Atheism's Wrong Turn

[By Damon Linker, The New Republic]

Excerpt: ..."ndeed, the tone of today's atheist tracts is so unremittingly hostile that one wonders if their authors really mean it when they express the hope, as Dawkins does in a representative passage, that "religious readers who open [The God Delusion] will be atheists when they put it down." Exactly how will such conversions be accomplished? Rather than seeking common ground with believers as a prelude to posing skeptical questions, today's atheists prefer to skip right to the refutation. They view the patient back and forth of dialogue--the way of Socrates--as a waste of time.

It is with this enmity, this furious certainty, that our ideological atheists lapse most fully into illiberalism. Politically speaking, liberalism takes no position on theological questions. One can be a liberal and a believer (as were Martin Luther King Jr., Reinhold Niebuhr, and countless others in the American past and present) or a liberal and an unbeliever (as were Hook, Richard Rorty, and a significantly smaller number of Americans over the years). This is in part because liberalism is a philosophy of government, not a philosophy of man--or God. But it is also because modern liberalism derives, at its deepest level, from ancient liberalism--from the classical virtue of liberality, which meant generosity and openness. To be liberal in the classical sense is to accept intellectual variety--and the social complexity that goes with it--as the ineradicable condition of a free society.

It is to accept, in other words, that, although I may settle the question of God to my personal satisfaction, it is highly unlikely that all of my fellow citizens will settle it in the same way--that differences in life experience, social class, intelligence, and the capacity for introspection will invariably prevent a free community from reaching unanimity about the fundamental mysteries of human existence, including God. Liberal atheists accept this situation; ideological atheists do not. That, in the end, is what separates the atheism of Socrates from the atheism of the French Revolution...

...Still, the rise of the new atheists is cause for concern--not among the targets of their anger, who can rest secure in the knowledge that the ranks of the religious will, here in America, dwarf the ranks of atheists for the foreseeable future; but rather among those for whom the defense of secular liberalism is a high political priority. Of course, many of these secular liberals are probably the same people who propelled Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens onto the best-seller lists by purchasing their books en masse--people who are worried about the dual threats to secular politics posed by militant Islam and the American religious right. These people are correct to be nervous about the future of secular liberalism, to perceive that it needs passionate, eloquent defenders. The problem is that the rhetoric of Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens will undermine liberalism, not bolster it: Far from shoring up the secular political tradition, their arguments are likely to produce a country poised precariously between opposite forms of illiberalism.

The last thing America needs is a war of attrition between two mutually exclusive, absolute systems of belief. Yet this is precisely what the new atheists appear to crave. The task for the rest of us--committed to neither dogmatic faith nor dogmatic doubt--is to make certain that combatants on both sides of the theological divide fail to get their destructive way. And thereby to ensure that liberalism prevails."

Tales of Angst, Alienation and Martial Law: Roasting Marshmallows on the American Reichstag Fire to Come

I need a beer after this...

Threat of Martial Law in The United States is Real

Hagee the false prophet...

Good link from DuneMessiah

Ship of Fools: Setting Sail With ‘The National Review’

Published on Friday, July 13, 2007 by The Independent/UK
by Johann Hari

The Iraq war has been an amazing success, global warming is just a myth - and as for Guantanamo Bay, it’s practically a holiday camp… The annual cruise organized by the ‘National Review’, mouthpiece of right-wing America, is a parallel universe populated by straight-talking, gun-toting, God-fearing Republicans.
I am standing waist-deep in the Pacific Ocean, both chilling and burning, indulging in the polite chit-chat beloved by vacationing Americans. A sweet elderly lady from Los Angeles is sitting on the rocks nearby, telling me dreamily about her son. “Is he your only child?” I ask. “Yes,” she says. “Do you have a child back in England?” she asks. No, I say. Her face darkens. “You’d better start,” she says. “The Muslims are breeding. Soon, they’ll have the whole of Europe.”
I am getting used to these moments - when gentle holiday geniality bleeds into… what? I lie on the beach with Hillary-Ann, a chatty, scatty 35-year-old Californian designer. As she explains the perils of Republican dating, my mind drifts, watching the gentle tide. When I hear her say, ” Of course, we need to execute some of these people,” I wake up. Who do we need to execute? She runs her fingers through the sand lazily. “A few of these prominent liberals who are trying to demoralize the country,” she says. “Just take a couple of these anti-war people off to the gas chamber for treason to show, if you try to bring down America at a time of war, that’s what you’ll get.” She squints at the sun and smiles. ” Then things’ll change.”

I am traveling on a bright white cruise ship with two restaurants, five bars, a casino - and 500 readers of the National Review. Here, the Iraq war has been “an amazing success”. Global warming is not happening. The solitary black person claims, “If the Ku Klux Klan supports equal rights, then God bless them.” And I have nowhere to run.

From time to time, National Review - the bible of American conservatism - organizes a cruise for its readers. I paid $1,200 to join them. The rules I imposed on myself were simple: If any of the conservative cruisers asked who I was, I answered honestly, telling them I was a journalist. Mostly, I just tried to blend in - and find out what American conservatives say when they think the rest of us aren’t listening. CONTINUE

The impeachment train is starting to roll...

Dave Lindorff: Co-Sponsors for Cheney Impeachment Bill: They Think They Can, They Think They Can
Submitted by BuzzFlash on Thu, 05/03/2007 - 2:19pm. Guest Contribution
A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
by Dave Lindorff


Last week, Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), started things off by filing a three-article bill of impeachment against Vice President Dick Cheney. Initially largely ignored by the mainstream media, and even ridiculed by some leading Democrats in Congress, that bill, HR 333, Wednesday garnered two co-sponsors, Rep. William Lacy Clay (D-MO) and Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), the latter a chief deputy whip and senior member of the House congressional leadership.

The two co-sponsors signing on to the bill give it a much stronger chance of being taken seriously in the House Judiciary Committee headed by Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), and follows a week of intense impeachment activities across the country.

A week ago, dozens of impeachment activists gathered on the steps of the main entrance to the Cannon House Office Building in a group press conference calling on Congress to back Kucinich's impeachment bill, and to initiate impeachment proceedings against President Bush.

That same week, delegates to the annual convention of the California Democratic Party, the largest state chapter of the Democratic Party, overwhelmingly passed a detailed resolution calling for the impeachment of the president and vice president. The resolution received the highest vote total of all the resolutions offered at that convention, and was a powerful message to California's top Democrat, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who represents a district in San Francisco, that her own party wants action on impeachment, not a political dodge.

A few days later, on Saturday, April 28, impeachment groups across the nation held demonstrations, many of which featured protesters assembling to form giant letters spelling out the word "Impeach." While the mainstream media largely ignored those protests, the message was not lost on House Democrats. The following day, Rep. John Murtha, a leader of the Democrats campaign to end the Iraq War, speaking on the CBS News program "Face the Nation," declared that impeachment was one of the tools Congress has to influence the president. Lest his statement be misconstrued as a slip of the tongue, Murtha, who is known to be a close political ally of Pelosi, repeated the statement on NPR the following day, this time saying pointedly that impeachment was "on the table" in Congress.

His choice of words was particularly significant, since Pelosi has been insisting for almost a year that under a Democratic Congress, impeachment of the president would be "off the table."

It remains to be seen whether more members of the House will sign on to Kucinich's bill, or whether other representatives will add new bills of impeachment of their own against the vice president. Kucinich's bill is narrow in scope, only citing three impeachable offenses: lying about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, lying about an alleged link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, and illegally threatening war against Iran, a country that poses no imminent threat to the U.S. Certainly there are plenty of other grounds for impeaching Cheney, ranging from conspiracy to commit kidnapping and illegal torture of prisoner of war detainees and war profiteering to lying to Congress and orchestrating the theft of national elections.

Thirty-nine members of the House in the last Congress were co-sponsors of a bill submitted in late 2005 by Rep. Conyers that called for an investigation into impeachable crimes by the president and vice president, and impeachment activists are now lobbying those members -- nearly all of whom were returned to office last November -- to join as co-sponsors of HR 333. Both Reps. Clay and Shakowsky had been co-sponsors of the earlier Conyers bill, signing on in January 2006.

With frustration with President Bush's insistence on endless war in Iraq, and with grassroots pressure for impeachment building, it is going to be harder and harder for the mainstream media to keep ignoring the impeachment story. It is also going to be harder and harder for Democratic Party leaders to deter their more progressive members in the House from filing impeachment bills.

To contact members of Congress and make your views on impeachment known, dial 202/225-3121 and ask for the member you want to reach. Speaker Pelosi's number is 202/225-0100.

DAVE LINDORFF is co-author, with Barbara Olshansky, of The Case for
Impeachment: The Legal Argument for Removing President George W. Bush from Office (St. Martin's Press, 2006). A paperback edition of the book is due out in late May. His work is available at thiscantbehappening.net.

Fascist America, in 10 Easy Steps

Published on Tuesday, April 24, 2007 by The Guardian/UK

Fascist America, in 10 Easy Steps
From Hitler to Pinochet and Beyond, History Shows There Are certain Steps That Any Would-Be Dictator Must Take To Destroy Constitutional Freedoms. And George Bush and His Administration Seem To Be Taking Them All

by Naomi Wolf

CLICK HERE

Working for the Clampdown

[Lots of good info in the whited hyperlinks]

Blueprint for Dictatorship
Recent legislation sets us up for tyranny
by Justin Raimondo, antiwar.com

[picture: Eric Drooker]

America is headed for a military dictatorship – and recent legislation makes this all but inevitable. Last September, Congress passed the Defense Authorization Act, which empowered the president to declare martial law with very little provocation, namely in the aftermath of a "terrorist attack or incident." Having determined that "the execution of the laws" is hampered by the "incident," the president can unilaterally impose martial law – without the consent of Congress, which need only be informed of the event "as soon as practicable." The only condition attached instructs the president to report to Congress after 14 days, and every 14 days thereafter.

This use of the military to enforce domestic order is a new development in American history, one that augurs a turning point not only in terms of law, but also in our evolving political culture. Such a measure would once have provoked an outcry – on both sides of the aisle. When the measure passed, there was hardly a ripple of protest: the Senate approved it unanimously, and there were only thirty-something dissenting votes in the House. Added to the Military Commissions Act [.pdf], this new brick in the wall of domestic repression creates the structure of a new imperial system on the ruins of the old constitutional order. George W. Bush and his hard-core neoconservative henchmen may have lost the war in Iraq, but they have won a virtually uncontested victory at home: the conquest of the old republic by an emerging imperial order. This recalls the opening of Garet Garrett's 1952 philippic, Rise of Empire, wherein he diagnosed the essential indeterminacy of the transition:

"We have crossed the boundary that lies between Republic and Empire. If you ask when, the answer is that you cannot make a single stroke between day and night; the precise moment does not matter. There as no painted sign to say: 'You are now entering Imperium.'"

The usually prescient Garrett got it somewhat wrong here: The single stroke between day and night can be fixed precisely in time, at 8:45 a.m. EDT on Sept. 11, 2001, and the Military Commissions Act and the disturbing changes in the U.S. Code outlined above are the closest to painted signs we are likely to get. Waiting in the wings, an infamous cabal took advantage of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, moving with preternatural speed to consolidate a dictatorship of fear. With the passage of more recent legislation, they are now moving to consolidate their gains. Sinisterly, the new legislation also alters the language of Title 10, Chapter 15, Section 333 of the U.S. Code (the so-called Insurrection Act) in an ominous manner:

"Whenever the president considers it necessary to use the militia or the armed forces under this chapter, he shall, by proclamation, immediately order the insurgents or those obstructing the enforcement of the laws to disperse and retire peaceably to their abodes within a limited time."

Why insert the bolded phrase – unless your objective is to widen the category of miscreants to include those exercising their First Amendment rights? No one expects an insurgency to be launched in this day and age in America, yet peaceably assembling to protest government policies can easily be interpreted to include "obstructionists" who might be "dispersed." As José Padilla discovered, any American can be kidnapped and held without trial – or even formal charges – on the orders of the president, and the granting of unprecedented power to rule by decree builds on this neo-royalist theory. The Bushian doctrine of the "unitary executive," which gives the occupant of the White House monarchical power in wartime, has now been approved by the Democrats, who can't wait to wield it themselves. Of course, they would exercise such unholy power only in a good way – say, if a state refused to cooperate in enforcing or implementing federal legislation instituting a draft, or, more likely, federalizing a state National Guard unit to be shipped to the Middle East.

Oh, you mean that's not so good? Just wait until the Democrats get their hands on all that power: then you'll see the real collapse of the movement to preserve civil liberties in America. Remember, it was Hillary Clinton who said of the Internet: "We are all going to have to rethink how we deal with this, because there are always competing values. There's no free decision that I'm aware of anywhere in life, and certainly with technology that's the case." Yes, the technology is very "exciting," she averred, yet "there are a number of serious issues without any kind of editing function or gatekeeping function. What does it mean to have the right to defend your reputation, or to respond to what someone says?"

The First Amendment is not big with Hillary and never has been. She's power-mad, and every once in a while the frigid mask gives way to the face of a real authoritarian, albeit a different one than that of the red-state fascists, as Lew Rockwell describes the anti-libertarian Right. Blue-state fascists trample on our civil liberties "for the children," but the effect is the same: bipartisan support for the abolition of our old republic and the inauguration of a new era in American history: the Age of Empire.

With the neoconized "conservative" movement transformed into a force fully committed to outright authoritarianism, and the "liberals" defending the depredations of the Democrats in power, who will be left to defend what's left of the Constitution? Just Ron Paul and Alexander Cockburn. The rest will go with the herd instinct of sheep threatening to stampede at the apparent intrusion of a wolf in their pasture.

Under the terms of this legislation, who defines a terrorist "incident"? The president. Who defines an "unlawful combination"? The president. Who determines that a "conspiracy" is in progress, one that threatens national security and domestic order? The president of these United States – which are to be united, in our darkest future, by a superpresident who can outlaw the opposition with the stroke of a pen and is more a military leader than the chief executive of an ostensible republic.

Stop, for a moment, and consider where we are in the spring of 2007.

On the home front, the representatives of the people have conceded the last of their waning powers to the executive branch and paved the way for the restoration of royalism in America. Overseas, American troops are fighting a war of conquest – there is no other way to describe it – in an effort to prop up a rapidly failing puppet government in the Middle East. Meanwhile, U.S. forces are gathering in the Persian Gulf for what looks to be a strike against Iran.

The unpopularity of our foreign policy is increasingly a cause for concern in the Imperial City, where both parties have colluded – with surprisingly little dissent – in ensuring a permanent U.S. military presence in the Middle East. It is merely a question of the size of our footprint that divides the two major parties on this all-important question. The Democrats want to "redeploy" – to Qatar and other neighboring countries. The Republicans won't give up an inch of conquered Iraqi territory and instead want to extend the battle into Iran, which is already the target of a not-so-covert campaign aiming at "regime change." (The Iran Freedom Support Act, authorizing millions in aid to "democratic" groups, was supported by the leadership of both parties in Congress.)

Rising antiwar sentiment worries William F. Buckley Jr., who opines that "There are grounds for wondering whether the Republican Party will survive this dilemma." Given the authoritarian proclivities of the Bush administration and the neoconized GOP, there are grounds for wondering whether the republic will survive. We are just a terrorist "incident," either real or imagined, away from a declaration of martial law and all its attendant consequences. Buckley grimly notes the polls are "savagely decisive" on the war question, and he asks: "Beyond affirming executive supremacy in matters of war, what is George Bush going to do?" The answer may be contained in Title 10, Chapter 15, Section 333.

Senators Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Kit Bond (R-Mo.) are sponsoring legislation that would repeal the changes, but, as Sen. John Warner pointed out the other day, when the Insurrection Act was revised to give the president extraordinary powers, no one raised any objection. Now, suddenly, the senators, including Warner, see some reason to regret their hasty actions – do they know something we don't?

I fear, however, that it may be too late. Bush will surely veto the Leahy-Bond measure – and, if necessary, declare America's governors, who all oppose this brazen usurpation, an "unlawful combination," as the Insurrection Act puts it. Then he will be empowered to "disperse" them, and the Senate, at will.

I'm back to Garet Garrett, who never fails to come up with some apt aphoristic prognostication, this one being from his classic The Revolution Was:

"There are those who still think they are holding the pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road. But they are gazing in the wrong direction. The revolution is behind them. It went by in the Night of Depression, singing songs to freedom."

TCR Deeply Regrets Vatican Invitation of Alleged War Criminal Henry Kissinger

As always, some great posts at Stephen Hand's TCRNews Musings
including this:

Friday, April 27, 2007 TCR Deeply Regrets Vatican Invitation of Alleged War
Criminal Henry Kissinger


"Mary Ann Glendon, a U.S. law professor and president of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, invited Kissinger to speak at the academy's April 27-May 1 plenary session.

"The academy, which advises the Vatican on social issues, was to focus on "Charity and Justice in the Relations Among Peoples and Nations." ...more

Genocide in East Timor:

The 1975 Indonesia invasion of -- and subsequent genocide in -- East Timor was delayed a few hours so as not to embarrass President Ford and Kissinger, who were visiting Jakarta. Noam Chomsky writes, "The Indonesia invasion of December 1975 following several months of military actions that were well-known to Australia, the US and Britain was an unprovoked act of aggression, a war crime, which makes all participants war criminals, from Henry Kissinger on down."

Despite a UN condemnation and call for the immediate withdrawal of troops and for "all States to respect the territorial integrity of East Timor as well as the inalienable right of its people to self-determination," Secretary of State Henry Kissinger increased the flow of arms to Indonesia and instructed the UN ambassador Moynihan to, according Chomsky, "to block any diplomatic reaction to Indonesia's criminal aggression, adopting the stance that Australian diplomat Richard Woolcott...admiringly called 'Kissinger realism,' a technical term for cowardly thuggishness and criminality."

Moynihan writes in his memoirs "The Department of State [under Kissinger] desired that the United Nations prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook. This task was given to me, and I carried it forward with no inconsiderable success." In the following few months some 60,000 people had been murdered -- 10 percent of the population.


Limited Nuclear War: An "Appropriate" Policy

As one of the most powerful men in the United States, Kissinger never shied away from the potential use of nuclear weapons. In his memoirs, Kissinger equates courage with an ability to "face up to the risks of Armageddon," for example, "go[ing] to the brink over Pakistan." In response to tensions in the Middle East in 1973, Kissinger ordered a worldwide alert for U.S. nuclear forces, with B-52s loaded with 20-megaton nuclear bombs taking off from Guam, US aircraft carriers loaded with nuclear weapons heading toward the Mediterranean, and U.S. anti-aircraft missiles raised to firing position in West Germany. The goal of this action, among many others, was, as Kissinger wrote, "to ensure that the Europeans and Japanese did not get involved in the diplomacy regarding the Middle East." Kissinger informed the Soviet ambassador, "This is a matter of great concern. Don't you pressure us. I want to repeat again, don't pressure us."

Although the crisis thankfully subsided when the Soviets declared they had no intention of going into the Middle East, it was evidence that Kissinger (who was the basis for Dr. Strangelove) had no problem with using the most destructive weapons on the planet like chess pieces, with no regard for human lives. Indeed, in 1969, he was, with Nixon, involved in the so-called "Madman: ultimatum to Hanoi, threatening to drop nuclear weapons to end the U.S. invasion of Vietnam. Thanks to popular dissent against the war, Nixon concluded that he could not keep the country together if he went ahead with these plans.

Kissinger's views on nuclear war were expounded in Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy (1957). He praised the idea of "limited nuclear war," declaring "Everything depends on leadership of high order, personal initiative and mechanical aptitude; qualities more prevalent in our society than in the regimented system of the USSR." For a capitalist nation, he wrote, "the most productive form of war is to utilize weapons of an intermediary range of destructiveness, sufficiently complex to require a substantial productive effort, sufficiently destructive so that manpower cannot be substituted for technology, yet discriminating enough to permit the establishment of a significant margin of superiority. It would seem that the weapons systems appropriate for limited nuclear war meet these requirements."


"Covert action should not be confused with missionary work."

The recent headlines about the Kurds in Iraq have historical roots which implicate Kissinger in criminal activity as well. In the early 1970s, the Shah of Iran (whose regime had one of the worst human rights records in the world), supported by Kissinger, hoped to use the Kurds to undermine the government of Iraq. The Nixon administration, under the guidance of Kissinger and the CIA, provided the Kurds with weaponry but, according to a Congressional report, "none of the nations who were aiding them seriously desired that they realize their objective of an autonomous state." One CIA memo stated clearly there was never any intention of helping the Kurds achieve an autonomous state, and that "Neither Iran nor ourselves wish to see the matter resolved one way or the other." The Pike Committee investigating CIA abuses concluded "Even in the context of covert action, ours was a cynical enterprise." As a result of these actions,. at least 35,000 Kurds were murdered, and 200,000 Kurdish refugees fled to Iran, but neither Iran or the US gave them adequate humanitarian assistance. "In fact, Iran was later to forcible return over 40,000 of the refugees and the United States government refused to admit even one refugee into the United States by way of political asylum even though they qualified for such admittance." Pike report


Support for apartheid and racist white-minority African States

In a National Security Study Memorandum, Kissinger concentrates on South Africa as a strategic asset, not as a criminal apartheid regime. "The whites are here to stay and the only way that constructive change can come about is through them. We can, by selective relaxation of our stance toward the white regimes, encourage some modification of their current racial and colonial policies...We would maintain public opposition to racial repression but relax political isolation and economic restrictions on the white states..."

MORE at TCR

Gerry Spence, "Kill All Lawyers"

Gerry Spence, "Kill All Lawyers"