Clinton and Obama pronounce themselves disgusted at the release on compassionate grounds of Mr al Megrahi. This, from the Daily Mail, suggests that maybe black man speak with forked tongue.
In Nixon and Kissinger's Vietnam episode, Uncle Sam's boys raped and murdered five hundred defenceless civilians and returned home to a heroes' welcome, an acquittal and in the case of the man in charge, a few years jail and a pardon.
Found: The monster of the My Lai massacre
Last updated at 23:07 06 October 2007
The sun had just risen over a tranquil Vietnamese hamlet, nestling in a steamy green valley of rice fields close to the South China Sea.
Hundreds of villagers were about to enjoy a simple breakfast outside their bamboo huts when a flotilla of U.S. helicopters came whirring low overhead, the draught from their giant propellers flattening the tall, yellow grass.
Old men and women, young mothers tending their children, most didn't bother to run away - they thought they had nothing to fear as the Americans routinely swept the countryside hunting the communist Viet Cong guerillas, 'the VC' in U.S. military parlance.
How could a huddle of defenceless farming people pose any threat? Moments after the soldiers had landed, however, it became clear that the villagers had made a terrible miscalculation.
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Mai Lai: Between 100 and 500 people were slaughtered
With bayonet fixed, the young platoon leader instructed his men to round up everyone, regardless of their age or sex, and herd them into a partially filled, 5ft-deep irrigation ditch. "Take care of these people!" he barked.
Those five words lit the fuse for a massacre. If there was any ambiguity in their meaning, the platoon leader removed it by bludgeoning an old man into the ditch with his rifle-butt, then machine-gunning him and at least 21 others as they cowered beside him.
Over the next five hours babies were bayonetted, teenage girls were raped or forced to their knees to perform sex acts before being mutilated and killed - and their watching parents and grandparents were summarily shot as they begged for mercy.
When the bloodbath was over, the hamlet was torched.
The number of villagers who were butchered is still a matter for debate. If we believe some of the soldiers, the so-called 'body count' totalled just over a hundred.
According to records in the grim museum which the victorious Vietnamese communists have built at My Lai, however, 504 people were murdered. The youngest was just one year old and the oldest 82, and their names are etched on a broad marble wall.
One thing, however, is certain. March 16, 1968, is the most infamous date in U.S. military history - a day that far overshadows the brutality at Abu Ghraib prison and the killing of 24 civilians by U.S. Marines in Haditha in western Iraq. With lasting shame, it is remembered as the My Lai Massacre.
Of course, many Americans would prefer not to remember My Lai at all. They want to draw a veil over this most shocking episode in the humiliating, decade-long fiasco that was the Vietnam War.
Their collective amnesia was never stronger than it is today, when young servicemen are once again dying on foreign soil, for a similarly ill-defined - and seemingly unwinnable - cause.
But arch-liberal film-maker Oliver Stone is determined that the savagery to which some American soldiers lowered themselves in Vietnam must never be forgotten.
He believes that now, more than ever, the White House hawks need to learn from the past. Having made his name with a trilogy of controversial films about Vietnam (Platoon, Born On The Fourth Of July and Heaven & Earth) Stone is working on a fourth, about My Lai.
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William Calley: Uniformed during the Vietnam war
"Why now? Because of Iraq. That's a major reason," the controversial director said, during a preliminary research trip to Vietnam. "It seems to me there are so many similarities between the wars in the Gulf and South-East Asia.
"Sometimes you can tell more about a war now by paralleling a previous war. I'm not seeking to denigrate the average soldier, but I think the time has come to remember events like My Lai."
Predicted to be the strongest indictment of war yet, Stone's movie will be called Pinkville, the name the GIs gave to the benighted village, and other surrounding settlements, because they were supposedly a communist stronghold.
He has already cast the hero. Bruce Willis will play General William R. Peers, the U.S. Army officer who presided over the official inquiry into the mass slaughter, and whose determination to uncover the truth blighted his career.
But, as yet, there is no word on who will portray the pivotal character in the My Lai story; the man who led the platoon by brutal example and would later be branded America's worst war criminal - Second Lieutenant William Laws Calley.
Whoever lands the part, it will certainly require a bravura performance.
For, as the Daily Mail discovered this week, when we tracked down the elusive Calley - now aged 64, and living in comfortable obscurity in Atlanta, Georgia - this comical-looking figure, standing just 5ft 3in tall and sporting a white Colonel Sanders goatee, jam-jar spectacles and a Stetson, makes a most unlikely mass murderer.
William Calley has been called the Everyman of the Vietnam War. A college drop-out from a white-collar Miami family, he drifted between jobs on the railroad and investigating insurance claims before joining the army as a trainee clerk.
Though he showed not the slightest aptitude for leadership, he was accepted into officer training school, where he is remembered for his passion for pizza, and little else.
It was during the Vietnam War that President Lyndon Johnson first popularised the phrase "hearts and minds". In a now wearily familiar refrain, he said winning them was imperative if the Viet Cong were ever to be defeated.
Rookie officers underwent a course designed to improve their respect and understanding of the distant strangers in whose land they would be fighting, entitled "Vietnam Our Host".
Calley would later claim to remember little about these lessons in winning over the locals. What he did seem to learn, however, was that everyone - old and young, male and female - was a potential enemy, capable of tripping a mine fuse, hurling a grenade or signalling to a VC sniper. As such, even civilians were not to be trusted.
It was with this dubious preparation that 2nd Lt Calley was airlifted into South Vietnam. By early 1968, soon after his arrival, the country was in the grip of the Tet Offensive: a massive push for victory which brought 80,000 North Vietnamese troops driving southwards, striking with unprecedented ferocity.
Calley was deployed to the scene of the fiercest fighting, in Quang Ngai Province, and placed in charge of a platoon of some 50 infantrymen in Charlie Company, part of the proud 23rd Infantry (Americal) Division.
While most of his charges despised the country and its people, Calley found he loved his new life in Vietnam.
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William Calley: Unrepentant
Rarely able to get a date with women in Miami, where he was regarded as a nonentity and a drifter, he found he had the pick of the prettiest 'boom-boom girls' - cheap local prostitutes who touted for business around the U.S. camps.
He also relished having the power to dish out orders without rebuke - even though they were frequently ill-advised.
More than once his crass misjudgments endangered his men, and when a subordinate was shot dead because Calley marched them into danger, they secretly discussed "fragging" - or assassinating - the bungling officer universally known as Lieutenant S***head.
Meanwhile, the officers above Calley were demanding results. Charged with the mission of wiping out as many "Commies" as possible, his bosses set up "free fire zones", where anyone could be shot on the merest suspicion of collusion, and demanded daily "kill ratios".
The problem was that, for weeks on end, Charlie Company never encountered a single enemy soldier, for the VC hid in underground bunkers connected by a labyrinth of tunnels.
The Americans only knew that they were silently surrounded by VC when one of their number was picked off by a sniper - a fate that befell Calley's radio operator and best friend, Bill Weber, who died after his kidney was shattered by a bullet in February 1968.
On the eve of the massacre, another comrade had been blown up by a VC booby-trap, and so it was amid a mood of pent-up frustration and vengeance that Charlie Company was briefed by Captain Ernest Medina about the following morning's planned sweep through 'Pinkville'.
Medina's orders are heatedly disputed to this day. A highly respected commander, he has always denied telling the men to kill indiscriminately, advising them that they should use discretion and only fire at anyone who threatened their safety - but Calley insists otherwise.
The instructions were clear, he says. They were to exterminate every last man, woman and child. Today, his platoon remains divided: some agree with Medina's version, others with Calley's.
One crucial element of Medina's orders is not in doubt, however. He warned the U.S. soldiers that My Lai was among a huddle of villages harbouring one of the VC's strongest battalions, and that they were about to face their fiercest battle.
At dawn the following morning, it quickly became evident that this was yet another piece of false information. In fact, just one Vietnamese man of combat age was found in the village. That wasn't about to deter Calley, however. He didn't see people - only targets.
"We weren't in My Lai to kill human beings, really," he said later. "We were there to kill an ideology that is carried by - I don't know - pawns, blobs, pieces of flesh. I was there to destroy an intangible idea. To destroy communism. Killing those men in My Lai didn't haunt me."
His actions would have been inexcusable even if he really had only killed 'men' but among the 22 people - at a very conservative estimate - whom he personally shot was a child of about two, who was trying to run away.
According to a fellow soldier, Calley caught the infant by the arms, swung him into the ditch, and despatched him with a single bullet.
Calley also bears responsibility for ordering his men to follow his lead. Warned of the dire consequences of disobeying, Private Paul Meadlo fired into the ditch for several minutes before breaking down in tears.
Another GI was so sickened that he shot himself in the foot to avoid taking part; the only American casualty that day.
Bizarrely, however, at one point 24-year-old Calley was seized by the need to maintain propriety. When he saw a GI force a woman to her knees by the hair and threaten to blow up her child with a grenade unless she performed a sex act, he became enraged. "Pull up your pants, soldier!" he snarled, brandishing his M16 menacingly.
Just 20 people survived the massacre, ten of whom are alive today. Most owe their lives to U.S. helicopter captain Hugh Thompson. Patrolling over My Lai, he saw what was happening, and airlifted as many villagers as he could to safety.
Thompson, who died last year, confronted Calley and urged him to stop the killing, but the Second Lieutenant refused to defer to his superior, saying: "Down here on the ground, I run the show."
For many months afterwards, the massacre was covered up. Utterly unrepentant, Calley went away on leave and then signed on for an extra stint in Vietnam.
Back in America, however, the story slowly began to leak out. Returning to civilian life in a country awash with anti-war fever, disaffected members of Charlie Company began to tell their story to investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, among others.
Aware of the damage that news of an American atrocity would cause, Richard Nixon, who had succeeded Johnson as president, tried desperately to downplay it.
But when army photographer Ron Haeberle sold the shockingly candid colour photographs he had smuggled away from My Lai to Life magazine for $50,000, the truth could no longer be hidden.
Of all the soldiers who faced the My Lai court martial, William Calley was the only man to be convicted. Damned by the evidence of men he led, in 1971 he was found guilty of 22 murders and sentenced to life with hard labour; but then events took a twist which today seems almost as incomprehensible as the massacre itself.
Instead of dismissing Calley as a cold-blooded killer, the majority of ordinary Americans accepted his claim - that he was simply a patriotic soldier, faithfully acting out his duty - and viewed him as a heroic martyr.
Even in the peace movement some were willing to believe he was merely a lowly scapegoat for the real architects of the war: a theory Oliver Stone will doubtless explore.
Nixon sensed which way the wind was blowing and within a few days, Calley was quietly transferred from the tough military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, to house arrest in a comfortable apartment at Fort Benning, Georgia, where was able to drink alcohol and entertain his girlfriend.
He served three years there before being paroled in 1974 with a tacit presidential pardon.
Free to resume his life at 31, Calley ditched the girl who had loyally stood by him during his years in custody, and married Penny Vick, the daughter of a wealthy jeweller in Columbus, Georgia.
Their wedding was the society event of the year. They were serenaded by the local sheriff, a baritone, and guests included the Mayor of Columbus and the judge who granted his liberty.
The newlyweds moved into a smart, detached bungalow, and Calley qualified as a master gemmologist. When his father-in-law retired, he took over the reins of the lucrative family business - a position beyond his dreams before he served in Vietnam.
By all accounts, Calley was accepted without question as a pillar of the community. Always smartly attired, he managed the jewellers until two years ago, when - after a series of heated rows about the way the store should be run - he left his wife.
He now lives 90 miles away in Atlanta, where the Daily Mail found him sharing a smart midtown apartment with their 27-year-old son, a brilliant PhD computer student also called William Laws Calley.
His path has not always run smoothly, however. For a time he ran a nice little sideline as a speaker on the college lecture circuit - sickeningly charging a fee to give sanitised talks about My Lai. But he was forced to give up when he was heckled by the students.
According to one neighbour - a former policewoman who remarked that Calley "doesn't look big enough to snap a twig in half" - during his middle years he also developed a drink problem.
Perhaps he turned to the bottle to blot out his memories, though his close friend Al Fleming, an award-winning local TV newsman, says he is now at ease with himself.
"William did have nightmares for a while, but not now," Fleming told the Mail. "I'm sure he didn't like doing what he did, but he shows no sense of remorse at all. He's not like a lot of Vietnam veterans; suicidal and sick. He's just an ordinary guy."
An ordinary guy? Visiting My Lai last week, we spoke to people who remember the day William Calley came to their village, and regard him rather differently. A dignified woman of 82, wearing a traditional black trouser suit, Mrs Hai Thi Quy's wrinkled face contorted with pain as she recalled how her family were forced into the ditch, where her mother and two children, aged six and 16, were murdered beside her.
"They just started shooting people and pushing them into the canal," she said. "People were screaming, but the American soldiers said nothing, and their faces were so hard. They even shot a pregnant woman.
"They just killed and killed. The bullets came down like rain. One man grabbed my mother's hair and pushed her face down into the water and shot her."
Mrs Quy was shot in the back, but recovered in a U.S. military clinic after being rescued by the helicopter hero, Hugh Thompson.
Understandably, she still feels angry - yet, like all the survivors we interviewed, she showed an uplifting spirit of forgiveness. The director of the My Lai Museum, Mr Pham Thanh Cong - who lost his mother and three siblings but escaped with bullet wounds - even extended an olive branch to Calley.
"If the government will allow it, I invite him here, not to scold him or reprimand him, but to try and understand why he ordered the killing," Mr Cong said. "If he comes here, he and I could become friends. We could confide and talk to each other. We really want him to come back and see the truth."
From a man who has suffered so much, it was a remarkable gesture. Sadly, however, William Calley - who has never demonstrated the slightest desire to make his peace with the Vietnamese people - was not even willing to discuss it this week. Unless, of course, he received a fat fee.
"Meet me in the lobby of the nearest bank at opening time tomorrow, and give me a certified cheque for $25,000, then I'll talk to you for precisely one hour," he drawled nauseatingly.
When we showed up at the appointed hour, armed not with a cheque but a list of pertinent questions, Calley scuttled away from the line of fire. It was an option the man who led the My Lai Massacre never afforded to his innocent victims.
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Clinton's pretend husband, Spunky Bill, was a draft dodger, like Dubya; had either of them gone to Vietnam, they might have come away with a different point of view, but probably not.
Obama insists that he will maintain the very best fighting forces in the world.
RELAXING AFTER THE PARTY.
nb it is probably too late to send these boys pizza but fresh opportunities for the von Fawkesians will surely arise.
45 comments:
firstly, this ex-officer is clearly a war criminal - why's he not in jail? secondly, this account is very worrying. Calley's men thought he was a "shithead" but they still followed orders which were obnoxious and illegal.
so three questions -
are similar events happening in theatres of war today but unrecorded?
could a similar brutal lack of empathy be instilled by a tyrannical Government, into a civil defence force and used against "dissidents?" eg critical bloggers?
is the current fashion in military circles for robots and drones an admission that human beings can sometimes be brutalised enough, but, unreliably, have a tendancy to sympathise with other human beings?
http://www.popsci.com/drones
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/12/business/12combat.html?_r=2
William did have nightmares for a while, but not now," Fleming told the Mail. "I'm sure he didn't like doing what he did, but he shows no sense of remorse at all. He's not like a lot of Vietnam veterans; suicidal and sick. He's just an ordinary guy." Er not quite ordinary "guys" do not order the mass slaughter of non combantants and it only stopped when a US helicopter pilot threated to machine gun the killers unless they stopped.
I live in Thailand and would just like to thank the USA for fucking this country up by using just the same as were going to do and did for that matter as an unsinkable aircraft carrier. Loads of " Luk Kruangs" 50% Thai 50% other, mind you they are getting on a bit now, but hey who gives a fuck?
Many of these G I's never went home and who could blame them beautiful country, women the same, eating meat that came from one animal rather than many in a hamburger. You still have US government funded clowns looking for M,I.A's 40 years on, don't bother I have met some of these over the years mostly crazy and smack heads, here in Thailand Viet Nam and Cambodia.Amother thing swept under the carpet is the amount of deserters who went over to the other side but don't mention that OK? all in all where would you rather be a smackhead here in SE Asia or New York?
Its bad enough GI's slagging off the Gooks Slopes etc but try this Thailand had a load of soldiers there and in a village near where I used to live there were a couple of vets from the conflict the tales they told scared the shit out of me, beheadings public as well, shoot first ask questions later. If anyone has any time they might nip next door to Cambodia and ask a couple of questions about the late great Pol Pot and how he got to be there in the first place.
Excellent posting, Ishmael. I have been quoting this for days but didn't know the complete story.
I happened, by chance, to come across the following which is an extract taken from the essay, A Prince of Our Disorder: The Life of T.E. Lawrence, by the late John E. Mack (Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School).
"It is a mistake to think of the loss of control and heinous behavior of low ranking military personnel at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere as exceptions. Such behavior is the direct and virtually inevitable result of the breakdown of command, beginning with top officials".
I perhaps could have added that he (Mack) goes on to say:-
"In this terrible moment we are seeing the results of a war prosecuted by a leadership that appears to be singularly lacking in the capacity for doubt, self-questioning, or the acknowledgement of mistakes. We have been plunged into a moral chaos that can only end when saner minds, “man rationale” in T.E. Lawrence's words, can once more assume authority in this nation."
This, I think, is key:
"We weren't in My Lai to kill human beings, really," he said later. "We were there to kill an ideology that is carried by - I don't know - pawns, blobs, pieces of flesh. I was there to destroy an intangible idea. To destroy communism. Killing those men in My Lai didn't haunt me."
There is no such thing as natural virtue, no bedrock of humanity on which everything rests. Identical crimes will I am sure be committed in defence of some other ideology: liberalism, the inviolability of the young or the unborn, etc, etc.
The decisive move is subjugating life to some set of arbitrary principles that - to the spiritually deaf and emotionally blind - appear to govern it. The political reality of your beloved Marxism, Mr Smith, tells us more about that than most of us would care to know.
There is a bedrock of humanity, at its most basic it is Women and Children First, survival of the species, hard-wired. It is the bedrock of humanity which makes things quantifiably better by any yardstick, save your own and which drives and informs Art and Science alike. It is unlike you to talk such tosh. That goodness, right conduct, decency can be suborned by those who claim to be its servants is one thing, to claim that it is non-existent seems to me absurd.
My beloved Marxism, as you mischievously put it, Mr TDG, is meaningless without the other parts of my denominational trio - Zen and Presbyterianism; to reiterate, for hospital admission purposes I am not "Oh, I'll just put C of E" but I am Zen-Presbyterian-Marxist - Shit happens, accept it; Take what you have and give it to the poor and Workers of the world unite; that all three seeming virtuous statements are corrupted by Masters, Ministers and Megalomaniacs does not devalue my adherence to their worth as ideals, however flippantly I report them.
Another way of outting that is that all of the scriptures have some value, some insight but none have them exclusively.
If you are going to be all evolutionary about it (like that idiot Dawkins insists we must) then a gene that makes us save all babies will lose under selection pressure to one that make us save only our own tribe's. Visceral though the revulsion at child killing is, hard-wiring does not explain it.
My point is not that virtue does not exist but that it cannot be assumed to be the default mode - it is created, intersubjectively, like everything else of importance in our lives. Descriptions of children reared in total isolation are instructive: they are neither bad nor good, just meaninglessly self-absorbed.
So releasing the "self" from the various burdens now by the miracles of science banished from our lives brings us no closer to virtue. I do not believe things are better now than they were in 5th century Athens or 16th century Florence, because I do not believe freedom from bodily suffering - the only conceivable advantage of modern life - is the highest achievement of mankind. If you are born only not to suffer then why fucking bother?
You may be right that it is not the ideology itself that is at fault, whether marxian, presbyterian or zen, but the failure of those who apply it. But what makes those who apply it fail, and fail so consistently? What is there but the ideology itself to warp them? Is it not that it is precisely when one attempts to reduce life to some set of ideals that one admits the possibility of transgressions far worse than those the ideals are meant to prohibit? The history of marxism needs no elaboration here.
Whatever else Richard Dawkins might be, he is certainly not an idiot.
You may well be impressed by him, Caractacus. Plenty of people with no scientific training are. Perhaps it is because the target of the natural inclination to submit unquestioningly to authority has shifted from religion to science. But if you are a serious scientist, one of the high priests of this new church, then the kind of thing exemplified by
"What are all of us but self-reproducing robots? We have been put together by our genes and what we do is roam the world looking for a way to sustain ourselves and ultimately produce another robot child."
can only make you feel profoundly embarrassed on behalf of the Royal Society.
It is not a question of being impressed or not. To be able to argue so coherently as he does on the subject of evolution clearly suggests he is anything but an idiot. Since most scientists (and I include the serious ones) are atheists I don't quite follow your line of reasoning in implying that those with scientific training are not impressed with him.
War is never really much to do with humanity and neither has communism .
many great scientists were/are Christians , but i presume you are refering to those born post 1960 as being mainly Athiest .
Dawkins makes some useful insights about evolution , but where he fails is in linking bits that he thinks proves there is no god to areas of faith that cannot engage his language. So far prof Dawkins has turned down any public debate from christian scientists or thelogians , why not he makes plenty out of books and TV shows.
This seperation of mechanism and purpose that by default gives the belief that all there is , is our desires and will , helps big science get funding , "the search for god particle" is very misleading , for if god organising the universe it is at the scale of the universe and not a particle.
Brain disorders are easy targets for the atheists , as it gives the theory that we are purely the activity within our brains and little else .
And yet still no one can tell me why , we take comfort from prayer , or if jesus really did exist , why they made up a post death story about him.
If the life of jesus is historically correct , where does that leave dawkins?
Idiocy and incoherence are not the same thing. Idiocy is stupidity - whether coherent or not - without self-awareness. The stupidity of the utterance I reproduced for you is obvious, the lack of self-awareness is his putting it on his website.
Atheists (like me) find him embarrassing because his arguments against religion (which are distilled in the quote above) display such astonishing poverty of life and mind. That this sad little nerd is celebrated as a sage is as damning an indictment of our times as a thousand X-factors
Mr TDG,
The Library phoned, "Philosophy for Idiots" is now overdue, can you please return it.
'If the life of jesus is historically correct'.... I suppose you mean the ability to turn water into wine and walking on water. Such feats must be from the John Lennox school of science.
The tactic of dehumanizing the 'enemy' is older than soldiering itself. To state that prostitution is the oldest profession is bollox, they doubtfully chose the job - sub human pieces of minge and tits - huzzah!
I don't know what book you are talking about, dear, but I am sorry it was not there when you looked for it.
Sounds like the kind of thing you might benefit from, but if I were you I would start with something on the theme of "how to avoid repeatedly shooting oneself in the foot", and - more generally - "how to think further than one step ahead". You need rather more intensive instruction on these things than surfing the internet can give you.
TDG asserts "If you are going to be all evolutionary about it (like that idiot Dawkins insists we must) ..."
Who, I ask, is the idiot that insists we mustn't?
Caesars wife: With reference to your comment, 'so far prof Dawkins has turned down any public debate from christian scientists or thelogians'
You may like to check out the public debate that Dawkins has had with Dr. John Lennox in Birmingham, Alabama 2007 and again at Oxford’s Natural History Museum in 2008.
Be careful that the original transcript is read as Dr. Lennox and Melanie Philips have a habit of misquoting Dawkins.
Edgar, "What is literature but ink on paper?", "what is music but sounds in sequence?", "what is painting but pigment on canvas?", do you need more or are you feeling enough of a fool already?
TDG
I think you're moving slightly off topic and into what is known as consciousness. As you no doubt know, this relates to superstring theory, quantum mechanics and the singularity.
i would say that the oldest profession is "hunter" because prostitutes, even neolithic hairy ones, would like to be paid with something that has value ie food. so the first professional was the first guy who distracted his lady-friend with a flung piece of venison before pouncing like a stoat upon her undefended flange.
anyway,since i had the privilege to leave the first comment on this extremely disturbing matter, i would like to interject with an observation (as several people become annoyed with each other) that any philosophy which allows for the initiation of force is bound to be wrong. this eliminates most if not all religions including Buddhism (Samurai testing their swords on peasants?) and most political systems (including any which impose compulsory taxes, or subscribe to warfare except in the event of invasion)
so if Dawkins does not believe in force - war or compulsory taxes - he is good. he may be strident, pompous and unbearably smug, but he is not a bad man.
furthermore, the officer who initiated the shootings was armed, trained etc via taxpayers' money. none of the taxpayers. or an insignificant amount, were overjoyed to be taxed in the first place, or to know that their dollars resulted in murder.
so evil in the field resulted directly from the evil of theft, ie taxation, and the evil of initiation of force.
Carl Sagan was the first of the telly-scientists, wasn't he, the originator of a genre which led to apparent knowledge, sound-bitten pseudo knowledge being acquired without what had been called proper study or as Mr TDG witheringly puts it:
"You need rather more intensive instruction on these things than surfing the internet can give you."
Sympathetic to the idea of the Tyranny of God, I watched an episode of Mr Dawkins' TV show and immediately realised from its grammar and vernacular that it was just a TV show, cutaway shots and voiceovers, the content dictated by the form, the medium IS the message.
I remember raging at a fat headed young man regularly beguiled by the repellent Mr Tony Robinson and his Time Team programme, claiming this venture was scholarship No, you are not watching archaeology, you are watching TV, the producer and director are playing with you, you fucking idiot, that's what they do. As Dawkins walked towards and past camera in Palestine, re-appearing in the next shot - continuing the same conversation - in New York, I thought This could be Simon Schama, queening and hissing, David Starkey, conspiring against what we must now call heterosexuality or Davina McCall twittering viciously outside the Big Brother House, all any of these arseholes care about is ratings. Dawkins is a celebrity presenter, nothing to do with reality, the thinking man's Jeremy Clarkson.
I don't know if there is a need for God and that need makes God real or as real as makes no difference but I do know that for numbers of people to co-exist there is a need for law and that that law needs to have what we call an ethical or a moral underpinning, needs to be enforced and offenders against it corrected and occasionally rebuked and punished - although the frequency, eagerness and savagery with which we do the latter indicates that there is something wrong with the former; what kind of jurisprudence jails so many children, so many mentally ill ?
Anyway, crime and punishment are tied to or rooted in notions of God, obeying Him, pleasing Him, getting on His Good side, just in case He exists, Pascal's Theorem, i think it's called, hedging your Heavenly bets. Those with a pan-historic perspective may argue that in the past the slaughter of the Innocents was normal, even laudable, - Greeks, Romans, Seventh US Cavalry - and that to get our knickers in a twist about it, now, is just, I dunno, naieve, juvenile, uninformed, these things happen in war, we are all men of the world, and they were communists, after all, all that shit; it's Pizza talk, innit. Slopes die but money is immortal, it is the discredited maxim of Greed, von Fawkesianism.
If enough sophists insist for long enough and hard enough that there is no bedrock of human decency then there won't be; if they insist that unless you know as they know you know nothing then you will know nothing; if we allow their insistence that a genuine moral outrage is the sound of one hand clapping then Ruin will be over the doorstep, sat at your fireside, in your favourite chair. I have often mentioned George Steiner's comment that The Holocaust happened because the 'thirties Berlin intelligentsia was too busy listening to the string quartet in the salon to hear the cry in the street. We squabble, superior, among ourselves over philosophy's bleached bones at similar peril.
The re-posting here of the Calley story -for those who knew it and those who didn't - was as a counterblast to skymadeupnewsandfilth's, Clinton's and Obama's al-Megrahi-isms. the cleverest person in the world would not persuade me that I erred.
you are right about the TV. we seem to tolerate people being killed. instead we care passionately about shite; we worry about what flag's on the city hall, or grieve hysterically over the deaths of pallid freaks or silver-spoon slappers.
are we still in the Dark Age?
Mr TDG dawkins only debate was in USA when his book was being sold , but why has he not had one in the UK or anywhere else since 2007??
Tricky one Stanislav , is there a need for god which is a function of the brain and not supernatural ??
i am still hooked by the third rule of thermodynamics .
the most efficient form of life is a single celled organism , in theory anything intelligent is too expensive for nature to up keep.It should never get beyond goo stage .
perhaps brain disorders brigade do have somthing , but bible inspires that I do know , but then again believers do know , dont they!!
Yes Mr cw
Professor McLuhan posited that individual consciousness is an evolutionary dead-end. Same sort of thing - anything larger than a uni-cellular wotsit being an unsustainable aberration. Not as though the Universe is crawling with us, is it? But then that is even more nihilistic than Mr TDG.
Heard that programme about GodInTheBrain but didn't pay enough attention. Must try harder.
I think a New Dark Age commenced in about 1962, mr anonymous; even though I argue with Mr TDG that some things have improved dramtically since that time, there has also been a flight from former absolutes - marriage, education, manners, park-keepers, bus-conductors, deferred gratification, starting-handles, neighbourliness - we all have our own lists of shit that has happened. I call mine Chronicles of Ruin.
TDG appears to be asking me, although perhaps his questions are rhetorical (being far too devastating to admit of any response):
"What is literature but ink on paper?", "what is music but sounds in sequence?", "what is painting but pigment on canvas?", do you need more or are you feeling enough of a fool already?"
The only time I feel a fool is when I persist in an argument with an idiot.
I read that several times, Mr Edgar, and tracked back over the comments, yet still couldn't understand it.
Mr TDG is often brusque and easily irritated but often, too, his insights and erudition compensate and provoke - although, in this case, I would not expect you to agree with that.
There used to be a bloke at order-order, Mr Red Despot Spotter, whose comments fluctuated from being completely indecipherable double Dutch to moments of mad, beautiful, insightful poetry. He just came and went, doing his thing, unbound by topic or even by comprehensibility in his own posts. That's how it is.
Blog comments flow this way and that and in this case most had little to do with Calley-Megrahi, even tangentially; that is the nature of the beast, any irritation on my part would be pointless, things go where they go; thankfully here they do not go as far into unpleasantness as elsewhere.
Thank you for explaining how you see these things, Mr Ishmael. I'm fairly new here, so my perspective on Mr TDG is pretty-much determined by what I see on this page. For example:
He writes: "You may well be impressed by him [Dawkins], Caractacus. Plenty of people with no scientific training are." Does he know that Caractacus has no such training? Is he claiming that people with no scientific training are incapable of understanding the arguments? Is he attempting to assert that people who do have scientific training see right through Dawkins's "astonishing poverty of life and mind"?
He writes: "a gene that makes us save all babies will lose under selection pressure to one that make us save only our own tribe's". This demonstrates a misunderstanding of very basic genetics. If such a competition arose between genes, the one that would 'win out' would be the one that produced more copies of itself, not the one that annihilated more of the dissimilar genes. Mr TDG has made the fundamental error that Dawkins warns about time and again: behaviours are selected purely on the basis of success in reproduction. That is all.
He pontificates: "Idiocy and incoherence are not the same thing" in response to a commenter who did not claim that they were the same thing. Caractacus was clearly claiming that the ability to argue coherently is evidence that the arguer is not an idiot. I would agree with that.
I might also be tempted to agree with the assertion that an inability to address the points that are being made and to resort to abuse when there is no satisfactory evidence for your position does not necessarily make Mr TDG an idiot. But, from what I've seen, I am yet to be convinced of that.
To Caesars wife..
To repeat again, Dawkins had a public debate last year in the UK contrary to what you keep asserting:-
Has Science Buried God?
7:00 pm Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Oxford Museum of Natural History, UK
Fixed Point will sponsor a discussion between Dawkins and Lennox on the main floor of the Oxford Museum of Natural History at 7:00 p.m. Both scientists will discuss atheism, the Christian faith, and the claims of their respective books: The God Delusion and God's Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? The building marks the historical site of the famed evolution debate of 1860 between Thomas Huxley and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce.
Edgar, you have diagnosed your problem very well: you only see what is in front of you, perhaps because there is not much knowledge or insight to give it context. None of this is irremediable, so here is some help.
1. The idiocy of Dawkins is indicated by the vicious reductionism of the quotation of his I reproduced. Saying that people are nothing but self-reproducing robots is like saying literature is nothing but ink on paper, music is nothing but sounds in sequence, etc.
2. Those with little scientific understanding tend to cede to Dawkins (FRS no less) because they feel they are not qualified to rebut his scientific arguments. Those with more understanding discard the whole thing: everything he says is either obvious or wrong.
3. I am afraid it is you who has an infirm grasp of genetics. If a baby dies it cannot grow to an adult and reproduce so the genes contained in it fail to propagate.
4. I am not surprised that you agree coherence excludes idiocy.
5. If you offer something foolish for comment, receiving praise for it instead would be double the insult, no?
Bruce Springsteen, the American Billy Bragg,"Same as Bob Dylan the thinking mans George Formby?
Positively Billy Bragg Street, yes. A sixty year old multi millionaire leaping about like a teenager, feigning allegiance, partnership with the blue collarites, lauding the rich man's God Emperor, Obama. What a fucking tosser, No business like show business. Do fucking grow up, mr anonymous, consign your teenage years to the past. Have you not yet seen through all this shit, are you determinedly Forever Young? Springsteen is a showbiz wanker. Just like Billy Bragg.
Elitism is unnecessary, here. I just don't like Dawkins, will that not do? Don't we reach a point where we CAN actually judge a book by its cover, at where first impressions are good enough? And if I don't like him on sight that's good enough for me. What is at work in these instantaneous judgements is the armour that ensured our survival all these generations, far more sophisticated than sophistry. I just don't like the look and the sound of Dawkins, thereafter, I may well find Reason's reasons for not liking him, but Reason is a latecomer to Survival's forces.
Mr TDG doesn't dismiss Dawkins because he's on the telly but I do. Show business used to be much less pretentious - jongleurs, tumblers, roving players and bards; ghastly, vulgar operas and then the Music Hall turns, variety-istes, song and dance men, ventriloquists, singing flower girls; now we have telly scientists, doctors, philosophers and historians, arseholes, one and all. And only in our time have actors and singers been venerated out of all proportion to their merits, their worth. Who gives a fuck what Richard Gere thinks, Tom Hanks, Paul McCartney - entertainment, that's what they do, when the proper work is done.
I may be misjudging mr anonymous above but it seems that he is defending the notion that our generation must be told truths in song, in rhyme, because we are too stupid to do proper thinking, as though we are infants, one potato, two potato, three potato four; this gun's for hire. You know, Man, I went to see Bruce and I came away, like, thinking about Poverty and War and Trade Unions, whatever they were. And shit like that.
And in that rage = at the merging of all into Infotainment - I do share some of Mr TDG's irritation with the leveling-down of, well, everything.
Regulars here will know that we are not agin music, per se, all sorts, but "music is so much less than what we are, even the birds, when they sing, its not everything" and the entertainmentisation of everything and the spurious validation of stadium rock as Art AND Politics does not counterbalance Power's stranglehold on Knowledge; the blessed children of Money still go to Oxbridge and Yale and the Sorbonne; they get, in short, to see Dawkins in person, close up, his drunkard's burst capillaries glowing like radioactive graffiti, they get to form a proper judgement, one which the director's and the editor's choices and embellishments deny his TV audience.
Springsteen, Dawkins, Bono, Dylan, Schama, the Dimblebys, Obama - the Charmed Circle of Celebrity. Fuck 'em all.
I have to slightly disagree with your analysis, Mr. Ishmael. Surely by making a judgment on first impressions one has more to potentially lose than potentially win?
Prof. Dawkins does far more than just appear on television and the manner and style of his appearance is almost certainly dictated by those producers and directors who go along with the fashion of the moment or the broadcaster in question.
In any event, I think that Dawkins has a mission and couldn't give two hoots what you or anybody else think of him - even if celebrity hood is a bi-product of such a cause. It's not as if he comments on subjects outside his own area of expertise unlike almost all the people you mentioned - Tom Hanks, Paul McCartney Richard Gere and their like etc.
I don't consider myself much of a Richard Dawkins cheerleader but I certainly feel I can identify with what frustrates and angers him. The brain washing of children into the religion of their parents, creationists who dismiss almost out of hand all scientific and historically record of evolution, Christian fundamentalists in America (who wield considerable political power in American and consequently in Middle Eastern politics) who seemingly either accept in its entirety (or cherry pick the more plausible bits) the bible.
Since I decided to stop watching television ten years ago I maybe less sensitive to Dawkins than you are and so concede that this may be a factor in my reaction.
Perhaps, therefore, this is a case of a book having more than one cover?
That's very elegantly put, Mr caractacus and I won't quibble with you, save to say that I and I guess you know all this stuff anyway and I don't need a telly academic to tell me what I already know, or to clarify it for me.
Somebody here, recently, was saying we now have a fingertip library of everything online, we are all potentially equally polymath, Google ramming Bangalore torpedoes beneath the specialists ramparts, the GPs, for instance, hate it.
Dawkins, in this interlude, is just a telly-specialist's arse to kick, any one of them will do, I think that, like the lawyers, they have stolen away the key of knowledge.
Thank you, Mr. Ishmael, for your reply. There were some further points I wanted to mention but I'm shortly off to the cinema (by invitation) and so must dash. No doubt there'll be other opportunities in the future...
I wish you a pleasant evening.
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