[Peace-discuss] When You Comin' Back, Red Ryder?
Morton K. Brussel
brussel at illinois.edu
Mon Aug 24 12:07:48 CDT 2009
This statement is what makes it so difficult to strengthen the anti-
war movement.
Wayne's (and others') ideas about abortion and what the state should
or should not do about it will never be accepted by a great mass of
progressives. It's one of the destructive/divisive aspects of
theological, i.e., irrational, thinking. --mkb
On Aug 24, 2009, at 11:52 AM, E. Wayne Johnson wrote:
> It's pretty hard to imagine that one ought to
> trust the beneficent benevolent care of the poor
> to a coercive government that promotes and funds abortion,
> imperialism, endless war, corporate malfeasance, and financial fraud.
>
> The new covenant message is that people would be internally motivated
> to care for one another. It's been effective where people dare to
> apply it.
>
> On 8/23/2009 8:52 PM, John W. wrote:
>>
>>
>> On Sun, Aug 23, 2009 at 12:31 PM, E. Wayne Johnson <ewj at pigs.ag>
>> wrote:
>>
>> The Philadelphia Liberty Bell bears a peculiar inscription:
>>
>> Proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all the inhabitants
>> thereof Lev XXV, v. X
>>
>> It should be noted that this is a fragment of "Leviticus 25.10",
>> not the entire "verse".
>> Although it is a complete thought and the use of this verse
>> fragment by the Quakers who commissioned the
>> Liberty Bell is appropriate and legitimate, it is useful to
>> consider the whole verse in the context
>> of that American Republic which venerates the fractured toquassen
>> and shuns its message.
>>
>> Leviticus 25. 10: "And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and
>> proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants
>> thereof:
>> it shall be a jubilee unto you; and ye shall return every man unto
>> his possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family.
>>
>> Leviticus 25.10 is part of a larger section (Lev. 23 through Lev.
>> 25) which deals with rules of economics, production, distribution
>> of property and wealth,
>> finance, and ethics, and it is punctuated with strong admonitions
>> about the divine inspiration and the practical spiritual
>> implications.
>>
>> Implicit is Leviticus 23-25 is the importance of social and
>> economic equality, and the recognition that left to itself,
>> the game of economics and the outrageous fortunes of the business
>> cycle proceed to a endpoint of masters and slaves.
>> This section of the Levitical law creates an enforced resetting of
>> property, slavery, and debt to the original default state
>> every 50 years, it forbids usury and exploitation, and it blows
>> against the creation of empires, economic classes and cumulative
>> inequality of opportunity.
>>
>> The underlying spiritual concepts of Lev 23-25 are demonstrated
>> under the new covenant, every man in the Kingdom of God acting as
>> led by the Spirit (Jer 31.33),
>> those with two coats willingly giving to those with only one (Lu
>> 3:11), willingly trusting in Providence for their needs (Lu 9.3),
>> sharing freely all things
>> in common (Acts 2.44, Acts 4.32), and egalitarianism without
>> coercion or taking by force (2 Cor 8.1-15).
>>
>> I was loving your discussion of Leviticus and the year of Jubilee,
>> Wayne, until I got to the paragraph above. The Israel of the Old
>> Testament was a theocracy, essentially, so the provisions of
>> Leviticus had the force of law. All of those economic things you
>> enumerate were mandated by law, and they took place, I presume,
>> every 50 years as mandated.
>>
>> Now suddenly in the New Testament it's all voluntary. And this is
>> precisely the argument that libertarians of today use AGAINST any
>> sort of governmental redistribution of wealth, similar to the
>> Jubilee. "I'm damned if I'm gonna let the 'nanny state' tell ME
>> what to do with MY money," they whine. "If I wanna help the poor
>> I'll help 'em, but it has to be voluntary!" The trouble is that
>> libertarians generally don't KNOW any poor people, so to the extent
>> that they help anyone they end up just helping each other. Plus
>> the problems of the poor and disenfranchised are too vast and
>> institutionalized to lend themselves to scattered individual acts
>> of 'charity' here and there. What we discuss on this list, ad
>> infinitum, is the role that GOVERNMENT should play in the economic
>> realm.
>>
>> I'd like to see a national year of Jubilee about every 20 years.
>> Fifty years is too long. But it doesn't really matter, does it?
>> It's never gonna happen.
>>
>> John Wason
>>
>>
>>
>> But what we have is the stupid and immoral party (the Dems) versus
>> the self-righteous and evil party both making
>> merchandise of us all and perverting progress to petty
>> contentions. It's easy to see that both sides
>> are wrong.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On 8/22/2009 10:21 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
>>> John W. wrote:
>>>> ...The two truly lasting contributions made by the Sixties were
>>>> the Civil
>>>> Rights Movement and the Women's Movement. Where those class
>>>> struggles? Only
>>>> in part, I submit.
>>>
>>> You omit the major movement that unites the two you mention, the
>>> anti-war movement.
>>>
>>> Class struggle is rarely perspicuous -- i.e., it's usually
>>> expressed through other conflicts. But it perhaps emerges more
>>> clearly over time:
>>>
>>> "All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is
>>> profaned, and people are at last compelled to face with sober
>>> senses, their real conditions of life, and their relations with
>>> their kind" (from the aforementioned tract).
>>>
>>> Slavoj Zizek notes "a fundamental difference between the goals of
>>> feminist, anti-racist, anti-sexist struggles on the one hand, and
>>> class struggle on the other. In the first case, the goal is to
>>> translate antagonism into difference (the peaceful coexistence of
>>> sexes, religions, ethnic groups), but the goal of class struggle
>>> is precisely the opposite: to aggravate class difference into
>>> class antagonism. To set up a series of equivalences between race,
>>> gender and class is to obscure the peculiar logic of class
>>> struggle, which aims at overcoming, subduing, even annihilating
>>> the other – if not its physical being, then at least its socio-
>>> political role and function. In the one case, we have a horizontal
>>> logic involving mutual recognition among different identities; in
>>> the other, we have the logic of struggle with an
>>> antagonist." ("Over the Rainbow" <http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n21/zize01_.html
>>> > -- the article repays the difficult of getting through it...)
>>>
>>> The goal is reconciliation on the basis of justice for races,
>>> genders, etc. But reconciliation is impossible between exploiter
>>> and exploited without their giving up their roles. --CGE
>>>
>>>
>>> John W. wrote:
>>>>
>>>> On Sat, Aug 22, 2009 at 3:15 PM, C. G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu
>>>> <mailto:galliher at illinois.edu>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> I'd say corporate capitalism managed to co-opt the counter-
>>>> culture over the course of a generation, roughly the late 1960s
>>>> to the mid-1990s, with the crucial change coming about half-way
>>>> through, with the rise of neo-liberalism. (David Harvey's book
>>>> with that title is the best general account I know.)
>>>>
>>>> Serious discussion of revolution as an historical phenomenon
>>>> rather quickly became ads for "Revolutionary Jeans!," etc.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Yes. And the factory workers, after calling hippies "faggots" in
>>>> the 1960s for their long hair, started wearing their hair long
>>>> themselves sometime in the 1970s. And watched passively, dumbly,
>>>> as private sector union membership
>>>> declined, factories were shuttered, and their jobs moved offshore.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> But it's certainly true that the uncomfortable questions and
>>>> challenges to the assumptions of American society that go under
>>>> the collective name of "the
>>>> sixties" had an unsettling effect. That's why the sixties and its
>>>> "excesses" are generally excoriated by bien-pensant liberals and
>>>> conservatives alike. (For a not unimportant example, see the
>>>> condemnation of
>>>> the sixties in "The Audacity of Hope.")
>>>>
>>>> American society suppressed but didn't answer the sixties'
>>>> questions, because
>>>> they were questions about human flourishing, which is
>>>> necessarily retarded
>>>> to a greater or lesser degree by the exploitation necessary to
>>>> capitalism.
>>>>
>>>> Nevertheless American society is a good bit more civilized today
>>>> than it was in the 1960s, largely as a result of those questions.
>>>> (As an example of the poets' -- in this case TV writers --
>>>> getting there first, see these questions
>>>> posed however obscurely in the current series "Mad Men.")
>>>>
>>>> I think you could argue that all real revolutionary movements
>>>> need to invent new media of communication, from the early
>>>> Christian movement's invention of the codex on.
>>>>
>>>> The new media of the 1960s were the underground newspaper and
>>>> alternative radio, now both sadly in almost complete decay.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Let us not forget Robert Crumb and Zap Comix. :-)
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> They've gone the way of an independent labor press (and radio) of
>>>> an earlier American generation. They've been supplanted by this
>>>> box I'm typing on; it and parallel IT will probably soon destroy
>>>> hard-copy newspapers, no bad thing.
>>>>
>>>> But where's the social revolution that should go with new media?
>>>> Maybe we'll be surprised.
>>>>
>>>> You agree with the Old Man who wrote (when he was a young man),
>>>> "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of
>>>> class struggles."
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Yes and no. The two truly lasting contributions made by the
>>>> Sixties were the
>>>> Civil Rights Movement and the Women's Movement. Where those class
>>>> struggles? Only in part, I submit.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> (His tract etc. are worth re-reading.) When you comin' back, red
>>>> writer? --CGE
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> John W. wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Fri, Aug 21, 2009 at 5:15 PM, C. G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu
>>>> <mailto:galliher at illinois.edu>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> "... the Counter-Culture hung up the Out of Business sign
>>>> sometime in the Nineties, finished off by identity politics and
>>>> general self-satisfaction..."
>>>> --<http://www.counterpunch.org/>
>>>>
>>>> Commenting weekly in those days on "the news of the week and its
>>>> coverage by
>>>> the media" on News from Neptune as I was, I'd say that Alex
>>>> Cockburn has
>>>> this about right.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> I haven't read Cockburn's article; his essays are invariably too
>>>> long for my
>>>> limited attention span. But I submit that in the so-called
>>>> "counter-culture" essentially BECAME the culture. In some ways our
>>>> generation, that of the 60s, was absorbed into the existing
>>>> culture; in
>>>> certain ways it profoundly changed the culture; and in yet other
>>>> ways the
>>>> culture recoiled in horror and moved in the opposite direction.
>>>> But isn't
>>>> that simply the way of the world? Thesis ---> antithesis --->
>>>> synthesis , for
>>>> good or ill?
>>>>
>>>> What we need now, I guess, is a NEW counter-culture. The closest
>>>> thing I've
>>>> seen to that in this country is the development of the
>>>> independent media movement starting in the late 1990s. Last I
>>>> looked, the U-C Independent Media Center was still very much
>>>> alive and well. But of course the new counter-culture needs to
>>>> affect more than just the media, important as that is.
>>>>
>>>> I further submit, though, that as long as human beings populate
>>>> the planet and compete for finite resources, there will ALWAYS be
>>>> war. I dare to imagine that American culture could change to
>>>> allow for universal health care
>>>> if the political and public will was there. We could inject a
>>>> bit of "socialism" into our "free-market capitalism" without
>>>> demonstrable ill effects. But human nature does not change, and
>>>> war will be with us always.
>>
>
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