GOOD v more ROns & april FOOLS (scroll down for Hillsborough memorial)
GOOD v more ROns & april FOOLS
(scroll down for Hillsborough memorial)
Previous; unsublog-chrisfandungo.blogspot.com/2022/04/via-redgemnet-versus-april.html
This LOG only exists BECAUSE YOU sheeple have ALLOWED or even VOTED in to POWER..those who DICTATE what you are allowed to DO, see, hear or write!..(and thus MY/OUR MEd1ATEAM posts, LOGS & videos have been censored, deleted or hacked/mutilated..
"deomcratic/free world, MY ARSE!"
BUT as much as the criminal/corrupt DICTATORS, seen or unseen manipulate YOU like puppets..YOU are at fault for FAILING to take action ..the most common reaction "what can I DO< I AM ONLY ONE person!!!!" yeah! ONE of 7 billion...WAKE THE FECK UP!
Armageddon was yesterday, last year, a decade ago, or even GOT (GOD?) under way 2000 years ago, when you started to think that YOUR crimes, even of apathetic contribution to VIOLATIONS against NATURE & Humanity would be FORGIVEN by whichever GOD or GODS you :voted for: ...
I believe in the POSITIVE spirit, I have put my energy & "faith" into GOOD, rather than "GOD" ..I respect those WHO DO GOOD in the name of whatever religion chosen, BUT not those, who use religion, politics (not much difference to me) to EXCUSE negaitive action or simply lazy "shrug" accompanies their CHOICE of IGNORANCE! ..
you dont know what to do, well WHY DONT YOU take MORE TIME to question..EVERYTHING & everyone ..????
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for NEW "absorb ers" (IF you just come here to "SCAN" (superficial read) PLEASE FECK off.. TRUE REbELS please NOTE;
* US/A/corp; the Illegal/immoral inhabitant/occupying army etc of the north american continent its WAR-biz, big pharma & polluting OIL obsessed industry/traffic & poodle allies...!
* F U B A R ; what you have caused this once beautiful planet to be; F ecked UP B eyond All R ecognition!!
* Game of THORNS.. the "global reality show which makes the TV series content of "game of thrones" seem like kiddies TV!
* NameriCANT! (see USAcorp)..& promoters of their CUNTtrees!
* Bizzies ; police & uniformed or other "agents" (who are now , directly or indirectly acting for the state or rich few)
_____________
LOCO LOCAL>
The fools & Mamula monkees are laying a triple power cable through beautiful Lucista, via Miriste's "wild beach" DESTURBING THE LOCALITY AND NATURE , JUST TO SATISFY SOME RICH BITCH who wants to land his Heli copter on ?Mamula Island" disturbing that beach and sea life between the bay & the Island ..(original name "swallow Island" before the HN state sold it off to the capitalist thieves)
EXTRA snips
Intro music; Peter, Paul and Mary - Where Have All the Flowers Gone (25th Anniversary Concert)
( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgXNVA9ngx8 )
BINOY KAMPMARK, C-P > .." The (USCorp Zombie) President, ..had been busily building “a coalition of freedom-loving nations” across Europe, the Americas, Asia and Africa to oppose that man in the Kremlin. .." ..BUT ; Macron, in response that, “We want to stop the war that Russia launched in Ukraine, without waging war and without escalation.”..!
..."(UScorp) ..responsibility for overthrowing an elected government (democracy, but just the wrong sort) and aiding to precipitate a civil war that saw the deaths of 13,000 people, impoverished a country, and laid the seeds of sorrow that are now returning a terrible harvest..."
(NameriCANT)Richard (dick?)Kooris,Austin,Texas, “and yet he refuses to impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine or allow Poland to make MiG-29 fighter jets available to Ukraine, ostensibly out of fear of igniting a wider (or nuclear) conflict.”
(hmmmm Texas could be high on my list of missile number 1...IF...)
RON JACOBS> (C-P 6th april) .."Supporting Militarism Will Not Bring Justice, Only Death.." (re Bucha = Butcher?_) ". In both instances, I am skeptical of the absolute truth of both claims. After all, mainstream media is not known for its truthfulness in wars." .....
....." supporting the relentless expansion of the greatest purveyor of violence in the world. In other words, the United States. (USAcorp) Is Russia’s invasion wrong on multiple levels? Of course it is. Was Washington’s multi-pronged pressure over the past couple decades to get Kyiv to join its side wrong on multiple levels? Of course it was..."
.... "be honest: two ..capitalist govts sacrificing human beings... Ukraine has a history of oppression at the hands of the Russians? ..many if not most of those who have carried the Ukrainian coloUrs high were (are) reactionaries whose primary interest was gaining power and ethnically cleansing the nation? ...Ask someone whose Jewish ancestors escaped Ukraine during WW2 who the oppressors were and who their liberators were"..?
.... "political and cultural presence of the WW2 Nazi collaborator government (Reichskommissariat Ukraine) exists in a very real fashion in modern day Ukraine...Likewise, those who deny Moscow’s coziness with various fascist manifestations in Russia and around the world are only fooling themselves... 1999 many on the Left supported NATO’s attack on Serbia .. Those of us who didn’t engaged in numerous debates with those who were. "
UNsub> we want to be seen as SOCIALIST, but do not forget that words & labels can and ARE manipulated & abused.. "NAZI" is an abbreviation of "National socialism"..
RON J> "ever-increasing and ever more lethal arms shipments from NATO member countries make it clear that neither Washington, London or Berlin are as interested in peace as they are in making war on Moscow. Militarism is once again the order of the day in Europe ans its watchword—as ever—remain death.".." The men and women who run this war, those who cheer it on in the media, and those who profit from it are the enemies of the majority of the world’s population. "..WAR IS THE CRIME. The worst war criminals are those who plan wars, profit from wars, convince their citizens to go to war,.."
LINDA PENTZ GUNTER, C-P 6 april) "as the crisis forces countries to realize that their commitment to renewable energy was always too little too late, it is still the right choice to make, rather than using the war as an excuse to perpetuate and expand the use of nuclear power.""Dr Paul Dorfman, chair of the Nuclear Consulting Group “ he (UK PM "bloJOB") has used the Russian invasion of Ukraine as an excuse to do that.”
UNsub>the UKPM should adopt the Dr's name.. as HE (the dangerous buffon playing PM of UK) is a "DORF-mann" (helps to learn german) :p
...A great player, (the "greatest"? hmmmm) a special character, but... a shirt auctioned for 4 million!!!..HOPE it was for charity??? or...? "hand of GOD" / spectatular Maradona; who died at age 60 (irishexaminer.com/sport/soccer/arid-40845650.htm ) & ex footballer & "SOUThampton FC ambassador" was criticised for "posting.. regarding what appear to be intentional killings of civilians in Bucha and other towns before Russian forces withdrew from the outskirts of Kyiv...Le Tissier wrote "This" and a pointing-down emoji towards a tweet suggesting the media had "lied", before deleting the post and seeking to clarify his position by saying "the point was about the media manipulation"....
( irishexaminer.com/sport/soccer/arid-40845608.html )
Linda P-G > continued; " Despite all the propaganda that continually seeks to vilify..German government will introduce legislation to require nearly 100 percent renewable electricity by 2035, on target to meet its 2045 net zero goal..." (
Linda Pentz Gunter is the editor and curator of BeyondNuclearInternational.org and the international specialist at Beyond Nuclear)
Nick Pemberton> 7th april; "men aren’t men because the world is run by machines....(?) Under capitalism, laboUr creates value and women’s laboUr is unpaid and the global South is enslaved".."Biden, like Trump before him, is a reckless senile brute of a nationalist who can’t and won’t fight for the people of his country. He can only punch down on those outside of it.".." Because if we remain in this nostalgic thirst for masculine valor we will all be cancelled."
UNsub> and is that what YOU all deserve??? to be cancelled for your crimes, corruption, pollution or apathy..if the machines run this SHYTE, then Nick, lets call OUT those who flick their SWITCH??? ...necessary to add to your points!
Ramzy Baroud C-P> also april 7th " hypocrisy is a reflection of a much larger phenomenon that governs the West’s relationship to war and conflict zones...." On March 19, the 19th anniversary of ( UScorp ) invasion which killed, according to modest estimates, over a million Iraqis. ...Also, on March 19, the 11th anniversary of the NATO war on Libya and five days later, by the 23rd anniversary of the NATO war on (former) Yugoslavia. every NATO-led war since 1949 inception, (starting with N. Korean, 1950) resulted in widespread devastation and tragic death tolls...
UNsub> N azty A rmy T error O rg ?
Ramzy> ..continued; ..."seventy years of failed military interventions have not taught us any meaningful lessons. Daily, news headlines tell us that the US, the UK, Canada, Germany, Spain or some other western power have decided to ship a new kind of ‘lethal (AID) weapons’ to Ukraine." .."a state of civil war has existed in Eastern Ukraine for eight years, harvesting thousands of lives and depriving whole communities from any sense of peace or security. NATO’s weapons.. can only fuel it further...".(USACorp)."has already allocated $2.7bn to Ukraine over the last eight years, long before the current war" ..
........Afghani refugees are rarely welcomed in Europe. The same is true for refugees coming from Iraq, Syria, Libya, Mali and other conflicts that directly or indirectly involved NATO. This hypocrisy is accentuated....amassing of NATO weapons in Ukraine, as was the case of Libya, will likely backfire. In Libya, NATO’s weapons fuelled the country’s decade-long civil war..."..
+++++
VIJAY PRASHAD, C-P> writes the Disputed islands in question: Habomai Islands, Shikotan, Kunashiri (Kunashir) and Etorofu (Iturup) – Japan’s Foreign Ministry releases a Diplomatic Bluebook, (which) ..refers to the Russian control over some islands north of Hokkaido as an “illegal occupation.” & called the islands “inherently Japanese.” This phrase ..suggest that the tensions between Japan and Russia will certainly increase...
... as Russian forces entered Ukraine, Yoshimasa released a statement to condemn .. Russian military forces .. freezing of Japan-based assets of three Russian banks, & to exclude seven major Russian banks ..Russia retaliated by placing Japan on its list of “unfriendly countries..(but) On March 31, 2022, Prime Minister Kishida "govt would remain involved with Russia’s Sakhalin 2 natural gas and oil project.“Our plan is not to withdraw.”
... "(thus far, Russia has only insisted that payment for the gaseous form of national gas be made in rubles)....in the Sea of Okhotsk..“the most outstanding issue in Japan-Russia relations.” .. allow Russia to extend its territorial waters into the Pacific Ocean. .. (where Russia rubs shoulders with an increased NATO presence). Any accidental clash between Japan and Russia would trigger Article V of the 1960 treaty that Japan signed with the United States; if that were to happen, it would be a catastrophe....(article was produced by Globetrotter...)
UNsub> writers at C-P bored with "the war MEd1A" ? looking for other scAres to occupy the feeble minds of sheeple??
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JOHN W. WHITEHEAD> (C-P also April 7) comments; “If you don’t want to get shot, tased, pepper-sprayed, struck with a baton or thrown to the ground, just do what I tell you.”
—Officer with the Los Angeles Police Department"
..."Police violence has not lessened...Police shootings have not abated...Police reforms have largely failed. according to the latest research, police violence kills three people a day...."Biden wants to throw more money (via) .. $30 billion “Fund the Police” program,..so-called crime prevention at taxpayer expense...Biden wants to fight gun violence with more gun violence."
..."Biden looking to do is score points with voters and police unions.V activists “defund the police,” research shows there is no real correlation between crime rates and police budgets..."( a call for greater accountability, better training, and overall reform), Biden’s could well encourage further police brutality..."
"NAmericaNT" is overrun with militarized cops—vigilantes with a badge—hyped up on their own authority and the power of their uniform, ride roughshod over the rights of citizenry.. trained to act as judge, jury and executione in their interactions with the public... outnumbering the good cops, "..."doesn’t matter if you’re in the right, it doesn’t matter if a cop is in the wrong, " old police motto to “protect and serve” has become “comply or die.” who treat “we the people” like suspects and criminals... even the most benign encounters with police can have fatal consequences.
.. “not that life has gotten that much more dangerous, it’s that authorities have chosen to respond to even innocent situations as if they were in a warzone.”.."thus ready to shoot first and ask questions later—are definitely not making us or themselves any safer... militarized police increasingly pose a risk to anyone ...disabled individuals make up a third to half of all people killed by law enforcement officers. (People of coloUr are three times more likely to be killed by police than their white counterparts.)
... court-sanctioned police violence carried out with impunity against individuals posing little or no real threat.. bullying, beating, tasering, shooting and killing their employers—the taxpayers to whom they owe their allegiance—
.. an unmistakable characteristic of a police state,
....made possible ... resist the placement of names and badge numbers on officer uniforms; not implicate their colleagues for their crimes and misconduct; prosecutors who treat police offenses with greater leniency than civilian offenses; courts that sanction police wrongdoing in the name of security; cops protected from most charges of shooting unarmed citizens (including children and old people), raping and abusing young women, falsifying police reports, trafficking drugs, or soliciting sex with minors—but ... it’s only a matter of time before they get re-hired again....rampant cronyism among government bureaucrats..."
UNsub> and the F U B A R USAcorp "leaders" preach to the rest of the world about their "God blessed America" regime..
..."police state wants the us vs. them dichotomy. It wants us to turn each other in, distrust each other and be at each other’s throats, while it continues amassing power. It wants police officers who act like the military, and citizens who cower in fear. It wants a suspect society. It wants us to play by its rules instead of holding it accountable to the rule of law. (article was originally published at The Rutherford Institute.)
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APRIL 6, 2022 Living With the Questions: Roosevelt Montás and the Tricky Thing about Liberal Educatio BY SUSIE DAY
EXtracts;
Roosevelt Montás.. father, a self-taught Marxist dedicated to fighting the Balaguer regime, installed by a 1965 US-sponsored coup. “I understood early in life the realpolitik of (NAmericanT) cold war policy, and how it was used to justify abuses in Latin America,” “I saw Dad go to jail … el Yanqui Imperialismo was a norm of international relations with which I was well acquainted.”
..." came to New York to live with the rest of their family...Roosevelt’s father, finding the Yanqui zeitgeist unbearable, went back home. (&) told him that “there was a world out there to be understood; that I belonged in the conversation.”
Roosevelt is Senior Lecturer in American Studies and English. He is all about liberal education " (interview continues);
* * *
RM: "Aristotle does not think people are equal. , he doesn’t think democracy should extend universally. For example, he thinks that women are not capable of the deliberative thinking in a democracy. And he thinks that some people are, in fact, slaves by nature. We reject that; we believe that all people are, by right, free..."
sd: "John Cleese, one of the Monty Python boys, tweeted during the protests following George Floyd’s murder, when statues of people like Robert E. Lee were being toppled, that, given the atrocity of slavery, shouldn’t we also be pulling down statues of Aristotle and Socrates?"
RM: "where do you draw the line?
sd: "Draw it democratically? Isn’t ancient Athens supposed to be the birthplace of democracy?"
RM: "Yeah, but pretty much all the ancient political theorists hate democracy, ... In Athens, democracy became imperial; democracy fought a bloody war against a despotic regime and lost; democracy murdered Socrates. There’s a line in Aquinas, where he says that democracy is a government in which the poor oppress the rich."
"Plato’s Republic – the ideal society Plato imagines – is not a democracy; it’s a hierarchical society, the top being philosophers, the wisest people, who rule. Aristotle is much more sympathetic to a kind of direct – not representative – democracy. But as he says, democracy is rule among equals; not for people who are unequal..."
sd: "I would think, given this mindset, that Martin Luther King’s statement, “No one is free until we’re all free” would be anathema to these guys."
RM: "Oh, absolutely."
sd: "So why teach these prejudiced texts written by privileged jerks?"
RM: "We don’t teach their texts because they’re the highest repositories of truth and wisdom; we teach them as provocations for debate – to understand how our world has come to be as it is —".. "is the most effective way of achieving a political education – again, looking at them as sources of provocation and debate."
sd: "Which is Socratic?"
RM: "Exactly. Democracy doesn’t get any respect or consideration, really, until the Enlightenment..will take 2,000 years"
" Our institutions, our values, our norms, our ideals, our prejudices all have a history. ...questions we continue to grapple with."
sd: "u say Enlightenment ... occurred at the time of, was probably made possible by, colonialism and slavery."
RM: "Right. Slavery was at its peak.....also gives birth to a critique of slavery, to its rejection, ..we still have some slavery going on, but very few people now defend it...
UNsub> 2020/2021 proved that 99% of the global sheeple are enslaved, and readily IMPRISONED THEMSELVES!!!!!
RM; "You see people arguing for new ways, Marx being a prominent example. But also Rousseau, .. a tradition with values we embrace and argue for, and values we condemn and reject."
sd: "The common perception of the “liberally educated” person, though, is pretty damning. ..."
RM: This person you’re describing ...is product of bourgeois culture – which works for people with and without liberal educations. Some of the most important activists, ... were liberally educated and put their liberal education to work."
sd: "Name names."
RM: "Martin Luther King. Malcolm X – self-educated but liberally educated, nonetheless. Franz Fanon. Karl Marx, of course –u need to read Marx. Ta-Nehisi Coates and Nikole Hannah-Jones,... Their writing employs the fruits of a liberal education."
sd: "But I don’t think most of them would sit down and quote Aristotle to you."
RM: "You can get educated outside of that. You don’t even need to be literate, to get a liberal education."
sd: "What?"
RM: "It’s possible that Socrates himself was illiterate..."
sd: "Could you say, then, that liberal education is more a state of mind than actual knowledge of great books?"
RM: "It’s a practice, not a state. A liberally educated person is such not because of the facts they know, but because of the way they think about their life and the world; the way they live what Socrates called “an examined life,” investigating the nature of the human good and what it means to live a good life."
UNsub> (ChRiS) : one of the most intelligent young men I ever met, didnt have a traditional education, & read ONE book! :)
sd: " Going back to the ancients."
RM: "Yes, there’s tremendous value in encountering ancient figures. ... implies that you are also in a cultural matrix."
..the difference between a liberal and a religious education is that religion purports to give you the answers. A liberal education just gives you the questions."
sd: "If you’re asking us to examine root cultural assumptions, couldn’t this also be called radical education?"
RM: "Right. “Radical,” emphasizing its engagement with the root questions, texts, debates, etc., that have shaped contemporary culture. And “liberal” education emphasizes its concern with human freedom."
sd: "What do you think a liberal/radical education should be today?"
RM: "Based on a contemporary democratic vision, with our idea that everyone is equal, this education has to take in history and economics and science and religion and ethics – there’s no area of human life that lies outside the questions the mass of people should engage in. "
sd: "But because most of us aren’t allowed into these debates, some of us take to the streets. So pretend you’re talking to a roomful of activists who demand an overhaul of this incredibly unjust, racist system that’s destroying the planet..."
RM: First thing is, there are different spheres of action. If you want to organize around, say, changing environmental laws, then you should be getting signatures and lobbying, not reading philosophical texts.... Liberal education lives in the questions....like, Where did the idea of race come from; Why is society structured in this way; What are the antecedents to the ideology? ..But I don’t think it can be subordinated to ideological agendas.
...I should qualify that by saying that there are certain notions that have always been central to liberal education, like justice and equality. ...But they’re very general values...(&)... it doesn’t mix well with mass movements because of the almost inevitable reduction and simplification and sloganeering around which you need to organize masses of people. The intellectual is on the sidelines, asking the hard questions – and wary of mass certainty. Whether it’s the left, the right, or religion: mass movements don’t like liberal education...
UNsub> which is why so few ABSORB these logs..FULLY!! :p
sd: " you realized your dad’s political movements often became as corrupt and overbearing as the governments they fought –"
RM: "Yeah, when some of them came into power, they’d end up doing the same oppressive things the earlier ones did."
sd: "Like in Woody Allen’s “Bananas.”
RM: "Right: “Underwear will be worn on the OUTSIDE!”
sd: "But at the same time, it’s not an argument to give up activism."
RM: "Exactly. Because we have to fight, to paraphrase Lincoln, for the right as we see it."
sd: "Besides your Columbia courses, you teach high school kids, immigrants,... What do you get from this?"
RM: "Teaching them is what I live for. It’s like seeing the world open up in front of them in new ways. I know what this education did for me, and what it can do for people from backgrounds like mine. I know that in my bones...
sd: "You write about teaching students of coloUr: ..." there’s an urgency from people who’ve been shut out of this system for their lives and cultures to be included. Don’t you think that’s legitimate?"
RM: "Legitimate, but not instead of. What’s happened in general is that people have said: Pick one or the other.... restricting access to this cultural, social, philosophical, ethical, and intellectual capital – has been to the detriment of the very people we want to empower. We have to read contemporary texts in addition to, not instead of."
sd: "... don’t you think .. to include texts from ancient Africa and Asia and the Mideast "?
RM: "They’re extraordinarily valuable. I dedicate a chapter of my book to Gandhi, who comes from a nonwestern tradition, although he’s also a deep student of Western tradition..."
sd: "When you say “Western tradition,” do you mean essentially dead-white-male European?"
RM: "The ancient Greeks certainly didn’t think of themselves as European; .. it as a Mediterranean tradition,– there’s a kind of cultural matrix there, of texts, wars, empire, trade – like one big conversation. It’s not monolithic; it’s very interconnected..."
sd: (snip) .."white culture has made friends with Gandhi’s nonviolence movement, as long as it stays nonviolent and nonthreatening."
RM: " It’s not that Gandhi and Martin Luther King aren’t radical thinkers; ...Aristotle has been used to legitimate slavery, but we shouldn’t therefore cede Aristotle to the racists... There’s a lot in Aristotle that’s extraordinarily valuable for undoing those structures of oppression..."
sd: "If Martin Luther King were alive today, how do you think he would upgrade his syllabus?"
RM: .. if King were alive today, he’d be teaching contemporary texts ..but I think he’d include what we’d call radical thinkers today, W.E.B. Du Bois, Franz Fanon, Michel Foucault. On a more literary note, I would expect Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Claudia Rankine…"
sd: "I still have problems with calling this education liberal. I’m not a liberal – how can I be having this conversation?"
RM: "That, you know, is a terrible self-fulfilling prophecy....teaching the great books has been left to conservatives, to the political right. I think that’s a huge strategic mistake. ...every conservative publication is writing positive reviews of my book. This makes me nervous…"
sd: "..how do we keep alive our learning and debate if we have jobs and kids, and .(Told) .we’re not capable of understanding great books in the first place?"
RM: .."engagement with our social reality – whether you listen to the news or debate with your coworkers or family the issues in the national and international consciousness – is enormously important. .. Use the spaces you have. Follow your interests... Movies very much occupy the same space books used to. Seeing movies or watching TV – fiction or documentaries – offers material to debate and analyze; that’s a liberal education. ..If you’re interested in Marx, pick up the Communist Manifesto and get three friends to read it with you over dinner once a month – just talk about it..."
.."One thing about liberal education is that it takes place in a little bubble that’s called leisure, ... – because it cultivates an aspect of your humanity that doesn’t have a utilitarian function...Of course, part of our problem is that our economy and social structure condemn many people to very little, often none at all, of that space. But that’s where liberal education happens. It’s a space not in the service of anything else....!"
(Note. Roosevelt Montás, Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation)
UNsub> considering the DIRTY stinking mess of a SWAMP "civilization" has mADE since thousands of years; the best thing to to do for a child is DE-EDUCATE, like you would DEtox an alchoholic!!! :p DO NOT SEND the poor kid to school (ChRiS) ;)
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(educate pic?)
APRIL 6, 2022
DEAN BAKER >(NAmeriCANT) Many of us have highlighted both the strong pace of job growth and the drop in unemployment in March. This is great news. We are now looking at a laboUr market that is as strong as at any point in the last fifty years.../
This should be cause for celebration, but all the Republicans have said they don’t give a damn about people getting jobs, the issue is inflation. And, most media commentators seem to agree. Hey, what difference does it make if someone can find a job, what about the price of gas?
UNsub> hmmmmmmm, well, we are against the OIL reptiles too, BUT should YOU "celebrate" that 99.99% of "workers" are simply making the billionaires/trillionaire few richer and feeding the WAR biz/big pharma / industrial/traffic DESTRUCTION????
",,, If the profit share is increasing, then wages clearly are not driving higher prices... productivity growth has actually sped up over the last three years, ....In the 1970s, productivity growth slowed to just over 1.0 percent annually after rising at a 2.5 percent annual rate in the prior quarter century. Workers had long become accustomed to substantial real wage gains year by year. That was no longer possible in the 1970s, with productivity growth slowing to a crawl.
the shift to profits in the pandemic and the uptick in productivity growth as two important differences between the current situation and the 1970s. (Dean Baker is the senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC. ..!!!!!) ------------------------------------------
UNsub>as USAcorp continues LEADING "democracies" TOP of the LEAGUE in violation of HUMAN RIGHTS, (also IN USAcorp) ;
JASON REED > ...the right to a fair trial and the presumption of innocence – or so it should be. So why do we routinely incarcerate people for months or years before their trial has even begun?..... a judge sets cash bail for someone accused of committing a crime but they cannot afford to pay, they have no choice but to wait behind bars until their rial date. On any given day, an estimated 445,000 people are held pretrial in jails across (USAcorp)
..– all of them presumed innocent, but all of them incarcerated. They represent a whopping 67% of the entire jail population....keeping people in jail who have not been found guilty of any crime. ..., researchers found that any time spent in detention pretrial – even if only a short stretch – is bad for the public...!
UNsub> ??? and YOU NEED "RESEARCHERS" TO GET THIS???????? HA HHA HA ..
... " putting defendants behind bars before they have been tried did not inspire faith in the justice system, the right to a speedy trial. ... reasonable bail ... the protection of liberty and property. By relying on cash bail and putting people behind bars because of their inability to pay up, we contravene their most basic rights." ..
UNsub> NO sh&te Sherlock!!?
... "Reforming the nation’s pretrial system is not about letting people with histories of violence go free. ... including the use of pre-trial detention when deemed appropriate..."
UNsub? "deemed appropriate" ..by whom? ..THE basic is that NO one "presumed innocent" should wait for trial ; NO one!!!
..."Jails overcrowded with defendants who pose little to no risk, who haven’t even been convicted of the crime they are being held for, and who are being kept away from their families, jobs, and communities, is the avoidable result of a system that doesn’t allow judges to find an appropriate balance between individual liberty and public safety on a case-by-case basis....
UNsub> and at the ROOT of all the world's problems is that the WRONG people decide, Judges come from a source who usually withOUT empathy... that how they GET jobs, as lawyers CONVICTING any "suspects" ...GET IT???
(Jason Reed is the PR Manager at Young Voices and a policy analyst and political commentator for a wide range of outlets...
UNsub>and in NEED of the (D)education of Roosevelt Montás (see UP!)
_______________________________
with the MEMORial 33 YEARS after the murder of 97 of my brothers & sisters by english police (dictated to by the fascistory THATCHER govt)
I was NOT there, by chance I was away, ABROAD, travelling for my enterprise, and the pain of NOT being able to be there, with a chance to help my REd mates save our SUPPORTERS , whilst, stadium crew, officials, officers etc not only stood by but OBSTRUCTED rescue by OUR lads,,, is almost as heavy as the loss of 97 of our REd SUPPORTING family.. we were then tainted by the english scumedia & other ignorant sheeple...during the following 20 odd years, I was also TAINTED by the accusations of "drunken HOOLIGANS" fed by mainSCREAMedia & police deliberate FALSE reposrts of the 15th April 1989.. had a dramatic affect (together with Heysell tragedy a few years before) on my football supporting LIFE..!
AND..on the 15th APRIL 1995, i (by no more than a day or so) prematurely closed a 7 year "international Multi-MEDIA initiative ..connecting 300 enterprise partners, in 45 regions with 500 online services as I went into COMA on THAT day (6 years after Hillsbough) and awoke in a belgian cinic's internsive care station several days after *21/22. april 1995... which completely changed my life..
\Footie 2 other
ChRiS> as predicted a point each so PLEASE REdS win the midweek v Benfica & FACUP semi v these skyblue mank rent boys!
pre M-shittie v REdS TEAM i the English PLASTIC MONEY league title race
mirror.co.uk/sport/football/news/liverpool-players-arrive-man-city-26676922
...man sh&tty fraud klub 2 LIVERPOOL 2 DIoGO, MANe
reactions;
www.theguardian.com/football/2022/apr/10/manchester-city-liverpool-premier-league-match-report
liverpoolfc.com/news/manchester-city-2-2-liverpool-jurgen-klopps-reaction
starters: Liverpool: A B; Matip, VVD, Trent; Fab, Hendo (Naby 78′), Thiago; Mo, Mane (Firmino 84′), Jota (Diaz 70′)
(N.B our OX not even on the bench!! in JKs bad books???) whilst sending Best wishes SADIO MANe; birthday BOY scorer!!
proposed v Benfica Kells
Joe KonG
Milly Hendo Kostas
Naby
Ox Curtis
Bobby
Diaz
(and for the semi (see my previous proposals for the league conflict!) :p
ADD... " Forty miles a day, every day, for three straight months. Why does Richard Donovan choose this life? "
for lazie sheeple ; irishexaminer.com/sport/othersport/arid-40847828.html ...
and RAfa (Benitez) birthday saturday!!
have a great time, mate!
MORE last words//..
RICHARD FALK> " the world is highly imperfect when it comes to accountability for international crimes. When the International Criminal Court (ICC) 2020 found it had authority to investigate alleged crimes committed by Israel in Occupied Palestine, the decision was called ‘pure anti-Semitism’ by the Israeli prime minister...."
"Similarly, when authorization was given by the ICC to investigate crimes by the (USAcorp) in Afghanistan, the decision was denounced as void because the U.S. was not a party to the Rome Statute governing the operations of the ICC. The Trump presidency went so far as to impose personal sanctions on the ICC prosecutor,...
" there is ‘victors’ justice’ imposing accountability on the defeated leadership but complete non-accountability for the crimes of the geopolitical winners. Beyond this, the UN Charter was drafted in ways that gave a constitutional status to geopolitical impunity by granting the victors in World War II an unconditional right of veto, and this of course includes Russia" ...
"the debate about embarking upon a regime-changing attack on and occupation of Iraq in 2003) rather than an obligation. When it comes to accountability double standards are still operative, illustrated by the execution of Saddam Hussein for war crimes after a war of aggression against Iraq. "..." ‘why Ukraine’? There have been other horrific events in the period since the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s, including Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Myanmar, and Palestine yet no comparable clamor for criminal justice and punitive action."
:" Western architects of this geopolitical war with Russia seem to assess gains and losses through a militarist optic, being grossly insensitive to the disastrous economic spill over effects, " ..the overall stability of the world economy is also at great risk unless the U.S. and China realize that their cooperation is the only check on a deep, costly, and prolonged world economic collapse." "the game of Armageddon Roulette being played without taking species wellbeing and survival into account, continuing its recklessness that began the day the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima more than 75 years ago."
UNsub>the gloal sheeple do Not realise OR do Not care that the are pawNs of the FUbAR "game of THORNS " USAcorp begaN!
Wartime Dispatches
STEPHEN F. EISENMAN> " a child, on October 22, 1962, but I can remember the dread silence in our Forest Hills apartment the evening we watched the president announce his plan to stop, by force, if necessary, the installation of missile launchers in Cuba. "Apart from the death of the war criminal, Madeleine Albright, the NYTimes carried no good news this morning. Biden met in Brussels with NATO leaders to coordinate responses to supposed .. threats posed by Russia.” The Times has abandoned all pretence to objectivity in its war reporting..."
" Dad was injured during a V2 rocket attack on Selfridges on the night of Dec. 6, 1944. The rocket destroyed the Red Lion Pub on Duke Street, and badly damaged part of the famous department store across the road on Oxford Street.... "
UNsub>"Doodlebugs" as Mum"s WW2 generation called them, were of the REAL WAR of mass destruction!..
" , wages are depressed, infrastructure is failing, and healthcare is underfunded. The political classes are a disaster: Corruption is rife in Tory-run Downing Street, Whitehall and Parliament, and the putative opposition, the Labor Party, is shedding its young, energetic cadres in favor of New Labo r stalwarts "... also exposed a profound, national shame: The selling of citizenship, aristocratic titles, sports teams, mansions, yachts, and fine art to Russian oligarchs..."
" the Tate had severed relations with two significant donors, Viktor Vekselberg and Petr Aven...." Also in on that deal was Leonid Blavatnik — a close associate of Vekselberg — whose name adorns the new wing of Tate Modern. Born in Ukraine, he has so far evaded sanctions."..fVan Gogh’s self-portraits at the Courtauld Gallery, Two American oligarchs, Yan Ho and Kenneth Griffin...support ..remarkable, is how totally opposed was Van Gogh’s moral system to that of the pair of hedge fund tycoons..."
A MuST READ; ???? "Plots and Counter-Plots: Western Skulduggery to Realign Central Asia
BY EVE ; counterpunch.org/2022/04/08/plots-and-counter-plots-western-skulduggery-to-realign-central-asia/ )
" Someone sure wants regime change in Kazakhstan and Pakistan. Someone sure aims to realign Central Asia from its current Russia-China tilt to a more western-friendly posture. And that someone may be willing to use violence and lawfare to get such results. "
UNsub>(USAcorp)!
" Imran Khan, who is not very friendly with Washington, faced a no-confidence vote and to get out of it precipitated a constitutional crisis and that Kazakhstan foiled a foreign agent’s attempt to kill President Kassym Jomart Tokayev, "
..Khan told a huge crowd on March 27 that “foreign powers are engineering a regime change in Pakistan.” He claimed to have proof in a letter and, based on that, later the Foreign Office reprimanded the U.S. ambassador. "
" han claims that U.S. assistant secretary of state Donal Lu was involved in the “foreign conspiracy to topple his government…the U.S. dismissed it,” ... obstinate resistance to U.S. bullying tactics... " Pakistanis have long considered the killing of leaders such as Liaquat Ali Khan, Z. A. Bhutto, Zia al Haq and Benazir Bhutto to be the work of U.S. intelligence.” : ??? intelligence...???) ..
"history of violent western political tampering in their nation is front and center in their minds, "... "the folly of American meddling in other nation’s internal affairs..." ; &)..in Kazakhstan, the government claimed it foiled a plot to assassinate president Tokayev. .." speculated back then that the failed coup was Washington’s handiwork,..."
" Khan is probably the bigger thorn in the empire’s side. He famously snapped at the EU, “Are we your slaves?” when told that Pakistan needed to get on board and vote against Russia at the UN in early March... "which many of those non-western nations regard as a U.S. proxy war. .." IK; “we have friendships with the United States, Russia, China and Europe. We are not in any camp.” ..
&
MICHAEL HUDSON, C-P> (Dollar Devours the Euro)..escalation of the New Cold War was planned over a year ago, with serious strategy associated with (NAmericaNT)’s plan to block Nord Stream 2 as part of its aim of blocking Western Europe (“NATO”) from seeking prosperity by mutual trade and investment with China and Russia."
"China was seen as the major enemy. ..posing the Ultimate Terror: prosperity through socialism" vs. neoliberal finance capitalism... threatens to be a long-drawn-out World War III. .."Russia seen as presenting greatest opportunity to begin isolating, ..from China and from the NATO Eurozone..."
UNsub> except that China was never "socialist" (few in the MEd1A, especially in USAcorp INFECTED regimes understand the true Socialism!...and why keep calling some involved "neoliberal" ? ..when they are FAR FROM LIBERAL!.."
"New Cold War could have been launched in the Near East – over grabbing of Iraqi oil fields, or against Iran or in East Africa. But Ukraine has been subjected to a (USCorp)-backed civil war since the 2014 Maidan coup, Donetsk and Luhansk regions were shelled with increasing intensity, (& now?).." a blitzkrieg Western Ukrainian attack organized by (USCorp) advisors and armed by NATO."
.." excuse to start imposing (USAcorp)-designed sanctions program that we are seeing unfolding today. Western Europe has dutifully gone along whole-hog. Instead of buying Russian gas, oil and food grains, it will buy these from the United States, along with sharply increased arms imports..." The prospective fall in the Euro/Dollar exchange rate; "
"..European trade and investment prior , promised a rising mutual prosperity between Germany, France and other NATO countries vis-à-vis Russia and China. ..This bilateral trade and investment is now stopped – and will remain stopped for many, many years, given NATO’s confiscation of Russia’s foreign reserves kept in euros and British sterling, and the Europe’s Russophobia being fanned by U.S. propaganda media...."
... "energy shortage will sharply raise the world price of gas and oil. NATO countries also will step up their purchases of arms from the U.S. military-industrial complex. T... food prices also will rise as a result of the desperate grain shortfalls resulting from a cessation of imports from Russia and Ukraine on the one hand, and the shortage of ammonia fertilizer made from gas." (..these trade dynamics will strengthen the dollar vis-à-vis the euro. "
".. Since the eurozone has been created with monetary handcuffs limiting its ability to create money to spend into the economy beyond the limit of 3 percent of GDP, why not simply throw in the financial towel and adopt the U.S. dollar, like Ecuador, Somalia and the Turks and Caicos Islands?.."
UNsub> how about ..the USD is worth zero...as USAcorp has a larger debt than a dozen of rivals combined??
" The eurozone will turn into an economic dead zone..."this is Dollar Hegemony on steroids – " Apart from the U.S. economic conquest of Europe, its strategists are seeking to lock in African, South American and Asian countries along similar lines to what has been planned for Europe..." sharp rise in energy and food prices will hit food-deficit and oil-deficit economies hard "
" At least, this is the plan. I would not be surprised to see some African country become the “next Ukraine,” with (UScorp) proxy troops .."world economy is being enflamed, and the United States has prepared for a military response and weaponization of its own oil and agricultural export trade, arms trade and demands for countries to choose which side of the New Iron Curtain they wish to join."
.."Greek laboUr unions already are demonstrating against the sanctions.. in Hungary, Orban has just won election on what is basically an anti-EU and anti-U.S. worldview, starting with paying for Russian gas in roubles. ..
What is in this for the Global South countries being squeezed – not merely as “collateral damage” to the deep shortages and soaring prices for energy and food, but as the very objective of U.S. strategy as it inaugurates the great splitting of the world economy in two? India has already told U.S. diplomats that its economy is naturally connected with those of Russia and China.
" From the (USAcorp) vantage point, all that needs to be answered is, “What’s in it for the local politicians and client oligarchies that we reward for delivering their countries?”..makes the looming World War III a veritable war of economic systems. What side will countries choose: their own economic interest and social cohesion, or (USAcorp) meddling along the lines of the $5 billion Ass-t Secretary of State Nuland bragged of having invested in Ukraine’s neo-Nazi parties eight years ago to initiate the fighting erupting in today’s war?..
_______________________
REF Abortion Rights: Beyond the Killing Confines of Liberal Mis-leadership BY PAUL STREET
UNsub>as we believe such aspects should be considered by each individual, case by case, in a world with an absence of justice, sanity NOR GOOD management of ANYthing & ANY issue... read the whole article on C-P ..make your own minds up! (ChRiS)?
PAUL STREET> Fear of the Mob: The Liberal Mis-leadership Class;
United States “democracy” is plagued by the presence of an elitist liberal mis-leadership class that fears the “mob” and “rabble” – everyday citizens and the working-class majority – more than it worries about right-wing (now neofascist) rule. This liberal “elite” is militantly opposed to popular movements. It rejects popular demands and indeed sees “demand” as a bad word. It maintains a dogged faith in existing bourgeois-“democratic” and constitutional rules, methods, institutions, and procedures no matter how completely those rules, methods, institutions, and procedures have been subverted and captured by the right. It is doctrinally committed to lobbying and litigation, work by professionals, which they see as the only safe and effective way to “get things done.” It works to tamp down rank-and-file energies and channel popular anger into the nation’s regular candidate-centered major party electoral extravaganzas. The liberal mis-leadership class, loaded with Ivy League graduates, will let the nation go fascist before it will mobilize masses by the millions to fight for human rights, equality, and decency.
UNsub> WE have a different understanding of the word LIBERAL, it is clear...
PAUL STREET> The Right-Wing Campaign to Kill Roe Hits the Jackpot...
"....right to control their reproductive lives....( ..// as guaranteed under the Supreme Court’s landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision...) " "Who will Alexis McGill-Johnson and her elitist ilk be after Roe falls and they made no effort to mobilize millions to save it? Complicit enablers and appeasers, that’s who..."“Who are we going to be, “when we are unleashed to actually have a conversation around where true equality fits and sits in the Constitution and how is that going to galvanize us to fight?”
"Being Part of the Street Rage to Channel it Into Votes for Democrats...And then there’s this head-shaking formulation from Alexis-Johnson – a depressing epitome" ..(PSTREET> Wow. Sunsara Taylor has the perfect response:
"So-called leaders like this are so enslaved to the system that they are willing to facilitate the enslavement "
...(SNIPPED)
.. "The violent subjugation of half of society must not be accommodated, excused, downplayed, or surrendered to. IT MUST BE STOPPED!..."
"Endnote ; "Let’s briefly review the killing confines of the US Constitution – a widely ignored but critical topic. (Many of my previous writings on this topic are embedded in the current essay’s hyperlinks). Created by and for slaveowners, merchant capitalists and other propertied and propertarian, aristo-republican elites for whom democracy and equality were the ultimate nightmares much to be prevented, the US Constitutional set-up encodes Minority Rule for the nation’s most reactionary regions, interests, and voters through: the presidential Electoral College, which overrepresents the nation’s most reactionary regions and voters while reducing presidential contests to a handful of contested states and rendering millions of popular votes superfluous; the granting of two representatives to the nation’s powerful upper legislative chamber to every state regardless of population size; a Supreme Court with vast powers of judicial review, appointed and approved by the undemocratically selected US president and Senate; strictly time-staggered elections that provide citizens painfully brief and narrow windows for democratic “input” through the marking of ballots for major party candidates selected in advance by wealthy and powerful interests; the granting of remarkable autonomy to the nation’s fifty state jurisdictions, leaving citizens stuck in reactionary states subject to politics and policies that do not reflect the views of the national majority. Along the way, corporate and financial interests undermine democratic politics and policy in numerous ways, including their control of jobs and investment and their operation of a commercial corporate media that functions as a potent agent of capitalist-imperialist ideology while spread divisive, individualist, violent, dehumanizing, infantilizing, and fatalistic, power-serving thoughts and feelings." (Paul Street’s new book is The Hollow Resistance: Obama, Trump, and Politics of Appeasement.)
UNsub> AND REbEL in co-op with anti WAR-Biz, big pharma (legalized drug addiction) & industrial/traffic/oil POllution?
respect for LIFE must be a RESPONSIBILTY for ONE & ALL!
................
extra from Jeffrey
From Never-Neverland
"Dreams of war, dreams of liars, dreams of dragons’ fire
And of things that will bite, yeah
Sleep with one eye open
Gripping your pillow tight
Exit light
Enter night
Take my hand
We’re off to never-never land
– Enter Sandman, Metallica"
"urgent dispatches on the unraveling of the earth’s climate system. Each one direr than the last. Each warning met with shrugs and political indifference. Nothing less than a revolution in the way the world’s economy functions and the fuels that drive it.... What will be done? Almost nothing. ... from Kyoto to Paris would not have been able to keep the climate below threshold, even had they been fully-implemented.../ Far from it."
"Sixty percent of all historical emissions were produced in the lifetime of the average "NAmericanT", who is 38. Almost 90 percent were produced since the birth of Joe Biden in November 1942...."
UNsub> and we thought his birthday was April 1!!!!
.." IPCC report essentially throws in the towel on the possibility of radically reducing carbon emissions. (At this point it’s unlikely that their increase can even be restrained.)...How many “now or never” reports on the unfolding climate catastrophe do we need to get before realizing we are living in Never-Neverland? Oh, never mind….." +++ “They are lying.” You can’t get much blunter than that from the Secretary General of the UN…..."
+ "Extreme rainfall events in the aftermath of Western wildfires will more than double by the end of the 21st century, causing an increased risk of killer floods and landslides...+ Wind and solar generated 10% of global electricity for the first time in 2021, but needs to be 50% at least by 2030 to make any headway against climate change...EU’s much vaunted plan to reach net zero carbon emissions doesn’t account for how growing more crops for biomass energy will increase its land footprint, which increasing global deforestation and decreasing biodiversity..."
+ "A week after the Bush Administration launched its War on Terror, Bob Woodward asked Dick Cheney how long it would last. Cheney replied: “It may never end. At least, not in our lifetime.” The wet-dream of weapons contractors had materialized. ...Pentagon Budget in 2001 was $287 billion. Now it’s $773 billion and rising... "
+ "Not only did the US-led coalition demolish (and re-demolish) cities at the beginning (Baghdad, Fallujah, Nasiryah, Hillah, Karbala, Ramadi) & middle of the war (see: Basra, Baghdad, Fallujah, Ramadi again) but also as the occupation “ended”–as any survey of the ruins of Mosul will attest…"+ “America’s response to My Lai was worse than the massacre.” — Kendrick Oliver..." Wars breed atrocities. To end atrocities, you must first end war. Who is seeking to do this in Ukraine?
Georgi Gospodinov > (author of Time Shelter) ; "Putin is portraying himself very clearly as embodying that line we know from Gogol’s Taras Bulba: “I gave you life, I will take it.” Russia will continue to bleed, literally and symbolically, for decades after this war.."
UNsub> so will USAcorp's "NAmeriCANT" sheeple..karma will see to it, for WAR biz, Big pharma drugs, & global pollution!
Jeff> (cont..) "Let me guess: Manzanar? US detention camps along the Rio Grande?" 1 of designers of gulag, Alfred Milner, was knighted for his services to the empire ..." lethal operation of concentration camps in S.Africa during the Boer War, pushed to have them deployed ..to suppress the Irish revolutionaries. In 1920, Ballykinlar Internment Camp was set up & filled with more than 2000 Irish..."just about every country wanted its own version, from Kolyma to Tule Lake to Dachau."
+ Who will tell her? + Let’s face it, many of the people running our government couldn’t pass a 6th grade social studies exam…...+ Liberals out-Trumping Trump…"
UNsub> PLEASE stop calling fascists & idiot sheeple.."LIBERAL"
" Russia’s greatest composer, Pyotr Tchaikovsky: performances of his music have been canceled in the West and the Russian army just destroyed his house in Ukraine....(?) 3 months: the average life expectancy of a fighter pilot during World War One.+ In 1918, B. Russell sentenced to prison..writing an article.." warned tUS troops arriving in England and France might be used as strikebreakers “an occupation to which the American Army is accustomed when at home.” In sentencing the philosopher, the judge said that this unquestionably true statement constituted “a very despicable offense.”
“A bayonet is a weapon with a worker at both ends.” a slogan from WW I, attributed to Lenin, which .. originated with Scottish socialist John Maclean, like B.Russell was jailed for his antiwar writings under the “Defense of the Realm Act.”
+ Total Military Deaths in WW I 10.5 million, Total Civilian Deaths in WW I 13.5 million(Not including Russian Civil War, which killed another 7-10 million people) (Source: To End All Wars, Adam Hochschild)
" ..In a century of mad generals (Patton, Budyonny, Iwane Matsui, Ludendorff, Franco, LeMay, Rios-Montt), perhaps none was more deranged than Douglas Haig, the commander of British forces on the Western Front during WW1 ...overseeing the deaths of nearly 900,000 British and Commonwealth military personnel .. hadn’t lost his conviction that light cavalry on horseback was the central component of ground warfare,..before he died pronounced an energetic young Italian named Benito Mussolini as just the kind of fresh, strong-willed leader post-war Europe, Britain included, needed: ...(etc!)
UNsub> obvious loony, but are the modern versions of Haig better? they do the same to civilians as Haig did to soldiers!
J>" F. Scott Fitzgerald in a letter to his daughter Scottie: “Read the terrible chapter in Das Kapital on the working day, and see if you ever feel quite the same.”..Amnesty International & Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic issued a report that finds Israel’s treatment of Palestinians on the West Bank amounts to the crime of apartheid...
(not MURDER??)+ Disturbing reports from Mali in what Human Rights Watch is calling “the worst single atrocity reported in Mali’s decade-long armed conflict targeting Islamist groups.”
"Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz's.. company just fired a worker after the NLRB had issued a complaint against the company for retaliating against her for union activity by suspending and disciplining her...!.. Words banned on Amazon’s new worker chat app: “union,” “grievance,” “vaccine,” “living wage,” “slave labor,” “harassment”, “restrooms” and “this is dumb.” Yes, it is...+ $631 million: the value of stocks traded by Members of Congress in the past year alone..."(in) year 2000, 41 of the world’s 100 most valuable companies were based in Europe. That figure has shrunk to only 15 today."
"John Gray ; ..a report by a former secret service officer cited by one of Bukharin’s biographers, he was given a chair so he could sit and watch as 17 of his co-defendants were shot, one by one, until his time came... fear and horror were multiplied many times over...no doubt that the proceedings were scripted by Stalin.”
+ "on Stalin’s reading material: memoirs of the ‘Iron Chancellor,’ Otto von Bismarck... warned against Germany becoming involved in a two-front war against Russia and Western powers. In the margin he wrote, ‘Don’t frighten Hitler.’.. (&) highlighted Edward Gibbon’s statement that the Romans believed troops should fear their own officers more than the enemy.”
.." when he was summoned before the tribunal witch hunters…..HUAC Investigator: “What is your personal opinion of the Communist Party, Mr Disney, as to whether or not it is a political party?”.. Disney: “I don’t think it’s a political party. I believe it is an un-American thing. ...all of the good, free causes in this country, .."
" + Oscar Wilde: “The story of mankind began in a garden and ended in revelations.”+ Rep. Greene has her own definition: “We came from Adam’s Rib. We are the weaker sex. We are our husband’s wife.” Speak for yourself, Marjorie…..+ The far right’s obsession with pedophilia is itself a sublimated form of pedophilia. They decry in others the thing they most want to do themselves..."
" attend a “social gathering” of the white nationalist group American Populist Union on April 20th…Hitler’s birthday...
(After a story about this appeared in the Arizona Mirror, Gosar’s office quickly announced that the congressman would be doing a “farm tour” on that day and didn’t know how he got on the APU bill..)"
"(USAcorp) federal prison population has increased by 3,000 people since Biden took office. In 1980, before the bipartisan drug war Biden helped launch, the federal prison population was 25,000. Now it’s more than 150,000 and rising again...
+ recent Lancet study found that official death records underreport by more than 50% how many people are killed by police."
.."cops who shot Amir Locke during a no-knock raid will not be charged. (USAcorp) Police can break into your apartment while you’re sleeping and within a few seconds of entering shoot you while you’re on the couch without any legal consequences…even when you’re not the person they were looking for. But we are not, I repeat NOT, living in a police state."
" Biden EPA announced this week it would maintain a Trump-era position of not regulating toxic perchlorate (aka, rocket fuel) in drinking water...(?) //..... high-rise buildings which are responsible for an estimated BILLION bird deaths a year in the US alone...
" ..“A recent model found that 99.8 percent of plastic that entered the ocean since 1950 had sunk below the first few hundred feet of the ocean. Scientists have found 10,000 times more microplastics on the seafloor than in contaminated surface waters.”
" Biden called Rupert Murdoch the “most dangerous man in the world.” I bet that made Rupert’s day.+ According to the World Health Organization, 99% of the world’s population now breathes air that exceeds safe limits for air pollution, including fine particulates that can lodge deep into the lungs.....!!!! " !!!!!!
UNsub> ACHTUNG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
".. Monty Python re-reuns now come with a warning label that is itself worthy of a Monty Python skit: “This program reflects the standards, language and attitudes of its time. Some viewers may find this content offensive. ( ha ha ha ha ha aha aha aha ha ha !) ...+ Hilarious Amazon Kindle version cover for All Quiet on the Western Front, marketing Remarque’s WW I novel as if it were a Louis L’Amour western…
The State Exacts the Utmost Degree of Obedience;
“This war, in which we had refused to believe broke out, and it brought disillusionment. not only is it more bloody and more destructive than any war of other days, because of the enormously increased perfection of weapons of attack and defence; it is at least as cruel…as implacable as any that has preceded it. It disregards all the restrictions known as International Law…It tramples in blind fury on all that comes in its way, as though there were to be no future and no peace among man after it is over. It cuts all the common bonds between the contending peoples, and threatens to leave a legacy of embitterment that will make any renewal of those bonds impossible for a long time to come… A belligerent state permits itself every such misdeed, every such act of violence as would disgrace the individual. It makes use against the enemy..of deliberate lying and deception…The state exacts the utmost degree of obedience and sacrifice from its citizens, but at the same time it treats them like children by an excess of secrecy and censorship upon news and expressions of opinion which leaves the spirits of those whose intellects it thus suppresses defenceless against every unfavourable turn of events and every sinister rumour.”
– Sigmund Freud on World War One, (1915)
UNsub> thank to all contributors, this is a NON-NOT ever for profit initiative of ChRiS SMITH.. appreciative of anyone with soul & opinion (rare indeed) whether agreed or contested;
I am ... Nikole Tesle ..without the tech,, Ghandi, without a Religion,, Lennon, without the tune, a pirate without a ship
Mandela, without the nation, Martin L-K, without the colour, "the Kop" ..without the (modern) fans...
Robin Hood, without arraws, Geronimo, without a horse, Shanks, without a club, I am a leader without an army, A general without a war, a Manager without an office...🙂 an advocate, without a law, A Rebel without his flag, and ...A father, without a child, a husband without a wife..
I am ME, without you!.....Alone and all one...without limits ....
a complete REbEL with many causes & reasons to fight!
______________________________
excuse ME, i for got to add/edit;)
APRIL 8, 2022
The Metaphysics of Memory
BY TONY MCKENNA
It takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.
– James Baldwin
There are certain modern myths which gain credence and currency because they are rendered in a ‘scientific’ tone and language. One such myth is that of the photographic memory. As the name suggests, this refers to a person who can recall a past scene with all the accuracy of a photographic image. Such memories neither fade nor fail and their crystalline clarity means they can be examined at will in the same way one might upload a digital image that has lost none of is clarity or lustre even if viewed many years after.
The idea of the human mind as operating akin to a machine, as a recording device with a given amount of storage space, is a belief which only comes into its own in the 19th century, at the time of the industrial revolution when those ‘dark satanic mills’ were springing up in and around the great cities; such a doctrine takes shape in a society where technological production has been ratcheted up to its zenith, its product effectively measured and quantified according to the relentless rhythms of the conveyer belt, and where human labour itself has been inexorably fused with the pistons and levers of the factory monolith.
Perhaps the first human ‘thinking machine’ was Conan Doyle’s fictional detective Sherlock Holmes who appeared in the 1880s, a product of the Victorian epoch. Conan Doyle was at pains to emphasise not only the brilliance of his seminal detective but also the way in which Holmes’ mind had a given quantitative capacity which could be tweaked and refined in much the way one might refine a sophisticated piece of machinery in order to yield its optimum capacity. Doyle has his eponymous detective describe how:
a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort … the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order … there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.[1]
In our own period, in the epoch of the microchip and the smart phone – when one can tap a small, limpid screen and within seconds access the vast stock of the human knowledge accrued over millennia – the ‘Holmes’ archetype has become ever more technologized. In the recent twenty-first century incarnation where the genius detective is played by Benedict Cumberbatch, Holmes is revealed to have a photographic memory; specifically he possesses a ‘mind palace’ which he can retreat into in order to recall the smallest of facts or details buried in the subconscious of his awesome mental landscape. We see him navigate this realm through a series of fantasy emblems which very much resemble the digital icons one might see on the screen of a smart phone or computer.
The idea of the photographic memory, therefore, is linked to a broader notion of genius in an age in which human production and human potential is understood in accordance with forms of mechanical productivity which can be strictly quantified according to specific measurements whether in terms of physical output or monetary value. Indeed, the development of computers has led to a situation where ‘memory’ itself is conceived in purely quantitative terms; i.e. the device is described as having a ‘memory’ which can be measured by way of gigabytes.
The ‘photographic’ memory is in some sense the reflection of this; the genius of the most brilliant of individuals is more and more conceived in machine-like terms (camera/computer); i.e. is understood according to a tangible remit to be expressed in purely quantified and mechanical terms – the speed at which one recalls, for instance, or the amount of information which can be recalled.
To borrow from the beloved British sitcom Blackadder, however, there is one little flaw in this bold and creative conception. It happens to be bollocks. For a start, there has never been a proven case. The closest anyone has come to successfully claiming a photographic memory was in the case of a Harvard student, Elizabeth Stromeyer. She was tested by a scientist who placed before her left eye a collection of 10,000 dots, before showing her right eye another collection of 10,000 dots. According to the scientist in question, Elizabeth was able to form a three dimensional image of all the dots in all their positions from both pictures melded together. However, having run the experiment, the scientist in question (Charles Stromeyer III) proceeded to marry his subject, and they both refused any further testing. His claims have been allowed to linger, therefore, but forever unsubstantiated.
Another claim to the power of the photographic memory was a historical one; that is to say, the Shas Pollaks, a set of Talmud scholars, were tested in the early part of the twentieth century and were able to give the precise locations of certain words on the pages of twelve books. But as the journalist Joshua Foer writes for Slate Magazine, this was not so much to do to with ‘photographic memory’ bur rather ‘heroic perseverance’, for if the ‘average person decided he was going to dedicate his entire life to memorizing 5,422 pages of text, he’d probably also be pretty good at it. It’s an impressive feat of single-mindedness, not of memory.’[2]
There are, of course, people who have extremely good memories, such as the memory savant Jill Price who was able to recall, decades later, the precise date the TV series ‘Mash’ went off air and was even able to give an account of the weather that same day. But while Price’s memory is undoubtedly prestigious, a more in depth test – in which she was asked to recall a long list of words verbatim – showed her missing several key words. In other words, her memory didn’t ‘offer instantaneous recall of discrete, fine-toothed details.’[3] It wasn’t ‘photographic’.
My suspicion is that a good deal of these types of people fetishize notions of intelligence and memory, partly because they tend to come from a social strata which is always seeking to justify its own power and prestige in terms of an innate and elite set of intellectual gifts with which the individual mind has been blessed – rather than the set of privileges and advantages that same ruling elite inherits by virtue of its social and economic position.
In this way, much like those parents who ensure that their children have private tuition which focusses on learning techniques to attain high scores in IQ tests, so too are some people driven to develop ‘photographic’ memories in and through intense acts of training and discipline – because the ‘high IQ’ or the ‘photographic memory’ denotes the means by which their social superiority can be enshrined in terms of clinical ‘scientific’ fact.
The endeavour to train themselves in accordance with an archetype of ‘genius’ corresponds to an epoch in human history where everything has been rationalised and quantified, measured according to the metrics of dollar and cent, and where accumulation is the buzzword. Just as one’s fortune can be objectively gauged by the millions upon millions sequestered in bank accounts, so too can one’s intelligence be quantified by the vast levels of IQ points one has stored in one’s brain, so too can one’s memory be described in the quantified and delineated terms of a mechanical device, a high-end camera with a vast and precise capacity to record every image its flash illuminates.
Of course, the photographic memory is just as much a fiction as the concept of IQ. But if it was possible for a human individual to possess a photographic memory; to be able to recall all the details of anything your mind had recorded – what would such a condition mean? Would it be wholly desirable?
From the point of view of passing exams, of recalling information in an instant without having to resort to Wikipedia, remembering people’s names at parties and never forgetting an anniversary, one would imagine it would be a pretty useful thing. In terms of being able to relieve the most perfectly happy moments of your life in glorious technicolour, and in real time, again the advantages are palpable.
But the same logic would also underwrite graphic disadvantages. If one could recall a car accident many years later in the same warping, scorched and graphic detail as the moment of the collision, the nightmares might never fade. Or what if one couldn’t avoid recalling, with sharp and real-time clarity, the expression on the face of a loved one lying in a hospital bed as they went through the last throes of an excruciating terminal cancer? Would the sharpness of all-consuming grief ever have the chance to meld into the softer and more gentle melancholy of remembrance?
The issue, however, is not simply about these more practical considerations – the benefits or damages wrought to the psyche. The more significant issue is the means by which memory operates at the most fundamental level. Our consciousness, in assimilating the details of the present moment, is always separating the wheat from the chaff; that is, it is always focusing on the important details – such as the words you are reading, while relegating to the background information about the colour of the page for example, or the type of font the text employs. The great horror writer Stephen King described those details which the mind is aware of but does not bring into conscious focus as belonging to the realm of the ‘subaudible’.
It is a neat expression which hints at a more profound truth; that is the process of creating thoughts, of learning, is a process of abstraction; i.e. the mind is constantly cleaving away unessential details in order to fix upon some essential characteristic; and that such discrimination is in the nature of memory itself. More often than not, memories are the process by which an essential thought or event from the past is excavated; in bringing it to light from the purview of the future, the memory itself is developed; some details assume a new and vital significance because they have been revealed in the context of new horizons, while other more insignificant details fade away in the passage of time.
In other words, a memory should not be conceived of as a single entity, a snapshot frozen in eternity; rather any single, specific memory forms its own mental chain; each time you recall it, it is changed and shaped organically – your mind brings new details to the fore while exiling others in accordance with your changing life experience. What you remember is no longer the thing in itself – the original memory – but rather the memory of the memory of the memory.
Any single memory, therefore, cannot be conceived of in terms of a photograph – because as an organic process rather than a static thing, its ability to shed certain details while deepening and ripening others, is what ultimately allows it to reach fruition in our minds. And, of course, our mental landscape is crisscrossed by these memory-forming chains – some of these are excluded as time passes, some of these are forgotten – so that those memories most pertinent to who we are and the experiences which have shaped us most fundamentally are pulled to the fore and better retained.
Or to say the same, remembering simultaneously necessitates a process of forgetting. A camera can record an image but it cannot remember it, because the images the camera records are fixed, perfect, but mutually exclusive photographs, which stand in discrete and absolute indifference to one another; whereas an important function of the human memory lies in its ‘imperfection’ – i.e. the way in which ‘recall’ transforms and distorts the original memory, melds it with others, and in the process the more inessential elements perish while more fundamental ones are preserved.
But it is not just individuals who remember and who forget. Sometimes it is epochs themselves. For what else is a dark age, apart from a lapse, a forgoing of memory? A period of time in which generations of people lose the ability to labour in certain specialised ways; forgotten are the talents and techniques of the artisan, the cobbler, the smith; the ability to smelt or to stich more complex linings and intricate seams is forgone – it fades into the past – and in the midst of such collective amnesia vast swathes of people abandon the cities hitherto great hubs of commercial activity, falling back, returning to the land once more, retreating into the bygone cycles of hoeing or simple ploughing which generations millennia before had first taken up.
And of all the skills, trades and techniques which grow dim and fade in such an epochal darkness, surely it is the loss of the capacity to write which presents the most grievous loss of all – for that involves, quite literally, the loss of memory; the loss of the ability to preserve and consecrate the events of the past so that they might once again bloom under the light and scrutiny of new eyes.
At around 1100 BC several civilizations on the European continent slipped into exactly this type of darkness. The Egyptians, the Hittites, the Mycenaeans to name a few. No one knows exactly why these civilizations, quivering on the edge of the precipice, finally slipped into the darkness. Some historians and anthropologists have posited a great cataclysmic event, flood or volcano – take your pick – while others posit the great migrations of ‘sea peoples’, barbarians from the south or from the east whose marauding hordes were too strong for the walls of civilization to withstand.
Still more (and in the current writer’s view this provides the definitive explanation) suggest that the great elites of these centuries old civilizations had grown bloated and decadent, that the bronze age economy was only capable of feeding an increasingly narrow section of society, that the possibilities of trade and commerce on the part of the vast majority became more and more negligible.
But whatever the case, generations of people did indeed forget. They forgot who they had once been, to the extent that when Hellenic peoples, centuries later, wandered through the abandoned cities of Mycenae and Tiryns, those travellers and nomads – passing underneath the shadows of the great ruins of the looming ancient buildings – were certain that those same structures were not the constructions of their own human ancestors but rather the work of supernatural beings known as cyclopes.
And yet, with forgetfulness comes the dim shadow of submerged memory.
At the turn of the millennium, when the Mycenaean world collapsed, as its buildings became beautiful mysteries and its written script became illegible to those sporadic peoples who wandered the world in its aftermath, nevertheless a new type of recollection was born. Writing was lost, but the oral tradition reasserted itself; stories of great warriors and their deeds – men who had long since faded into shadows – stepped out from the mists of time; huddled by the fire against a backdrop of night, the lyrical spells of the wandering minstrels drew villagers close as they sung their stories of the fleet-footed Achilles, the great King Agamemnon, the beautiful Helen and the wily Odysseus.
A past whose empirical historical record had been erased by forgetfulness was in another sense reborn; in the strange, fantastical and mysterious idiom of myth and legend, the evocation of an epoch whose faint and distant outlines were no longer perceived by historians only now to be glimpsed by poets.
Sometimes the act of forgetting stirs memories anew. Sometimes loss stimulates growth.
To return to the ancient world, one might alight upon the example of the dark lords of Hattusa, the brutal overseers of a city on a great hill which oversaw the militaristic Hittite empire, one which exerted a lethal territorial power and even succeeded in dealing mighty Egypt several defeats in prolonged and pitched battles. And yet, the tributes which the Hittite kings could command from their vast territories came at a cost. The resort to war and plunder as a fundamental means to nourish the civilizations life’s blood meant that the development of labour technology for use on the land – for genuinely productive measures – was increasingly stifled. More and more did a ruling elite develop which gorged itself on the type of luxuries which the spoils of war provided, but which showed less and less concern for the sort of innovation and economic development which would facilitate and raise the skills of farmers, artisans, scholars and even slaves. The society which developed in the aftermath was top-heavy; a massive, bloated and decadent aristocracy, alongside a weak and anaemic civil society which, increasingly deskilled and isolated, began to slip back into older and more primitive forms of producing, gradually forgetting the skills and techniques its civilization had accrued.
But one group that wasn’t subject to the same gentle amnesia in the same way was the barbarian populations on the periphery of the empire. If the civilisation itself was in the process of fading, the barbarians in the hinterlands were not only able to preserve some of the science and techniques which civilization had evolved, but also, on occasion, to uplift it. The barbarians had been drawn into the culture and technology of the Hittite civilization – through colonial occupation for sure – but also by having been drawn into the orbit of empire in their capacity as mercenary soldiers who were paid to fight for the Hittite king. As the great anthropologist Gordon Childes would write, ‘by such employment barbarians received a new lesson in civilization. They were apt to learn at least ‘civilized’ methods of warfare, urban processes of armament manufacturing.’[4]
The barbarians imbibed some of the craft and science which civilization yielded while simultaneously retaining a degree of separation, of independence, from the elite class of kings, princes, aristocrats and their minions who were tied into a royal bureaucracy whose parasitic wealth had put a breaker on its ability to innovate. The barbarians themselves, therefore, were in a position to forge developments and innovations which, hindered by the cloudy fug of decadence, the imperial elite were totally incapable of seeing through.
And so it was that the barbarians who lived in the region of Anatolia, on the edges of the Hittite centre of power, were the ones to carry through perhaps one of the most radical and fundamental innovations; the ability to smelt iron which would eventually yield a whole new epoch of human history.
But if losing touch with one’s own culture and civilization can provide the impetus to others to further develop those same elements, history also furnishes us with examples where the details of the past generations, having long since grown faint in the historical memory, are reworked and reimagined by those in the present for new purposes. In the 17th century John Locke would argue that memory is the key to personal identity, but one should add that is also serves as the key to the identity of whole nations.
And yet, here too, memory can prove to be a slippery and errant guide: what is it we choose to remember and how closely does that correspond to the past as it actually was? Every English schoolboy or schoolgirl knows of Richard the Lionheart, a key emblem of English nationalism, a symbol of the ‘courageous’ way in which the English crusaders shaped their identity and their freedoms in the context of battling the Muslim ‘hordes’ in the Holy Land.
And yet, though it was true that Richard came to rule over a region labelled ‘England’ it had very little in common with the nation which exists today. Firstly, its borders were a lot more permeable – the area was also constituted by much of what is modern day France and was always shifting in its parameters depending on conquest or the marriage of royal houses.
But perhaps more importantly, there was no single presiding language; the aristocracy tended to speak French, the clergy Latin, and the peasant majority old English. Richard himself was probably raised in the English isles but it would have been unlikely for him to have spoken more than a handful of words in Old or Middle English. His first, and likely only language, would have been an early form of French. He spent the best part of a decade warring abroad in the crusades, and perhaps he spent only around six months of that time back in the English isles.
He was, for this reason, more of a glorified feudal warlord, looking to expand what by and large resembled a personal fiefdom through plunder and land seizure, rather than resembling a leader of a nation with a set of independent interests and cohesive boundaries. As the late Victorian scholar William Stubbs would argue, ‘He was a bad king: his great exploits, his military skill, his splendour and extravagance, his poetical tastes, his adventurous spirit, do not serve to cloak his entire want of sympathy, or even consideration, for his people. He was no Englishman … His ambition was that of a mere warrior’.[5]
And yet, our historical memories have, in the main, managed to memorialize a different type of figure. The Richard I of Marochetti’s 1856 statue, the Lionheart on horseback, his sword raised aloft, positioned outside the Palace of Westminster like a sentinel, ready to ward off those historical enemies which might try to breach the seat of Britain’s power. In World War I, when the British captured Jerusalem, little patriotic postcards were issued which featured the image of Richard gazing down from the heavens above, with the caption: ‘At last, my dream has come true’. Here the imperial aims and ambitions of a modern nation state are distilled by marshalling a figure from the past and resurrecting him, making him speak to the present in a fantasy-patriotic guise. But such a fantasy figure had little in common with his genuine historical counterpart.
Perhaps such mythmaking occurs most of all in the gaps which forgetfulness creates. In the Roman Republic of 300 BC, one assumes the citizens had little memory of the first villagers who fashioned a few mud-daubed huts by the river Tiber thereby founding the eternal city many centuries before. So, into this void, they poured their own mythology; a story came to light of two brothers of aristocratic origin whom, having been abandoned at birth and raised by a she-wolf – they then came to found the city of Rome. But just as with the myths which surround modern nation building, the story of Romulus and Remus tells us more about the nature of the present than the past.
The idea of two warring brothers speaks most eloquently to the Roman Republic in the third century where the two orders were constantly at each other’s throats; where the plebeians and patricians were battling one another for control of the Senate and, over the centuries, this sometimes spilled over into murder – consider the ill-fated Gracchi brothers who both served as Tribunes of the plebs but were assassinated for endeavouring to effect land distributions to the poor. The fraternal ire which spills over into murderous violence at the apex of the Romulus and Remus myth is situated in the distant and forgotten past but it speaks most profoundly to the violent political dualism which had developed out of the conflicting classes of men in the Roman order during the present.
Sometimes, however, the issue is not about remembrance but about forgetting. In order to facilitate the history of the colonizer, the history of the colonized must be erased. One recalls the way in which the catholic conquistadores of the sixteenth and seventeen centuries looted the art of the indigenous peoples, melting sculptures down for their gold, burning manuscripts, raising temples to the ground in order to construct Christian churches out of the debris, building the edifice of a new culture upon the rubble of the old. Conquest in some way demanded the systematic erasure of that which had been conquered, the denial of the history of those who had been pressed into servitude or slavery, perhaps because – the hope went – if one erases another’s history, one erases the sense of who they are too, who they were. And if you can do that, the conquered themselves become a tabula rasa which you can rebrand according to the dictates of your own culture, you might hope to render them passive and supine through the fog of forgetfulness.
Or perhaps it is the nature of conquest and colonisation; faced with his or her victims, the colonizer is confronted by their own lack of humanity therein; to erase the victim’s identity, their history, their humanness – is this not simultaneously the endeavour to cleanse the stain of occupation? To occlude the brutal and parasitical nature of the occupiers if only from themselves? Sometimes this is stated in the most literal of ways.
To take a more contemporary example – the Zionist slogan which underwrote the occupation of Palestine and the creation of Israel at the cost of hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians was ‘a land without people for a people without land’. With a single phrase, the colonized – the indigenous Palestinians who had lived and worked the land for centuries and even millennia – are airbrushed out of history, their identities erased from the mind in much the same way their physical presence had been cleansed from the land.
But the erasure of selfhood is not always carried out by other persons or other groups.
Sometimes the loss of self is exacted by the remorseless rhythms of time and entropy working against physical matter. The gradually decaying material of age-old cells cossetted deep within the brain, blood vessels bleeding at the microscopic level, elemental processes which slowly fug the mind in a great black cloud, gradually dissolving each and every memory of who and what you are. This is what dementia means. For we are our memories; they are the record of our unfolding, the lasting imprints and images of our dialogue with the world, the forms and shapes on which our personhood is structured. When we begin to lose them fundamentally, it is then when we lose ourselves.
That is what makes dementia such a tragic illness from the purview of the human being. Cancer is awful, there is no doubts about that – most often it is painful and relentless and frightening and absolutely horrific to the physical body it swarms over. But weakened, enfeebled and in pain as they so often are – cancer patients nevertheless tend to retain a sense of self. What is so tragic about dementia is that the person who is subject to it simply begins to fade away within the physical body, until they are little more than a shadow behind the eyes.
And for the loved ones of the sufferer, the process is more painful and more potent still. Seeing someone who was once lively, vibrant, cheeky, intellectually curious, belligerent, sometimes cruel, sometimes kind – watching them gradually slip away into the mists before your eyes, witnessing the childlike bafflement which comes from no longer being able to command your own thoughts. The way the world suddenly rears up in all its vastness, appearing to them as something infinite and alien, a terrible stranger with whom they can no longer communicate. The retreat into immediacy, into the comfort of sensation, like a traumatized child – desperate and lonely and isolated, clinging to a raggedy and moth-eaten blanket.
And perhaps most of all, those moments when one glimpses something of the former self. They cut like glass. When the person manages a joke, and in their tentative smile and soft eyes, you see something of the person who once was – their humour, be it ironic or coarse. Or a fumbled memory from a childhood so long away, and the stuttering determination to seize hold of it, to elucidate it, to recover a sense of ‘self’ if only for a few moments.
That is where those with dementia live, always on the edges, always on the precipice between being and non-being, personhood and oblivion.
And yet, there are moments of light in the unfolding dark. In Making an Exit, the author Elinor Fuchs gives an account of her life with her mother, who is a dementia sufferer. What’s particularly interesting about this relationship is that when Fuchs was growing up, she was not so close to her mother. Her mother was absent much of the time, pursuing her career, leaving her daughter to the charge of her grandparents. The mother figure is portrayed as a charismatic and beautiful woman, strong and ambitious, creative and lively, and yet remote from her daughter’s life. However, when she contracts Alzheimer’s in the twilight of her life, this revolutionises the relationship between them.
The increasing dependence of mother on daughter enables a new sense of warmth, intimacy and love to bloom. Fuchs comes to learn about her mother’s playfulness and her fears from within the condition she is suffering: ‘The more reduced you are, the more loving you are, everything else washed away – success, money, glamour, clothes, ‘things’ … It hardly matters now which us is the mother and which the daughter. Taking care of as good as being taken care of. My job, to keep the little flame alive for just a while, to keep the little spirit in the world.’[6]
There is, therefore, an incredibly moving reversal in the relations between mother and daughter whereby the daughter becomes a repository of safety and security and the mother enters into a period of gentle, childlike innocence: ‘I call her “Little Bones” and sit her on my lap. “I love you,” she purrs. I talk comforting baby talk. “Little pussycat, my little pussycat.” The memoir ends in a note of gentle melancholy, ‘the last ten years: they were our best.’[7]
I don’t know if it is possible to reach any clear cut conclusion from Fuchs’ incredibly moving account. The loss of personhood which is the slow and inevitable terminus of all dementia sufferers is a kind of living death, and it is difficult to see in that anything worth such suffering. And yet, as Fuchs’ memoir illustrates, through the gaps of disintegration, moments of great humanity peek through; one’s relationship to the sufferer can be sharpened in its focus while at the same time being softened in terms of its compassion. In another memoir centred on a dementia sufferer – this time the author Alix Kates Sculman’s husband – the author reflects on her loved one’s loss of memory in the following terms:
That he forgets the concert or dance the minute it’s over hardly matters; even in undamaged brains sensual pleasure fades quickly. Like the flavour of an exquisite dish or the quality of a given orgasm, the sound of a particular performance, however transporting, wont usually outlive the week. Whereas once I kept whole libraries in my head, nowadays I can only recall vaguely the contents of a book I read a month ago, but that doesn’t diminish my passion for reading in the slightest.[8]
Here we see that, as frightening as it is, dementia isn’t a condition which is alien to our humanity; rather it simply heightens what is already an integral part of all human experience – that is, the continual and constant process of shedding one’s memories, of forgetting. The poet Elizabeth Bishop captured the paradoxical nature of this in a poem which is both light-hearted and mordant, playful and tragic:
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.
—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.[9]
The poem was written apropos of the poet’s lover who committed suicide – which clearly imbues it with a tragic tinge – and yet at the same time there is a gentle and melancholy acceptance; that is to say, we all must lose, we all must forget; for this is the inevitable cost life rings, the toll one must pay in order to enter into existence in the first place.
Another moment of poetry which encapsulates the same paradox; the same sweet, strange sadness is the end scene in the film Blade Runner. Here the Harrison Ford character is chasing down rogue replicant Roy Batty, but he misses a jump, and is close to falling to his death, whereupon the fugitive replicant saves him, raising him up to safety. The moments where the dumb-struck bounty hunter recovers, are also the moments when the replicant is dying, his body only designed to live a short period of time.
In those final seconds, as the rain cascades over the dark outline of the dystopian cityscape, the replicant utters his last words. Even though he is a synthetic creation fashioned in a laboratory, nevertheless he appears in that moment as the most human of all the characters, as he sums up what the life which is now ending has meant:
I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.[10]
Notes.
[1] Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlett, The Project Gutenberg, 12 July 2008: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/244/244-h/244-h.htm#link2HCH0002
[2] Joshua Foer, ‘Kaavya Syndrome’, Slate 27 April 2006: https://slate.com/technology/2006/04/no-one-has-a-photographic-memory.html
[3] Chris Weeler, ‘The Photographic Memory Hoax: Science Has Never Proven It’s Real, So Why Do We Keeping Acting Like It Is?’ Medical Daily 6 June 2014: https://www.medicaldaily.com/photographic-memory-hoax-science-has-never-proven-its-real-so-why-do-we-keeping-acting-it-286984
[4] V. Gordon Childe, What Happened in History (Aakar Books, Delhi: 2019) p.184
[5] William Subbs, The Constitutional History of England (Hard Press, Miami: 2017) pp. 550–551.
[6] Elinor Fuchs, Making an Exit: A Mother-Daughter Drama with Machine Tools, Alzheimer’s, and Laughter (Thorndike Press, Maine: 2005) p.283
[7] Ibid., p. 283-85
[8] Alix Kates Sculman, To What Love Is: A Marriage Transformed (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York: 2008) p.170.
[9] Elizabeth Bishop, ‘One Art’ Poetry Foundation: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47536/one-art
[10] Hampton Fancher and David Peoples, Blade Runner screenplay, Trussel: https://www.trussel.com/bladerun.htm#TOP
Tony McKenna’s journalism has been featured by Al Jazeera, Salon, The Huffington Post, ABC Australia, New Internationalist, The Progressive, New Statesman and New Humanist. His books include Art, Literature and Culture from a Marxist Perspective (Macmillan), The Dictator, the Revolution, the Machine: A Political Account of Joseph Stalin (Sussex Academic Press), a first novel – The Dying Light (New Haven Publishing), Toward Forever: Radical Reflections on History and Art (Zero Books) and The War Against Marxism: Reification and Revolution (Bloomsbury). He can be reached on twitter at @MckennaTony
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