[Peace-discuss] This week's News from Neptune ion UPTV

[C. G. Estabrook via Peace-discuss]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2C219OlQd8


NEWS FROM NEPTUNE ON UPTV FOR 15 AUGUST 2014

{INTRO} ~ Good evening, & welcome to News from Neptune for the 33rd week of 2014. (Cablecast Friday at 7pm on ch. 6 & 99 in C-U.)
~ For more than twenty years, this program has been "a spontaneous & unrehearsed discussion of the news of the week and its coverage by the media" - first on a so-called "community radio station" - and, when censored & locked out of there - welcomed, I'm happy to say, by the good people at Urbana Public Television.
~ I’m Carl Estabrook. My discussants tonight are David Green & Ron Szoke.
~ Our program's name, News from Neptune, was chosen to honor Noam Chomsky, who has been talking sense about American politics for twice the quarter-century we've been on the air.
~ Chomsky has said that in the American media, “either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it’s from Neptune.”Our format is to take turns suggesting stories that have been ignored or misreported (occasionally even innocently) and then having our colleagues comment on them.
~ Previous programs are archived on YouTube and posted to the facebook page for News from Neptune, where you’ll also find comments from viewers (not all unadulterated praise) and some answers from us. I also can be reached at <carl at newsfromneptune.com>; I'm happy to receive your comments.

~Today is August 15. On this day in the year 636, there was a battle between Empire and Caliphate on what is now the Israel/Syria border. The parallel to today is interesting, but it can lead us to a lot of bad ideas. Let me explain.

August 15 is the anniversary of the Battle of Yarmouk in AD 636, four years after the death of the Prophet (PBUH) of Islam. The Roman Emperor Heraclitus sent an army to Syria to check the advance of the Caliphate, and the two armies fought for a week near the Yarmouk River, east of the Sea of Galilee, along what today is the border of Syria and Israel.

Empire and Caliphate face one another in arms today, just where they did almost 1,400 years ago. As Mark Twain said, history doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

In 636, the Muslim general Khalid ibn al-Walid (a Sunni, and a Companion of the Prophet) withdrew from Syria at the Roman advance but then defeated the numerically superior Byzantine army at Yarmouk and opened the way for the Islamic conquest of the Levant. (Shia Muslims do not honor him because they believe that he helped Abu Bakr to suppress the supporters of the Prophet's son-in-law Ali, who they believe was appointed by Muhammad as his political successor.)

In the century following the battle, muslim armies conquered north Africa and moved into the Iberian peninsula. At poitiers in what is now southern France, they were defeated in the Battle of Tours, almost a bookend with the Battle of Yarmouk.

In the year of American independence, Edward Gibbon (in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 1776-78, chapter 52) speculated on the consequences, had the Muslim army won this battle: “A victorious line of march had been prolonged above a thousand miles from the rock of Gibraltar to the banks of the Loire; the repetition of an equal space would have carried the Saracens to the confines of Poland and the Highlands of Scotland; the Rhine is not more impassable than the Nile or Euphrates, and the Arabian fleet might have sailed without a naval combat into the mouth of the Thames. Perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet.”

Noam Chomsky has said, I think correctly, “There's a good reason why nobody studies history: it just teaches you too much.” But it is possible for the lesson to perverted into propaganda. I have in mind the desperate attempt of American “traditional intellectuals” to devise a new excuse for U.S. world-wide imperialism after the collapse of the USSR. They couldn’t admit that U.S. presidents were killing literally millions of people to retain economic control of the world for the American 1%: it had to be to “stop communism”; so once communism went away they needed a new excuse. The American academy rushed to provide “the clash of civilizations.”

“The Clash of Civilizations is a theory that people's cultural and religious identities will be the primary source of conflict in the post-Cold War world.” It was proposed by political scientist Samuel “Mad Dog” Huntington in a 1992 lecture at the American Enterprise Institute, which was then developed in a 1993 Foreign Affairs article titled "The Clash of Civilizations?", in response to his former student Francis Fukuyama's 1992 book, “The End of History and the Last Man” (a more serious effort). Huntington later expanded his thesis in a 1996 book, “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.”

The Nation, in a May 9, 1987, editorial (“Scholars Bite Mad Dog”) explains that "Mad Dog" was the epithet accorded Professor Samuel P. Huntington (the professor of the Science of Government [sic] of Harvard) in the “wars of Massachusetts Avenue” (a street adjacent to the Harvard campus), when Cambridge activists objected to the pro-war propaganda coming form the Harvard faculty during the Vietnam war. Huntington did not concoct or direct the U.S. intervention, as other Harvard and M.I.T. scholars did, but he devised a rationalization for imperial oppression. In a famous article published in Foreign Affairs in 1968, Huntington sought to give intellectual shape and moral legitimacy to the program of "forced-draft urbanization and modernization" under which millions of Vietnamese peasants were taken out of their villages and crammed into the cities. (In 1962 President Kennedy sent the U.S. Air Force to attack rural South Vietnam, where more than 80 percent of the population lived. This was part of a program intended to drive several million people into concentration camps - called "strategic hamlets" - where they would be surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards. This would "protect" these people from the guerrillas whom, the US conceded, they were largely supporting.)

The poets often get there first. From Eliot, "Gerontion" (1920):

“After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities.”

We may recall Gandhi's response to the question of what he thought about Western Civilization. He's alleged to have said, "It would be a good idea."

You’re watching News from Neptune, the “Western Civilization would be a Good Idea” edition.

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{OUTRO} You've been watching NEWS FROM NEPTUNE for the 33rd week of 2014 [August 15], a "Western Civilization Would be a Good Idea" edition.

I'm Carl Estabrook: my discussants tonight have been David Green & Ron Szoke. Our thanks to UPTV, especially Jake and Jason.

Note these upcoming programs here on UPTV:

~ "Labor’s World View" - Sunday at 4pm, with Neptuner David Johnson;
~ "Progressive Voices" - Mondays 3-5pm; and on WRFU radio,
~ “Living Simply” - first Fridays at 8am, with Neptuner Ron Szoke.

Inshallah we'll be back next week with a new edition of News from Neptune - to remind you, in the words of Edward de Vere,

"...what's past is prologue, what to come / In yours and my discharge."

In the meantime, confusion to our enemies, and a good night to you.

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