[Peace-discuss] When You Comin' Back, Red Ryder?

[LAURIE SOLOMON]

I find - not surprisingly given the source - two things in your post
disconcerting if not objectionable.  The first pertains to the inclusion of
your special interest position on abortion in the list of generally agreed
upon flaws of the established government with the implication that the
coercive government is using it authority to force people to have abortions
as opposed to making the opportunity available to them to voluntarily avail
themselves of.  I would argue that it is a legitimate function of government
to promote and fund abortion - and certainly to prevent one special interest
group from putting obstacles to such things in the way of other interested
parties who do not hold the same views. It certainly falls within a
different  category from governmental acts that force people to actively
engage in proscribed conduct without any choice on their part imperialistic
foreign policies and endless wars or which promote and fund legally defined
criminal acts or forms of civil and financial malfeasance and fraud which
are proscribed by the laws.  

 

Secondly, your new covenant message, despite the suggested content of it, is
a Christian thing and pushing it as an official policy to be followed in a
society is a form of elitism that holds that Christianity is the dominant
establishment authority with other religions - including atheism and
no-religion - being the non-elite positions which are dominated and at the
mercy of the dominant establishment religion.   While I do not know what the
hell the new covenant message refers to, I can only guess that it is a
reference to some interpretation of the New Testament, which the Jewish
Religion rejects as doctrine and which other religions recognize even less.
Why should contemporary Christians benefit from the imperialistic conquests
of Native peoples in the past and use those imperialistic conquests for
proclaiming that their newly established socio-cultural societies and their
governments are Christian ones with the right to dominate over other -
especially those whose lands and cultures they have acquired via force and
violence? To accept this is to say that the so-called Christian ethic and
doctrine is elitist and flawed by its own biased predispositions and to
belie the fact that Christianity is another form of the "might makes right"
ideology.

 

From: peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net
[mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of E. Wayne
Johnson
Sent: Monday, August 24, 2009 11:52 AM
To: John W.
Cc: Peace-discuss
Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] When You Comin' Back, Red Ryder?

 

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>
<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> <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> <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/> <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. 

 

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.chambana.net/mailman/archive/peace-discuss/attachments/20090824/91ae8317/attachment-0001.html