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flashfuture · 3 years

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Follow up questions because I’m a Nerd and I love learning: is there any evidence to suggest frequent inclusion of women in Scandinavian warfare? Or is finding something like women’s armor rare? Was there a standard definition of any queer terminology in any ancient civilization? Did any Norse culture ever find its way to the Middle East???

I feel a bit like an over eager student writing this but uh...I’m very curious. 👀👀

When talking about women in Scandinavia you run into people describing how it appeared these women would take on the role of men in the absence of men. But I think there is an issue in that we’re assuming the role of women in these societies would match the role of an Ancient Greek woman (which is a whole other thing but I digress)

They’ve found that some of the founding fathers of Iceland were women, thirteen of them to be exact. women could inherit land and money from their parents. Women could be involved in legal matters and hold official positions.

There is lots of evidence that women were very frequently going raiding. They have been debating recently I believe if the term dregnr a young warrior really was only applied to men. Young women were described in the same vulgar terms as dominators and something we discuss in ancient Rome was the ideal of male “hardness” basically just being the top dog in the room. Women were the same in Ancient cultures if not expected to hold themselves differently but Skalds (the poets) describe the women just like the men.

Another thing quite recently (1993 so really recent in terms of historical archives) is the idea of the surrogate son. Basically, if a man died with no son to inherit a surrogate son would be chosen over a daughter. It has recently been noted that they very well could have been describing the daughter as a surrogate son. Someone to take up that male role of head of the household. This suggests in the sagas we have noted women but there is also a possibility for women to be described with male traditional words because of the role they were playing.

And we have found tons of armor that looks ceremonially and some battle worn for women yep. All women could fight though it was excepted they could defend themselves and their home front. Against potential attackers and wild animals.

Plus in the 13th century, the Christians introduced the Law of Gulathing which were sets of rules for people to follow. Women were then banned from cutting their hair like men, dressing like men, or in general behaving like men. This suggests It was common enough for them to throw it in the laws that banned traditional things that Scandinavians did that did not fit the Christian narrative or way of life.

-- This is gonna go under the cut for the rest cause wow I got long lol.

Okay queer terminology. You’ll see lesbian which was women who fucks women. and you’ll see penetrator a lot. These were slave cultures also so the idea of sleeping with another citizen was defiling them you shouldn’t do it.

In Ancient Athens, you saw men preferred the company of men over women because they didn’t think women were of value they were only good for producing heirs. There was a thing called pederasty where a wealthy man in his 20s, the erastes, would court a young wealthy man from the ages of 13-19, the eromenos, and teach him and keep him as a lover. Their debate over Achillies and Patroclus for example wasn’t if they were sleeping together but who was fucking who really. Because Patroclus was older but Achillies was the hero so was he being emasculated or were they breaking the age rule? That was their debate cause these things mattered to them

They were kinda the exception to the citizenship rule. The Spartans felt the pederastry was weird because it involved citizens but they were all in with the homo. Obviously, this was all very public and you’d be scorned if they thought you were being penetrated.

All in all, being penetrated was something women and slaves did and the last thing you wanted to be was a woman.

Another thing to consider was these cultures had a lot of problems with excess. So too much sex or food and in Rome you were a uh Cnidus? Idk I can only spell it in Greek which is staggeringly unhelpful but basically, you can’t control your urges. Based off that time someone tried to fuck a statue I think or something like that

The Norse had a similar word ergi which meant you had too much heterosexual sex actually, you were too promiscuous. In the 12th century we know in Iceland homosexual acts like sodomy were banned under Christian canon (Thanks Richard I of England) so there is that. Pre-Christian influence there seemed to be no stigma around this minus don’t force yourself on your friends that’s rude but slaves were fair game. (I wrote a paper on the weird stereotypes of Vikings being the sexual aggressors when the literature of the time suggests the Lotharingians were way way more likely to commit those acts. At least according to French who were besieged constantly by everyone all the time.)

níð was an insult for the ancient norse which basically you had displayed unmanliness. Or you liked to take it up the ass to be plain about it. (Ancient people were vulgar as shit the Romans were obsessed with sexual threats to the point where its just in common day-to-day speech.) Ragr was a term that meant you were unmanly which is much more severe and you could like legally kill someone for saying that up till the 13th century.

There is actually some debate that the concept of unmanly comes from making fun of the Germans. So like if you were Ancient Germanic or Ancient Brittania you were the savages of the day. Which is interesting when you consider the rhetoric those two countries put out. Like literally no one like the Germans or the Brits they thought they were filthy uncivilized and cowardly people.

Also fun from the 7th to 10th century in Norse culture there were these figurines called gold foil couples. In it a couple would be portrayed which was a way of proclaiming themselves married before the gods. It was a very religious practice for them. There are figurines depicting people of the same sex in the gold foil figurines.

Basically, we can thank Christianity for why we think the Vikings didn’t do homosexuality or homosexual acts. Because well they didn’t want them to starting in the 12th century again thanks Richard for having the worst break up with your boyfriend in the history of break ups.

And onto gender which if you know Loki from Marvel him being genderfluid is based entirely on mythology and is common in Norse writings. Okay so essentially we think of seiðr or magic as something women do. And they did too. But men did practice it. This was seen as a third gender in Norse culture, the seiðmaðr a man who practices magic. Hence Loki moving between the three as he’s a known magic-user. There was also this concept of gender mixing, biological men buried in traditionally female clothing. But there is no way for us to know if that is this third gender or potentially they were more excepting of what we would call transgender.

Because most of the writings we have come from the 13th century where Christianity really took over and just started making shit up. Like we have evidence they were trying to cover up things about Norse culture they didn’t like. So men who practiced seiðr were actually ergi and not a different gender, just an unmanly male.

So yeah lol these were acts they did so verbs can be found really easily. But we have mostly Icelandic stuff cause Christians they did fucked up shit

And the Vikings in the Middle East. They went all over. We have this assumption they were raiding whenever they went. Actually, the thing is they only raided northern Europe because they rightfully assumed those guys couldn’t fight back.

But they had trading agreements easily with the Greeks, Persians, and Abbassids mostly. There is a woman from Sweden who was buried with a ring that was inscribed with “For/To Allah”

The Arabs had the term Rusiyyah to describe the Vikings because they came so often. They noted that the Rusiyyah were not good at practicing hygiene but also describe their bodies as being “in perfect form” They liked a good ripped viking and I can appreciate that. They were like “they’re filthy but damn are those rusiyyah built”

Baghdad had the first real market place and they had paper from China so they were printing stuff into books which the Vikings found very interesting. There was so much international trade but the British and Germans who we mostly hear from now were so technologically unadvanced there was no way they could have participated with these other older cultures.

There is money found sometimes that was certainly viking in nature. They didn’t really have money like the Arabs at the time preferring to trade in goods. So they offered furs and silks along with weapons and slaves.

And it is possible that there was culture exchange as all cultures were being exchanged back then. We know some vikings converted to Islam as Arab writers commented that they missed pork dearly but were committed to the Path of Islam.

The Slavs or Rus (Russians) of the time were also annoyed with these viking raiders because their shit would get stolen and then sold to Arabia where they’d have to buy it back usually.

So yeah lots of trading going on. And many Vikings like I mentioned worked as bodyguards or mercenaries. We don’t know much of what the Vikings thought except that the writers in Arab noted they were very polite to their hosts if not aggressive with each other in a playful manner.

Lol you really let my nerd pop off here. I’d have to do more research into the Norse effect on the Middle East though cause I only know about the other way around off the top of my head here.

#ask #history #me and my nerd brain

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oscopelabs · 5 years

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The Murder Artist: Alfred Hitchcock At The End Of His Rope by Alice Stoehr

“Rope was an interesting technical experiment that I was lucky and happy to be a part of, but I don’t think it was one of Hitchcock’s better films.” So wrote Farley Granger, one of its two stars, in his memoir Include Me Out. The actor was in his early twenties when the Master of Suspense plucked him from Samuel Goldwyn’s roster. He’d star in the first production from the director’s new Transatlantic Pictures as Phillip Morgan, a pianist and co-conspirator in murder. John Dall would play his partner, homicidal mastermind Brandon Shaw. Granger had the stiff pout to Dall’s trembling smirk.

The “interesting technical experiment” was Hitchcock’s decision to shoot the film, adapted from a twenty-year-old English play, as a series of 10-minute shots stitched together into a simulated feature-length take. This allowed him to retain the stage’s spatial and temporal unities while guiding the audience with the camera’s eye. In the process, he’d embed a host of meta-textual and erotic nuances within the sinister mise-en-scène. Screenwriter Arthur Laurents (Granger’s boyfriend, for a time) updated the play’s fictionalized account of Chicagoan thrill killers Leopold and Loeb to a penthouse in late ‘40s Manhattan. There, Phillip strangles the duo’s friend David—his scream behind a curtain opens the film—immediately prior to a dinner party where they’ll serve pâté atop the box that serves as his coffin. It’s a morbid premise for a comedy of manners, and Brandon taunts his guests throughout the evening. (Asked if it’s someone’s birthday, he coyly replies, “It’s, uh, really almost the opposite.”)

Granger deemed the film lesser Hitchcock due to two limitations. One was the sheer repetition and exact blocking demanded by its formal conceit, the other the Production Code’s blanket ban on “sex perversion,” which meant tiptoeing around the fact that Brandon and Phillip—like their real-life inspirations and, to some degree, Rope’s leading men—were gay. That stringent homophobia forced Hitchcock and Laurents to convey their sexuality through ambiguity and implication; the director would use similar tactics to adapt queer writers like Daphne du Maurier and Patricia Highsmith. (“Hitchcock confessed that he actually enjoyed his negotiations with [Code honcho Joseph] Breen,” notes Thomas Doherty in the book Hollywood’s Censor. “The spirited give-and-take, said Hitchcock, possessed all the thrill of competitive horse trading.”) The nature of the characters’ relationship is hardly subtext: Rope starts with their orgasmic shudder over David’s death, then labored panting after which Brandon pulls out a cigarette and lets in some light. A few minutes later, Brandon strokes the neck of a champagne bottle; Phillip asks how he felt during the act, and he gasps “tremendously exhilarated.”

Like Brandon’s hints about the murder, the homosexuality on display is surprisingly explicit if an audience can decode it. The whole film pivots around their partnership, both criminal and domestic. In an impish bit of conflation, their scheme even stands in for “the love that dare not speak its name,” with David’s body acting as a fetish object in a sexual game no one else can perceive. The guests, as Brandon puts it, are “a dull crew,” “those idiots” who include David’s father and aunt, played by London theater veterans Cedric Hardwicke and Constance Collier. Joan Chandler and Douglas Dick, both a couple years into what would be modest careers, play David’s fiancée Janet and her ex Kenneth. Character actress Edith Evanson appears as housekeeper Mrs. Wilson, a prototype for Thelma Ritter’s Stella in Rear Window, and a top-billed James Stewart is Rupert Cadell, who once mentored the murderers in arcane philosophy.

This was the first of Stewart’s four collaborations with Hitchcock. It cast the actor against type not as a romantic hero but as an observer and provocateur, his gaze shrewd, his dialogue heavy with irony. The role presaged his work in the ‘50s, with Mann rather than Capra, emphasizing psychology over ideology. Rupert, like L.B. Jeffries or Scottie Ferguson, is rooting out a crime, and in so doing comes to seem more loathsome than the villains themselves. “Murder is—or should be—an art,” he lectures midway through Rope, eyebrow arched, martini glass in hand. “Not one of the seven lively perhaps, but an art nevertheless.” Half an hour in real time later, having seen David’s body, he flies into a moralizing monologue: “You’ve given my words a meaning that I never dreamed of!” It takes up the last several minutes of the film, with Rupert snarling from deep in his righteous indignation, “Did you think you were God, Brandon?”

Stewart was a master of sputtering, impassioned oratory, and his facility for it renders Rupert’s hypocrisy especially stark. He taught these murderers; he can’t just shrug off his culpability. The Code decreed that “the sympathy of the audience shall never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, or sin.” Every transgression reaps a punishment. The ending of Rope abides by the letter of this law, as Rupert fires several shots into the night, drawing a police siren toward the building. He sits, deflated, while Phillip plays piano and Brandon has one last drink. But none of David’s loved ones get to excoriate his killers. The one man here with no integrity, no moral authority, is the one who gets the final, self-flagellating word.

The Code forbade throwing sympathy to the side of sin, but if Hitchcock meant any character in Rope as his stand-in, it was Brandon, not Rupert. The top to Phillip’s bottom, he’s the director of the play within a film. He’s storyboarded it to perfection. Janet, realizing he’s toying with her, cries that he’s incapable of just throwing a party. “No, you’d have to add something that appealed to your warped sense of humor!” Hitchcock, who’d built a corpus of corpses, must have gotten a chuckle from that line. Whereas Phillip fears discovery, Brandon puts symbolism above pragmatism, prioritizing what Phillip dubs his “neat little touches.” He needs to have dinner on the chest, the murder weapon tied around antique books, and his surrogate father Rupert in attendance, much as the film’s director needed to shoot in long takes—not because it’s pragmatic, but because it’s beautiful. He went to great lengths for verisimilar beauty here, as Steven Jacobs details in The Wrong House: The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock. Miniatures in the three-dimensional cyclorama seen through the broad penthouse window were wired and connected to a ‘light organ’ that allowed for the gradual activation of the skyline’s thousands of lights and hundreds of neon signs. Meanwhile, spun-glass clouds were shifted by technicians from right to left during moments when the camera turned away from the window.

Jacobs notes as well that a painting by Fidelio Ponce de León hanging on Brandon and Phillip’s wall actually belonged to the director and had previously hung in his own home. Rope is avant-garde art wrapped in a bourgeois thriller, about avant-garde art wrapped in a dinner party, pushing moral and aesthetic boundaries while collapsing any distinction between the two. In this nested construction, Brandon the murder artist becomes a figure of auto-critique or perhaps apologia. Did you think you were God, Alfred? By 1948, he’d already made dozens of films, often obliquely about sex and violence, across decades and continents. He’d become the world champion sick joke raconteur. Rope is a reckoning with the ethics of his genre.

By 1948, the world had changed. A few years earlier, Hitchcock’s friend (and Rope co-producer) Sidney Bernstein had asked him to advise on a film about Germany’s newly liberated concentration camps. As Kay Gladstone writes in Holocaust and the Moving Image, Hitchcock worried that “tricky editing” would let skeptics read its footage as fraudulent and asked the editors “to use as far as possible long shots and panning shots with no cuts.” The director took his own counsel to heart.

Rope was also his first color film, the start of his fascination with dull palettes. (A quarter-century later he’d limn Frenzy’s London with every shade of beige.) Genteel browns and grays dominate the penthouse, the hues of men’s suits. Only after nightfall does the apartment glow with, in Jacobs’ phrasing, “the expressive possibilities of urban neon light.” The dinner party takes place at the crest of postwar modernity, a world away from the camps. Here, among the East Coast intelligentsia, murder’s merely a thought experiment. When David’s father mentions Hitler, Brandon dismisses him as “a paranoiac savage.” Yet even in polite society, the evening can begin with a secret killing and end with that iniquity brought to light. “Perhaps what is called civilization is hypocrisy,” says Brandon. “Perhaps,” David’s father concedes.

In 1948, the world was changing. That year saw the publication of Gore Vidal’s landmark gay novel The City and the Pillar and the first of the Kinsey Reports. Antonioni was a documentarian about to make his first feature; Truffaut was a delinquent catching Hitchcock movies at the Cinémathèque. Rope’s amorality and pitch-black humor augur a world and a cinema that were yet to come. It’s thorny gay art through a straight auteur. The film’s last thirty seconds show Rupert’s back to the camera while Brandon sips his cocktail and Phillip plays a tune, the trio lit by flashing neon. In this denouement lie decadence and damnation, art and death, the Code-closeted past and a disaffected future.

#alfred hitchcock #rope film #rope movie #hitchcock #james stewart #farley granger #john dall #gore vidal #michelangelo antonioni #francois truffaut #frenzy film #the wrong house: the architecture of alfred hitchcock #musings #film writing #film essay #oscilloscope laboratories #o-scope labs #adam yauch #Beastie Boys

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theunofficialchurchofsatan · 7 years

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“A Clockwork Messiah” (Essay by High Preist Peter H Gilmore)

Mel Gibson’s film, “The Passion of The Christ” is a rather tedious exercise in graphic brutality and strained reaction shots, with a generous dollop of anti-Semitism and a soupçon of anti-paganism thrown in for good measure. In a clever fusion, Gibson melds the aesthetic sensibility of the plague-ridden late Middle Ages with the over-the-top mayhem of a contemporary shoot-’em-up video game to craft an ultra-violent “religious” film fit for today’s box office.

His Satan, an omnipresent, androgynous, deep-voiced figure wrapped in a cloak, is perhaps inspired by medieval depictions of “death triumphant”: a sexless, worm-riddled avatar of corruption. Satan at one point parodies images of the Madonna and Child by hefting a bloated demonic infant. It certainly suits the aesthetic choices made by the director, but is not congruent with our symbol of Satan as heroic individualist.

It seems pretentious to have the actors speak in Latin and Aramaic, but it’s all part of the director’s attempt to create a “you are there” sensibility in the viewer’s mind. In fact, the gospels which served as the source for this tale were crafted long after the time of the alleged events by people who could not have been present. Gibson is trying to sell the audience a myth by presenting it as if it were as authentic as a historically-accurate recreation of a Civil War battle. Additionally, the dialogue is often not even subtitled, particularly when Yeshua is being abused by the Romans, so those unfamiliar with Latin will miss the precise meaning of the epithets being showered upon the bruised Nazarene. Translating Latin curse words is a no-no; rubbing your nose in graphic violence is A-OK!

Gibson is trying to sell the audience a myth by presenting it as a historically-accurate recreation

of a Civil War battle.”

Like the Dark Age passion plays, the film focuses solely on the beating and crucifixion of Yeshua, and Gibson wastes no time in presenting the culprits. With a full-moonlit night to set a horror film context, Judas goes to the Sanhedrin and betrays his mentor for the traditional 30 pieces of silver. The Hebrew priests are depicted as heavyset, overdressed, and utterly dedicated to the murder of Yeshua, whom they consider a rival to their spiritual authority. They send their military lackeys, also Jews, to “begin the beguine” by putting a beating on Yeshua and his hippie-like followers in the garden of Gethsemane.

Contrast this image with the later depiction of the pragmatic figure of Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of this far-flung cesspit of a province filled with religious maniacs. He does not see why Yeshua should be killed, and only orders the already-battered and obviously meshuggah fellow to be flogged in hopes of appeasing the bloodthirsty Jewish ruling class. Now do you wonder why some folks might contend that this film has a certain slant?

Of course, the fellows who administer the punishment are a bunch of rowdy pagan brutes, dull-witted frat-boy-turned-corrections-officer types, who go too far. Here follows the most brutal whipping ever filmed. Yeshua, rather buff for a desert-dwelling prophet, is first caned until he is beaten down, his back deeply marked in the closely-depicted process. But he stands again, which prompts the sadistic Romans to choose more damaging implements, to wit, leather-thonged flails woven with metal beads. These are used with utmost effort and we are treated to close-up views of gobbets of flesh being torn from Yeshua’s body. He is nearly beaten to death, finally lying on the cobblestones in a literal sea of blood, and Greg Cannom—who is known for having done make-up effects for horror films—has wrought a body suit that lovingly details the ribs showing through the flayed flesh. Splatter fans may find this of interest. It certainly goes way beyond anything that could remotely be considered erotic sado-masochism into the realm of disgusting atrocity.

You all know the rest of the tale, but Gibson has added some personal touches.

Perhaps [Judas] should be considered the patron saint

of thankless tasks?”

We are treated to a number of flashbacks, one of which depicts Yeshua the carpenter as having crafted a table which is too tall for local traditions. When his mother remarks upon it, he says he’ll make chairs to match. So, not only is he the Messiah, but he’s a brilliant innovator of furniture design! I wonder if that bit was in one of the non-canonical gospels?

When Yeshua stumbles the second time on the way to his place of execution, his mother recalls in flashback a scene wherein little toddler Yeshua falls and she rushes to comfort him. Not particularly subtle.

We need not deal in detail with the inherent contradictions in the tale. However, it is interesting to note that, as shown in this film, Yeshua knows at the “final nosh” that he is going to be executed (as his deity-father wills), and he knows that Judas will betray him to set the deal in motion. But then Yeshua seems angered at Judas who is only doing what his God has ordained him to do. You’d think Judas, who supposedly loved and revered his mentor and thus felt great pain at being the one who had to do this, might actually be considered a hero by Christians for having to be placed in such a painful situation that he is driven to suicide. Perhaps he should be considered the patron saint of thankless tasks? Such an odd cult is Christianity.

Also of interest is the scene wherein the two criminals crucified along with Yeshua express their take on the situation. One believes in him as a holy man, the other challenges this dying Messiah to exercise his powers to get them the hell out of there. The doubter is punished when a raven arrives and pecks his eye out. Seems a tad bitchy of God, wouldn’t you say? The Romans who savaged Yeshua are unscathed, while somebody under great personal duress who presents a verbal challenge gets mutilated. Anyone else think this is a strange hierarchy of values? And of course, the Almighty lets his son be abused and saves the vengeful earthquake as an after-death climactic scattershot retribution. Poor timing? Why wreak havoc upon those who are doing what you wanted them to do, Jew and pagan alike? Seeking sense in this myth system has been fruitless for millennia.

When Longinus’ spear pierces the side of Yeshua to make certain he is dead, it releases such a fountain of blood and body fluids, that one must recall “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” to find a similarly overdone gout. Several people ecstatically bathe under this torrent; the director celebrates this revolting behavior.

The penultimate pieta image of Mary embracing the shattered body of her dead son was one of defeat and resignation. Indeed, that is a human touch, and would be the natural reaction to witnessing such events. There was no triumph and resistance and looking ahead to resurrection—only pain, degradation, and intense suffering. And since the director clearly blames this death on the Jewish community leaders, it wouldn’t surprise me that Christians who hold this myth dear might find such imagery spawning vengeful feelings toward those depicted as being responsible—as they also forget that their own deity is supposedly the ultimate author of the scenario. We all know that throughout history, Christianity, when linked up with the state, did turn implements of torture, similar to those used on Yeshua in this film, against anyone who would not buy into their sick faith, as well as against those “heretics” prone to hair-splitting of doctrine and dogma. They’ve had plenty of “tit-for-tat” over the past two thousand years, so one might reasonably expect they should now be sated.

This film takes abuse, torture and execution to pornographic excess and it is not suitable for viewing by children. If a film depicted any other individual—fictional or otherwise—being put through such a harrowing experience, I would think it likely that it would have been rated X, or banned outright as being obscene, perhaps even if it had been Hitler cast as the victim. That such generally objectionable imagery can be made palatable to a broad audience by placing it in a religious context is food for thought.

With that in mind, I could speculate that innovative pornographers might find this to be the time to introduce a new Messiah. A “spiritual” young lady (“hot” by contemporary standards, with her legal age statement properly on file), a true daughter of God, receives a vision that Mankind is so sinful that the death of Yeshua just wasn’t enough. She claims that God has inspired her to subject herself to the ultimate degradation of the world’s biggest “gang-bang,” so that Mankind’s multitudinous sins will be expiated through her selfless act as a receptacle for the jism of thousands of “fallen” men. They too will be saved through contact with this prostitute-paraclete. If such were realized with enough piety, perhaps in time this myth could be the foundation for a new religion? Is it any less ridiculous or obscene than what Gibson has portrayed?

It seems that many are forgetting that the imagery of Gibson’s film has been previously approached with the same glee. Recall the sequence in Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange” wherein violent delinquent Alexander De Lodge finally reads the “Holy Scriptures” while incarcerated and imagines himself as a Roman, lustily flogging Yeshua on the way to Golgotha. Gibson has made little Alex’s wet-dream into a feature-length snore/gore fest. Perhaps one day, this director—much as another one who uses savior images but casts extraterrestrials in such roles—will feel the need to retouch his work. He might see that he gave torture too much of the center stage, and so he will create a revised “special edition.” In this, the brief image of resurrection will be extended into a view of Yeshua and the believer-thief entering into a brightly-lit heavenly kingdom, thronged with angels, much as Spielberg’s Paul Neary entered the mother ship in the revamped ��CE3K.” Or perhaps the impulses that fueled “Braveheart” will come to fore and he’ll depict the risen Yeshua harrowing Hell in a flashy action sequence.

Your present humble narrator leaves you now with the proposal that this dull work is indeed an embodiment of the essence of Christianity. Witness the concentration on pain and suffering as the central value, joined with the idea of a father-deity torturing his child to death and this being celebrated as a positive image. We Satanists find it accurate to the spirit of Saul of Tarsus (aka “Saint Paul”), the true creator of Christianity, and we reject all of this as a vile creed, unfit for anyone who loves life and seeks joy in the world. I’ve always thought it a perversion to link the word “passion” to these mythical events of hideous torture, and this film has more than confirmed my opinion, as well as my wariness of those who do feel that this is a proper use for the word. Such twisted folk cannot be trusted.

#satanist #the church of satan #satanism #satan #lucifer #leviathan #belial #peggynadramia #peter h gilmore #antonlavey

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pinarworks · 7 years

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''Hell is Other people'' Michael Haneke’s 2005 movie Cache is categorized as a ‘’psychological thriller’’ in most magazine reviews and/or online streaming sites and DVD shelves; but after a close watching, apart from leaving the audience shocked and thrilled, it also leaves a profoundly bitter and unidentifiable taste in one’s mouth; because under the disguise of the category of psychological thriller, Cache is also a movie about colonialism, and its historical, physical and affective implications on people and societies. The movie starts with a stable sight of a house, shot from a direct angle at a distance. It’s a nice, peaceful street with bird sounds and not much traffic or noise and all the passersby are white. The audience instantly gets that it’s a middle class neighborhood which then is confirmed by the street sign that says Rue Des Iris. After a few minutes of the same sight we hear people talking over the view and thus understand that this is a videotape that was sent anonymously to the people who live in the house that the tape showed directly. It’s the house of Georges and Anne Laurent, a middle class, white couple with a teenage son named Pierrot. The tape shows nothing else than the house and the couple leaving and entering their building. It clearly has a message that says ‘’you’re being watched’’ and is only the first of many to come. Throughout the movie the mystery behind the ambivalent videotapes unfolds slowly but not completely, we never learn who actually did send them. After the first or second one, the tapes begin to be sent in a folded paper with a child’s drawing on it, each time a different drawing. First it’s a drawing of a kid with blood coming from his mouth. Then it’s a rooster whose throat has been cut and is dead with blood spilled around. Another tape features shootings of Georges’ childhood home in which he was grown up and then another tape leads to a door of a flat in a poor district of town. All of these mean nothing to Anne but Georges gets the clues and things start to unfold. By the means of these tapes we slowly dive into Georges’ past and also unconscious and learn that he has a secret that’s hidden from everyone and also himself: Turns out when he was 6 years old, he had prevented an Algerian boy called Majid, whose family were working as servants in Georges’ house and were killed in the Paris massacre of 1961, to be adopted by his own parents through lying about him because he was jealous of him and ‘’did not want to share his room with him’’. In this sense the events that the Laurent family encounter emerge as the reflection of French society’s colonial past. The hidden cameras, the hidden secrets and lies and things that are left ambivalent in their life all come together to echo French society’s hidden secrets and dirty past, both stigmatized with traumas of whose effects are still vibrant although kept hidden and unconfronted and unrecognized. As Georges who does not want to recognize his hidden past about Majid, France does not want to recognize and reconcile with its own colonial past too. In the movie Georges grew up while the French/Algerian war was going on and there were many protests and resistance movements against French government within France especially in Paris. It was in those days that his parents hired an Algerian family as helpers in the house. When the Algerian couple died during the Parisian massacre of October 17, 1961, Georges’ parents decided to adopt their orphaned son Majid, may be out of guilt. Georges was enraged with fear and jealousy and he told lies about Majid. He told his parents that Majid was coughing blood and then he killed a rooster by cutting off its head in cold blood (although it was Georges that told Majid his parents would only adopt him if he would cut the rooster’ head off). We see how Georges creates his own oxidant in the form of Majid as France created its oxidant through Algeria. Similar to Gobineau’s racial characteristics according to Hotze (Young, 1995), Majid is remembered and portrayed throughout the movie by Georges as an animal-like creature, who is prone to manipulation and with little moral values. Mahmut Mutman quotes Johannes Fabian when talking about how Western hegemony was constructed: Through ‘’pushing the other back in time’’. (Mutman, 1992-93). Majid stays that savage child who can kill an animal with a blink of an eye, needs to be taken care of, kept under control (Majid has been sent to a hospital or an asylum forcedly after Georges’ lies). Just as Algeria and Algerians needs to be kept under control. The events in which Majid’s parents were killed is known as the Paris Massacre of 1961, in which the police killed many pro-Algerian demonstrators by throwing them into the Seine River to drown. France did not recognize or apologize about this event until 1998 and even then, the government acknowledged only 40 deaths, although it’s been known that the death toll was more than that, between 100 to 300. This insistence on not recognizing the other, is prominent in both Georges own experience with Majid and France’s with Algeria. When George goes up to where Majid lives to confront him about the videotapes, we see how Majid is trying to open up a conversation. He is calm and careful and refuses he has anything to do with the tapes but Georges only wants to shout down at him and make him confess his supposed ‘’guilt’’. When Anne asks Georges about what actually happened back then that would have caused Majid to hold such grudge till now, Georges responds ‘’I was a kid, I don’t remember, isn’t it normal? Should I call it a tragedy?’’. He keeps ignoring, not recognizing and overreacting. Seems like he never wants to recognize Majid as a person. Just like French government’s resistance to accepting the actual death toll and just sticking to the number of 40. After all, in turbulent times like war, death is normal, isn’t it? Georges cannot accept that it was a tragedy. France cannot accept it was a massacre, Turkey won’t accept there was an Armenian Genocide. These are all banned words from the consciousness of people and communities of ‘’official histories’’ of dominant powers written by white Western (or Western wannabe) men. The first anonymous videotape instantly evokes some tension between the Georges and Anne as a couple which continue to climb up until the end of the movie. Anne is sure that the tape was sent for Georges although there’s no note with it that confirms this suspicion; and so sure is Georges too. He is the white male protagonist, the subject, of the movie, just like the white western male main agent of history in Western civilization, so it’s only natural that we assume things are going to revolve around him. This assumption is perpetuated in the way that representation is handled, very subtle but very effectively, in the movie. For instance, the neighborhood where the couple live, the interior of their home and their jobs: Anne is a book publisher and Georges is an intellectual discussion TV show host. They are surrounded by symbols of civilization: books: Books in their living room, books in the studio of Georges’ show, even books in their kitchen. They drink wine at dinners, invite friends over and talk. There’s an ‘imagined community’ of intellectuals, in a sense, of people who can judge good books from bad, who can discuss about art and ‘other’ people. They conversate about things, mostly superficial things that seem to mean nothing but they continue to conversate nonetheless. After all, in a dualist world that Western metaphysics offer, speech is the Meta medium in which a rational and authentic civilization can be erected by human animals who ‘speak’. The world that the videotape is recording is dominantly white too. The Laurents are surrounded by white, educated and secular intellectual ‘French’. The only black person who can find a way into this world is the ‘nameless’ black woman on their dinner party who looks very beautiful but speaks almost nothing. She seems to be the girlfriend of one of the male guests. Apparently she was ‘’saved by a white man from black men’’ (Spivak, 1988). We can assume she is only there because she has the adequate social capitals to be included in the dinner table, and also she may be one of those which Fanon calls as ‘black skin, white mask’, (Fanon, 1952) in the sense that she is a docile, assimilated, civilized, compromised ‘other’ who has been fit into the norms of the ‘mOther’ country, in a Lacanian sense, that is France which ‘nurtured’ her. The movie is full of subalterns in this sense. The power dynamics between characters and the impact of their positions are felt throughout the movie. As the white male subject of the movie, Georges has the strongest position which later is being challenged by ‘’the other’s’’ intervention. As a woman and a wife, Anne is subaltern to Georges but then again she is in a stronger position when compared with Majid. These subalterns ‘cannot speak’ or to put it more accurately are not ‘allowed to speak’ by those who hold dominant positions. Anne is being shut down by male characters in the movie all the time, her husband Georges, her friend Pierre, even by her child Pierrot, who believes she’s having an affair with Pierre and does not let her talk and explain it is not the case so. Once the anonymous videotapes start to come wrapped in drawings, Georges repressed past begins its return journey. Something clicks and the videotapes start to be interfered with a memory of Georges from then on; a flashback that shows a little boy with blood in his mouth being caught by a stranger ‘gaze’. This boy is probably Majid, the ‘other’ Georges hated when he was a child, did not want to share his room and his world with. The ‘other’ that he was jealous of. The ‘other’ which he constructed as ‘the other’ in a way as what Said would say, through lying and hence creating knowledge about. But once in a while, his narrative is challenged. The videotapes challenge his self-esteem and unconscious. Also in the scene when he is almost hit by a bike, we see how his constructed reality is shaken too. The rider of the bike is one of the very few black persons we see on screen other than the guest in the dinner party (and apart from Majid and his son of course). This young black person though, is not as silent, docile and ‘fragile’ as the black woman guest at the dinner. This young black boy is angry; he won’t be silenced. He talks back and corners Georges’ inner fear of the other. He symbolizes the return of Majid; the boy Georges did not want to be brothers with when they were little. Just like Majid, he too emerges as ‘another’ problem, a bump, in his white, clean, isolated, Western life. This constructed narrative about the other, the produced knowledge about the other comes in frequently in the movie. Georges’ isolated life filled with Western ideas, books and intellectual gatherings, is so sterile and separated from the ‘other’ side of France and then the world. He is only coming face to face with reality through recorded material. First these anonymous videotapes that are sent to him and then the news in the background in his home, telling about the war in Iraq and the invasion of Iraq by the European collaborative military forces. As in his TV show he is in charge of creating whatever knowledge he can create. As he can cut and edit the conversations and the flow of the TV show in a way as he thinks is appropriate, he can lie to his wife and mother about his past, can hold back certain facts or push others in front to create a new form of knowledge about his past and about Majid in order to deal with them more easily. After all, as Said argues ‘’Knowledge of subject races or Orientals is what makes their management easy and profitable’’ (Said, 1978). As a person who is very used to being under the camera’s gaze on TV and on media, why are these new surveillance tapes so scary for Georges? Because in life he has the control of the camera, he can cut and edit what the camera shoots in the production room, he excludes the scenes he does not like, he can create a new narrative a new discourse so to say among the existing ones by cutting, excluding and pasting the tapes. He wants to be the sole subject, the agent, the person that controls ‘the gaze’, he wants to be in control of the discourses. Because he knows what a ‘created’ narrative can do, he is scared of this new, ‘alien’ camera with an unknown person behind it. The anonymity of the camera drives him crazy. That’s why he actually does not question a lot. He immediately decides that it’s Majid or his son. He wants to have conclusions and leave the problem behind. The mainstream narrative, the representation of the other, the Orient in Georges’ mind, allows him to come to such conclusions very easily. Georges’ and the rest of the white adults’ problematic relation with ‘others’ show itself in the way they tend to infantilize the others in the movie. Georges constantly infantilizes his wife Anne, he lies to her, does not think she’s capable of understanding him and handling the situation. Then he infantilizes Majid, when they meet, keeps shouting at him, does not listen to him. He also infantilizes Majid’s son too. All of Majid’s attempts on being recognized on Georges side fail. In the end he commits suicide in front of Georges, cutting his own throat like he cut off that rooster’s throat. In a way he fulfills Georges’ fantasy of him being the savage, uncivilized, irrational creature. Frantz Fanon suggests that neither the colonizer or the colonized is free from the damage that colonization brings. The subject/other relationship of Georges and Majid gets complicated every time an attempt on recognition is rejected. The historical baggage this relationship has accumulated in both of these men’s and even in their family’s psyches, cannot be erased, forgotten or undone After Majid dies, his son comes to see Georges, still asking for recognition but the reaction is the name: No time for talking or trying to understand. Georges’ paranoia is still living as if he wants to keep it alive by refusing to solve the issue through talking. It’s the same for France and Algeria too. The actual war is over now. We are supposedly in the period of ‘decolonization’. The subject devoured its desire. But the after effects still show. Either in the form of increased terrorists acts in the colonized side or in the form of increased paranoia on the colonizer’s. Georges’ paranoia is similar to France’s obsession on secularism that bans the burka, makes Islamophobic legislations etc. It’s a vicious circle feeding on each other and keeping the fire burning. Since there’s no ‘genealogy’ of guilt, pain and horror prevails. Despite looking and acting like an intellectual, Georges actually lives a very close life, limited to the time he spends in his work, the dinner parties with friends and the guests he invites to his TV show. I believe there’s a critique here directed at the intellectual middle class of French society and then the Western world which sees itself as the center of the world and is not very much interested in what happens in the rest of the world. Georges is indifferent to the war news on TV at home, although claiming to be an intellectual, he does not seem to be bothered by what’s going on beyond his own doors, his own world. It’s the West and the rest. It’s Georges Laurent and the rest. On one scene we see a glimpse of a scene of Georges’ TV show in which guests talk about famous French poet Arthur Rimbaud. I think there’s a double reference here in the usage of Rimbaud as the main subject of that specific show. Apart from being a successful poet, Rimbaud is also known to have enlisted for Dutch Colonial Army and worked in the Dutch colonization of Indonesia and dealt with slave-trading too. He may be used as a symbol for France’s colonial past and also as a reference to the role of the intellectuals in sustaining the status quo, implying that those who are ‘sophisticated’ may very well be not free of responsibility of a collective crime. The movie ends without any conventional ending. Majid kills himself, Georges goes on with his busy life, refusing to confront Majid’s son, still not sure who shot and sent the tapes. The only clue of a redemption/reconciliation is visible for a moment in the final scene that is shot through a video camera again, probably recording that scene too, in which Majid’s son (whom we never learn the actual name of) visits Georges’ son Pierrot after school. They talk a bit and part in seemingly good moods. May be it’s a reference to the idea of letting the ‘subaltern speak’. May be if Majid could have spoken and be recognized as his son was recognized by Pierrot, he would have not killed himself. In this very scene, Majid’s son the subaltern speaks and apparently when allowed, he can speak.

#cache #haneke #postcolonial theory

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theconservativebrief · 6 years

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This July 4, let’s not mince words: American independence in 1776 was a monumental mistake. We should be mourning the fact that we left the United Kingdom, not cheering it.

Of course, evaluating the wisdom of the American Revolution means dealing with counterfactuals. As any historian would tell you, this is a messy business. We obviously can’t be entirely sure how America would have fared if it had stayed in the British Empire longer, perhaps gaining independence a century or so later, along with Canada.

But I’m reasonably confident a world in which the revolution never happened would be better than the one we live in now, for three main reasons: Slavery would’ve been abolished earlier, American Indians would’ve faced rampant persecution but not the outright ethnic cleansing Andrew Jackson and other American leaders perpetrated, and America would have a parliamentary system of government that makes policymaking easier and lessens the risk of democratic collapse.

The main reason the revolution was a mistake is that the British Empire, in all likelihood, would have abolished slavery earlier than the US did, and with less bloodshed.

Abolition in most of the British Empire occurred in 1834, following the passage of the Slavery Abolition Act. That left out India, but slavery was banned there, too, in 1843. In England itself, slavery was illegal at least going back to 1772. That’s decades earlier than the United States.

This alone is enough to make the case against the revolution. Decades less slavery is a massive humanitarian gain that almost certainly dominates whatever gains came to the colonists from independence.

The main benefit of the revolution to colonists was that it gave more political power to America’s white male minority. For the vast majority of the country — its women, slaves, American Indians — the difference between disenfranchisement in an independent America and disenfranchisement in a British-controlled colonial America was negligible. If anything, the latter would’ve been preferable, since at least women and minorities wouldn’t be singled out for disenfranchisement. From the vantage point of most of the country, who cares if white men had to suffer through what everyone else did for a while longer, especially if them doing so meant slaves gained decades of free life?

It’s true that had the US stayed, Britain would have had much more to gain from the continuance of slavery than it did without America. It controlled a number of dependencies with slave economies — notably Jamaica and other islands in the West Indies — but nothing on the scale of the American South. Adding that into the mix would’ve made abolition significantly more costly.

But the South’s political influence within the British Empire would have been vastly smaller than its influence in the early American republic. For one thing, the South, like all other British dependencies, lacked representation in Parliament. The Southern states were colonies, and their interests were discounted by the British government accordingly. But the South was also simply smaller as a chunk of the British Empire’s economy at the time than it was as a portion of America’s. The British crown had less to lose from the abolition of slavery than white elites in an independent America did.

The revolutionaries understood this. Indeed, a desire to preserve slavery helped fuel Southern support for the war. In 1775, after the war had begun in Massachusetts, the Earl of Dunmore, then governor of Virginia, offered the slaves of rebels freedom if they came and fought for the British cause. Eric Herschthal, a PhD student in history at Columbia, notes that the proclamation united white Virginians behind the rebel effort. He quotes Philip Fithian, who was traveling through Virginia when the proclamation was made, saying, “The Inhabitants of this Colony are deeply alarmed at this infernal Scheme. It seems to quicken all in Revolution to overpower him at any Risk.” Anger at Dunmore’s emancipation ran so deep that Thomas Jefferson included it as a grievance in a draft of the Declaration of Independence. That’s right: the declaration could’ve included “they’re conscripting our slaves” as a reason for independence.

For white slaveholders in the South, Simon Schama writes in Rough Crossings, his history of black loyalism during the Revolution, the war was “a revolution, first and foremost, mobilized to protect slavery.”

Slaves also understood that their odds of liberation were better under British rule than independence. Over the course of the war, about 100,000 African slaves escaped, died, or were killed, and tens of thousands enlisted in the British army, far more than joined the rebels. “Black Americans’ quest for liberty was mostly tied to fighting for the British — the side in the War for Independence that offered them freedom,” historian Gary Nash writes in The Forgotten Fifth, his history of African Americans in the revolution. At the end of the war, thousands who helped the British were evacuated to freedom in Nova Scotia, Jamaica, and England.

This is not to say the British were motivated by a desire to help slaves; of course they weren’t. But American slaves chose a side in the revolution, the side of the crown. They were no fools. They knew that independence meant more power for the plantation class that had enslaved them and that a British victory offered far greater prospects for freedom.

Starting with the Proclamation of 1763, the British colonial government placed firm limits on westward settlement in the United States. It wasn’t motivated by an altruistic desire to keep American Indians from being subjugated or anything; it just wanted to avoid border conflicts.

But all the same, the policy enraged American settlers, who were appalled that the British would seem to side with Indians over white men. “The British government remained willing to conceive of Native Americans as subjects of the crown, similar to colonists,” Ethan Schmidt writes in Native Americans in the American Revolution. “American colonists … refused to see Indians as fellow subjects. Instead, they viewed them as obstacles in the way of their dreams of land ownership and trading wealth.” This view is reflected in the Declaration of Independence, which attacks King George III for backing “merciless Indian Savages.”

American independence made the proclamation void here. It’s not void in Canada — indeed, there the 1763 proclamation is viewed as a fundamental document providing rights to self-government to First Nations tribes. It’s mentioned explicitly in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (Canada’s Bill of Rights), which protects “any rights or freedoms that have been recognized by the Royal Proclamation of October 7, 1763” for all aboriginal people. Historian Colin Calloway writes in The Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the Transformation of North America that the proclamation “still forms the basis for dealings between Canada’s government and Canada’s First Nations.”

And, unsurprisingly, Canada didn’t see Indian wars and removals as large and sweeping as occurred in the US. They still committed horrible, indefensible crimes. Canada, under British rule and after, brutally mistreated aboriginal people, not least through government-inflicted famines and the state’s horrific seizure of children from their families so they could attend residential schools. But the country didn’t experience a westward expansion as violent and deadly as that pursued by the US government and settlers. Absent the revolution, Britain probably would’ve moved into Indian lands. But fewer people would have died.

Robert Lindneux

None of this is to minimize the extent of British and Canadian crimes against Natives. “It’s a hard case to make because even though I do think Canada’s treatment of Natives was better than the United States, it was still terrible,” the Canadian essayist Jeet Heer tells me in an email (Heer has also written a great case against American independence). “On the plus side for Canada: there were no outright genocides like the Trail of Tears (aside from the Beothuks of Newfoundland). The population statistics are telling: 1.4 million people of aboriginal descent in Canada as against 5.2 million in the USA. Given the fact that America is far more hospitable as an environment and has 10 times the non-aboriginal population, that’s telling.”

Independence also enabled acquisition of territory in the West through the Louisiana Purchase and the Mexican-American War. That ensured that America’s particularly rapacious brand of colonialism ensnared yet more native peoples. And while Mexico and France were no angels, what America brought was worse. Before the war, the Apache and Comanche were in frequent violent conflict with the Mexican government. But they were Mexican citizens. The US refused to make them American citizens for a century. And then, of course, it violently forced them into reservations, killing many in the process.

American Indians would have still, in all likelihood, faced violence and oppression absent American independence, just as First Nations people in Canada did. But American-scale ethnic cleansing wouldn’t have occurred. And like America’s slaves, American Indians knew this. Most tribes sided with the British or stayed neutral; only a small minority backed the rebels. Generally speaking, when a cause is opposed by the two most vulnerable groups in a society, it’s probably a bad idea. So it is with the cause of American independence.

Honestly, I think earlier abolition alone is enough to make the case against the revolution, and it combined with less-horrible treatment of American Indians is more than enough. But it’s worth taking a second to praise a less important but still significant consequence of the US sticking with Britain: we would’ve, in all likelihood, become a parliamentary democracy rather than a presidential one.

And parliamentary democracies are a lot, lot better than presidential ones. They’re significantly less likely to collapse into dictatorship because they don’t lead to irresolvable conflicts between, say, the president and the legislature. They lead to much less gridlock.

In the US, activists wanting to put a price on carbon emissions spent years trying to put together a coalition to make it happen, mobilizing sympathetic businesses and philanthropists and attempting to make bipartisan coalition — and they still failed to pass cap and trade, after millions of dollars and man hours. In the UK, the Conservative government decided it wanted a carbon tax. So there was a carbon tax. Just like that. Passing big, necessary legislation — in this case, legislation that’s literally necessary to save the planet — is a whole lot easier with parliaments than with presidential systems.

This is no trivial matter. Efficient passage of legislation has huge humanitarian consequences. It makes measures of planetary importance, like carbon taxes, easier to get through; they still face political pushback, of course — Australia’s tax got repealed, after all — but they can be enacted in the first place, which is far harder in the US system. And the efficiency of parliamentary systems enables larger social welfare programs that reduce inequality and improve life for poor citizens. Government spending in parliamentary countries is about 5 percent of GDP higher, after controlling for other factors, than in presidential countries. If you believe in redistribution, that’s very good news indeed.

The Westminister system of parliamentary democracy also benefits from weaker upper houses. The US is saddled with a Senate that gives Wyoming the same power as California, which has more than 66 times as many people. Worse, the Senate is equal in power to the lower, more representative house. Most countries following the British system have upper houses — only New Zealand was wise enough to abolish it — but they’re far, far weaker than their lower houses. The Canadian Senate and the House of Lords affect legislation only in rare cases. At most, they can hold things up a bit or force minor tweaks. They aren’t capable of obstruction anywhere near the level of the US Senate.

Former Canadian Governor General Michaëlle Jean. Sophia Paris/MINUSTAH via Getty Images

Finally, we’d still likely be a monarchy, under the rule of Elizabeth II, and constitutional monarchy is the best system of government known to man. Generally speaking, in a parliamentary system, you need a head of state who is not the prime minister to serve as a disinterested arbiter when there are disputes about how to form a government — say, if the largest party should be allowed to form a minority government or if smaller parties should be allowed to form a coalition, to name a recent example from Canada. That head of state is usually a figurehead president elected by the parliament (Germany, Italy) or the people (Ireland, Finland), or a monarch. And monarchs are better.

Monarchs are more effective than presidents precisely because they lack any semblance of legitimacy. It would be offensive for Queen Elizabeth or her representatives in Canada, New Zealand, etc. to meddle in domestic politics. Indeed, when the governor-general of Australia did so in 1975 it set off a constitutional crisis that made it clear such behavior would not be tolerated. But figurehead presidents have some degree of democratic legitimacy and are typically former politicians. That enables a greater rate of shenanigans — like when Italian President Giorgio Napolitano schemed, successfully, to remove Silvio Berlusconi as prime minister due at least in part to German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s entreaties to do so.

Napolitano is the rule, rather than the exception. Oxford political scientists Petra Schleiter and Edward Morgan-Jones have found that presidents, whether elected indirectly by parliament or directly by the people, are likelier to allow governments to change without new elections than monarchs are. In other words, they’re likelier to change the government without any democratic input at all. Monarchy is, perhaps paradoxically, the more democratic option.

John Singleton Copley depicts a black loyalist soldier in “The Death of Major Peirson.”

Original Source -> 3 reasons the American Revolution was a mistake

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elizabethleslie7654 · 7 years

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Donald Trump’s Christmas Present to the Alt Right

all kinds of cool jewelry and no shipping or getting mobbed t the mall

by Jay Lorenz

*Editor’s note: this article was originally published on Christmas Eve 2016.

Europe and America may be under invasion by third world savages who grow bolder every day (if anyone forgot, the series of Muslim attacks this week reminded them), but Christmas is right around the corner. Christmas is not a time to despair, but a time to gather with our families and loved ones to celebrate our religion, culture, and traditions. In the spirit of Christmas, I’m going to spread some optimism and holiday cheer with today’s article.

If you feel a warmth in your heart this Christmas that was missing last year, I think I know why: the next President of the United States plans on barring Muslims from entering the country.

This week’s dose of Muslim violence prompted Trump to make several statements on the Muslim Question. In a press release on the Berlin attacks, Trump stated, “ISIS and other Islamist terrorists continually slaughter Christians in their communities and places of worship as part of their global jihad.” This is a very interesting statement. By pointing out that this was an attack by Muslims on Christians, Trump invokes the Christian identity of America and the West. This is important, because in order to decide who should be kept out of our country, we first must define who we are. This is a distinction which has been missing in our recent administrations. If America has no identity—no racial, ethnic, or religious pillars—then there is no basis for barring anyone from becoming a citizen. Obama and Clinton made it very clear that, to them, America is not a White, or even a Christian, nation. In fact, we are a “nation of immigrants,” which means we’re not a nation at all. If there is no “us,” then there cannot be a “them.” To the Left, a Muslim murdering Christians is not an attack on us. It is a member of one of “our communities” attacking members of another one of “our communities.” Since they are already valued, diverse members of the rich multicultural tapestry of America, Muslims cannot be singled out as problematic.

This thinking will not take place in the Trump administration. Trump has an instinct to distinguish between us and them. I call it an instinct because I do not think his strategy comes from a careful reading of Carl Schmitt’s political theory. Rather it comes from a natural tribal impulse and from an understanding that the American public has this impulse. He’s the only major player in American politics currently willing to say that Americans are a people with an identity. This is one of the key reasons for his election victory, and one of the clear mandates he has received—Americans want a nation again. Despite Liberal kvetching over Trump’s rhetoric on identity, Trump’s idea of American identity is not White nationalism. It is something closer to civic nationalism. Even if Trump were a White nationalist, it wouldn’t be politically possible for him to discuss racial identity in the current climate. For now, we should be very happy with this characterization. We are a nation; they are foreigners. We are Christians; they are Muslims. Do we really want to let them into our country?

This is the question Trump is asking. Should Muslims be in our country? In other remarks this week, Trump appears to have given us his answer. Wednesday, when asked if the Berlin terrorist attack would alter his policy toward Muslims, Trump said, “You know my plans.” This is the second key quote from this week. Trump clearly delineated an “us” and “them” in his previous statement. This second statement is an affirmation of his plan to ban “them.” He has already laid out a plan to bar Muslims from entering America. He did it explicitly last December. Then, he changed the wording to bar immigration “from areas of the world where there is a proven history of terrorism.” The second statement was a euphemism for the original policy. The media has been in hysteria over this proposal ever since. Without a doubt, he’s correct in saying they know his plan—they’ve been obsessing over it for a year. He could have walked back the stance this week. He could have said something ambiguous about protecting “all Americans” after such a tragedy. He didn’t. He said “I’ve been proven to be right. One hundred percent correct.” He said he was sticking to the plan.

When the ban was originally suggested, everyone, including the Alt-Right, scrambled to find out if it was possible. Because of this, many of you have seen the following information before, but it bears repeating: it is one hundred percent legal and constitutional for the President of the United States to bar Muslims from entering the country.

Title 8, Section 1182 of the U.S. Code gives the President the authority to enact an immigration ban on any group of people. The President “may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens.” This is precisely what Trump has suggested he will do. Congress would need a veto-proof majority (two-thirds in the House and Senate) to override any policy Trump institutes in this area. With a Republican majority in congress, he should be able to pass the Muslim ban. There are sure to be plenty of cucks on the Muslim Question, but Republican voters largely favor a Muslim ban. A Morning Consult poll done in March showed that 50 percent of Americans, 71 percent of Republicans, and 84 percent of Trump supporters favored the Muslim ban.1 Various other polls have showed similar results. The Muslim ban is more popular than Trump. With Trump in the Presidency and pushing for the ban, it will be very difficult for the required number of congressmen to ignore their constituents on this issue.

We need to continue to hold Trump’s feet to the fire on the Muslim ban, but his recent comments are promising. Trump has said repeatedly, “We’re going to be saying ‘Merry Christmas’ again.” And we should. We should say it to everyone every chance we get this week. But, with his recent comments, Trump has put a different phrase in our minds as well this Christmas: “Remove Kebab.”

That extra holiday cheer we feel this year. That feeling that things are finally going our way. That feeling that 2016 was truly special. That feeling that we’re actually going to physically bar Muslims from entering our country. That is President Trump’s Christmas present to the Alt-Right.

1Easley, Cameron. “Half of Voters Back Muslim Travel Ban, Patrols of Muslim Neighborhoods.” Morning Consult. March 29, 2016. morningconsult.com (accessed December 22, 2016).

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therightnewsnetwork · 7 years

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British Medical Association Votes to Legalize Abortions Up to Birth

On June 27 delegates at the BMA annual representative meeting (ARM) voted to support the decriminalization of abortion. You can listen to the whole debate here and five brilliant two-minute speeches against the motion here.

The opposition speakers spoke with grace, eloquence, and courage but were unable to sway the meeting.

Many people may be surprised to know that abortion is still illegal in Britain. After all, there have been over 8 million abortions in Britain since the Abortion Act came into being 50 years ago in 1967.

Department of Health figures for England and Wales released last month show that there were 190,406 abortions in 2016 and that 98% of these were carried out on mental health grounds. The Abortion Act was intended to be restrictive, allowing abortion only in limited circumstances, but its provisions have been very liberally interpreted by doctors so that now one in every five pregnancies ends in abortion.

So in practice, although abortion is still technically illegal, the law is widely flouted. But, nonetheless, abortion remains illegal under the Offences Against the Person Act (OAPA). The clue as to why this law exists is the name – it’s based on the idea that the baby in the womb is a person who deserves legal protection along with the mother; in other words, that both lives matter. Every abortion stops a human heart beating and that is why abortion has been treated as legally different from any other medical procedure. It takes a human life.

Here are ten observations on the vote to legalize all abortion.

1. This change was brought about by a very small number of doctors. The BMA, Britain’s medical trade union, currently has 156,000 doctors and 19,000 medical students as members. That’s a total of 175,000. Only 500 members, however, attended the annual representative meeting and the five parts of the six-part motion supporting decriminalization [the other part was non-controversial] were backed by fewer than half of these. There were also a significant number of abstentions which were not recorded as the electronic voting devices only gave ‘yes’ and ‘no’ options leaving delegates to wave cards to abstain. Between 155 and 180 people voted in favor of each decriminalization clause.

This is about 0.1% or one thousandth of the total membership of BMA. Given that those who attend trade union meetings tend to be more socially liberal in their outlook the vote can hardly be taken as representative. It is striking that over 1,500 doctors and medical students signed an open letter in just six days leading up to the vote calling on the BMA to reject the motion. This vote is reminiscent of a small number of members moving the BMA neutral on assisted suicide back in 2005. That vote produced similar outrage and was actually overturned a year later.

2. The BMA has betrayed its own ethics and turned its back on 2,500 years of history. The Hippocratic Oath (400 BC), which all doctors used to take on graduation, gives a blanket prohibition on all abortion: ‘I will give no deadly medicine to anyone if asked, nor suggest such counsel, nor in like manner will I give a woman a pessary to produce abortion.’ It is somewhat ironic that just 70 years ago in 1947 the BMA called abortion ‘the greatest crime.’

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The Declaration of Geneva (1948), which the BMA once affirmed, declares ‘I will maintain the utmost respect for human life from the time of conception even against threat.’ So by becoming abortion’s greatest promoter and facilitator the medical profession in this country has betrayed its own historic position.

3. This vote was carefully stage-managed. Last year the same BMA meeting agreed to do some research into decriminalization of abortion and a 52 page briefing document was produced. This was purported to hold an objective centre ground but was heavily supportive of decriminalization and selective in its presentation. The document was ‘discussed’ in an almost unprecedented one-hour meeting immediately prior to the debate and one attendee remarked to me that after this they felt the vote was already a ‘done deal.’ It was very clear that some members of the BMA ethics committee who had contributed substantially to the report were heavily committed to decriminalization. One, Wendy Savage, claimed to have performed 10,000 abortions personally.

The debate was poorly informed and in fact actively misled. On two occasions, during the debate itself, incorrect information was given to delegates which would have affected their assessment of the issues. Several opposition delegates mentioned a ComRes poll which showed that only 1% of women wanted the abortion upper limit of 24 weeks to increase and 70% wanted to see a decrease to 20 weeks or below.

In order to undermine this poll one pro-abortion delegate, Emma Runswick, gave a ‘point of information’: ‘The ComRes poll has been mentioned a number of times. I googled it and it had 2,008 people in it. 904 were men, more than 1,000 of these people were over 50, 24-34-year-olds 290 of them and no under 25s. Thank you.’

The obvious intention as to undermine the poll by implying that under 25s were not asked their views. The totals of 2,008 and 904 she quoted were actually correct but 186 of these were people aged 18-24. How Runswick missed this is hard to understand as these figures were all on the same page in the report. Another speaker, Coral Jones, responded to the point made in a prominent Canadian medical journal that Canada has become ‘a haven for parents who would terminate female fetuses in favor of having sons’ after decriminalizing abortion. Jones announced that she also had googled male/female ratios in Canada and found them to be one to one. She conveniently ignored the fact that these variations in ratios noted in the journal occurred only in certain ethnic subgroups. This disinformation had the effect of undermining the credibility of opposition speakers who were actually telling the truth.

4. There was huge confusion among delegates about abortion gestational limits. The most obvious, and perhaps, the only way of decriminalizing abortion would be to repeal section 58 and 59 of the OAPA, which makes carrying out abortions, or supplying drugs or equipment for that purpose, illegal. This would render the Abortion Act, with all its provisions including the 24 weeks gestation limit, null and void. The fall-back position would be then the Infant Life (Preservation) Act (1929), which makes it illegal to destroy a child ‘capable of being born alive.’

The problem is that this Act defines this threshold as 28 weeks, although many babies born now as early as 23 to 24 weeks will survive with good neonatal care. So scrapping the relevant sections of the OAPA would leave us with a 28-week limit. If the ILPA were also to go it would make abortion legal for any and every reason right up to term. Delegates asked the chairman of the ethics committee, John Chisholm, to clarify this but the answer of 24 weeks was given with no legal justification or explanation. Later, after the vote had been taken there was an apology from the chair of the meeting about the confusion this created. As it is, the meeting referred the matter of ‘viability’ to the Royal College of obstetricians and gynecologists to seek their advice. But it was not clear how long that would take.

5. The decriminalization move was backed by a campaign run by abortion provider BPAS (British pregnancy advisory service). BPAS have specifically acknowledged that they campaign for removal of all gestation of time limits to abortion. Their CEO Ann Furedi stated categorically at the London launch of the campaign, ‘I want to be very, very clear and blunt… There should be no legal upper limit.’

Abortion providers have a huge vested interest in decriminalization because it would mean far less accountability and scrutiny for them. It’s fully understandable why they might seek this given the fact that the Care Quality Commission (CQC) had to step in to protect women from potential harm at Marie Stopes abortion clinics last year. Their report showed doctors had been block-signing consent forms, babies had been left in open beds, women were left at risk of infection, staff were not trained in how to respond to deteriorating patients and post-surgery safety checks had been completed before the surgery started.

7. Regulation alone, which is what the BMA is seeking, pulls any legal teeth from abortion oversight. Regulation, as opposed to legislation, would effectively leave doctors regulating themselves. Given how current guidelines are already flouted, we could only expect more of the same. Doctors are not above the law and they should be held legally accountable. We know that abortion can be used to cover up sexual crimes like rape, pedophilia, sexual abuse and incest.

8. The BPAS campaign is titled ‘We Trust Women’ but there is no evidence that women are actually seeking a change in the law. A ComRes poll in May 2017 (see above) found that only 1% of women wanted to see the time limit for abortion extended above 24 weeks and that 70% wanted to see the abortion limit reduced to 20 weeks or below. 91% of women favored a total an explicit ban on sex-selective abortion. So women want the law to be stricter on the legality and regulation of abortion, not laxer.

This whole campaign has been based on the false premise that women who seek abortions are living under the constant shadow of arrest. This is simply not true. Prosecutions are exceptionally rare – in many years there have been none at all – and in the past two years there were just two convictions both in extreme and disturbing scenarios.

9. Decriminalisation will move Britain in a direction that has not worked in other countries. China and Canada are currently the only countries which have gone down this route and after two states in Australia did so, concerns about an increase in late abortions, abortion tourism and babies being born alive after abortion, led other Australian states not to follow suit.

10. The move at the BMA ARM has been cynically planned just ahead of a new private member’s bill in the House of Commons. Earlier this year a 10-minute rule bill, tabled by Diane Johnson, attempted to decriminalize abortion. It passed by a slim majority but later ran out of parliamentary time. It is expected that this bill will return, quite possibly in the current private members’ ballot. We’ll know in just a few weeks’ time.

It was noteworthy that the BMA made its decision to decriminalize abortion the very same week that the Minister of women and equalities, Justin Greening, agreed to fund abortions in England and Wales for women from Northern Ireland, where it is currently illegal. The move followed a threat to place the measure as an amendment to the Queen’s speech, which could well have put the government itself at risk of a vote of no confidence at a very critical time in British history.

It’s clear that there has been a huge cultural shift within Britain in attitudes towards abortion amongst the general population, but especially amongst doctors. Some doctors have already resigned from the BMA after the vote. I will not be doing so myself, because I believe it’s best to try and fight these battles from within. Furthermore, I object to the doctors’ trade union being hijacked by a small number of activists with extreme views to achieve their ideological and political goals.

This decision could be reversed, but unless we act quickly to prevent any ensuing bill going through parliament, it may be too late. Regardless, doctors who respect human life before birth could easily overturn the decision by bringing opposing motions next year and ensuring that they turn up in sufficient numbers to win the vote. Whether this happens or not, time only will tell. However, I can’t help thinking that the real blame lies with the bulk of the medical profession who have either capitulated to the new ethic or acquiesced in silence whilst allowing others steer the ship. The church has also been largely silent.

The aim of medicine is to prevent and treat illness. Abortion, the intentional taking of human life before birth, neither prevents nor treats any illness. Pregnancy is not a disease. Abortion runs contrary to the general strategy of medicine which is why it is against all historic codes of medical ethics.

When the OAPA was first passed in 1861 it was inconceivable that doctors would ever be involved in abortion. However, now they are leading the way in the destruction of innocent human life. It is not too late to stop this, but only if we have the collective will and courage to do so.

LifeNews.com Note: Dr. Peter Saunders is a doctor and the CEO of Christian Medical Fellowship, a British organization with 4,500 doctors and 1,000 medical students as members. This article originally appeared on his blog. He is also associated with the Care Not Killing Alliance in the UK.

from http://www.therightnewsnetwork.com/british-medical-association-votes-to-legalize-abortions-up-to-birth/

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British Medical Association Votes to Legalize Abortions Up to Birth

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British Medical Association Votes to Legalize Abortions Up to Birth

The opposition speakers spoke with grace, eloquence, and courage but were unable to sway the meeting.

Here are ten observations on the vote to legalize all abortion.

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