Let’s in ten years if Jackson is relevant at all.)

Racism is not only the belief that someone or group is inferior based on race. Race is a social construction that presupposes a segmentation of social reality. A society is racist to the extent that it divides groups based on selected phenotypic features and then differentially rewards and punishes members of those groups regardless of whether members of these groups realize this is happening to them or for them. Jackson is right when he says that key is structural inequality and that Obama is wrong when he argues that racism is largely a state of mind.

Obama’s rhetoric seeks to dissimulate racism while keeping the divisions going. The result is that the capitalists and their functionaries maintain the status quo that privileges them. This is the central reason why Obama’s blame-the-victim approach is so successful for the perpetuation of racism and so devastating to the civil rights movement.

Jackson was using a slur to criticize Obama’s anti-black propaganda, a strategy that has become central to his campaign for president. Obama talks down to blacks in order to talk over them to the white audience whose votes he seeks. He wants whites to support him and he believes the best way to get this support is to say the racist things some white people think but are afraid to say in mixed company. 

Based on the research by David Sears and John McConahay, Joe Feagin, in his various writings on race, defines symbolic or modern racism as “white beliefs that serious racial discrimination does not exist today and that black Americans in particular are making illegitimate demands for social changes.” This definition, we are told, helps clarify the way the ideological racism evolves in order to maintain the status quo.

In the early period of racism, the ideology of racism had most people believing that the inequalities among racialized groups were rooted in race, a social construction pitched as a biological reality. Because groups had different natures, the argument went, inequalities between groups are explicable in terms of those differences. There are still many people who believe this.

Of course, the inequalities between racial groups is because of racism, a social system that organizes human populations into hierarchically-arranged groups based on differences in physical appearances and ancestry; the result is differentially rewarded or punished. These inequalities have nothing to do with nature. The ideology of racism, which attempts to naturalize a social construct, justifies unjust social arrangements. Thus racism is a complete ideology: it orders life in a particular way and justifies that order.

Scientists have since debunked the notion of racial nature (see, for example, Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Paolo Menozzi, and Alberto Piazza’s 1996 The History and Geography of Human Genes). There are no races of humans in nature. With this debunking, the old ideology of racism received a serious blow to its legitimacy. But this did not bring an end to the ideology of racism. Nor, did it bring an end to the material system which that ideology justified. Racism as a objective force ordering group lives continues unabated.

What remains of the old ideology of racism is the notion that different racialized groups have superior and inferior cultural systems. And this idea of superiority and inferiority of cultural systems has been joined with the recognition of the reality that there are no natural differences to strengthen racism rather than weaken it. 

Since many Americans falsely conflate structural racism with the ideology of racism, they wrongly believe that, with the disappearance of the old ideology of racism, serious racial discrimination does not exist today and therefore black Americans are making illegitimate demands for social change. The belief that no serious racial discrimination exists today instructs whites to believe that the situation blacks face today is not caused by racism, but rather is caused by black people themselves. 

By reducing racism to the ideological system that justifies it and then proudly proclaiming that the ideology of racism is dead, yet still retaining the notion of superior and inferior cultural systems, a new racism has emerged that encourages victim blaming. It’s not that blaming the victim was not a component of the old ideology of racism. But in the new system, victim blaming mutates into an opportunity to reinforce the Protestant ethic. White Americans want blacks to have a better life, but, having done enough for blacks already, it’s time for blacks to lift themselves up.

The new racist ideology is far superior to the old one. The new racist ideology does not depend on so obviously false an assumption as intrinsic racial differences. The new ideology of racism allows white and black actors striving to maintain the status quo of whites on top and blacks on bottom to deny that they are racist. Indeed, it allows them to turn ideological racism into an expression of virtue and concern. It allows for a declaration of a colorblind society which self-evidently cannot be a racist society. With this system in force, those members of oppressed group who make grievances against white society are themselves said to be racist because they are making claims based on race.

This is the argument anyway. And it is compelling. At the same time, racial discrimination was much worse in earlier historical periods than it is today. De jure segregation has been abolished and there are many African Americans living in affluence (while the majority of poor people remain white). It is therefore possible that some black Americans are making illegitimate demands for social change. But if one says this, then he is guilty of symbolic racism. Is it possible to recognize that America has made great strides in race relations while admitting there is more to do without having this observation smeared as racist?

The claim of a post-racial order in a society where racialized groups are not longer hierarchically organized is self-evidently false. Racism persists. But to claim that criticism of the claims made by members of the black community and their allies constitutes a new racism is problematic. One can be ignorant or wrong or disagreeable without being racist.  

I had a chance to review a documentary by Marco Williams, Banished (2007) for Teaching Sociology. This is a version of that review. Those of us who teach race and ethnic relations routinely encounter difficulty explaining to our students the causes of the present conditions of black Americans, for example, why blacks are more likely to live in poverty than whites. As sociologists, we teach what the evidence and our theories tell us, namely that the situation of black America is the result of a dynamic process of cumulative disadvantages emplaced by white supremacy and perpetuated by the inertia of history. We typically deliver this information as texts, charts, and statistics, abstract forms of knowledge that our students often find difficult to process. Sociologists want for methods of presenting material that connect with our students’ lay understandings, strategies that make the subject matter live for them. 

Banished is a smart and engaging film about racial cleansing in the United States that brings the sociology of racism to life for the lay person. Banished traces the outline of racial terrorism: the alleged violation of a young white woman, the lynching of the alleged black perpetrator or perpetrators, the removal of black residents from the community by violent means and the criminal confiscation of their property. Many of the places that experienced racial cleansing, the so-called “sunset towns,” remain, often proudly, all-white or virtually all-white communities, with many blacks too uneasy to return to claim what they feel is rightfully theirs, and many more resigned to the belief, reinforced by those in authority, that the moment to bring legal action has long since passed. By emphasizing the intersections of history and biography, Banished exposes students to more than the history of racial violence in a white-dominated social order; students also see how the racialized structure of power perpetuates the state of inequality and the denial of justice shapes the future.

Three white communities focus Williams’ film: Forsyth, Georgia, Pierce City, Missouri, and Harrison, Arkansas. Elliot Jaspin, whose superb Buried in the Bitter Waters (2007) documents these and other cases, appears throughout the documentary. Teachers who use Banished in the classroom might well consider assigning Jaspin’s book as one of the course texts. His research lends the voice of authority to the film, reassuring viewers that the cases Williams selects are not extraordinary, but rather examples of a clear pattern of racial terrorism in American history. Several central questions guide Jaspin’s study and these inform Williams’ documentary: What happened to the people who lived in these communities and their descendants? What happened to their property? How have they made do? How do whites and blacks negotiate yesterday? What can they do today that would make tomorrow different?

Jaspin documents that before whites racially cleansed Forsyth, Georgia in 1912, the black population there numbered 1,098. Within a matter of months, it had dropped to 30. By the 1930 census, there was only one black person living in Forsyth. The county remains almost all-white (fewer than five percent of residents are black). To call attention to this history, black and white civil rights activists organized a march on Forsyth in 1987 on the inauguration of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. White supremacists met the bus carrying the marchers. Reminiscent of the attacks on blacks marching for civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s, whites pelted the Forsyth marchers with rocks and garbage. Fallout from the march compelled the governor of Georgia to organize a bi-racial commission, headed by white attorney Phil Bettis, to study the issue of racial reconciliation. The commission quickly polarized over the issue of whether the community should compensate black families for the loss of their property. The sides never came together. White members of the commission refused to acknowledge that whites had banished blacks from Forsyth. The participants presented their conclusions to the governor in a segregated report. 

Williams personalizes the segment by concentrating on the legacy of a man named Morgan Strickland and his descendants’ determination to locate the property he allegedly sold to the white persons whose names appear on the deeds. Leola Strickland Evans, ninety-five at the time of the filming of the documentary in 2005, lived in Forsyth County as a child, her presence debunking the claim that banishment directly affects no living persons. Williams films the Stricklands visiting the family graveyard in Forsyth. They find it littered with the trash of a white family living in a house nearby. After cleaning the graves and planting flowers, the Stricklands travel to city hall to look at the deeds. They find no record of Morgan having legally sold his land. 

Williams looks further into the circumstances of how whites came to possess Morgan Strickland’s property. Jaspin documents the dirty truth: Strickland had not sold his property; whites, using the legal technique of adverse possession, stole it. After driving blacks from Forsyth, whites needed to occupy the land for only seven years, after which time title attorneys granted them legal title to it.  Williams arranges a meeting between Jaspin and Phil Bettis to discuss the matter. Bettis is a title attorney involved in passing black property to generations of white families. This is the same Phil Bettis who had headed the governor’s failed bi-racial commission back in 1987. Their encounter produces one of the more compelling moments in the film, as Bettis, refusing to accept any responsibility for a crime affecting generations of Stricklands, takes strong exception to Jaspin’s characterization of banishment in Forsyth as racial cleansing.  (This is not the first time Jaspin has run into opposition to the phrase. In Buried in the Bitter Waters, he recounts a fight with his own editors at Cox Newspapers over the use of the term.) Proving the truism that justice delayed is justice denied, viewers are witness to the argument that it is too late for the Stricklands to recover their loss.  They did not seek redress in a timely manner. Yet, how could they when trying would likely have put their lives in jeopardy?    

The other case studies are equally powerful. Two descendants of James Cobb, Charles Brown, Jr. and his brother James, travel to Pierce City, Missouri to bring their great grandfather’s body back to Springfield. Whites banished the Cobb family in 1901 and James lay in an unmarked grave, unmarked because white residents had removed the stone. The story Williams tells revolves around the relationship between the white coroner and Cobb’s descendants. After relocating the body, Charles inquires about the price. The coroner takes Charles aside and many watching will likely expect, as did I, the relocation will be a gift to Charles and James, an act of racial healing. It seems that the moment has moved the coroner’s sympathies. Then he quotes a price.  Charles informs the coroner that he has written a letter to Pierce City asking the city to cover the cost. Later we discover that the city refuses to pay the coroner’s bill.  No amount of money can heal such a hurt, the coroner tells Williams. Yet the whites in Pierce City, despite the fact that the government failed to protect its lack citizens and failed to protect the chain of custody, are unwilling to produce a meager sum of money to satisfy the coroner (Charles pays the coroner himself). Just as in Forsyth County, when money becomes an issue, there is always a reason why whites should not have to pay. The implication is that blacks are unreasonable for asking.

Residents of Harrison, Arkansas divide between those who desire racial reconciliation and those who love Harrison because it is white. Williams meets with Thom Robb, a leader of the Ku Klux Klan residing in Harrison. Williams asks Robb how he would feel if he built a house on the vacant lot next to Robb’s. Robb says he would be displeased because he has a culture and a heritage to preserve.  The degree of civility shown towards Williams by Robb and the matter of fact way Robb articulates his racism is chilling. Viewers will find fascinating the brief debate, held in front of a basement shrine Robb has constructed from photographs of Klan rallies, about whether one lights a cross to celebrate European culture or burns a cross to intimidate black people. Accepting a challenge from Robb, Williams speaks with community members who tell him that they came to Harrison because they want to live in a community without black people.

Sociologists should find Banished, especially accompanied by Elliot Jaspin’s Buried in the Bitter Waters, a useful addition to their courses covering the subject of race and ethnic inequality.  Williams’ penetrating work provides students, in a readily-accessible format, information about a heretofore little-known aspect of racism in America, one that unlocks a greater understanding of the black-white inequality dynamic. The images, interviews, and commentary concern not only documenting the tyranny of the pervasive white supremacy that represents a defining characteristic of American civilization, but also illustrate C. Wright Mills’ argument concerning the connection between public issues and personal troubles. The documentary is moreover useful for demonstrating the contrasting logics of the “perpetrator” and “victim” perspectives, a foundational argument in critical race theory. In this view, the fact that the demand that a legitimate grievance must involve a living perpetrator who acted intentionally to harm a person or persons (the perpetrator’s perspective) trumps the argument that those who benefit from the crime of others have a responsibility to make whole the injured party (the victim’s perspective) reflects the prevailing structure of racialized power in the United States.

Some students may take issue with Williams’ standpoint in the documentary. Yet, their perception likely reveals more about their politics than those of the director. For the most part, Williams strives to leave the conclusions to viewers. Indeed, given the things that happen in the film, many will admire his restraint. I am not one of them, however. I expect from the documentary format persuasive efforts that either leave viewers with compelling arguments to use in political debate or clear positions about which to develop stronger critiques. At any rate, Banished will no doubt provoke spirited discussion among students about the obligations of the white community and the responsibility of local and national governments to do more than address racism in America merely by acknowledging it, but also by organizing concrete action that fundamentally changes the dynamic of cumulative disadvantage.

War Hawks and the Ugly American: The Origins of Bush’s Central Asia and Middle East Policy. Pp. 47-66 and Beyond the Texas Oil Patch: The Rise of Anti-Environmentalism. Pp. 163-184 in Bernd Hamm (ed) Devastating Society: The Neo-conservative Assault on Democracy and Justice (London: Pluto Press, 2005). These are two chapters of mind (the latter co-written with Laurel Phoenix) that are now no longer carried by the University of Michigan press.

When controversy flared last summer, the executive board of the University of Michigan Press defended its relationship with Pluto, saying reservations about the content of a single book shouldn’t interfere with an existing business relationship, and that stopping the book’s distribution would be a blow to academic freedom and free speech. The University of Michigan Press does not review content of the books it only distributes. 

But under pressure from Jewish advocates and three regents, the executive board announced in January that it would re-evaluate all of its distribution deals based on newly created internal guidelines. Pluto was the only independent publisher that didn’t measure up. Last month, the university sent a two paragraph letter notifying Pluto executives that the distribution contract would be terminated in six months, effective Dec. 31. A six-month notice is required by the distribution contract. 

“It wasn’t just one book,” said Betsy Kellman, regional director of the Southfield-based Michigan chapter of the Anti-Defamation League, who said Jewish advocates read all of Pluto’s titles. “You can certainly criticize Israel, but when you set them up for a different standard of criticism than any other nation, that’s when we get into trouble,’’ she said. 

Losing the revenues from distributing Pluto books will have an impact on the University of Michigan Press, but it’s too early to be specific, she said. The press received $918,000 in revenues from distributing Pluto Press books in the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2007. That was 16 percent of the its total revenues that year.

The upshot is that I no longer have chapters published in a university press book.