As any of you who know me, can imagine, I've been chewing on this one for quite some time. Not that it's anything terribly difficult to address, aside from the fact that it's an incredible WHAT THE FUCK!!! So, to summarize... The Commonwealth of Kentucky, one of the counted "states" in the Republic of the United States of America, is going to not only fund (with YOUR tax dollars), a faith-based theme park, they're going to give the park $40 million dollars worth of tax breaks (annually), at your expense!! The fact that people are even remotely in agreement with this proposal is a detriment to the very notion of everything that this country is founded upon.
Ark Park? Really? Fuck you!
Ark Park Coming to Kentucky—On the Taxpayer’s Dime
By: Clayton Whitt
The Tower of Babel is going to be built (or rebuilt, depending on your view of the historicity of the Bible)in Kentucky.
And that’s not all: the Ark Encounter theme park, slated to be constructed near Williamstown in the greater Cincinnati area and completed in 2014, will include a full-scale (presumably measuring 300 x 50x 30 cubits) “replica” of Noah’s Ark, as well as retail shops, a petting zoo, a first-century Middle Easternvillage, a walled city, and more.
The Ark Encounter is a project led by Answers in Genesis, proprietors of the infamous Creation Museumin nearby Petersburg and proponents of young Earth creationism, the belief that the god of the Bible created the Earth in six days, approximately 10,000 years before the present.
The Ark Encounter will indeed reflect this view in its features, for Answers in Genesis interprets the story of Noah and his ark literally. On their webpage you will find detailed articles explaining the answers to difficult questions such as how Noah was able to accomplish the greatest nautical feat of his time witha tiny crew of family members, and where all the extra water that flooded the earth went after the rain stopped. The answer always leads to the same point: it was possible, and it happened exactly the way thatthe book of Genesis describes it in those brief passages of chapters 6 through 9.
While nearly all humanists, and anyone who cares about scientific and historical accuracy, probably feels less than enthusiastic about the construction of a $172 million modern-day tribute to such an impossible tale, the taxpayers of the state of Kentucky have even more reason to be concerned. The Ark Encounter ispoised to reap approximately $40 million in tax rebates from the state, approved in a unanimous vote by the Kentucky Tourism Development Finance Authority on May 19.
This vote means that the Ark Encounter will receive a rebate on sales taxes collected on food, ticket, and merchandise sales at the park for ten years, allowing the project to recoup up to 25 percent of construction costs if it meets attendance and sales projections, according to a press release from Ark Encounter.
These sales tax rebates are a common tool of state and local governments for economic and tourism development. But while the state’s goal to promote job creation is laudable, by supporting Biblical creationism the tax rebates likely run afoul of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.Government entities cannot transfer resources to a wholly religious institution that is pushing such a strictly sectarian point of view. That $40 million could go a long way toward job creation in a purely secular context, but instead Kentucky is reinforcing the view that it is a center for old-fashioned Biblicalliteralism rather than scientific advancement.
The Ark Encounter enjoys the freedom of religion guaranteed by the First Amendment, but likewise, that same amendment limits the support for the project that the state of Kentucky can give. With the increasingly dim view that the federal courts are giving toward taxpayer standing,
I’m not so confident that a lawsuit by concerned citizens will be successful in stopping the tax rebates, but every Kentuckian who cares about the separation of church and state should let his or her legislators and governor know that they should invest state money in constitutionally appropriate projects that promote sound science and education.
Let them build the Ark park, but not on the taxpayer’s dime!
Clayton Whitt is the development and communications coordinator for the American Humanist Association.
Posted 13:37PM on June 08 2011 by Clayton Whitt
6.04.2011
Goodbye to All That: Why Americans Are Not Taught History
"Goodbye to All That: Why Americans Are Not Taught
History" (1998)
Christopher Hitchens
"You all remember," said the Controller, in his strong deep voice, "you all remember, I
suppose, that beautiful and inspired saying of Our Ford's: "History is bunk. History," he
repeated slowly, "is bunk."
He waved his hand; and it was as though, with an invisible feather whisk, he had brushed
away a little dust, and the dust was Harappa, was Ur of the Chaldees; some spider-webs, and they were Thebes and Babylon and Cnossos and Mycenae. Whisk. Whisk—and where was Odysseus, where was Job, where were Jupiter and Gotama and Jesus? Whisk—and those specks of antique dirt called Athens and Rome, Jerusalem and the Middle Kingdom—all were gone. Whisk—the place where Italy had been was empty. Whisk, the cathedrals; whisk, whisk, King Lear and the Thoughts of Pascal. Whisk, Passion; whisk, Requiem; whisk, Symphony; whisk…. "That's why you're taught no history," the Controller was saying.
—Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
We dwell in a present-tense culture that somehow, significantly, decided to employ the telling expression "You're history" as a choice reprobation or insult, and thus elected to speak forgotten volumes about itself. By that standard, the forbidding dystopia of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four already belongs, both as text and as date, with Ur and Mycenae, while the hedonistic nihilism of Huxley still beckons toward a painless, amusement-sodden, and stress-free consensus. Orwell's was a house of horrors. He often seemed to beg credulity because he posited a regime that would go to any lengths to own and possess history, to rewrite and reconstruct it, and to inculcate it by means of coercion. Whereas Huxley, writing of a California-style utopia of 1932, rightly foresaw that any such regime could break but could not bend. In 1988, four years after 1984, the Soviet Union scrapped its official history curriculum and announced that a newly authorized version was somewhere in the works. That was the precise moment at which the regime conceded its own extinction. For true blissed-out and vacant servitude, though, you need an otherwise sophisticated society where no serious history is taught at all.
And yet there is still an unmet need, an unanswered yearning, for an intelligible past. It finds its expression in surrogate forms, like the "referred pain" of a complex ailment, but it may still be registered. A few years back, just as many major university departments of English were sidelining Shakespeare or dropping him altogether, the Hollywood sensibility "kicked in" to bring us Ian McKellen as a Weimar-like Richard III, or Kenneth Branagh as Hamlet, or Laurence Fishburne as the first black man to take the part of Othello on-screen. In somewhat the same way, the departure of the historical muse from the standard curriculum has been revenged or requited by a torrent of retrospectives. Some locate this moment in the vast popular response to Ken Burns's television series on the Civil War; in any event, the "history" and "biography" menu on A&E and the History Channel, and on PBS, is not furnished by those who are quixotically determined to lose money for integrity's sake. Nor do the lords of celluloid believe that they are acting pro bono when they revisit the beaches and cliffs of Normandy, the fouled hulls of the Middle Passage, the suggestive outlines of Dealey Plaza or the Watergate building. Nor is their product received as mere entertainment: Mel Gibson's Braveheart is credited with fueling a revival of Scottish nationalism that even now discomfits Tony Blair and the monarch whose bacon he saved last September.
Consider, too, the question of memorials. Is there a major city in the United States that is not currently arguing over some statue or plaque, or disputing the name given to some school or public building? These tussles are often sorry enough to make one reel and clutch the brow (Washington National Airport was already named for a president before some bright sparks thought to dub it again, in honor of the nation's leading amnesiac), but even in their paltriness they disclose a readiness to take history seriously.
Yet this fluttering cultural pulse has no attending physician. According to the last "National Assessment of Educational Progress in U.S. History," which was undertaken in 1994, we can no longer call upon the traditional schoolmarm concept of history as a pageant, or even as one damn thing after another. In order to argue against this caricature, you would need to know at least the official reason why Pilgrims and Puritans first voyaged to America, which 59 percent of fourth graders were unable to do. You would certainly need to be able to name one of the original thirteen colonies, which was beyond the capacity of 68 percent of that grade. By the eighth grade, matters have got worse, as they are bound to do. Ninety percent of eighth graders could recount nothing of the debates at the Constitutional Convention. Even when prompted by mentions of Yalta, Lend-Lease, and Hiroshima, 59 percent of the eighth grade were unprepared to say which conflict these references brought to mind. In the twelfth grade, 53 percent looked blank when invited to specify "the goal that was most important in shaping United States foreign policy between 1945 and 1990."
It isn't as if today's twelfth-grade students are giving the "wrong" reply to that last question, and scrawling ironic references to "imperialism" or "folie de grandeur" or even "Globocop" on their tests, let alone some variant like "Stalinism" or "Kulturkampf." They just don't know, and very probably don't care. Their immediate past has been airbrushed, or whisked, as surely as antiquity. When Henry James was writing The American Scene at the very opening of this century, he fretted about what Leon Edel, James's biographer, termed "America's cult of impermanence" or what James himself called "the perpetual repudiation of the past, so far as there has been a past to repudiate." So there is perhaps an innate cultural bias against "dwelling on the past," unless it is for the sanctified purposes of good citizenship. Sheer ignorance generally stems from plain ignorance, and surveys have been turning up results like this for generations. An amazing 54 percent of eleventh graders "knew," at least by dint of multiple choice, that Joseph Stalin was the leader of the Soviet Union during World War II, according to the determinedly pessimistic 1987 work of Diane Ravitch and Chester E. Finn Jr. (What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know?). Yet a poll published by the New York Times in 1995 discovered that only 49 percent of American adults could say with confidence that the Soviet Union had been on the same side as the United States for that period, with the rest either having no opinion or identifying "Russia" as an enemy or, most remarkably of all, as a noncombatant. And even this is salutary, by comparison with a New York Times survey of fifty-five years ago, which found that a quarter of entering college freshmen in 1943 could not name the man who had been president of the United States during the Civil War. In the contemporary "debate" on the inculcation of history, the United States has even managed to forget its own amnesia. The measure of an education is that you acquire some idea of the extent of your ignorance. And it seems at least thinkable that today's history students don't quite know what subject they are not being taught. At the time when alarm first (or last) began to be registered on this score, which was around the middle of the present decade, the good people at the National Council on History Education did some homework. They found that most states required highschool students to "take" a maximum of one year each of American and "world" history, and that several states had no history "requirement" of any kind. You might be startled to find that among the no-history-curriculum states was numbered the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. So would I have been, if I had not been a visiting professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh in 1997. Since you can't teach the American literary canon (indeed, you can't even teach people to deconstruct it) without some reference to historical context, I began every class with an abbreviated introduction about the period in which the author was writing. I still have the notes and papers sent me by my students, asking why they had to get all the way to college before anyone bothered to fill in this nagging blank. Michigan and Alaska also let history slide altogether, while much-derided West Virginia wanted two years of U.S. history (combined with world history) and three years of world history (combined with U.S. history). Between these two poles, Nevada stipulated three years of U.S. history, while mandating that this should include "state history and government" and omitting world history altogether. Ohio opted for a judicious and restrained 0.5 years of American history and left it at that. Numerous other states, few of them asking for more than a year's reflection on the American past, folded history, national or global, into a package that included "world geography or world cultures," "global studies," "psychology/sociology" (the Montana solution), or the babble of "outcomes-based" or "core-competency" requirements. Every classroom a hive of inactivity; every flag-draped school a factory for the mass-production of a little learning.
About four years ago I began to ask the teachers of my own children how it came to be that they could not tell Thomas Jefferson from Thomas the Tank Engine. In the preceding sentence, it is unclear whether I mean that the children didn't know unless I told them, or that the teachers didn't know unless I told them. The confusion is intentional. One instructor, at a rather costly District of Columbia day school, cheerfully avowed that she herself "had never been that much of a reader." Others, more candid, announced that history was a bit of a minefield subject and that "good examples" (like Pocahontas and, on a good day, Frederick Douglass) were the thing. Parson Weems himself could hardly have bettered the modern method whereby children get good reports in a subject that they have never studied in order that a tiny pump be applied to the
valves of their fledgling self-esteem.
According to statistics compiled by the National Center for Education Standards, fewer than 19 percent of high-school and middle-school social-studies teachers in 1994 had majored (or minored) in history. That same year, when Alan Bennett's wonderful play The Madness of George III was released as a motion picture, its title was given as The Madness of King George. Hollywood's publicity people worried that audiences might think they had missed parts I and II.
It was time for one of those full-dress cultural sham-fights, like the earlier one about core values and "Western Civ," that animate the op-ed pages every decade or so. We need new standards! Alas, with no galvanizing Sputnik to unlock real money and talent, and with no encircling foe to spark another rewrite of the Pledge of Allegiance, federal monies went to subsidize a rather pallid and prolix set of "guidelines" that might as well have been marketed as "American History—Making a Difference Since 1776" or "Our Past—Serving the Community with Pride." As with many such trite labelings, however, the small print should have carried the dire admonition "Contents Under Pressure" or "Some Assembly Required."
Batteries were included. The tempestuous Lynne V. Cheney, spouse of George Bush's one-time secretary of defense, found herself temporarily at a giddying and pivotal point. Not only did she chair the National Endowment for the Humanities, which the zealots in her own party desired to abolish, but this same endowment had funded, to the tune of $2 million, the new "standards," which she found she wanted to abolish also. An article, catchily titled "The End of History," written either by or for Cheney, appeared in the Wall Street Journal in October 1994. You know the sort of thing—too many Native Americans and slaves in the new standards, too few pioneers, too much political correctness. In a matter of months, on the motion of Senator Slade Gorton, Republican of Washington, the full Senate had repudiated the "standards" in a vote of 99-1. It is safe to say that few if any of the legislators and deliberators had cleared their own passage through the offending volumes.
Thus began the current dialogue of the deaf, still raging at a school near you. Working toward his master's in tautology, John Fonte of the conservative Committee to Review National Standards said that "if you have a 99-1 vote in the Senate against it, obviously it was not consensual enough." He and his co-thinkers believe that consensus is best achieved by letting "states and local school districts" decide on the tenor of history teaching, which would certainly help insulate children from the news about McCarthyism and the Ku Klux Klan that Cheney found so depressingly salient in the original "guidelines."
Ever since the tussle between Cheney and the forces of P.C., history classes and textbooks have been oscillating between demands for a patriotic and intelligible narrative and cries for a story that is more "user-friendly" to minorities and new arrivals. School bureaucracies everywhere have responded by looking for safe and tepid waters, and educational publishers have been keen to abet the process in order to sell their bland and uncontroversial series. Combine this with lobbying from disparate confessional, regional, and ethnic groups, and each tributary blends imperceptibly to produce a uniform flow of drool:
TIME, CONTINUITY AND CHANGE
Content Standard A:
Students in Wisconsin will learn about history through the concepts of time, continuity and change in order to develop historical perspective and answer questions about our contemporary world and future.
Rationale:
Human beings want to understand their historical roots and to locate themselves in time. In developing these insights the students must know what things were like in the past and how things change and econstruct and interpret historic events provides a needed perspective in addressing where we have been, what we have become, and where we might be going. In Wisconsin schools, this teaching focus typically appears in units and courses in history and the humanities.
The above is the preamble to a "standards" blueprint of mid-1996. It seems to have been written by some kind of poorly engineered machine. It violates a principle that holds good for education as well as for medicine: "First Do No Harm." And it is the sort of prose in which "history" is increasingly packaged by state authorities. The ensuing Wisconsin paragraphs are headed with the minatory words "Performance Standards" and assure us with more assertion than conviction that: "By grade twelve, students will:
- learn how to use a variety of sources and to check their credibility in order to interpret the past and to better understand current issues
- apply theories and historical inquiry to decision making about the future, such as citizenship responsibilities in the 21st century, the long term possibility for peace in Eastern Europe and the evolving role of China in a world economy.
It's all there—the slovenly grammar, the weary obeisance to the millennium and to "globalization," the inept repetitions: all of it boiled into a mush wherein history is offered cajolingly and apologetically as a sort of "Old News You Can Use." Let no one doubt the extent of the damage done by comfort teaching or therapeutic education, which has reversed the idea that educators should be educated (a decent teacher will teach in order to learn) and which has made the relationship of instructor to student into an exercise in the mutual, restful softening of the cortex. Here is how the state of Illinois, long renowned for toughness and direct speech, proposed to illuminate the past to its future citizens as recently as 1996. Students were ostensibly required to:
-Assess the long-term consequences of major decisions by leaders in various nations of the world, drawing information from a variety of traditional, electronic and on-line sources.
-Explain the effects of urbanization, industrialization and technology on society and institutions throughout history.
These and other fatuities—or impossibilities, if you try and guess the real weight of the second stipulation above—were the result of a history "curriculum" that had been collapsed into the social-science department and that furthermore had to be "clear and meaningful to students, parents, educators, business representatives and the community at large." The capacious "inclusiveness" of that last gorgeous mosaic demands that the whole project be preintelligible to those who haven't studied it yet, those who missed it last time, those who need it most, and those whose business it isn't! The exhausted phraseology melds with the upward-and-onward automatic rhetoric to produce nullity. In a gesture to aspiration, the compilers of the standards quoted George Santayana to the effect that those who did not learn from the past would be condemned to repeat it. By Santayana's absurd standard, the grade-schoolers of Illinois should be entering their Babylonian epoch just about now.
In December 1950, in the course of his presidential address to the American Historical Association, Samuel Eliot Morison expressed the view that it was time to abandon the Jefferson-Jackson-F. D. Roosevelt line" and to have at last an American history "written from a sanely conservative point of view." This was the midpoint in a reaction against "progressive" history teaching, which reaction ran almost unchecked (especially in the states of the old Confederacy) from about 1939 until the high noon of the Cold War. There was then an opposite but not equal reaction from certain revisionists, many of them excellent, such as Barton Bernstein and Christopher Lasch, but some of them callow and annoying. In due time, this collision expressed itself in a fight over history textbooks, in one of the few advanced nations that does not establish a nationally mandated curriculum where all students learn, so to speak, from the same page. The result is a version of News from Nowhere, written from nobody's point of view and deferential to the largest book-buying market or the most loquacious lobby.
The Greek verb historein means "to ask questions" and was employed by Herodotus, who, often credited with being the first or founding historian, described his work as "inquiries" or historiai. In 1950, Henry Steele Commager and Samuel Eliot Morison jointly produced a textbook entitled The Growth of the American Republic. Describing the antebellum state of affairs below the Mason-Dixon line, they wrote:
As for Sambo, whose wrongs moved the abolitionists to wrath and tears, there is some reason to believe that he suffered less than any other class in the South from its "peculiar institution."
I would not, personally, wish to be deprived of this excerpt when teaching American history. Essay questions and classroom discussions might inquire: (1) What "reason to believe"? (2) Why were abolitionists so moved? (3) What gave rise to the notable coinage "peculiar institution"? (4) Why did both camps believe they had biblical authority? and (5) What has changed in America since 1950 to stop distinguished Yankee historians from employing the term "Sambo"? I think any competent teacher would and should have been able to cope with any "hurt feelings" that might arise in or out of the classroom. (If there were no such feelings, then something other than history would be the subject being taught.) But as matters stand, we have Southern textbooks that euphemize the Confederacy, Northern ones that scant the whole unpleasant subject, and a recent national debate on a possible presidential "apology" for slavery so etiolated that hardly anyone thought to ask whether President Lincoln's Second Inaugural had not in fact contained a rather finely worded section on the subject, dealing not just with apology for slavery but with real-time revenge for it. One can phrase the "First Do No Harm" injunction, as it applies to teaching, in another way: You must not bore young students, and you must not—may not—condescend to them. Who would dare argue, in the inculcation of geography or mathematics or French, that there are volatile elements to which the tender, rising generation ought not to be exposed? Who would dare insist that instruction in physics, for example, ought to be "clear and meaningful" to ignorant parents or to local "business representatives"?
Young Americans are at home with the concept of black holes and the imminence of cloning. The idea that human life may be a cosmic joke is well known to them. They understand that viruses and other microorganisms can be more powerful actors than dictators. The youngest of them share the wised-up humor of The Simpsons ("Springfield Youth Center: Building Unrealistic Hopes Since 1966"). But can they be allowed to consider their own history as anything other than a story of uplift, or, at worst, a chronicle of obstacles overcome? Not really, says David McCullough, whose Why History? is widely circulated by those hoping for a revival of the subject: "History shows us how to behave. History teaches, reinforces what we believe in, what we stand for, and what we ought to be willing to stand up for. History is—or should be— he bedrock of patriotism, not the chest-pounding kind of patriotism but the real thing, love of country." And no, also, says Joy Hakim, a self-starting amateur historian who decided to write her own textbooks (marketed as A History of US) and ignited a brief spark of hope by breaking the monopoly of so-called educational publishing. Her introduction states:
Learning about our country's history will make you understand what it means to be an American. And being American is a privilege. People all over the world wish that they, too, could be American. Why? Because we are a nation that is trying to be fair to all our citizens.... The more you study history, the more you will realize that all nations are not the same. Some are better than others.
Does that seem like an unfair thing to say? Maybe, but we believe it.
The third sentence does express a factual truth. But the reason given in the fifth sentence is mere propaganda, at least insofar as it distinguishes the United States from Italy, say, or Iceland or Chile. In what other discipline may a teacher so readily assume what has to be proved? Many critics have hailed Hakim for contesting the relativists and the guilt-trip historians head-on. But how different is her approach from the standard textbooks of the last generation, entitled as they were: The American Pageant, The American Way, Land of Promise, American Adventures, Life and Liberty, The Challenge of Freedom, Triumph of the American Nation? It was under this benign rule that the current crop of unlettered teachers and distracted pupils was sown.
In many ways, the low-level argument between the safe traditionalists and the ingratiating multiculturalists mirrors the dispute over the teaching of literature. And since history is literature, among other things, and since most historians have been literary authors, the comparison may be an illuminating one. In which class should students be asked to read Charles Dickens's American Notes, for example (not that they are given this opportunity in either English or history)? The chapter on slavery in that short book contains a list of small ads from the contemporary Southern press in which masters would identify runaway serfs: "Clog of iron on his right foot"; "several marks of lashing." It electrifies every student to whom I have shown it, partly because Dickens is a recognized "canonical" author and partly because of the stark immediacy of the reportage.
Or consider the great Samuel Clemens. Huckleberry Finn is one of the few books that all American children are mandated to read. Jonathan Arac, in his brilliant new study of the teaching of Huck, is quite right to term it "hyper-canonical." And Twain is a figure in American history as well as in American letters. The only objectors to his presence in the schoolroom are mediocre or fanatical racial nationalists or "inclusivists," like Julius Lester or the Chicago-based Dr. John Wallace, who object to Twain's use—in or out of "context"—of the expression "nigger." An empty and formal "debate" on this has dragged on for decades and flares up every now and again to bore us. But what if Twain were taught as a whole? He served briefly as a Confederate soldier and wrote a hilarious and melancholy account, The Private History of a Campaign That Failed. He went on to make a fortune by publishing the memoirs of Ulysses Grant. He composed a caustic and brilliant report on the treatment of the Congolese by King Leopold of the Belgians. With William Dean Howells he led the Anti-Imperialist League, to oppose McKinley's and Roosevelt's pious and sanguinary war in the Philippines. Some of the pamphlets he wrote for the league can be set alongside those of Swift and Defoe for their sheer polemical artistry. In 1900 he had a public exchange with Winston Churchill in New York City, in which he attacked American support for the British war in South Africa and British support for the American war in Cuba. Does this count as history? Just try and find any reference to it, not just in textbooks but in more general histories and biographies. The Anti- Imperialist League has gone down the Orwellian memory hole, taking with it a great swirl of truly American passion and intellect, and the grand figure of Twain has become reduced—in part because he upended the vials of ridicule over the national tendency to religious and spiritual quackery, where he discerned what Tocqueville has missed and far anticipated Mencken—to that of a drawling, avuncular fabulist. Ours is a society wedded to the idea that "Western" and "civilization" are cognate terms, ready to do battle for the heritage of fifth-century Athens as our ancestor, consecrated in its state architecture and statuary to the Graeco-Roman ideal—and there is not a whiff, not a hint, not a suspicion of the Socratic method in the way it instructs and elevates its young. What Is History? inquired E. H. Carr in a short book, published in 1961 and written well within the grasp of anyone with a reading age of sixteen, that appears on no reading list anywhere in the fifty states. Well, whatever it is (and Professor Carr had his own freely stated dogma), we know that it proceeds by means of irony, contradiction, and unintended consequence. Theodore Draper's entirely engrossing book A Struggle for Power, about the origins of the American Revolution, finds its locus in a "pamphlet war" in London in 1759. Anticipating the victorious outcome of the Seven Years' War, the British disputed about which French colony they should annex. The choice narrowed to Guadeloupe, rich in spices, and Canada, rich in space. The acquisition of Guadeloupe would complete British control of the Caribbean basin, while Canada would offer a great potential market for future British manufactures. Mercantile factions and lobbies formed on both sides of the question, and you can look up their exchanges and read them in plain English. The pro-Canada forces were better organized and financed. But the pro-Guadeloupe lobby made a telling point on the eve of its defeat. If we take Canada, it argued in a finely written polemic, then the ambitious American colonists will no longer require our protection from France. Indeed, they already manifest the stirrings of an independence movement... Within two decades of this debate, the Tory loyalists of His Majesty King George (Part III) were scuttling to sanctuary over the Canadian border. I have taught Draper's book in several classrooms and have had the pleasure of watching even the most indifferent students undergo the kindling of an interest: "What if the British had plumped for Guadeloupe? Would that have meant no Declaration of Independence?" "Not necessarily, but the context and conditions would have been different. Next week I want someone to tell us why the word 'czar' is an odd one to employ in today's American social engineering."
The idea of trying to teach the whole story, not just "warts and all" but as an inquiry or an argument, has been well advocated by Dr. James Loewen, a veteran lecturer in history at university level and the author of Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. Testifying to the thirst for honest and well-written discussion of history, this 1995 book has a quarter-million copies currently in print. In Loewen's opinion, the present teaching of history by rote is neither a science nor an art and has manifestly and confessedly, and for all reasonable purposes also completely, failed. There is no chance of amassing, as Bishop Stubbs once fondly hoped, a true bill of facts to be memorized. Von Ranke's famous dictum just to show "how it really was" represents a noble but impossible aspiration.
Loewen once won a benchmark case, beautifully entitled Loewen et al. v. Turnipseed et
al., against the crass censorship of schoolbooks in Mississippi. But unlike Joy Hakim, whose verve he admires, he does not recommend the teaching of history as any kind of inspiration. Instead, he proposes that students be given two contrasting texts: Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, for instance, as against Clarence B. Carson's A Basic History of the United States, published by the conservative American Textbook Committee in Alabama in 1986. When there is a basic grasp of narrative and evolution, and a corresponding grasp of the idea of differing views of the same story, it will become apt to consider theories and interpretations.
This is how the Greeks, more honored by invocation than by emulation, conceived the theory and practice of teaching by dialectics. What was the influence of Pericles' funeral oration on the Gettysburg Address? This engrossing question, open to any mind of average ability, cannot even be asked if, as was recently discovered, the majority of America's schoolchildren don't know in which century the Civil War was fought. But if an appreciation of history as a continuous argument, and not a dull Whiggish series of "problems resolved," can be instilled, then a student entering college might be ready to attempt the pleasurable exercises of a reasonably trained mind. False and emptily moralistic trails, such as "Are We Too Eurocentric?" or "Was Columbus Ecologically Friendly?" can be abandoned in favor of the real thing. Why did Basil Davidson have to refute Hegel in order to show that Africa had a history? Was Bertrand Russell right in saying that the disappearance of North American Indians was no tragedy? And why was he banned from teaching in the United States? Had Russell read Bartolomé de Las Casas, first historian of the Americas, who doubted that the "discovery" had been a good thing? Why did the first historian of the Americas have a Spanish name? Why do New Yorkers no longer speak Dutch, and who proposed that the official language of the United States be German? Was the Civil War really fought to free the slaves? Why are Woodrow Wilson's "Fourteen Points" unthinkable without Lenin's dissolution of the Constituent Assembly? Was the Great Depression caused by too little government intervention or too much? Why is the largest military base in Cuba an American one? Why is it possible to swim from America to Russia?
Each of these questions admits of several answers, many of them equally "valid." In such cases, what matters is how you think and not what you think. E. D. Hirsch Jr. and other scholars of cultural literacy have already been solidly vindicated in their view that fresh knowledge builds on existing knowledge. It remains to apply this realization to the most despoiled and neglected subject in the curriculum. The task cannot be left to the "community of scholars"—and what an antique ring that phrase has now acquired—because they have mostly elected to desert the field or to clutter it with the wrappers of comfort food.
Those who care about cultural literacy are chiefly volunteers, and they are already hardpressed on numerous fronts. But the potential "pool" of volunteers for a struggle to reinstate historical discourse is quite substantial. What needs to be combated is the idea, so often and so worthily expressed—and so stultifying—that "light" is to be preferred to "heat." Heat, as can be learned in other classrooms, is the only possible source of light. History must become a field of ardent contestation and not another arid patch of middle ground. If properly joined, this battle would also and of itself lead to more confident and thoughtful citizens, whose formation requires more than a mixture of Crispus Attucks, Betsy Ross, and Emma Lazarus. Pluralism is a means as well as an end. "Such a lot of things seem to me such rot," says a young girl in one of Agatha Christie's mysteries. "History, for instance. Why, it's quite different out of different books!" To this her mentor, wise in the ways of the world, replies: "That is its real interest." Confronted by the philistine verdicts of "bunk" and "rot," and the wasteland created by the attempts at an authorized version, we can, in the time where Hawking and Heisenberg are commonplaces, at least borrow the last phrase of Professor E. H. Carr's Trevelyan Lecture: "I shall look out on a world in tumult and a world in travail, and shall answer in the well-worn words of a great scientist: 'And yet—it moves.'"
History" (1998)
Christopher Hitchens
"You all remember," said the Controller, in his strong deep voice, "you all remember, I
suppose, that beautiful and inspired saying of Our Ford's: "History is bunk. History," he
repeated slowly, "is bunk."
He waved his hand; and it was as though, with an invisible feather whisk, he had brushed
away a little dust, and the dust was Harappa, was Ur of the Chaldees; some spider-webs, and they were Thebes and Babylon and Cnossos and Mycenae. Whisk. Whisk—and where was Odysseus, where was Job, where were Jupiter and Gotama and Jesus? Whisk—and those specks of antique dirt called Athens and Rome, Jerusalem and the Middle Kingdom—all were gone. Whisk—the place where Italy had been was empty. Whisk, the cathedrals; whisk, whisk, King Lear and the Thoughts of Pascal. Whisk, Passion; whisk, Requiem; whisk, Symphony; whisk…. "That's why you're taught no history," the Controller was saying.
—Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
We dwell in a present-tense culture that somehow, significantly, decided to employ the telling expression "You're history" as a choice reprobation or insult, and thus elected to speak forgotten volumes about itself. By that standard, the forbidding dystopia of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four already belongs, both as text and as date, with Ur and Mycenae, while the hedonistic nihilism of Huxley still beckons toward a painless, amusement-sodden, and stress-free consensus. Orwell's was a house of horrors. He often seemed to beg credulity because he posited a regime that would go to any lengths to own and possess history, to rewrite and reconstruct it, and to inculcate it by means of coercion. Whereas Huxley, writing of a California-style utopia of 1932, rightly foresaw that any such regime could break but could not bend. In 1988, four years after 1984, the Soviet Union scrapped its official history curriculum and announced that a newly authorized version was somewhere in the works. That was the precise moment at which the regime conceded its own extinction. For true blissed-out and vacant servitude, though, you need an otherwise sophisticated society where no serious history is taught at all.
And yet there is still an unmet need, an unanswered yearning, for an intelligible past. It finds its expression in surrogate forms, like the "referred pain" of a complex ailment, but it may still be registered. A few years back, just as many major university departments of English were sidelining Shakespeare or dropping him altogether, the Hollywood sensibility "kicked in" to bring us Ian McKellen as a Weimar-like Richard III, or Kenneth Branagh as Hamlet, or Laurence Fishburne as the first black man to take the part of Othello on-screen. In somewhat the same way, the departure of the historical muse from the standard curriculum has been revenged or requited by a torrent of retrospectives. Some locate this moment in the vast popular response to Ken Burns's television series on the Civil War; in any event, the "history" and "biography" menu on A&E and the History Channel, and on PBS, is not furnished by those who are quixotically determined to lose money for integrity's sake. Nor do the lords of celluloid believe that they are acting pro bono when they revisit the beaches and cliffs of Normandy, the fouled hulls of the Middle Passage, the suggestive outlines of Dealey Plaza or the Watergate building. Nor is their product received as mere entertainment: Mel Gibson's Braveheart is credited with fueling a revival of Scottish nationalism that even now discomfits Tony Blair and the monarch whose bacon he saved last September.
Consider, too, the question of memorials. Is there a major city in the United States that is not currently arguing over some statue or plaque, or disputing the name given to some school or public building? These tussles are often sorry enough to make one reel and clutch the brow (Washington National Airport was already named for a president before some bright sparks thought to dub it again, in honor of the nation's leading amnesiac), but even in their paltriness they disclose a readiness to take history seriously.
Yet this fluttering cultural pulse has no attending physician. According to the last "National Assessment of Educational Progress in U.S. History," which was undertaken in 1994, we can no longer call upon the traditional schoolmarm concept of history as a pageant, or even as one damn thing after another. In order to argue against this caricature, you would need to know at least the official reason why Pilgrims and Puritans first voyaged to America, which 59 percent of fourth graders were unable to do. You would certainly need to be able to name one of the original thirteen colonies, which was beyond the capacity of 68 percent of that grade. By the eighth grade, matters have got worse, as they are bound to do. Ninety percent of eighth graders could recount nothing of the debates at the Constitutional Convention. Even when prompted by mentions of Yalta, Lend-Lease, and Hiroshima, 59 percent of the eighth grade were unprepared to say which conflict these references brought to mind. In the twelfth grade, 53 percent looked blank when invited to specify "the goal that was most important in shaping United States foreign policy between 1945 and 1990."
It isn't as if today's twelfth-grade students are giving the "wrong" reply to that last question, and scrawling ironic references to "imperialism" or "folie de grandeur" or even "Globocop" on their tests, let alone some variant like "Stalinism" or "Kulturkampf." They just don't know, and very probably don't care. Their immediate past has been airbrushed, or whisked, as surely as antiquity. When Henry James was writing The American Scene at the very opening of this century, he fretted about what Leon Edel, James's biographer, termed "America's cult of impermanence" or what James himself called "the perpetual repudiation of the past, so far as there has been a past to repudiate." So there is perhaps an innate cultural bias against "dwelling on the past," unless it is for the sanctified purposes of good citizenship. Sheer ignorance generally stems from plain ignorance, and surveys have been turning up results like this for generations. An amazing 54 percent of eleventh graders "knew," at least by dint of multiple choice, that Joseph Stalin was the leader of the Soviet Union during World War II, according to the determinedly pessimistic 1987 work of Diane Ravitch and Chester E. Finn Jr. (What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know?). Yet a poll published by the New York Times in 1995 discovered that only 49 percent of American adults could say with confidence that the Soviet Union had been on the same side as the United States for that period, with the rest either having no opinion or identifying "Russia" as an enemy or, most remarkably of all, as a noncombatant. And even this is salutary, by comparison with a New York Times survey of fifty-five years ago, which found that a quarter of entering college freshmen in 1943 could not name the man who had been president of the United States during the Civil War. In the contemporary "debate" on the inculcation of history, the United States has even managed to forget its own amnesia. The measure of an education is that you acquire some idea of the extent of your ignorance. And it seems at least thinkable that today's history students don't quite know what subject they are not being taught. At the time when alarm first (or last) began to be registered on this score, which was around the middle of the present decade, the good people at the National Council on History Education did some homework. They found that most states required highschool students to "take" a maximum of one year each of American and "world" history, and that several states had no history "requirement" of any kind. You might be startled to find that among the no-history-curriculum states was numbered the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. So would I have been, if I had not been a visiting professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh in 1997. Since you can't teach the American literary canon (indeed, you can't even teach people to deconstruct it) without some reference to historical context, I began every class with an abbreviated introduction about the period in which the author was writing. I still have the notes and papers sent me by my students, asking why they had to get all the way to college before anyone bothered to fill in this nagging blank. Michigan and Alaska also let history slide altogether, while much-derided West Virginia wanted two years of U.S. history (combined with world history) and three years of world history (combined with U.S. history). Between these two poles, Nevada stipulated three years of U.S. history, while mandating that this should include "state history and government" and omitting world history altogether. Ohio opted for a judicious and restrained 0.5 years of American history and left it at that. Numerous other states, few of them asking for more than a year's reflection on the American past, folded history, national or global, into a package that included "world geography or world cultures," "global studies," "psychology/sociology" (the Montana solution), or the babble of "outcomes-based" or "core-competency" requirements. Every classroom a hive of inactivity; every flag-draped school a factory for the mass-production of a little learning.
About four years ago I began to ask the teachers of my own children how it came to be that they could not tell Thomas Jefferson from Thomas the Tank Engine. In the preceding sentence, it is unclear whether I mean that the children didn't know unless I told them, or that the teachers didn't know unless I told them. The confusion is intentional. One instructor, at a rather costly District of Columbia day school, cheerfully avowed that she herself "had never been that much of a reader." Others, more candid, announced that history was a bit of a minefield subject and that "good examples" (like Pocahontas and, on a good day, Frederick Douglass) were the thing. Parson Weems himself could hardly have bettered the modern method whereby children get good reports in a subject that they have never studied in order that a tiny pump be applied to the
valves of their fledgling self-esteem.
According to statistics compiled by the National Center for Education Standards, fewer than 19 percent of high-school and middle-school social-studies teachers in 1994 had majored (or minored) in history. That same year, when Alan Bennett's wonderful play The Madness of George III was released as a motion picture, its title was given as The Madness of King George. Hollywood's publicity people worried that audiences might think they had missed parts I and II.
It was time for one of those full-dress cultural sham-fights, like the earlier one about core values and "Western Civ," that animate the op-ed pages every decade or so. We need new standards! Alas, with no galvanizing Sputnik to unlock real money and talent, and with no encircling foe to spark another rewrite of the Pledge of Allegiance, federal monies went to subsidize a rather pallid and prolix set of "guidelines" that might as well have been marketed as "American History—Making a Difference Since 1776" or "Our Past—Serving the Community with Pride." As with many such trite labelings, however, the small print should have carried the dire admonition "Contents Under Pressure" or "Some Assembly Required."
Batteries were included. The tempestuous Lynne V. Cheney, spouse of George Bush's one-time secretary of defense, found herself temporarily at a giddying and pivotal point. Not only did she chair the National Endowment for the Humanities, which the zealots in her own party desired to abolish, but this same endowment had funded, to the tune of $2 million, the new "standards," which she found she wanted to abolish also. An article, catchily titled "The End of History," written either by or for Cheney, appeared in the Wall Street Journal in October 1994. You know the sort of thing—too many Native Americans and slaves in the new standards, too few pioneers, too much political correctness. In a matter of months, on the motion of Senator Slade Gorton, Republican of Washington, the full Senate had repudiated the "standards" in a vote of 99-1. It is safe to say that few if any of the legislators and deliberators had cleared their own passage through the offending volumes.
Thus began the current dialogue of the deaf, still raging at a school near you. Working toward his master's in tautology, John Fonte of the conservative Committee to Review National Standards said that "if you have a 99-1 vote in the Senate against it, obviously it was not consensual enough." He and his co-thinkers believe that consensus is best achieved by letting "states and local school districts" decide on the tenor of history teaching, which would certainly help insulate children from the news about McCarthyism and the Ku Klux Klan that Cheney found so depressingly salient in the original "guidelines."
Ever since the tussle between Cheney and the forces of P.C., history classes and textbooks have been oscillating between demands for a patriotic and intelligible narrative and cries for a story that is more "user-friendly" to minorities and new arrivals. School bureaucracies everywhere have responded by looking for safe and tepid waters, and educational publishers have been keen to abet the process in order to sell their bland and uncontroversial series. Combine this with lobbying from disparate confessional, regional, and ethnic groups, and each tributary blends imperceptibly to produce a uniform flow of drool:
TIME, CONTINUITY AND CHANGE
Content Standard A:
Students in Wisconsin will learn about history through the concepts of time, continuity and change in order to develop historical perspective and answer questions about our contemporary world and future.
Rationale:
Human beings want to understand their historical roots and to locate themselves in time. In developing these insights the students must know what things were like in the past and how things change and econstruct and interpret historic events provides a needed perspective in addressing where we have been, what we have become, and where we might be going. In Wisconsin schools, this teaching focus typically appears in units and courses in history and the humanities.
The above is the preamble to a "standards" blueprint of mid-1996. It seems to have been written by some kind of poorly engineered machine. It violates a principle that holds good for education as well as for medicine: "First Do No Harm." And it is the sort of prose in which "history" is increasingly packaged by state authorities. The ensuing Wisconsin paragraphs are headed with the minatory words "Performance Standards" and assure us with more assertion than conviction that: "By grade twelve, students will:
- learn how to use a variety of sources and to check their credibility in order to interpret the past and to better understand current issues
- apply theories and historical inquiry to decision making about the future, such as citizenship responsibilities in the 21st century, the long term possibility for peace in Eastern Europe and the evolving role of China in a world economy.
It's all there—the slovenly grammar, the weary obeisance to the millennium and to "globalization," the inept repetitions: all of it boiled into a mush wherein history is offered cajolingly and apologetically as a sort of "Old News You Can Use." Let no one doubt the extent of the damage done by comfort teaching or therapeutic education, which has reversed the idea that educators should be educated (a decent teacher will teach in order to learn) and which has made the relationship of instructor to student into an exercise in the mutual, restful softening of the cortex. Here is how the state of Illinois, long renowned for toughness and direct speech, proposed to illuminate the past to its future citizens as recently as 1996. Students were ostensibly required to:
-Assess the long-term consequences of major decisions by leaders in various nations of the world, drawing information from a variety of traditional, electronic and on-line sources.
-Explain the effects of urbanization, industrialization and technology on society and institutions throughout history.
These and other fatuities—or impossibilities, if you try and guess the real weight of the second stipulation above—were the result of a history "curriculum" that had been collapsed into the social-science department and that furthermore had to be "clear and meaningful to students, parents, educators, business representatives and the community at large." The capacious "inclusiveness" of that last gorgeous mosaic demands that the whole project be preintelligible to those who haven't studied it yet, those who missed it last time, those who need it most, and those whose business it isn't! The exhausted phraseology melds with the upward-and-onward automatic rhetoric to produce nullity. In a gesture to aspiration, the compilers of the standards quoted George Santayana to the effect that those who did not learn from the past would be condemned to repeat it. By Santayana's absurd standard, the grade-schoolers of Illinois should be entering their Babylonian epoch just about now.
In December 1950, in the course of his presidential address to the American Historical Association, Samuel Eliot Morison expressed the view that it was time to abandon the Jefferson-Jackson-F. D. Roosevelt line" and to have at last an American history "written from a sanely conservative point of view." This was the midpoint in a reaction against "progressive" history teaching, which reaction ran almost unchecked (especially in the states of the old Confederacy) from about 1939 until the high noon of the Cold War. There was then an opposite but not equal reaction from certain revisionists, many of them excellent, such as Barton Bernstein and Christopher Lasch, but some of them callow and annoying. In due time, this collision expressed itself in a fight over history textbooks, in one of the few advanced nations that does not establish a nationally mandated curriculum where all students learn, so to speak, from the same page. The result is a version of News from Nowhere, written from nobody's point of view and deferential to the largest book-buying market or the most loquacious lobby.
The Greek verb historein means "to ask questions" and was employed by Herodotus, who, often credited with being the first or founding historian, described his work as "inquiries" or historiai. In 1950, Henry Steele Commager and Samuel Eliot Morison jointly produced a textbook entitled The Growth of the American Republic. Describing the antebellum state of affairs below the Mason-Dixon line, they wrote:
As for Sambo, whose wrongs moved the abolitionists to wrath and tears, there is some reason to believe that he suffered less than any other class in the South from its "peculiar institution."
I would not, personally, wish to be deprived of this excerpt when teaching American history. Essay questions and classroom discussions might inquire: (1) What "reason to believe"? (2) Why were abolitionists so moved? (3) What gave rise to the notable coinage "peculiar institution"? (4) Why did both camps believe they had biblical authority? and (5) What has changed in America since 1950 to stop distinguished Yankee historians from employing the term "Sambo"? I think any competent teacher would and should have been able to cope with any "hurt feelings" that might arise in or out of the classroom. (If there were no such feelings, then something other than history would be the subject being taught.) But as matters stand, we have Southern textbooks that euphemize the Confederacy, Northern ones that scant the whole unpleasant subject, and a recent national debate on a possible presidential "apology" for slavery so etiolated that hardly anyone thought to ask whether President Lincoln's Second Inaugural had not in fact contained a rather finely worded section on the subject, dealing not just with apology for slavery but with real-time revenge for it. One can phrase the "First Do No Harm" injunction, as it applies to teaching, in another way: You must not bore young students, and you must not—may not—condescend to them. Who would dare argue, in the inculcation of geography or mathematics or French, that there are volatile elements to which the tender, rising generation ought not to be exposed? Who would dare insist that instruction in physics, for example, ought to be "clear and meaningful" to ignorant parents or to local "business representatives"?
Young Americans are at home with the concept of black holes and the imminence of cloning. The idea that human life may be a cosmic joke is well known to them. They understand that viruses and other microorganisms can be more powerful actors than dictators. The youngest of them share the wised-up humor of The Simpsons ("Springfield Youth Center: Building Unrealistic Hopes Since 1966"). But can they be allowed to consider their own history as anything other than a story of uplift, or, at worst, a chronicle of obstacles overcome? Not really, says David McCullough, whose Why History? is widely circulated by those hoping for a revival of the subject: "History shows us how to behave. History teaches, reinforces what we believe in, what we stand for, and what we ought to be willing to stand up for. History is—or should be— he bedrock of patriotism, not the chest-pounding kind of patriotism but the real thing, love of country." And no, also, says Joy Hakim, a self-starting amateur historian who decided to write her own textbooks (marketed as A History of US) and ignited a brief spark of hope by breaking the monopoly of so-called educational publishing. Her introduction states:
Learning about our country's history will make you understand what it means to be an American. And being American is a privilege. People all over the world wish that they, too, could be American. Why? Because we are a nation that is trying to be fair to all our citizens.... The more you study history, the more you will realize that all nations are not the same. Some are better than others.
Does that seem like an unfair thing to say? Maybe, but we believe it.
The third sentence does express a factual truth. But the reason given in the fifth sentence is mere propaganda, at least insofar as it distinguishes the United States from Italy, say, or Iceland or Chile. In what other discipline may a teacher so readily assume what has to be proved? Many critics have hailed Hakim for contesting the relativists and the guilt-trip historians head-on. But how different is her approach from the standard textbooks of the last generation, entitled as they were: The American Pageant, The American Way, Land of Promise, American Adventures, Life and Liberty, The Challenge of Freedom, Triumph of the American Nation? It was under this benign rule that the current crop of unlettered teachers and distracted pupils was sown.
In many ways, the low-level argument between the safe traditionalists and the ingratiating multiculturalists mirrors the dispute over the teaching of literature. And since history is literature, among other things, and since most historians have been literary authors, the comparison may be an illuminating one. In which class should students be asked to read Charles Dickens's American Notes, for example (not that they are given this opportunity in either English or history)? The chapter on slavery in that short book contains a list of small ads from the contemporary Southern press in which masters would identify runaway serfs: "Clog of iron on his right foot"; "several marks of lashing." It electrifies every student to whom I have shown it, partly because Dickens is a recognized "canonical" author and partly because of the stark immediacy of the reportage.
Or consider the great Samuel Clemens. Huckleberry Finn is one of the few books that all American children are mandated to read. Jonathan Arac, in his brilliant new study of the teaching of Huck, is quite right to term it "hyper-canonical." And Twain is a figure in American history as well as in American letters. The only objectors to his presence in the schoolroom are mediocre or fanatical racial nationalists or "inclusivists," like Julius Lester or the Chicago-based Dr. John Wallace, who object to Twain's use—in or out of "context"—of the expression "nigger." An empty and formal "debate" on this has dragged on for decades and flares up every now and again to bore us. But what if Twain were taught as a whole? He served briefly as a Confederate soldier and wrote a hilarious and melancholy account, The Private History of a Campaign That Failed. He went on to make a fortune by publishing the memoirs of Ulysses Grant. He composed a caustic and brilliant report on the treatment of the Congolese by King Leopold of the Belgians. With William Dean Howells he led the Anti-Imperialist League, to oppose McKinley's and Roosevelt's pious and sanguinary war in the Philippines. Some of the pamphlets he wrote for the league can be set alongside those of Swift and Defoe for their sheer polemical artistry. In 1900 he had a public exchange with Winston Churchill in New York City, in which he attacked American support for the British war in South Africa and British support for the American war in Cuba. Does this count as history? Just try and find any reference to it, not just in textbooks but in more general histories and biographies. The Anti- Imperialist League has gone down the Orwellian memory hole, taking with it a great swirl of truly American passion and intellect, and the grand figure of Twain has become reduced—in part because he upended the vials of ridicule over the national tendency to religious and spiritual quackery, where he discerned what Tocqueville has missed and far anticipated Mencken—to that of a drawling, avuncular fabulist. Ours is a society wedded to the idea that "Western" and "civilization" are cognate terms, ready to do battle for the heritage of fifth-century Athens as our ancestor, consecrated in its state architecture and statuary to the Graeco-Roman ideal—and there is not a whiff, not a hint, not a suspicion of the Socratic method in the way it instructs and elevates its young. What Is History? inquired E. H. Carr in a short book, published in 1961 and written well within the grasp of anyone with a reading age of sixteen, that appears on no reading list anywhere in the fifty states. Well, whatever it is (and Professor Carr had his own freely stated dogma), we know that it proceeds by means of irony, contradiction, and unintended consequence. Theodore Draper's entirely engrossing book A Struggle for Power, about the origins of the American Revolution, finds its locus in a "pamphlet war" in London in 1759. Anticipating the victorious outcome of the Seven Years' War, the British disputed about which French colony they should annex. The choice narrowed to Guadeloupe, rich in spices, and Canada, rich in space. The acquisition of Guadeloupe would complete British control of the Caribbean basin, while Canada would offer a great potential market for future British manufactures. Mercantile factions and lobbies formed on both sides of the question, and you can look up their exchanges and read them in plain English. The pro-Canada forces were better organized and financed. But the pro-Guadeloupe lobby made a telling point on the eve of its defeat. If we take Canada, it argued in a finely written polemic, then the ambitious American colonists will no longer require our protection from France. Indeed, they already manifest the stirrings of an independence movement... Within two decades of this debate, the Tory loyalists of His Majesty King George (Part III) were scuttling to sanctuary over the Canadian border. I have taught Draper's book in several classrooms and have had the pleasure of watching even the most indifferent students undergo the kindling of an interest: "What if the British had plumped for Guadeloupe? Would that have meant no Declaration of Independence?" "Not necessarily, but the context and conditions would have been different. Next week I want someone to tell us why the word 'czar' is an odd one to employ in today's American social engineering."
The idea of trying to teach the whole story, not just "warts and all" but as an inquiry or an argument, has been well advocated by Dr. James Loewen, a veteran lecturer in history at university level and the author of Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. Testifying to the thirst for honest and well-written discussion of history, this 1995 book has a quarter-million copies currently in print. In Loewen's opinion, the present teaching of history by rote is neither a science nor an art and has manifestly and confessedly, and for all reasonable purposes also completely, failed. There is no chance of amassing, as Bishop Stubbs once fondly hoped, a true bill of facts to be memorized. Von Ranke's famous dictum just to show "how it really was" represents a noble but impossible aspiration.
Loewen once won a benchmark case, beautifully entitled Loewen et al. v. Turnipseed et
al., against the crass censorship of schoolbooks in Mississippi. But unlike Joy Hakim, whose verve he admires, he does not recommend the teaching of history as any kind of inspiration. Instead, he proposes that students be given two contrasting texts: Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, for instance, as against Clarence B. Carson's A Basic History of the United States, published by the conservative American Textbook Committee in Alabama in 1986. When there is a basic grasp of narrative and evolution, and a corresponding grasp of the idea of differing views of the same story, it will become apt to consider theories and interpretations.
This is how the Greeks, more honored by invocation than by emulation, conceived the theory and practice of teaching by dialectics. What was the influence of Pericles' funeral oration on the Gettysburg Address? This engrossing question, open to any mind of average ability, cannot even be asked if, as was recently discovered, the majority of America's schoolchildren don't know in which century the Civil War was fought. But if an appreciation of history as a continuous argument, and not a dull Whiggish series of "problems resolved," can be instilled, then a student entering college might be ready to attempt the pleasurable exercises of a reasonably trained mind. False and emptily moralistic trails, such as "Are We Too Eurocentric?" or "Was Columbus Ecologically Friendly?" can be abandoned in favor of the real thing. Why did Basil Davidson have to refute Hegel in order to show that Africa had a history? Was Bertrand Russell right in saying that the disappearance of North American Indians was no tragedy? And why was he banned from teaching in the United States? Had Russell read Bartolomé de Las Casas, first historian of the Americas, who doubted that the "discovery" had been a good thing? Why did the first historian of the Americas have a Spanish name? Why do New Yorkers no longer speak Dutch, and who proposed that the official language of the United States be German? Was the Civil War really fought to free the slaves? Why are Woodrow Wilson's "Fourteen Points" unthinkable without Lenin's dissolution of the Constituent Assembly? Was the Great Depression caused by too little government intervention or too much? Why is the largest military base in Cuba an American one? Why is it possible to swim from America to Russia?
Each of these questions admits of several answers, many of them equally "valid." In such cases, what matters is how you think and not what you think. E. D. Hirsch Jr. and other scholars of cultural literacy have already been solidly vindicated in their view that fresh knowledge builds on existing knowledge. It remains to apply this realization to the most despoiled and neglected subject in the curriculum. The task cannot be left to the "community of scholars"—and what an antique ring that phrase has now acquired—because they have mostly elected to desert the field or to clutter it with the wrappers of comfort food.
Those who care about cultural literacy are chiefly volunteers, and they are already hardpressed on numerous fronts. But the potential "pool" of volunteers for a struggle to reinstate historical discourse is quite substantial. What needs to be combated is the idea, so often and so worthily expressed—and so stultifying—that "light" is to be preferred to "heat." Heat, as can be learned in other classrooms, is the only possible source of light. History must become a field of ardent contestation and not another arid patch of middle ground. If properly joined, this battle would also and of itself lead to more confident and thoughtful citizens, whose formation requires more than a mixture of Crispus Attucks, Betsy Ross, and Emma Lazarus. Pluralism is a means as well as an end. "Such a lot of things seem to me such rot," says a young girl in one of Agatha Christie's mysteries. "History, for instance. Why, it's quite different out of different books!" To this her mentor, wise in the ways of the world, replies: "That is its real interest." Confronted by the philistine verdicts of "bunk" and "rot," and the wasteland created by the attempts at an authorized version, we can, in the time where Hawking and Heisenberg are commonplaces, at least borrow the last phrase of Professor E. H. Carr's Trevelyan Lecture: "I shall look out on a world in tumult and a world in travail, and shall answer in the well-worn words of a great scientist: 'And yet—it moves.'"
6.01.2011
Just because it needs to be disseminated.
Excerpt from 'The Portable Atheist'
Posted 11/1/2007 4:19 PM
By Christopher Hitchens
One is continually told, as an unbeliever, that it is old-fashioned to rail against the primitive stupidities and cruelties of religion because after all, in these enlightened times, the old superstitions have died away. Nine times out of ten, in debate with a cleric, one will be told not of some dogma of religious certitude but of some instance of charitable or humanitarian work undertaken by a religious person. Of course, this says nothing about the belief system involved: it may be true that Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam succeeds in weaning young black men off narcotics, but this would not alter the fact that the NoI is a racist crackpot organization. And has not Hamas—which publishes The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion on its website—won a reputation for its provision of social services? My own response has been to issue a challenge: name me an ethical statement made or an action performed by a believer that could not have been made or performed by a non-believer. As yet, I have had no takers. (Whereas, oddly enough, if you ask an audience to name a wicked statement or action directly attributable to religious faith, nobody has any difficulty in finding an example.)
No, the fact is that the bacilli are always lurking in the old texts and are latent in the theory and practice of religion. This anthology hopes to identify and isolate the bacilli more precisely.
It also involves ignoring or explaining away the many religious beliefs that antedated Moses. Our primeval ancestors were by no means atheistic: they raised temples and altars and offered the requisite terrified obsequies and sacrifices. Their religion was man-made, like all the others. There was a time when Greek thinkers denounced Christians and Zoroastrians denounced Muslims as "atheists" for their destruction of old sites and their prohibition of ancient rituals. The source of desecration and profanity is religious, as we can see from the way that today's believers violate the sanctity of each other's temples, from Bamiyan to Belfast to Baghdad. Richard Dawkins may have phrased it most pungently when he argued that everybody is an atheist in saying that there is a god—from Ra to Shiva—in which he does not believe. All that the serious and objective atheist does is to take the next step and to say that there is just one more god to disbelieve in. Human solipsism can generally be counted upon to become enraged and to maintain that this discountable god must not be the one in which the believer himself has invested so much credence. So it goes. But the man-made character of religion, from which monotheism swore to deliver us at least in its pagan form, persists in a terrifying shape in our own time, as believers fight each other over the correct interpretation and even kill members of their own faiths in battles over doctrine. Civilization has been immensely retarded by such arcane interfaith quarrels and could now be destroyed by their modern versions.
It is sometimes argued that disbelief in a fearful and tempting heavenly despotism makes life into something arid and tedious and cynical: a mere existence without any consolation or any awareness of the numinous or the transcendent. What nonsense this is. In the first place, it commits an obvious error. It seems to say that we ought not to believe that we are an evolved animal species with faulty components and a short lifespan for ourselves and our globe, lest the consequences of the belief be unwelcome or discreditable to us. Could anything show more clearly the bad effects of wish-thinking? There can be no serious ethical position based on denial or a refusal to look the facts squarely in the face. But this does not mean that we must stare into the abyss all the time. (Only religion, oddly enough, has ever required that we obsessively do that.)
Believing then—as this religious objection implicitly concedes—that human life is actually worth living, one can combat one's natural pessimism by stoicism and the refusal of illusion, while embellishing the scene with any one of the following. There are the beauties of science and the extraordinary marvels of nature. There is the consolation and irony of philosophy. There are the infinite splendors of literature and poetry, not excluding the liturgical and devotional aspects of these, such as those found in John Donne or George Herbert. There is the grand resource of art and music and architecture, again not excluding those elements that aspire to the sublime. In all of these pursuits, any one of them enough to absorb a lifetime, there may be found a sense of awe and magnificence that does not depend at all on any invocation of the supernatural. Indeed, nobody armed by art and culture and literature and philosophy is likely to be anything but bored and sickened by ghost stories, UFO tales, spiritualist experiences, or babblings from the beyond. One can appreciate and treasure the symmetry and grandeur of the ancient Greek Parthenon, for example, without needing any share in the cults of Athena or Eleusis, or the imperatives of Athenian imperialism, just as one may listen to Mozart or admire Chartres and Durham without any nostalgia for feudalism, monarchism, and the sale of indulgences. The whole concept of culture, indeed, may partly consist in discriminating between these things. Religion asks us to do the opposite and to preserve the ancient dreads and prohibitions, even as we dwell amid modern architecture and modern weapons.
It is very often argued that religion must have some sort of potency and relevance, since it occurs so strongly at all times and in all places. None of the authors collected here would ever have denied that. Some of them would argue that religion is so much a part of our human or animal nature that it is actually ineradicable. This, for what it may be worth, is my own view. We are unlikely to cease making gods or inventing ceremonies to please them for as long as we are afraid of death, or of the dark, and for as long as we persist in self-centeredness. That could be a lengthy stretch of time. However, it is just as certain that we shall continue to cast a skeptical and ironic and even witty eye on what we have ourselves invented. If religion is innate in us, then so is our doubt of it and our contempt for our own weakness.
Some of the authors and writers and thinkers assembled in these pages are famous for other reasons than their intelligence and their moral courage on this point. Several of them are chiefly celebrated because they took on the most inflated reputation of all: the elevation into a godhead of all mankind's distilled fears and hatreds and stupidities. Some of them have had the experience of faith and the experience of losing it, while others were and are, in the words of Blaise Pascal, so made that they cannot believe.
Arguments for atheism can be divided into two main categories: those that dispute the existence of god and those that demonstrate the ill effects of religion. It might be better if I broadened this somewhat, and said those that dispute the existence of an intervening god. Religion is, after all, more than the belief in a supreme being. It is the cult of that supreme being and the belief that his or her wishes have been made known or can be determined. Defining matters in this way, I can allow myself to mention great critics such as Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine, who perhaps paradoxically regarded religion as an insult to god. And sooner or later, one must take a position on agnosticism. This word has not been with us for very long—it was coined by the great Thomas Huxley, one of Darwin's stalwart defenders in the original argument over natural selection. It is sometimes used as a half-way house by those who cannot make a profession of faith but are unwilling to repudiate either religion or god absolutely. Since, once again, I am defining as religious those who claim to know, I feel I can lay claim to some at least of those who do not claim to know. An agnostic does not believe in god, or disbelieve in him. Non-belief is not quite unbelief, but I shall press it into service and annex as many agnostics as I can for this collection.
Authors as diverse as Matthew Arnold and George Orwell have given thought to the serious question: what is to be done about morals and ethics now that religion has so much decayed? Arnold went almost as far as to propose that the study of literature replace the study of religion. I must say that I slightly dread the effect that this might have had on literary pursuit, but as a source of ethical reflection and as a mirror in which to see our human dilemmas reflected, the literary tradition is infinitely superior to the childish parables and morality tales, let alone the sanguinary and sectarian admonitions, of the "holy" books. So I have included what many serious novelists and poets have had to say on this most freighted of all subjects. And who, really, will turn away from George Eliot and James Joyce and Joseph Conrad in order to rescrutinize the bare and narrow and constipated and fearful world of Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, and Osama bin Laden?
It is in the hope of strengthening and arming the resistance to the faith-based, and to faith itself, that this anthology of combat with humanity's oldest enemy is respectfully offered.
Reprinted from THE PORTABLE ATHEIST
Posted 11/1/2007 4:19 PM
By Christopher Hitchens
One is continually told, as an unbeliever, that it is old-fashioned to rail against the primitive stupidities and cruelties of religion because after all, in these enlightened times, the old superstitions have died away. Nine times out of ten, in debate with a cleric, one will be told not of some dogma of religious certitude but of some instance of charitable or humanitarian work undertaken by a religious person. Of course, this says nothing about the belief system involved: it may be true that Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam succeeds in weaning young black men off narcotics, but this would not alter the fact that the NoI is a racist crackpot organization. And has not Hamas—which publishes The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion on its website—won a reputation for its provision of social services? My own response has been to issue a challenge: name me an ethical statement made or an action performed by a believer that could not have been made or performed by a non-believer. As yet, I have had no takers. (Whereas, oddly enough, if you ask an audience to name a wicked statement or action directly attributable to religious faith, nobody has any difficulty in finding an example.)
No, the fact is that the bacilli are always lurking in the old texts and are latent in the theory and practice of religion. This anthology hopes to identify and isolate the bacilli more precisely.
It also involves ignoring or explaining away the many religious beliefs that antedated Moses. Our primeval ancestors were by no means atheistic: they raised temples and altars and offered the requisite terrified obsequies and sacrifices. Their religion was man-made, like all the others. There was a time when Greek thinkers denounced Christians and Zoroastrians denounced Muslims as "atheists" for their destruction of old sites and their prohibition of ancient rituals. The source of desecration and profanity is religious, as we can see from the way that today's believers violate the sanctity of each other's temples, from Bamiyan to Belfast to Baghdad. Richard Dawkins may have phrased it most pungently when he argued that everybody is an atheist in saying that there is a god—from Ra to Shiva—in which he does not believe. All that the serious and objective atheist does is to take the next step and to say that there is just one more god to disbelieve in. Human solipsism can generally be counted upon to become enraged and to maintain that this discountable god must not be the one in which the believer himself has invested so much credence. So it goes. But the man-made character of religion, from which monotheism swore to deliver us at least in its pagan form, persists in a terrifying shape in our own time, as believers fight each other over the correct interpretation and even kill members of their own faiths in battles over doctrine. Civilization has been immensely retarded by such arcane interfaith quarrels and could now be destroyed by their modern versions.
It is sometimes argued that disbelief in a fearful and tempting heavenly despotism makes life into something arid and tedious and cynical: a mere existence without any consolation or any awareness of the numinous or the transcendent. What nonsense this is. In the first place, it commits an obvious error. It seems to say that we ought not to believe that we are an evolved animal species with faulty components and a short lifespan for ourselves and our globe, lest the consequences of the belief be unwelcome or discreditable to us. Could anything show more clearly the bad effects of wish-thinking? There can be no serious ethical position based on denial or a refusal to look the facts squarely in the face. But this does not mean that we must stare into the abyss all the time. (Only religion, oddly enough, has ever required that we obsessively do that.)
Believing then—as this religious objection implicitly concedes—that human life is actually worth living, one can combat one's natural pessimism by stoicism and the refusal of illusion, while embellishing the scene with any one of the following. There are the beauties of science and the extraordinary marvels of nature. There is the consolation and irony of philosophy. There are the infinite splendors of literature and poetry, not excluding the liturgical and devotional aspects of these, such as those found in John Donne or George Herbert. There is the grand resource of art and music and architecture, again not excluding those elements that aspire to the sublime. In all of these pursuits, any one of them enough to absorb a lifetime, there may be found a sense of awe and magnificence that does not depend at all on any invocation of the supernatural. Indeed, nobody armed by art and culture and literature and philosophy is likely to be anything but bored and sickened by ghost stories, UFO tales, spiritualist experiences, or babblings from the beyond. One can appreciate and treasure the symmetry and grandeur of the ancient Greek Parthenon, for example, without needing any share in the cults of Athena or Eleusis, or the imperatives of Athenian imperialism, just as one may listen to Mozart or admire Chartres and Durham without any nostalgia for feudalism, monarchism, and the sale of indulgences. The whole concept of culture, indeed, may partly consist in discriminating between these things. Religion asks us to do the opposite and to preserve the ancient dreads and prohibitions, even as we dwell amid modern architecture and modern weapons.
It is very often argued that religion must have some sort of potency and relevance, since it occurs so strongly at all times and in all places. None of the authors collected here would ever have denied that. Some of them would argue that religion is so much a part of our human or animal nature that it is actually ineradicable. This, for what it may be worth, is my own view. We are unlikely to cease making gods or inventing ceremonies to please them for as long as we are afraid of death, or of the dark, and for as long as we persist in self-centeredness. That could be a lengthy stretch of time. However, it is just as certain that we shall continue to cast a skeptical and ironic and even witty eye on what we have ourselves invented. If religion is innate in us, then so is our doubt of it and our contempt for our own weakness.
Some of the authors and writers and thinkers assembled in these pages are famous for other reasons than their intelligence and their moral courage on this point. Several of them are chiefly celebrated because they took on the most inflated reputation of all: the elevation into a godhead of all mankind's distilled fears and hatreds and stupidities. Some of them have had the experience of faith and the experience of losing it, while others were and are, in the words of Blaise Pascal, so made that they cannot believe.
Arguments for atheism can be divided into two main categories: those that dispute the existence of god and those that demonstrate the ill effects of religion. It might be better if I broadened this somewhat, and said those that dispute the existence of an intervening god. Religion is, after all, more than the belief in a supreme being. It is the cult of that supreme being and the belief that his or her wishes have been made known or can be determined. Defining matters in this way, I can allow myself to mention great critics such as Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine, who perhaps paradoxically regarded religion as an insult to god. And sooner or later, one must take a position on agnosticism. This word has not been with us for very long—it was coined by the great Thomas Huxley, one of Darwin's stalwart defenders in the original argument over natural selection. It is sometimes used as a half-way house by those who cannot make a profession of faith but are unwilling to repudiate either religion or god absolutely. Since, once again, I am defining as religious those who claim to know, I feel I can lay claim to some at least of those who do not claim to know. An agnostic does not believe in god, or disbelieve in him. Non-belief is not quite unbelief, but I shall press it into service and annex as many agnostics as I can for this collection.
Authors as diverse as Matthew Arnold and George Orwell have given thought to the serious question: what is to be done about morals and ethics now that religion has so much decayed? Arnold went almost as far as to propose that the study of literature replace the study of religion. I must say that I slightly dread the effect that this might have had on literary pursuit, but as a source of ethical reflection and as a mirror in which to see our human dilemmas reflected, the literary tradition is infinitely superior to the childish parables and morality tales, let alone the sanguinary and sectarian admonitions, of the "holy" books. So I have included what many serious novelists and poets have had to say on this most freighted of all subjects. And who, really, will turn away from George Eliot and James Joyce and Joseph Conrad in order to rescrutinize the bare and narrow and constipated and fearful world of Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, and Osama bin Laden?
It is in the hope of strengthening and arming the resistance to the faith-based, and to faith itself, that this anthology of combat with humanity's oldest enemy is respectfully offered.
Reprinted from THE PORTABLE ATHEIST
5.30.2011
Going to visit Amsterdam to smoke some killer bud? Think again!
Yeah, I know... There's a lot out there, and you should be just as informed as myself.
So, let's put this together and figure out who has the most influence. K? K. Amsterdam, famous for one thing, has decided that you have to be a resident 18+ to get your smoke on. I find this pretty suspicious as many in the United States are using Amsterdam as a shining example of how the legalization of cannabis can positively impact a local government. This, as you can imagine, isn't sitting well with those who don't want you to see the positivity of cannabis. Can it be considered coincidental then, that on the rising surge of support for the legalization of cannabis in the US, that Amsterdam of all places is making it illegal to everyone but residents of the city?
Amsterdam - up in smoke?
Amsterdam’s relaxed attitude has long been a draw for tourists. But as the city bans visitors from its infamous coffee shops, one resident, Senay Boztas, wonders if the high times are over
Tuesday, 10 May 2011
Amsterdam, city of canals, cafes and cannabis-selling “coffee shops”, may not be home to the British tourist’s lost weekend for much longer.
The Dutch government plans to make the shops private clubs with membership only open to city residents aged 18+, effectively banning tourists.
The policy is currently under constitutional review and should be decided for good (or bad, depending on your point of view) in the next few months.
Amsterdam’s tourist board, ATCB, is up in arms about the challenge to its “famous Spirit of Freedom”, while researchers at the Netherlands Board of Tourism and Conventions are investigating the economic impact of the “wietpas” (weed pass). ATCB research suggests that one in 14 people come to the capital city for its 223 coffeeshops, but almost a quarter of overnight visitors end up wiling away a few hours in one. Having lived in the Netherlands for 18 months, in both the canal belt and trendy Jordaan, this comes as no surprise to me.
A head frequently pops out of a group of noisy tourists to ask me and my baby: “Where’s the nearest coffee shop?” in a fine Glaswegian, Mancunian or Surrey accent. Tired of the request, I now misdirect them into the sea a few streets north.
Contrary to popular belief, soft drugs are illegal in the Netherlands. There is a policy of tolerance for personal use – “gedoogbeleid” – and under this, the coffee shops are allowed to sell exoticallynamed strains of cannabis under strict conditions, including a limit of 5g per person, per day. Confusingly, there’s now a ban on smoking tobacco indoors, so only pure cannabis can be smoked in the shops, which serve non-alcoholic drinks (our recent British guests found a simple solution: get a takeaway and enjoy a memorably lost weekend rolling joints by a canal instead).
So, this might well be the last summer for British tourists interested in a 50 quid getaway to a Dutch land of mellow escape. On top of the wietpas plans, there are other proposals to close down coffee shops located within 350 metres of schools, which local newspaper NRC Handelsblad reckoned would mean the death of 187 Amsterdam establishments and six in 10 coffee shops.
So should you be surprised that the first home of legal gay marriage and a famously liberal attitude may not be so forgiving any more? Actually, the British reputation of Amsterdam as home to flagrant sex, drugs and general permissiveness is rather out of kilter with the more conservative reality. This is a place where, yes, you can be gay and married or straight and married... but as one town hall official told me, finger-waggingly, you had better be married. Sex and drugs are licensed, providing tax income and a measure of control, but then a favourite Dutch proverb is: “Just be normal – that’s crazy enough.”
Meanwhile, the anti-Islamic politician Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party won 1.5 million votes in last year’s general election to become the third largest party in the Dutch House of Representatives.
Some people are still fighting, however. Machteld Ligtvoet, manager of communication at the ATCB, explains: “Amsterdam Tourism & Convention Board agrees with the mayor of Amsterdam that we shouldnot implement a so-called ‘weed card’. We believe it is a solution for a problem that Amsterdam does not experience [and]? implies an act of discrimination towards foreigners. Furthermore, we fear that soft drugs will be sold on the street again, leading to more crime and dangerous situations. ATCB now never actively promotes soft drugs or coffee shops, but we consider the availability of soft drugs part of our famous Spirit of Freedom. And that is what people like about our city – you can be yourself in Amsterdam.”
Unsurprisingly, cannabis experts are with them. David Duclos, manager of Amsterdam’s Cannabis College Foundation, said: “The central bureau for statistics has stated that tourism could suffer by up to 20 per cent. And if you take cannabis out of the coffeeshops, there’s only one place to go: back on the streets, so the regulation of the quality and safety would be greatly diminished.”
His own organisation, recognising its inevitable bias, surveyed its visitors last October and found 85 per cent wouldn’t come to Amsterdam if the residents’ permit went ahead.
Meanwhile, some tour operators have said the scheme would have a negative impact on the marketability of the Dutch capital and the cautious Netherlands Board of Tourism and Conventions adds: “It is possible that a decision to introduce the Weed Card will reduce the number of foreign tourists who choose Amsterdam or the Netherlands as a destination for a stay. But a less liberal policy might also attract new tourists.”
There’s a coffee shop just 50 metres away from my front door, but I will not be going anywhere near it.
And other long-time Dutch residents, such as writer Rodney Bolt – whose forthcoming series of crime novels with prominent criminal lawyer Britta Boehler will reveal even murkier sides of the city – confesses that relief from British drug tourists might be quite nice.
“Most Amsterdammers will breathe a sigh of relief that they can reclaim weekends from roving, tribal bands of stag (and hen) parties, bizarrely-dressed, stoned and rowdy,” he confesses. Then again, “if the ban does come into force, the Dutch ‘business is business’ attitude, and the British aptitude for finding a path through gaps in rules, without actually breaking them, is sure to mean that together they will come up with a plan”.
So, let's put this together and figure out who has the most influence. K? K. Amsterdam, famous for one thing, has decided that you have to be a resident 18+ to get your smoke on. I find this pretty suspicious as many in the United States are using Amsterdam as a shining example of how the legalization of cannabis can positively impact a local government. This, as you can imagine, isn't sitting well with those who don't want you to see the positivity of cannabis. Can it be considered coincidental then, that on the rising surge of support for the legalization of cannabis in the US, that Amsterdam of all places is making it illegal to everyone but residents of the city?
Amsterdam - up in smoke?
Amsterdam’s relaxed attitude has long been a draw for tourists. But as the city bans visitors from its infamous coffee shops, one resident, Senay Boztas, wonders if the high times are over
Tuesday, 10 May 2011
Amsterdam, city of canals, cafes and cannabis-selling “coffee shops”, may not be home to the British tourist’s lost weekend for much longer.
The Dutch government plans to make the shops private clubs with membership only open to city residents aged 18+, effectively banning tourists.
The policy is currently under constitutional review and should be decided for good (or bad, depending on your point of view) in the next few months.
Amsterdam’s tourist board, ATCB, is up in arms about the challenge to its “famous Spirit of Freedom”, while researchers at the Netherlands Board of Tourism and Conventions are investigating the economic impact of the “wietpas” (weed pass). ATCB research suggests that one in 14 people come to the capital city for its 223 coffeeshops, but almost a quarter of overnight visitors end up wiling away a few hours in one. Having lived in the Netherlands for 18 months, in both the canal belt and trendy Jordaan, this comes as no surprise to me.
A head frequently pops out of a group of noisy tourists to ask me and my baby: “Where’s the nearest coffee shop?” in a fine Glaswegian, Mancunian or Surrey accent. Tired of the request, I now misdirect them into the sea a few streets north.
Contrary to popular belief, soft drugs are illegal in the Netherlands. There is a policy of tolerance for personal use – “gedoogbeleid” – and under this, the coffee shops are allowed to sell exoticallynamed strains of cannabis under strict conditions, including a limit of 5g per person, per day. Confusingly, there’s now a ban on smoking tobacco indoors, so only pure cannabis can be smoked in the shops, which serve non-alcoholic drinks (our recent British guests found a simple solution: get a takeaway and enjoy a memorably lost weekend rolling joints by a canal instead).
So, this might well be the last summer for British tourists interested in a 50 quid getaway to a Dutch land of mellow escape. On top of the wietpas plans, there are other proposals to close down coffee shops located within 350 metres of schools, which local newspaper NRC Handelsblad reckoned would mean the death of 187 Amsterdam establishments and six in 10 coffee shops.
So should you be surprised that the first home of legal gay marriage and a famously liberal attitude may not be so forgiving any more? Actually, the British reputation of Amsterdam as home to flagrant sex, drugs and general permissiveness is rather out of kilter with the more conservative reality. This is a place where, yes, you can be gay and married or straight and married... but as one town hall official told me, finger-waggingly, you had better be married. Sex and drugs are licensed, providing tax income and a measure of control, but then a favourite Dutch proverb is: “Just be normal – that’s crazy enough.”
Meanwhile, the anti-Islamic politician Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party won 1.5 million votes in last year’s general election to become the third largest party in the Dutch House of Representatives.
Some people are still fighting, however. Machteld Ligtvoet, manager of communication at the ATCB, explains: “Amsterdam Tourism & Convention Board agrees with the mayor of Amsterdam that we shouldnot implement a so-called ‘weed card’. We believe it is a solution for a problem that Amsterdam does not experience [and]? implies an act of discrimination towards foreigners. Furthermore, we fear that soft drugs will be sold on the street again, leading to more crime and dangerous situations. ATCB now never actively promotes soft drugs or coffee shops, but we consider the availability of soft drugs part of our famous Spirit of Freedom. And that is what people like about our city – you can be yourself in Amsterdam.”
Unsurprisingly, cannabis experts are with them. David Duclos, manager of Amsterdam’s Cannabis College Foundation, said: “The central bureau for statistics has stated that tourism could suffer by up to 20 per cent. And if you take cannabis out of the coffeeshops, there’s only one place to go: back on the streets, so the regulation of the quality and safety would be greatly diminished.”
His own organisation, recognising its inevitable bias, surveyed its visitors last October and found 85 per cent wouldn’t come to Amsterdam if the residents’ permit went ahead.
Meanwhile, some tour operators have said the scheme would have a negative impact on the marketability of the Dutch capital and the cautious Netherlands Board of Tourism and Conventions adds: “It is possible that a decision to introduce the Weed Card will reduce the number of foreign tourists who choose Amsterdam or the Netherlands as a destination for a stay. But a less liberal policy might also attract new tourists.”
There’s a coffee shop just 50 metres away from my front door, but I will not be going anywhere near it.
And other long-time Dutch residents, such as writer Rodney Bolt – whose forthcoming series of crime novels with prominent criminal lawyer Britta Boehler will reveal even murkier sides of the city – confesses that relief from British drug tourists might be quite nice.
“Most Amsterdammers will breathe a sigh of relief that they can reclaim weekends from roving, tribal bands of stag (and hen) parties, bizarrely-dressed, stoned and rowdy,” he confesses. Then again, “if the ban does come into force, the Dutch ‘business is business’ attitude, and the British aptitude for finding a path through gaps in rules, without actually breaking them, is sure to mean that together they will come up with a plan”.
Try this one on for size.
Dear reader, I am slowly returning to blogging. As I have stated previously, I'm torn by this decision to do so, but I feel that it is my duty to keep you abreast of what you may or may not know what's going on around you.
Submitted for your perusal:
CONFESSIONS OF AN EX-MOSSAD AGENT
FROM: http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/deception.html?q=deception.html
Excerpt from Victor Ostrovsky's, "By way of deception"
NOTE: Needless to say, the Israeli Lobby has demanded (and gotten) a total ban on this book in all major bookstore chains, while pro-Israeli experts have trashed it at every opportunity. Ostrovsky's book is available only online at places like Amazon
Revealing the facts as I know them from my vantage point of four years spent inside the Mossad was by no means an easy task.
Coming from an ardent Zionist background, I had been taught that the state of Israel was incapable of misconduct. That we were the David in the unending struggle against the ever-growing Goliath. That there was no one out there to protect us but ourselves - a feeling reinforced by the Holocaust survivors who lived among us.
We, the new generation of Israelites, the resurrected nation on its own land after more than two thousand years of exile, were entrusted with the fate of the nation as a whole.
The commanders of our army were called champions, not generals. Our leaders were captains at the helm of a great ship. I was elated when I was chosen and granted the privilege to join what I considered to be the elite team of the Mossad.
But it was the twisted ideals and self-centered pragmatism that I encountered inside the Mossad, coupled with this so-called team's greed, lust, and total lack of respect for human life, that motivated me to tell this story.
It is out of love for Israel as a free and just country that I am laying my life on the line by so doing, facing up to those who took it upon themselves to turn the Zionist dream into the present-day nightmare.
The Mossad, being the intelligence body entrusted with the responsibility of plotting the course for the leaders at the helm of the nation, has betrayed that trust. Plotting on its own behalf, and for petty, self-serving reasons, it has set the nation on a collision course with all-out war.
One of the main themes of this book is Victor's belief that Mossad is out of control, that even the prime minister, although ostensibly in charge, has no real authority over its actions ...
Victor Ostrovsky, a former Israeli Mossad agent, wrote two books about Israel’s terror against their enemies. In one of them, he discusses the fate of Palestinians who illegally cross the border in search of work in Israel.
Many thousands of these young men simply are never heard from again after being captured by Israel’s forces. Some of them are taken to the ABC research facilities where they endure the indescribable terror of chemical, nuclear or biological warfare.
The Mossad - believe it or not - has just 30 to 35 case officers, or katsas, operating in the world at any one time. The main reason for this extraordinary low total, as you will read in this book, is that unlike other countries, Israel can tap the significant and loyal cadre of the worldwide Jewish community outside Israel. This is done through a unique system of sayanim, volunteer Jewish helpers.
My first six weeks were uneventful. I worked at the downtown office, essentially as a gofer and filing clerk. But one chilly day in February 1984, I found myself joining 14 others on a small bus. ... This course was to be known as Cadet 16, as it was the sixteenth course of Mossad cadets.
He walked briskly to the head of the table while the other two sat at the back of the room. "My name is Aharon Sherf," he said. "I am the head of the Academy. Welcome to the Mossad. Its full name is Ha Mossad, le Modiyn ve le Tafkidim Mayuhadim [the Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations]. Our motto is: 'By way of deception, thou shalt do war.'
"It's the old Trojan dick trick." He lit a cigarette.
"What's that?" I couldn't help smiling; I'd never heard it called that before.
"I knew that would get your attention," he said, grinning. "Shimon activated Operation Trojan in February of this year."
I nodded. I'd still been in the Mossad when that order was given, and because of my naval background and acquaintance with most of the commanders in the navy, I participated in the planning for the operation as liaison with the navy.
A Trojan was a special communication device that could be planted by naval commandos deep inside enemy territory. The device would act as a relay station for misleading transmissions made by the disinformation unit in the Mossad, called LAP, and intended to be received by American and British listening stations. Originating from an IDF navy ship out at sea, the prerecorded digital transmissions could be picked up only by the Trojan. The device would then rebroadcast the transmission on another frequency, one used for official business in the enemy country, at which point the transmission would finally be picked up by American ears in Britain.
The listeners would have no doubt they had intercepted a genuine communication, hence the name Trojan, reminiscent of the mythical Trojan horse. Further, the content of the messages, once deciphered, would confirm information from other intelligence sources, namely the Mossad. The only catch was that the Trojan itself would have to be located as close as possible to the normal origin of such transmissions, because of the sophisticated methods of triangulation the Americans and others would use to verify the source.
In the particular operation Ephraim was referring to, two elite units in the military had been made responsible for the delivery of the Trojan device to the proper location. One was the Matkal reconnaissance unit and the other was Flotilla 13, the naval commandos. The commandos were charged with the task of planting the Trojan device in Tripoli, Libya.
On the night of February 17-18, two Israeli missile boats, the SAAR 4-class Moledet, armed with Harpoon and Gabriel surface-tosurface missiles, among other weaponry, and the Geula, a Hohit-class mlsslle boat with a helicopter pad and regular SAAR 4-class armament, conducted what seemed like a routine patrol of the Mediterranean, heading for the Sicilian channel and passing just outside the territorial waters of Libya. Just north of Tripoli, the warships, which were vlsible to radar both in Tripoli and on the Italian island of Lampedusa, slowed down to about four knots - just long enough to allow a team of twelve naval commandos in four wet submarines nicknamed "pigs" and two low-profiled speedboats called "birds" to disembark. The pigs could carry two commandos each and all their fighting gear.
The birds, equipped with an MG 7.62-caliber machine gun mounted over the bow and an array of antitank shoulder-carried missiles, could facilitate six commandos each, while towing the empty plgs. The birds brought the pigs as close to the shore as possible, thus cutting down the distance the pigs would have to travel on their own. (The pigs were submersible and silent but relatively slow.)
Two miles off the Libyan coast, the lights of Tripoli could be seen glistening in the southeast. Eight commandos slipped quietly into the plgs and headed for shore. The birds stayed behind at the rendezvous pomt, ready to take action should the situation arise. Once they reached the beach, the commandos left their cigarlike transporters submerged in the shallow water and headed inland, carrying a dark green Trojan cylinder six feet long and seven inches in diameter. It took two men to carry it.
A gray van was parked on the side of the road about one hundred feet from the water, on the coastal highway leading from Sabratah to Tripoli and on to Benghazi. There was hardly any traffic at that time of night. The driver of the van seemed to be repairing a flat tire. He stopped working as the team approached and opened the back doors of the van. He was a Mossad combatant. Without a word said, four of the men entered the van and headed for the city. The other four returned to the water, where they took a defensive position by the submerged pigs. Their job was to hold this position to ensure an escape route for the team now headed for the city.
At the same time, a squadron of Israeli fighters was refueling south of Crete, ready to assist. They were capable of keeping any ground forces away from the commandos, allowing them a not-soclean getaway. At this point, the small commando unit was divided into three details - its most vulnerable state. Were any of the details to run into enemy forces, they were instructed to act with extreme prejudice before the enemy turned hostile.
The van parked at the back of an apartment building on Al Jamhuriyh Street in Tripoli, less than three blocks away from the Bab al Azizia barracks that were known to house Qadhafi's headquarters and residence. By then, the men in the van had changed into civilian clothing. Two stayed with the van as lookouts and the other two helped the Mossad combatant take the cylinder to the top floor of the five-story building. The cylinder was wrapped in a carpet.
In the apartment, the top section of the cylinder was opened and a small dishlike antenna was unfolded and placed in front of the window facing north. The unit was activated, and the Trojan horse was in place.
The Mossad combatant had rented the apartment for six months and had paid the rent in advance. There was no reason for anyone except the combatant to enter the apartment. However, if someone should decide to do so, the Trojan would self-destruct, taking with it most of the upper part of the building. The three men headed back to the van and to their rendezvous with their friends on the beach.
After dropping the commandos at the beach, the combatant headed back for the city, where he would monitor the Trojan unit for the next few weeks. The commandos wasted no time and headed out to sea. They didn't want to be caught in Libyan waters at daybreak. They reached the birds and headed at full speed to a prearranged pickup coordinate, where they met with the missile boats that had brought them in.
By the end of March, the Americans were already intercepting messages broadcast by the Trojan, which was only activated during heavy communication traffic hours. Using the Trojan, the Mossad tried to make it appear that a long series of terrorist orders were being transmitted to various Libyan embassies around the world (or, as they were called by the Libyans, Peoples' Bureaus). As the Mossad had hoped, the transmissions were deciphered by the Americans and construed as ample proof that the Libyans were active sponsors of terrorism. What's more, the Americans pointed out, Mossad reports confirmed it.
The French and the Spanish, though, were not buying into the new stream of information. To them, it seemed suspicious that suddenly, out of the blue, the Libyans, who'd been extremely careful in the past, would start advertising their future actions. They also found it suspicious that in several instances Mossad reports were worded similarly to coded Libyan communications. They argued further that, had there truly been after-the-fact Libyan communications regarding the attack, then the terrorist attack on the La Belle discotheque in West Berlin on April 5 could have been prevented, since surely there would have been communications before, enabling intelligence agencies listening in to prevent It. Since the attack wasn't prevented, they reasoned that it must not be the Libyans who did it, and the "new communications" must be bogus. The French and the Spanish were right. The information was bogus, and the Mossad didn't have a clue who planted the bomb that killed one American serviceman and wounded several others. But the Mossad was tied in to many of the European terrorist organizations, and it was convinced that in the volatile atmosphere that had engulfed Europe, a bombing with an American victim was just a matter of time Heads of the Mossad were counting on the American promise to retaliate with vengeance against any country that could be proven to support terrorism. The Trojan gave the Americans the proof they needed. The Mossad also plugged into the equation Qadhafi's lunatic image and momentous declarations, which were really only meant for internal consumption.
It must be remembered that Qadhafi had marked a line in the water at that time, closing off the Gulf of Sidra as Libyan territorial waters and calling the new maritime border the line of death (an action that didn't exactly give him a moderate image). Ultimately, the Americans fell for the Mossad ploy head over heels dragging the British and the Germans somewhat reluctantly in with them. Operation Trojan was one of the Mossad's greatest successes. It brought about the air strike on Libya that President Reagan had promised - a strike that had three important consequences. First, it derailed a deal for the release of the American hostages in Lebanon, thus preserving the Hizballah (Party of God) as the number one enemy in the eyes of the West. Second, it sent a message to the entire Arab world, telling them exactly where the United States stood regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict. Third, it boosted the Mossad's image of itself, since it was they who, by ingenious sleight of hand, had prodded the United States to do what was right. It was only the French who didn't buy into the Mossad trick and were determined not to ally themselves with the aggressive American act. The French refused to allow the American bombers to fly over their territory on their way to attack Libya.
On April 14, 1986, one hundred and sixty American aircraft dropped over sixty tons of bombs on Libya. The attackers bombed Tripoli international airport, Bab al Azizia barracks, Sidi Bilal naval base, the city of Benghazi, and the Benine airfield outside Benghazi. The strike force consisted of two main bodies, one originating in England and the other from flattops in the Mediterranean. From England came twenty-four F-111s from Lakenheath, five EF-111s from Upper Heyford, and twenty-eight refueling tankers from Mildenhall and Fairford. In the attack, the air force F-111s and the EF-111s were joined by eighteen A-6 and A-7 strike and strike support aircraft, six F\A-18 fighters, fourteen EA-6B electronic jammer planes, and other support platforms. The navy planes were catapulted from the carriers Coral Sea and America. On the Libyan side, there were approximately forty civilian casualties, including Qadhafi's adopted daughter. On the American side, a pilot and his weapons officer were killed when their F-111 exploded.
After the bombing, the Hizballah broke off negotiations regarding the hostages they held in Beirut and executed three of them, including one American named Peter Kilburn. As for the French, they were rewarded for their nonparticipation in the attack by the release at the end of June of two French journalists held hostage in Beirut. (As it happened, a stray bomb hit the French embassy in Tripoli during the raid.)
Ephraim had spelled it all out for me and confirmed some of the information I'd already known. He then went on. "After the bombing of Libya, our friend Qadhafi is sure to stay out of the picture for some time. Iraq and Saddam Hussein are the next target. We're starting now to build him up as the big villain. It will take some time, but in the end, there's no doubt it'll work."
"But isn't Saddam regarded as moderate toward us, allied with Jordan, the big enemy of Iran and Syria?"
"Yes, that's why I'm opposed to this action. But that's the directive, and I must follow it. Hopefully, you and I will be done with our little operation before anything big happens. After all, we have already destroyed his nuclear facility, and we are making money by selling hlm technology and equipment through South Africa."
In the following weeks, more and more discoveries were made regarding the big gun and other elements of the Saddam war machine. The Mossad had all but saturated the intelligence field with information regarding the evil intentions of Saddam the Terrible, banking on the fact that before long, he'd have enough rope to hang himself. It was very clear what the Mossad's overall goal was. It wanted the West to do its bidding, just as the Americans had in Libya with the bombing of Qadhafi. After all, Israel didn't possess carriers and ample air power, and although it was capable of bombing a refugee camp in Tunis, that was not the same. The Mossad leaders knew that if they could make Saddam appear bad enough and a threat to the Gulf oil supply, of which he'd been the protector up to that point, then the United States and its allies would not let him get away with anything, but would take measures that would all but eliminate his army and his weapons potential, especially if they were led to believe that this might just be their last chance before he went nuclear.
Submitted for your perusal:
CONFESSIONS OF AN EX-MOSSAD AGENT
FROM: http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/deception.html?q=deception.html
Excerpt from Victor Ostrovsky's, "By way of deception"
NOTE: Needless to say, the Israeli Lobby has demanded (and gotten) a total ban on this book in all major bookstore chains, while pro-Israeli experts have trashed it at every opportunity. Ostrovsky's book is available only online at places like Amazon
Revealing the facts as I know them from my vantage point of four years spent inside the Mossad was by no means an easy task.
Coming from an ardent Zionist background, I had been taught that the state of Israel was incapable of misconduct. That we were the David in the unending struggle against the ever-growing Goliath. That there was no one out there to protect us but ourselves - a feeling reinforced by the Holocaust survivors who lived among us.
We, the new generation of Israelites, the resurrected nation on its own land after more than two thousand years of exile, were entrusted with the fate of the nation as a whole.
The commanders of our army were called champions, not generals. Our leaders were captains at the helm of a great ship. I was elated when I was chosen and granted the privilege to join what I considered to be the elite team of the Mossad.
But it was the twisted ideals and self-centered pragmatism that I encountered inside the Mossad, coupled with this so-called team's greed, lust, and total lack of respect for human life, that motivated me to tell this story.
It is out of love for Israel as a free and just country that I am laying my life on the line by so doing, facing up to those who took it upon themselves to turn the Zionist dream into the present-day nightmare.
The Mossad, being the intelligence body entrusted with the responsibility of plotting the course for the leaders at the helm of the nation, has betrayed that trust. Plotting on its own behalf, and for petty, self-serving reasons, it has set the nation on a collision course with all-out war.
One of the main themes of this book is Victor's belief that Mossad is out of control, that even the prime minister, although ostensibly in charge, has no real authority over its actions ...
Victor Ostrovsky, a former Israeli Mossad agent, wrote two books about Israel’s terror against their enemies. In one of them, he discusses the fate of Palestinians who illegally cross the border in search of work in Israel.
Many thousands of these young men simply are never heard from again after being captured by Israel’s forces. Some of them are taken to the ABC research facilities where they endure the indescribable terror of chemical, nuclear or biological warfare.
The Mossad - believe it or not - has just 30 to 35 case officers, or katsas, operating in the world at any one time. The main reason for this extraordinary low total, as you will read in this book, is that unlike other countries, Israel can tap the significant and loyal cadre of the worldwide Jewish community outside Israel. This is done through a unique system of sayanim, volunteer Jewish helpers.
My first six weeks were uneventful. I worked at the downtown office, essentially as a gofer and filing clerk. But one chilly day in February 1984, I found myself joining 14 others on a small bus. ... This course was to be known as Cadet 16, as it was the sixteenth course of Mossad cadets.
He walked briskly to the head of the table while the other two sat at the back of the room. "My name is Aharon Sherf," he said. "I am the head of the Academy. Welcome to the Mossad. Its full name is Ha Mossad, le Modiyn ve le Tafkidim Mayuhadim [the Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations]. Our motto is: 'By way of deception, thou shalt do war.'
"It's the old Trojan dick trick." He lit a cigarette.
"What's that?" I couldn't help smiling; I'd never heard it called that before.
"I knew that would get your attention," he said, grinning. "Shimon activated Operation Trojan in February of this year."
I nodded. I'd still been in the Mossad when that order was given, and because of my naval background and acquaintance with most of the commanders in the navy, I participated in the planning for the operation as liaison with the navy.
A Trojan was a special communication device that could be planted by naval commandos deep inside enemy territory. The device would act as a relay station for misleading transmissions made by the disinformation unit in the Mossad, called LAP, and intended to be received by American and British listening stations. Originating from an IDF navy ship out at sea, the prerecorded digital transmissions could be picked up only by the Trojan. The device would then rebroadcast the transmission on another frequency, one used for official business in the enemy country, at which point the transmission would finally be picked up by American ears in Britain.
The listeners would have no doubt they had intercepted a genuine communication, hence the name Trojan, reminiscent of the mythical Trojan horse. Further, the content of the messages, once deciphered, would confirm information from other intelligence sources, namely the Mossad. The only catch was that the Trojan itself would have to be located as close as possible to the normal origin of such transmissions, because of the sophisticated methods of triangulation the Americans and others would use to verify the source.
In the particular operation Ephraim was referring to, two elite units in the military had been made responsible for the delivery of the Trojan device to the proper location. One was the Matkal reconnaissance unit and the other was Flotilla 13, the naval commandos. The commandos were charged with the task of planting the Trojan device in Tripoli, Libya.
On the night of February 17-18, two Israeli missile boats, the SAAR 4-class Moledet, armed with Harpoon and Gabriel surface-tosurface missiles, among other weaponry, and the Geula, a Hohit-class mlsslle boat with a helicopter pad and regular SAAR 4-class armament, conducted what seemed like a routine patrol of the Mediterranean, heading for the Sicilian channel and passing just outside the territorial waters of Libya. Just north of Tripoli, the warships, which were vlsible to radar both in Tripoli and on the Italian island of Lampedusa, slowed down to about four knots - just long enough to allow a team of twelve naval commandos in four wet submarines nicknamed "pigs" and two low-profiled speedboats called "birds" to disembark. The pigs could carry two commandos each and all their fighting gear.
The birds, equipped with an MG 7.62-caliber machine gun mounted over the bow and an array of antitank shoulder-carried missiles, could facilitate six commandos each, while towing the empty plgs. The birds brought the pigs as close to the shore as possible, thus cutting down the distance the pigs would have to travel on their own. (The pigs were submersible and silent but relatively slow.)
Two miles off the Libyan coast, the lights of Tripoli could be seen glistening in the southeast. Eight commandos slipped quietly into the plgs and headed for shore. The birds stayed behind at the rendezvous pomt, ready to take action should the situation arise. Once they reached the beach, the commandos left their cigarlike transporters submerged in the shallow water and headed inland, carrying a dark green Trojan cylinder six feet long and seven inches in diameter. It took two men to carry it.
A gray van was parked on the side of the road about one hundred feet from the water, on the coastal highway leading from Sabratah to Tripoli and on to Benghazi. There was hardly any traffic at that time of night. The driver of the van seemed to be repairing a flat tire. He stopped working as the team approached and opened the back doors of the van. He was a Mossad combatant. Without a word said, four of the men entered the van and headed for the city. The other four returned to the water, where they took a defensive position by the submerged pigs. Their job was to hold this position to ensure an escape route for the team now headed for the city.
At the same time, a squadron of Israeli fighters was refueling south of Crete, ready to assist. They were capable of keeping any ground forces away from the commandos, allowing them a not-soclean getaway. At this point, the small commando unit was divided into three details - its most vulnerable state. Were any of the details to run into enemy forces, they were instructed to act with extreme prejudice before the enemy turned hostile.
The van parked at the back of an apartment building on Al Jamhuriyh Street in Tripoli, less than three blocks away from the Bab al Azizia barracks that were known to house Qadhafi's headquarters and residence. By then, the men in the van had changed into civilian clothing. Two stayed with the van as lookouts and the other two helped the Mossad combatant take the cylinder to the top floor of the five-story building. The cylinder was wrapped in a carpet.
In the apartment, the top section of the cylinder was opened and a small dishlike antenna was unfolded and placed in front of the window facing north. The unit was activated, and the Trojan horse was in place.
The Mossad combatant had rented the apartment for six months and had paid the rent in advance. There was no reason for anyone except the combatant to enter the apartment. However, if someone should decide to do so, the Trojan would self-destruct, taking with it most of the upper part of the building. The three men headed back to the van and to their rendezvous with their friends on the beach.
After dropping the commandos at the beach, the combatant headed back for the city, where he would monitor the Trojan unit for the next few weeks. The commandos wasted no time and headed out to sea. They didn't want to be caught in Libyan waters at daybreak. They reached the birds and headed at full speed to a prearranged pickup coordinate, where they met with the missile boats that had brought them in.
By the end of March, the Americans were already intercepting messages broadcast by the Trojan, which was only activated during heavy communication traffic hours. Using the Trojan, the Mossad tried to make it appear that a long series of terrorist orders were being transmitted to various Libyan embassies around the world (or, as they were called by the Libyans, Peoples' Bureaus). As the Mossad had hoped, the transmissions were deciphered by the Americans and construed as ample proof that the Libyans were active sponsors of terrorism. What's more, the Americans pointed out, Mossad reports confirmed it.
The French and the Spanish, though, were not buying into the new stream of information. To them, it seemed suspicious that suddenly, out of the blue, the Libyans, who'd been extremely careful in the past, would start advertising their future actions. They also found it suspicious that in several instances Mossad reports were worded similarly to coded Libyan communications. They argued further that, had there truly been after-the-fact Libyan communications regarding the attack, then the terrorist attack on the La Belle discotheque in West Berlin on April 5 could have been prevented, since surely there would have been communications before, enabling intelligence agencies listening in to prevent It. Since the attack wasn't prevented, they reasoned that it must not be the Libyans who did it, and the "new communications" must be bogus. The French and the Spanish were right. The information was bogus, and the Mossad didn't have a clue who planted the bomb that killed one American serviceman and wounded several others. But the Mossad was tied in to many of the European terrorist organizations, and it was convinced that in the volatile atmosphere that had engulfed Europe, a bombing with an American victim was just a matter of time Heads of the Mossad were counting on the American promise to retaliate with vengeance against any country that could be proven to support terrorism. The Trojan gave the Americans the proof they needed. The Mossad also plugged into the equation Qadhafi's lunatic image and momentous declarations, which were really only meant for internal consumption.
It must be remembered that Qadhafi had marked a line in the water at that time, closing off the Gulf of Sidra as Libyan territorial waters and calling the new maritime border the line of death (an action that didn't exactly give him a moderate image). Ultimately, the Americans fell for the Mossad ploy head over heels dragging the British and the Germans somewhat reluctantly in with them. Operation Trojan was one of the Mossad's greatest successes. It brought about the air strike on Libya that President Reagan had promised - a strike that had three important consequences. First, it derailed a deal for the release of the American hostages in Lebanon, thus preserving the Hizballah (Party of God) as the number one enemy in the eyes of the West. Second, it sent a message to the entire Arab world, telling them exactly where the United States stood regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict. Third, it boosted the Mossad's image of itself, since it was they who, by ingenious sleight of hand, had prodded the United States to do what was right. It was only the French who didn't buy into the Mossad trick and were determined not to ally themselves with the aggressive American act. The French refused to allow the American bombers to fly over their territory on their way to attack Libya.
On April 14, 1986, one hundred and sixty American aircraft dropped over sixty tons of bombs on Libya. The attackers bombed Tripoli international airport, Bab al Azizia barracks, Sidi Bilal naval base, the city of Benghazi, and the Benine airfield outside Benghazi. The strike force consisted of two main bodies, one originating in England and the other from flattops in the Mediterranean. From England came twenty-four F-111s from Lakenheath, five EF-111s from Upper Heyford, and twenty-eight refueling tankers from Mildenhall and Fairford. In the attack, the air force F-111s and the EF-111s were joined by eighteen A-6 and A-7 strike and strike support aircraft, six F\A-18 fighters, fourteen EA-6B electronic jammer planes, and other support platforms. The navy planes were catapulted from the carriers Coral Sea and America. On the Libyan side, there were approximately forty civilian casualties, including Qadhafi's adopted daughter. On the American side, a pilot and his weapons officer were killed when their F-111 exploded.
After the bombing, the Hizballah broke off negotiations regarding the hostages they held in Beirut and executed three of them, including one American named Peter Kilburn. As for the French, they were rewarded for their nonparticipation in the attack by the release at the end of June of two French journalists held hostage in Beirut. (As it happened, a stray bomb hit the French embassy in Tripoli during the raid.)
Ephraim had spelled it all out for me and confirmed some of the information I'd already known. He then went on. "After the bombing of Libya, our friend Qadhafi is sure to stay out of the picture for some time. Iraq and Saddam Hussein are the next target. We're starting now to build him up as the big villain. It will take some time, but in the end, there's no doubt it'll work."
"But isn't Saddam regarded as moderate toward us, allied with Jordan, the big enemy of Iran and Syria?"
"Yes, that's why I'm opposed to this action. But that's the directive, and I must follow it. Hopefully, you and I will be done with our little operation before anything big happens. After all, we have already destroyed his nuclear facility, and we are making money by selling hlm technology and equipment through South Africa."
In the following weeks, more and more discoveries were made regarding the big gun and other elements of the Saddam war machine. The Mossad had all but saturated the intelligence field with information regarding the evil intentions of Saddam the Terrible, banking on the fact that before long, he'd have enough rope to hang himself. It was very clear what the Mossad's overall goal was. It wanted the West to do its bidding, just as the Americans had in Libya with the bombing of Qadhafi. After all, Israel didn't possess carriers and ample air power, and although it was capable of bombing a refugee camp in Tunis, that was not the same. The Mossad leaders knew that if they could make Saddam appear bad enough and a threat to the Gulf oil supply, of which he'd been the protector up to that point, then the United States and its allies would not let him get away with anything, but would take measures that would all but eliminate his army and his weapons potential, especially if they were led to believe that this might just be their last chance before he went nuclear.
5.29.2011
5.27.2011
A view of the American Police State in action.
The Bin Laden story was a scam. You were told that the removal of Bin Laden would make you safer in your homes, schools, workplaces, playgrounds and churches. What you got was a tightening of the hand of fascism on the throat of the Republic of the United States of America. The threat level increased and on the coat-tails of us uncovering the farce for what it was, the DHS was soaked up by the Pentagon to become the Internet watchdogs and the TSA decided that it was time to tell you that your "liberties" didn't matter.
Federal Blockade of the entire state of TX promised by YOUR government if Texas doesn't comply with the TSA's unConstitutional decision to grope you at will.
For those of you who are new here... The above is a link. And what's contained within the link is unbridled financial terrorism.
Federal Blockade of the entire state of TX promised by YOUR government if Texas doesn't comply with the TSA's unConstitutional decision to grope you at will.
For those of you who are new here... The above is a link. And what's contained within the link is unbridled financial terrorism.
5.21.2011
So, as I sit here, on my sidewalk, on a picture perfect spring morning; my baby girl riding her Radio Flyer trike and my son climbs a tree in the front yard, I wrestle with whether I want to return to political blogging/punditry. There's so much currently happening that I really don't even know where to start or whether to start at all.
It's almost inconceivable... Later today, I may or may not extrapolate.
2.20.2011
2.06.2011
You only get one chance in this body
The Internet's a very interesting place, full of interesting and awesome people. As I sit here and write this, I'm kinda reeling a bit. The ebb and flow of people in and out of our lives is a constant. Some who enter are quickly escorted to the exit, due to their lack of positive influence in our lives, and others are... Well, others make an impression. Such was the case with SaDiECrAZyBaBe. You may know of her by the pix that she posted on Twitter, you may know her for her fiery attitude, you may have even had the opportunity to get to know her. I was one of those lucky people whom she let in and we chatted and joked and discussed life's ups/downs regularly.
At 3A.M. (EST) February 1, 2011, she slipped through the veil and left us all to scramble and collect our memories of her and put them in that special place; where we hope they'll always be accessible. She was undergoing the last of her 12(lifetime) surgeries to combat Chron's Disease, and couldn't fight the complications. I would like to think that she would have called me a friend, and I would venture to say that she probably wouldn't have minded if I called her such. I miss her. I miss talking to her through DM's in Twitter, I miss reading her hilarious posts, I even miss the times when the discussions weren't so hilarious. She was a great person, and the world truly is a smaller place without her in it.
She was the only straight-edge snow angel I have ever known or care to know.
<3
Wrench
1.31.2011
Katie Banks
Want a different perspective? Want to take a shot and not be prejudiced for once in your life? Click the title of this post to be transported to a place where you may not otherwise visit, but you'll definitely return.
1.27.2011
Here's something for you to consider:
The rise in cannabis consumption and acceptance is directly correlated to the demise of a production based economy and the severe increase in a service based economy/unemployment (my theory).
The fewer of us who don't have to worry about (Perfectly acceptable) random drug testing in factories, construction sites, and a few other places are going to exercise our ability to sit around and chill out (this doesn't factor into the millions who smoke and go to work every day; i.e. teachers, lawyers, doctors, delivery drivers, etc.). It's inevitable. Accept it. Legalize it. Profit from it.
Time flies. WTF?
Here I am, most likely the only person whom will ever contribute to what started out as some pretty interesting/hilarious shit.
Things happen, life goes on, some people are just recognized for the cunts that they are. <---=LIFE
I'm going to return to blogging. No, not because I'm self-centered and honestly think that you want to read what I write. I have to write. Much like I have to draw, design, play music, game, fuck, and smoke copious amounts of cannabis. Plus, it appears, when the steam has cleared from the stinking pile of shit that is The State of the Union, some of us get to say we told you so, but at the same time, we have to tell you to wake the FUCK UP!! I'll be doing dual-duties here and at my personal blog.
Buckle up, bitch... It's time to ride the whirlwind.
12.27.2009
Down the rabbit hole.
What happens when everyone turns a blind eye and goes on about their business?
12.07.2009
My, how this semester had throroughly kicked our asses.
We've managed to sequester ourselves in, separate ourselves from various modes of communication, and get absolutely hammered in the process.
For all of us who know where we've been and who have no idea where we're going... SKÖL!!
11.04.2009
Slayer: World Painted Blood
Call it blasphemy, call it what you will. Yesterday, I was so busy with pointless bullshit that I forgot to inform you that the new exercise in brutality that is the new Slayer album: "World Painted Blood" hit the street.
Of course I have it. Now, get off your collective asses and go get it!!
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