Posted on 10/10/2008 1:54:32 PM PDT by mojito
...On this July 4, we would do well to renounce nationalism and all its symbols: its flags, its pledges of allegiance, its anthems, its insistence in song that God must single out America to be blessed. Is not nationalism—that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary so fierce it engenders mass murder—one of the great evils of our time, along with racism, along with religious hatred?
Patriotism is perhaps the single concept in greatest need of being subjected to intense scrutiny and questioning in our country today. We live, after all, in a time of empire resurrected and unapologetic, of war without borders and seemingly without end, of greed enthroned and of a rapidly widening gulf between rich and poor, of the elusive and seemingly intractable barriers to racial justice, and of patriotism rehearsed and paraded in every corner, and yet the basic questions of who we are and where we are eludes us.
....This enforced ignorance is part of the logic of patriotism, which is of a piece with the logic of nationalism: anyone who by chance was thrust onto this small specific patch of earth is to consider himself or herself superior to all those unfortunates who were thrust onto some other patch. This beatified place is imagined to be qualitatively unparalleled, so different from all other places that it’s as if a high wall shuts it off from the rest of the world. And walls as metaphors are reinforced with barbed wire erected in East Germany, Israel, and now the US on its southern border. Here, within the wall, a chosen people, so to speak, live blessed lives that are nobler, greater, deeper and wiser and more beneficent than the lives led by any other human beings anywhere else.
This is the constant conceit of patriotism, the narcissistic and arrogant stance. The result is that we are willing to fight, kill, and die—or as is almost always the case, to at least send the children of the laboring classes as proxies to do the killing and dying—in a patriotic fever for real estate before reason.
Samuel Johnson called patriotism “the last refuge of a scoundrel,” and Bertrand Russell, “the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons”—patriotism is justification for murder. And the great Malcolm X advised that no one become “so blind with patriotism that you can’t face reality…Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or says it.” Howard Zinn describes the typically disingenuous justification for war: As our armies were committing massacres in the Philippines (at least 600,000 Filipinos died in a few years of conflict), Elihu Root, our secretary of war, was saying: “The American solider is different from all other soldiers of all other countries since the war began. He is the advance guard of liberty and justice, of law and order, and of peace and happiness.” We see in Iraq that our soldiers are not different. They have, perhaps against their better nature, killed thousands of Iraq civilians. And some soldiers have shown themselves capable of brutality, of torture. Yet they are victims, too, of our government’s lies.
Wikipedia (no edits permitted due to pending disputes, yeah, I bet).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Ayers
Ayers and his ilk do not deserve the blessings of a free society. Why do these people try to tear down the very foundations upon which they stand?
Thanks for Post #35.
Everybody, please read it.
Views on his past expressed since 2001
Ayers was asked in a January 2004 interview, "How do you feel about what you did? Would you do it again under similar circumstances?" He replied:[24] "I've thought about this a lot. Being almost 60, it's impossible to not have lots and lots of regrets about lots and lots of things, but the question of did we do something that was horrendous, awful? ... I don't think so. I think what we did was to respond to a situation that was unconscionable." On September 9, 2008, journalist Jake Tapper reported on the comic strip in Bill Ayers's blog explaining the soundbite: "The one thing I don't regret is opposing the war in Vietnam with every ounce of my being.... When I say, 'We didn't do enough,' a lot of people rush to think, 'That must mean, "We didn't bomb enough shit."' But that's not the point at all. It's not a tactical statement, it's an obvious political and ethical statement. In this context, 'we' means 'everyone.'"[25][26]
Ayers' political views
In an interview published in 1995, Ayers characterized his political beliefs at that time and in the 1960s and 1970s: "I am a radical, Leftist, small 'c' communist ... [Laughs] Maybe I'm the last communist who is willing to admit it. [Laughs] We have always been small 'c' communists in the sense that we were never in the [Communist] party and never Stalinists. The ethics of Communism still appeal to me. I don't like Lenin as much as the early Marx. I also like Henry David Thoreau, Mother Jones and Jane Addams [...]"[27]In 1970 Ayers was called "a national leader"[28] of the Weatherman organization and "one of the chief theoreticians of the Weathermen".[29] The Weathermen were initially part of the Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM) within the SDS, splitting from the RYM's Maoists by claiming there was no time to build a vanguard party and that revolutionary war against the United States government and the capitalist system should begin immediately. Their founding document called for the establishment of a "white fighting force" to be allied with the "Black Liberation Movement" and other "anti-colonial" movements[30] to achieve "the destruction of US imperialism and the achievement of a classless world: world communism."[31] In June 1974, the Weather Underground released a 151-page volume titled Prairie Fire, which stated: "We are a guerrilla organization [...] We are communist women and men underground in the United States [...]"[32] The Weatherman leadership, including Bill Ayers, pushed for a radical reformulation of sexual relations under the slogan "Smash Monogamy".[33][34]
FV: Shades of ACORN and of community organizing IMO. Barack Obama imo looks like the result of William Ayers' long term goals, not just a coincidence. Ayers is the marxist behind the curtain!
Ck out my last from wiki. I think Bambi is Ayers’ Eliza Doolittle even down to his sophisticated speech (Bambi turns it on and off depending upon his audience demographics).
FV says Once a terrorist always a terrorist.
Sounds like he wrote Dreams of my Father....
On this May 1, we would do well to renounce socialism and all its symbols: its flags, its workers' anthems, its insistence that only a nomenklatura should control men's lives. Is not socialism — that devotion to a discredited ideology so fierce it engenders mass murder — one of the great evils of our time, especially those variants known as Hitler's National Socialism and the Communism of Stalin and Pol Pot? Socialism is perhaps the single outworn concept in greatest need of being subjected to intense scrutiny and questioning in our world today....
JOHN MCCAIN, NAME NAMES!!!!!!
from wikipedia: "In 2001, as co-chairman of the bipartisan Joint Committee on Administrative Rules, Obama supported Republican Governor Ryan's payday loan regulations and predatory mortgage lending regulations aimed at averting home foreclosures.[31]"
(FR's got to research Bambi's law firm.) Got to stop for dinner. : ) There's plenty on this thread for freepers to flesh out.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Rezko
I like your new tagline.
Ayers is unrepentant commie rat filth. There should reinvestigation for espionage & treason for him and his collection of leftist 1960s era cohorts. This is the type of willing anti-American sellout the Kremlin could utilize.
Thank you for your diligent research & posting of those links.
This book is in my local library, so I put a hold on it just now. I’ll go over and pick it up tomorrow. Should be interesting reading ...
Thanks. My tag line will be more relevant after Corsi’s back in town.
Okay, so if Obama thought Ayers was now rehabilitated, I want to know
1) when did Obama first learn that Ayers ever behaved in a manner that needed rehabilitating from,
2) when did Obama think Ayer's rehabilitation occurred, and
3) when did Obama learn of Ayer's rehabilitation?
It seems to me that Obama always bring up The Annenberg Foundation (friend of Reagan) but NEVER brings up Public Allies. He met a commie in Hawaii before he got to the mainland and met Ayers. Obama is Ayer’s puppet for social change.
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