Democracy Now! Reports on Honduras Deal

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Here's the link (embedding doesn't yet seem to be working for this one).

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Possible Agreement for Zelaya to Return to Presidency in Honduras

There are reports that an agreement has been reached, following pressure from US envoys, between Zelaya and the koupists in Honduras for him to return to the presidency. It appears this has to be approved by the coup-philic congress and court and some of the details remain unclear, but it looks promising. The deal also seems to include the establishment of a truth commission to investigate the actions of the past few months.

(Here's a recent video to remind us of what the oligarchs have been up to:)



This is, of course, no reason for the growing movement for a new constitution to cease. On the contrary, people are more organized and mobilized than ever to fight for justice.

HONDURAS UPDATE 10-18-09: THANK YOU, Al Jazeera!

It's been a frustrating week - talks on, talks off, old and new deadlines (here's another worthwhile interview with Zelaya, this one by PBS), more smug stalling by the thugs,... Meanwhile, for the people of Honduras, the terror continues.

One light has been this report by Al Jazeera. Please, please watch both parts.





I come down on the side of this piece: "La amnistía a los golpistas, un punto que debemos rechazar categóricamente."

Somewhere in my pantry

or my mother's cellar lies this...

tape. :/ From many years ago, when it was being sold to raise funds.



Admirable, and catchy.

I thought this was what we WANTED!

I just posted this over at Pharyngula's neverending thread, but I'm so bewildered by Dawkins' attitude and that of some of his commenters that I feel compelled to post it here as well (leaving aside, for the moment, the misogynistic-language issue):

Richard Dawkins:

If any teachers are reading this, who are in the habit of giving credit for attendance at visitor talks, I am asking you to please NOT give credit for attending any talk of mine. I have a number of venues to come on my current US tour. I shall make a point of asking, at the beginning of each talk, whether any students are there because they have been told to be there, or because they have been offered extra credit for attending. If the answer is yes, I shall ask them publicly to leave. I cannot compel them to leave but if, as has happened at most of my talks on this tour, there is an overflow crowd outside, I shall draw it to their attention and invite them, as a matter of personal conscience, to give up their seats.

This is incredibly stupid, quite frankly. Teachers, as Dawkins should know, give assignments for credit to encourage students to expand their horizons - to be challenged by ideas that go against what they've long accepted unquestioningly. This is at the heart of a university education. It can be a painful, emotional process, and people understandably are often hostile to new ideas, but few aspects of education could be more important. And he wants to impede these efforts? At any talk, there are going to be a number of people there who are obliged to be by a professor, friend, spouse, whatever. For every one who enters and leaves unchanged or more hostile, I would speculate that there's at least one who comes away thinking about things in a new way (especially when we're talking about a speaker of Dawkins' caliber). I can't tell you how many stories I've heard of people who later became activists having transformative moments when they were dragged to a public talk by a friend or spouse. Why on earth would anyone want to stop this? I would love to attend a talk by Dawkins, but I would be happy to relinquish my seat to someone who doesn't want to be there, especially a young person.

As for asking the students at the beginning of the talk to leave, this sounds insane to me. How the hell is it a "matter of conscience" to deny oneself a learning opportunity? And thinking back to my university years, when I was even more shy than I am now, I would have been utterly and enduringly traumatized by being singled out in front of thousands of people and asked to leave in a situation in which I was trying to do what my teacher had asked and had fairly obtained my seat. I would also have thought that atheists were assholes. The whole idea of it is horrifying, and I hope Dawkins changes his mind about this plan.

We want people who don't know about us to be exposed to our ideas. I'm astounded by Dawkins' stance here.

Interlude - Beauty

One more try:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOlgI6GV228

HONDURAS UPDATE 10-9-09: Continuing repression, an opinion poll, a cacerolazo, paramilitaries, anti-Semitism and the media

It’s been another week in which reports from Honduras have focused on a handful of politicians within and without and largely ignored what’s happening on the ground. I did find this video from Al Jazeera a few days ago:



Also, Al Giordano recently reported on a survey of the Honduran populace: "Poll: Wide Majority of Hondurans Oppose Coup d’Etat, Want Zelaya Back."

Honduras en lucha! has posted a call for a cacerolazo across Latin America, this Monday, the 12th, at 7 PM Honduras time.

Today, as talks continue between representatives of the elected president of the country and the violators of international law, there are more infuriating if not entirely surprising reports. The koup regime, faced with domestic and international pressure, was forced to cut short what was initially set to be a 45-day suspension of constitutional guarantees. Of course, they had already raided and confiscated the equipment of media outlets, which hasn’t been returned, and arrested people in the resistance movement, who haven’t been released, and continued to repress protests and commit human rights violations...

Now, there are reports from the UN that landusurpers have brought in Colombian paramilitaries and that the regime has hired an international gang. Another violation, and another clear indication of what this coup was about. It should be abundantly clear that these people care about nothing but maintaining their illegitimate grip on power. They should realize that it’s over. They may have derailed democracy temporarily, but they can’t stop the movements for democratic participation and social justice in the country.

I feel the need to comment, belatedly, on the matter of David Romero at Radio Globo and his revolting remarks. I have only a few things to say. First, few seem to be noting one of the most bizarre aspects of this story:

Romero later apologized for the remarks in an interview with The Associated Press, saying that they were "stupid" statements made in the heat of the moment and that don't reflect his real views. He said his grandfather was a Jewish immigrant from Czechoslovakia who came to Honduras to escape persecution in Europe.

Does this jackass not realize that he would have been considered a “mixed-breed” under the Nuremberg laws? If that genocidal vision had been fulfilled, his family would have been killed and he would likely never have been born. Some people are too stupid to be on the radio. He has apologized; as I understand it, though, he hasn't been dismissed and no action will be taken against him by the station, which, as noted above, is still off the air. That bothers me immensely. When they start broadcasting again, I’ll remove their link from the side of the page.

Annoyingly, attempts have been made by some to portray Zelaya as an unbalanced anti-Semite, apparently twisting his words about reports of Israeli mercenaries having been brought to the country. I was going to write about this a few days ago, but the reports coming out today (on top of the evidence concerning the use of LRAD and other techniques at the Brazilian embassy) - in addition to the shameless, relentless mendacity of this regime - should give pause to anyone who would reject out of hand reports of Israeli mercenaries. Nor is the simple suggestion of the involvement of Israeli mercenaries or "security" implements anti-Semitic. Is the contention that there are no such people? Tell it to black South Africans who lived under Apartheid. Anti-Semites will, of course, try to use this for their purposes. This is encouraged by sensationalistic and inaccurate reporting and needs to be smacked down, especially in times of turmoil in which scapegoating is an even greater danger.

Ophelia Benson and the Atheist Alliance International*

She coulda been a contender. Instead, a one-way ticket to Palookaville.

Don't count us out.

(By the way, I can't seem to find the video of the PBS film about Elia Kazan, Arthur Miller, and the blacklist online. A shame - it was one of their best.)

*Yes, I later corrected her name. No idea what happened, beyond too much time in the past 48 hours spent looking at a baby-name-mocking site. I blame Greg Laden.

Book Bits #2: There is No Novelist of History

I think I’ll make this a semi-regular feature! I recently provided a little snippet from a biography of Anne Hutchinson, and here I am again, offering not a full review of a work but just a few thoughts on a single passage within. In this case, I haven’t even read the work in question [!] (though I have read the exchange in question (this has all of the important links) and watched some interviews with the author. There are so many problems with this book in general that I wouldn’t even know where to begin; happily, Coyne and others have risen to the challenge.

I here address only Wright’s contentions regarding irony, which he refers to as “moral irony” but which, mealy mush aside, is more accurately depicted as historical irony. Here’s the quotation Jerry Coyne provides from Wright’s book:

This is the moral irony of the Koran. On the one hand, it is vengeful; people who read it after hearing only whitewashed summaries are often surprised at the recurring air of retribution. Yet most of the retributive passages don’t encourage retribution; almost always, it is God, not any Muslim, who is to punish the infidels. And if we confine ourselves to the Meccan years – most of the Koran –Muslims are encouraged to resist the impulse of vengeance.

Coyne’s response:

Here, as in much of his reply, Wright seems oblivious about the disparity between what scripture actually says, and how it bears on his main thesis. He admits that the Meccan verses are not only written earlier than the Medina ones, but are also superceded by the Medinan verses (in light of this, it’s completely irrelevant which verses make up “most of the Koran”). So what’s the point of emphasizing the sunny verses if they’re rendered obsolete by darker ones? And who cares whether it is God rather than the Muslims who is to punish the infidels? As Wright insists throughout The Evolution of God, it’s how the scripture is interpreted by humans that’s important. If Muslims, in the end, see the Qur’an as mandating vengeance, then Islamic theology has grown less moral.

Whenever I hear “irony” in reference to history, I reach for my…critical faculties. Coyne is completely correct, but I wish to raise a broader question – Is there such a thing as historical (or moral) irony? I’ll go out on a limb and say there isn’t. I think Coyne is right: the key issue is the historical reception of the relevant passages. But another question is – Can this historical reception really be ironic in any meaningful sense? I don’t think so. “[M]ost of the retributive passages don’t encourage retribution…God rather than the Muslims…is to punish infidels” is claptrap, which ignores the ways in which ideas have been interpreted. “Marxist-Leninism merely suggested that the kulaks were doomed by History. It's a historical irony that millions were deliberately killed”; “I merely said that homosexuals were engaging in sinful behavior that is repulsive to the Lord. I never told anyone to go out and beat them up.” The history of people believing themselves agents of the forces of necessarity/teleology is so evident that only the most naïve theorist would ignore it.

And that’s what we have here. Someone so enamored of his thesis that contrary evidence is not recognized as such, but viewed as irony. I’ve long considered it a rule of thumb in writing about events in the past and present that if I find myself resorting to claims of irony I should rethink my thesis. Irony only makes sense as a deviation from a narrative script – a literary device. There are no historical scripts.

I’m happy to hear arguments to the contrary or to discuss concrete examples of what people see as historical irony. I don’t see irony as having any place in the physical/natural/social sciences.

VIDEO - WOMEN'S RESISTANCE IN HONDURAS

VIDEO AND AUDIO FROM HONDURAS

Tear gas and LRAD:



Radio Globo forced off the air (now playing music):



(I can't confirm their provenance, but these appeared within the past hour.)

HONDURAS - URGENT: Constitutional guarantees suspended for 45 days

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Read it here:

"Honduras Coup Leader Micheletti Decrees 45-Day Suspension of Constitution"

Good thing Micheletti and his gang were around to protect democracy and the constitution from opinion polls. Clownish thugs.

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Puritan Monster

The other day, I finished Eve LaPlante's American Jezebel, a biography of Anne Hutchinson:



I won't review it now, and may not do so here at all. Still haven't decided, though I'll recommend it generally. (I will give in to the temptation to yet again recommend Linebaugh and Rediker's The Many-Headed Hydra:)



But I did want to share one story from the book that struck me. It concerns a stillbirth of Mary Dyer in Boston in 1637 and the responses to it:

Only three weeks before her trial, on a balmy October night in 1637, Hutchinson had sought and received private advice from [John] Cotton about a matter that, had the other ministers learned of it, would have caused an outcry. The matter was the birth of a deformed stillborn to a Boston couple, an event that most of their neighbors would have seen as evidence of God’s displeasure with the baby’s parents.

On October 17, Mary Dyer, the twenty-six-year-old wife of the milliner, William Dyer, went into labor two months before her due date and lost consciousness. The midwife Jane Hawkins, who was attending her at home, sent a man on horseback to summon Mistress Anne Hutchinson to assist in the birth. Later that evening, with both midwives present, Mary Dyer delivered a stillborn female with extensive deformities of the head, spinal column, and extremities.

To protect Mary and her husband from public shame, Hutchinson and Hawkins swaddled the tiny corpse, concealing its deformities. When Mary Dyer regained consciousness, the midwives told her only that her baby had died. But what to do with the body? Anne Hutchinson proposed that they bury it and not speak of it again. The risk of this, as both she and Jane Hawkins knew, was that if townspeople heard what had happened, they would suspect evil intent, which would only intensify the Dyers’ shame. English common law allowed a midwife to bury a dead baby in private, as long as ‘neither hog nor dog nor any other beast come into it’, but the Massachusetts court had forbidden this practice as a way of preventing attempts at abortion. Anne Hutchinson thought to ask Reverend Cotton for his advice.

Well past midnight, she walked from the Dyers’ house, at the corner of what is now Summer Street, to the Cottons’ gabled mansion…

…Anne tapped on the parlor window, and the minister let her in. in the candlelight, she described Mary Dyer’s birthing and requested his counsel.

Yes, conceal it, Cotton agreed, aware of the English custom and law. She thanked him and went back out into the night. Before dawn, she and Jane Hawkins buried the baby. According to one account, Cotton accompanied the midwives and dug the grave. A few other women who had been present at the difficult birth knew of the baby’s state. But no man in the colony save John Cotton, William Dyer, and probably Will Hutchinson knew that the midwives and the minister had conspired to save the Dyers additional pain (pp. 88-9).

This seemed to me so compassionate and moral. Hutchinson and the others weren't just concerned with protecting Dyer socially, but emotionally as well. There was nothing to be gained from their actions socially or - to their imaginations - with their deity, and in fact they took a great risk, motivated only, it appears, by the desire to spare others pain. Which is why I found the denouement so sickening:

[At the conclusion of her church trial, at which she was publicly excummunicated] Holding her head high, [Hutchinson] stood, turned, and walked swiftly to the meetinghouse door. Now she took the proffered hand of her friend Mary Dyer, whom she had aided after her difficult birth. A group of Anne’s supporters, shrunken by the many banishments, disenfranchisements, and voluntary exiles from the colony, clustered around the rude wooden door that led out to the late-winter light.

…[John] Winthrop was unaware, as he watched Mistresses Hutchinson and Dyer in the rear of the meetinghouse, of the events in October that had followed Dyer’s stillbirth. Within a week, however, word of the ‘monster’ that Dyer had borne – and that Hutchinson and Hawkins, with Cotton’s support, had secretly buried – would reach the governor, horrifying him. He had always admired the charming and attractive young Mary Dyer, but now she seemed ‘of a very proud spirit’, ‘much addicted to revelations’, and ‘notoriously infected with Mistress Hutchinson’s errors’. Of the Dyer baby, he would report in his journal:

It was so monstrous and misshapen as the like that scarce been heard of. It had no head but a face, which stood so low upon the breast, as the ears, which were like an ape’s, grew upon the shoulders.

The eyes stood far out, so did the mouth. The nose was hooking upward. The breast and back was full of sharp prickles, like a thornback [an ocean dweller with thornlike spines]. The navel and all the belly with the distinction of the sex were where lower part of the back and hips should have been, and those back parts were on the side the face stood.

The arms and hands, with the thighs and legs, were as other children’s, but instead of toes it had upon each foot three claws, with talons like a young fowl. Upon the back above the belly it had two great holes, like mouths, and in each of them stuck out a piece of flesh.

It had no forehead, but in the place thereof, above the eyes, four horns, whereof two were above an inch long, hard, and sharp.

The infant’s condition is consistent with a severe birth anomaly, anencephaly, the partial or total absence of the brain, according to modern medical experts. The horns, talons, and prickles are, however, embellishment.

‘Many things were observable in the birth and discovery of this monster’, the governor would note. The Dyers were ‘Familists, and very active in maintaining their party. The midwife, one Hawkin’s wife, of St. Ives, was notorious for familiarity with the Devil, and is now a prime Familist. This monster was concealed by three persons about five months’. Intimating a communal revulsion like that later associated with the witches of Salem Village, Winthrop reported that most women present at the birth ‘were suddenly taken with such a violent vomiting, as they were forced to go home, others had their children taken with convulsions, and so were sent home, so as none were left at the time of the birth but the midwife and two others, whereof one fell asleep. At such time as the child died, the bed where in the mother lay shook so violently as all in the room perceived it’.

Learning of the birth, Winthrop would order that Mistress Hawkins be questioned and the corpse exhumed. ‘The child was taken up’ from its grave, he reported, ‘and though it was much corrupted, yet the horns and claws and holes in the back and some scales were found and seen of above a hundred persons’ (pp. 205-6).

Monster, indeed.

HONDURAS UPDATE 9-27-09

• The Keystone Koupists have demanded that the Brazilian government define the status of Manuel Zelaya - still resident in the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa - within 10 days. The Brazilian government has rejected this ultimatum and noted that their embassy is protected by international law.


• There are allegations that the Koupists have also denied entry to and/or detained a contingent of four representatives from the OAS seeking to promote negotiation.


• There are reports (well, I've only seen one - in AFP, which I don't particularly trust and won't link to*) that Zelaya has issued a nationwide call for people to amass in Tegucigalpa tomorrow, which will be the three-month anniversary of the criminal coup.


• Here's a link to an interview with Honduran activist Bertha Caceres.

If a showdown is looming, I hope it is peaceful. The oligarchs should realize that they have failed, and step aside.

*Their wording implies that he was urging a violent offensive; even without knowing more details, I'm sure that isn't the case.

Geoffrey Megargee on Nazi camps and ghettos

I watched an interview yesterday on Book TV with Geoffrey Megargee - author of Inside Hitler's High Command (2002) - about the set of reference volumes he and others have been working on for about a decade for the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945, from which Volume I has recently been released. Here's the link to the brief (18-minute) interview.