2 GUINNESS TO MIDNIGHT

2011 IN REWIND

2011-12-31T23:35:00.005-05:00

A splattering of some of the news n' names that rounded out this year: Rob Ford; Toronto cop Sgt. Ryan Russell; Jack Leyton; Arab Spring in the MidEast with Egypt & Syria; Muammar Gaddafi; earthquake, tsunami & nuclear meltdown crisis in Japan; African famine; flooding in the Phillipines; tornadoes in Mississippi & Alabama; U.S. woes over the retail slumps, budget, unemployment, deficit & recession; Gabrielle Giffords & Jared Lee Loughner; Anthony 'Weinergate'; Arnold Schwarzenegger; Angry Birds; iPad 2; SlutWalk; flashmobs; London riots n' looting in the UK; Athens riots over Greek debt & defaulting; financial problems in Ireland, Spain & Portugal; (self indulgent?) worldwide "We are the 99 percent" Occupy movement; overhyped Royal Wedding trumped by Pippa Middleton's ass & Beatrice's hat; reality whore & talentless Kim Kardashian's stupid 72-day publicity-stunt marriage to Kris Humphries; 85yr old Hugh Hefner ditched at the altar by 25yr old fiancee Crystal Harris; Toronto Zoo elephants & Bob Barker; Maple Leaf Gardens re-opens as a Loblaws; Stanley Cup riot in Vancouver; NHL concussions and enforcers Derek Boogarde, Rick Rypien & Wade Belak; Lokomotiv Yaroslavl; last day of the pro baseball regular season; NBA labour dispute; Penn State & Syracuse Univ. sex scandals; Osama Bin Laden; Anders Behring Breivik; Dr. Conrad Murray; Donald Trump vs. Barack Obama birth certificate controversy; Charlie Sheen; Lindsay Lohan; Dominique Strauss-Kahn; final launch of Space Shuttle 'Atlantis'; meddling Parents Television Council; Peter Kent's (hypocritical?) Kyoto Accord announcement; TTC subway sex; Roller Derby World Cup; Casey Anthony; Amanda Knox; Gerard Depardieu's airline pissing douchebaggery; Andy Rooney; Steve Jobs; Amy Winehouse joins the '27 Club'; Christopher Hitchens; Vaclav Havel; Kim Jong Il & Kim Jong Un; Metallica & Lou Reed team up; REM calls it quits; Harry Potter comes to an end; official end of the war in Iraq...

DECEMEBR 16, 1916 (DEATH OF THE MAD MONK)

2011-12-16T09:53:00.005-05:00

(Or Dec 30th, if going by the old Russian calendar)... 95yrs ago today, Grigori Rasputin, the Russian mystic is murdered by a trio of nobles consisting of 2 relatives of Czar Nicholas II and a right-wing politician over concern he held too much influence over Czarina Alexandra after displaying his uncanny ability to control the haemophilia of the royal couples' young son. There was also widespread resentment & alarm over Rasputin wielding power with growing prominence in the royal court. The complete manner of his assassination to this day remains mysterious n' controversial with many an unverified claim. The exploits of Rasputin's harrowing ordeal have literally made him out to be superhuman: It is believed that after being invited to a party & lead to a cellar, he was served poisoned cakes along with cyanide-laced wine (allegedly enough to kill 5 men). Upon his drunken realization that the 3 were trying to kill him, he is said to have cursed them in contempt for being incapable to even kill properly. After this initial method failed, one of the conspirators ran upstairs, came back with a revolver & shot Rasputin in the back. After falling, the trio left the room briefly but reappeared to find him missing. Some have said he tried to strangle one of the killers (yelling in his ear "you bad boy") then throwing him across the room trying to escape but was fired upon again & again, falling, while others charge when the would-be killers exited the room, he infact stumbled into the street where he was shot again atleast 3 more times & now crawling. The 3 finally dispatched him by beating him to a bloody pulp supposedly kicking & stabbing him and finally dispatching him by clubbing him to death with a heavy chain. Whether or not he was castrated - before or after death - is the source of great debate but Rasputin's finality ends with his arms n' legs bound with rope, his body wrapped in a heavy carpet & thrown from a bridge (the fall splitting his head open) into the freezing Neva River below to drown. His body is found 3 days later encased in ice where an autopsy establishes that because his arms were found in an upright position (having broken free of his bonds), he tried to claw his way out from under the ice trying to swim to the surface and with water found in his lungs, was thus still alive & trying to breath before total submersion. Medical examiners also declare that 2 of the shots were fatal making Rasputin's immortal-seeming struggle all the more incredibly bizarre.

"I write and leave behind me this letter at Saint Petersburg. I feel that I shall leave life before January 1 (1917). I wish to make known to the Russian people, to Papa, to the Russian Mother and to the Children, to the land of Russia, what they must understand. If I am killed by common assassins, and especially by my brothers the Russian peasants, you, Tsar of Russia, will have nothing to fear for your children, they will reign for hundreds of years in Russia. But if I am murdered by boyars, nobles, and if they shed my blood, their hands will remain soiled with my blood, for 25 years they will not wash their hands from my blood. They will leave Russia. Brothers will kill brothers, and they will kill each other and hate each other, and for 25 years there will be no nobles in the country. Tsar of the land of Russia, if you hear the sound of the bell which will tell you that Grigori has been killed, you must know this: if it was your relations who have wrought my death, then no one in the family, that is to say, none of your children or relations, will remain alive for more than two years. They will be killed by the Russian people. I go, and I feel in me the divine command to tell the Russian Tsar how he must live if I have disappeared. You must reflect and act prudently. Think of your safety and tell your relations that I have paid for them with my blood. I shall be killed. I am no longer among the living. Pray, pray, be strong, think of your blessed family."
-Grigori

NOVEMBER 27, 1911 (HOOK 'EM FROM SIDE STAGE AND BRING DOWN THE CURTAIN)

2011-11-27T11:33:00.007-05:00

100yrs ago today, the 1st recorded occurrence of a US audience throwing vegetables at actors took place. Predating vaudeville, the custom was once described by noted author Washington Irving (The Legend of Sleepy Hollow) as audiences expressing displeasure by "stamping, hissing, roaring, whistling and occasionally groaning in cadence to throw apples, nuts & ginger-bread at the stage." These were actually sold to the audience & while the intention of the real weapon meant may have been 'the mass protest of ridicule', the food products soon turned to eggs, rotten produce & tomatoes making for a much harsher attack. As far back as Shakespearean plays during the Elizabethan era, those who would pelt the actors or for that matter, anyone connected with theatre was considered unsavory. Theatre audiences in the early 19th century were boisterous, loud & unattentive. Prostitutes plied their trade pretty openly in the balcony & patrons in the crowd routinely heckled the actors so much that the stage performers would drop character to fire back at the harassing criticism. People often paid more attention to others & unruliness in the audience than the performances as belligerence often led to fighting. Thrown objects were derived from oppurtunity: People brought what they had to eat & if they turned their items into sudden aerial projectiles, it was out of disapproval. If they were planning on booing & hissing (a much common occurence), they would naturally bring food now garbage & sometimes rain such a shower of debris that would force actors to run quickly for the sides to shield themselves from the blows. Balconies (before microphones & opera glasses) were typically the cheap seats & worst in a theatre catering to the lower classes - even rowdier than those in the orchestra sections. With their clearest view of the stage, those in the upper levels naturally had the best shot for their propensity to throw from the decks what was the most common snack of the time -- peanuts (hence the term 'peanut gallery'). Audiences quieted down by the end of the century but the tradition had been established.

2011-11-11T16:20:00.000-05:00

Remembering the armistice & when the guns fell silent. Never forget how a lost generation marched off into madness.

SEPTEMBER 11, 2001 (FROM OUT OF THE CLEAR BLUE SKY)

2011-09-11T15:58:00.015-04:00

The United States is in a state of shock after being rocked by attacks (the worst such foreign attack since Pearl Harbor & the largest ever on American soil) which have left thousands dead & New York's World Trade Center destroyed. The Pentagon was also severely damaged by 1 of the 3 commercial airliners which hijackers turned into flying suicide bombs. A 4th plane crashed in a field near Pittsburgh. A state of emergency has been declared in Washington D.C. and the US has closed its airspace & borders with Mexico and Canada. American forces are on one of their highest states of alert with a naval battle group having been deployed off the country's east coast to bolster air defences. American Airlines Flight 11 was hijacked at 8:25AM and 18 minutes later crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center. United Airlines Flight 175 - which had been hijacked within minutes of the 1st plane - was flown into the south tower at 9:03AM causing another devastating explosion. The 2nd crash was captured live on news cameras trained on the burning north tower, horrifying already stunned viewers. At 9:40AM, a 3rd hijacked airliner - American Airlines Flight 77 - was flown into the side of the Pentagon in Washington. An hour after the Boeing 767 slammed into the south tower of the WTC, the 110-storey building collapsed. The north tower followed minutes later, compounding the destruction & loss of life. Witnesses reported seeing people jumping from the towers just before they both crashed down in a shower of raining glass, steel, concrete & choking dust. President George W. Bush was reading to children at a Florida school when his Chief of staff, Andrew Card, whispered news of the terror to him. He was flown to the US Strategic Command Centre at Nebraska - a heavily fortified bunker where the country's nuclear weapons are controlled - and then made his way back to Washington with the expectation of addressing the nation later this evening. New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani said the final number of dead "may be more than any of us can bear".

10yrs ago today, 9/11 occured. Nothing again would be the same & the world changed forever (not the least of which beginning with travel & security). The final death was nearly 3000 people & it took almost 9 months to clear the millions of tons of rubble at 'Ground Zero' where the World Trade Center had stood. The image of the twin towers - from being hit by the 2 planes, burning & then crashing down has been called the most televised day in history. It's impossible to forget those pictures burned permanently into our memories. The biggest criminal investigation in history quickly identified the terrorist hijackers & linked them to Al-Qaeda - the Islamic militant group set up by Osama Bin Laden based in Afghanistan ---

TIMELINE OF TERROR

Aug 1988 - late 1989
With the Russian-Afghanistan war winding down, Saudi-born and mujahideen resistance organizer & financier - Osama Bin Laden - founds Al-Qaeda. He is long-believed to have had CIA affiliations.

Feb 26, 1993
A huge truck bomb is detonated in the parking basement below the North tower of the World Trade Center. The explosion fails to bring down the structure but the blast kills 6 people & injures over 1000 more. The perpetrators have links to Al-Qaeda. In Mar 2004, 4 of the conspirators are convicted of the bombing & all are sentenced to life in prison without parole. In Nov 1997, 2 more men including the mastermind, Ramzi Yousef are both convicted with Youself given 2 life sentences.

Jun 25, 1996
The Khobar Towers housing complex in Saudi Arabia which is home to foreign military personnel and located near the national Saudi Aramco oil company headquarters of Dhahran is bombed in a terrorist attack with Al-Qaeda described by some sources as the likely culprit (with Bin Laden believed to have co-operated with the terrorsits) but an official American statement later identified members of Hezbollah Al-Hejaz (Party of God in the Hijaz) as the responsible party -- after still, Iran originally being blamed (to which a decade would pass until they would be absolved of involvement). A rigged gas tanker truck was exploded causing devastation to the 8-story building which injured 19 U.S. airmen, 1 Saudi & another 372 of various nationalities.

Aug 7, 1998
At 10:30AM, 2 American embassies in the African capitals of Kenya & Tanzania - both within minutes of each other - are bombed. 224 people are killed & over 4000 were injured trapped under rubble. It took an Israeli search n' rescue team to retrieve the last bodies. 4 men linked to Al-Qaeda were convicted & jailed for life for the attacks in May 2001 and Bin Laden's connection in Africa heightened fears that he was dealing with Sudan to obtain weapons-grade uranium or plutonium. Surviving victims of the embassy bombings tried & failed to sue the US Government for compensation.

Oct 12, 2000
Suicide bombers attack the USS Cole navy destroyer in a Yemen port killing 17 American sailors. The massive blast badly gashing the left side of the warship, injured atleast 40. An inflatable raft packed with explosives rammed the USS Cole as it was apparently being moored to a buoy. The 2 Yemeni men responsible were given death sentences (one of whom was Al-Qaeda's chief of operations in the Gulf) but the other conviction was later commuted on appeal to serve 15yrs instead. Another 4 defendants were given jail sentences of 5-10yrs. The warship was saved & towed out 2 weeks later. It has since been repaired & is back in service.

post 9/11, 2001
Sept 12: Vowing to avenge the WTC catastrophe & hunt down Bin Laden, Bush declared a worldwide 'war on terror' on those bent on destroying democracy & freedom. 9/11 brought some unexpected sympathy from countries well-known to be hostile to the USA as the leaders of Libya & Palestine both strongly (and uncharacterictically) condemned the attacks. The Iraqi leadership however endorsed the atrocity when they issued an inflammatory statement saying it was "a lesson for all tyrants & oppressors and the fruit of American crimes." Even in the face of overwhelmingly superior American military might & then-US Secretary of State Colin Powell saying the struggle would be a long-term conflict, Bin Laden proved stubbornly elusive & remained at large for a decade...

Sept 17: Workers (many draped in American flags & wearing face masks) returned to Wall Street as a symbolic gesture to show life can go on. The devastated business district in the heart of Manhattan still looked like a warzone but people were determined to prove their defiance as one lawyer likened Americans to imitating the British way of dealing with years of attacks by the IRA. The search fro survivors in the wreckage continued as Red Cross workers mingled with the crowds to offer counselling - many still reeling from trauma. The stock markets eventually returned to their pre-attack levels in about 1 month but the recession which financial analysts had been predicting long before 9/11, took hold at the end of Nov 2001 with many experts stirring up some controversy by saying companies whose profits were already declining, had infact decided to just "blame it on Bin Laden" thus using him as a scapegoat for all losses.

Sept 22: BBC World Affairs editor, John Simpson became the only Western reporter to broadcast from Taliban-held Afghanistan as the country prepared for American attack. Heavily disguised by armed smugglers, Simpson & a cameraman were snuck into a province bordering with Pakistan. He reported a heavy Taliban presence along large stretches of the frontier but spoke of eerie emptiness in the region he visited due to people having fled & Taliban popularity declining because of corruption by power. Simpson went on to report from northern Iraq when the US & Britain invaded in Mar 2003. In April 2003, he was injured in a 'friendly fire' attack by a US Navy jet which killed his Iraqi translator.

Oct 7: In the 1st retaliatory response to 9/11, the USA launches air strikes against the Taliban & Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan where Bin Laden was believed to be hiding. Particularly targeted are the airports of Kandahar & the capital Kabul and terrorist training camps near Jalalabad. President Bush (later to call Bin Laden a "parasite") promised a "sustained & relentless" campaign & warned that any govts who sponsor terrorism do so at their own peril. British PM Tony Blair unequivocally contributes an aircraft carrier & a small number of submarines further pledging his country's commitment to fight on 3 fronts being military, diplomatic & humanitarian. Iran & Iraq condemn the attacks and Al-Jazeera tv delivers a Bin Laden message denouncing the bombing as a war against faith by infidels.

Oct 8: The USA & Britain with further bombardments against air fields (as well as dropping leaflets), commit their ground troops. Soon after collateral damage occurs when a Red Cross warehouse is bombed by mistake & the deaths of innocent civilians mount. For the rest of the month, an anthrax scare occurs in Washington,DC when letters containing spores were mailed to news media offices & atleast 2 Democratic Senators. Capitol Hill & the House of Representatives were hit and in all, 5 die & 17 are infected. 10,000 Postal workers were believed to have been exposed and the prime suspect focused on one-time government biodefense lab scientist, Bruce Edwards Ivins who kills himself on Jul 27, 2008 with an overdose of acetaminophen. Later that Aug - despite having no direct evidence of his involvement - federal prosecutors declare Ivins to be the sole culprit (after Al-Qaeda & Iraq had been blamed) and in Feb 10, the FBI formally closes the investigation...

Dec 7: Taliban surrender Kandahar. Beginning in Nov 2001, American Special Forces troops entered Afghanistan to help the shaky Northern Alliance (a tribal army of fragile rebel factions) capture vital Taliban-held cities. By Nov 12, the Taliban Forces had withdrawn from Kabul with uprisings in Kandahar & Jalalabad resulting in the last enemy remnants fleeing. Former captured foreign workers were rescued & the holdout city of Kunduz was laid seige on Nov 15 with US propaganda urging the city to surrender & hand over Bin Laden. On Nov 26, Kunduz fell to the Northern Alliance & with American Marines having taken up positions near stronghold Kandahar, that city was heavily bombed. In as little as 3 months, the Taliban were effectively ousted. With help from the shaky Northern Alliance (a tribal army of fragile rebel Afghan factions), coalition forces & the Pakistani military (who had their own hands full having to quell national riots) had been hunting down Al-Qaeda militants. Bin Laden remained on the run as opposition forces focused almost all of their objective resources on the hunt for him in the Tora Bora mountains south of Jalalabad where a cave complex/fortress hq-center was believed to exist with Bin Laden's 2nd-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, also suggested to be in hiding but the important reiteration was made that the harboring enemy regime was toppled. After weeks of carpet-bombing Tora Bora to no avail, a deal brokered by Hamid Karzai, the head of Afghanistan's new interim administration (endorsed by the UN Security Council), helped secure the surrender of the hardline Taliban's spiritual home and eventually vowed to crack down on warlords & their private militias after winning the country's landmark election in Oct 2004.

Dec 21: Acting on information from Scotland Yard, British police in a joint security operation with the Royal Navy & Customs, storm a cargo ship - linked to Al-Qaeda - in the English Channel off the Sussex coast after an intelligence tip-off it may contain terrorist material. It had sailed from Mauritius with reports of a Djibouti stop (next to Somalia) & was bound for a sugar refinery in east London. An initial search (lasting 5 days & looking for possible anthrax) found nothing & determined the Djibouti stopover was to unload American grain as part of a food aid shipment.

Dec 22: British-born Richard Reid aka 'the shoe bomber' was arrested after trying to blow up an American Airlines trans-atlantic flight from Paris to Miami through the use of explosives stuffed in his shoes. He was overpowered by flight attendants & passengers who prevented him from igniting a protruding fuse and tied up with belts & headphone cords as the plane made an emergency landing in Boston under escort from fighter jets. Authorities later said that his shoes contained enough powerful plastic explosives which could have blown a hole in the fuselage & killed all 197 people aboard. On Jan 30, 2003 he was sentenced to life in prison on 3 of 8 charges including attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction. In addition, he also racked up 20yrs each for another 4 offences including attempted murder and 30yrs for using a device in relation to a violent crime totaling 110yrs. Before his fate, a defiant Reid (declaring his love of Islam & loyalty to Bin Laden) made a brief statement lashing out at the US government he blamed for sponsoring the capitalist torture of Muslims in the Arab world. Several other suspects were arrested over the attempterd bombing conspiracy, but only 1 - a 24yr old Gloucester UK man - was sentenced after police & MI5 surveillance, receiving 13yrs in prison in Mar 2005.

2002
NATO begins peacekeeping duties & maintaining a heavy presence in Afghanistan. Infighting between local commanders over power & territory became a feature of the post-Taliban period as authorities in Kabul prove to be incapable of exerting control beyond the capital resulting militant violence to continue. A US-friendly Afghan administration stays in place until 2004. NATO helps to keep order in Kabul but warlords maintain powerbases in the regions with human rights abuses rising higher along with heroin production. Estimates of civilian deaths vary between several hundred & several thousand.

Jan 10, 2002
The US flies suspected Al-Qaeda & Taliban fighters captured in Afghanistan to the Guantanamo Bay naval base detention/interrogation facility in southeast Cuba. 10 days later on Jan 20, photos of prisoners being held in one of the military detainment compounds (Camp X-Ray) sparked outrage leading to concerns of human rights abuse. The publication of the pictures showed shackled detainees kneeling & subjected to sensory deprivation on their arrival. They were handcuffed and wearing goggles, ear muffs, surgical masks & heavy gloves. Kept in temporary 8x8 feet cells made of wire mesh & corrugated metal roofs (left subject to adverse weather), Amnesty International objected to the conditions saying they were degrading to the men, comparable to the old Soviet gulags & fell below US standards for ordinary prisoners. Anti-torture proponents said the measures could be responsible for panic attacks, mood changes & terrible nightmares but Washington quickly responded saying the pictures were not representative of daily life there and that arriving prisoners (extremely dangerous 'high value targets') were treated humanely & given adequate provisions. Hundreds of detainees remaining in custody in Afghanistan awaited transfer to the camp and a team from the Red Cross eventually visited to evaluate conditions & interview prisoners to later conclude with a report whether their treatment was in accordance with the Geneva Convention's rules on prisoners of war. The US insisted the men were not POWs but illegal combatants meaning they could be interrogated (like 'waterboarding' - simulated drowning) without legal representation. Critics charged that under the Geneva Convention, prisoners could be tried for war crimes through court martials or civilian courts but not by secretive military tribunals (which many said Guantanamo Bay was an extension to begin with) which could impose the death penalty. In Apr 2003, Camp Delta replaced Camp X-Ray & at its peak, Guantanamo held 680 prisoners from around 40 countries (under the equally troubling practice of 'rendition') with more than 100 who would be released (the majority being held without charge). In 2004, hearings began so detainees could challenge the rules of their imprisonment to determine if their jailing was legal.

Indonesia 2002-05
Al-Qaeda forges ties to the violent Islamist group, Jemaah Islamiyah - headed by a radical cleric. On Oct 12, 2002, 2 nightclubs in a tourist district on the island of Bali catering to Western clientele and the US Consular office are car bombed. The 3 explosions are all detonated by backpack mounted devices triggered by cellphone. 202 people are killed & 240 injured. A week after the blasts Arab satellite channel 'Al-Jazeera' aired an audio-cassette purportedly carrying a recorded voice message from Bin Laden saying that the Bali bombings were in direct retaliation for support of the United States' war on terror & Australia's role in the liberation of East Timor. 3 men responsible for the attacks were executed by firing squad just after midnight on Nov 9, 2008. On Aug 5, 2003, a suicide bomber detonates a car bomb outside a Marriott Hotel lobby in South Jakarta on the island of Java. 12 people are killed & 150 injured. Police arrest atleast 11 mean involved & 2 are sent to Guantanomo Bay. Al-Jazeera again praises the attacks. On Sept 9, 2004, a small 1-ton car bomb packed into a delivery van explodes outside the Australian embassy, killing 9 & injuring over 150. Damage to the nearby Greek & Chinese embassies are also reported. On Jul 17, 2009, Jakarta is yet again the site of hotel suicide-bombings when the JW Marriot & Ritz-Carlton are hit 5 minutes apart. 7 are killed & 50 injured. On Oct 1, 2005, a series of suicide & car bomb attacks occured at a food court near a main square and 2 sites in a beach resort 19 miles away. The detonations were again by backpack devices set off by cellphone in which all 3 bombers died in the blasts. 20 people were killed & over 100 injured. Police found another 3 unexploded bombs (intended for Australians as an estimated 7500 were believed to have been visiting) which failed to go off after security forces shut down the island's telephone network following the first blasts. Noordin Mohammad Top was accused of being a mastermind in all 4 of the 2002-05 incidents. He was killed in a police raid on Sept 17, 2009.

Mar 20, 2003
President Bush extends his global campaign against terror to Iraq (predicated on false intelligence of that country's supposed Al-Qaeda link & weapons of mass destruction) when a coalition, again dominated by US and UK forces, invaded. Amidst deep controversy & massive aerial assaults, by Apr 15, the first meeting to talk about a new democratic regime was held & the coalition succeeded in overthrowing dictator Saddam Hussein by May. In Nov, just 6 months after the victory, Bush travelled to Britain under heavy security for a 4-day visit with Prime Minister Tony Blair which was marred by mass protests everywhere the President went. Some gatherings were said to have numbered as high as 200,000 demonstrators but the trip overall went without incident & would be overshadowed by 2 truck bomb attacks in Turkey carried out by Al-Qaeda ringleaders (the 1st wave of 2 explosions having taken place 5 days earlier) that killed 27 & wounded some 450. Inspite of the rising Muslim insurgency, Sunni vs. Shiite violence & ever-increasing ambushes from IED's (improvised explosive devices), the US formally handed over power to the Iraqis on Jun 28, 2004. Saddam Hussein was captured on Dec 13, 2003. On Nov 5, 2006, his trial by an Iraqi court found him guilty of crimes against humanity & sentenced him to death. He was hanged on Dec 30, 2006.

Dec 28, 2003
The British govt gives the go-ahead to place armed undercover 'sky marshals' on some of its passenger planes in the US (to be deployed where appropriate) in response to the American heightened state of alert. The UK move would follow the Americans, Israelis & Germans who also employ the officials. Although the plan was meant to be part of a general tightening of airport & airline security in the wake of 9/11, it was opposed by the British Airline Pilots Association who commented that guns on planes would be dangerous & the protection measures should be taken at ground level. The UK announcement followed a similar move by the Austrailian govt just 2 days before to place sky marshals on Qantas flights to Singapore & came following a number of recent threats to attack Air France flights. The following day on Dec 29, the Bush administration ordered all foreign airlines to deploy armed sky marshals on flights to the USA deemed by Washington to be a risk, or face having their flights banned from American air space. Some EU countries - in particular Italy, Portugal, Denmark, Sweden & Finland - strongly opposed the use of sky marshals, preferring to cancel flights that the US felt were a threat & to concentrate on tightening security through preventitive anti-terror measures also at ground level. In Jan 2004, after talks in Brussels with EU officials, the US softened its stance insisting there was no 'blanket policy' to stop airlines without marshals entering America. In Dec 2005, a US sky marshal shot dead a man claiming to have a bomb on board an American Airlines plane. It was the first time since 9/11 that a passenger had been shot by an armed security official on a flight.

Mar 11, 2004
Al-Qaeda hits Europe. In Madrid,Spain between 7:37-7:40AM during morning rush hour (and 3 days before the country's general elections), 10 explosions occured aboard 4 commuter trains all travelling on the same line killing 191 people & injuring over 1800. The Basque separatist 'ETA' were initially blamed as just 12 days earlier, police had intercepted a van bound for the capital which was packed with explosives. The culprits were infact an inspired terrorist cell (with vague relationship to ideology) who purchased the explosives from retired miners who still had access to dynamite blasting equipment. Days after the train bombings, voters turned out in record droves spurning the Conservative govt (accused of misleading the public) & brought in the Socialists who quickly pulled Spanish troops out of Iraq. On Apr 4, 2004, a security raid closed in on atleast 7 suspected miltants who committed suicide by setting off bombs, killing themselves and 1 policeman & injuring another 11. Media & witnesses reported that 5-8 more suspects escaped. On Mar 25, 2005, a prosecutor asserted the train attacks happened exactly 911 days (precisely 2 and a half years) after the WTC collapse. A trial of 29 men began on Feb 15, 2007 (14 of whom went on a hunger strike but quickly ended their fast when the court refused to suspend proceedings) & ended on Oct 31, 2007 (with 21 found guilty & 3 of whom were sentenced to 40,000yrs in prison - with the law limiting time served to 40yrs).

Apr 28, 2004
CBS Program '60 Minutes II' airs an episode showing appalling pictures of American military police personnel (aided by additional US govt agencies like the CIA & private subcontractors) abusing detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. 2 days later another report in The New Yorker magazine by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh (posted online) came to public attention (followed by a publishing in the May 10 issue) which questioned n' criticized the systemic use of coercive methods & stress applications as so-called 'standard procedure'. The CBS news segment had infact been delayed by 2 weeks at the request of the Department of Defense and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The graphic & disturbing photos deepened into an international scandal to expose human rights violations by physical violence, torture, psychological deprivation, sexual abuse including rape & sodomy and even murder (Manadel al-Jamadi). US media had initially showed little interest when the military first reported abuse & cruelty on Jan 16 and that an official investigation had begun involving further claims of prisoners being humiliated. By Feb 24, it was reported that 17 soldiers had been suspended & announced again on Mar 21 that the 1st charges had been filed against 6 soldiers. 11 in all (no officers) would be charged n' convicted with dereliction of duty, maltreatment and aggravated assault n' battery in court martials - The 2 most notorious implicated being 21yr old SPC (Private 1st Class) Lynndie England, seen prominently in photos of her grinning, giving the 'thumbs up' & pointing at naked prisoners - one of whom is being held attached to a leash and 36yr old SPC Charles Graner (England's fiancée allegedly impregnated by him during their tour of duty) said to be the ringleader of the abuse and seen in photos posing behind a human pyramid of naked prisoners & over the corpse of a prisoner dead by homicide. On Jan 15, 2005, Graner was sentenced to 10yrs in prison & dishonorably discharged but released on Aug 6, 2011, having served 6 and a half yrs. On Sept 27, 2005, England was sentenced to 3yrs in prison & dishonorably discharged but paroled on Mar 1, 2007, having served approximately 1 yr & 5 months. When interviewed in Mar 2008 by German magazine Stern & again in Jan 2009 by UK newspaper The Guardian, she appeared unrepentant - either unwilling or incapable - to accept any wrongdoing and refused to take any oppurtunities to apologize for her role saying she was goaded into the photos (doing it for the man she loved) & that the media was responsible for damaging her image. She later wrote a biography in Jul 2009 & told of having PTSD. The most infamous image symbolizing the scandal became that of Satar Jabar, wearing a black hood & cape, standing atop a box, arms outstreched in a Jesus Christ-type pose. It was featured on the cover of newsmagazine The Economist with the condemnation having become so overwhelming resulting in critics charging that US Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, authorized the controversial techniques & therefore called for his resignation. The Pentagon in turn was accused of an attempted cover-up & indifference when blame would fall merely to the inexperience of troops. Right-wing radio host, Rush Limbaugh & conservative talk show host, Michael Savage on the other hand, both staunchly defended & approved of the tactics. Their detractors likened them to morons & said they were just as sick as the perpetrators. President Bush's apology over the scandal as an isolated incident & expressing shame was received with mixed reviews. The army feared that the photos were a serious blow to their image & objectives and along with attacks of hypocrisy, would only inflame Muslims & breathe new life into radicalism for terrorists to deliberately carry out more egregious atrocities in direct retaliation - as that of a video released by Islamic militants on May 11, 2004, of the beheading of an American civilian in Iraq, Nick Berg, in which the executioners said his death was in response to the Abu Ghraib abuse. On Mar 29, 2006, the US govt released a new set of photographs & again Rumsfeld was criticized for authorizing the interrogation techniques. In Nov 2006, the Australian SBS tv network aired previuosly unreleased pictures documenting the more sexually depraved of the offenses (a disturbing amount of sodomy) & again on May 28, 2009, aired still more shocking pics. On Feb 3, 2010, an allegation was made by a California elected official alleging that under the Bush Administration, prisoners detained at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay & undisclosed secret "black sites" were being used as involuntary research subjects for human biomedical experimentation, behavior modification research & drug-testosterone delivery in a manner similar to past CIA Project MK-ULTRA activities investigated in 1977. The claim supported information contained in a Red Cross report relative to the expanded role of CIA medical personnel in torture & interrogation. In 2010, the last of the prisons were turned over to the Iraqi government to run. Ironically, despite Abu Ghraib (or perhaps because of reforms in its wake) prisoners have more recently said they received far better treatment in American custody than in Iraqi jails & by Sept 2010, Amnesty International had warned in a report that up to 30,000 prisoners, including many veterans of the US detention system, remain detained without rights in Iraq and were frequently tortured or abused in a detention system described as having not evolved since Saddam Hussein's regime. On Oct 22, 2010, nearly 400,000 secret US army field reports and war logs detailing torture, rape, summary executions, murder by Iraqi police & failure to investigate war crimes, were passed on to the The Guardian & several other international media organizations through the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks. On Jun 27, 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal of lawsuits from a group of 250 Iraqis who wanted to sue 2 contractor companies over claims of abuse by interrogators & translators at the prison. The suits were dismissed by the lower courts on the grounds that the companies held derivative sovereign immunity based on their status of having government exception pursuant to a battlefield pre-emption doctrine. No one has been convicted for the murders of any detainees.

Jul 7, 2005
4 bombs are detonated in the centre of London in the morning rush hour targeting civilians. 3 exploded in underground subway stations across the city & the 4th on a double-decker bus. 56 people (including the 4 suicide bombers) are killed & 700 injured (from Mar-May 2007, some 7 arrests would be made in connection with the bombings on the 7th). Exactly 2 weeks later on Jul 21, 2005 there were 4 more attempted attacks on the city's public transport system but this time only the detonators of the bombs went off (again around underground stations) resulting in no fatalities. The very next day on Jul 22, police shot dead 27yr old Jean Charles de Menezes, a Brazilian man - hoping to be an electrician - whom was misidentified as a terrorist fugitive. 2 officers (neither of whom would be brought up on charges due to an independent Commission declaring "insufficient evidence" to prosecute) fired a total of 11 bullets with 7 landing in the victim's head. The death sparked an intense public debate on shoot-to-kill policy, the family refused to accept an apology from PM Tony Blair and reaction in Brazil was overwhelmingly negative with protests & demonstrations held. On Jul 29, police arrested 4 main suspects in the bombings on the 21st and on Jul 9, 2007 they were found guilty of conspiracy to murder, each sentenced to a minimunm of 40yrs imprisonment. Strangely enough, during London’s bid for the 2012 Olympics, one of the arguments in London’s favour was its multicultural & cosmopolitan character but in the immediate aftermath of the bombing attacks, this diversity became a target for some individuals who used the religious background of the Muslim terrorists as an excuse for racist attacks & abuses against members of minority communities.

Apr 30, 2007
A group of 5 Al-Qaeda-linked terror suspects in the UK (some of whom secretly trained in radical Pakistani military camps while others had met the Jul 7, 2005 London bombers) headed by 28yr old Omar Khyam are sentenced to life in prison and another 2 are acquitted after MI5 & more than 700 undercover police from 5 agencies uncover their multiple plot to co-ordinate explosions on Britain's gas-distribution network, poison London's water supply, target a shopping center, seize an airliner to crash it, attack the Prime Minister in Parliament & blow up 'loose women' in the nightclub districts. 25 homes & businesses were searched and 600kg of ammonium nitrate fertilizer had been confiscated from a storage locker. The jury deliberations in convicting the men took 27 minutes - a record in British criminal history.

May 23, 2007
7 insurance companies that had been refusing to pay out claims related to the WTC site, agreed to hand over $2 billion with the money split between owners and the Port Authorities of both New York & New Jersey. Developer Larry Silverstein who took over a 99yr lease on the buildings weeks before their destruction on 9/11, had been accused of profiteering to which he lambasted the insurers for ducking their duty. Ironically, Silverstein himself won a total of a cool $4.68 billion in lawsuits (around two-thirds of what he originally had sought) after abandonning his claim that he was owed more than $500 million in interest accrued from the squabble.

Jun 1, 2007
A group of 4 people (one a former cargo worker & another a former MP for the Caribbean nation of Guyana) are charged with plotting to blow up New York City's JFK airport - hoping to outo the 9/11 attacks. The plot involved blowing up the airport's fuel tanks & 40-mile pipeline and according to the FBI, luckily didn't get past the planning stages inspite of the cell's alleged persistence in consistently refinig their scheme and taking extensive measures to seek expert advice, finances & explosives. The suspects apparently conducted surveillance, videotaped targets & downloaded satellite images from the internet. They were exposed by an FBI informant whom they tried to recruit and U.S. Attorney Roslynn Mauskopf was derided by some media outlets for delivering bombastic hyberbole in describing the plan as catastrophic when critics said it was infact amateurishly inept. The arrests were the latest in a series of terror-plans targeting American facilities & landmarks - such as the Jun 2006 charging of 7 suspects who set out to destroy the Sears Tower in Chicago, the Jul 2006 arrest of 3 people (out of 8 & all Arab foreigners) for their attempt to suicide-bomb the tunnel under the Hudson River connecting Manhattan with New Jersey and the May 2007 arrest of 6 men conspiring to attack Fort Dix army base in New Jersey. In Aug 2010, 2 of the JFK-plotters were found guilty of conspiracy charges.

Jun 30, 2007
Just 3 days after the appointment of Glasgow-born Scottish MP Gordon Brown as Prime Minister of the UK, 2 Muslim men (Bilal Abdullah & Kafeel Ahmed) set themselves ablaze & drive a dark green Jeep Cherokee loaded with propane canisters into the glass doors of the main terminal of Scotland's Glasgow International Airport at 3:15PM. The vehicle's driver was severly burnt in the ensuing fire & 5 people were minorly injured. Both the failed suicide-attackers were apprehended at the scene by police (who were assisted by members of the public) when both tried to put up a fight but were overpowered. They were also believed to have been the same men who parked 2 car bombs in London the day before on Jun 29 which didn't detonate. Security pillars stopped the men from driving fully into the building but the doors were damaged. Within 3 days, Scotland Yard confirmed another 8 men had been taken into custody in connection with this incident. The attack was the first in Scotland since the Lockerbie Pan Am flight 103 bombing in 1988 & the first ever to target the country. On Aug 2, 2007, Ahmed died of his injuries. On Dec 17, 2009, Bilal was found guilty of conspiracy to commit murder & sentenced to 32yrs in prison.

Nov 26, 2008
Islamist terrorists from Pakistan (Lashkar-e-Taiba) co-ordinate more than 10 shooting & bombing attacks in Mumbai, India's largest port city, over a 3-day span methodically killing 166 people (many of the bodies showing signs of beatings n' torture) & injuring over 300. Included among the targets were 2 hotels (one of which - The Taj Mahal - was set ablaze), a railway station, a Cafe, College, Cinema, Women n' Children's hospital & a Jewish community center. The 10 terrorists had planned the attack several months ahead & had made their way ashore in inflatable speedboats reportedly telling suspicious fishermen asking who they were to mind their own business. The 10 split up and the fishermen's report to police was ignored. During their deadly mission, the 10 had been in continuous contact with their controllers by cellphones. They knew of the authorities actions from tv broadcasts & radio reports and it was some time until the feeds were blocked. Commandos eventually seized the venues, freeing many hostages & killing 9 of the terrorists. The only one captured alive (Ajmal Kasab) later claimed his group had been helped by the Pakistani ISI (intelligence service). On May 6, 2010 he was sentenced to death. The incident only served to heighten ethnic enmity & border tensions between the 2 countries and highlighted a long violent background of explosions in Mumbai (Mar 1993 - 13 co-ordinated explosions [believed to have been a retaliation for a Mosque demolition] that killed 257 people & injured 700; Dec 2002 - bus station blast; Jan 2003 - bicycle bomb one day before a visit from the Indian PM; Mar 2003 - train compartment bomb one day after the 10th anniversary of the 1993 attacks; Jul 2003 - bus blast; Aug 2003 - 2 bombs in the South killing 44 & injuring 150; Jul 2006 - 7 bombs exploded within 11 minutes on a railway in Mumbai killing 209 & injuring over 700). One of the chief operators of the attack was an American - David Coleman Headley (born Daood Saleem Gilani in Pakistan). For 2yrs he had been undercover casing Mumbai developing a blueprint for his 2 handlers and alleged masterminds of the 'gun n' grenade' seige (Sajid Mir & a Major Iqbal). After moving to the USA, Gilani was a small-time drug smuggler & bigamist who lived in Philadelphia then New York. After some drug arrests, he spent time as a DEA informant to give information on his Pakistani sources. At the same time, he immersed himself in radical Islam & joined Lashkar later attending training camps. After 9/11 he gathered intelligence on extremists to which he has been controversially accused of being a double agent himself. The FBI has been criticized for dropping the ball on failing to look into his life with an investigation after Gilani's Canadian-born 2nd wife accused him of domestic abuse & revealed his background to them. His 3rd wife warned the US embassy in Islamabad also about his activities just as the Mumbai plot was gathering momentum but again, American officials did nothing. Although India was warned about a possible hotel attack, immediate security alerts produced nothing. Having slipped through the cracks, Gilani changed his name to 'Headley' for more covert travel and over a 20-month period, had visited India 5 times staying weeks or months at a stretch conducting reconnaissance & insinuating himself amongst many locals - each time advancing the impending deadly assault. His final instructions were to map the GPS routes for the co-ordinated targets. After the deaths of the civilians, Indians & Westerners, Headley was sent to Copenhagen twice to figure out a retaliation/destruction plan of the Jyllands Posten newspaper building for its controversial publishing of the Mohammad cartoons which had caused outrage across the Muslim world. By this time however, he had changed allegiances & when his Pakistani sponsors grew suspicious they called off the plan. His new backing came from Al Qaeda with notoriously fearsome terrorist Ilyas Kashmiri (who would be killed in a US drone strike) saying the postal attack should include the beheading of hostages. Shadowed by Danish intelligence & under FBI surveillance, Headley was finally arrested at Chicago's O'Hare airport in Oct 2009. Facing the death penalty for his role in Mumbai & the Denmark plot, he co-operated and gave unprecedented evidence about the ISI, Lashkar & Al Qaeda. He tried luring Mir out of Pakistan but to no avail & after 2 weeks of interrogation, turned on an old high school friend (Tahawuur Rana) whom he accused of being an accomplice having provided a business cover. Headley agreed to a plea bargain to escape the death penalty by pleading guilty to multiple terror charges. He's still in federal custody at an undisclosed location where he awaits sentencing. Theories abound as to what kind of spying/espionage (if at all) he was engaged in. Mir & Iqbal have never been arrested and are believed to be living in Pakistan.

Dec 25, 2009
24yr old Nigerian-born Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab aka 'the underwear bomber' is arrested after his unsuccessful attempt to detonate plastic explosives hidden in his underwear while on board an airliner en route from Amsterdam to Detroit. He had spent about 20 minutes in the bathroom as the destination neared & then covered himself with a blanket after returning to his seat. Other passengers then heard popping noises, smelled a foul odor and saw his pant leg & the wall of the plane on fire. The flames were doused with fire extinguishers. Once apprehended, he explained he had an explosive device and in custody, told authorities he had been directed by an Al-Qaeda affiliation from Yemen. With 2nd degree burns to his hands, legs, right inner thigh & genitalia, he was subsequently charged on criminal counts including attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction & attempted murder of 289 people. On Oct 12, 2011 he plead guilty to 8 charges including inspiring to commit terrorism.

May 2010
The Park51 project (originally named Cordoba House & first announced in Dec 2009) - a planned $100 million 13-story Muslim community center/prayer space to be located 2 blocks from the WTC site (controversially referred to as 'The Ground Zero Mosque') and meant to promote interfaith tolerance n' understanding through dialogue & counterbalance radicalism, stirs a firestorm of enraged criticism from Lower Manhattan residents & 9/11 victims families who charge they were not properly consulted about the proposed development and that the building itself - replacing a former Burlington Coat Factory that was damaged by debris in the twin tower attacks (and designed to contain a theater, auditorium, art school, gym, swimming pool, basketball court, bookstore, food court & commemorative 9/11 memorial for the victims) near sacred ground is in extreme bad taste & insultingly dishonors the dead. Inspite of the development's support of a downtown community board & unanimously endorsed (Mayor Michael Bloomberg being in favor), loud n' booing protesters (from public debates frequently breaking out into shouting matches) and harsh right-wing media remain incensed over what they deem the shameful insensitivity of the intentional Mosque standing as a despicable slap in the face tarnishing the area & calling Islam a "religion of hate." By late Sept 2011, the project developer opened a 4000 sq.ft. Islamic center in the renovated location space with hopes to build the larger planned project within several years.

Jul 2010
First appearing on Facebook, Pastor Terry Jones of the Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Florida declared he would burn 200 Korans on the 2010 anniversary of 9/11 & the ensuing media-frenzy coverage quickly resulted in international outrage sparking pleas from the leaders of several countries including Canada, France, Germany, Pakistan, Iran, Cuba, Indonesia and world bodies such as The Vatican City, NATO & the UN. President Barack Obama condemned the ceremonial stunt as an act not only of religious intolerance & bigotry but warned it could put American soldiers overseas at risk with Al-Qaeda & terrorist sympathizers retaliating for the defilement of their holy book. For his announced act of desecration, Jones received numerous death threats and spawned riots in the Middle East & parts of Asia all the while igniting deep debates about freedom of speech, expression & censorship. After Gainsville refused to grant his church a burning permit, a bank holding a $140,000 mortgage loan on the property demanded immediate repayment of the balance then cancelled the insurance. A web hosting service for his church disconnected the site & the city said it would charge $200,000 for the cost of providing him security. All of these disuading factors led to Jones cancelling the burning on Sept 9, 2010. On Mar 20, 2011, Jones held a mock-trial of the Koran finding it guilty of crimes of humanity & sentencing it to execution. The book was burned in the church sanctuary. Upon hearing this news on Apr 1, 2011, angered protesters in Afghanistan attacked a UN Mission killing atleast 30 people (7 of whom were UN workers) & injuring 150. Jones denied any responsibility.

May 2, 2011
9yrs, 7 months & 20 days after 9/11, Osama Bin Laden at long last is finally killed after a gunbattle with US Navy SEAL & CIA paramilitary forces at a compound in Abbottabad,Pakistan. The elite commandos were launched from Afghanistan & dropped by 4 helicopters in a secret raid (one of the choppers crashed & was destroyed by the US team as the mission went forward). The men were on the ground for 40-45 minutes as the entire operation was watched in real-time by members of the Obama administration, intelligence n' national security officials. Bin Laden guards opened fire as the SEAL team blasted their way floor-to-floor in the assault finally cornering him on a 3rd floor room to which 2 of his sons, 2 of his most trusted couriers & a bewildered Bin Laden himself were shot dead. Also killed was an unidentified woman (said to be a wife) apparently used as a human shield. 2 more wives & another 4 of his children were captured. The troubling discovery that he was living in an expensive 2storey house 100-yards (less than a mile) from a military academy (described as an equivalent to West Point) housing soldiers & police units (less than 100km drive from the capital Islamabad) raised serious questions as to how he managed to evade capture and if his whereabouts where known all along as well as a having protection, a support system & the shelter provided for him. It was suggested that he had been in the residence for 5yrs. Pakistan's government categorically denied all the allegations, promising a full inquiry while having to explain how their own intelligence servies failed to find Bin Laden. After the raid, the American forces took Bin Laden's body to Afghanistan for identification, then buried it at sea within 24hrs (to the consternation of many Muslims around the world who felt that inspite of their religion, he was unworthy of the strict ritual). Understandably with Bin Laden's death was an emotion of justice delivered, there was great elation & revelling in the bloodlust and just as quickly (because of the initial unconfirmed news n' rumors spreading like wildfire), conspiracy theories began flying as to whether the world's most wanted terrorist was infact really dead -- especially stemming from the White House refusal to issue video or photos of the corpse (thus fuel for the paranoid skeptics & lunatic fringe spewing denials n' denouncements for years to come citing disbelief without authentic proof of a lifeless body).

Jul 13, 2011
3 co-ordinated bomb explosions in Mumbai which caused the jamming of phone lines and put metro cities like Dehli, Bangalore & Hyderabad on high alert kill 26 people & injure 130. Victim compensation from 50,000-500,000 rupees was announced for the kin & families of the dead and survivors who were seriously wounded. Speculation of responsiblity for the blasts ranged from the Indian Mujahideen, Mumbai gangsters connected to the murder of a journalist & the possibility of Kashmiri groups plotting to derail the Indo-Pakistani peace process. Along with accusations of lax security concerns, the police were heavily criticized when they detained several men (one of whom died in custody sparking allegations of brutality when the deceased man's family members charged he was subjected to torture) and the investigation provided no real viable suspects. Several countries offered their sympathies & expressed outrage over the terrorist acts.

TO BE OR NOT TO BE

Was the WTC an act of controlled demolition? Was the Pentagon really hit by an airliner or was it a missile? Was the American govt in cahoots with the terrorists on 9/11? I like conspiracy theories as much as the next person: notions of clandestine corporations, shadowy operatives, secret oraganizations, corrupt collusions & cover-ups… all acting against our better interests with a sinister agenda. However far-fetched, my curiosity is captured in this 'all bets are off' arena but the real friction/schism between believers & skeptics is credibility. In the assertion of bold, shocking claims there has to be more than just a modicum of proof & strong suspicions but a solid foundation with a basis of supported evidence to outweigh being outright dismissed. Without absolute certainty, how will/can we ever know/trust what is supplied as definitive when we are filled with doubt? I’m all for hearing 2 sides of the story (and granted, all viewpoints have a slant) but if real backing has no documentation or fact & is instead replaced by bias, then all that is produced is wild unfounded speculation in which thin argument ironically allows for a mass to run with the ball. To knowingly go this angle is too easily asking for trouble so maybe stirring the pot, hornet’s nest or opening cans of worms is to deliberately spark spotlight for the sake of investigation. Either way, in the search for answers, blind acceptance instead of proper examination appears to be evermore an accessory against the quest for truth.

ANARCHY IN THE UK?

2011-08-13T16:16:00.007-04:00

Takin' it to the streets.
AFTER BRITISH RIOTS, ASKING 'WHY' YIELDS CONFLICTING ANSWERS
by Ravi Somaiya

LONDON — Outside a London court last week, as those accused of looting & rioting in the most destructive and widespread violence in recent British history faced justice, a mother turned to her 11yr old son, accused of theft, and asked simply, "Why?" That question has been at the heart of a fraught national debate as Britons puzzle over what drove even some previously law-abiding people to steal, sometimes risking arrest for nothing more than bottles of water. The debate has often divided people into predictable camps.

All the trouble was first sparked by the fatal controversial police shooting of 29yr old Mark Duggan, a Tottenham father of 4, following a surveillance operation on suspicion Duggan was planning a revenge attack for the stabbing death of his cousin. When Duggan was killed by a single shot to the chest after a failed attempt to arrest him, his relatives & local neighborhood residents marched to a police station demanding answers. Duggan had an illegal gun but the police claim of the weapon having been fired in an exchange of shots was untrue. Demonstrators turned unruly & certain elements in gathering crowds began vandalizing which subsequently in the next few days - just like a sickness - negatively infected Tottenham, London, Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Nottingham, Liverpool & Manchester. Duggan's family quickly condemned the disorder and further denounced allegations that Mark was a drug-dealing gang member. Despite the fact he was a nephew of deceased & notorious gangland boss Desmond Noonan whose feared crime family ran the Manchester underworld for 20yrs, Duggan himself had no criminal record. Piling questions nonetheless only served to expose police tensions when dealing with the Afro-Carib community and how long-standing practice in the treatment of black suspects fuelled charges of racism in law enforcement.

The Conservative Prime Minister, David Cameron, stood up in Parliament as Britain smoldered around him and railed against moral collapse & 'sick society' in what he blasted as "mindless violence and thuggery." His critics on the left blame deep mistrust of the police in poor communities & income inequality they say will worsen as his government pursues sweeping cuts in spending & social welfare. Some commentators have blamed modern society at large (with recent triggers in Greece, Spain, France & Argentina). The Daily Telegraph struck a popular chord when it blamed a “culture of greed and impunity” that it said extended to corporate boardrooms & the government itself. Many politicians, meanwhile, have lashed out at technology — including the instant messaging that encouraged 'flash mob' looting — for whipping up the crowds. But as more details of the crimes emerge, the picture has become infinitely more complicated & confusing. In some of the more shocking cases, the crimes seemed to be rooted in nothing more than split-second decisions made by normally orderly people seduced by the disorder around them. An aspiring social worker, Natasha Reid, 24, turned herself in after stealing a $500 television. Nicolas Robinson, a young engineering student who had never been in trouble with the law, grabbed bottles of water because, his lawyer said, he was thirsty. The 11-yr old, the youngest looter arrested, stole a trash can. At several of the riots last week, those perpetrating the violence had no ready explanation for their behavior. One young man, kicking trash cans into the street, shrugged when asked why. And the atmosphere in Hackney’s Pembury Road low-income housing projects was sometimes one of adrenaline-driven glee. Looters cheered wildly as they stripped a convenience store bare, mere yards from the police. Even some Londoners who had initially condemned the riotous behavior joined in. Bystanders had watched in shock as rioters lined up against police officers on a Tottenham main street, setting fires & looting. The mood shifted dramatically, though, after officers moved in with dogs barking & horses charging. One man, suddenly emboldened, grabbed a box of pears from outside a convenience store. A woman carried off an armful of coconuts. Another man, seemingly conflicted, sprinted, then turned back briefly to snatch a crate of bottled water.

Many who were outraged, heavily criticized the police for what was seen as their initial slow response but in an almost surreal twist, the police then criticized the Prime Minister for turning to an American solution when Cameron confirmed a former New York police commissioner as the new government anti-gang expert to help stop the chaos. The police branded the move as misguided & an insult to their professionalism. Clifford Stott, a social psychologist at the University of Liverpool who studies riots, says that behavior, at least, is not unusual & further added that bystanders often turn against the police when they themselves get swept up in a broad crackdown. He said that "confrontation makes them start to think that the police are wrong, not the rioters." But he added that crowd dynamics are incredibly complex & cannot be readily reduced to blame people or to explain away their behavior. One theory suggested that those who took to the streets in a frenzy, took their cue from the Arab revolt in the Spring. But whereas the actions in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Morocco, Algeria & Jordan by huge sweeping masses of the population - having had enough of decades of oppression & corruption - where not about mindless anarchy, the UK counterparts were arguably instead just a nihilistic free-for-all abhorent mutation of protest. Pamela Rutledge, who studies the intersection of the media & human psychology, said the condemnation of social media is equally glib and added "it is true that it accelerates behaviors because it creates social modeling — people see that other people are involved and they’re encouraged but these tools are not only in the hands of the rioters; the police, for instance, have used social media to inform worried local residents about the state of rioting in their areas. You can use a hammer to build something or destroy it because it’s just a tool."

Especially difficult to explain, both psychologists said, are the rapid-fire decisions behind the snatching of small & often cheap goods. In Wood Green, where looters were allowed a free rein for 4hrs before the police arrived, some rioters set upon an eyeglass shop. And 3 men stood just outside a GNC, debating whether stealing the vitamins & food supplements was worth the trouble. "Shall I take this?" asked one as he lifted a tub of a nutritional supplement. "Nah man, don’t bother," his friends replied. He took it anyway. So far, the police say more than 1,200 people have been arrested in connection with "violence, disorder and looting." Of those, 725 have been charged & some are being handed stringent sentences by courts that run 24hrs in some areas. Many have prior convictions & court records reveal that some were armed or carrying quantities of drugs when arrested — the 'criminals' that many political figures have blamed for the riots. The most serious case involves 4 Birmingham men (ages 17-16) charged with murder for the hit n' run deaths of 3 Muslim men (2 of whom were brothers) who were killed after being struck by a car. The victims had been protecting shops & homes from looters. Natasha Reid & Nicolas Robinson are not so readily pigeonholed. Ms. Reid is a university graduate who put her head in her hands in court while her mother told reporters that she had been sobbing in her bedroom since her daughter's arrest over the stolen television. The mother said, "She didn’t want a TV. She doesn’t even know why she took it. She doesn’t need a telly." Mr. Robinson, the engineering student, was walking home at 2:40AM when he looted a supermarket in Brixton. His lawyer said of his client "he got caught up in the moment & is now incredibly ashamed." He was sentenced to 6 months. The story of Chelsea Ives, an 18yr old athlete who had been chosen to be one of the faces of London’s upcoming Olympic Games, has dominated the front pages of newspapers in Britain. She has been accused of burglary, violent disorder & throwing bricks at a police car, according to media reports. She was turned in by her mother, Adrienne who told reporters, "I had to do what was right." Another woman listed on court documents was accused of stealing 6 bottles of nail varnish & a tin of food.

Dr. Rutledge said that in times of unrest, people craved clarity: "In the same way we want to blame social media, we want an answer to this. But individuals are individual. So what if these people didn’t have criminal records? We can’t know what they were feeling." Dr. Stott said that people in a rush to judgment often latch onto the idea that a mob mentality has taken hold "There’s an excitement & an intensity to those situations that are really quite profound and the tendency is to identify these people are upstanding citizens, like me, so something must have gone wrong with their brains. It must be mob mentality." But he said the theory that people in mobs become mindless had been widely discredited, alos warning that focusing on such a simplistic explanation would prevent an important national discussion about the underlying causes of the riots. When faced with difficult questions about the role that policing, government policies, & societal ills might have played, Dr. Stott concluded: "You can see it becomes very useful to portray it all as just mindless. Why did that young man steal bottles of water? We may never know."

2011-08-06T13:01:00.020-04:00

Watched some more lost gems again which I last saw 20yrs ago. Damn. An interesting cast of characters involving alien criminals: One with a penchant for heavy metal & high propensity for violence, no less, that bodyjumps into human hosts seemingly for no other purpose than to create maximum destruction and the other who extracts fluid from human victims & dispatches anyone unfortunately trying to thwart the serum collection with lethal razor-flying disks. Both are extraterrestrial fugitives chased by hardnosed, grizzled detectives. And lastly, a cyberpunk sculptor in an irradiated post-nuclear nihilistic future, who finds an insectoid robot-head intended for a piece of art (which happens to have come from a killing machine which is still sentient) is freaked out when it becomes operational again & proceeds to initiate an exterminatory bloodbath in a nightmarish dystopia of artifical intelligence rendering even the last scavenges of mankind, obsolete. So therefore of course, you know this 'borrows' heavily from Mad Max, Blade Runner & Schwarzenegger in a particular role as a ruthless T1 sent back in time - which if I'm not mistaken, I think made that franchise famous... All this sci-fi plays on a similar theme: beneath the appearance & what lies below the surface is the unleashing of potential otherworldy obliteration. Late 80's / early 90's - gotta love it.

JULY 18, 1936 (DRESS REHEARSAL FOR THE BIG SHOW)

2011-07-18T14:11:00.024-04:00

In the 1930's, the power of a surging re-arming Germany under Adolf Hitler & that of the Italians through Benito Mussolini was soon to be demonstrated in supporting the rise of another dictator in Spain and 75yrs ago today, Civil War (perhaps most memorably romanticized by Ernest Hemingway) erupted in Spain which was exceptionally vicious setting family against family, communist against fascist & religious believers against atheists. In Apr 1931, a left-wing government had come to power determined to abolish the centuries-old Spanish monarchy in favor of declaring a more liberal system stripping away rule by heritage. King Alfonso XIII was forced into exile & the second Republic was proclaimed under the leadership of President Manuel Azaña. In Feb 1936, the parties of the Bolshevist left combined in a 'popular front' to take on the forces of the right in a general election. The Popular Front (aka Republicans or Loyalists) narrowly won and even though its organized labor reform program was modest, the wave of strikes & land seizures (in part because of region autonomy) led the right & aristocracy to fear that a communist takeover was inevitable. Within the Spanish army -- long a bastion of Catholic & conservative thinking -- senior officers, dreading a Marxist revolution, began to consider the possibility of a coup supported by the Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas (C.E.D.A); among them was Generalissimo Francisco Franco, a former chief of staff who had been effectively exiled to command Spanish forces in the Canary Islands.

On Jul 17, 1936, the units of the army, fighting guerillas in Spain's colony in Morocco mutinied & the next day, Franco (aka 'El Caudillo' -- the leader) flew to join them proclaiming a new right-wing nationalist movement (the 'Falange') which would overthrow the Republicans & save Spain from communism. Mainland garrisons joined the revolt & the Popular Front responded by calling for volunteers to defend the Republic & quash the uprising. Battle lines had been drawn. At first, Franco faced problems as he & his army were in North Africa and he had to get across the straits of Gibraltar back to Spain. He turned to the one person he thought might help: Hitler, who did. Within a month, German transport aircraft from the new Luftwaffe began an airlift taking Franco's battle-hardened veterans over to southern Spain. At this stage, the Republic still seemed to have the advantage as the pro-Franco military uprisings in the capital Madrid & Barcelona were quickly crushed by peasants, leaving the leftists in control of most of the east of the country. Franco's Nationalists (or Rebels) were confined largely to the northwest & parts of the south but their situation & positions were transformed when Hitler & Mussolini began offering immediate aid by pouring in troops n' weapons -- in large part as a testing ground oppurtunity for their new equipment, expanding armies & their own expansionist aims. The first Panzer tanks were sent along with 12,000 soldiers and the Luftwaffe deployed it's Condor Legion with its ultra-modern new bombers & fighters. Mussolini sent a so-called 'volunteer corps' of 50,000 men & over 700 aircraft.

With the injection of outside fascist participation (including also Portuguese & Irish), the Republicans in vain appealed to Britain, France & Russia for help but London & Paris were scared of setting off a European war and declared a policy of non-intervention. Cynically, both Germany & Italy had signed up to the policy but when it became increasingly obvious that they were still sending arms to Franco, Josef Stalin decided the Russians would support & help the Republic as his worry was the rise of Hitler since the German leader had made it abundantly clear that communism was the ultimate enemy of nazism. Stalin saw the Spanish conflict as a way of keeping Germany & Italy occupied while building up the strength of the Russian army and he sent about 700 military advisors along with tanks & figther aircraft; it was atleast something (along with some help from Mexico) but no match for what Franco had recieved. The largest source of outside help for the Republic didn't come from a country at all but infact from foreign volunteers -- the international brigades -- numbering nearly 30,000 left-wing Americans, British, French, Canadians, Hungarians, Romanians, Yugoslavians, Chinese & Germans joining the fight in Spain. The Nationalists were able to open 2 fronts: one advancing towards Barcelona from the north & the other led by Franco pushing up to Madrid from the south. By the end of 1936, Madrid was enveloped on 3 sides & virtually under seige. The fighting was intense & often accompanied by appalling atrocities against the civilian population -- committed by both sides. The Republicans hunted down & murdered Roman Catholic clergy and the Nationalists committed massacres in Seville, persecuted Protestants & slaughtered anyone accused of being a communist. (Noted & highly revered poet n' playwright, Federico García Lorca was executed by a Nationalist death squad. Theories ranging from his apolitical views to his homosexuality are said to have made him a high-profile target & his murder shocked the dramatist world community). German & Italian air-power was used indiscriminately against civilian targets as Madrid was heavily bombed. The worst incident came on Apr 26, 1937, when the Basque town of Guernica was almost obliterated with deaths controversially estimated as high as 6000 (considerably up from the govt report listing 1,654 killed) & the horrors of the bombing commemorated in Pablo Picasso's famous painting of the same name. The area controlled by the Republic was steadily ground down as its forces fought with great gallantry but under-trained & under-equipped amateurs were no match for the professional soldiers led by Franco or for the combined modern weaponry of Italy & Germany, helping to overrun Republican territory.

As the war dragged on, the fighting around Madrid became a symbol of the left's determination not to be conquered by a fascist dictatorship but behind the scenes, the Republican alliance was falling apart. The communists & socialists wanted to concentrate on winning a miltary victory but the more idealistic anarchists & syndicalists saw the war as an oppurtunity for a mass worker's revolution. In May 1937, these disagreements burst out into open infighting in Catalonia between the communists & anarchists which was a fatal weakening of the Republican cause now all but lost. By the end of 1938, the Nationalists had penned their enemy into a small enclave around Barcelona & another stretching eastward from Madrid to the coast. Madrid continued to hold out but the international brigades were withdrawn as more n' more countries began to recognize Franco's government as his forces closed in for the final assault on the capital (he had refused attempted peace negotiations). On Jan 26, 1939, Barcelona fell. On Mar 28, exhausted Republican defenders in Madrid finally surrendered. Valencia surrendered the next day. On Apr 1, 1939 Franco formally declared hostilities at an end. The scars of the Spanish Civil War would take decades to heal & some would say, never have as internationally, Franco's victory proved a disaster. The figure of those estimated to have died during the conflict remains in dispute: some sources calculate up to 500,000 while others claim 2 million executed alone. More sobering estimates say 100,000-200,000. After the war, much of Spain's infrastructure was ruined & the population was further depleted as between 250,000-500,000 Republican refugees streamed out of the country to find safety abroad, mainly in France. Harsh reprisals against Franco's former enemies saw hundreds of thousands of Republicans imprisoned with atleast 30,000 summarily executed (some calculations range these deaths from 50,000-200,000) & many others were put to forced labour, building railways, drying out swamps, digging canals, etc.

During WWII, Franco remained neutral but did send a division to fight alongside the Germans on the Eastern Front. At war's end 1945, still viewed as a pariah state by the rest of the world & the last surviving fascist dictator in Europe, Franco invites scorn as he is prepared to shelter thousands of Nazi's fleeing justice (most notably, granting asylum to Ante Pavelic, the fascist dictator of the Independent State of Croatia, whose reign was one of the bloodiest of the war resulting in 600,000 to 1 million deaths). With the advent of the Cold War, Spain received no aid from the Marshall Economic Recovery Program and was excluded from membership of the United Nations (until 1955) & NATO. Franco's attempts to implement a policy of economic self-sufficiency lead to further international isolation as well as stagnation of the domestic economy but he did however, begin to be seen as a potential anti-communist ally by the West & previous frosty relations started to thaw with diplomatic receptions resuming in 1950. As the monarchy was reinstated, his position of head of state was confirmed which he retains for life. In Spain, criticism will be regarded as treason; political parties are outlawed; universal suffrage is eliminated; civil marriage is banned; divorce & abortion are made illegal and the Catholic Church is restored as the official religion of the country with the church regaining complete control of the education system. Around 30,000 children of political prisoners & those suspected of Republican sympathies, would be removed from their parents and put up for adoption. Spain became a cultural wilderness as artists & intellectuals were either forced into exile or silenced by censorship. With trade unions destroyed and their funds & property confiscated, former supporters of the Popular Front would be banned from entering public life. Respectability for the country begins to come when the government is reorganised to give a more professional approach to economic management, with military administrators being replaced by civilians with business expertise.

By the 1960's, the Spanish economy had grown spectacularly as industry was modernised & the country became a popular tourist destination with gross domestic product rising by 40%. Popular discontent with the strictness of the regime also started to grow & become quite vocal. Franco responded by slightly loosening his control hoping to maintain favor & approval but in 1969, a wave of strikes in conjunction with rebellion in the universities caused Franco to proclaim a "state of exception" thus suspending the rights to freedom of expression & assembly. The decree is eventually lifted & Franco designates 32yr old prince Juan Carlos de Borbón, grandson of former King Alfonso XIII, as heir to the Spanish throne & his successor. In 1973, Luis Carrero Blanco, a former admiral & long-time confidant of Franco is appointed Prime Minister. On Dec 20, he is assassinated by 4 members of the Basque terrorist 'ETA' (one of whom is himself killed by a car bomb in France on Dec 21, 1978) in retaliation for the execution of 5 political opponents by the regime. In 1974, with opposition to the regime continuing to mount & again, more strikes spreading across the country along with Universities in turmoil & increasing ETA activity, the government places the Basque provinces under martial law in April 1975. On Nov 20, 1975 in Madrid, Francisco Franco dies. His body is entombed at the 'Valley of the Fallen', a giant necropolis to the south of the capital built for Nationalist soldiers killed during the Civil War. King Juan Carlos I begins to dismantle the authoritarian institutions of Franco's regime & encourages the revival of political parties. On Jun 15, 1977, the first general elections in the country since the outbreak of the fighting in the 1930's, take place & within 3yrs of Franco's death, Spain has become a fully democratic constitutional monarchy.

On Dec 1, 2003, the Spanish parliament paid homage to the victims of the Franco regime but the governing People's Party boycotted the proceedings. On Mar 18, 2005, the last publicly displayed statue of Franco remaining in Madrid was removed from the Plaza de Oriente. Meanwhile, a radio station poll in Nov finds that 30% of Spaniards do not know that Franco overthrew a democratically elected government and over half those polled believed that his influence could still be felt with 63% believing that the fascist dictatorship was negative for Spain. In July 2006, a survey by 'El Mundo' newspaper found that a third of those polled believed that Franco was right to overthrow the Republican government. On Oct 31, 2007, the lower house of the Spanish Parliament passed a bill removing many of the last remaining vestiges of the Franco era. Under the bill known as the Law on Historic Memory, the summary military trials of the Franco regime were declared illegitimate along with their sentences. All statues, street names & other public symbols honouring Franco were ordered taken down. Political assemblies at the Valley of the Fallen were banned & the citizenship of Spaniards forced into exile by the dictatorship, to be reinstated with the descendants of those exiles declared able to apply for citizenship. Lastly, the program for the exhumation & identification of victims of the Civil War was to be expanded.

WHAT SPAIN SEES IN ROBERT CAPA's CIVIL WAR PHOTO
(from Time Magazine by Geoff Pingree and with commentary from The Guardian by Isabel Hilton)

"If your pictures aren't good enough," Robert Capa once remarked, "then you're not close enough." For more than 35 years, Capa's 1936 photograph "Death of a Militiaman" — arguably the most enduring image of the Spanish Civil War — commanded worldwide acclaim and helped establish Capa as the archetypal modern war photographer.

His identity established only relatively recently in 1996, Federico Borrell García was a 24yr old textile mill worker & anarchist who was one of 50 men reinforcing an artillery battery atop a hill. His detachment was infiltrated & fired upon from behind by the enemy; the only member of his unit to die in the fighting. He was identified by the famous photo from his brother & reportedly had no death certificate issued by the Spanish government. Controversial versions of his being shot have been attributed to one suggestion by Willis E. Hartshorn, director of the International Center of Photography, that he may have been shot n' killed by fascist rebels -- mainly a sniper firing from a distance -- while posing for a staged photo for Capa. Capa’s photographs of the Loyalist Republican militia at Cerro Muriano, including a 2nd picture of a fatally shot militiaman (in similar body-positioning), were first published in the September 23, 1936 issue of the French magazine VU. Images shot at the same location were also published a day later in the magazine Regards. In the USA, 'The Falling Soldier' has been reproduced first in Life and inumerable times after as it has become a symbol of the Spanish Civil War & is one of the most famous war photographs of all time.

But beginning in the 1970s, doubting researchers & historians began to challenge the picture's veracity and raise questions about Capa's reputation: Did the famous photograph capture the Loyalist Republican militiaman, Borrell, at the moment of his death on Sept 5th, 1936 at the Cordoba front or was it staged? Then came a claim that new and "indisputable" evidence determined once n' for all that the photograph is fake. "We tried to reconstruct the events exactly as they would have to have occurred for Capa's photo to have been taken during a military conflict," said Ernest Alos, the reporter for Cataluna's daily El Periodico who has led the latest inquiry. "And we discovered that the picture does not correspond to any actual event." The first real questions of authenticity were raised in 1975 by author Phillip Knightley in his book The First Casualty, From the Crimea to Vietnam: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist, and Myth Maker in which he alleged that Capa had staged the scene for the camera. Referring to the picture first published in the French magazine, Vu, he believes the caption describing soldiers, "With lively step, breasting the wind, running down the slope, suddenly their soaring interrupted by a whistling fratricidal bullet & their blood drunk by their native soil" was also written by Capa. When Life magazine republished a year later, captioned as the instant of a soldier's death, Capa's strange shot of the 2nd soldier falling on the identical spot is followed by a 3rd picture of a dead militiaman holding his rifle across his stomach corresponding to neither of the first two. Then a group shot appears in which Borrell is visible as part of a relaxed group posing for the camera. None of the other images suggest a battle was in progress, though the location is known to have been on the frontline. Knightley tried in vain to find all the negatives to examine the sequence of events & was unsuccessful.

In 2007, the documentary 'La Sombra del Iceberg' ("The Shadow of the Iceberg") claimed that Capa's Falling Soldier photo was staged & particulary cast doubt on the identification of the photo's subject, citing that [A] a 1937 Spanish anarchist publication stated that Borrell died while sheltered behind a tree, [B] a specialist in forensic science who concluded after analyzing pictures of Borrell & pictures of the militiaman (who did appear in other rolls of film earlier in the day alongside comrades waving guns & greeting photgraphers), that the militiaman depicted infact did not greatly resemble & therefore is not Borrell, [C] Elderly British journalist O'Dowd Gallagher in 1975 (quickly following Phillip Knightley) proclaiming that Capa told him the photo was staged by Loyalist Republican soldiers for the press (and further re-igniting the debate also adding that he had shared a hotel room with Capa near the French border at the time the photo was made) and [D] an astronomical study finalizing that the picture was taken at 9AM, not 5PM (as long historically believed). No battle happened at 9AM. Yet the findings, published by El Periodico are about more than that one shot — or the Capa mythology it fuelled. The latest investigation may settle any questions about the actual location of Capa's image, but despite its focus on historical accuracy, it is unlikely to end all debate about the photograph's authenticity. What the study does reveal is Spain's growing interest in the role that visual documents might play in understanding the country's complex — and still unresolved — relationship with its civil war. With the arrival of the exhibition "This is War! Robert Capa at Work" which displayed in Barcelona's Museu d'Art de Catalunya in 2008, Alos notes that local experts were able to observe several additional photographs Capa took of the Spanish Civil War that had never before been exhibited in Spain. "This is important because these photos are part of our history, and here we know our country's geography and history better than those in New York or London," he says.

The Falling Man is part of a broken series of images and in the exhibition, the 5th in a sequence of 7 shots. Other images from the sequence are missing. Images 6 and 7 are of a 2nd 'falling' soldier, who is not the famous man of shot number 5. It is the striking similarity between these similar images 5,6 and 7, two of which were published on the same page of the early VU spread, that always has led some to conclude that the soldiers were casualties of war & now allowed others to conclude that all the pictures in this series were staged by Capa. It made for successful propaganda for the Republican cause but also furthered Capa's young career. Alos and his colleagues came to the conclusion that Capa's photo had been staged by following the lead of Jose Manuel Susperregu, photography professor at the University of the Basque Country. In his 2009 book Sombras de la Fotografía ("Shadows of Photography") having closely examined the previously unseen photographs, Susperregu sent 2 of them to the governing councils of towns near Andalusia's Cerro Muriano, where Capa's photo purportedly was taken & received confirmation that the background landscape seen in the picture is actually located roughly 30 miles (50 km) away, near Espejo, a Cordoban town isolated from the war's battle zone. The El Periodico reporters spoke with the people of Espejo & with historians of the Civil War, learning that no military conflicts had taken place in the area during the days when Capa took the photograph. Susperregu also dismissed Hartshorn's assertion of veracity, pointing out that the frontlines were too widely separated & that there was no documentary evidence about the employment of snipers on the Córdoba front. He includes other contradictions, noting that Capa mentioned in interviews that the militiaman had been killed by a burst of machine-gun fire rather than a sniper's bullet and also that he gave very different accounts of the vantage point & technique he used to obtain the photo.

So is the Borrell image an authentic & genuine exact moment of his being shot to death? Or is the photo pushing we, the observer, over an edge and into the domain & seeming weird territory of 'hoax'? Capa had said that the picture had been taken when the Borrell militiamen were fooling around, not in combat. From surviving contact prints & notebooks, Capa's unease may rest with the fact that he & his German girlfriend Gerda Taro (real name Gerta Pohorylle who died in Spain in 1937 in a tank accident while taking pictures) had come across the group of comrades taking a siesta at the foot of a slope. The siesta was respected by both sides in the war & since no action was taking place, the men were persuaded the to pose for a series of simulated scenes. (The contact prints of the men pointing their guns over the side of a gully & cheerfully raising their rifles for the camera confirming this). The men then climbed a hill, turned & pointed their rifles again; then in high spirits, ran back down the hill with Capa running beside them taking pictures. Reaching the gully, they again aimed & perhaps fired their rifles. The evidence from other images suggests that the fatal photograph was taken near the edge of the gully. Significantly, a forensics expert consulted by Capa biographer & curator, Richard Whelan, categorically asserts that Borrell was not running when he died. He "had been standing flat-footed when he was shot. He was clearly not in stride". Capa's account & the Vu magazine caption stated that the man had been shot as he ran down the hill. So why should Capa have lied? Perhaps for the same reason that he was so fortunately placed right next to Borrell, positioned to take the lethal final frame. If the militia had posed & fired for the camera, they would have attracted the attention of the rebel forces. As Borrell stood to pose for Capa, he was cut down by a rebel fascist bullet. Was the secret that so tortured Capa the knowledge that without his intervention, Borrell might not have been shot?

One of the main bones of contention against Capa by detractors is the accusation that the 2 soldiers have not been killed in the heat of battle as the images appear too sharp & clear (more indicative of the subject carrying out an exercise - playing at pretend) as opposed to the suddeness of combat which would account for a distinct hazy blurring. And another charge: why wouldn't there of all verifications, be photographs of the dead bodies of these same 2 men lying lifeless on the hillside ground? It was revealed that in 1937, Capa fabricated footage for the 'March of Time' newsreel series. In a strange way, these findings of deception can exonerate Capa as some writers & historians have even suggested that he might have been responsible for the militiaman's tragic death which haunted him badly -- all for setting up a fake picture. Proving Capa’s photo is not genuine is to perhaps undermine its legendary status as an iconic image of the war & say that the Hungarian was willing to compromise journalistic integrity for the sake of political propaganda or to help launch his career. In the quest for truth, it marks one more step in the Spaniards’ gradual reconquest of the right to shape & tell their history. (A recent discovery of the archives of Agustí Centelles, one of the Republic’s official photographers also famous for his images, includes a photo of 2 Republican guards shooting rifles from behind a pile of dead horses which are ironically also known to have been posed).

In early 2009, a lost 'suitcase' of Capa's negatives containing 126 rolls of 35mm film with about 4300 images of the Spanish Civil War, most never seen before, was unearthed (having been taken to Mexico at the end of WWII) but hopes to find the missing negative of Capa's most famous picture were soon dashed. The traveling exhibition of hundreds of images that toured major art galleries just a year before showed pictures taken on the same location & at the same time. Many of the images in this show were clearly staged & posed including many famous images by Capa from the Spanish Civil War. While the new findings clearly establish where the famous shot was taken, not everyone believes they suggest it was a fraud. "The evidence certainly changes the photograph's location from Cerro Muriano to Espejo — there's no longer any question about that," says Cynthia Young, a curator at the International Center of Photography in charge of the Robert Capa and Cornell Capa Archive and one of the exhibition's organizers. "But I don't see how one goes from 'new location' to 'fake photo' — it's a lot more complicated than that. Capa never said the photo was taken at Cerra Muriano — not once, not anywhere."

In 2002, Wheelan wrote of how he undertook a fantastic amount of research over the course of 2 decades in confronting the growing controversy & after wrestling with the dilemena, came to the conclusion that the photo was once & for all, real. And that slander could be further put to rest with a key piece of evidence supplied by a Memphis PD homocide detective to prove moment of death: "The most decisive element in his reading is the soldier’s left hand, seen below his horizontal left thigh. Capt. Franks told me in conversation that the fact that the fingers are somewhat curled toward the palm clearly indicates that the man’s muscles have gone limp and that he is already dead. Hardly anyone faking death would ever know that such a hand position was necessary in order to make the photograph realistic. It is nearly impossible for any conscious person to resist the reflex impulse to brace his fall by flexing his hand strongly backward at the wrist and extending his fingers out straight." Ever since the camera went to war, photographers have staged scenes, rearranged bodies & had events re-enacted for the camera and we look at them in 2 states of mind -- open to their impact as authentic images & aware that to perceive the camera as a neutral observer is naive. Capa will always be regarded as a great photographer despite the known episodes of fakery and many critics regard this pre-digital age interrogation of the relationship between photographer & subject as irrelevant. What matters, they argue, is the impact of the image not what they see as spurious questions of authenticity. But as the story of Capa's iconic photograph shows, discredited images lose their impact. If the story is not what we are invited to believe, we are entitled to resist its effects. If Capa's actions that day did contribute to the death of Borrell, the photograph is telling a radically different & shocking story. Truth & authenticity are not only artistic criteria. They are moral judgments too. The camera never lies. But photographers can & do. For all of the controversy, heated tensions & extra fuel added to the fire that is the 'Falling Soldier' (perhaps made into an explosive inferno more than it should be), it's quite possible that nothing more than Capa's own reputation (and he certainly wasn't without his faults) may be responsible for all of the new-found dismantling: He was a liar, compulsive gambler, depressive, heavy drinker & a womanizer with a special penchant for prostitutes. He used people, broke promises & when he was accused of being a communist to which the U.S. State Department kept his passport, he "named names" to get it back at the expense of others being ruined by 'blacklists'. Unflattering traits which can easily lend to him being denounced as a phony.

Indeed, many who have long followed this renewed debate see the latest investigation as part of a larger tension. "There is more going on than just getting at the truth," says Sebastiaan Faber, a Civil War scholar and professor of Hispanic Studies at Oberlin College in Ohio. "In the reactions to these latest revelations there is a clear undertone of irritation and indignation, an underlying accusation of opportunism: Capa as an unscrupulous, deceitful foreigner who made his career off the Spanish Civil War." He adds: "This is one more chapter in the Spaniards' long struggle to regain control over the story of their civil war, reversing the notion that only foreigners have access to the 'truth about Spain.'" On this point, at least, those pursuing the meaning of Capa's falling militiaman may find common ground. "To show that Capa fabricated this photo shakes his reputation, yes," says El Periodico's Alos. "But rather than destroying Capa's myth, it forces us to confront the realities of that time and place: that it was 1936, that Capa was a 22yr old on his first assignment." More important, he says, "this is part of an effort to recuperate the historical & graphic memory of our country. That's the really important thing — that we've taken a new step forward in understanding our own history."

JULY 12, 1906 (REDEMPTION & WRECKONING)

2011-07-12T15:54:00.000-04:00

105yrs ago today, French artillery officer, Alfred Dreyfus is finally pardoned, restored to full rank of Captian, promoted, decorated with the Legion d'honneur & returned to his original regiment in a full dress parade. Completely innocent, he was falsely accused of treason in one of the most notorious & shameful miscarriages of justice ever perpetrated that became a landmark in the Third Republic & modern France. Deliberately picked as the scapegoat for a major espionage scandal in the 12yr ordeal known as 'The Dreyfus Affair', he was degraded in a humiliating public ceremony & railroaded in 2 highly irregular trials (even after the real traitor - Maj. Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy who later confessed - was identified). Maj. Hubert Joseph Henry admitted he forged much of the false evidence against him through incriminating documents. These actions owed far more to the prevailing & predominant anti-Semitism permeating France at the time which regarded Dreyfus as the 'faceless foreigner/enemy within' therefore untrustworthy & dangerous, rather than any actual guilt. The blatantly corrupt conviction stemming from his rigged court martial saw Dreyfus sentenced to life imprisonment & sent to the dreaded pestilential hellhole in French Guyana known as Devil's Island. Residing in a hut in solitary confinement, his isolated incarceration under inhumane conditions not only magnified the immense existing bigotry but opened the faultline of implacable hostility between far right & left-leaning liberals as philosophies were transplanted into nationalism. In no time at all, every stratum of French life unwilling to allow the most fundamental principles of honesty, decency, justice & humanity be trampled into dust, soon turned outrage & protest into fury as riots broke out in several provinces. The far-reaching deep rift between intellectuals divided Europe as even Queen Victoria, the President of the USA & Kaiser Wilhelm II called for Dreyfus' release. Virulent propanganda had exploded into a psychological war for the moral soul of the country and not until France's greatest writer, Emile Zola (with already growing doubt of the legal procedures mounting around Dreyfus), championed the cause of the condemned man with his famous newspaper editorial "J'accuse" (to which he was sued for libel, defended himself brilliantly in court & fled France for England in Jul 1898 to avoid a 1yr prison sentence), were the reputations as well as the careers - even governments - seen as consuming the very fabric of society.

In Mar 1898, Lt. Lemercier-Picard, the master forger of the fake bordereau (memorandum) which sparked the Affair, was found hanging from a hotel bedroom window. 5 months later in Aug, Maj. Henry committed suicide in prison by slashing his throat with a razor and Esterhazy fled to Belgium then England (he died there in May 1923, an object of scorn). Zola did return to France in Jun 1899 but died in Sept 1902, sadly never seeing the freedom of Dreyfus or getting to meet the liberated man. In summarizing Dreyfus' desperate plight; savaged by military & political racist skullduggery, the massively embarrasing cover-up, perjuries & manufactured evidence was finally exposed and in trying to save face, the military administration defended its disgraceful conduct as patriotic duty. Condemned Dreyfus would at last emerge blameless (his convictions reversed) but broken. France, permanently altering its intellectual consciousness, had tore itself apart in his name. The Dreyfus Affair permanently altered political consciousness in France where left & right remain polarized at extremes. The turmoil that caused sharper alignments in social forces also brought about greater liberalizations & directly motivated the 1905 legislation separating Church & State. The repercussions haunted the country right up to 1914, WWI and well after as the power of the military had been reduced and from mobilization to violent upheaval, disastrous battles once again highlighted mistaken loyalties, repeated stupidities & passionate extremisms further intensifying severe splits that kept proving to be a source of perilous national weakness. Once villified as a most loathsome scoundrel, Dreyfus (having retired to the reserves after leaving the army) was recalled to active service during WWI and as a Lieutenant Colonel, commanded an ammunition column. After the war he retired into obscurity & died in Jul 1935 - having outlived everyone in the case. During WWII, his granddaughter Madeleine perished in Auschwitz. His grave in Paris, bearing her name, was desecrated in 1988. The French Army did not publicly declare his innocence until 1995(!)
Both the Tour de France bicycle race and L'Auto (L'Equipe) daily sports newspaper owe their extistence straight from the Dreyfus Affair: anti-Dreyfusards (Catholic conservative) started L'Auto in 1900 to challenge the pro-Dreyfusards' (Protestant coalition) paper Le Velo. When the anti-side L'Auto readership fell, the Tour de France was created in 1903 to boost circulation.

JULY 4, 1776 (THE SPIRIT OF LIBERTY)

2011-07-04T13:34:00.004-04:00

235yrs ago today in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the Continental Congress adopts the Declaration of Independence, which proclaims the independence of the United States of America -- a new sovereign nation having broken away from Great Britain & its King. The declaration came 442 days after the first volleys of the American Revolution were fired at Lexington & Concord in Massachusetts and marked an ideological expansion of the conflict that would eventually encourage France's intervention on behalf of the American Patriots. The declaration is signed on Aug 2,1776 and the USA formally becomes a free & self-governing country with the signing of the Treaty of Paris with England in 1783. Only 20yrs previous in 1763, there were some very colorful autocrats ruling the European domain: Catherine of Russia, Fredrick of Prussia, Charles III of Spain & Louis XV of France, all sharing in their distrust n' declared hatred of the English & King George III. With their disdain for the British crown, the European royalty helped in their own ways to ensure the success of the American revolt.

The first major American opposition to British policy came in 1765 after Parliament passed the Stamp Act, a taxation measure to raise revenues for a standing British army in America. Under the banner of "no taxation without representation," colonists convened the Stamp Act Congress in Oct 1765 to vocalize their opposition to the tax. With its enactment in Nov, most colonists called for a boycott of British goods and some organized attacks on the customhouses & homes of tax collectors. After months of protest in the colonies, Parliament finally voted to repeal the Stamp Act in Mar 1766. Most colonists continued to quietly accept British rule until Parliament's enactment of the Tea Act in 1773, a bill designed to save the faltering British East India Company by greatly lowering its tea tax & granting it a monopoly on the American tea trade. The low tax allowed the company to undercut even tea smuggled into America by Dutch traders & thus, many colonists viewed the act as another example of taxation tyranny. In response, militant colonists in Massachusetts organized the Boston Tea Party which saw British tea valued at some £18,000 dumped into Boston Harbor. Parliament, outraged by the defiance & other blatant acts of destruction of British property, enacted the Coercive Acts aka the Intolerable Acts by the colonists in 1774. These measures closed Boston to merchant shipping, established formal British military rule in Massachusetts, made British officials immune to criminal prosecution in America & required colonists to quarter British troops. The colonists with their ever-growing deep resentments, subsequently called the first Continental Congress to consider a united American resistance to the British. With the other colonies watching intently, Massachusetts led the resistance to the British, forming a shadow revolutionary government & establishing militias (the minutemen) to resist the increasing British military presence across the colony. In April 1775, Thomas Gage, the British governor of Massachusetts, ordered British troops to march to Concord where a Patriot arsenal was known to be located. Later that same month, the British regulars encountered a group of American militiamen at Lexington (with both battles preceded by Paul Revere's legendary midnight ride alerting the colonial militia of invasion) & so, the first shots of the American Revolution were fired. Initially, both the Americans & the British saw the conflict as a kind of civil war within the British Empire: To King George III it was a colonial rebellion while to the Americans it was a struggle for their rights as British citizens. However, Parliament remained unwilling to negotiate with the American rebels & instead hired 'Hessians', German mercenaries to help the British army crush the rebellion.

On Jun 17, 1775, during the Seige of Boston, the British defeated a colonial force of 1200 men under the command of Col. William Prescott (said to have issued the famous order: "Don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes") at the Battle of Bunker Hill & as the British had suffered heavy casualties after 3 assaults, the loss for the relatively inexperienced Americans (in large part from running out of ammunition) still demonstrated they were willing to engage & fight a strong Imperial army in a pitched contest. In response to Britain's continued opposition to reform, the Continental Congress began to pass measures abolishing British authority in the colonies. In January 1776, radical journalist Thomas Paine published the influential political pamphlet 'Common Sense' that convincingly argued for American independence & sold more than 500,000 copies in just a few months. In the spring of 1776, support for independence now sweeping the colonies, saw the Continental Congress call for states to form their own governments & a 5-man committee was assigned to draft a declaration. This Declaration of Independence was largely the work of Virginian legislator Thomas Jefferson. In justifying American independence, Jefferson drew generously from the political philosophy of English philosopher & physician John Locke, an advocate of natural rights. Also influenced & inspired by the works of other English theorists, the 1st section of the document features the famous lines, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." The 2nd part presents a long list of grievances against King George III that provided the rationale for rebellion, particularly stating that tyrants & their harassing oppressive subordinates are unfit to rule free people. On July 2, 1776, the Continental Congress voted to approve a Virginia motion calling for a legal separation of the 13 colonies from Britain. The dramatic words of this resolution were added to the closing of the Declaration of Independence. 2 days later, on July 4, the Declaration was formally adopted by 12 colonies after minor revision. New York approved it on July 19. It was initially published as a printed broadside that was widely distributed & read to the public.

On August 2, the Declaration of Independence was at last signed but the American Revolutionary War would last for 5 more years. Yet to come were the Patriot triumphs at Saratoga (resulting in the treachery of Benedict Arnold, a Franco-American alliance & French entry into the war), the bitter winter at Valley Forge & the final victory at Yorktown in 1781 ending the fighting and yet, the independence America was seeking STILL did not come with the signing of the Declaration. It was not until 1782 that British, Spanish & French peace negotiators in Paris began to make progress with American commissioners. After 8yrs of bitter battle, on Sept 3, 1783, with the signing of the Treaty of Paris with Britain by the representatives, the United States formally became a free & independent nation. (Odd then that this isn't the date the country celebrates as its true birthday for if the Americans had lost the war, the Declaration of Independence may have been nothing more than a historical document burned by the marauding Redcoats & somewhat forgotten by the passage of time).

New borders of the USA were created including all land from the Great Lakes to Florida and from the Atlantic Ocean west to the Mississippi River. The British legally recognized American independence & was allowed to remove all remaining troops from American soil (the last withdrawing from New York on Nov 25, 1783 in which General George Washington enters the city in triumph to boisterous cheering crowds). The Americans had to pay all outstanding debts & not persecute loyalists to the King who were still in America. It's difficult to calculate the number of American casualties during the war but many historians contend at least 50,000 lost their lives. On Apr 30, 1789, George Washington became the 1st President of the USA. 4 days later on Mar 4, 1789, the modern USA is established with the Constitution of 1787 (the supreme law of the country) & its first 10 amendments aka The Bill of Rights officially replaces the ratified Articles of Confederation of 1781 (the first written plan of government). Lawyer, statesman, diplomat, political theorist, a signer of the Declaration & 2nd President of the USA in 1797, John Adams wrote in 1818, "The revolution was effected before the war commenced. The revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people…This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affection of the people was the real American Revolution."

JULY 3, 1971 (THIS IS THE END)

2011-07-03T15:20:00.005-04:00

DOORS OF DECEPTION: RUMORS, MYTHS AND URBAN LEGENDS SURROUNDING THE 'DEATH OF JIM MORRISON
(reprinted from SECRET AND SUPPRESSED: BANNED IDEAS AND HIDDEN HISTORY by Thomas Lyttle)

So much has been written and suggested surrounding Jim Morrison's life, death & after-death that it is no longer enough to address just the facts. One must now also address the self-perpetuating mythos that has developed to envelope the facts. In the late 1960's, Doors' singer Jim Morrison founded a publishing company named Zeppelin Publishing Company with the help of the legal department of Warner Brothers Pictures & Atlantic Records. According to promotions for Zeppelin, Jim wanted to get his hands on the trademark name 'Zeppelin' before Led Zeppelin did. He did this while everyone in America knew who The Doors were but before the other rock group was well known..." Zeppelin Publishing Company was chartered & put into hibernation for later resurrection.

40yrs ago today -- exactly 2yrs after Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones drowned in his swimming pool from taking a cocktail of drink n' drugs -- rock n' roll wunderkind James Douglas Morrison was supposedly, reportedly, found dead in a Paris, France apartment at 17 Rue Beautraillis he had sub-leased as a writer's studio. His 'wife', Pamela Courson, was the first to discover the body in the bathroom. Jim lay in the bathtub, naked & half-submerged. At first she thought that he was pretending, noticing that he had recently shaved. What immediately followed was a series of bizarre n' convoluted events, probable speculation, strange coincidences & surreal news reports surrounding the untimely death of Jim Morrison at only 27.

One of the most emulated pioneering frontmen in rock history (reportedly with an IQ of 149 meaning genius level) and widely regarded for his wild personality & mesmerizing performances, Morrison was as charismatic as he was outrageous. A young, attractive and full-of-vice hedonistic Dionysius with behavioural episodes in indecent exposure, lewd conduct & public intoxication, Morrison's influential stage presence & stereotypical skintight black leather-clad apparel is considered a template which inspired a generation of numerous singers & musicians to later follow. Half a century later, he remains an icon & prototype of a rock star: surly, sexy, scandalous & mysterious. With The Doors' ever growing fame, the band did lose some credibility in the rock underground & for a short while in crisis, it was difficult for the group to perform live because of Morrison's reputation but he used the reflective period as a spur to creativity which saw the production of 'Morrison Hotel' & 'L.A. Woman' -- the 5th and final 6th albums to be released by the band, both blues-oriented & critically acclaimed. Morrison arrived in Paris in March 1971 on sabbatical (after a mini-breakdown on tour in Louisiana & his agreement that he was ready to retire from performing). Over the past year, he had made it clear he wanted to drop music altogether to become a writer. Often improvising poem passages while playing live, this trademark trippy mix of his admiration for visionaries Nietzsche, William Blake, Arthur Rimbaud & Huxley (usually filtered through heavy doses of bourbon & mescaline or some other combo of booze & pills), had already resulted in Morrison publishing 2 volumes of poetry -- The Lords and The New Creatures -- in which he planned to begin a literary career once his contractual obligations to Elektra Records were fulfilled.

Following the death there was a 3 day news blackout. This was reported on & questioned widely in the media, including articles in The Berkeley Barb, Esquire, the LA Free Press, Sounds, The Baltimore Morning Sun, & many others. Robert Hillburn writing at that time in The LA Times, called his obituary of Morrison "Why Morrison Death News Delay??" igniting a spark that would smolder for decades. The blackout prevented Morrison's close friends from getting at the principals & witnesses -- and the corpse -- for close inspection. Even Jim's parents & his in-laws were prevented from seeing his body. Pamela had called a local French medical examiner -- Dr. Max Vasille -- to take charge upon finding her husband's body. Dr. Vasille listed the cause of death as heart failure. Several people viewed the sealed coffin, including Doors manager Bill Siddons who apparently chose not to view the body. Siddons official statement to the press was that 'Morrison died of natural causes & his death was peaceful'. Although the death was listed officially as heart failure by aggravated drinking (and long claims of accidental heroin overdose), Morrison's personal physician, Dr. Derwin, stated to the press that "Jim Morrison was in excellent health before travelling to Paris". This has recently been complicated by "Queen Mu" writing in the avant garde magazine Mondo 2000 (Summer 1991). Apparently Mondo 2000 surfaced a rare medical file regarding 'Morrison's various sexual diseases & the treatments he was undergoing for them'. There was also mention of cancer of the penis. Said Mu: "...Hey! No one wants to be expunged from the Book of Life. How many medical workers at UCLA knew that Jim Morrison was being treated for gonorrhea in the Fall of 1970? Knew of the biopsy that confirmed adenoma of the penile urethra -- often consequence to repeated gonorrhea? This is a particularly swift form of cancer whose only alternative may have been radical castration..." By French law, no autopsy was performed on Morrison's corpse, as is the usual custom in unusual or suspect deaths in France (as the medical examiner claimed to have found no evidence of foul play & Courson lied, telling authorities that he hadn't been using drugs). Had friends been able to at least see the corpse this might have been done. Naturally, the absence of an official autopsy has left many questions, raised suspicion, fuelled persistent rumors & fed into the conspiracy machine surrounding Morrison's cause of death. According to several reports, a Morrison confidant Alan Ronay also helped maintain the blackout surrounding the death. Morrison's body was quickly whisked away to be buried at Père Lachaise cemetery.

Pere Lachaise is a national French monument with highly regarded and respected notables like Balzac, Edith Piaf, Moliere, Oscar Wilde & other French countrymen buried there. The famous at rest have become shrines for visiting tourists & mourners around the world paying their tributes. Regarding Pere Lachaise: Jim had handpicked the gravesite on several occasions for his impending 'burial'. He had visited the site as late as 3 days before his 'death'. This is reported in several Morrison biographies. The media at once showed suspicion regarding Morrison's grave due to the fact that foreigners are rarely buried in a national French monument. Reports like those in the Baltimore Morning Sun questioned how he might have cajoled his way into the cemetery to be buried. Upon viewing the grave site, Doors drummer John Densmore stated the grave was too short(!) Doors manager Bill Siddons, when asked about the Pere Lachaise controversy, in rock magazine Bam! back in 1981, said he was unclear as to how the site was chosen. At any rate, Morrison's grave remained unmarked for several months (thus adding and maintaining a further cloak around the corpse & the evidence) until French officials placed a shield over it, which was stolen in 1973. In 1981, Croatian sculptor Mladen Mikulin placed a bust of Morrison & the new gravestone with Morrison's name at the grave to commemorate the 10th anniversary of his death. Along with the frequent placement of flowers, pictures & wine, the bust was defaced through the years by cemetery vandals & later stolen in 1988. In 1990, Morrison's father, George Stephen Morrison (a former U.S. Navy Rear Admiral who was privy to intelligence & counter-intelligence information), placed a flat stone on the grave. The stone bears the Greek inscription 'ΚΑΤΑ ΤΟΝ ΔΑΙΜΟΝΑ ΕΑΥΤΟΥ', literally meaning "according to his own daemon" and usually interpreted as "true to his own spirit". Mikulin later made 2 more Morrison portraits in bronze (but did not receive the license needed that would've allowed him to place a new sculpture on the tomb). In 1991, on the 20th anniversary of the singer's death, the cemetery had to hire extra security after police used tear gas to disperse nearly a thousand rowdy fans who had mobbed the cemetery for commemorations. Only 2 people ever saw Morrison's dead body -- his wife Pamela and Dr. Vasille. (who had repeatedly denied interviews & refused to answer questions). Pamela Courson died almost 3yrs later (also at 27) on April 25, 1974 of a heroin overdose.

The Occult Connection

Besides the "facts" as laid out in countless books, films, interviews & press reports, there exists also a wild surreal assortment of rumors regarding 'what really took place'. (Perhaps rather outlandishly) many of these rumors center in on the occult, black & white magick, Voodoo, magical Christianity and assorted mystical strangenesses. In James Riordan's & Jerry Prochniky's biography of Morrison, Break On Through, there is this description of Morrison-based occult rumors: "...even more incredible were theories that Morrison had somehow been "murdered" through "supernatural means". While Jim was fascinated with the occult, it is quite an assumption that a jealous rival or jilted lover could cause his death in a Paris bathtub by stabbing a Voodoo doll or melting down a Doors album while chanting a curse... Another supernatural-based theory is that Morrison's body had been driven to great extremes by the spirit of the shaman he believed had entered his body as a child on that New Mexico highway. When this spirit or a demon its talents to influence the world, it abandoned Jim and left him a physically wasted & mentally exhausted man who felt betrayed with no desire to go on..."

Another occult theory exists in No One Here Gets Out Alive by Jerry Hopkins & Danny Sugarman. Regarding Jim's death, they state: "...Other theories abounded in Jim's close circle of friends. One had him killed when someone plucked out his eyes with a knife ("to free his soul" as the story had it). Another had a spurned mistress killing him long distance from New York by Witchcraft..." The authors also recount Morrison drinking blood with Witch-initiate Ingrid Thompson. In certain occult traditions, the use of blood combined with certain sexual acts is regimen; part of a hidden technology for spell casting. This is especially so in the Tantric Vama Marg (left-handed) rites. It is also a part of Western ritual magic used in groups like La Couleuvre Noir, the Ordo Templi Orientis, Les Ophitis & others, although it is more uncommon than common in occult work. This sort of sorcery is also used in Voodoo/Voudun Petro rites to summon different Loas (gods & goddesses). Anthropologist Allison Bailey Kennedy even went so far as to tie Morrison in with Orphic mystery cults & the initiatory uses of various spider venoms which release the "deuende in Gypsy tradition -- the dark soul that burn incandescently like a cicada, immolating itself in fiery passion." Morrison many times claimed connections to the occult, specifically Voodoo or Voudun philosophy and magick. It was a part of his 'path'. The moniker "Mr. Mojo Risin'" was an anagram -- a rearrangement of the letters in Jim Morrison. Mojo is a religious term describing shamanic 'power icon' or affiliation. The African root Mo refers to the dark or darkness. Mojo is a specific African/Voodoun/Obeah traditional term. He said circa 1968: "I think that there are whole regions of images & feelings that are rarely given outlet in daily life... when they do come out, they can take perverse forms... the shaman is the healer, like the Witch-doctor... we must not forget that the snake or the lizard is identified with the unconscious & the forces of evil..." So says the legendary "Lizard King", a title that stood for one of his occult code names. He was also called "The Exterminating Angel" in occult circles, according to film critic Gene Youngblood & others.

Speaking of the Tantra Vama Marg & the Voodoo Petro (of which at the very least he would have known of these ideas), one description of death mythology pertinent to Morrison's occult beliefs & possibly his practices indicates, "...but the human form is no means just an empty vessal for the Gods... Rather it is a critical locus where a number of sacred forces may converge. The players are the basic components of man: the z'etiole, the gros bon ange & the ti bon ange, as well as the n'ame of the corpse cadaver. The latter is the body itself, the flesh & the blood. The n'ame is the gift from God & the spirit of the flesh that allows each cell in the body to function. It is the residual presence of the n'ame for example, that gives form to the corpse long after the clinical "death" of the body. The n'ame upon the "death" of the body begins to pass slowly into the organisms of the soil... A process that takes 18 months to complete..." Remember, Jim Morrison's grave at Pere Lachait had no official marker for several months so that no one might disturb the corpse & the surrounding site. Again, the whole event from day one was part of a blackout. According to Tibetan tradtion, something similar is believed to exist so far as naming the componants of the soul & the body. The Vama Marg & especially the 'Bardo Thodol' (the Tibetan Book of the Dead) relate specific death myths concerning what occurs right after someone dies. Writing in Psychedelic Monographs and Essays, psychiatrist Dr. Rick Strassman shows that: "... Another model of birth & death, and transformation in which the 49 day interval appears, is in the Bardo Thodol... This is the time when the life forces of the deceased -- the energetic tendencies accumulated during 'life', 'decide on' or gravitate towards or coalesce around the next incarnate form..." Rock writer Greg Shaw, writing in Bam! and Mojo Navigator interpreted Morrison's song 'The End' along these lines also, stating that each line in the song is a direct quote from the Bardo Thodol & that "It all makes perfect sense, if one is familiar with the mystical background."

So what are the implications for these ideas in light of the supposed "death" of Jim Morrison? At clinical death, according to the above, the person actually splits up into his or her true parts, formerly connected into a whole being. According to occult lore, it is possible to ensnare or trap parts of the personality or spirit during this transition. Canadian anthropologist Wade Davis, author of The Serpent and the Rainbow and Passage of Darkness: The Ethnobiology of the Haitian Zombie, says "During initiation for example, the ti bon ange may be extracted from the body & housed in a clay jar called a canari. A canari is a clay jar that has been placed at the inner sanctuary of the hounfour (ritual house)... During the stages directly following the physical death & the first stages of after-death, the ti bon ange is extremely vulnerable & only when it is liberated from the flesh, is it relatively safe..." Is it Morrison's ti bon ange that is at the root of all these occult rumors? Was it his ti bon ange that was bought, sold & then collected on that fateful day in Paris when he 'died'? Does that canari carry the name, Zeppelin Publishing Company? And what of the bokor, or voodoo high priest who cajoled Morrison's ti bon ange into the canari? Is he running a company called 'The B of A Company' (or B of A Communications), formerly of Baton Rouge, Louisiana and now of Fort Lauderdale, Florida? Are among his possessions, an active passport & IDs under the name of James Douglas Morrison? Whoever this person, is he proper in claiming to actually be the not-so-dead rock star??

Apparitions and Appearances After the "Death"

In the first 2yrs after Morrison's 'death' in Paris, many sightings of the rock star were reported. These sightings range from the totally spurious & ridiculous to the reliable and very hard to shake. The LA Free Press & several wire service reports described someone in 1973 appearing on several occasions in San Francisco. There, Morrison was involved with business & banking transactions with the Bank of America of San Francisco. The employee that handled the transactions, Walt Fleischer, confirmed that someone resembling Morrison & using that name was indeed doing business at the Bank of America. He did add that he was far from sure that this was the 'dead' artist as Morrison showed no identification. Could this be because a photo ID was already on file at the bank, with the name James Douglas Morrison? Yes, it is still on file. According to authors Riordan & Prochniky, Morrison was also seen on several occasions hanging out in "unpleasant places" in Los Angeles and wearing Morrison's leather garb, all in black. This was over a period of 2yrs right after the Paris 'death'. The sordid areas meant notorious gay bars & the underground gay community in Los Angeles. There were also many rumors that Morrison was also appearing regularly in Louisiana & had made several radio interviews. Again, Prochniky & Riordan reveal that: "... At an obscure radio station in the Midwest, Jim supposedly showed up in the dead of night & did a lengthy interview that explained it all... After the interview he vanished into the darkness again. As you might guess, no recordings of the interview exist & of course, no reliable source remembers hearing the broadcast..."

In 1974, an LP record called 'Phantom's Divine Comedy' was released which was rumored to be Morrison singing with an anonymous band with the names of "drummer X, bassist Y, and keyboardist Z". The music reportedly resembled Morrison's sound quite well. All this again added & sparked the rumor mills, stirring public fascination. However, in a 1992 press released from the Zeppelin group, it was revealed that Morrison pal Iggy Pop was actually doing all the singing & helping the "death hoax" along. This got more heated as to how many people were said to be involved in maintaining the Morrison fabrication. Up until the admitted media statement, the record company that had released 'Phantom' had refused to divulge the names on the LP, or the singer's name -- which was indeed Iggy Pop. Regarding all these rumors, Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek stated: "If there was one guy that would have been capable of staging his own death -- getting a phony death certificate, paying off some French doctor, putting a 150lb. pound sack of sand into a coffin & splitting to some point on this planet like Africa or who knows where -- it is Jim Morrison who would have been able to pull it off." Morrison's best friend Tom Baker, writing in High Times (June 1981) said he was very tempted to believe the rumors that Jim had faked his own death and one group of fans went so far as to try to get Morrison's dental records, apparently also having tried to get permission to exhume his body & match the records to the remains. This was immediately blocked both by Morrison's parents & their attorneys -- at least for the time being. It is well known that Morrison had repeatedly planted the seeds which would lead to this sort of speculation -- that he had somehow faked his own death & dropped out into a new identity. At the Fillmore in San Francisco in 1967, Jim started suggesting that he should pull a "death stunt" to bring national press attention onto the band. This was when he came up with the "Mr. Mojo Risin'" anagram which would be used after he "split to Africa" and wished to secretly contact friends. He also told authors Hopkins & Sugarman on more than one occasion that he could see himself radically changing careers, reappearing as a suited & neck-tied businessman. Steve Harris, the assistant to Elektra Records' founding executive Jack Holzman, even remembers Morrison asking what might happen if he were to suddenly "die"... how might it affect business, record sales, the press & would people believe it? With confidant Mary Francis Werebelow, Morrison entertained long conversations about how the 12 Disciples had stolen the body of Christ from the crypt, jokingly calling it the 'Easter heist', etc.

In a Rolling Stone article for September 17, 1981, author Hopkins recounts many other Morrison sightings: [A] "The first one I remember was a beaut... He surfaced in San Francisco shortly after Morrison's death & began cashing checks in Morrison's name. He was not writing bad checks, mind you; it was his money he was spending. It was just that he was dressed as Jim would in his 'leather period' & that he told everyone that he was indeed the 'dead singer'... [B] The telephone operator asked: 'will you accept a long distance collect call from Jim Morrison?' It was an interesting conversation... [C] Our conversations were unsettling. He told me to go to Paris & dig up the corpse but that you would need permission from '12 Catholic Bishops' to do it. A visit to his home was more jarring. There at the end of one room was a Morrison 'shrine', converted with posters, flowers, religious icons -- the works!" Years later, the shrine's owner was interviewed & asserted to be Jim Morrison. He matter-of-factly mentioned details about Hopkins, as well as that other reporters had actually burglarized the shrine in an attempt to get a scoop. Another surreal sighting involved 'Donny' of Baton Rouge who described Jim Morrison at Morrison's home in 1978 to his friend 'Larry' who was trying to break into the world of rock n roll. Said Donny: "I remember Larry telling me about the whole wall of one room lined with books all across it. Every one of the books were about Satan or had something to do with him. Larry also told me about a large chair that looked like a throne, on which this man sat & watched over his nude children running around... I guess that you can probably guess who that kinky old weird man was -- Jim Morrison, The Lizard King!" Then there was the person named Rhea (after the Greek goddess of fertility) who claimed she was living with Morrison in 1979 with their son 'Jesse Blue James'. She straightforwardly said that Morrison had evolved into a state of pure energy and could materialize & vanish at will." Supposedly, she n' Jim were also in direct telepathic communication & in electromagnetic synch(!)

The Intelligence Connection and JM2

Remember Jim's Dad, George Stephen Morrison's military involvement with information collection & analysis? The assessment of such data and its interaction with civilian capabilities, informs the spectrum of political activities. Even with the generation gap, is there an eerie link between father & son regarding the past secret duties of a parent altering/affecting the later lifestyle outcome of a son? During the first few years surrounding Morrison's 'death', a number of interesting articles surfaced citing references showing various intelligence interests either in his underground activity or that intelligence had even masterminded the singer's death itself! One of the more explicit of these alleged agendas responsible for his demise, appeared in the Scandinavian magazine Dagblatte. This article detailed French intelligence efforts to assassinate Morrison in Paris. Author Bernard Wolfe writing 'The Real Life Death of Jim Morrison for Esquire' (June 1972) related the story of: Sherry, a Pasadena girl who knew Morrison well & stated: "...I couldn't make sense out of the stories in the papers. Suppose he had a heart attack exactly as they reported, is that what he died of? My God, you might as well say that Ernest Hemingway died of 'extensive brain damage'. If you want to know the cause of Jim's death -- not just the physiology of it -- ask what triggered his heart to stop... And whose finger was on the trigger."

In the first few years after Morrison's 'death', the owner of B of A Communications, named James Douglas Morrison, claimed to be operating as an intelligence agent for a number of domestic & international groups including the CIA, FBI, NSA, Interpol, Danish intelligence, Swedish Inteligence & others. There are also connections between James Douglas Morrison (referred to as JM2) & various occult groups with probable intelligence connections and several documents implicating him in intelligence circles. JM2 also claims to be the "dead" rock star and former singer for The Doors. The new JM2 dropped the old JM1 rock n' roll identity to become a "James Bond" wearing the suit n' tie that Morrison predicted when he was with the band. There exist what appear to be stacks of official-looking documents & letters between the CIA; various government agencies; national news groups like CNN & NBC and also JM2, involving what looks like personal meetings, projects & ephemera. Of special interest is that viewed parts of the files contain reports affixed with a paper-thin metallic band & colored UPC bar codes. While it may be extremely difficult to authenticate the claims of JM2, everything does look extremely official & very elaborate.

From about 1972 through 1992, JM2 has left a surreal trail of paper & appearances all over the world. These include letters to n' from Louisiana Governor Edwin Edwards & CIA Director William Colby, through the Washington,DC law firm of Colby, Miller and Hanes. One courtroom transcript implicates the FBI and CIA in several coverups regarding JM2's intelligence career. These show that there seems to be a systematic destruction of files relating to JM2's spy activities. JM2's Swedish Intelligence ID card, obtained from the FBI through the Freedom of Information Act features a copy in which the facial area is deliberately obscured but the ID numbers are intact. Then there are files concerning JM2's rogue financial activities with the Bank of America and news reports regarding lawsuits by & against JM2 for bank fraud as well as espionage, with JM2 claiming both done under intelligence auspices as part of financial experiments to destabilize foreign currencies & exchange rates. There also appear to be hundreds if not thousands of miscellaneous files -- both classified & declassified -- regarding one James Douglas Morrison, dated after his 'death' in 1971. These also refer to "WBC", a nom de plume of JM2. Once again, these look like real letters, documents & court transcripts involving intelligence circles; all consisting of the usual suspects/powerplay particpants of international intrigue when it comes to the shadowy cloak n' dagger field that is the highly advanced services of law enforcement & security. Not surprisingly then, there is also an ACTIVE passport & banking IDs under the name James Douglas Morrison. Is this all for real or is this an elaborate hoax? Where is the proper scope to determine the truth -- or lack of truth -- or the consequences of such activities? The important thing to note for the sake of understanding is that someone or some group are actively pursuing & setting up a mass "urban legend" regarding James Morrison. They are painstakingly documenting it also. Whether this is a sham or not is not as important as the fact that a lot of official-looking information is being generated surrounding the myth & legendry of Jim Morrison, his life & his supposed 'death'. Just why might this be?

Multiple Morrisons

Like the "multiple Oswald" theories of JFK-assassination conspiracy buffs, there also exist rumors & urban legends describing the "multiple Morrison" theory. The idea that Jim Morrison was in fact several different people & actors, or intelligence agents has been going on for quite sometime. Besides the "Morrison" singing on the Phantom LP (now shown to be Iggy Pop) there continues to be one belief that a Louisiana banker as well as Richard Tanguay -- a close friend of Mick Jagger -- perpetuated the death hoax. Even High Times ran an old news story about someone claiming to be Morrison (post 1971) running for governor of Louisiana! Supposedly Tanguay (related to vaudeville legend Eva Tanguay) on several occasions took on the Morrison persona, and even sang with The Doors when they toured Europe with the Rolling Stones. Could this be possible? Infact, JM2 has claimed publicly that there have been numerous James Douglas Morrisons & that they all knew one another, meeting from time to time to work it all out. The impersonations were part of CIA sociological experiments like Artichoke or the notorious MK-ULTRA mind-control programs of the 1950's and 60's -- both involving the surreptitious administering of psychotropic drugs. In conclusion, there definitely is more than just a slim chance of possibility to substantiate wild stories like this. But the fact that there are people & groups out there making these claims in a big way and perpetuating modern folklore (with often easily doybtable veracity) about Jim Morrison is a curiosity in itself... And funny, in a dark sort of way.

BEATDOWN BY BEANTOWN

2011-06-16T09:45:00.003-04:00

So, after the Bruins humiliated the Canucks 4-0 to hoist the Stanley Cup in a winner-take-all game 7 last night, here's where I stand -- being a fan of these guys all my life, I couldn't be happier & more proud. Seriously, after 39yrs, we absolutely deserve this (especially in exorcising the ghost of what happened last year with Philly). A job well done, boys. FUCK THE 'NUCKS! Defeat & neutralization couldn't come more to a deserving team such as them. They were outplayed, outworked, outsmarted & flat out rubbed out. No question who was the best on the ice. I've said it since day 1: Luongo is overrated, overpaid, cracks under pressure & nowhere near as headstrong or with bounce-back stamina as Thomas. And beyond him laying an egg tonight, there's PLENTY of blame to go around -- this whole series saw the Ginger twins shut down & all but useless, Kessler clearly lost his physical edge, Bieksa disappeared, Lapierre has always been an idiot (and always will be), Burrows is a douchebag, Torres is dirty and coach Vaigneault is definitely gonna get his knuckles wrapped. And as for the cowardly, troublemaking fans in the streets afterwards? I hope every last one of them is prosecuted & raked over the coals. Just as gutless as their team's performance. But enough negativity... If you really think about it, for an American team, the Bruins are more Canadian than the Canucks anyway: they're geographically closer, have more Canadians on their team than Vancouver does and for the Ontario connection, they play in Toronto Dominion Bank arena. And why shouldn't the east coast cheer for them? There's more of an obvious kinship seeing as distance doesn't exactly factor into immediate connection with those out west on the opposite end of the country. And speaking of Toronto (gotta wonder what was in Phil Kessel's mind seeing his former team triumphant), for all the bandwagoners & fairweathers (who made up a heavy contingent of supporters here) quickly proclaiming how it's time for the Cup to come back home, (blahblahblah about patriotic pride & the national fever that swelled up) newflash: You live in TORONTO & frequent downtown. You wanna see the Cup? Go to the Hockey Hall of Fame. That's where the real one is anyway & it's never leaving this country. Lastly, I also like how the Bruins just spoiled the superstitious Olympic tradition: In 1976, Montreal hosted the Summer Games & the next year, won the Cup. In 1989, Calgary hosted the Winter Games & the next year, won the Cup. Last year, Vancouver hosted the Winter Games & this year, NO DICE! Hahahaha! Seriously though - no apologies. Original 6! Boston winning is better for hockey! Just wish I could attend the celebratory parade but it's more than all good. Here endeth the brewin' lesson.

APRIL 17-20, 1961 (SMOKED PORK)

2011-04-17T14:35:00.003-04:00

50yrs ago today, the roots & tensions on an area of Cuban coast known as the Bahía de Cochinos, or 'Bay of Pigs', an inlet to the south & 90 miles southeast of Havana, had first come to a boil early in 1960. Fidel Castro had taken steps to reduce"Yankee Imperialist" American influence in Cuba by nationalizing US-dominated industries such as sugar & mining which as a result, financed socialist policies including: universal healthcare, free education, introducing land reform schemes & calling on other Latin American governments to act with more autonomy. In response, then-President Dwight D. Eisenhower imposed a crippling trade embargo, began cutting diplomatic ties and authorized the CIA to recruit some 1500 Cuban exiles living in Miami, begin training them to overthrow Castro and restore a pro-American government which would include American support from sea & air. By May 1960, Cuban diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union had been established & the United States retaliated by prohibiting the importation of Cuban sugar (80 percent of the country's total). To prevent the Cuban economy from collapsing, the Russians agreed to buy the sugar which cemented an economic alliance. When John F. Kennedy took office in Jan 1961, Cuba in becoming an increasingly irritable thorn became one of the first immediate issues his Presidency had to confront & he effectively inherited Eisenhower's plan. JFK began skeptical & unconvinced but was persuaded to sanction the operation under the smokescreen of"plausible deniability" to protect his reputation.

On April 15, 1961, a group of Cuban exiles took off from Nicaragua in a squadron of American B-26 bombers painted to look like stolen Cuban planes (but whose features where identified by journalists as American-made) & conducted a successful strike against 3 Cuban airfields (with a cover story of defecting Cuban pilots). However, it turned out that Castro & his advisers knew all about the upcoming raid from infiltrators among the exiles who had reported back with intelligence & thus, other planes were moved out of harm's way. That same day in a speech at the United Nations, Cuban foreign minister Raul Roa accused the US & its Latin American allies of plotting an invasion. In a later emergency meeting of the UN General Assembly, the Cuban Ambassador Carlos Lechuga delivered a stinging denunciation of the American government (Washington initially n' repeatedly kept denying any involvement) calling their attacks 'a mercenary force organized, financed & armed by the USA - coming from Guatemala & Florida'. Following the bombing raid, 5 US merchant ships set off for the main landing point at the Bay of Pigs which turned out to be a beach surrounded by a mosquito-infested swamp & the only way to get further into the island was along just 3 heavily-defended roads. The leader of the Cuban exile movement in the US, Dr. Miro Cardona, said the battle had begun"to liberate our homeland from the despotic rule of Fidel Castro". Castro on high alert & broadcasting on state-run radio to beat back the enemy, promised to resist with"an iron hand". Cardona played a part in Fidel Castro's revolution against the corrupt dictatorship of President Fulgencio Batista that took power on Jan 1, 1959. He was Prime Minister for 45 days before Castro himself seized full control.

The fighting lasted just 3 days & was a doomed fiasco: the lightly armed invasion force having waded inland on Apr 17 was badly outnumbered, unexpected coral reefs sank 2 of the exiles’ transport ships as they pulled into shore, jeeps landed without fuel, backup paratroopers landed in the wrong place, inadequate maps were issued & the mass defection of Cubans in popular uprising the exiles hoped for -- their only realistic chance of success -- was a disastrous misjudgement that never materialized. The invaders were surrounded & pinned own on the beach by Castro’s militia & they surrendered after 72hrs of fighting. A reluctant-to-continue Kennedy cancelled further air strikes and both the CIA & JFK's administration blamed each other for the plan's failure. 118 of the invasion force died in the ill-fated mission & 1189 were taken prisoner. While the Cubans had prevailed, their losses where high with an estimated over 2000 soldiers killed, wounded or missing in action. Shortly afterwards, JFK finally acknowledged US support for the invaders & the debacle became the worst foreign policy embarrassment of his term. For Castro, his hold on power was strengthened and his ties to the Russians brought them even more firmly onto his side as the strategic & military bungling of the incident practically drove him into their welcoming arms. Still, JFK was not adverse to covert plans & on November 30, 1961, he approved 'Operation Mongoose', an espionage, propaganda & sabotage campaign which was another CIA program directed against Castro that proposed a number of assassination ideas/plots. (In 1962, the Pentagon mounted its propaganda plan - 'Operation Northwoods' - involving false-flag actions, state-sponsored terrorism and the hijacking of planes on US & Cuban soil deliberately designed to generate American public support for an invasion of Cuba). With the Cold War heating up, JFK, contrary to popular myth spouted by his detractors, was not soft on communism & soon turned his attention to the emerging new troublespot of Vietnam.

On Dec 24, 1962 more than 1000 of the exile-invaders taken prisoner, returned to the US after the American government agreed to pay a ransom of $53 million in food & medical supplies as a condition of their release. The freeing of the captives came at the end of an all-time low in relations between the 2 countries involving almost a year of talks to get a settlement in place. The men were originally given to up to 30yrs in prison at their trials & when sentences were passed, the court added the price of their freedom would cost $62 million. Money was raised in a frantic day of fundraising & greedy Castro was persuaded to accept the charitable donations instead of cash but the deal almost fell apart at the last minute when he demanded an additional $2.9 million just as the prisoners were preparing to leave. Relations since have never properly been restored, stiff sanctions still remain in place & refugees continue to join the growing community of Cubans in Florida. The Bay of Pigs aftermath acted as a key catalyst for the Cuban Missile Crisis just 18 months later in Oct 1962, which brought the world to the very brink & narrow avoidance of catastrophic nuclear war.

APRIL 15, 2001 (GABBA GABBA GONE)

2011-04-15T11:51:00.001-04:00

10yrs ago today, lead singer Jeffry Ross Hyman better known as Joey Ramone died of lymphoma at a New York hospial after a 7yr battle. He was reportedly listening to a U2 song when he died with Bono later saying that the tune was originally about a lovestruck hangover but Joey turned it into a gospel song. Shortly after, The Ramones were named as abductees into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame with the ceremony taking place on March 18, 2002. That same year, Joey's solo album 'Don't Worry About Me' was released posthumously. The Ramones broke up in 1996 after appearing on the Lollapalooza tour and within a decade, 3 of the band's 4 founding members were dead -- bassit Dee Dee dying on Jun 5, 2002 and guitarist Johnny on Sept 15, 2004. On Nov 30, 2003, a block of East 2nd Street and Bowery in New York (where Joey once lived with bandmate Dee Dee) near the former site of the music club CBGB's where the Ramones got their start, was officially renamed "Joey Ramone Place" and in Sept 2010, the Associated Press reported that the street sign at the corner was the city's most stolen sign. It eventually had to be moved 20 feet above ground level to which an amused drummer Marky said "Now you have to be an NBA player to see it." With his trademark rose-colored shades, black leather jacket, shoulder-length hair, ripped jeans and alternately snarling & crooning vocals, Joey was an iconic godfather of punk. There is no debate on how influential & inspirational he was with accolades from an endless list of music luminaries. On Feb 11, 2011 the group was awarded a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.

ROT IN PEACE, YOU PARIAH FOR PLUNDER

2011-03-23T16:54:00.015-04:00

(with thanks and apologies to Debbie Schlussel)

The Real Elizabeth Taylor: Litigated to Keep Nazi-Stolen Painting from Holocaust Survivors

The world of glitterati & star-worship mourns the death of actress Elizabeth Taylor today with tributes & celebrity reminiscence pouring in. While she was beautiful for a good part of her life & acted in some classic movies, including her memorable turn as Cleopatra, she's also known for the 8 marriages, 7 husbands & her weird relationship with Michael Jackson. Who can forget her for her far-left AIDS activism which told us that those who worry are nuts (even though an organ recipient just recently contracted AIDS from a donor)? But most of all, what should never be forgotten was her long, shameful & disgraceful drawn-out court battle to keep a Holocaust survivor from getting back a painting the Nazis essentially stole from her family & which her father bought for her. It’s inexcusable & unforgivable. It is also a valuable episode in illuminating who the real Elizabeth Taylor was as a person. You would think a woman who preaches to us that we should be humanitarians, especially towards gays with AIDS, would also preach the same toward Jews who fled the Holocaust & their descendants. Sad to say - nope. When Taylor learned that the Van Gogh she owned was the property of Jews forced to sell it by the Nazis in order to flee Hitler’s Germany on the eve of Kristallnacht in November 1938, she refused to give the painting back to its rightful owners. And her fraudulent, quickie “conversion” to Judaism (to marry Eddie Fisher) didn’t influence her one bit. Instead, she litigated in court for years to prevent the return of the painting to its rightful owners. And she was unfortunately successful. First the defendants endured the Nazis & then they endured Elizabeth Taylor.

(From 2007):
Liz Taylor Declared Owner of Van Gogh
Suit Claimed Nazis Forced Its Sale in 1939
by Karen Gullo

A San Francisco court ruled that Elizabeth Taylor doesn't have to give "View of the Asylum and Chapel at Saint-Remy" to the descendants of a Jewish woman who once owned it. The actress has been allowed to keep the Vincent van Gogh painting after a federal appeals court upheld dismissal of a lawsuit by relatives of the Jewish woman who said she was forced to sell it before fleeing Nazi Germany in 1939.

In the ruling, the court dismissed claims by descendants of Margarete Mauthner who sued Taylor for return of the 1889 painting, completed a year before van Gogh committed suicide. Taylor's father purchased the painting - now worth as much as $20 million - for her in 1963.

Mauthner, an early collector of van Gogh's work, bought the painting around 1907. Her relatives claimed she sold it under duress before fleeing Hitler's Germany. They sued Taylor under a 1998 law that directs the United States to work with other governments on returning works of art confiscated from rightful owners during Nazi rule. The appeals court in stating the act doesn't create a private right to sue said "The provision's focus is on 'governments' rather than individuals, urging those governments 'to facilitate' enforcement of preexisting property rights. The statute thus does not explicitly confer a benefit on Holocaust victims."

The court also said the plaintiffs waited too long to file the suit. Thomas Hamilton, attorney for Mauthner's great-grandchildren, plans he will likely appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court and stated in an interview he was very disappointed. He further said that the 1998 Holocaust Victims Redress Act aimed to return artwork lost during the Nazi era to rightful owners citing "There has to be a remedy, otherwise the words mean nothing."

Lawyers for Taylor, 75, claimed the painting was sold through 2 Jewish art dealers to a Jewish art collector with no evidence of any Nazi coercion or participation in the transactions.

The court concluded "Vincent van Gogh is said to have reflected that 'paintings have a life of their own that are derived from the painter's soul.' The confused and perhaps turbulent past of his painting may prove the truth of his observation."

Elizabeth Taylor made hundreds of millions of dollars from her licensed perfume, jewelry & other products. As an enshrined Hollywood screen legend, you’d think she could buy another Van Gogh or a reproduction and give the purchased one she owned, effectively 'loot' which didn’t belong to her, to its rightful owners. But that’s simply not who she was. That was all clever smoke n' mirrors marketing. The real starlet is the decrepit woman who sent an army of lawyers to court to prevent the family of Margarete Mauthner from taking possession of their property taken by the Nazis. While Liz Taylor was once a beauty on the outside, it shouldn't be difficult to remember her as tainted and ugly on the inside.

ERIN GO BRAGH-LESS

2011-03-17T13:13:00.007-04:00

Kylie Ireland extends emerald blessings & wishes you a Happy St. Patty's

MARCH 3, 1991 (CLUB CHAOS: WE HAD TEAR THIS MOTHERFUCKER UP)

2011-03-03T14:27:00.003-05:00

RODNEY KING, 20 YEARS LATER
(from CNN by Jim Kavanagh)

The beating of African-American Rodney King 20yrs ago today marked the end of a 100mph car chase and the beginning of a chain of events that would forever change Los Angeles, its police department & the racial conversation in the United States. King, then a 25yr old convicted robber on parole, admittedly had a few drinks under his belt as he headed home from a friend's house. When he spotted a police car following him, he panicked thinking he would lose an upcoming job interview & fearing he would be sent back to prison. So he took off & a chase ensued. (He was the driver & had 2 passengers -- Bryant Allen & Freddie Helms) Realizing he couldn't outrun police (with several patrol cars & a helicopter having joined in the high-speed pursuit) but knowing what they were likely to do to him when they caught him, he said he looked for a public place to stop and if "IT" went down, somebody would be present to what would follow. "IT" did go down. 4 police officers - all of them white - struck King more than 50 times with their wood batons & shocked him with an electric taser gun after he acted bizarrely when being ordered to lie on the ground, to which he physically resisted arrest. He said they shouted racial slurs as they beat him. The officers would deny using epithets. (The 2 passengers having complied, were taken into custody without incident).

King was right in his expectation of a beating, but his hope of having a witness was fulfilled in a huge way. Not only did somebody see it, somebody videotaped it -- still a novelty in 1991, before people had cellphone cameras. From a distance & unseen by those involved, George Holliday, a manager of a plumbing compnay & private citizen, caught the lengthy beating of the motorist on video from his apartment in Lake View Terrace. He initially contacted the police about his 12-minute tape (the King segment where he is specifically beaten is 81 seconds) of the incident but was dismissed; a decision that would represent a paradigm shift. He then went to KTLA television with his videotape. They broadcast it on air in its entirety & the footage became a media sensation (almost an eerie precursor in spawning what would eventually emerge as an ingredient in 'reality tv'). Portions of it were aired hundreds, if not thousands, of times around the world, thus turning what would otherwise have been yet another violent - but soon forgotten - encounter between the LAPD & a black suspect into one of the most widely watched n' discussed incidents of its kind. The video showed a large lump of a man floundering on the ground, surrounded by a dozen or more cops, 4 of whom were beating him relentlessly with nightsticks. One officer's repeated swings slowed down as he appeared worn out by his non-stop flailing. King was literally beaten nearly to death as not one of the other officers watching, intervened. At the Pacifica Hospital, 3 surgeons operated on him for 5hrs that morning of Mar 3. His face and body was a mass of numerous swollen bruised welts, fractures & lacerations. Nurses had reported that the officers who accompanied King openly joked & bragged about the number of times he had been hit. The dramatic video of the episode appeared on national TV 2 days later. At last, blacks in L.A. -- and no doubt in other parts of the country -- had evidence to document the police brutality many had known for far too long but most of America had always denied or tolerated. Said King's attorney, Milton Grimes: "We finally caught the Loch Ness Monster with a camcorder." They filed a negligence suit against the LAPD.

The District Attorney dismissed the charges leading to King's arrest & 4 LAPD officers -- Theodore Briseno, Laurence Powell, Timothy Wind and Sgt. Stacey Koon -- were indicted on charges of assault with a deadly weapon & excessive use of force. All 4 would claim self-defense to restrain King, each mentioning they didn't believe their striking blows had potentially lethal or fatal consequences (reminiscent of the use of the controversial 'chokehold'). On Apr 29, 1992, after a 3-month trial in the predominantly white suburb of Simi Valley, 3 of the officers were acquitted of all charges of police brutality. But the jury, which had no black members, was deadlocked on one charge of excessive force against Powell resulting in Judge Stanley Weisberg declaring a mistrial. Powell's defense attorney, Michael Stone, said the unedited video worked against King & helped prove the officers' case further adding: "Most of the nation only saw a few snippets where it's the most violent. They didn't see him get up n' run at Powell. In a use-of-force case, if the officers do what they're trained to do, how can you find them guilty of a crime? And the jury understood that." Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley said, "the jury's verdict will not blind us to what we saw on that videotape. The men who beat Rodney King do not deserve to wear the uniform of the LAPD." State Senator Ed Davis, a former city police chief, said "I was shocked & flabbergasted by the verdict. Having seen the video like millions of other people, I cannot accept this as police conduct for California." Even President George H. Bush couldn't fathom how such a verdict could be reached with what the video had shown. Bush almost immediately announced that he ordered the Department of Justice to investigate the possibility of filing charges against the LAPD officers for violating the federal civil rights King. Still, the backlash was enormous as news of the stunning acquittal triggered outrage and black Los Angeles (especially in the South Central district) exploded in anger & violence not seen since the Watts riots of 1965.

Rioters rampaged through the streets, looting businesses, torching buildings & attacking people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. California Governor, Pete Wilson declared a state of emergency & called in reinforcements from the California Highway Patrol. On the 1st day, at 6:45PM, came the most famous victim to suffer at the hands of a mob. 36yr old white truck driver Reginald Denny drove into the intersection at Florence & Normandie. Little could he have known that he would instantly become the nationally televised symbol of savage retribution for the King beating. Several men throwing rocks through his window as he came to a stop, dragged him from his vehicle and after a vicious beating of kicks & being hit 3 times with a claw hammer, the most sickening moment involved 19yr old assailant Damian Williams then hurling a piece of concrete cinder block point-blank into Denny's right temple, knocking him unconscious for close to 5 minutes & causing pieces of his skull to be embedded in his brain. As he lay bleeding, senseless & motionless in the street, Williams thrust his arms upward in celebration, doing an endzone-like victory dance that imitated a receiver in football who had just scored a touchdown. He then pointed back at Denny in taunting recognition and finished by flashing gang signs to a crowd across the street (a particular crew -- who went on to brutally beat several other motorists [mainly Asian & Latino] -- who were dubbed 'The L.A. Four') & then looked up at the filming news helicopters hovering above (the choppers going on to provide extensive, near-continuous coverage) to point out Denny. Sadly, Denny's ordeal didn't end after Williams. When he amazingly managed to rise to his knees, trembling & fumbling about as if in the dark to steady himself, others wandered over to spit on & throw liqour bottles at him. A crack addict rifled through his pockets robbing him, another man jumped across him using his head as a stepping stone and one observer - identified by police as a process server for a law firm - calmly got off his motorcycle, pulled a shotgun from a gym bag and shot at Denny's gas tank, narrowly missing it & him. Miraculously somehow, Denny managed to crawl back into the cab of his truck & start the vehicle. Through it all emerged a lone individual with mercy & rescue on his mind. An unarmed black civilian & fellow trucker named Bobby Green Jr. who saw the assault live on television, rushed to the scene and with the help of 3 other black men, drove him to the local hospital using the victim's own truck. Had Denny arrived mere minutes later, he most certainly would have been dead.

On May 1, the 3rd day of rioting, King emerged from seclusion at a news conference to make a plea that echoes to this day: "People, I just want to say, can we all get along?" His words went unheeded & with the appeal for peace falling on deaf ears, the continuing disorder didn't stop & would total 6 days invloving thousands in the Los Angeles area. There was an imposed curfew, Bill Cosby's suggestion for everyone to stop the anarchy so they could watch the final episode of 'The Cosby Show' instead, transportation disruptions resulting in bus & train services suspended along with some major freeways closed down and numerous entertainment & sporting events postponed or cancelled. On the 4th day, 4000 National Guard troops and elements of the US Army & Marines were deployed and arrived to disperse crowds & restore calm. Schhols, banks & offices evetually resumed and by the time the rioting ceased & the smoke had cleared, some 53 people were dead; over 2800 were hurt; more than 7000 fires from arson; and looting, vandalism & property destruction to nearly 3100 business exceeded $1 billion in damage. The LAPD had been woefully unprepared for the widespread spontaneous explosion & the aftermath forced the retirement of longtime Chief Daryl Gates whose controversial tenure was marked by allegations of racism, indifference & arrogance. Many wondered had he stepped down much earlier in his career (as there had been no shortage of public demands), could the chaos have been prevented? Gates was replaced by Willie Williams (the 1st black police commissioner of the LAPD as well as Philadelphia previously) whose tenure was short-lived, lasting only 5yrs. There were all kinds of theories & blame for what had transpired. One troubling sore-point in addition to African-American mistreatment was the poor relationship with Koreans. One belief held that the Asian merchants & shopkeepers were disrespectful - a perceived antagonistic insult to injury as if taking money out of the community wasn't bad enough. Controversy involved the Koreans seen as vigilantes on the verge of sparking a race war as another iconic tv image of the violence was a scene of 2 Korean merchants firing pistols repeatedly at roving looters. But protecting their property with guns (assault rifles) had come at a high cost & one of the riots' sparking events occured when a shopkeeper shot n' killed a black teenager & was leniently sentenced to only 5yrs probation. Other causes for the unrest (with Vice President Dan Quayle, Democratic Presidential candidate Bill Clinton & civil rights activist/Baptist minister Jesse Jackson weighing in) cited extremely high unemployment, the declining standard of living conditions, growing economic disparity in the ghetto contributing to poverty & the breakdown of social institutions; all urban decay & a tinderbox of seething frustrations ripe for lawlessness. The King beating was a new rallying cry to focus on these problems.

Nearly a year later, on Feb 25, 1993, the 4 LAPD officers were tried in federal court on civil rights charges. The trial was very different from the first: It took place in Los Angeles, 2 African-Americans were picked for the jury & King actually testified this time. Law enforcement was placed on high alert for fears of renewed violence in the event of another "not guilty" verdict. Said officer Powell's attorney: "There was no way in the world that any jury would acquit all of the defendants again" & King's own testimony may have hurt the federal case, as he hedged on whether police had used racial slurs during the beating. He would later say he appeared unsure on the stand because his mother had advised him to avoid talking about race. Regardless, at the end of the trial on Apr 16, 2 of the 4 officers who were acquitted in Simi Valley, Sgt. Stacey Koon & Laurence Powell, were convicted of federal civil rights violations and served 30 months in prison. Both were released on parole in Dec 1995. In a surreal prelude just before Koon's release, on Nov 23, 1995, an armed intruder broke into the California halfway house Koon was staying at in an attempt to murder him. Koon wass away for the Thanksgiving holiday & the thwarted invader was killed by police in a shoot-out. The other 2 officers, Theodore Briseno & rookie Timothy Wind, were acquitted. King's attorney, Grimes, said "We got half-justice." Still, one more trial awaited: a lawsuit against the city of Los Angeles. This time, there was only one African-American on the jury, and she was a force to be reckoned with. Cynthia Kelley would remark of her fellow jurors: "Half of them had no sympathy whatsoever. They didn't care at all and said he broke the law & he deserved what he got. I told them they were crazy! It was about justice for what happened to him. No one deserves to get beat like that." Eventually, the other 11 jurors came around & on Apr 19, 1994, The city of Los Angeles awarded King a payment of $3.8 million in civil suit damages. It was finally all over. But the after-effects of the whole ordeal would linger long after, continuing to this day.

And the psychological fallout was not without other scars elsewhere; time doesn't easily heal all wounds. After the 1993 'L.A. Four' trial of his black assailants, Reginald Denny appeared on the Phil Donahue Show and in an extraordinary gesture, he shook hands & accepted the apology of one of his attackers (Henry Keith Watson, later to operate his own limo service) who had come close to killing him. Denny had to undergo years of rehabilitative therapy, with his speech & ability to walk resulting in permanent damage. He largely avoided the media, rarely speaking about his ordeal & after an unsuccessful lawsuit against the city of Los Angeles, he moved to Arizona to work independently as a boat motor mechanic. With a criminal record including arrests for auto theft & robbery, thug Damian Williams, the brick-throwing/celebrating attacker of Denny, was positively identified by computer enhancement which revealed an identifying tattoo. In 1993, charged with attempted murder, he was convicted of mayhem & misdemeanor assault and was sentenced to 10yrs behind bars. He served only 4yrs & was released in 1997 for good behaviour. Williams allegedly had a 'hit' placed on him by the Mexican Mafia with the contract being picked up by the now infamous but then little known 'MS-13' - a transnational Hispanic gang ethnically composed of primarily Central Americans. In 2003, he was sentenced to 46yrs at Pelican Bay State Prison for the 2000 murder of a drug dealer. Susan J. Clemmer, an officer who gave crucial testimony for the defense at the federal trial, committed suicide in July 2009 in the lobby of a Los Angeles Sheriff's Station. She had rode in the ambulance with King and testified that he was laughing & spat blood on her uniform. A 19yr lveteran of the LAPD's Gang & Narcotics division, Clemmer was a Sheriff's Detective at the time of her death. All 4 of the offending officers are no longer with the LAPD: Theodore Briseno was dismissed & is now a private security officer, Laurence Powell went back to school due to difficulty finding new work, Timothy Wind was fired in 1994 & now a community service officer in Culver City. In 2002, he was a law student at Indiana University & Stacey Koon, the overall supervising cop that fateful night, now works as a paralegal.

King inadvertently became an on-going saga; in danger of almost morphing into a parody. He invested most of his settlement money in founding a rap music record label but the venture failed to garner any success & soon folded (ironically enough, the L.A. riots & King would be referrenced in dozens of songs from singers & bands spanning a number of genres). As well as still having frequent recurring nightmares, he admitted to sometimes wearing a protective vest in response to fears of reprisal & the odd genuine threats. He didn't exactly stay out of the spotlight & had several more run-ins with the law, having beenarrested 11 times(!) on a variety of misdemeanor charges, including a 90-day jail stint in 1996 for a hit-n-run involving his then wife at the time, domestic abuse, various traffic influences while DUI involving speeding, running a red light and failing to yield to police officers. He's been in alcohol rehab for different times after he's slammed his car into a wall & then a house, resulting in a broken pelvis. On November 29, 2007, while riding home on his bicycle, King was shot in the face, arms & back with pellets from a shotgun. He reported that it was done by a couple who demanded his bike then shot him when he rode away. Police described the wounds as looking like they came from birdshot & said King offered few details about the suspects. Naturally, all the post-riot brushes left people wondering why he kept getting into & couldn't stay out of trouble. He acknowledged long-standing substance abuse problems but was trying to conquer his demons. In May 2008, he checked into a Pasadena Recovery Center which was filmed as part of the 2nd season of VH1's 'Celebrity Rehab' & afterwards appeared on the spin-off 'Sober House'. Both shows filmed his quest to seek honest treatment for addiction, achieve sobriety, deal with the lingering trauma of his beating & re-establish a relationship with his family which had been badly disrupted to the point of severe dysfunction. Despite his troubles, King says he's happy. After his family moved from Los Angeles to the Rialto suburb in San Bernardino County (in an attempt to escape the fame & glare of notoriety to begin a new life), they later returned to L.A. to run a family-owned construction company. Positivity & stability seemed to settle with him. In Sept 2009, he won a celebrity boxing match for charity against an ex-cop from Pennsylvania and later he & other "Celebrity Rehab' alumni appeared as panel speakers to a new group of addicts, marking 11 months of being clean. In September 2010, the now grandfather was engaged to marry Cynthia Kelley, juror no. 5 from his civil trial. First meeting at a pizzeria, the 2 had an on/off relationship right after that trial ended but reconnected when he called her up on a whim. King referred to her as a "nice, friendly person who is a godsend & a blessing in my life."

Perhaps, The main impact of the Rodney King case is that it accelerated change. It's no longer tenable in the USA for a police force of a major city to administer policy, protection and/or control without having the community being a part of that governance. The upper ranks of the LAPD became much more diverse and changes were made (sometimes under court order) in the way certain neighborhoods are patrolled & in how civilian complaints are handled. After the riots, the video of the beating became an example of inverse surveillance - of how citizens watching police. Several copwatch organizations were subsequently organized nationally to safeguard against police abuse, misuse of force, brutality & even corruption. King rarely discusses the incident or its aftermath anymore, preferring to remain out of an unwanted limelight. Renee Campbell, his most recent attorney, has described him as "simply a very nice man caught in a very unfortunate situation." The King case also exposed the deep wedges driven when it comes to the issue of race. With little argument, it was a match that lit the fuse for what would truly be a dividing line of color straight through the middle of the country -- the involvement of another unusual police confrontation when on Jun 17, 1994, double murder suspect O.J. Simpson (being driven by friend Al Cowlings) led the LAPD in a low-speed chase on the Interstate. What quickly followed was the most publicized criminal court case in American judicial history; a festival-like atmosphere of network trial coverage oversaturation involving high-profile lawyers, DNA evidence, Detective Mark Fuhrman & racism, the infamous 'glove', another not guilty verdict, more polarization in the USA with an overwhelming majority believing justice had been denied and another civil trial dealing with liability. Somehow, the old addage of 'the more things change, the more they stay the same' remains.

In a twist of irony befitting the pages of fiction, on Mar 3, 2011, the 20th anniversary of the videotaped King beating, Rodney King was again stopped by the LAPD for driving erratically. This time however, he was only issued a citation for driving with an expired license. And on Jul 12, 2011, he was arrested on suspicion of DUI. 2 reminders of how being forgotten may not be so simple & of how difficult - if not downright impossible - it is to get past 'black-n-white'. Whether society itself has sufficiently changed may be a question for every generation to consider.

FEBRUARY 21, 1916 (INTO THE CAULDRON)

2011-02-21T16:38:00.002-05:00

VERDUN: MYTHS AND MEMORIES OF THE 'LOST VILLAGES' OF FRANCE
(from The Independent by John Lichfield)

On a heavily wooded ridge above the river Meuse, 170 miles to the east of Paris, there is a village of ghosts. The 50 houses which once stood here disappeared in a sheet of flame -- an almost forgotten landscape maybe best remembered from distant black n' white photographs or the scant grainy film footage of combat. Each home is now represented by a square of grass with a sign marking the name & trade of a villager: "Legrandidier, vigneron (wine grower)" or "Dupuis, Jean-Baptiste, maçon (mason)". This is Douaumont, one of the "lost" villages of 1916. 4 miles to the southeast is the small town of Verdun.

95yrs ago today, a German shell looped high over the ridge & fell onto the town 137 miles east of Paris, beginning a bombardment of positions along the Meuse River. During the following 10 months (mostly during the next 4 months) the Verdun ridge was hacked & ploughed by some 32,000,000 shells. It is estimated that in places, 10 shells were dropped on every square centimetre. 9 evacuated villages -- and 371,000 French (some estimates put the figure as high as 550,000) and 337,000 German soldiers (some estimates put the figure as high as 434,000) with half of both totals being fatalities -- were obliterated in an area of about 50 square miles. Never before or since has there been such a lengthy battle & at the end of it, the 2 armies stood a few hundred yards from where they had started. The only real effect of the fighting having stopped (inspite of it amazingly deemed a French victory) was the irrevocable wounding of both armies as no tactical or strategic advantage had been gained by either side. For the French, the word "Verdun" still symbolises (according to viewpoint) the murderous horror & futility or the impossible heroism of the 1914-18 war; a representation typified by attrition, pointless attacks & disproportionate waste -- a protracted cataclysmic engagement all for nothing. When the war ended, the blood-soaked moonscape of the ridge was not cleared or reclaimed (as were the "British" battlefields of the Somme or Passchendaele). The whole Verdun battlefield -- rolling, desolate farmland before the war -- was planted with conifer trees n' shrubs. The ridge was to be a permanent memorial, frozen in time so that future generations would never forget.

The forests have now grown dark & tall but if you wander or peer among the trees, you find that the ground is still perforated like a giant cheese-grater. In many places, you still see the zigzag lines of the trenches. Deep beneath your feet there are scores of thousands of young French & German bodies; remains pounded into the sand & chalk of western Lorraine. The 9 villages of the Verdun ridge were never rebuilt but according to the French state, they still exist. Douaumont is still in the dictionnaire national of French communes. It has a Mayor & an electorate (descended from the original inhabitants) and an annual fête on the site of the village main street. Marie-Claude Minminster, 51, has been Mayor since 2001. She says: "We keep alive the memory of Douaumont because it was a place where people lived for 1,000 years before the war came. We want to preserve the memory of what people did here, their joys & their sufferings. Every year, our fête is attended by the relatives of the villagers of 1914 who return from all over France. What worries us -- and we ask ourselves this question all the time -- is the future generations. Will they still wish to continue to preserve the memory of Douaumont? How long will they care about what happened at Verdun?" The First World War is passing over the horizon of living memory. Only 4 centenarian active-service veterans survive in Britain & only 6 in France (none of whom fought at Verdun). The question of how n' why we commemorate the war which shaped the modern world -- how we separate memories from myths -- is becoming more acute and more confused. Mixed in with commemorations, cathedral peace concerts and series of lectures from historians & academics are the colored perceptions of reality -- -- --

Myth 1.
A recent French popular history calls Verdun the "greatest battle of all time". Is this true? In terms of overall, murderous scale , it was rapidly eclipsed by the Somme, which began 200 miles to the northwest on 1 July 1916, helping to draw German forces away from Verdun. Something like 1,200,000 soldiers (British & Empire, French and German) were killed, wounded or captured on the Somme -- compared to a total of 700,000 on both sides at Verdun.

Myth 2.
French popular memory tends to dwell on Verdun as the emblematic & most destructive "French" battle of the war. Really? Yes & no. French casualties in 1915, the year before Verdun, totalled 1,500,000; victims of a scattering of blundering, poorly planned offensives in Champagne, Artois & the Vosges. These stupid, costly battles have disappeared from French popular memory. Verdun was far more hellish than any one of them. And yet, if you do the simple arithmetic, French casualties in 1915 come to 125,000 a month -- way more than the monthly average at Verdun. Total French deaths in the 10 months of Verdun were 371,000 -- about 40,000 a month, or a devastating 90,000 a month for the meat-grinding of the intense, first phase of the campaign.

Myth 3.
Verdun the town, has been portrayed by both French & German generals and historians as a strategically & psychologically vital French stronghold. But was it? The importance of Verdun to the French as a symbol & heart of the nation was mostly something invented during & after the battle. One of the brightest of a new generation of young French historians of the war, Jean-Yves Le Naour, points out that Verdun was within a lightly defended & strategically meaningless salient -- or bulge -- in the trench lines running from the Channel to Switzerland. The town was relatively unimportant & its main claim to fame pre-1914 was that it was the sugared-almond capital of the world. (It still is.) Verdun only became vital because so much national prestige & blood, on both sides, was expended on it in 1916. The myth of Verdun as a historically crucial town going back to the time of Charlemagne was glued on after the battle.

So why then, has Verdun become so lodged in the French popular memory and imagination? Part of the answer is that Verdun -- despite 170,000 French deaths -- was a French "victory" in a war in which victories were scarce. Victory was important to the legend of Verdun but the battle achieved legendary status even before it ended. The Germans were on the offensive for the first time since 1914. As a defensive battle, Verdun achieved a kind of moral status as a symbol of French national resistance to the aggressor. All the regiments in the French army were rotated in & out of Verdun and it seemed in the collective conscious as though the blood of the entire country was coursing through one battlefield. The German Chief of the General Staff, Erich von Falkenhayn, claimed in his memoirs after the war that his aim was not to break through at Verdun but to kill French soldiers. Period. And "bleed the French army white". This is now generally thought by historians to have been a lie to explain his defeat when infact his real intention was to break through & destabilize the allies before the new 'Pals' regiments of Lord Kitchener's British volunteer army could enter the war. The German army captured a handful of forts. They advanced by about 4 miles. From April 1916, they were stopped, advanced again, pushed back, advanced again & were eventually repulsed (5 relentless attacks on the town of Vaux). Had the Germans broken through, the war might have been lost but this is far from certain. More importantly, the fact that the French held firm even at enormous cost, provided a huge moral boost to the French nation & a propaganda boost -- at home and abroad -- to the French government and to the leading French generals.

Verdun is important for another reason: The 1914-18 war brought slaughter to an industrial pitch of intensity not seen before. The new technologies of the 19th & early 20th centuries -- barbed wire, machine-guns, powerful artillery, tanks & canned food -- combined to allow huge armies to smash the life out of one another for weeks & months at a time. At Verdun, the sheer weight of firepower exceeded anything seen even in the murderous campaigns of 1914 and 1915. Artillery was assembled by the Germans & later the French on an unimagined scale. Tactical warplanes, flamethrowers & new, more efficient forms of poison gas joined the world's arsenal of butchery; one can almost say the logic of Hiroshima began at Verdun as it was here that the notion & infinite capacity of modern man to commit industrialised mass destruction was pushed to its limit for the first time & fully realized. Between them, the battles of Verdun & the Somme ensured that the Germans could not win a military victory on the Western Front. Even so, the estimated 700,000 (some say over 900,000) - combined total German casualties in the 2 monstrous overlapping battles of 1916 fell far short of allowing the French & British to win. That took another 2 exterminatory years & American intervention.

The British naturally enough, tend to dwell on memories of the Somme. All the same, is the argument that there was something particularly dreadful about the distilled horrors of the small battlefield of Verdun. The front was so narrow (less than 15 miles) and men might be killed instantly but without apparent damage by concussion, torn to smithereens by direct hit, cut up & shredded as if by some malicious butcher, crippled by flying fragments of their comrades' bodies or shell-shocked into babbling incoherence or infantile weeping by a capricious hit which left them unscathed among the remnants of their friends. And there were also the terrible sights just as scarring: the wounded groaning in pools of blood, rats feasting on the deceased in no man's land, the blinded screaming maniacally, eyes hanging out of sockets, limbs blown off and entrails n' guts hanging out of ripped open stomachs... Numb, dazed & terrified soldiers waiting to be destroyed. The First World War was the first in history in which trouble was taken to give soldiers individual graves (at least those who could be found & identified). This collision between industrialised, mass slaughter & democratic respect for the individual is the great paradox of the first global mechanized conflict & one of the reasons, maybe, why it still haunts us to this day. There is only one French cemetery on the Verdun battlefield but it is the largest First World War cemetery in all Europe. There are more than 15,000 marked graves. In the morning mists, the geometrical lines of the crosses seem to come in endless waves; like troops rising from the trenches awoken form their eternal sleep in the smoke of the battlefield. Animals -- rabbits, foxes & deer from the surrounding memorial forests leave meandering tracks in the snow during winter. Walking through the blocks of crosses, a strange sight appears through the fog. In one block, the gravestones are not shaped like crucifixes. They have elaborate curled tops, like miniature mosques. The first gravestone is inscribed Moussa Diara ("Mort pour la France, Mai 1916"). There are 579 such graves containing the bodies of Algerian & other colonial soldiers who fought at Verdun. Their presence is a jolting reminder -- a codicil to today's headlines of suburban riots & cartoon demos -- that Islam & France have a long history and that France owes much to its Muslim communities. In Jun 2006 President Jacques Chirac inaugurated a new memorial beside the cemetery to honour the Muslim fallen of Verdun.

After the Great War, the cemetery and other memorials at Verdun became a shrine to national sacrifice & resistance to the "Boche". It was only after the 1939-45 war that Verdun became something else: a shrine to Franco-German reconciliation, the place where President François Mitterrand & Chancellor Helmut Kohl were pictured walking hand-in-hand in 1984. And while the theme of bridging friendship, co-operation, understanding & toleration is obvious however from such a troubled past filled with grief from reeling loss, the power of such symbolism is waning. The notion of war between France & Germany now seems absurd. (Soccer the new replacement)? New generations of politicians are already taking power who had no experience of the Second World War, let alone the First.Verdun -- and the Somme -- should be remembered nonetheless. Even for the internet/cellphone/cheap-air-fares generation, they are not distant events like Waterloo or Agincourt. Advanced progressionin warfare frighteningly showed that it could decimate mankind.The presence of the Muslim graves -- and the new Muslim memorial -- is a reminder that humanity is frail & indivisible. Verdun is also a reminder of what happens when 2 causes collide: each driven by blind faith in its own righteousness (the result of a matter of prestige for both sides degenerating & continuing to fight for the sake of fighting) and armed with the machinery & weapons of annihilation.

HAPPY HEARTS & STUPID CUPID

2011-02-14T08:39:00.005-05:00

Lesbian cupid

RETRACING ROOTS BY WAY OF RACE

2011-02-08T09:20:00.029-05:00

In honor of Black History month.
1. TOWARDS 40 ACRES AND A MULE

THE FREEDOM FIGHTERS
by Bill Twatio

Convinced long before President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation that the fight against slavery and the preservation of the Union were synonymous, Henry Jackson, a black Canadian, wrote to a friend: "I wish to impress upon your mind that the war is a trial between freedom and slavery not only here, but all over the world." True to his convictions, he crossed the border to enlist in the Union Army and was killed at Campbell's Station on November 16, 1863. Black Canadians had no problem choosing sides in the American Civil War. Bred in slavery, they rallied to the Union cause as soon as Lincoln issued a directive allowing black enlistment in the Union armies. Maritimers made their way to Massachusetts to enlist in the famous 54th Regiment, celebrated in the movie Glory, while blacks from the Elgin and Buxton Settlements in Ontario crossed the border at Detroit to join the 1st Michigan Colored Infantry. Sarah Emma Edmonds from New Brunswick enlisted in the 2nd Michigan Infantry as "Franklin Thompson." Her true identity was not discovered until a regimental reunion in 1884. Other young blacks, encouraged by Joseph Henson (a leading abolitionist and founder of the British-American Institute in Dresden, Ontario, and whose escape from slavery inspired Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin), would serve in the Union artillery, the cavalry, the navy and the marines, in every theatre of war. The American Civil War was the bloodiest war ever fought on the continent. From 1861 until the defeat of the secessionist South in 1865, almost 3 million young men in Union blue or Confederate grey faced each other on battlefields from Texas to the Carolinas, and from New Orleans to the Canadian border. By war's end, some 600,000 had died, and a way of life, based on slavery, was gone forever. It wasn't just an American conflict, however, as Canada and its black population played a significant role. In 1861 the population of British North America numbered almost 3 million, most in Upper and Lower Canada. Another 250,000 Canadians lived in the United States, making them the "4th largest foreign-born ethnic group" according to the last census before the war. Their participation is not generally recognized, but more than 50,000 Canadians, including thousands of black Canadians, served in the Union Army. An estimated 5,000 were killed. Although most black Canadians were American born, blacks had settled in Canada as early as 1629 when David Kirke arrived at Quebec with a black slave from Madagascar whom he promptly sold to Champlain's master builder, Guillaume Couillard. Little is known about this first black resident of Canada except that he was baptized under the name Olivier Le Jeune, served as a domestic, and died, still a young man and a slave, in 1654.

SLAVERY IN CANADA
Slavery was forbidden in France, but Louis XIV gave it limited approval in Canada, informing his subjects that "His Majesty finds it good that the inhabitants import Negroes to take care of their agriculture." Blacks were set to work as household servants and field hands and did much of the heavy work in the new fur-trading posts. Though there would be fewer slave-owners in New France than in the neighbouring English colonies to the south, the attitude to slavery was similar. Enumerated with the livestock, a black was a slave everywhere and no one was astonished to find him in bondage. Slavery in Canada continued to flourish under the British regime. Sir Jeffrey Amherst, the commander-in-chief of British forces in North America and the conqueror of New France, assured the Marquis de Vaudreuil, a slave-owner, that "Negroes of both sexes shall remain as slaves in possession of the French or Canadians to whom they belong." This assurance was included in the Articles of Capitulation signed at Montreal in 1760. Many prominent citizens acquired slaves. The Reverend David Delisle of the Church of England in Montreal bought a slave named Charles in 1766. Two years later, James McGill, a wealthy merchant and the founder of the university which bears his name, bought "a Negro woman named Sarah, about the age of 25yrs for the sum of 56 pounds, lawful money of the Province." Much of the dealing in slaves was carried on through the newspapers. When Fleury Mesplet founded the Montreal Gazette in 1778, he announced that his paper would "give notice to the public at any time slaves deserted from their masters." Slaves accompanied the Loyalists to their new homes in British North America in the wake of the American Revolution. Veterans of Butler's Rangers who settled along the Niagara frontier brought slaves with them or bought them from livestock dealers who plied the slave trade in Canada. A Colonel Clark of Ernestown in Prince Edward County recalled that "drovers used to come in with horses, cattle, sheep and Negroes, for the use of the troops, forts, and settlers in Canada, and my father purchased his 4 Negroes, 3 males and 1 female named Sue."

THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD
Wherever the Loyalists brought their slaves, black settlements began to form--at Birchtown near Shelbourne in Nova Scotia; at York, Kingston, Prescott, Sandwich, Amherstburg and Chatham, Ontario. Although they came as slaves, hope was beginning to dawn. In 1791, Colonel John Graves Simcoe, the newly appointed Governor of Upper Canada, pledged himself never to support any law that "discriminates by dishonest policy between the Natives of Africa, America or Europe." Two years later, he introduced a bill in the Legislative Assembly prohibiting the importation of slaves, which passed "with much opposition but little argument." Simcoe's legislation preceded the total abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire by 45yrs. In spite of its limitations, Simcoe's bill helped to change public attitudes to slavery and by the turn of the century most Canadian blacks were free. Moreover, American blacks, learning that they would not be enslaved north of the border, began a trek to freedom and honoured Simcoe's memory with an abolitionist song:

"I'm on my way to Canada
That cold and distant land
The dire effects of slavery
I can no longer stand
Farewell, old master,
Don't come after me.
I'm on my way to Canada
Where coloured men are free."
The legendary Underground Railroad, with its mythical "trains" running through the northern states to terminals in Canada, had no track or rolling stock. It was underground only in the sense that it was a secret operation. Quakers and Methodists, free blacks and slaves, and "shareholders" united in their hatred of slavery worked tirelessly in the border states, using railway terms to confuse the authorities. "Conductors" drove carts and farm wagons with slaves hidden in false compartments and transferred them to "stations" along the many "lines" leading to Canada. The most famous conductor, Harriet Tubman, called the "Black Moses" of her people, made repeated trips into the South to guide slaves north. Her forays ended at St. Catharines, Ontario, at the home of Rev. Hiram Wilson, the leader of the local refugee community. Operating informally, without meetings and memoranda, the Underground Railroad spirited some 40,000 fugitive slaves to Canada between 1800 and 1860.

PROUD TO SERVE CANADA
Many of the new arrivals served their adopted country as soldiers. Noted for their dedication to the Crown, black Canadians fought with distinction alongside British regulars in the War of 1812 and the Rebellions in Upper and Lower Canada in 1837. Captain Robert Runchey's Coloured Company played a significant role in driving the Americans off Queenston Heights, following the death of Gen. Sir Isaac Brock in 1813. William Hall, the first black man to win the Victoria Cross, the British Empire's highest decoration for valour, was a freed slave from Halifax who served with the Royal Navy during the Indian Mutiny in 1857. Black Canadians would serve with equal distinction in the cause of Emancipation.

THE FIRES OF WAR
Harriet Tubman continued her work during the Civil War as a spy and nurse for the Union Army. Discriminated against and denied a pension, her experience was only too familiar to that of black Canadian volunteers. Black soldiers did not receive the same pay as whites and could not become officers. Many served for long periods without pay until they were grudgingly awarded half the standard rate, prompting the 54th Regiment to adopt the bitter battle cry: "Three Cheers for Massachusetts and 7 Dollars a Month!" The men who died in the assault on Fort Wagner in North Carolina in 1863 had never been paid. Military hospitals had separate but unequal facilities for black and white troops leading to a higher death rate for blacks. Only 8 black surgeons were commissioned and they were resented by their white colleagues. Dr. Alexander Augusta, who had trained at Trinity College in Toronto, was removed from his position as head of surgery at Camp Stanton in Maryland after his white assistants personally complained to the Secretary of War. Returning to Washington by train, he was attacked by 2 white men who tore his officer's insignia from his uniform, while white bystanders cheered them on. Approximately 180,000 blacks served in the Union Army. They participated in over 500 military engagements, 40 of which were major battles. Their most difficult battle, however, was waged against entrenched racial prejudice. American and Canadian blacks alike faced the fires of war and hatred with courage in the hope that they too would finally have the right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

2. HIGH SOCIETY COFFEE AND CREAM

A DYNASTY IS BORN:
A socialite and a slave turned senator take Washington by storm
(from U.S. News & World Report / July 2006)

A former slave from Mississippi and the daughter of a wealthy dentist from Cleveland -- the marriage of Blanche Kelso Bruce and Josephine Willson was an unlikely one. Yet when their union was celebrated in grand fashion in 1878, it marked the birth of one of America's great black political dynasties. In his book, The Senator and the Socialite, author Lawrence Otis Graham chronicles the history of this remarkable family, offering a rare, detailed glimpse into politics, race, and class in post-Reconstruction America. Born in 1841, Bruce made a fortune in real estate, then became the 1st black man to serve a full term in the U.S. Senate. He later earned appointments under four Republican presidents, including as register of the Treasury. In the following excerpt, Bruce had been in the Senate or less than a year. His victory had been an aberration at a time of overwhelming loss for the Republican Party: President Grant was embroiled in corruption scandals, and the party's troubles were worsened by a national financial collapse. The South, in particular, was suffering economically, hardships its citizens blamed on corrupt Republicans. As conditions worsened, they pointed to Reconstruction policies and black freedmen as the cause of their problems. These attitudes in flamed white hate groups and Democrats bent on redeeming the South, and the result was violence. By 1877, just 3yrs after Bruce took office, a new regime was controlling the South and pulling the strings in Washington. Meanwhile, the newlywed Bruces were being introduced to Washington society. They made an indelible mark. As freeborn blacks who had long been at the center of black elite society in Philadelphia and Cleveland, Dr. Joseph and Elizabeth Willson had strong opinions about people outside their social class. Since the senator had first met the Willsons and their daughter, Josephine, during his June 1876 visit to the Republican Convention in Ohio, he corresponded regularly with the 22yr old Cleveland schoolteacher. On more than one occasion, Bruce visited Cleveland and dined with Josephine and her family. As one of the more prominent black families in the city, the Willsons were surely flattered by the fact that they were hosting such a prominent man. But as the relationship between Bruce and Josephine advanced, it is likely that their own concerns about class and skin color caused them to worry about the Senator's background.

CLASS CONFLICT
Their daughter's choice represented much of what their class of black people was trying to leave behind. Not only were his complexion and features considered too Negroid for the light-complexioned, straight-haired blacks that formed their social circle, but Blanche Bruce had been a slave from Mississippi. He claimed not to know the identity of his father, and his illiterate mother had given birth to children by at least 2 white men. The Willsons' world, while mostly black, was a world of educated Northeasterners and Midwesterners who felt far removed from slavery and the Deep South. They were a group that looked down on blacks from that region, because these uneducated people reminded them of their own less advantaged ancestors. Their children were well schooled, sophisticated, and could almost pass for white because of their coloring (their only son eventually did pass) and their northern accents, as well as the comfort with which they moved among the liberal whites in Philadelphia and Cleveland. The Willsons' large, comfortable home at 228 Perry Street was outfitted with oil paintings, plaster molding, marble fireplaces, heavy mahogany furniture, and gleaming oak floors, much like the houses of their white professional neighbors. Joseph Willson's father had been one of the founders of the Bank of Augusta in Georgia. His Negro mother, Betsy, had directed the slaves who worked in her own Georgia home and kitchen. Elizabeth's mother had been a free woman of color from Georgia. In his Sketches of the Higher Classes of Colored Society in Philadelphia, publishedin 1841, Joseph Willson had revealed his own elitism and strong belief in class divisions when it came to friendship and marriage. He wrote, "It is not my desire to be understood as an advocate of universal social union. Far from it. Such a union would not only be impractical, but even could it take place, would, to say the least, be highly injudicious and prejudicial. If the virtuous and exemplary members of society should not keep aloof from the worthless, they would furnish no example to the latter to strive to make themselves reputable..." The Willsons were probably aware of the conversation that was surrounding their daughter's name as she prepared to marry Bruce and move to Washington, a city that was more segregated and race conscious than any place she had ever lived. Still, Josephine received almost weekly letters from Blanche, letting her know that both black and white Washingtonians were speculating about which white hostesses in the capital would welcome her in their homes. Bruce attempted to joke about it, but the subject was raised frequently in his letters to her. In a December 5, 1877, letter to Josephine, he writes,

My Dear Miss Josie, ...A great deal of curiosity is manifested here, or what reason I know not, to know where you will stop... It is very amusing. Washington is all ablaze to see you...
If Josephine's parents were privy to these letters arriving at their home, they might have wondered if Bruce was using their daughter's family credentials as a means to aid his own popularity among white and black elite Washingtonians who might be more inclined to accept the modest background [of the] dark-complexioned senator once he was paired with an educated, light-complexioned wife. At the very least, Dr. and Mrs. Willson would have been concerned that their daughter might face a hostile reception from bigoted southern whites. The racial attitudes of Washington citizens, and the treatment accorded by white congressmen and their wives, would take considerable adjustment for Josephine.

CHANGING FORTUNES
Back in Washington, much had changed since Senator Bruce had arrived in the fall of 1874. While there were nine blacks in Congress when he joined, there were now only three: Bruce, and the South Carolina representatives Robert Smalls and Richard Cain. Even though Frederick Douglass had just become the first black to be appointed to a major position as U.S. marshal for Washington, the setbacks for blacks were coming swiftly and surely. Senator Bruce now had to work alongside racist Southern Democrats, who were quickly being brought back into power, including South Carolina Gen. Matthew Butler. Butler had become famous for attacking the largely black town of Hamburg, SC, 2 years earlier and leading the killing of black residents and the ransacking and burning of their homes and businesses because white area residents resented the black people's power. Almost as a reward for Butler's anti-black defiance in the middle of Reconstruction, the state elected him to the U.S. Senate in 1876. It was just one more indignity for Blanche to suffer, as he wrote to Josephine:

"I have just been honored with an invitation and hope to be able to attend, but on account of the equality of parties in the Senate, I fear I shall not be able to get away. You know we have just passed through a fiery ordeal which ended with the admission of Hamburg Butler. We do not know at what moment the Democrats will spring some unseen trap on us, and taking us unawares, defeat us."
Bruce felt powerless after being handed defeats like this. These losses, no doubt, shook his confidence and made him even more cautious in his work. His reticence disturbed his friend John Roy Lynch, who had stood up to greater white opposition when he helped shepherd through the Civil Rights Act of 1875. Lynch, who was first elected to the House of Representatives in 1872, was unapologetic in his support for his fellow blacks in Mississippi and elsewhere. He had hoped that Bruce would be the same. Lynch expressed that concern in a letter he wrote to Bruce in the fall of 1877:

"You are very particular and guarded in what you [say], thus demonstrating the fact that you possess a good deal of senatorial diplomacy."
Lynch was not far off the mark in his analysis of Bruce. In fact, there were many situations where Bruce pulled his punches with people who had openly disrespected him. For example, Bruce found amusement in telling the story of how he had been insulted by a white Democrat's racist remark years earlier, before both of them were elected to the Senate. In the 1850s when Bruce was a young teenager in St. Louis, he was approached by a white man, Lewis Bogy, who offered Bruce a quarter if he would carry his suitcase to a waiting steamboat. After the young Bruce carried the luggage, Bogy refused to pay the money. When Bruce countered that he would turn over the bag only in exchange for the promised quarter, Bogy snatched the bag, called Bruce a "black rascal," and shook his fist at the insulted teenager. More than 20yrs later, in 1877, when Bogy was a Democratic U.S. senator from Missouri, he approached Bruce and asked the black Republican senator to support him on a bill. Upon realizing that Bogy did not recognize him, Bruce reminded him of the incident that took place between them in St. Louis 2 decades earlier, and added, "You were the gentleman and I was the colored boy." In recalling the experience to the Washington Post, Bruce added, "Senator Bogy laughed heartily at the reminiscence, and we shook hands. I helped him pass his bill, just to demonstrate that strange things frequently happen in this world and I bore him no malice."

COMPROMISE
There were many blacks who, like Lynch, felt that Bruce was too passive, or downright submissive, when dealing with bigoted whites. But Bruce had been feeling particularly uncertain of his position since President Rutherford Hayes had been sworn into office. Since that time, blacks in the South were becoming more frightened, as federal troops, who had been there to protect them against white hate groups, started withdrawing. By April, the troops had already been removed from South Carolina and Louisiana. As Bruce attempted to explain to his black Mississippi constituents, the fact that the new president was a Republican was irrelevant; Hayes was not on the side of southern freedmen. In fact, in numerous letters between Bruce and Lynch, it becomes clear that Bruce felt somewhat overwhelmed by the cynicism that he had seen in his own party, particularly since the February meeting where Hayes's Ohio representatives cut their infamous deal with the Democrats. The deal that disturbed Bruce and Lynch was a meeting between 4 Southern Democrats and 5 Ohio Republicans who represented Hayes. Since the presidential election of 1876 was still being contested in Congress because Democratic candidate Samuel J. Tilden was disputing the electoral college results for Hayes well into the new year of 1877, Democrats had approached Hayes and his representatives with a compromise. This compromise, which came to be known as the Compromise of 1877 was an opportunity for the southern Democrats to demand an end to Reconstruction, a removal of federal troops from the South, and a return of unfettered power to the white Democrats in the South, and a chance to remove blacks from public office as well as to re-enact laws that limited the activities, rights, and mobility of blacks.

What the 4 southern Democrats offered to Hayes's 5 representatives was a compromise that basically stated that the Democratic Party would relinquish its support for Tilden candidacy and offer it to Hayes if Hayes agreed to give the white Democrats the control they wanted over the South and the black freedmen who lived there. Hayes and his representatives agreed, which gave him the presidency and brought an immediate downfall to the rights and safety of blacks who had been living under the protection of federal troops and nondiscriminatory laws. With this deal, Reconstruction was officially over. What made the Compromise of 1877 so unsettling to the characteristically savvy Bruce was that he did not see it coming -- not even after Tilden began complaining about the electoral vote issue. Senator Bruce and his brother Henry had earlier commented on the danger of Tilden's candidacy and the degree of protection that they and other blacks would receive from the Ohio-bred Hayes. Months earlier, Henry had agreed with his brother in a letter saying they had to do everything necessary to prevent the Democrat Tilden from coming to power, because he would try "to be president by fraud and intimidation." He and Henry naturally believed that if they could keep the conservative Tilden out of the White House, their black brethren in the South would be secure. They quickly discovered their miscalculation... Bruce found a welcome relief from his Senate duties as his wedding day approached. He wrote out a 300-dollar check to Saks and Co. in his First Washington Bank checkbook and sent it to Josephine. He wanted to be sure that when he and Josephine left their nuptials and arrived at the Hoffman House Hotel in New York City, they were dressed in the best manner possible. Their new wardrobe would be used during their four-month honeymoon in Europe. Even before the articles were published, he knew that blacks and whites in the District of Columbia, Mississippi, and Ohio would be following the details of this wedding. During the last few months of their engagement, Josephine's parents had become more civil to him, but whenever he visited Cleveland to call on her, he never stayed in their four-bedroom home. He stayed at Forest City House, one of the city's top hotels. When he visited the Willsons' home, Josephine and her mother would tell him about the plans they had made. The house would be completely repainted. The ceremony would take place in the parlor, which opened up to a library on one end and a large foyer on the other end. The hors d'oeuvres and food would be provided by Henry Weisgerber, a popular Cleveland caterer. Calla lilies would be arranged throughout all of the first-floor rooms.

BEARING GIFTS
They would also show him the gifts that had already begun to arrive: four crystal vases from the Herkomers, a silver berry dish from the Huntingtons, a silver butter dish from the Boyds, silver and crystal from the Vosburghs, silver vases from the Morgans. Finally, the wedding day arrived. At 7:30 p.m. on June 24, 1878, the Willson family hosted the wedding of their daughter to the most prominent black man in America. By the time Blanche married Josephine Willson, he had well established himself in the press and in the minds of white colleagues he sought to impress as a wealthy and well-spoken man. He never spoke of his experiences as a slave in Virginia and Missouri, presumably because those details would underscore that the Mississippi senator was not, in fact, from Mississippi and was no different from the other Republican carpetbaggers. And while other blacks in Congress had often made reference to their families' slave experiences as a means of showing deference to white colleagues, Blanche made no such attempts. He avoided making any public speeches or published writings that referred to his life prior to his 1869 arrival in Mississippi. The senator likewise chose to assume a low profile in the wedding preparations. He gave no interviews, extended no high-profile invitations. One might presume that he was protecting himself and his future wife against the stories of his slave past rearing their ugly heads in the press. The wedding was almost a metaphor for what the senator's experiences were going to be for the rest of his life: publicly glamorous and triumphant, but privately reticent and guarded. Why would a U.S. senator with great personal wealth fail to have any fellow political leaders-black or white-at his wedding? And more important, why would he fail to have any of his own family members present? As Senator Bruce and his wife, Josephine Beal Willson Bruce, left for an extravagant four-month European honeymoon cruise, they sailed closer toward a life that Blanche had been contemplating for the last several years. It was a live that would exclude any family members who lacked their social status. They would display grace and sophistication as they accumulated greater wealth, power, and prestige, but they were going to do it by themselves.

3. LIFTING THE CURSE OF BEING 'A CREDIT'

There are some born ahead of their time. Destined in moments of excellence epitomizing greatness to rewrite rules, break taboos & set "thee standard" to surpass. From controversy to crucial, hope rests & pride reigns for the common people (our prestige, their shoulders). Be it Duke Ellington or Michael Jordan, we've let it ride. For Afrocentric ethnic understanding, achievement doesn't have to be about gloating & accomplishment doesn't have to be about boasting. Sure there's flavor n' swagger but we should never have to apologize for true heroes who found (sometimes unwanted & by accident) the spotlight - especially when we've had to work 3 times as hard to still only receive half the recognition. Just once, it's nice to say the inferiority complex isn't ours.

4. CIVIL RIGHTS BEYOND THE BUS

LEGACY OF A LONSEOME DEATH:
Had Bob Dylan not written a song about it, the 1963 killing of a black servant by a society man's cane would have been long forgotten.
by Ian Frazier

Do you know the Bob Dylan song "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll"? Grab the lyrics & give it a listen. If you are unfamiliar or you don't remember it, it's about a young society swell named William Zantzinger who, in 1963, killed a black serving woman named Hattie Carroll at a ball at a Baltimore hotel by striking her with a cane. Dylan was just 22 when he wrote it, and the lyrics show him at his high-energy, internal-rhyme-spinning peak:

William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll
With a cane that he twirled around his diamond ring finger...
[She] Got killed by a blow, lay slain by a cane
That sailed through the air and came down through the room,
Doomed and determined to destroy all the gentle...
Zantzinger's motive, Dylan sings, was that he "just happened to be feelin' that way without warnin'." When Zantzinger came to trial, charged with 1st degree murder, the judge "spoke through his cloak, so deep and distinguished," and then gave Zantzinger a 6 month sentence. At this last injustice, the song ends ---

But you who philosophize disgrace
And criticize all fears,
Bury the rag deep in your face,
For now is the time for your tears.
The song contains errors of fact. Dylan misspells the perpetrator's name, omitting the 't' perhaps deliberately, out of contempt, or perhaps to emphasize the Snidely Whiplash hissing of the zs. Zantzinger's actual arrest and trial were more complicated than the song lets on. Police arrested Zantzinger at the ball for disorderly conduct — he was wildly drunk — and for assaults on hotel employees not including Hattie Carroll, about whom they apparently knew nothing at the time. When Hattie Carroll died at Mercy Hospital the following morning, Zantzinger was also charged with homicide. The medical examiner reported that Hattie Carroll had hardened arteries, an enlarged heart, and high blood pressure; that the cane left no mark on her; and that she died of a brain hemorrhage brought on by stress caused by Zantzinger's verbal abuse, coupled with the assault. After the report, a tribunal of Maryland circuit court judges reduced the homicide charge to manslaughter. Zantzinger was found guilty of that, and of assault, but not of murder. The judges probably thought they were being reasonable. They rejected defense claims that Hattie Carroll's precarious health made it impossible to say whether her death had been caused, or had simply occurred naturally. The judges considered Zantzinger an "immature" young man who got drunk and carried away, but they nevertheless held him responsible for her death, saying that neither her medical history nor his ignorance of it was an excuse. His cane, though merely a toy one he got at a farm fair, they considered a weapon capable of assault. They kept the sentence to only 6 months because (according to the New York Herald Tribune) a longer one would have required that he serve it in state prison, and they feared the enmity of the largely black prison population would mean death for him. Zantzinger served his 6 months in the comparative safety of the Washington County Jail. The judges also let him wait a couple of weeks before beginning his sentence, so he could bring in his tobacco crop. Such dispensations were not uncommon, apparently, for offenders who had farms. In listening to Dylan's old protest songs today, something about them suits a current need, with commercial radio so jingly and dead and Dylan himself doing the music for Victoria's Secret lingerie ads. He must be proud of "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll"; since the song came out in 1964 he has included it on a greatest-hits CD (Biograph) and on a live-concert CD. The song is also part of his touring repertoire, an exposure that has brought it many listeners in recent years. On the long and sad list of victims of racial violence, from Emmett Till to Amadou Diallo, most names are forgotten after the news moves on. Dylan's poetry has caused Hattie Carroll's name, and the sorrow and true lonesomeness of her death, to stick in some people's minds. Dylan describes Hattie Carroll as a 51-year-old maid whowaited on tables, took out garbage, emptied ashtrays, and "never sat once at the head of the table." He mentions that she had borne 10 children. Of Zantzinger, he says ---

William Zantzinger, who at 24 years,
Owns a tobacco farm of 600 acres
One can't help noticing the tense of that verb. "Hattie Carroll" was perhaps Dylan's most journalistic song, nearly contemporary with the events it chronicles. Hattie Carroll died on February 9, Zantzinger went to jail on September 15, and Dylan recorded the song in New York City on October 23, all in 1963. The immediacy of that "owns" leads to wondering about the actual event, and about its consequences working themselves out through time. For example, William Zantzinger: What happened to him? Does he own that farm today? Zantzinger is, it turns out, something of an enigma. In the semi-rural part of Maryland where he still lives, many people know his name. If you mention him to someone in real estate, the antiques business, the legal profession, or law enforcement, you get a reaction. People don't want to talk about him, or they do, or they want their names left out of it, or they shake their heads and laugh; they never have to be told who he is. Many say he's a wonderful person or even an amazing guy, always polite and smiling, a good friend. Because Dylan's song made him a "story," in the news sense, reporters come to Charles County, Maryland, every so often to see what Zantzinger is up to now. They are usually surprised, that he is very hard to summarize.

When Zantzinger got out of jail in early 1964, he returned to his family and farm. He had a wife and 2 young boys. (His wife, Jane, had been charged with assaulting a policeman at the ball.) The farm is called West Hatton. Its main house, a 3-story brick mansion, has pillars and a porch on the side facing the Wicomico River. A Revolutionary War veteran built the house in about 1790. Both of Zantzinger's parents also lived on the farm; his father could trace his ancestry from the earliest white settlers of Maryland, and his mother, from a governor of Maryland. All along the river, lawns and fields lead up to mansions facing the shores, landmarks of the old tobacco-growing Maryland Tidewater. Neighbors of the Zantzingers owned enough land that you could ride to the hounds after foxes on it. Zantzinger loved foxhunting, and some of the 1963 news articles identified him as a "huntsman." Yet the Zantzingers were country gentry — he worked his farm alongside his employees, and he drank with the locals, black and white, in the nearby bars. At some point, Zantzinger sold the farm and got into real estate. Notoriety did not pursue him, and his name stayed out of the paper until it began to appear regularly in the notices of Charles County property owners who were delinquent with their taxes. In 1986, because of the back taxes, the county took possession of some ramshackle rental houses he owned in a neighborhood called Patuxent Woods. What Zantzinger did next got his name back in the news. He knew that the county now owned the properties, but that the renters, all poor and black, did not know. Counting on a lack of attention all around, he simply went on collecting rents as before. Even more enterprising, when tenants fell behind on their rent, he filed complaints against them and took them to court for not paying him rent on property he no longer even owned(!) The county court, in calm and bureaucratic ignorance, heard the cases. And to put the cap on it, he won. He was legally allowed to prosper on dishonesty. Eventually, local authorities caught up with him.

In 1991, a Charles County sheriff's deputy arrested Zantzinger at his real estate office on charges that included fraud and deceptive business practices. A number of newspapers, the Washington Post among them, did stories about this latest chapter in the Zantzinger saga. The houses he had been renting were such disasters — rundown shacks without plumbing or running water — that they embarrassed the county and gave traction to local fair-housing advocates, whose cause had been mostly frustrated until then. All the same, a few tenants came forward to speak up for Zantzinger, saying that without him they'd be living on the street. When the judge sentenced him to 18 months on work-release in the county jail, 2,400 hours of community service, and about $62,000 in penalties and fines, there were people in the courtroom who cried. The small building on Highway 301 in White Plains, Maryland, where Zantzinger's real estate office used to be, is now closed and empty, with a "Keep Out" sign on the door. The number listed for his real estate company in the Yellow Pages has been disconnected. A car dealership and a lumberyard flank his former office, and across the highway is a tattoo parlor. Similar enterprises—featuring bagels, blinds, birdseed, braiding, bail bonds — not to mention the usual behemoth stores as common as traffic, spread along Highway 301 for miles and miles, interrupted only occasionally by patches of trees labeled with developers' signs. At this rate, what little remains of rural Maryland will eventually disappear; foxhunting fields, antebellum mansions, and all. People say Zantzinger now lives on a farm in neighboring St. Mary's County. They say he's had a few health problems; he's a big man, 6 feet tall and heavy, and he's 72. They say he still owns a lot of rental properties, some as run-down as Patuxent Woods. (He doesn't talk to reporters, so it's hard to know for sure).

Candice Quinn Kelly, a former housing activist in La Plata, Maryland, has stated:
"I was on the other side from Zantzinger in the Patuxent Woods situation. In fact, it was our organization that uncovered his fraud to begin with. Maybe I've mellowed or sold out, but I don't see things as clear-cut as I did then. Billy Zantzinger provides housing to marginal folks nobody's gonna give a lease to, because they don't have a job or a rent deposit or a bank account or whatever. I learned that you can offer people tons of help and they still can't get out of poverty. Billy rents to those people anyway. Since Patuxent Woods, I've met him and talked to him a couple of times, and I feel strange saying this, but Billy Zantzinger is really a very niceman."
In Baltimore, 70 miles to the north, friends and acquaintances of Hattie Carroll don't agree. Carroll lived in Cherry Hill, a lower-middle-class black neighborhood, and attended Gillis Memorial Christian Community Church. At the time, the church was at the corner of Mulberry and Calhoun, downtown, but it has since moved to Park Hill on the city's northwest side. People at the church remember Hattie Carroll as a quiet, well-dressed woman, tall and poised, with good taste in hats. She sang in the church's over-45 choir and was a member of the Flower Guild, which does floral displays for the altar and other projects of church beautification. Away from work, at least, Hattie Carroll seems not to have fit the picture of the lowly person Dylan described. Few people today at the church knew that her death had been the subject of a widely played protest song.

After the ending of a noon service, A minister, the Reverend Dr. Theodore C. Jackson Jr., was making some final prayerful exhortations, boosted by an organ's repeated chords. In the parish hall, still glowing from his preaching, he mentioned that he had been a student away at seminary when Hattie Carroll died. He introduced 2 longtime parishioners, Dorothy Johnson and Mildred Jessup. The 1st wore a hat of black mesh material in a broad-brimmed Stetson shape, and an ankle-length dress appliquéd with lighter patterns like stylized leaves, and the 2nd wore a white blouse and tan slacks. Both are themselves preachers — the Reverend Johnson for 30 years, and the Reverend Jessup for 28. Both knew Hattie Carroll. They sat for a while in the church's library and talked. "I remember that Hattie went to work at the hotel that day, and later word came back that she'd been struck with a cane," said Rev. Johnson. "And right after that we heard that she had died. Everybody in the church was very upset. It was a terrible blow. She had a huge funeral, people filling the church to the doors and hundreds more standing on the street. A sad, sad day. Hattie's family suffered so, her children, after she died. They don't go to this church anymore. 4 of them, I think, became Muslims. One daughter ended up in a mental institution. But whatever you cause by word and by deed, it's all comin' back to you." Rev. Jessup, asked: "I wonder what kind of respect did that man have for people? What kind of respect did he have for ladies? He wasn't thinking about people at all. He was acting under the slave mentality. If I was that man's nurse — I used to be a nurse at Johns Hopkins — I would give him so much prayer to think about that he'd be miserable." When both Reverends were asked if they thought God would forgive Zantzinger, Johnson said: "You see, you are not your own, you belong to God. God gives you agape love — deep, unconditional, fatherly love. And with God all things are possible. Didn't he forgive Peter, who denied him three times? Now, if the man who killed Hattie Carroll is willing to repent, and if he is really godly sorry for what he did — and God knows if you are truly godly sorry — I know God will forgive. Yes, I believe I could him. I've forgiven people that did worse than he's done." Jessup responded: "For myself, I don't know about that. Things may be possible for God that are not possible for me. But I will tell you one thing. Because of what happened to Hattie Carroll, I have a phobia about canes to this day. I don't like to even see 'em, and I can't stand when people be foolin' with 'em. Just don't be bringin' no canes around me."

According to press accounts of Zantzinger's trial, he and his wife arrived at the ball, a charity event called the Spinsters' Ball, at the Emerson Hotel on Friday evening, February 8, 1963. He was in top hat, white tie, and tails, attire with which a cane is optional. Unlike other guests, Zantzinger didn't check his cane at the door because, as he said, "I was having lots of fun with it, tapping everybody." Tapping turned to hitting; a bellboy named George Gessell said Zantzinger struck him on the arm, and a waitress named Ethel Hill said Zantzinger argued with her and struck her several times across the buttocks. At about 1:30 a.m., he ordered a drink from the bar from Hattie Carroll, one of the barmaids. When she didn't bring it immediately, he cursed at her. Carroll replied, "I'm hurrying as fast as I can." Zantzinger said, "I don't have to take that kind of shit off a nigger," and struck her on the shoulder with the cane. Soon after, Hattie Carroll said, "I feel deathly ill, that man has upset me so." She then collapsed and was taken to the hospital. "What makes it hard to bear was that no one at the party challenged him, no one stopped him," Rev. Jessup said. "He was bold enough to behave like this in the presence of many people, and not one of them intervened. Maybe they had connections to him, maybe they came for business, or their hands were tied by who he was. But not one of those people stood up for her." Bobby Phelps, a friend of Zantzinger's since childhood asked:

"Can you imagine waking up from a drunk to find out you'd done something like that? He and I were talking on the front porch of the post office in Mount Victoria, a hamlet just up the road from Zantzinger's old farm. I'd've probably blown my brains out if it had been me. And what I really can't understand is, when Billy started getting crazy at the party, why somebody didn't just kick his ass for him and throw him out on his ear. You think about it and you feel bad for everyone. Billy is somebody I would trust with my life. Billy didn't hate black people—he used to set with them here in my bar and drink with them. A colored woman that used to work for the Zantzingers told me that Mr. Zantzinger — Billy's father — was pacing the floor and saying, How could my boy have done such a thing? His parents were just devastated. What a hell of a sad thing that was, that Hattie Carroll killing. You look back and wonder, How in hell did that all happen?"

Zantzinger was sentenced in the Hattie Carroll killing on August 28, 1963. As it happened, that was the exact same day of the March on Washington, when Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech. The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Baltimore Sun all ran stories about the sentencing; the Times gave it a short, single-column write-up on page 15; the stories in the Post and the Sun were not much larger. None mentioned that anybody objected to the lightness of the sentence. All 3 papers devoted pages and pages to the march; and it is striking, to a reader with the perspective of 4 decades, how blind (for want of a better word) the coverage in all 3 papers was. What comes through in the stories about the march is a vast relief—shared, presumably, by the reporters, the papers' management, and their readership — that the 200,000-plus assembled Negroes hadn't burned Washington to the ground. All 3 papers used the adjective "orderly" in their headlines; all reported prominently on President Kennedy's praise for the marchers' politeness and decorum. The Post and the Sun gave small notice to Dr. King, and less to what he said. Neither made much of the phrase "I have a dream." Only James Reston of the Times understood that he had witnessed a great work of oratory, but even his story veered into brow-wiping at the good manners of the Negroes. Listening to "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" today, you can hear Dylan shouting against exactly this blindness. The song he wrote took a one-column, under-the-rug story and played it as big as it deserved to be. Dylan's voice sounds so young, hopeful, unjaded, noncommercial — so far from the Victoria's Secret world of today. Even the song's title is well chosen: Before I went to Hattie Carroll's church, I hadn't quite understood why her death was "lonesome." But of course, as Rev. Jessup noted, "not one of those people stood up for her"; in a party full of elegant guests, Hattie Carroll was on her own. If it weren't for TV and videotape, we would not know how powerful the March on Washington, or Dr. King's speech, really was. And if it weren't for Dylan, nothing more would have been said about Hattie Carroll.

5. GOONS OF HAZZARD

WHITEWASH:
America's first Truth and Reconciliation Commission is attempting to get North Carolina to face what really caused the 1979 Greensboro Massacre.
by JoAnn Wypijewski

GREENSBORO, NORTH CAROLINA. A highway sign on the edge of town along I-85 welcomes motorists to Guilford County, "North Carolina's Future." The motto distills the story that the county, especially the county seat of Greensboro, and particularly its better-off white people, has told about itself since Jim Crow days, a story of Greensboro as vanguard of the New South, bustling, progressive, "on the move" in all ways, including those of racial "tolerance." Greensboro's school board was the first in the South to formally endorse desegregation, the day after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision. Years earlier, when the polio epidemic of 1947-48 hit Guilford County more severely than any area of the country, the political powers mobilized to build a convalescent hospital in 95 days and to suspend the rules of race, admitting black and white children, hiring an interracial medical staff, and providing equal treatment. That testament to enlightened can-doism is memorialized in photos at the Greensboro Historical Museum, which also houses the stools from which four young black men launched the sit-in movement at a lunch counter here on February 1, 1960. By July 25 of that year, blacks in the city had won the right to pay money for food and drink, just like whites, at counters in Woolworth's, S.H. Kress, and Meyer's department stores. A visitor today can stroll along South Elm Street, past flowering crape myrtle in this pleasantly semi-preserved downtown, and come to the intersection of what is now February One Place, where the handsome art deco F.W. Woolworth building is under renovation to become a civil rights museum. Like all convincing tales, the story of white Greensboro is just true enough to be believable. Like the simplest happy-ender, though, indeed like America's official civil rights story, it admits of no past offense that cannot be packaged into an edifying moral. Something was bound to mess it up...

The Greensboro Massacre, on November 3, 1979, should have done the job. It was one of the worst homicidal racial and political assaults of the era, but as one volunteer at the historical museum said, "You won't find anything about that in here." None of the 60 historical markers that dot the county commemorate it, and at the site where it occurred, the streets have since been rerouted, names changed so the bloodiest intersection no longer exists. In the years that have passed, a public revisitation of the massacre has sought to unlock the box of silence, and in so doing to challenge the process by which white power here has traditionally assured itself that everything is running right. At 11:23 on that sunny November morning, about 40 members of the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party, mustered in a caravan of gun-laden vehicles, opened fire on black and white demonstrators at the Morningside Homes housing project, while 4 television news teams and 1 police officer recorded the action. People ran screaming for cover. When the shooting ceased, 4 were dead and 11 wounded, 1 mortally, their bodies strewn about the project as if on a battlefield. One of the dead, a local woman named Sandi Smith who'd been active in the black student movement and was at the time trying to unionize textile workers, was shot between the eyes when she peeked out of a hiding place. The demonstrators had been gathering for a permitted march and rally rhetorically declaring "Death to the Klan" and organized by the Workers Viewpoint Organization (WVO), which was active in the poor neighborhoods and mills of a region then dominated by textiles. It advocated anti-racism, unionism, and communist revolution, all abhorred by the Klan, with which it had previously clashed, yet a police lieutenant posted his men out of sight of the demonstration and then permitted them to take a break until 11:30. Court proceedings later revealed that police had an informant in the Klan to whom they had given a copy of the march permit and route, and who 2 days later would lead the white supremacist caravan. He informed for the FBI as well. The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, which had been running surveillance on the WVO, also had an informant among the Nazis. At the time of the killings, the police special agent in charge of the Klan informant was at the back of the caravan, having trailed it to the site. He did not intervene, or radio for help, or trip a siren, or pursue the killers as 9 of their vehicles got away. Arrests occurred only because 2 police officers broke ranks and apprehended a van. In 2 criminal trials all-white juries acquitted 6 defendants. In 1985 a civil jury found the city, the Klan, and the Nazis liable for violating the civil rights of one demonstrator; the city paid his widow $350,000 on behalf of all parties.

To the extent that the massacre entered polite white Greensboro's story, it was as a "shoot-out" between extremist "outside agitators." That all of the dead were communists and 4 of the 5 were white men emboldened city officials and the white press to regard the attack as a thing apart from Greensboro's race history. Any competing narrative was erased. In the summer and fall of 2005, some of those narratives finally got a public hearing. There was no celebrated retrial here, as has occurred elsewhere in the South. Instead, Greensboro became the site of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission process, familiar to places such as South Africa and Chile but unprecedented in the United States. Greensboro's TRC, initiated by survivors and assisted by international experts, provided a public forum for righting the record and restoring the spirit of justice where judicial practice and punishment had become impossible. Unlike its international antecedents, however, Greensboro's TRC was not preceded by a major shift in power. It had no official sanction, public funding, or authority to issue subpoenas or grant amnesty. The white mayor, who opposed the process along with the white-dominated police force, the white majority of the City Council, the white financial interests and chamber of commerce, complained to the Washington Post that "the TRC project is being used as an alternate way to create what never happened, and that is a major investigation." Which is exactly the point in a situation where conventional avenues to justice are posted Dead End. When the commission issued its report in March 2006 many already felt it was unlikely to produce hard proof of police complicity in the attack. Although 2 Klansmen testified ("Maybe God guided the bullets," Imperial Wizard Virgil Griffin declared), most police and federal agents refused to. But the hearings had already relocated the massacre within the long sequence of struggle-repression-political opening-bad faith-struggle-repression that white Greensboro's story denies, and absent which "the events of 1979 are unintelligible," according to Nelson Johnson, who organized the protest, was wounded, and then arrested for inciting a riot. Once a revolutionary communist, now a Christian minister and, with his wife Joyce, director of the Beloved Community Center ("The distance between Marx and the Old Prophets is not as great as it seems," he says), Johnson has been a lightning figure as a black activist in Greensboro since the late 1960s. He reviews the pattern by which city power players historically raised competing specters of the Klan and black radicalism or communism to justify racial policies long on rhetoric and blue-ribbon panels but short on action. To blacks, white leaders cast themselves as the moderate bulwark against the Klan, meanwhile stoking race fury among the white working class to thwart unionization in the mills.

Despite that 1954 resolution on desegregation, for instance, Greensboro's best men said race mixing in the schools would only rile the Klan; thus, the city was one of the last to integrate its schools, in 1971. After the epidemic, the polio hospital reverted to the segregationist mode of every other city hospital, and in 1963 was used as a jail during a month-long black uprising. By the late '60s and '70s, Johnson says, the black community had had it with the white power structure and achieved an extraordinary level of organization exercised in student strikes, rent strikes, work stoppages, and poor people's groups. When white radicals began entering the mills, organizing cross-racially, and were elected in a few cases to union positions, "you had a convergence of forces for social, racial, and economic justice that culminated in 1979." That was shattered on November 3. Although the WVO was a small sectarian group, its decapitation had the broad freeze effect of terror. Now when survivors like the Johnsons talk of reconciliation, it's in terms of following the full skein of Greensboro's experience to arrive at what Joyce calls "an authentic language" for addressing past and future. Nothing can right America's race history; it is what it is, mendacious and brutal. The high-profile convictions of old Klansmen for crimes of the 1960s only reinforce notions of individual monstrosity, isolated incidents, and punishment as the solution to all problems. "What does it mean for an 80yr old man, one foot on a banana peel and another in the grave, to go to prison?" Johnson asks. "What does this explain about the vicious sentiments of the system that used him? What does it challenge?" In Greensboro people who weren't alive in 1979 stopped by Johnson's church to ask about the TRC. Hundreds have sat through all-day hearings. Elijah Andrews, who was 13 on November 3 and remembers his mother going after his little brother and shrieking, "Get down!" learned of the hearings and, amazed that attention was finally being paid, attended them. How does anything change in this country? How do people fragmented for years get themselves together, find a voice, "a way out of no way"? With 67 years of the mess of life behind him, Nelson Johnson talks in deep, even tones about alternative structures, creative democracy, restorative justice: "They're kind of a Jacob's ladder. You do it all, and then you do it all again, and each time you go higher."

6. INCOGNEGRO

During film fest 2003, I saw the documentary AFROPUNK about the black experience of fans/musicians involved in the hardcore scene. And recently with black history month, my mind has been wandering about with afrocentricity involved with punk/hc & metal. Although a small presence (growing?) an effective one. Black history month in a deeper sense seems to honor & embody more on the socio-political front than entertainment (as sports & music on an everyday scale alone goes without saying). So someone asked me if I ever participate in festivities & the answer was no - for me it's about observance. And this all came from recalling a February Bollweevils show 15yrs ago & hanging out with the band afterwards (which took a weird turn after this drunk gutterpunk chick took a piss infront of us outside and then came into a van to sit on various laps). The singer Daryl is black whom I got along with (he was also studying to be a Doctor) & it's always good to see a brotha in a really cool band you like, so could my attendance in some strange connective & coincidental manner have been as close as it gets to recognizing/celebrating black history month? The idea may seem rather flimsy, slipshod & haphazard but fuck it! Great music is just that any month of the year so I'll take it either way.

JANUARY 31, 1606 (OVERTHROW FROM THE BASEMENT)

2011-01-31T12:59:00.002-05:00

405yrs ago today at Westminster Hall in London, Guy Fawkes jumps from the gallows to his death moments before his execution for treason. He was a chief conspirator in the 'Gunpowder Plot' of Nov 5, 1605, which was a Catholic plan to blow up the British Parliament building & wipe out the entire Protestant government including King James I of England (also the VI of Scotland), his oldest son & the Queen. With the intention of installing his 9yr old daughter, Princess Elizabeth on the throne, a group of 12 conspirators led by its architect, Robert Catesby (an English Catholic whose father had been persecuted by Queen Elizabeth I for refusing to conform to the Church of England) had conceived the terrorist action in May 1604 when he rented rooms adjacent to the House of Lords. The devious scheme arose from being angered by intolerant laws restricting religious practice & banning especially many Jesuit priests from the country. Catesby confessed the plot to his priest (Oswald Tesimond) who in turn told a colleague (Henry Garnet). The plot was delayed because of the arrival in London of the Black Plague in the summer of 1604 & the opening of Parliament was put off until Oct 1605. The conspirators in the meantime learned that the lease on the cellar beneath the House of Lords was up & took it on and by Mar 1605, they had already stored barrels of gunpowder. 2 months later in May, the 12 had left London for the country or to travel abroad, arranging to return in Sept. However, the opening of Parliament was postponed again. When Catholic Baron, Lord Monteagle (William Parker) received an anonymous threatening letter from one of the conspirators (his brother-in-law who was recruited to help financially) warning him not to attend the ceremonial state opening of Parliament which James was to attend, he gave the letter to Robert Cecil: 1st Earl of Salisbury, the Secretary of State & the chief minister of James.

As the evening of Nov 4 reached midnight, a party of armed men undertook a search of the cellars led by Sir Thomas Knyvet (a justice of the peace). There on guard they found Guy Fawkes - a convert & religious zealot who fought in the Spanish army in the Netherlands - lurking with 36 barrels of gunpowder. He was arrested, taken to the Tower of London & tortured on the rack where he revealed the names of his co-conspirators who were themselves later arrested (as had been dozens of innocent citizens). Catesby was shot & killed evading capture by a force of 200 government troops on Nov 8, said to have been clutching a picture of the Virgin Mary. As a warning against insurrection, his decapitated head was exhibited outside Parliament. King James managed to escape assassination. On Jan 27, 1606, the conspirators were tried with all but one pleading guilty and on Jan 30-31, they & Fawkes were sentenced to be hanged, drawn & quartered. While climbing the platform, Fawkes jumped from the ladder & broke his neck, dying instantly. Father Garnet (who had heard confession from several of the plotters) was executed that May at St. Paul's Cathedral. In the aftermath, far harsher anti-Catholic laws were passed including fines for those who didn't attend Anglican services & Nov 5 was established as a day of public thanksgiving. Today, in remembrance of the Gunpowder Plot, Guy Fawkes Day is celebrated annually across Great Britain on Nov 5. As dusk falls in the evening, villagers & city dwellers light bonfires, set off fireworks & burn an effigy of Fawkes reciting the famous cry, "Remember, remember, the 5th of November" (even the Houses of Parliament are still searched by the Yeomen of the Guard before the state opening every year as a security precaution) -- all in commemoration of his foiled overt attempt to blow Parliament, nobility & James I to kingdom come. Famously, George Washington once condemned soldiers & officers in the Continental Army for planning such celebrations in 1775. As he was struggling to win French-Canadian Catholics to the Patriot cause, he called Guy Fawkes night "that ridiculous & childish custom" and also wrote that he found it damnable & monstrous and expressed bewilderment "that there could be [men under his command] so void of common sense."

JANUARY 28, 1986 (FALLING STAR BLASTED FROM THE HEAVENS)

2011-01-28T09:19:00.009-05:00

I still remember this vividly. Coming home from school for lunch & watching this at a friends place. He said in mild passing (not even meant in bad taste), "wouldn't it be something if it blew up"? It did, we were shocked, we came back to school & told classmates and no one believed us. I guess it said a lot about the tragic end: it was too terrible to even contemplate & that sad to even comprehend.

25yrs ago today, the space shuttle 'Challenger' exploded just after lift-off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, killing the 7 astronauts aboard -- most notably, 37yr old New Hampshire highschool social studies teacher, Christa MacAuliffe who had won a competition to be part of the flight crew & the 1st civilan to travel into space.

For 6 days previous the launch countdown had been previously delayed because of weather & technical problems. Just 73 seconds into ascending take-off, hundreds on the ground, including Christa's family, stared in disbelief as the shuttle blew up in a forking plume of smoke & fire and plunged into the ocean. Millions more watched the wrenching tragedy unfold on live television. There were no survivors. In the aftermath of the disaster, President Ronald Reagan (postpoing a State of the Union address) instead spoke to the nation of the sadness & appointed a special commission to determine what went wrong. The investigation determined that the explosion was caused by the failure of an "O-ring" seal in one of the 2 solid-fuel rocket boosters. The elastic O-ring did not respond as expected because of the cold temperature at launch time, which began a chain of interfering events that resulted in the massive explosion. It was disturbingly revealed that superiors had warned that certain equipment was vulnerable to failure but went unheeded. Things went wrong immediately as the rocket boosters became brittle with flames breaking out & damaging the external fuel tank. Another investigation etermined that the forces involved in the Challenger destruction were not sufficient to have caused the 7 deaths but that all aboard may have lost consciousness only seconds later as their module lost cabin pressure. Morton Thiokol, the company that designed the boosters was found to have ignored serious concerns about potential flaws & been negligent in taking proper action. The NASA program was placed on hiatus & did not send astronauts into space for more than 2yrs as it redesigned a number of features of the space shuttle in the development of future corrective measures.

17yrs later, on Feb 1, 2003, a 2nd space shuttle disaster rocked the USA when 'Columbia' disintegrated on live television, 231,000 feet above Texas upon re-entry of the Earth's atmosphere near the end of its mission killing another all-7 crew. Travelling approx. 12,500 mph and scattering debris over eastern parts of the state, Arkansas & western Louisiana (with wreckage found in more than 2000 locations), residents had heard a loud boom & saw streaks of smoke in the sky. Adding to the tragedy were 2 pilots aboard a search helicopter who were killed in a crash while looking for debris. Strangely, worms that the crew had used in a study that were stored in a canister aboard the craft did survive. Again, the original launch date had been delayed numerous times for a variety of reasons. 80 seconds into take-off, a piece of foam insulation broke off from the shuttle's propellant tank & hit the edge of the shuttle's left wing which was further blown apart by heat & wind. Some engineers at NASA had previously believed that the damage to the wing could cause a catastrophic failure but their concerns were not addressed because management believed that even if major damage had been caused, there was little that could be done to remedy the situation. In the wake of the explosion, President George W. Bush ordered the nation's flags to fly at half-mast & solemnly addressed the public, eulogizing the shuttle's crew at a memorial service reciting biblical passages & praising their international makeup (as some of the astronauts were from Israel & India). In Aug 2003, an investigation board issued a report that revealed that it in fact would have been possible either for the Columbia crew to repair the damage to the wing or for the crew to be rescued from the shuttle. In the aftermath of the disaster, another hiatus grounded the NASA program & it's next planned shuttle, 'Atlantis'. Despite fears that the problems that downed Columbia had not been satisfactorily dealt with & corrected, flights into orbit resumed in July 2005 with the launch of 'Discovery'.

AHEAD OF THE PACK

2011-01-26T16:32:00.003-05:00

First there was Bobby Orr. And then we hit the 80's... Today is Wayne Gretzky's 50th birthday. Naturally there were accolades & tributes aplenty reflecting/reminiscing on his illustrious 20yr pro career: the dynasty years in Edmonton, playoff dominance, Stanley Cups, perennial all-star, the Canada Cup, World Championships, setting records galore, shattering records thought unbreakable, winning numerous individual awards, finishing with several 100+ point seasons, the most this n' the fastest that, bringing hockey success to California, playing for 4 teams, having coaching experience, his jersey number retired by the NHL, achieving Olympic gold, no-brainer Hall of Fame induction & being the all-time leading goal scorer --- The man is pride, honor & glory personified. His fame n' popularity don't even begin to cover what was astonishing skill & talent; a human highlight reel full of endless victorious memories. As a stunning junior there were already glimpses of brilliance (and this was STILL before hitting his teen years) but who really knew from the start just how much he would revolutionize the sport & thus change the game forever? To the Great One indeed. Happy gold one, 99.

JANUARY 25, 1971 (LIONS BLOOD IN AFRICA)

2011-01-25T16:29:00.002-05:00

40yrs ago today, Gen. Idi Amin Dada Oumee, seized power in Uganda & became dictator after a military coup that ousted Prime Minister Milton Obote who was in Singapore during a Commonwealth Summit. Amin (born in 1925, the 3rd of 8 siblings) joined the King's African Rifles - a regiment of the British colonial army - in 1946. He received only a rudimentary education but excelled at sports & reportedly converted to Islam at an early age. In 1951, he became the heavyweight boxing champion of Uganda (holding the title until 1960). In 1952 with the British, he saw action against the Mau Mau revolt in Kenya. Various commanding officers described him as cheerful, energetic, shrewd, cunning & brutal. As a Lt. in 1962, troops under his command committed the 'Turkana Massacre' while conducting an operation to suppress cattle stealing by tribesmen spilling into the north of Uganda from a northern region of Kenya. Investigations by the British authorities revealed that the victims of the massacre had been tortured, beaten to death & in some cases, buried alive. However, with Uganda's independence only months away, the authorities decided against court-martialing Amin for his "overzealous" methods. When Obote became PM, he overlooked the charges of torture and promoted Amin to Maj. in 1963 and to Col. & Deputy Commander of the army and air force in 1964. Amin was then sent to Israel on a paratrooper training course where he became a favourite of the Israelis when he acted as a conduit for the supply of arms & ammunition to Israeli-backed rebels fighting a war in southern Sudan. Following a financial scandal in 1966 implicating Obote & Amin in gold smuggling, and on the back of growing opposition from the King (Mutesa), Obote suspended the constitution, arrested half his cabinet & installed himself as President for life. Mutesa was driven from his palace in a military operation led by Amin & forced into exile while a new constitution quickly abolished all the country's kingdoms. After more promotions, Amin began building a support base in the army by recruiting from his own tribe but his relations with Obote started to sour. In Dec 1969, an unsuccessful attempt was made to assassinate Obote and when a senior rival army officer & his wife were shot dead at their home in Jan 1970, relations deteriorated further following the murder. By Nov, Amin had been removed from his command positions & placed in administrative roles. After discovering that Obote intended to arrest him on charges of misappropriating millions of dollars of military funds, in 1971 he staged a coup alleged to have been backed by Israel & welcomed by the British. Amin's military government accused Obote and his regime of corruption, economic mismanagement, suppressing democracy & failing to maintain law n' order. Obote later called Amin "the greatest brute an African mother has ever brought to life."

Although the coup was initially supported by Ugandans, with Amin promising to abolish Obote's secret police, free all political prisoners, introduce economic reforms & immediately return the country to civilian rule, elections would never be held during Amin's reign. Inspite of saying he had no ambitions and was only concerned for his country & people, Amin later declared himself with the preposterous title: "His Excellency President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, Lord of the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular"(!) Right off the bat, he initiated mass executions of officers & troops he believed to be loyal to Obote. As many as two-thirds of the army's 9000 soldiers were killed during Amin's 1st year of rule. In foreign affairs, he was initially pro-West and inclined towards Britain & Israel. His first overseas trip as President was a state visit to Israel, followed by a separate state visit to London that included a meeting with Queen Elizabeth II. His relationship with her was odd to say the least: He once wrote to her saying, "I would like you to arrange for me to visit Scotland, Ireland & Wales to meet the heads of revolutionary movements fighting against your imperialist oppression" and he was alleged to have sent her a telex stating, "Dear Liz, if you want to know a real man, come to Kampala." His policy positions soon changed after he returned from a trip to Libya near the end of 1971. In Aug 1972, determined to make Uganda "a black man's country", Amin began expelling the country's 40,000-80,000 Indians & Pakistanis, reportedly after receiving a message from God during a dream. He blamed the Asians for sabotaging the economy of Uganda (when infact they were the backbone) & gave them 90 days to leave the country, only allowed to take what they could carry. The businesses, homes & possessions they left behind were distributed without compensation to inner circle acolytes. The country's money matters were quickly plunged into chaos, further harmed by incompetence & his looting of the treasury and with the true nature of his regime having become more apparent, the British & Israeli governments began to back-pedal on their support, refusing to sell him more arms. Amin looked to Libya for aid, promising leader Col. Muammar Gaddafi that he would turn Uganda into an Islamic state. The Soviet Union also provided aid & arms for a time. He challenged Britain & the United States, broke relations with Israel & reversed his previous stance now throwing his support behind the Palestinian liberation movement. British property in Uganda was appropriated, business relations between the 2 countries were restricted & those Britons remaining in Uganda were also threatened with expulsion.

To secure his regime Amin stirred up ethnic tensions and launched a campaign of persecution against rival tribes & Obote supporters, murdering an eventual estimated 300,000. Among those to die were ordinary citizens, former & serving Cabinet ministers, the Chief Justice, Supreme Court judges, diplomats, academics, educators, prominent Roman Catholic & Anglican clergy, senior bureaucrats, medical practitioners, bankers, tribal leaders, business executives, journalists & a number of foreigners. In some cases entire villages were wiped out & so many corpses were thrown into the Nile (allegedly for crocodiles) that workers at one location had to continuously fish them out to stop the intake ducts at a nearby dam from becoming clogged. With further totalitarian decrees, he created his own security apparatus to identify and eliminate opponents. At its height, this force would consist of about 18,000 men serving in 3 squads -- the Public Safety Unit, the State Research Bureau & the military police. Amin's Presidential Guard also doubled as a death squad as well as protecting the dictator from the many assassination attempts made against him. These units were made up of nothing more than vicious cruel thugs operating with criminal impunity. By 1975, as terror reigned & the country was in collapse, he staged a publicity stunt for the world media -- forcing white residents of Kampala to carry him on a throne then kneel before him & recite an oath of loyalty. That summer, Denis Hills, a Uganda-based British subject, was sentenced to death by the regime for describing Amin as a "village tyrant". The sentence was dropped only after the British foreign secretary travelled to Kampala to plead for Hills' life. Hills was eventually freed but later warned against viewing Amin (inspite of his erratic behaviour & personality) as a buffoon, clown or murderer, explaining that Amin's "aggressive black national leadership" had won him many admirers in Africa inspite of negative world press. Meanwhile, Amin took up the rotating position of head of the Organization for African Unity but was largely seen as an embarrassment & during the same period, Uganda was appointed to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights which many condemned as outrageous. He also added to his already absurd moniker: "the uncrowned King of Scotland" and lavished his guests & dignitaries playing the accordion while dressed in kilts & wearing tams. Mixed with the eccentricities were widespread belief of him being a cannibal & unsubstantiated rumors of multiple mutilations.

On Jun 27, 1976, Amin became personally involved in hostage negotiations with Israel when 2 pro-Palestinian guerillas & 2 German terrorists hijacked an Air France passenger jet originating at Tel Aviv that left Athens for Paris carrying 105 Israelis & Jews of the entire 243 crew. The airliner was diverted to Libya then flown to Entebbe airport in Uganda where the 4 were joined by 3 more. They demanded the release of 53 prisoners held in various jails worldwide & threatened to begin killing hostages from Jul 1 if their comrades weren't freed. When all the Israelis & Jews were separated from the rest of the passengers, one holocaust survivor showed his concentration camp registration number tattoo to a German hijacker. The armed terrorist protested: "I'm no Nazi! I am an idealist." Along with the entire crew who had refused to leave them, the hostages were moved to the transit hall of the airport where they stayed for a week. On Jul 3, Israel's Knesset (cabinet) approved a rescue attempt based on Mossad intelligence & 100 IDF commandos set out for the 2500 mile flight to Uganda, landing at 11PM on Jul 4. They went into action immediately, attacking the terminal building shouting "Get down!" in Hebrew & English. 3 of the hostages were accidentally killed & 10 others wounded in the firefight. While rescuing the passengers, one commando (Lt. Col. Yonatan Netanyahu, elder brother of future Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu) was killed & 5 others wounded during the operation (the entire event according to varying accounts taking 53-90 minutes with the assault itself lasting only 30-35 minutes). All 7 hijackers were shot dead as were 45 Ugandan soldiers & 30 Ugandan fighter planes destroyed. Amin was deeply humiliated by the successfully staged raid. Only one passenger was left behind left behind -- Dora Bloch, a 75yr old British-Israeli grandmother who had been released by the hijackers for medical treatment. She was taken to a hospital in Kampala never seen or heard from again and only after long suspected rumors of foul play was her killing finally confirmed in 2007 (from the Apr 1987 Ugandan Attorney General & Minster of Justice telling the country's HRC), that she was dragged out of her bed by 2 army officers, shot, her body thrown in the trunk of a car & her remains recovered near a sugar plantation. Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin later accused Amin of collaborating with the terrorists by using deceit & false pretences during the hostage negotiations when all the while simultaneously allowing reinforcements to join the original 4 hijackers. In the wake of the Entebbe raid, the Ugandan government later tried & failed to have Israel sanctioned at the United Nations. a furious Amin had more than 200 senior officers & government officials executed as well as hundreds of Kenyans living in the country killed as retaliation for Kenya's assistance to Israel in the raid. He also expelled foreigners from the country & unleashed a new round of violence, ordering the deaths of anyone suspected of opposing him.

At the end of Jul 1976, Britain broke off diplomatic relations with his regime to which he ridiculously stated that he had beaten them. In Jan 1977, he accused the Anglican Archbishop of Uganda of conspiring in an invasion plot. The next day the Archbishop and 2 Cabinet ministers were murdered. The USA meanwhile, cut off aid to Uganda with President Jimmy Carter saying that Amin's policies disgusted the entire civilised world. By 1978, the country's main export of coffee began to see sharp falls in price further damaging the beleagured economy. Armed rebellions broke out in the southwest, coup attempts became an ever-present threat & the Libyans also began to cut aid. In an attempt to divert attention from the country's internal problems, Amin launched an attack on neighboring Tanzania (falsely accusing Presdient Julius Nyerere of waging war) on Oct 9, 1978 & by the end of the month, Tanzanian troops assisted by armed Ugandan exiles quickly put Amin's army (assisted by a Libyan force of 2500) to flight & counter-invaded in Jan 1979. On Apr 11, 1979, the invading Tanzanians beat back heavy Ugandan resistance & took Kampala. Amin fled to Libya taking 4 wives, some 30 mistresses & about 20 of his children. He settled & was later asked to leave where for a time, he briefly lived in Iraq. After moving on still, he was allowed to stay in Saudi Arabia provided he kept out of politics and was given a monthly stipend of about US$1400, domestic servants, cooks, cars & drivers. He lead a comfortable life with his 4 wives in a modest house. Besides a huge death toll, Amin had left Uganda with a staggering annual inflation rate of 200%, a national debt of US$320 million, an agricultural sector in tatters, closed factories & ruined businesses.

In 1980, Milton Obote returned to power in Uganda following a general election. Obote's 2nd administration wass said to be just as violent as Amin's with security forces mercilessly combating an insurgency movement. More than 500,000 civilians died as a result of the conflict & Obote was once again ousted in July 1985. In 1989, Amin tried to return to Uganda to reclaim power but was identified at Kinshasa, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) & forced to return to Saudi Arabia. For a decade he lived quietly out of the spotlight until 1999 when he gave an interview to a Ugandan newspaper saying he liked to play the accordion, fish, swim, recite from the Koran & read. He expressed not one shred of remorse for the abuses of his regime & was reported to say, "I'm very happy now, much happier now then when I was President." In 2001, Amin again made news wishing to return to Uganda. He continued to be popular in his home province & began to fund the rebuilding of family properties destroyed by the Tanzanian troops who expelled him in 1979 but the Ugandan government made it clear that he was free to come back but would automatically be arrested to answer for his sins & be dealt with accordingly by the law. If he died abroad, his body would be allowed back for burial but his relatives however, were able to travel to & from the country and several of his children still live & work there. In 2002, Uganda officially celebrated Amin's downfall for the first time in 23yrs. On Jul 20, 2003 Idi Amin, was reported by one of his wives to be in a coma & on life support from kidney failure in a Saudi hospital. On Aug 16, 2003 he died of complications due to multiple organ failure & was buried in a Saudi cemetery during a small ceremony just hours after his death. He never stood trial for his crimes.

JANUARY 17, 1991 (LINE IN THE SAND)

2011-01-17T14:51:00.006-05:00

The mandate has passed, the deadline has expired & the Gulf War Allies have sent hundreds of planes on bombing raids into Iraq at the start of 'Operation Desert Storm'. The American, British, French, Saudi & Kuwaiti aircraft took off at 11:30PM last night after Iraq had refused to comply with a United Nations ultimatum for its troops to withdraw from its 5-month occupation of oil-rich neighbor Kuwait by Jan 15. Their bombs were aimed at military & strategic targets, including an oil refinery & Baghdad airport. The devastating & sustained aerial bombardment also involved cruise missiles launched from US warships & helicopters. At least 400 raids took place. Latest reports say all the Allied aircraft have returned home safely although France says 4 of its planes were hit. (Although a friend of the USA, Israel was asked not to participate to prevent diplomatic complications that would surely arise from the severe friction & contentiousness of the co-operating Arab nations). US Defence Secretary, Dick Cheney, said the operation appeared to have gone "very well". 2hrs after the raids began, President George H. Bush made a televised address saying the military objectives were clear -- force Iraqi troops out of Kuwait & restore the legitimate government. In Baghdad, Dictator Saddam Hussein remained defiant. He said the "Mother of all Battles had begun" & urged the Iraqi people to "stand up to evil". First news of the bombing came from reporters in the capital working for CNN. They reported hearing air raid sirens shortly before the bombs hit. President Bush said: "Our operations are designed to best protect the lives of all the coalition forces by targeting Saddam's vast military arsenal. Initial reports from General Schwarzkopf are that our operations are proceeding according to plan." British Prime Minister, John Major, came out of 10 Downing Street shortly before 8PM to make a statement to reporters, saying: "No-one wanted this conflict. No-one can be pleased about the fact this conflict has been necessary. I hope now it is clear to Iraq that the scale of the Allied operation is such that they cannot win. I hope that Saddam Hussein will now make a very swift decision that he will do what he's been invited to do by the world community for a long time, that he should get out of Kuwait and end this matter swiftly & decisively." He further added the attacks would continue until Saddam withdrew his troops. Allied planes have taken off this morning to launch a 2nd round of air strikes.

20yrs ago today, The first Western-allied conflict against Iraq began. Since Aug 2, 1990, under the ludicrous pretext of a border dispute, Iraq had held Kuwait & the annexation provoked instant condemnation. Saddam had belligerently threatened to turn Kuwait into a "graveyard" if any other country dared to challenge the take-over by force & expel his army. On Jan 18, 1990, Iraq fired scud missiles into Israel attacking Tel Aviv & the main seaport Haifa. Initial reports of chemical warheads were quickly proved false, casualties were light with no one killed & only a few injured, and to the relief of the Coalition, Israel left retaliation to the allies. On Jan 21, Iraq deliberately set Kuwaiti oilwells on fire & dumped millions of gallons of crude oil into the Persian Gulf apparently to prevent US Marines from landing. The wanton sabotage was an environmental nightmare: nearly 500 miles of coastline reaching Saudi Arabia was affected; 600 sq miles of the sea's surface was covered by war's end; almost all plant, animal, fish & bird species (covered in thick tar sludge) were wiped out and an already fragile ecosystem came close to being entirely destroyed with the severe disruption of many beaches, mangrove swamps & salt marshes -- which presently is far from fully recovered. After more than a month of intensive air attacks that saw sorties at the rate of 2000 a day, the Allies launched a land offensive on Feb 24 & the next day saw Iraqis begin retreating en masse. With the war essentially over & Iraq having been virtually brought to its knees, on Feb 27 after a declared ceasefire, President Bush declared victory. Kuwait was liberated but Saddam remained in power in Baghdad. The war was one of the most unequal & lopsided engagements in history as the Iraqis proved to be no match to the vastly superior equipment, resources & weaponry opposing them. Coalition losses have been estimated as low as 381 deaths (a number of which came from 'friendly fire' accidents) while the Iraqi toll has been put over 100,000 military deaths, some 3500 civilians dead from bombing raids & tens of thousands more succumbig to disease. The war had also made fledgling CNN a bigtime newsplayer with memorable coverage (and propaganda) such as Saddam's PR disaster with terrified 5yr old British hostage Stuart Lockwood; shot down & captured-then beaten & tortured-then humilated on tv British pilot John Peters; lurid stories of rampaging Iraqi soldiers over-running & ransacking hospitals and continuous battle footage looking like a video game. On Mar 20, 2003, after years of economic sanctions, President George W. Bush, amidst great skepticism & protest, led another 'coalition of the willing' allied-invasion of Iraq with the aim of toppling the Bagdad regime due in large part to the highly controversial issue of weapons of mass destruction. While none were found, within a month, Saddam had been ousted & the Americans were claiming victory in the war. (American-led coalition forces ran Iraq until power was officially handed back on Jun 28, 2004). After several months of hiding, Saddam was finally captured (literally in a hole in the ground) on December 13, 2003. He was tried by an Iraqi court beginning on Oct 19, 2005 particularly for his violently bloody campaigns against the Kurds & Shiites, sentenced to death after a guilty verdict on Nov 5, 2006 & executed by hanging on Dec 30, 2006.

JANUARY 16, 1936 (STARK RAVING GRAMPA)

2011-01-16T11:17:00.003-05:00

75yrs ago today, Hamilton Howard "Albert" Fish -- one of America's most deviant, disturbed, demented, depraved, disgusting & despicable killers aka the Gray Man, the Werewolf of Wysteria, the Brooklyn Vampire and The Boogeyman -- becomes the oldest man ever at 65 to be electrocuted in New York's Sing Sing Prison. Born in 1870, the pedophiliac Fish came from a long line of mental illness. As a child he was a regular runaway from an orphange & took to visiting swimming pools to watch boys undress. By 1898, he was an estranged apprentice house painter & father of 6 who later apparently went bonkers after his wife abandonned him for another man in 1917. Given custody of his kids, he demanded they eat raw meat with him during full moons (hence his most common nickname 'The Moon Maniac') and he would hand them a 5-inch nail-studded paddle begging them to spank him until blood flowed down his buttocks. Once on a family vacation, they watched him stand on a hilltop yelling at the top of his lungs, "I am Christ! I am Christ!" Obviously suffering from religious psychosis, he later said he received visions of hell, angels, demons & Jesus himself. And that God commanded him to castrate boys. As a voyeur & exhibitionist usually abusing boys under the age of 6, he stepped up his brothel visits, paying prostitutes to more so inflict pain, beat & whip him rather than fuck. Aside from his consistent sick love for children (he is attributed to killing 6 -- 3 confessed & found through verified homicide and 3 strongly suspected), his intended victims were either retarded or black because he believed law enforcement & newspapers would take no interest in them being missed. He was a classic walking 'psychopathia sexualis' (to which a psychiatrist would later say: "There was no known perversion which he did not practrie & practise frequently.") revelling in all bizarre manners of gratification and whose abnormal indulgences involved coprophilia (introduced to him at age 12 by another boy), urophilia, masturbation, pederasty, self-flagellation, homosexuality, burning himself & ramming flaming alcohol-soaked cotton swabs up his ass as well as permanently embedding needles in n' around his scotum. (X-rays would later show he had 29 insertions in his pelvic region - some of which had been there so long that they had begun to rust). One can only imagine how all of this truly impacted his temperament. Police were aware of Fish through his habit of writing filthy letters to women (replies to lonely hearts' classified ads) & from some minor money swindles that had rersulted in a number of short spells in jail. On May 28, 1928, posing as a "Mr. Frank Howard" in Manhattan, Fish befriended the Budd family on the pretence of hiring 18yr old son Edward as a farmhand. When he visited again on Jun 3 to discuss more about the job on his fictional Long Island farm, he mentioned his neice was having a birthday party & persuaded the Budd parents to let him escort their 10yr old daughter Grace to attend. It was the last time they ever saw her & she never returned home. He brought the girl to a vacant cottage, strangled her, chopped off her head & sawed her body in 2. He then ate her flesh boiled with carrots & onions for the next 9 days. Hopelessly sadomasochistic, he confessed to the heinous murder 6yrs later in a Nov 1934 anonymous letter sent to the girl's mother Delia Flanagan which was full of misspellings & grammatical errors detailing his deed:

"Dear Mrs. Budd. In 1894 a friend of mine shipped as a deck hand on the Steamer Tacoma, Capt. John Davis. They sailed from San Francisco for Hong Kong, China. On arriving there he and two others went ashore and got drunk. When they returned the boat was gone. At that time there was famine in China. Meat of any kind was from $1–3 per pound. So great was the suffering among the very poor that all children under 12 were sold for food in order to keep others from starving. A boy or girl under 14 was not safe in the street. You could go in any shop and ask for steak—chops—or stew meat. Part of the naked body of a boy or girl would be brought out and just what you wanted cut from it. A boy or girl's behind which is the sweetest part of the body and sold as veal cutlet brought the highest price. John staid there so long he acquired a taste for human flesh. On his return to N.Y. he stole two boys, one 7 and one 11. Took them to his home stripped them naked tied them in a closet. Then burned everything they had on. Several times every day and night he spanked them – tortured them – to make their meat good and tender. First he killed the 11 year old boy, because he had the fattest ass and of course the most meat on it. Every part of his body was cooked and eaten except the head—bones and guts. He was roasted in the oven (all of his ass), boiled, broiled, fried and stewed. The little boy was next, went the same way. At that time, I was living at 409 E 100 St. near—right side. He told me so often how good human flesh was I made up my mind to taste it. On Sunday June the 3, 1928 I called on you at 406 W 15 St. Brought you pot cheese—strawberries. We had lunch. Grace sat in my lap and kissed me. I made up my mind to eat her. On the pretense of taking her to a party. You said yes she could go. I took her to an empty house in Westchester I had already picked out. When we got there, I told her to remain outside. She picked wildflowers. I went upstairs and stripped all my clothes off. I knew if I did not I would get her blood on them. When all was ready I went to the window and called her. Then I hid in a closet until she was in the room. When she saw me all naked she began to cry and tried to run down the stairs. I grabbed her and she said she would tell her mamma. First I stripped her naked. How she did kick – bite and scratch. I choked her to death, then cut her in small pieces so I could take my meat to my rooms. Cook and eat it. How sweet and tender her little ass was roasted in the oven. It took me 9 days to eat her entire body. I DID NOT FUCK HER tho I could of had I wished. She died a virgin."

When the letter was handed over to police, Lead investigator on the case Det. William F. King, noticed on the envelope an unsuccessfully blotted-out initialled monogram in a small hexagonal emblem: 'NYPCBA' standing for New York Private Chauffeur's Benevolent Association. A trace led to a boarding house at the same address which used to be the former local chapter & a tip from a janitor pointed to a room which the landlady confirmed Fish had just checked out of but would return to pick up a check sent to him by a son. When he came back & found the police waiting for him, he agreed to go to headquarters for questioning then violently brandished a straight razor. He was disarmed & promptly placed under arrest. Afterwards, he repulsed everyone with the shocking claim of molesting more than 400 children over a 20yr period. As he did with Grace, he said he took them to empty buildings where he killed, dismembered & ate them -- carving them up with his "implements of hell" being a saw, knives & cleavers toted around in a small satchel. Sometimes the victims were gagged before they died but he preferred to hear their screaming. The figure is widely considered a fabrication (although 100 is considered to be possible) and is unclear whether he was talking about rapes or cannibalization, let alone if he was telling the truth. Under psychiatric examination, Fish said his mind originally became unhinged as a child in foster homes where he suffered brutal physical abuse & witnessed boys performing unspeakable atrocities on one another. His trial began on March 11, 1935 to which he pleaded insanity for the killing of Grace Budd, claiming again to have heard voices from God ordering him to kill children. After just 10 days & less than an hour to reach a guilty verdict, he was convicted of kidnapping & 1st degree murder and he thanked the judge for his sentence of execution. He remained warped during imprisonment where he would expose himself during a church ceremony & used a sharpened bone from one of his last meals to lacerate his stomach in the shape of a cross. It has been suggested that his appalling murders were a twisted kind of personal salvation; acts of sacrificial lambs being slaughtered to purge & erase pangs of guilt. Fish's youngest victim was 4yr old Billy Gaffney, abducted from playing in his apartment hallway on Feb 11, 1927. He was last seen by a streetcar motorman who said the child was crying for his mother and being dragged by an old man described & positively identified as Fish from a picture in the newspaper. Billy's body was never recovered. Now locked up, Gaffney's mother visited Fish behind bars to get details on her son's death. In another vile account, Fish confessed:

"I brought him to the Riker Ave. dumps. There is a house that stands alone, not far from where I took him. I took the boy there. Stripped him naked and tied his hands and feet and gagged him with a piece of dirty rag I picked out of the dump. Then I burned his clothes. Threw his shoes in the dump. Then I walked back and took the trolley to 59 St. at 2 A.M. and walked from there home. Next day about 2 P.M., I took tools, a good heavy cat-of-nine tails. Home made. Short handle. Cut one of my belts in half, slit these halves in six strips about 8 inches long. I whipped his bare behind till the blood ran from his legs. I cut off his ears – nose – slit his mouth from ear to ear. Gouged out his eyes. He was dead then. I stuck the knife in his belly and held my mouth to his body and drank his blood. I picked up four old potato sacks and gathered a pile of stones. Then I cut him up. I had a grip with me. I put his nose, ears and a few slices of his belly in the grip. Then I cut him through the middle of his body. Just below the belly button. Then through his legs about 2 inches below his behind. I put this in my grip with a lot of paper. I cut off the head – feet – arms – hands and the legs below the knee. This I put in sacks weighed with stones, tied the ends and threw them into the pools of slimy water you will see all along the road going to North Beach. I came home with my meat. I had the front of his body I liked best. His monkey and pee wees and a nice little fat behind to roast in the oven and eat. I made a stew out of his ears – nose – pieces of his face and belly. I put onions, carrots, turnips, celery, salt and pepper. It was good. Then I split the cheeks of his behind open, cut off his monkey and pee wees and washed them first. I put strips of bacon on each cheek of his behind and put them in the oven. Then I picked 4 onions and when the meat had roasted about 1/4 hour, I poured about a pint of water over it for gravy and put in the onions. At frequent intervals I basted his behind with a wooden spoon. So the meat would be nice and juicy. In about 2 hours, it was nice and brown, cooked through. I never ate any roast turkey that tasted half as good as his sweet fat little behind did. I ate every bit of the meat in about four days. His little monkey was as sweet as a nut, but his pee-wees I could not chew. Threw them in the toilet."

Albert Fish entered the death chamber at 11:06PM and wass pronounced dead 3 minutes later. He is said to have smiled as he approached the chair even calmly helping the executioner apply the electrodes. 2 long-standing rampant rumors that are now regarded as untrue are that: (a) reporters & witnesses present were aghast at his behavior in how he could barely manage to contain his joy at getting ready to meet a horrific end and (b) he allegedly had to be zapped twice in the chair -- the first jolt failing because of short-circuiting by the metal still in his genitals; ultimately he died the same as so many others did. His last statement of several pages of handwritten notes, penned in the hours leading up to his death & littered with obscenities has never been released but his famous final quote of: "What a thrill that will be if I have to die in the electric chair. It will be the supreme thrill. The only one I haven't tried" is perhaps the most enduring legacy of this grandfatherly fiend.

JANURAY 10, 1901 (THERE WILL BE BLACK GOLD)

2011-01-10T12:31:00.004-05:00

The dawn of 20th century prosperousness couldn't have happened without the discovery of oil beneath the dirt of Beaumont,Texas 110yrs ago today - an advent which would ultimately power the modern world... The Hamill brothers were 24yr old Al, an ex-cattleman & 28yr old Curt, an ex-salesman. Both represented a new breed of young, rugged, ambitious pioneer on the American frontier. In the early 1890's, with oil just recently being found in Texas with small wells, propsectors had a hunch that a low hill east of Houston could mean drilling success & what they didn't know was that beneath the chosen ground lay oil reserves worth $11 billion today. Nowhere in the world had that much ever been discovered anywhere & the first prospectors to tap into the liquid pools would become wealthy beyond their wildest dreams. The field the 2 siblings were hired to drill on Oct 1, 1900 on a leased tract of land that was called 'Spindletop'. Until the late 1850's, oil had been an annoyance by people digging for water, striking oil & cursing their bad luck but with the Industrial Revolution & development of railroads, for the first time, oil become much sought after. Whale oil had initially cornered the market as it was used to light lamps n' streets but the leviathans had been hunted to near extinction & now the new discovery would save them. Oil is made from the remains of tiny organisms having laid dormant for 160 million yrs. Native Americans used it as medicine & in 1854, when Pennsylvania scientists discovered its use for lighting, there was no turning back. Coal still dominated industry, powering trains & factories but it was dirty & less efficient with a ton of coal having roughly just half the energy as a ton of oil - with the right rig in the right place, there were fortunes to be made.

Prospectors had previously tried drilling at Spindletop but all the wells before came up empty. (Former amateur geologist, Patillo Higgins [with several partners in their small established 'Gladys City Oil, Gas and Manufacturing Company'] made a number of unsuccessful attempts, left the company & would lose ownership stake that would come back to haunt him...) The land was better suited for farming as earlier wells had hit hundreds of metres of sand only to collapse. Predicting any breakthrough was hard. At the time, the Hamill's were earning $6.50 for every metre penetrated which was top dollar & for that money, results were expected. Their contract paid them for 366 metres & if they hadn't hit oil by then, business would be terminated. While still searching, they were only at 120 metres. The work was dangerous as 6000 people died every year from explosions. Most rigs were primitive tools smashing through rock by pounding it with a heavy object fastened to a cable. The difficulty lay in the inability to smash through sand and also in the gamble of revolutionary technology using a steam engine to drill a pipe through the ground which so far was able to bore through 150 metres of sand & bedrock with no collapses. At 180 metres however, disaster struck as the drill hit a pocket of explsoive gas & water causing pressure to force the gas back up through the pipe - a close call resulting in no explosion. For all the entrepreneurial surveying, progress was slow in fighting for every metre as the sand was too fine for the drill and the walls of the bore-holes became more unsteady & began falling apart. Normally such rigs pumped water into the bore-holes to support the wood-slat walls but with fine sand combines with too thein water, a thicker liquid was needed and forced improvization meant using mud which held up the walls (a process still used today only now with synthetic compounds) & got the Hamills' back on track which from then on saw the rig operating 24hrs a day.

After drilling for over 2 months & reaching past 330 metres underground with nothing in sight, another 30 metres would've meant having to quit but then a bubbling/gurgling sound was heard. A small amount of frothy oil was seen that breathed up from the spinning of the gas pressure. As it rose higher over the rotary table with each flow, the increased rising would eventually change the USA forever -- pay dirt: with a rumbling, the crude oil shot up with such momentum and clear through the derrick in an enormous geyser (named 'the Lucas gusher' after their mining engineer, Anthony Lucas) reaching 100ft into the air & coating the landscape. The brothers were hoping for 50 barrels a day but the well would soon be pumping out over 80,000(!) - and then nearing 100,000 - making America the largest oil producer in the world. Overnight, the backers funding the rig became $40 million richer & the Hamill's became legends. Having burst out of the ground, it took 9 days to bring the spewing oil under control. Production instantly increased 50% and then tripled. Spindletop changed everything with the birth of the petroleum age (which until that time, had been used primarily as a lubricant or kerosene) now the main fuel source for new inventions such as cars & airplanes and with the coal-powered transportation of trains & ships converting to the liquid source. 500 oil companies emerged (including Texaco, Mobil, Gulf & Exxon) and crude oil would become the world's first trillion dollar industry. The price of oil plummeted from $2/barrel to 3¢ - cheaper than water. Around the turn of the century, millions of Americans lived their entire lives within 30km of their home but petrol would make the USA mobile in ways never thought possible. Beaumont became an instant boomtown, with its population soaring in 3 months. The town filled up with oil workers, investors, merchants & con-men (leading some to dub it 'Swindletop'). After 1902, Spindletop production began to deline rapidly but in Nov 1925, a 2nd boom was sparked with oil discovery at deeper depths culminating in its peak year of 1927 that saw the churning out of 21 million barrels. Over the next decade until 1936, 72 million barrels were produced. From the 1950's to about 1975, Spindletop was mined for sulphur. Today - because of our oil consumption - the average American drives the equivalent of 2 and a half round trips to the moon.

JANUARY 5, 1976 (NIGHTMARE IN YEAR ZERO)

2011-01-05T09:41:00.003-05:00

35yrs ago today, despotic Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot announces a new constitution changing the name of Cambodia to Kampuchea & legalizing its Communist government. During the next 3yrs, his brutal regime sent the nation back to the Middle Ages & was responsible for the deaths of an estimated 1 to 2 million people - out of a population of 7.5 million - in the infamously described 'killing fields'. Pol Pot was born 'Saloth Sar' in 1925 to a relatively well-off Cambodian family & became involved in the Communist movement as a young man studying in Paris. After he returned home to his country which gained its independence from France in 1954 (stemming from that country's defeat in Indochina which became Vietnam), he rose rapidly through the ranks of his homeland's small underground Party. By the mid-1960s & now influenced by China's Mao Zedong, he was known as 'Brother Number One' & living in a remote part of the country with a band of supporters he organized as the Khmer Rouge. When Cambodia's ruler (neutral constitutional monarch Prince Sihanouk) was overthrown in a pro-American coup in 1970, the KR with initial help from neighboring Vietnamese Communists & Viet Cong rebels, waged a civil war against the new government which saw the insurgency gain control of nearly a third of the country. At the same time, the U.S. launched a controversial bombing campaign (inadvertently greatly aiding the KR cause) in a war-widening expansion of bordering neighbors (that reached as far as the boundaries of Laos) and sent in soldiers to Cambodia to hunt down North Vietnamese troops operating there & suppress guerilla activity. With Sihanouk having fled for refuge in Beijing, even though he was still seen as the KR's figurehead, it was Pol Pot who was the de facto leader. In Apr 1975, following 5yrs of fighting & a power vacuum, Pol Pot's guerillas seized power in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Pehn thus ousting the pro-American regime. Exhausted by years of conflict, many of the city's 2 million residents initially welcomed the KR as liberators who would bring about a social revolution. Instead, seeing himself as an architect, Pol Pot's warped vision & inept attempt at building a peasant-based agrarian utopia became a hellish reign of terror and the program of reform (with its hopelessly inadequate projects) instead led directly to genocide.

In his radical aim to eliminate Western influence, cities were evacuated and Cambodians were forcibly marched into the countryside; herded to work in communes & rural collective farms. Minorities were persecuted & killed in staggering numbers with ethnic Chinese high on the hit list. Other targets included Cham Muslims. Intellectualism was a death sentence as anyone with even remote education, wealth, technological skill, ability to speak a foreign language or just wearing glasses or a wristwatch was killed. Schools, factories, newspapers, hospitals, culture, currency, religion & private property were abolished and tens of thousands of Cambodians died of starvation while countless others succumbed to disease, forced labor, famine & execution. Murder ruled the day & intensified as the continued emptying of urban centers was punctuated with countless horrendous atrocities. The most notorious of security prisons was S-21 or Tuol Sleng (meaning 'Hill of the Poisonous Trees' or 'Strychnine Hill'), a former high school. Of the 17,000 interrogated, tortured & executed behind its walls, only 7(!) would survive. Hundreds of thousands of Cambodians fled into Thailand for safety & survival. On Dec 25, 1978, following clashes over territory, Vietnam invaded Cambodia & seized the capital on Jan 7, 1979, putting an end to the slaughter. Pol Pot & the defeated KR retreated back into the jungle where he maintained the pretence of legitimacy after a modest Communist government was established in the country. He later fled to Thailand and spent almost 2 decades hiding out in jungle camps there & in northern Cambodia, protected by guerillas and the Thai military. In 1985, he officially retired but remained the effective head of the KR, which continued its guerilla actions against the government in Phnom Penh. In 1997, following an internal power struggle with a rival faction led by Ta Mok, Pol Pot was arrested by members of his own party on charges of treason where he was stripped of his leadership & put on trial which was derided as nothing more than a kangaroo court. After he was sentenced to life imprisonment by a people's tribunal, he declared in an interview: "My conscience is clear." Much of the international community hoped that his captors would extradite him to stand trial for his crimes against humanity but on Apr 15, 1998, he died remorseless & never having faced justice, of apparently natural causes while under house arrest (or according to rumors, having been poisoned). Today Tuol Sleng is a museum; a monument to genocide.

JANUARY 3, 1841 ('THAR SHE BLOWS)

2011-01-03T15:27:00.001-05:00

170yrs ago today, Herman Melville shipped out on the whaler 'Acushnet' to the South Seas. The adventurous voyage would figure very prominently in his life -- (2yrs before as a cabin boy at age 19, he had bound a ship for Liverpool and he spent time in the merchant marines & US Navy). The Acushnet anchored in Polynesia where Melville took part in a mutiny. He was thrown in jail in Tahiti, escaped & wandered around the South Sea islands for nearly 3yrs. Beginning in 1846, he published 2 novels that dealt with his exploits in the region the region & both were popular commerical successes, although his 3rd book, more experimental in nature, met with mixed results & failed to catch on with the public. On Nov 15, 1851, Harper & Brothers in New York published Moby Dick. (it had appeared in London a month before in Oct, in 3 volumes entitled 'The Whale'). Set aboard the whaling ship Pequod about an elusive giant white whale & the vengefully obsessed Captain Ahab's quest to hunt the leviathan, the story was a tragic epic inspired by the whaler 'Essex' which was attacked by an enraged 80-ton sperm whale 2,000 miles from the western coast of South America on Nov 20, 1820. The vessel was rammed twice & capsized. 20 crew members escaped in 3 open boats but only 8 of the men survived the harrowing 83-day journey adrift in the ocean, where they were picked up by other ships. Most of the crew resorted to cannibalism with 7 men having ended up on the ghoulish menu -- as a result of drawing straws to determine who would be shot in order to become food. 3 other men who had been left on a desolate Pacific island were saved later... Upon its release, Moby Dick flopped. It's disappointingly cool reception was spurned by complaints of being too long & too dull but criticism aside, the last would not be heard of the novel and it wouldn't be recognized as a classic for many years. Melville meanwhile, continued writing novels & highly acclaimed short stories and published several volumes of poetry but as being an author didn't bring him stable income, in 1866 he won appointment as a New York customs inspector, a job he held for nearly 20yrs. He died in 1891, ignored & largely forgotten by the literary world & his last novel, Billy Budd, was not published until 1924 -- 33yrs after his death. It wasn't until the 1920's when the book was rediscovered by scholars for its descriptively poetic language & symbolsim, and thus hailed as a masterpiece as well as eventually becoming a staple on high school reading lists. It is now widely considered a great work of American literature & contains one of the most famous opening lines in fiction: "Call me Ishmael."

POISONED LOTUS

2011-01-02T12:28:00.018-05:00

The sleeping giant has awoken.
BEIJING (Reuters) - China shut down more than 60,000 pornographic websites in 2010, netting almost 5,000 suspects in the process according to a government spokesman, vowing no let-up in its campaign against material deemed obscene. The Chinese capital city has run a highly publicized drive against what officials said was smutty n' lewd content overwhelming the country's Internet & cell phones, threatening the emotional health of children.

Critics accused the Chinese government of deepening the crackdown, launched in December, and tightening overall censorship. They also said that the push has netted many sites with politically sensitive or even simply user-generated content. But Wang Chen, head of the State Council Information Office (or cabinet spokesman's office) said the offensive was vital & declared in a news conference:

"Our campaign has been a great success & this has not been achieved easily. We have made the Internet environment much cleaner than before as there was a lot of pornography available. We have changed this situation & this has been well received by many sectors across society but our campaign has not come to a stop. This will be a long battle. As long as there are people with bad motives who want to spread violent or pornographic information, we will have to continue our campaign to resolutely crack down on the spread of such information."

Wang said, Of the 4,965 suspects, 1,332 people received "criminal punishment" with 58 jailed for 5yrs or more. He further added that the government checked the content of 1.79 million websites and deleted 350 million pornographic & lewd articles, pictures and pieces of video footage. With an estimated 450 million Internet users (calculated at the end of November), China had a bigger online population than any other country. Yet the government continues to worry the Internet could become a dangerous conduit for threatening images & ideas.

China has blocked a number of popular websites and Internet services, including Google's YouTube, Twitter, Flickr & Facebook, as well as Chinese content filesharing sites. The government accused them of carrying content harmful to China's security as well as being in breach of Chinese laws, including images of protests in sensitive regions such as Tibet. Continuing controversy still remains in regards to Western criticism of their blockage of information pertaining to the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations that led to massacre.

Wang said he had seen media reports that Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg had visited China recently meeting with well-known tech figures in the online industry but said Zuckerberg had not met his department which oversees the Internet for the country. He added he was still trying to learn more about this trip.

Google Inc, the world's top Internet search engine, closed its China-based search service in March 2010, just 2 months after it said it would stop censoring search results in response to what it said was a sophisticated cyber-attack that it traced to China and increasing limits on freedom of expression. The dispute was resolved in July after Google changed the way it directs users to an unfiltered search engine. The case prompted a diplomatic row between China & the United States over web freedom.

THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION HAS BEEN INTERNETIZED...

...And the ghosts of the People's Liberation Army spin in their graves. From swimming in the Yangtze to visualizations of socialist future, have commemorations of Chinese reform crumbled into decadence?

Is the Communist Party obsolete & dead? click here
THE GREAT LEAP FORWARD FROM MAO TO YAO

Some Chinese sports historians claim their country to have invented basketball pointing to an ancient pastime form of handball. The game was infact invented by eccentric Canadian YMCA Doctor James Naismith in 1891 whose missionaries arrived in China shortly after believing salvation for heathens lay through God & hoops. Fast forward to 100yrs later and the symbols of faith now trickling into the country would be Michael Jordan & the Nike swoosh both played to a hiphop soundtrack. China finally emerging from centuries of isolation & hurtling into dizzying prosperity went NBA crazy. As the last great untapped market, sports in the world's most populous nation transcends mere entertainment, recreation & even business: it's a projection of national ambition. Basketball as a hyper-capitalist import is modelled on the old Soviet system of 'womb-to-womb' programs all about glorification to the motherland as a non-stop assembly line churns out champions. When 7'6 Mao Ying was drafted in the top spot by Houston in 2002, he literally went from Pacific foreigner to instant patriot smashing the stereotype of the weak & diminutive Asian. Pepsi, Reebok, McDonald's, & VISA all jockeyed to kiss his ass, waving multimillion dollar endorsement contracts. Chinese history suddenly looked to be radically transformed through a giant: the catastrophe of the disastrous decade-long cultural revolution could finally give way to renaissance; global power & proud oriental supremacy would command respect; gold medal training schools would produce juggernauts and finally a positive image of China could be offered having nothing to do with murderous Chairman Mao, communist oppression, massacres at Tiananmen Square or controversial occupation of Tibet or suppression of Taiwanese independence from the mainland. Even the ridicule from being considered nothing more than just aggressive tennis table/ping pong nerds & doping cheats would disintegrate and bird flu was still unheard of. And all of this at a time when the NBA just a few years before was a wasteland plagued by bankrupt teams, drug scandlas & a weak audience. Yao was both the 1st saviour & heir apparent after Jordan passed the torch. He is the obedient embodiment in corporate conglomeration of East meets West.

BREAK OUT THE BUBBLY

2011-01-01T03:37:00.007-05:00

Auld Lang Syne & a toast. Wow, a full decade gone already in this thing called the 2000's! Just flew right by. Man, where does the time go? Talk about "blink-and-you'll-miss-it" eh? Oh well, it's all good. Cheers & Happy New Year 2011. Hope it's a blast!

DECEMBER 10, 1930 (WHEN SHIT REALLY HIT THE FAN)

2010-12-10T12:30:00.004-05:00

By Oct 1929, the Wall Streeet stock market lost 12 times more money in 3 weeks than the American government used in an entire year. From an economic point of view, the whole country almost went down & for an entire year after the devastating crash, the USA was teetering on the abyss... 80yrs ago today, the streets of New York were quiet. Only 2 percent of the population owned stocks & the remainder continued on with their lives until the last vestige of confidence in the banks would be shaken to its very core...

An unidentified man whose name is lost to history had put his money in the local 'Bank of the United States' -- a branch which would only have hours left to exist because of a newspaper article in the New York Times that had questioned the bank's stability thus creating a crucial moment that began an immediate chain reaction & domino effect that rocked the country's last steady calm believed left in the money system. The story reported that apparently this man was a small merchant in the Bronx who went to the branch & asked bank officials to dispose of his stock with them. With bank regulations virtually non-existent at the time, bad real estate investments meant the bank was only kept afloat by false accounting. The last thing the institution needed while in a desperate position was to hand out all its cash but even in a panicked situation, a customer withdrawl of shares couldn't be refused. The man departed & allegedly spread a lie saying the bank had refused to sell his stock. By mid afternoon a considerable crowd had gathered outside estimated as high as 25,000 people. Worry of insolvency turned to fear as it seemed the run on banks would go the way of the stock market (one person is said to have stood in line for 2hrs just to claim his entire account balance of $2). Hysteria became wildfire as $2 million was emptied from the branch by those pulling out their savings. Even though all the anxious depositors asking for their money back were accomodated, the crowd became increasingly restless. A squad of police were dispatched to control rising tensions & in no time at all, a riot started. The trouble spread to other branches as disorder saw civilians & cops injured and by next morning, the Bank of the United States had collapsed -- all because of a source of anonymity.

Faith in American banks disintegrated & in the last 2 months of 1930, some 600 banks closed shut in wave after wave across the country. And unlike today, with no federal govt bailouts, unemployment went from 4 million in 1930 to 12 million in 1932. By 1933, 28 states had not a single bank open. Every day saw a thousand homes repossessed. 200,000 vagrant children wandered the USA & 34 million Americans had no source of income as tens of thousands of jobless derelict men took to riding the rails in search of work. Aside from the poverty & crushing destitution, the Great Depression also spawned criminal ambition by way of notorious bank robbers conducting murderous multi-state sprees. More positive ingenuity however (even in the face of the coinciding environmental cataclysmic events of both farmland drought & dust storms) would fight back through massive publicly funded & privately constructed building projects.

NOVEMBER 20,1945 (UNPRECEDENTED JURISPRUDENCE)

2010-11-20T14:15:00.003-05:00

NUREMBERG TRIALS LEFT A LASTING LEGACY
by Cornelia Rabitz

The Nuremberg trials, launched in the wake of WWII left behind a broad legacy. Successful in sentencing a group of 22 key personalities of the Nazi Party, they inspired a series of further trials all aimed at punishing the war criminals of the Third Reich.

The trials, which began 65yrs ago today at 10AM on November 20, 1945 in the Bavarian city of Nuremberg, were a new type of event - the first of their kind - on the world stage. It was the first time an international tribunal had sought to sentence prominent high-ranking leaders of a regime - politicians, army officers & economic advisors - even though in some cases direct responsibility for specific criminal acts could not be attributed to them. As a group, they were seen as initiators, aides, organizers & executers of crimes against humanity. They were accused of violating the customs of warfare by orchestrating wars of aggression, war crimes such as murdering civilians n' prisoners of war, mass deportations, plundering, engaging in racial persecution, the perpetration of genocide through the murder of European Jews and occupying numerous European countries. However, all these accusations had little impact on the Nazis in the courtroom (seated in a specially adapted dock of 2 rows & surrounded by American military police in their trademark steel white helmets) who did not see themselves as responsible for the listed crimes. Not a single one of the accused architects plead guilty to any of the charges read out & the modern excuse of "only following orders" was born.

A combined international effort

The 4 representative judges for the trials came from the dividing powers of the United States, the Soviet Union, France & Great Britain and were appointed by their governments for this role as talks about how to punish the Nazi leadership once the war was over infact had been discussed as early as 1943. Winston Churchill famously wanted to summarily shoot the leaders once they were caught & formally identified but Russia & the USA favoured a legal process and the main parties agreed to a compromise on a set of internationally recognized offences. (They had also accepted Russian insistence that only Axis aggression was covered by the new court otherwise the Soviet authorities would have been in the dock as well for carving up Poland in September 1939 & attacking Finland in Nov 1939 - both acts while allied to Hitler). The chief prosecutor was Robert Jackson from the United States and his assistant chief counsel was German-Jewish lawyer Robert Kempner, who had been stripped of his German citizenship by the Nazis before WWII & had immigrated to the USA. He said: "When I began to work on this matter in America in 1942, my American colleagues asked me was this (the holocaust) all true? Can we prove it? And I said we can prove this 100 percent.'" The British president of the tribunal, Justice Geoffrey Lawrence, opened the trial, calling it "Unique in the history of the jurisprudence of the world & of supreme importance to millions of people all over the globe. For this reason there is laid upon everybody who takes any part in this trial, the solemn responsibility to discharge his duties without fear or favour in accordance with the sacred principles of law & justice." The whole day's sitting was then taken up with the simultaneous reading of the 24,000-word indictment in 4 different languages & for this speech, everyone in the court was issued with headphones to allow them to hear the charges being read in their native language but the accused showed little interest. Later on during the proceedings, as part of the documentary evidence to give magnitude to the chilling full scope of Nazi horror, shocking film footage of the extermination camps was shown all but sealing the fate of the defendants.

Inspiration for further trials

The trials lasted 218 days (10 months) with 236 witnesses questioned, 5330 documents & 200,000 statements submitted as evidence and 25,000 pages of protocol written. The hearings shed light on the dimensions of the Nazi regime's crimes. The verdicts came out on September 30 and October 1, 1946: 7 imprisonments (3 of which were life while the remaining 4 ranged from 10-20yrs), 12 death sentences (1 of whom was sentenced in absentia) & 3 acquittals. The first round of trials was followed by 12 others. These were aimed at Nazi medical doctors (for conducting experiments on prisoners and for participating in euthanasia & forced sterilization), judges & lawyers (for the gross & perverted abuse of human rights), SS personnel (for recrimination/reprisal atrocities such as the torture n' murder of civilians, hostages & POW's) and even companies such as Flick - an industrial conglomerate that supported the Nazi party. Flick profited from the liquidation of Jewish property, assisted Hitler's rearmament efforts & used slave laborers from concentration camps. The German population & its attitude towards the Nazi era were largely unaffected by the trials. Altogether there were 4 more military tribunals in Nuremberg, the last one of which finished in April 1949. All of the trials were controversially seen as an arbitrary act of the winning side (victor's justice) and it wasn't long before the government of the newly-formed Federal Republic of Germany, together with party and church representatives, pleaded for clemency on behalf of the convicted persons. Some of the condemned had death sentences commuted to prison stretches & there were some early releases. Some of the accused even got the chance to resume their interrupted careers. Despite some of these overturnings by the courts (with the last of the convicted Nazis hanged in June 1951), the trials left a lasting impression on the world and prosecutions of fugitive war criminals smoked out of hiding in South America, continued into the 80's still managing to recapture the public's imagination. The creation of the International Military Tribunal has served as a model for other tribunals set up after conflicts, including The Hague in the Netherlands - for trying crimes committed during the 1991-95 Balkan wars, leaders accused of slaughter in Rwanda and the International Military Tribunal for the Far East which tried Japanese officials (the Tokyo trials) for both crimes against peace & against humanity. Ultimately, Nuremberg significantly influenced the development of international criminal law serving as models for conventions such as the 1948 Convention on Genocide.

WAR TO END ALL WARS

2010-11-11T08:06:00.003-05:00

Remembrance Day 11th hour reflection.

(with thanks and apologies to SLAM fanzine)

A DAY IN THE STRIFE
a short primer of the history of the world in armed conflict...

THE KNIGHTS OF THE ROUND TABLE WARS (c.485-496)
What sounded cool & chivalrous, realistically wasn't. How many people are able to put on 20 tons of armor, jump on a horse & charge into a crowd of a thousand faceless wackjobs swinging 100lb. swords & maces at them? Inspite of Excalibur, the holy grail, King Arthur, Lancelot, Merlin & sexy Gwenyvere dragging this out in epic-saga fashion, these wars were most likely short-lived since most of these medieval, dungheap-smelling participants (if not ravaged by plague first) were more than likely crushed to death by their own equipment long before reaching the battlefield.

ARAB CONQUESTS (632-732)
The 1st proper 100yrs wars after the Islamic prophet Muhammad dies. Muslim armies praising Allah obtain huge territorial gains and Jews & Christians awaken to the threat of a serious formidable foe.

THE CRUSADES (1097-1291)
The Pope orders an armed Christian pilgrimage to retake the Holy Lands of Arabia in 9stages. From Jeruslaem to Constantinople, a wild cast of characters is thrown into the mix including Richard the Lionheart, Saladin, the Normans, the French, Turks, Teutons & the Kinights Templar.

THE HUNDRED YEARS WAR (1337-1453)
By this period only 5 names existed in all the world for men: Edward, Richard, Philip, John & Charles. There was fear the French would wipe out the English language forever, lotsa archery n' peasant rebellion and Joan of Arc convinced followers she received visions of God. The moral boost & her initial victories were the genesis for televangelism but her subsequent capture n' execution were also the foretelling that false idols sooner or later get flayed alive. In the midst of all the killing, scorekeepers ultimately displayed their mathematical failings as the century war infact tacked on an additional 16 years of further conflict.

THE SPANISH IN NORTH & SOUTH AMERICA (1492-1541)
Christopher Columbus searching for a route to the West Indies instead stumbles upon the Americas mislabelling the natives 'Indians'. Colonization of the New World introduces slavery, disease & genocide.

REFORMATION WARS (1562-1598)
French wars of religion that saw Protestants (Huguenots) & Catholics (Guises) battling it out for control of the new churches. The Regent Catherine initiates a systematic extermination of Protestants resulting in a massacre convincing many that Catholicism is a force of the Devil itself.

THIRTY YEARS WAR (1618-1648)
The Nazis 315yrs before Hitler? Political disputes over balance of power see German decimation of the Low countries & Italy with ventures in Spain, France & Scandinavia bringing bankruptcy, looting & severe occupation to those nations.

SEVEN YEARS WAR (1756-1763)
the first 'First World War'. Actually starting in 1754 in America stemming from conflict in Austria; a complex web of alliances n' treaties ivolved Germany, Britain, France, Russia, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Canada, West Africa, India & South America as overseas colonies meant to develop expanding empire.

THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION (1775-83)
13 British colonies in North America say 'fuck you' to parliamentary governance back in England declaring themselves the sovereign United States of America. The Continental Congress, Articles of Confederation, the Constitution, Bill of Rights, Founding Fathers, Patrick Henry, the Boston Tea Party, Lexington n' Concord, Independence n' Union, Yorktown, Treaty of Paris & Loyalists all result in a brand new eventual superpower.

NAPOLEONIC WARS (1803-1815)
After the French guillotine street parties, Napoleon's popularity swelled his small frame to a bombastic arrogance in which the need to dominate grew insatiable. From Scandinavia to the stretches of the Ottoman empire with practically all of Europe inbetween, allied coalitions n' campaigns became his obsession to do away with Britain. The invasion of Russia became a huge clusterfuck and the disastrous winter retreat was a sign to everyone that frostbite is an enormous bitch (the Germans would get the point in their game decades later). Cursed in defeat & forced to abdicate, he was exiled where his legacy gave rise to navies, nationalism, proto-industrial revolution & reflected sentiments that divorced wives somehow remain the most regal & were best left as mistresses.

THE AMERICAN PLAINS INDIAN WARS (1860-1890)
Whites vs. the Indigenous proves to be tragic with the victor in complete domination of the continet & the loser facing extinction. Never having fought a European-style war with its constant pressure & co-ordinated strategies, the Indians even with Kevin Costner on their side are doomed from US military might responsible for countless massacres that wipe out tribe after tribe.

THE CIVIL WAR (1861-1865)
People may have been politer back then but that didn't make fighting any cooler. No siree. About the best thing one could hope for was a quick Ken Burns voice-over death - unless amputation of arms & legs by a drunken, ZZ Top-bearded doctor with a saw didn't bother them. The slaves were freed but not really.

WORLD WAR WON (1914-1918)
Memory of this war is fading with the last of these REALLY old liver-spotted veterans shivering from shellshock dying off. Enthusiasm quickly waned with not a lot of options in joining up & the accompanying parades followed by megakisses from random women had since disappeared. If spending months in trenches neck-high in mud watching rats as big as cats feast on dead flesh didn't sound appealing, one joined the airforce (before planes flew very well) or the navy (when boats didn't float very well).

THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR (1936-1939)
Republicans vs. The Nationalists. A totalitarian proxy war, dress rehearsal involving Germany, Italy & Russia for the eventual showdown between communism against fascism. This first media war for its coverage arose passion because of its religious divison & controversy for double-sided US involvement: although neutral, many Americans joined the International Brigades fighting for democracy while many American corporations quick to make a buck, greatly supplied the fascists with vehicles, fuel & machine tools.

WORLD WAR TOO (1939-1945)
The 1st 'Star' Wars. John Wayne, Audie Murphy & Bob 'Hogans Heroes' (let me break out my videocam and film myself having sex with a bevy of unsuspecting whores to jumpstart the amateur/youtube age) Crane were very safe-conscious & made sure none of their buddies ever died. There was lots of time to sing songs & carouse but sex wasn't allowed back then. Spies, drinking & cracking jokes about Adolf helped to add to the excitement and even if one did get shot, there was little bleeding (except if you had anything to do with Pvt. Ryan) & always a beautiful nurse to sing during the hospital stay.

THE VIETNAM WAR (1946-1975)
'Star' Wars III. Controversial & highly unsupported. Even Sly Stallone & Chuck Norris got bad reps in their own country for this one despite their heroics in otherwise shitty movies. Russian roulette never caught on as a socially accepted past-time & hostage taking snipers were just jerks. In the end, coming back home paralyzed in a wheelchair to traitor Jane Fonda just wasn't worth it.

MIDDLE EAST WARS (1947-1982)
If absolutely necessary to visit this territory one may as well join the military seeing as chances are, even if you don't, somebody there is going to kill you anyway with their terrorschism.

THE NEW CLEAR WAR (1948-1991)
We were all supposed to die in this one with only cockroaches and Christmas fruitcake left intact but not before our eardrums had long since bled & were decimated by air raid sirens.

THE KOREAN WAR (1950-1953)
'Star' Wars II. The only guaranteed method of survival was to be a top-notch, woman-chasing, combat surgeon or hairy, big nosed transvestite. If one was the doctor, they had to be extremely good at it (inspite of borderline alcoholism) since operations took place on room-fulls of soldiers blown to ittybitty pieces - after that, one could drink gallons of turpentine moonshine from a still in their tent.

AFGHANISTAN (1979-1989)
Russia's Vietnam. After the Russkies bail, the Taliban sets up shop, Al-Qaeda rears its ugly head marking the Bin Laden era (Osama having been on the CIA payroll arming Afghan rebels) and the US & Canada will visit after 9/11 on dragged out missions.

IRAN-IRAQ WAR (1980-1988)
Border disputes & insurgency from the Iranian revolution resulted in Iraq thinking they could take adavantage of the ensuing chaos. Saddam is on the CIA payroll of George Bush the 1st & accused of using chemical weapons. Iran remains on the offensive for 6yrs & repeated calls for a ceasefire by the UN are ignored. Both sides are devasted economically & Iraq will later bully Kuwait. The last POW's from this war are exchanged 15yrs(!) after its end.

GRANADA (1983)
Like most made-for-TV wars, everyone involved soon decided they'd rather be doing something else & just hit 'The Rovers' for a pint. Better a shot at the pub than being shot in a pillbox on the beach beacuse hell, that's no way to be spending a caribbean vacation.

PANAMA (1989)
Dictator Manuel 'Pineapple Face' Noriega (another one-time payrollee of the CIA) has rigged elections, harassed US troops n' civllians & worse, turned drug-trafficker. After economic sanctions & American invasion, he flees to an embassy which is surrounded & bombarded loudly with boomboxes. Fed up with endless Bon Jovi at ungodly hours, he surrenders to be flown to Miami where he is tried & imprisoned.

DESERT STORM I (1991)
The last act of George Ist. CNN earns it stripes presenting the war as a videogame with precision missile strikes & amidst lone camels in the desert against a backdrop of burning oilwells, the decisively lop-sided quick win gives way to mass refugees, sanctions and Saddam left intact to haunt us later on; a bastard ironically brought down by false accusations.

YUGOSLAVIA (1991-1995)
The Balkans have always been an unstable region often referred to as 'the sick man of Europe'. Continous splits along ethnic lines & civil war have long been common and results in the formation of several new independent countries (formerly republic federal units) including Bosnia & Herzegovina, Montenegro, Macedonia and Slovenia. The dissolution stemming from economic collapse, the death of President Josip Tito, the nationalist rise of Slobodan Milosevic, Albanians n' Kosovo and the xenophobic hatred of Serbs vs. Croats results in both sides using notorious paramilitary groups to launch attacks causing widespread destruction, target civillians, force tens of thousands into internment camps and commit atrocities involving mass rape & ethnic cleanisng.

DESERT STORMIER II (2003- )
Return to Iraq - the sequel. The trauma of 9/11 on the world has spawned fearmongering, backlash & the Patriot Act. With unsettling questions being raised at the inability to capture boogeyman Osama, the Bush administration fosters the idea of a Saddam connection further tied into weapons of mass destruction that Iraq intends to use. Even as the alleged intelligence is widely condemned as false, the UN security council greenlights another American invasion. Saddam's capture to trial to execution, insurgency, shady Defense contractors & Abu Ghraib loom on the horizon as omen to a bogged down horrible mess (inspite of democracy & rebuilding of infrastructure) that still sees no agreeable end in sight...

TOP OF THE LINE

2010-11-10T10:30:00.022-05:00

"Of all the weapons in the vast Soviet arsenal, nothing was more profitable than Avtomat Kalashnikova model of 1947. More commonly known as the AK-47 or Kalashnikov. It's the world's most popular assault rifle. A weapon all fighters love. An elegantly simple 9 pound amalgamation of forged steel & plywood. It doesn't break, jam or overheat. It'll shoot whether it's covered in mud or filled with sand. It's so easy, even a child can use it; and they do. The Soviets put the gun on a coin. Mozambique put it on their flag. Since the end of the Cold War, the Kalashnikov has become the Russian people's greatest export. After that comes vodka, caviar & suicidal novelists. One thing is for sure - no one was lining up to buy their cars."
-Nicholas Cage as Yuri Orlov in 'Lord of War'

Happy 91st birthday, Russian gunsmith Mikhail Kalashnikov.

How the AK-47 Rewrote the Rules of Modern Warfare
By C. J. Chivers

PART 1: ORIGIN

The compact automatic rifle that Stalin’s engineers unveiled in 1947 didn’t look like much of a gun. The result of a secret design contest, its components were simple, inelegant, workmanlike. Its ammunition lacked the stopping power of other rifle cartridges. Its barrel was too short to achieve the range of standard infantry rifles. When the Pentagon finally got its hands on a few of the weapons in the 1950s, officials scoffed. But from this unheralded beginning, the Soviet Union’s modest little gun—dubbed the Avtomat Kalashnikova-47—would become one of the most recognizable artifacts of the 20th century.

The AK-47 and its variants can be seen as a lot of things—amoral massacre machines, pop-culture icons, the most plentiful and influential weaponry of the past half century. But the gun can also be viewed as one of the most disruptive technologies ever. Quickly transcending the purposes and borders of the highly centralized state that created it, the AK-47 gives individuals and small groups a lethality that previously belonged only to rigidly organized and well-financed militaries. What it may have lacked in precision and power it has made up for in ease of use, cost, reliability, and readily available parts and ammunition. It has helped ensure that even the poor, the small-statured, the dim-witted, the illiterate, and the untrained are able to acquire weapons and keep them functioning.

The AK-47’s rise was enabled by a government-led manufacturing push. Throughout the 1950s, the Kremlin shared its new rifles with like-minded states and ordered its Warsaw Pact vassals to produce them. By the 1960s, factories were churning out AK-47s in the planned economies of the Eastern bloc, where the communist governments distributed and stockpiled the rifles by the tens of millions—whether anyone wanted them or not. That oversupply, combined with poor security and rampant corruption, meant that by the 1970s and ’80s, the guns were available to fighters for almost any cause. After the Warsaw Pact unraveled and the Soviet Union collapsed, many successor governments lost custody of their surplus arsenals, providing an almost boundless new supply.

Today, the AK is almost everywhere, and it has fundamentally rewritten the rules of modern warfare, giving bands of moderately skilled fighters with few other resources the power to take on, and defeat, some of the best-resourced armies in the world. Stalin’s rifle became, and remains, the everyman gun, a success—and scourge—that is sure to last well into the 21st century.

(Soviet satellites, allies, and rivals have all built weapons based on the Kalashnikov platform, producing scores of local AK variants that still flood the market today.)

PART 2: ENGINEERING

The AK-47 has powered some of the most dramatic revolutions of the past half century. But it was originally engineered to reinforce state power, not overturn it. Indeed, its very design was the result of an intensive state-directed pursuit. The Soviet Union, impressed by the ammunition and performance of a medium-powered automatic rifle used by Nazi forces, launched a contest within its secret arms-design community to create a similar weapon. Competing teams saw one another’s submissions as the field was narrowed, freely borrowing ideas from their rivals and from existing guns. The winning design was in reality a mashup forged by many minds. That may have made for a good gun, but it didn’t make for a good backstory. The Soviet propaganda mill claimed the AK was the brainchild of senior sergeant Mikhail Kalashnikov, a proletariat tinkerer who was inspired to create it after being wounded in a battle against the Nazis. But while Kalashnikov got credit as the leader of the winning design team—official glory in which he basks to this day—he was really a part of a huge government machine that ordered up and then fine-tuned and mass-produced the resulting gun.

(The schematic below presents a simplified view of the AK-47 and does not include every component. To explore in more detail, move your cursor over the components.)

1. RECEIVER
Early versions of the AK-47 incled a receiver - the main body of the weapon not including the barrel - constructed out of a block of solid steel that had been cut, ground & drilled into shape by assembly line workers. The Soviet Union spent 10yrs figuring out how to design a receiver that would be machine-stamped, which would result in a lighter gun and cut down on the cost of labor & raw materials. By 1959, the stamped-metal AKM had replaced the first generation AK-47 & soon became the most widely distributed version of the rifle

2. DUST COVER / SELECTOR SWITCH
Big & easy to find, this unmistakable & simple feature allows users to switch between safe, automatic & semiautomatic fire as well as prevents dust n' sand from entering the weapon's chamber. Mikhail Kalashnikov (who at 91, still lives in Izhevsk, Russia) is intensely proud of it but many dislike it. The switch can be balky & it often makes a loud click when manipulated. It's also not original - Remington's Model 8, developed several decades before, had a similar mechanism

3. MAGAZINE
One of the eye-catching traits that gives the Kalashnikov line its iconic profile is the magazine - curved to account for the tapered shape of the cartridges. Other guns had used curved magazines but as the AK grew more popular, the shape became associated with the Kalashnikov. The magazine, which has a reinforced metal lip to prevent damage, is one reason the gun rarely jams. This contrasts sharply with the magazines that have fed the American M-16 and M-4 over the years which have been endlessly redesigned & reissued (as late as 2009)

4. GAS SYSTEM
This combination of port, cylinder, piston & return spring is key to the AK-47's reliability. When propellant burns at near-explosive speeds, it releases more energy than needed to fire the bullet; the gas system captures some of that energy and puts it to work ejecting spent cartridges & loading fresh ones. The gun's parts are heavy & loose enough to plow through grit or mud. That reliability comes at the expense of accuracy but the AK-47's designers ignored the Western preference for tight-fitting rifles in favor of one that would almost always work

5. FRONT-SIGHT POST
This elevated sight which helps shooters see over the gas tube above the barrel, also contributes to the AK-47's distinctive shape. Similar posts had appeared on previous guns including the AS-44, an earlier Soviet project

6. M1943 CARTRIDGE
In 1943 the Soviets captured an unusual cartridge from Nazi soldiers on Germany's eastern front. The cartridge, roughly midway in size between traditional rifle & pistol ammo, lacked the power for effective long-range shooting but was more than adequate for most combat. It generated less heat & recoil which meant that guns built around it could be lighter, cheaper & easier to fire. The Soviets decided to design their own version of the cartridge - called the M1943 - and then a new weapon to fire it: the Kalashnikov assault rifle

PART 3: IMPACT

The Kalashnikov was designed to be a tool of the state, with its earliest production runs distributed exclusively to Soviet soldiers. By the mid-1950s, the Soviet Union was supplying AK-47s to ideologically aligned states like China and East Germany. By the late '50s, the USSR had set up a kind of franchising model, sharing the specs with communist-government-run munitions factories around the world, allowing for local varieties and derivations. But as more Kalashnikovs were assembled, they started drifting from state hands—supplied to proxy forces, sold to shifty purchasers, and stolen from underprotected weapons depots. Soon, the guns were being used by guerrilla groups against the very governments that produced them.

(A timeline of who has wielded the AK-47 & where, throughout the years.)

1. 1956 / The Hungarian Revolution
The AK-47 was intended as a tool to put down anti-Soviet uprisings but Hungarian rebels picked up guns abandoned in Budapest. The onetime tool of the police state was turned against its makers

2. 1961-73 / Vietnam War
The USSR & China passed AK's to the North Vietnamese army & the Viet Cong, whose uneducated & agrarian forces used them to outgun US troops. The weapon's reputation was forged here

3. 1964-present / Mozambique
The newly empowered rebel movement put a silhouette of the Kalashnikov on the national flag. The symbol remains there today despite a push to remove it

4. 1972 / Munich Olympics, Germany
8 young Palestinians disguised as athletes entered the Olympic village carrying Kalashnikovs in duffels & seized Israeli athletes. The dark spectacle played out on live TV & ushered in the era of modern terror

5. 1979-present / Afghanistan
AK-toting mujahideen, armed by Pakistan, the US, Saudi Arabia, & others, drove out the Soviet army. Some of the same fighters are now members of the Taliban aiming their AK's at US & NATO forces

6. 1980-92 / El Salvador
The leftist guerrillas of the FMLN used guns from East Germany & North Korea and ammunition from Cuba — a distributed global network to arm Soviet-friendly groups. Today, the FMLN is a legitimate political party holding the presidency

7. 1981 / Sadat Assassination, Egypt
Soldiers on parade turned their AK's — which the Egyptians had manufactured to strengthen the state — on their president, Anwar Sadat, killing him in full view of the world. The nation plunged into martial law

8. 1987-present / Uprising in Uganda
Warlord Joseph Kony used abducted children as his soldiers in his campaign against Uganda's government. He armed them with AK's — easy to use, they're the ideal weapon for children

9. 1994 / Rwandan genocide
Machetes a& farm tools are remembered as the weapons of the Hutu militias but AK's were also widely. The gun was further seen in genocides like the massacre of Kurds in Iraq & the slaughter of Bosnians in Srebrenica following the break-up of Yugoslavia

10. 2003-10 / Iraq War
After US troops were met by Kalashnikov-carrying soldiers & insurgents, the Pentagon purchased tens of thousands of the guns to arm local security forces

11. 2006-present/ Venezuela
In 2006 Hugo Chavez purchase 100,000 AK's & a license to manufacture the guns, leading the Pentagon to worry that he might try to become an arms broker. His factory is due to open in 2011

POP-POP-POP CULTURE
From movies to videogames to product design, the AK-47 has taken plenty of star turns in pop culture

1984
'Red Dawn' stars a group of US teens played by the likes of Patrick Swayze, Charlie Sheen, C. Thomas Howell, Jennifer Grey & Lea Thompson repelling Russian & Cuban communist invaders by using the Reds' own AK's against them

1988
NWA's "Straight Outta Compton" becomes the defining anthem of gangsta rap & includes a shout-out to the Kalashnikov: "AK-47 is the tool"

1996
Brooklyn hipsters declare their allegiance to the borough — and their superiority over fellow gentrifiers — by wearing AK-bedecked "Defend Brooklyn" T-shirts

1997
Samuel L. Jackson as Ordell Robbie in 'Jackie Brown' waxes rhapsodic: "Here we go, AK-47 the very best there is. When you absolutely, positively got to kill every motherfucker in the room, accept no substitutes"

2001
Andrei Kirilenko — born in Kalashnikov's hometown of Izhevsk — starts playing forward for the Utah Jazz. His jersey number: 47. Guess his nickname

2001
The anonymous anti-hero of Grand Theft Auto III terrorizes the good people of Liberty City with a baseball bat, a rocket launcher & an AK-47 variant

2005
Design guru Philippe Starck releases a luxury line of gun-shaped lamps, including an AK-47 model (available in chrome or gold). Great for armchair dictators

HAPPY CANUCK THANKSGIVING

2010-10-11T11:25:00.009-04:00

Gravy, stuffing, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, squash, wine, the Mayflower, pumpkin pie, invasion & some hacked scalps as well... In memory of the indigenous to commemorate their roles in the origin of this particular holiday. Ironically enough, our Canadian feast of the fat fowl falls on the same day as Columbus Day in the USA. Anti-native conspiracy? Still, Merry turkey unrepentance to all & to all a burnt drumstick.

And while we're on the subject of meals, here's some more food for thought.
GET READY TO GASP AT UPCOMING GLUTTONY (ALL THAT MEAT AND NO POTATOES)

EATING TO COST A LOT MORE - AND SOON
Grocery wars and a strong loonie can’t protect us from rising food prices around the world
by Dana Flavelle

Among the discount supermarkets in Ontario - No Frills, Food Basics and Price Chopper - the food price war is in high gear. In recent weeks, flyers have featured fresh pineapple, grape tomatoes and whole grain bread for as little as $1. Others are touting brand name orange juice, cheese and pasta sauce at a 3rd of their regular price or less. Sparked by Wal-Mart’s continuing expansion into grocery – 40 more stores are coming this year – this kind of retail competition, along with a higher Canadian dollar, has so far spared Canadian consumers the kind of food price inflation that threatens to erupt in violence in other parts of the world. But Canadians can expect to see more food price increases in supermarkets soon, the country’s 3rd largest food retailer predicted this week.

Eric La Flèche, president and chief executive officer of Metro Inc., has told analysts: “We do expect some cost increases to be processed through the system starting in February. In certain categories we’re expecting some pretty significant increases." Citing pasta and bread, he predicts the increases will occur across the food industry. he predicted. Metro operates what used to be the Dominion store chain in Ontario, as well as stores under the Metro name in Quebec. Starbucks Corp. and Kraft Canada have already announced some price increases on coffee. Other multinational food processors and restaurant operators, from General Mills to McDonald’s Corp., have warned price increases are coming as their costs rise. Grains, oilseeds and sugar are all higher, in some cases near levels last seen during the food crises in 2008, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. The FAO’s overall Food Price Index for December 2010 surpassed its peak in June 2008, the agency said, citing its closely watched measure of international food prices. The basket of food basics reached nearly 215 points for that December, up 25 percent since 2010, as demand rose in China while Russia’s grain crop suffered its worst drought in half a century. The impact on Canada, so far, has been modest by global standards as the food price index is up a mere 1.7 percent over last year, Statistics Canada. That’s a fraction of the pace in countries like India, where food prices are up 15 percent, and China, where they’re up 9 percent, and where food accounts for a much larger share of consumer staple spending.

In Canada, food accounts for just 17 percent of all items in the index, behind shelter and transportation, but ahead of recreation, clothing and alcohol. In comparison, in India, food accounts for nearly half (47 percent) the overall consumer price index. In China, it’s more than a 3rd (34 percent). Kevin Grier, an analyst with the George Morris Centre, a food policy think tank, in Guelph says: “As consumers, we haven’t really seen it yet. Competition in grocery is starting to peak a bit. You’ve got Wal-Mart going into Quebec. Target coming into Canada. And because of that we’re not seeing the price increases as much as we’d expect.” American-based Target, a discount department store that also sells groceries, plans to open as many as 150 stores in Canada by 2014. While competition has kept food prices in check here until now, a higher Canadian dollar has also helped, making imported fruit and vegetables cheaper for our supermarkets, Grier adds.

In other parts of the world, such as Tunisia and Egypt, rising food prices were already partly blamed for the wave of violent protests. The chairman & former CEO of Nestlé, the world’s largest food group, Peter Brabeck, warned that higher food prices could become permanent. Saying the financial crisis of 2008 provided a brief respite, he said one of the long-term problems is growing competition for agricultural land from biofuels. The wholesale price of corn is now $6.60 (U.S.) a bushel, after trading between $3.50 and $4 for most of last year. But while global leaders fret over the impact of food price inflation on the world’s fragile economic recovery, Canadians remain relatively insulated. Indeed, the country stands to benefit as a supplier of major commodities, such as the fertilizer potash, to the rest of the world. Within its stores, Metro says food prices fell 1 percent in the latest quarter as a stronger loonie helped keep some costs down. Says Flèche: “The consumer remains cautious. As retailers we’re feeling that because we’re giving them a lot of promotions. They have opportunities to cherry pick.” Despite consumers’ sentiment and the added competition from new entrants, food industry analysts believe Canada’s supermarket operators will be able to pass some cost increases on to customers.

Donald Marleau, an analyst with Standard & Poor’s Canada remarked: “Two-thirds of the grocery market in Canada is controlled by 3 companies and they have a very strong position in each of their respective areas, which gives them some pricing power.”

- 1.7%
How much food prices have risen in Canada this year over last year.

- 15%
How much food prices are up in India so far this year.

- 9%
How much prices have risen in China to date this year.

FRANKENGLUTTON HUNGER STRIKE

1. A STEADY DIET OF UNHAPPY MEAL

Finally caught FAST FOOD NATION (after putting off reading the book for so long). Even though it's about a fictionalized burger joint franchise, a direct statement about eating shit both figuratively n' literally and a hope for activism to encourage change, the condemning of McDonalds is unmistakable - even more so than 'Supersize Me'. Burgers are produced amid cruelty, sold through corruption & consumed as filth. And still we keep coming back to the golden arches to shove crap down our throats. Mickey Dee's is perenially popular for its greasy n' common cheapness; billions are served & billions made in profit because it's the stuff of regular folk. It clogs arteries, makes you fat, trashes the soil, poisons the water, condemns animals to a non-life & chews up multitudes of helpless undocumented workers and yet, people consistently want more without any second thoughts. They can't get enough... It's clear to see how FFN has been added (if not helped) in the open floodgates laying out a far-reaching takedown of the US food industry, from factory opeartions to supermarkets to federal regulators. Aside from disturbing stomach-churning practices, are the increasing controls of what we eat from farm to grocery aisle to the detriment of our health & the environment. Food-borne bacteria is killing thousands of Americans each year & are becoming more resilient thanks to the meat industry's addiction to antibiotics. Corporate lawyers menace rural residents for filing complaints & threaten prison terms in cease-and-desist letters. Big name chains shake down small producers of produce n' dairy for kickbacks called 'slotting fees' that run the little 'Mom & Pop' or independents off the shelves. If there are glimmers of hope in the upsurge of community gardening & organics, grim possibilities still exist in the movements for as 'natural' foods become more lucrative, they risk getting sucked into the machine thus becoming just another offering turned plain in the unfortunate but inescapable big business sphere.

2. FILLET O' SOMETHING FISHY BY A CHICKEN OF THE SEA

National Geographic, with its familiar yellow border & unforgettable photography, is an American icon. Millions around the world count on the magazine for its reports on global cultures & the natural world but those same readers might also have learned about another great American institution: "objective" journalism that lacks the courage to tell the truth. In the summer of 2003, the magazine's editors took the easy way out on the topic of salmon farming. The cover of the July issue promised an exposé on "Disappearing Salmon" but the 24-page feature failed to deliver the guilty verdict laid out by most independent scientists. In fairness, the article did report some dire predictions with the chairman of the Atlantic Salmon Federation declaring aquaculture being the single most serious threat to the survival of [wild] Atlantic salmon & unless brought under control, it will one day bring about the extinction of the species. But how heavily does the evidence weigh against salmon farming? The article's author, Fen Montaigne, sat on the fence on every point from species extinction to the use of wild fish stocks to feed penned salmon. Critics said it takes 4lbs pounds of fish rendered into food pellets to produce a pound of farmed salmon. Industry experts countered that it takes less feed to produce a pound of salmon than a pound of poultry or pork. In the tit-for-tat between the 'critics' and 'experts' the essential point disappeared: salmon farming is a net-loss industry, consuming more pounds of wild fish than it produces in farmed salmon fillets. Writing about sea lice, the parasite that plagues the industry, Montaigne pointed out that "studies indicate that sea lice outbreaks at fish farms can have devastating effects on wild salmon & sea trout." But he quickly softened the blow with how aquaculture companies were working to solve the sea lice problem. The article never mentions that sea-lice infestations & outbreaks of disease lead to the heavy application of antibiotics, fungicides n' pesticides - in fact, according to independent research commissioned by the David Suzuki Foundation in Canada, farmed salmon contain more antibiotics per pound than any other kind of domestic livestock. Neither does Montaigne disclose that many of these chemicals trickle down into the surrounding marine environment. National Geographic readers might have been interested to know that Ivermectin, Cypermethrin & Azamethiphos, 3 commonly used pesticides, have been found in the waters surrounding fish farms in concentrations lethal to other types of marine life. In Canada, government watchdogs had banned all shellfish harvesting within 300 meters of a salmon farm due to concerns about pollutants ranging from pesticides to sewage to heavy metals. Montaigne also failed to blame aquaculture companies for other industry problems, including escaped farm fish that out-compete wild stocks. And of course, the magazine was too polite to mention that incidents of vandalism & sabotage were on the rise in areas where aquaculture threatens other coastal livelihoods. Apparently, it seemed in mainstream American journalism, the future is always a hopeful one. In the article's final scene, Montaigne is fishing on the St. Jean River in Quebec, where he effortlessly reels in a 30-pound female Atlantic salmon swollen with 10,000 eggs. Ah yes, the eternal cycles of nature - no doubt culminating in a finished reading, closing the cover & guiltlessly lighting the barbeque in preparation for some delicious sockeye steaks.

2010-10-05T14:27:00.017-04:00

Broke out this guilty pleasure not long ago for a good laugh & still, perhaps the most telling poignant moment in the whole movie is infact the briefest: Ozzy (surprisingly coherent) in a short cameo plays the Rev. Aaron Gilstrom, a priest preaching against heavy metal on tv. It's a great & brilliantly funny bit of satire considering that at this time (1986), Ozzy himself for real was being roasted by Tipper Gore & her PMRC bitches -- along with other conservative alarmists -- attacking his (and Judas Priest's) music n' lyrics for promoting a variety of social ills in youth (practically every one that could be found), from anti-socialism to teen violence, Satanism(!) & suicide. It's actually hilarious to think of the hysteria that arose from so-called devil worship tied to rock bands and thanks to a number of lame talk shows that were exploitive, sensationalist & fear-mongering, a lot of ridiculous scare tactics & ignorant misinformation was cited as severe dire warnings for parents to beware lest they end up having their throats cut in their sleep by their own kids because of long hair, loud guitars, skulls on t-shirts, Slayer graffiti & Twisted Sister videos. It's nice to know that it's the intelligent people that don't take the subject matter of tongue-in-cheek sterotypes seriously. Hell, even Gene Simmons as radio DJ "Nuke" is actually watchable here.

OCTOBER 5, 1970 (THE AUTUMN SPAWN OF DESPERATE DAYS)

2010-10-05T08:53:00.025-04:00

40yrs ago today, the FLQ scared the country.

CANADA RECALLS QUEBEC SEPARATIST VIOLENCE
The October Crisis was a tumultuous time in Canada's history as the country was gripped by the dramatic events surrounding the political kidnappings of a British diplomat and a Quebec politician by home-grown terrorists known as the Front de liberation du Quebec (FLQ)
by Sian Griffiths

The FLQ (or the Quebec Liberation Front) was founded in 1963 with the aim of achieving independence for Quebec, Canada's majority French-speaking province - through terrorist means, if necessary. It emerged against the backdrop of the Cuban Revolution, US student activism against the Vietnam War and Algeria's War of Independence seeking to ending colonial rule from France. The FLQ claimed to be fighting against what it called "a capitalist system characterised by English-dominated, foreign-ownership -- the FLQ aims to smash that system." Throughout the 1960s and its period of great political tumult, the organization carried out a perilous campaign of bank & armoury raids as well as mailbox bombings in English-speaking neighbourhoods in the Montreal area, performing 200 acts in all. 27 people were injured during the bombing of the Montreal Stock Exchange, a security guard was killed during a raid on an armoury and a bomb disposal expert lost an arm & suffered brain damage handling an explosive. From 1968-69, FLQ actions had really come to a boil & by October 1970, they raised the stakes still higher...

On Oct 5, gunmen seized James Cross, the British Trade Commissioner, from his Montreal home - sparking off a manhunt. The diplomat, now nearly 90, is still clearly upset by the experience & he recently told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC): "I was under a sentence of death for 59 days, which was extremely stressful." Among the FLQ's demands for Mr Cross's release were the freeing of jailed FLQ members whom they called political prisoners & the broadcasting of the FLQ manifesto which asked the people of Quebec to join its cause. While the document was read on the CBC, the terrorists' demands were largely unmet. The diplomat remained at the mercy of his kidnappers as negotiations were being held with Premier Robert Bourassa's Quebec government. On Oct 10, Quebec's Vice-Premier & Minister of Labour, Pierre Laporte was also kidnapped. The reaction of Canadians to the news of the abductions was of shock as people just didn't expect this in Canada. Security was ramped up in Quebec to protect prominent individuals & sites. And in Ottawa, soldiers were deployed to protect ministers, diplomats & government buildings like the Canadian Parliament. Canadians were bemused & upset by the sudden military presence on their streets.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau was losing patience with the FLQ and when asked by a reporter how far he would go to maintain law n' order, Trudeau famously said: "Just watch me." Alarmingly, a 3000-strong pro-FLQ rally full of students, trade union officials & intellectuals took place in Montreal and Oct 16, the Canadian government declared that Quebec was in a state of "apprehended insurrection" & invoked the War Measures Act - its first such action during peacetime. The legislative decree allowed the government to assume emergency powers in the event of war, invasion or armed uprising. The FLQ was banned & after an impasse in the hostage talks, over 1000 army troops from across the country were called in to support the police manhunt efforts in Montreal of the kidnappers. Civil rights were curtailed & the Canadian Armed Forces occupied several Quebec cities. In just a few days, between 450 to 500 people were subsequently arrested without warrant or charge & detained. The majority were described as artists, unionists, intellectuals & ordinary citizens who supported French-Canadian nationalism. Most were soon released. Trudeau explained his actions in a televised statement: "Violent & fanatical men are attempting to destroy the unity & the freedom of Canada. I will not tolerate intimidation & terror." Sadly, Pierre Laporte would meet a tragic end. On Oct 17 he turned up dead, found strangled in the trunk of a car. The FLQ claimed responsibility & was roundly condemned by a stunned nation. Rene Levesque, the leader of the separatist 'Parti Quebecois' described the killers as "inhuman" while society at large had to ask n' question what was truly going on while still coming to terms with the murder. Laporte's death completely eroded support in Quebec for the FLQ and Trudeau came under severe criticism from his political foes. Levesque accused Trudeau of "a panicky & altogether excessive reaction" while the leader of Canada's third party, the left-leaning New Democratic Party (NDP), accused the Prime Minister of using "a sledgehammer to crack a peanut" but regardless, the public seemed to approve overwhelmingly of the tough approach. Several polls at the time showed about 90% of Canadians - including those in Quebec - backed the measures & further condemned the criminals, not approving of their methods. By December, the crisis was effectively over. James Cross was released on Dec 3 in exchange for Cuban exile/safe-conduct for his kidnappers - led by Jacques Lanctot & Marc Carbonneau. They eventually returned to Canada & served short prison sentences. Pierre Laporte's killers, led by Paul Rose were found by police on Dec 28. Rose and a fellow FLQ member were convicted of kidnapping & murder charges (with another member convicted of just kidnapping). All were out of prison by the early 1980s.

Today, all of the ex-outlaws play roles in Quebec society as writers, film-makers & commentators. Rose even worked as a politician for some time. All have at some point in some fashion blamed Quebec's then-administration for the conditions that brought about their revolutionary extremism. Some former FLQ members have sought to revise this provocative chapter in Canadian history. Lanctot said he & his accomplices never planned to kill James Cross - and the diplomat knew it. He recently told French-language CBC: "It was clear that we would never kill him. We told him we wouldn't hurt a fly." Cross is naturally sceptical saying he continues to feel "hate" for his former captors. He told the CBC: "I'm sure they said the same thing to Pierre Laporte." Jean Laporte, who lost his father when he was just 11yrs old, says he still suffers. In the years since the crisis, separatists have sought - and failed - to achieve independence through 2 referendums (narrowly losing in the last one held in 1995). The appetite for an independent Quebec now seems on the wane as some 60% of Quebec residents feel the issue has been settled according to another recent poll. Former separatist leader Lucien Bouchard recently admitted that independence was unachievable.

WAS THIS ACTIVIST THE LAST FLQ VICTIM?
Separatist may have been killed over plot to assassinate Bourassa
by Michel Arsenault

Paris - Rue Eugène Lumeau, a sleepy street of Saint-Ouen, a northern suburb of Paris, does not look like the scene of an international murder mystery. Yet this is where Canadian Mario Bachand, a Marxist-Leninist who believed in independence for Quebec was gunned down in 1971. His murder to this day unsolved, not only harkens back to a sombre period in Canadian history but still raises questions about the Front de libération du Québec & the RCMP which then ran Canada's intelligence service. That period is being remembered again this month to mark the 40th anniversary of the so-called 'October Crisis' during which the War Measures Act was imposed after the abduction of British diplomat James Cross & murder of Quebec labour minister Pierre Laporte.

Newly classified documents here show the Bachand case was as murky & intriguing as the victim himself, a man described as both a "dangerous individual" & a "mythomaniac." The records from police & the Interior Ministry indicate that the murder investigation collapsed when 2 Canadian witnesses managed to escape from France. They also show Bachand - who had arrived in France in 1970 after spending 4yrs in jail for a string of bomb attacks in Montreal in the early 1960s - had not escaped RCMP attention. After they were called in, French police started asking questions about 2 young Quebecers who had visited Bachand on the day of his death, March 29, 1971. They arrived unannounced & Bachand was suspicious because virtually no one knew his address. The 3 went to a nearby café. The owner told police that customers "with Canadian accents" came at around 1pm. Bachand, 27, invited the 2 back to his place for lunch with his housemate Pierre Barral, a Basque professor of mathematics. Their conversation was friendly until Barral left for work & when he returned from his university at 6pm, he found Mario in a pool of blood. Bachand had been shot in the head twice with a US-made .22 calibre handgun according to the ballistics report. The casings were never found, The small calibre gunshots (similar to the uncorking of a champagne bottle) would not have attracted undue attention & a silencer would not have been required. Police tried to track down the mystery couple who documents refer to as witnesses. An "extremely urgent" telegram dated March 30, 1971 was sent out to border posts & airports asking police to keep an eye out for a "French-Canadian couple" in their mid-20's, both wearing jeans & dark blue pea coats. They were never caught.

Investigators also quizzed some of the 600 Quebec students who were then enrolled in French universities. Police heard that Bachand had visited a Canadian student residence - the Maison des étudiants Canadiens. He argued that Quebecers were the "white niggers of America" (echoing a theory expounded by FLQ intellectual Pierre Valliéres) & that the FLQ was a Quebec equivalent of the Black Panthers. Students were unconvinced & according to a police memo, Bachand frightened many "with the virulence of his words. His repeated condemnations of the democratic process & his defence of international terrorism gave him from the start the reputation of being a dangerous individual, more preoccupied with personal adventurism than with the cause of Quebec." French records show the RCMP was keeping an eye on Bachand.

On March 22, 1971, a week before he was murdered, the Interior Ministry's domestic intelligence service, the Renseignements Généraux (RG), received an urgent message from Ottawa. This unsigned document marked "secret" was apparently sent by the RCMP. The RG referred to its author as "our correspondent." The document alerted Paris about Bachand's sister, Michéle Bachand on an Air France flight from Montrel. The RCMP asked the French to forward all information they could gather "discreetly" on her activities. To facilitate their job, Ottawa gave them her brother's Saint-Ouen address. Not even she knew it when she boarded the plane. In a phone interview from Montreal where she still lives she exclaimed, "So they knew." This is not far-fetched. In their fight against the FLQ, the Mounties engaged in dubious activities in Quebec. 2 commissions (1 federal, 1 provincial) heard that police had allegedly engaged in arson & theft among other things. The federal commission headed by Justice David McDonald eventually recommended that national security operations be taken away from the RCMP. This lead to the creation of the civilian Canadian Security and Intelligence Service in 1984 (CSIS).

In 1971, the Quebec govt's delegation in Paris believed that Bachand was the victim of a power struggle within FLQ ranks according to a police memo. French police asked the RCMP for help on this asking for photos & fingerprints of FLQ members. But Mounties provided little information perhaps because relations between Ottawa & Paris had been chilly since Charles de Gaulle's infamous cry of "Vive le Québec libre" in 1967. The Quebec delegation was concerned about the security of premier Robert Bourassa who was expected in France in April 1971 - especially because he had just asked Prime Minister Pierre Troudeau to prolong the War Measures Act. A police memo noted, "The increasingly difficult political situation leads Quebec officials in Paris to believe that the premier of their land could conceivably come under attack during his upcoming visit." Theories purporting to expalin Bachand's murder abound. Montreal french-language newspaper 'Le Devoir' earlier this month suggested that a rival FLQ member may have decided to kill Bachand after he refused to join a plot to assassinate Bourassa in Paris. The newspaper was given access to an RCMP memo dated April 30, 1971, explaining that Bachand "knew too much." A Radio-Canada investigation similarly concluded in 1997 that Bachand had been killed by an FLQ member & stated that it was because Bachand had posed as the group's "general secretary in exile" thus irritating real other would-be leaders in hiding having fled law enforcement.

Writer Michael McLouglin has argued in a controversial book 'Last Stop Paris' that Bachand was murdered by an FLQ member on RCMP orders. Montreal journalist Normand Lester who has reported extensively on intelligence-gathering, is of the same thinking & in a 1998 book 'Enquéte sur les services secrets' he wrote that the Mounties had infiltrated the FLQ's cell in Algeria. According to Lester, this explains why its members received only "light sentences" when they returned to Canada. After he returned to Canada, the FLQ activist whose name sometimes surfaces as the alleged murderer was sentenced in 1975 to 30 months in jail in connection with Montreal bombings. It is impossible to verify how much time he did spend in jail because his name has been deleted from Quebec court records presumably due to a pardon. Louis Fournier who wrote an authoritative 'FLQ: The Anatomy of an Underground Movement' has given up trying to understand. Say's the 65yr old former journalist, "I don't think I'll get to know the truth in my lifetime." Michéle Bachand continues to mull her brother's death saying "There's always a journalist who wants to know but no one knows anything. It's painful in the end. It's emotionally exhausting."