Acknowledging Reality

10 January 2008

Acknowledging Reality

Some days it is really difficult to post articles to SOTT. I tend to generally go for the ones about Palestine or the plight of the Iraqis because this is what makes me angry and motivated. but some of the time recently I've been kind of avoiding those subjects (or at least diluting the impact, with some nice safe stuff about economic meltdown or cometary armageddon!) because the shock of some of these stories, about the rampant infliction of unimaginable suffering, is really... shocking. it hurts.

and it is cumulative. it is not just one mad senseless decapitation of a child somewhere in Sierra Leone. Instead it is layer upon layer of countless terror and misery and greed and pain and violence and wanton destruction that spans the globe whichever way I look. and every day there is more. It is crushingly horrific to contemplate.

Yet contemplate it, I must. Some stubborn part of me refuses to turn a blind eye, because to turn away in denial and to ignore the suffering of others, is somehow worse, denying a part of myself and making me complicit in perpetuating the world of pain.

It seems that facing up to and acknowledging this reality without flinching is a most important and most difficult task.

All I can do is take inspiration from others who work tirelessly on this day after day, and hope that my small contribution is of some value to the universe.

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

How we burned in the prison camps later thinking: What would things have been like if every police operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive?

If during periods of mass arrests people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever was at hand? The organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and, not withstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt.

"Unitary Executive" = Dictator

"It bothers me that the executive branch is taking the amazing position that just on the president's say-so, any American citizen can be picked up, not just in Afghanistan, but at O'Hare Airport or on the streets of any city in this country, and locked up without access to a lawyer or court just because the government says he's connected somehow with the Taliban or Al Qaeda. That's not the American way. It's not the constitutional way." Laurence Tribe - Carl M. Loeb University Professor and Professor of Constitutional Law, Harvard University - Source: interview on ABC's Nightline

Masters and Slaves

Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder. In the Middle Ages when the feudal lords who inhabited the castles whose towers may still be seen along the Rhine concluded to enlarge their domains, to increase their power, their prestige and their wealth they declared war upon one another. But they themselves did not go to war any more than the modern feudal lords, the barons of Wall Street go to war.

The feudal barons of the Middle Ages, the economic predecessors of the capitalists of our day, declared all wars. And their miserable serfs fought all the battles. The poor, ignorant serfs had been taught to revere their masters; to believe that when their masters declared war upon one another, it was their patriotic duty to fall upon one another and to cut one another's throats for the profit and glory of the lords and barons who held them in contempt. And that is war in a nutshell.

The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose - especially their lives.

Eugene Debs, 16 June 1918

The speech was given to about 1,200 people and was later used against Debs to make the case that he had violated the espionage Act. The judge sentenced Debs to ten years in prison

Signs Of The Times - SOTT.NET

10 January 2008