Saturday, June 7, 2008

Terra Incognita 37 Heidegger, Africa, Quotes, Children

Terra Incognita
Issue 37
“Written to enlighten, guaranteed to offend”

A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel

Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/

May 31st, 2008

1) The terrible secret: Heidegger's shadow and the rise of Islamism: The shadow of the Philosopher Martin Heidegger is phenomenal. He influenced the French deconstructionists such as Jacques Derrida, the popular French philosopher Michel Foucault, the Marxist Herbert Marcuse and the theorist of the ‘other’ Emanuel Levinas. Much of Western thought is enthralled with him and PhDs and M.A are produced at every major American University analyzing every facet of his thought. There is one problem: he was a Nazi. The truth is that Heidegger’s dangerous philosophy has been translated into terms palatable and popular among the left and that the current leftist love of Islamism can be directly traced to the influence of Heidegger. The love of Islamism by Western intellectuals is merely the recreation of Heidegger’s Nazism with German Nationalism replaced with Islamic Nationalism.

2) War over nothing in Africa? A recent article in the New York Times described a standoff between Djibuti and Eritrea as being fought over sand by two tiny nations. This is a decidedly European Western perspective and says a great deal about the way people are taught to look at war today. Since war is ‘old school’ in Europe we are told that therefore any nation that fights with another is fighting over ‘nothing’ and the nations themselves are derided for daring to have any attachment to their own soil.

3) On the Proper Use of Quotation Marks: The BBC seems to be caught in a quotation quagmire of grammatical nonsense. Certain headlines receive quotes that don’t need them and others don’t receive quotes when they probably should have them. This is only the tip of the iceberg in the world of journalism where the quotation mark is not used to signify speech but rather to deride and marginalize ideas so that the journalist may editorialize in an article while pretending to be neutral.

4) The State and the Children: The recent seizure of more than 400 children of a ‘cult’ in Texas was applauded by child welfare activists everywhere. It turns out dozens of the ‘children’ were in fact adults, some in their 20s. Now the state is busy reclassifying them, as if the state can determine when someone is over 18 (the age the state considers people adults) and when they are not. But the arbitrary and capricious abduction of these 400 people by government authorities points to the way the state has come to view itself vis-à-vis our children; the parents no longer have any rights to their children and not even the right to due process before those children are removed from the home. This is an out of control situation bred out of the extremist view that the state knows what is better for children than the parents of those children. If only the state could have intercourse and get pregnant then it wouldn’t need humans and could raise the children completely without the parents. Alas the State still needs us breeders to produce the children so that it can then police how we raise them.



The terrible secret: Heidegger's shadow and the rise of Islamism
May 29th, 2008
Seth J. Frantzman

The 1977 cult classic animated post-apocalyptic fantasy Wizards tells the story of two wizard brothers confronting eachother in a world inhabited by dwarfs, ferries and other mythical beasts. One of the brothers discovers an old projector and Nazi propaganda films. Through the use of projection he is able to destroy the simple-minded, but good natured, nations of elves and dwarfs. The movie is supposedly a commentary on the dangers of technology and propaganda but it poses an interesting question for our own world. What if Nazi propaganda lives on, not in the medium of movies but in the medium of the intellectual world and through it in our daily lives? What if, unbeknownst to us, we live in a world that is deeply and troublingly affected by the shadow, not merely of Nazism, but of its chief Philosopher, Martin Heidegger?

Keith Windschuttle, the Australian historian and critic, has proposed this very problem in his book Killing History. Here he tells the story of the leading French philosophers of the second half of the 20th century, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. Windschuttle proposes that the philosophy of Foucault is based primarily on that of Heidegger and Nietzsche and Derrida's philosophy is predicated primarily on Heidegger.

Heidegger was born in 1889 to a Catholic family in Meßkirch in Germany. He completed his PhD on Duns Scotus, a 13th century Franciscan theologian and philosopher, in 1916 and served in the German Army during the First World War. By 1933 he had become the rector of the University of Freiburg and a Nazi. In his inaugural address the 'Self Assertion of the German University' he played on themes of nationalism, severity and essence: "We regard the German University as the 'high' school that, grounded in science and by means of science, educates and disciplines the leaders and the guardians of the destiny of the German people…Out of the resoluteness of the German students to stand their ground while Germany destiny is in its most extreme distress comes a will to the essence of the university…the much-lauded 'academic freedom' will be expelled from the German university, for this freedom was not genuine because it was only negative." Later in 1945 he would defend his decision to be a Nazi in a letter to his son "The rectorate was an attempt to see something in the movement that had come to power, beyond all its failings and crudeness, that was much more far-reaching and that could perhaps one day bring a concentration on the Germans' Western historical essence." Heidegger was a great critic of technology, connecting it to the crimes of Nazism that he was very much a part of; noting in 1949"Agriculture is now a motorized food industry, the same thing in its essence as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and the extermination camps, the same thing as blockades and the reduction of countries to famine, the same thing as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs." But his connection to Nazism was not merely an accident of circumstance, the way the present Pope Benedict's being forced to join the Hitler Youth was. Heidegger was an active collaborator. He forbid his former mentor Edmund Husserl, a German Jew, from using the University's library. In 1941 when Heidegger reissued his philosophical work Being and Time he removed the dedication to Husserl.

But Heidegger's most interesting success was among Jews. Hannah Arendt, who blamed the Jews for the Holocaust by referring to their own contribution to their deaths and who called the Nazis merely 'banal' bureaucrats, had an affair with Heidegger that lasted from before his period as a Nazi through the post-war period. The woman, Arendt, who condemned Israel for executing the Nazi Eichmann was therefore sleeping with the chief philosopher of Nazism even while Eichmann was in the dock in Jerusalem. The Jewish poet Paul Celan was a friend of Heidegger’s after the war even though Celan had been in a Nazi camp. But Heidegger's greatest achievement was in penetrating French thought where Jacques Derrida, a Jew, became enthralled with him. Later Foucault also built upon his ideas.

The man most responsible for bringing the terrible secret of Heidegger's connection to Nazism, and therefore the French leftist reliance on Nazi ideals, to light was Victor Farias who brought the connection to light in his 1987 book, Heidegger and Nazism. But Farias went one step further in 2005 when he dared to challenge the saint and martyr of Chilean history, Salvador Allende, who had been overthrown and killed in a coup in 1973. By analyzing the early writings of Allende, who was born in 1908, Farias showed that Allende was not only a rabid anti-semite but that Allende also supported the Nazi euthanasia and sterilization program that was supposedly designed to rid the world of the mentally ill. After connecting Allende to Nazism Farias came under even harsher intellectual assault than he had when he connected French philosophy to Nazism.

But the terrible secret is much larger than Farias revealed. The entire field of deconstructionist philosophy is polluted with Nazism, including the work of Jacques Lacan (whose daughter Judith Miller was a Maoist and close associate of Foucault when he taught at Paris VIII at Vincennes). Paul de Man, the Belgian Deconstructionist literary critic was polluted with Nazism. While writing some 200 articles for a collaborationist literary journal he noted in one piece that “the Semitic infiltration of all aspects of European life" had been resisted in the realm of European literature. When it came to light that De Man, who had been at Harvard, Yale, Cornell and Johns Hopkins, had written these articles the Jewish philosopher and Heidegger lover Jacques Derrida came to his defense, noting that “to judge, to condemn the work or the man ... is to reproduce the exterminating gesture which one accuses de Man of not having armed himself against sooner."

But the infection of one field of philosophy and a handful of intellectuals and their students in France, the U.S and Germany is surely not the end of the world? What is interesting is to note the degree to which Heidegger influenced the creation of Post-modernism and through it the creation of the Post-Humanist ethos of self hate, love of the Other and support for Islamism. In fact the advent of Post-Humanism should be seen as a way for Western intellectuals to support that thing that is at their root, Nazism, abroad, so long as it is named Islam. How does this work? Heidegger was a Nazi. But being a Nazi was unpalatable after the war. Heidegger used the fact that many influential Jews enjoyed him and his work in order to infect the mindsets of the likes of Derrida and Arendt. From there it was merely a step to Foucault, post-modernism and Post-Humanism. But the central thesis of Post-Humanism and its pillars of Diversity, Multi-culturalism, Moral-Relativism and the Other, is that what is authentic and wonderful abroad, such as Islamism, must be hated at home so long as it is called 'Christian Right wing fundamentalism'. Foucault's support of the Islamic Revolution in Iran was merely the beginning. What Foucault saw in Iran was enjoyable to him because he himself was a worshipper of Heidegger's Nazism. But since he couldn't love Nazism as home he found it abroad, in its modern form, known as Islamism.

The rise of Islamism abroad and in Europe allows for Heidegger Nazism to rejoin its liberalistic descendants. The extreme left which spent the period 1945-1989 worshipping Marxism and Communism and bathing in the blood of the millions killed in the name of Sacred Causes (to use the title of Michael Burleigh's book) was itself infused with the ideas of Heidegger through none other than Herbert Marcuse (born 1898 in Germany), a student of Heidegger's, who, like so many of those who loved the Nazi Heidegger, was a Jew. Thus Heidegger's Nazism lay dormant for more than seventy years, weaseling its way into deconstructionism and Marxism and into the most popular philosophers in the Western world, alive in the halls of Yale, Harvard and the College de France. His ideas were everywhere. At Louisiana State University Gregory Schufreider, the Director of Graduate studies is an expert and adherent as is Francois Rafful. In 2002 Andrea Conque even submitted for an M.A thesis a paper entitled 'Heidegger, Levinas and the Feminine.' There has been a Heidegger Circle operating in the U.S rotating between Universities such as DePaul, Villanova, Vanderbilt and Tulane since 1966. Meanwhile the leftist adherents to Heidegger kept his ideas alive in their Marxism and Maoism that was popular at Western Universities. The rise of Islamism and radical Muslims such as Sayyid Qutb and Muahmmed Wahhabi had nothing to do with Heidegger Justas the rise of Nazism was not concerned with the existence of Heidegger. But as Nazism was a movement that Heidegger saw promise in and Islamism was a movement Foucault saw promise in, so we can see that the return of Nazism, in the form of Islamism, in fact completes a trajectory and binds together the divergent strains of the Heidegger infection. Islamism brings together Post-Humanists, and it is an inspiration for radical Western intellectuals, but more than that it also is the return of Heidegger. So long he has been the subject of admiration and dogged defense by his intellectual followers, so long they have waited for his return, but instead of Heidegger or Jesus they receive Mohammed. But for them, caught up in the malaise of the worship of the Other, there is no difference. Muhammad is just as good as Heidegger and Islamism as an ethos to redeem the soul and provide some sort of essence, spiritual striving and authenticity is as good as Nazism was.

They dare not speak the terrible secret. They dare not look back and realize that their heritage is the heritage of the Nazi. Today the British colleges boycott Israeli Universities under the pretext of defending the powerless. In 1933 the same inclination led them to bar the Jews from Freiburg University. Heidegger was their instrument. He was a 'friend of the Jews'. A friend of Emmanual Levinas, the popularizer of the theory of the Other, Martin Heidegger barred their mutual friend Husserl from using the library. But that act. That one act casts a shadow over us all. Nazism was the highest point of Western Civilization, western Civilization at its most extreme and perverse. Now intellectuals see a new high point for us all. Using the ideology of The Other they see Islam and they bow down to it. In their offices across the world this strain of evil that has been dormant arises again and instead of a strait arm salute the intellectual gets on his knees before god and he bows down to Mohammed and he loves his new religion. He has waited. But who will struggle against this sickening perversion. Who can today say they are not influenced by this thing? Who can step outside of Western Civilization and see what has happened and understand that Islam is the West, the two are coming closer everyday and there are few who will free their minds of these strange notions.



War over nothing? The media and war in the modern era
Seth J. Frantzman
May 26th, 2008

The May 26th, 2008 headline for one article in the New York Times read ‘Eritrea and Djibouti square off over wasteland at the horn of Africa.’ The article became more condescending as it went on. It claimed that “two of Africa's tiniest nations squaring off over a few piles of uninhabited sand…The disputed zone includes a hill called Gabla, or Ras Doumeira, and a small island called Doumeira, deserted except for the occasional fishermen who use it as a pit stop. It is all sand out here - miles of it, trimming a Windex-colored sea… These two countries barely register on the map… [it may be a] ploy to distract Eritreans from growing internal problems.”

But the insults are mostly directed at Eritrea: “Eritrea's less-than-neighborly relations with just about all of its neighbors. In the 1990s, Eritrea clashed with Yemen over the Hanish Islands in the Red Sea; battled Sudan-backed rebels on its western frontier; and fought Ethiopia, the second most populous country in sub-Saharan Africa, over a little border town called Badme. That conflict killed 100,000 people and is still not resolved.”
The article admits that the problem may well have origins in the past: “map itself is part of the problem. Scholars say that the border area was never properly demarcated and that the best guidance on who owns what goes back to a vague communiqué between France and Italy more than 100 years ago. They were the colonial powers at the time, with France occupying what is now Djibouti and Italy controlling what is now Eritrea.”
The journalist whose name is Jeffrey Gettleman was annoyed that the armies wouldn’t allow him full access and didn’t speak his language: “ ‘No pictures, no pictures,’ one Eritrean soldier yelled. When asked what he and his men were doing there, he just shook his head, ‘No English.’… The Eritrean soldiers were not very approachable. When asked for their insights, they shook their heads viciously.”

The problem is that this article represents the media’s disturbing decision in recent years to discredit every non-European country’s decisions to have armed conflict and fight over ‘wastelands’. Another mainstream media outlet described the Golan Heights, over which Israel and Syria have fought two wars, as being about as important to Israel as a ‘picnic’ site. Europeans frequently express wonder at Serbian anger over losing Kosovo with newspapers regularly opining that Serbia must choose to either ‘move forward’ towards the EU or ‘remain in the past’ and ‘cling’ to Kosovo (perhaps the way Barack Obama describes Americans as ‘clinging’ to religion and guns). This decision by European and Western media to denigrate foreign conflicts shows the degree to which Westerners have forgotten their own history and especially Europeans have forgotten about all the wars they have fought. It shows the total arrogance that has engulfed the European and western leftist mindset.

How many people died in the First World War? 20 million. For what? Not for a wasteland. It was because of a murdered archduke. That is right. One royal. The Crimean war, in which almost a million died, was fought over the right of one power versus another to have their church have more access to the Holy Places in Jerusalem and Bethlehem. But it was not fought over the Holy Land since it was all about privileges in two churches, not about anything material. What was the War of Spanish Succession about? It was about which power would lay claim to the Spanish throne on the death of Charles II in 1700. Europeans have fought so many countless wars over so many wastelands and useless monarchs and worthless causes that it is surprising to hear criticism for Djibouti and Eritrea for ‘daring’ to fight over an island and a strip of ‘sand’. But this is the typical characterization by Europeans and the western media of conflicts throughout the world. Kashmir is said to be a conflict over ‘nothing’ because it takes place in a barren and desolate place where few people live. But it is apparently about more than that for India and Pakistan.

Does the size of the country mean the country has less of a right to fight over its territory? Gettleman claims that “These two countries barely register on the map.” Is that true? Eritrea is 45,000 square miles (121,000 Sq. Km). Scotland is 30,000. Austria is 32,000. Eritrea is actually the 106th largest country in the world. There are 157 smaller ones at least a dozen of which are in Europe (Slovenia, Croatia, Switzerland, Portugal, Belgium, Luxemburg, Slovakia, the Netherlands, Ireland, Montenegro, Andorra and the Czech Republic). Djibouti is the 158th largest country at 23,000 Sq. Km. But even it is bigger than Israel at 20,770 Sq. Km. Yet Europeans seem to find plenty of time focus on the relative ‘importance’ of the conflict in Israel. Gaza is not referred to as a ‘wasteland’ of sand, when in fact that is precisely what it is. Sinai too.

Europeans seem to think that the causes and conflicts they have found themselves in are very important. Northern Ireland is only 13,000 sq km. That means it is almost half the size of Djibouti. Yet for dozens of years during the ‘troubles’ we all had to hear how important that place was. We all had to learn about Bloody Sunday and we had to watch In the Name of the Father. During the Balkan wars we all had to hear how important Bosnia was. It was not just a ‘wasteland’. So where do Europeans and Mr. Gettleman get the arrogance to decide that for Africans to fight over some worthless island is so unacceptable. Perhaps for Eritreans it is the most important thing. Recall that the Syrian need for the Golan is based on damaged Syrian ‘pride’ (although its not clear what they ever had to be proud of). Perhaps for Eritrea this slice of sand is in fact wrapped up in her national pride. But that pride apparently is to hard to understand.

The truth is that Mr. Gettleman was born in his own sliver of land, in Illinois. He attended Cornell University and then became the director of ‘Save the Children’ for Ethiopia. He was a ‘Marshall Scholar’ at Oxford University. In 2006 he became the East African Bureau Chief for the New York Times, stationed in Nairobi, Kenya. But this particularly arrogant leftist American seems to forget that just because people do not speak English, as those Eritrean soldiers refused to speak with him, does not make their decision to fight over something less important. Perhaps Mr. Gettleman forgets that his state was once a ‘wasteland’ considered part of the Northwest Territory. But it was a place dear to its French trappers, Native-American tribes such as the Potawatomi and to Mormons and early American settlers. On August 15th, 1812 Fort Dearborn, near modern day Chicago was the site of a vicious massacre during the War of 1812 in which more than 50 Americans were killed. The massacre is today commemorated on the municipal flag of Chicago, the first red star on the flag representing the victims. Surely it was a wasteland these men died for, but perhaps for them it was also something more. Had Mr. Gettleman lived in 1812 we can be assured he would have denigrated the war of 1812 and found a way to make it seem like a stupid conflict over nothing. But it was the War of 1812 that gave the United States the Star Spangled Banner.

The world deserves better media coverage. Foreigners deserve more empathy and at least the tacit consideration that their motives for doing things are just as important as our own. The European stereotype of worldwide conflicts as being unimportant and fought over meaningless historical baggage or over ‘wastelands’ not only denigrates the dead but it also is a flagrant example of hypocrisy. The West was allowed to fight many bloody wars for hundreds of years, most of which were fought over mind numbingly ambiguous and seemingly unimportant things. To be true to our own history and recognize the importance of these conflicts is a must in order to hang on to our heritage, to allow others to do the same is a must in a world in which people deserve respect for their decision to love their countries and love their land. Just because the Irish ‘troubles’ are over and the Scottish have long since put down the sword and the kilt in their fight against the British does not mean there are not people out there today who still hold their swords in their hands and prefer their heritage to some meaningless secular urban cesspool.




On the proper use of quotation marks
Seth J. Frantzman
May 13th, 2008

The quotation mark can be used to signify two things. It can be used to signify speech, either recollected or direct transcription. It can also be used to cast aspersions on the authenticity of something. Thus the word 'terrorist' has found itself inside quotes more and more as news organizations show their objection to the word. The related use of 'so-called' before 'war on terror' shows an equal critique of the media's concern that the war on terror is not, in fact, a war on terror.

But the misuse of quotes is getting quotes is getting worse everyday. When quotes were put around words and terms such as 'honor killing' or 'terror' or 'freedom fighter' one could understand that the use of the quote resulted either from the commentators disagreement with the term (i.e how can a killing be honorable?) or that the commentator objected to the way certain people had been described (as freedom fighters or terrorists for instance). But now people have forgotten entirely where quotes should be put and where they shouldn't. The BBC is the worst offender.

Take a sample of the BBC website's headlines on May 13th, 2008.
*Senior Afghan officials suspended
*Bangladesh vote 'in December'
*Fighting 'continues' in Kashmir
*Nine dead in Indian rebel attack
*Jury shown airline 'bomb impact'
* British tourists 'safe' in China
* Rocket 'bounced off' army officer
*Technical fault grounded Nimrod
*Blair 'secretly advising Brown'
*Baghdad clashes 'kill seventeen gunmen'
*Japan tourists 'freed in Yemen'
*Checkpoint attack kills 10 Iraqis
*Israeli fuel allows Gaza reprieve

What is the logic behind these quotation marks? Some of them are properly used. For instance the notion of Blair 'secretly advising Brown' is in fact an allegation made by someone and the quote is taken from the allegation. It is not, yet, a fact. But what about the word 'freed'? The Japanese tourists are either free or they are not. The BBC put the whole statement in quotes because a 'security official' said them. But why not check to see if the Japanese are in fact 'free'. Why is 'in Yemen' also in quotes? Is there some discussion over whether they were freed 'in Yemen' or somewhere else? Is the notion of 'Yemen' up for debate? What about the dead Iraqis. In one case the words 'kill seventeen gunmen' is in quotes but in another the words 'kills 10 Iraqis' is not. It turns out that the Iraqi police claimed ten Iraqis died at a checkpoint while the U.S military claimed to have killed 17 gunmen. Why take issue with one and not the other? If the BBC rejected the use of the word 'gunmen' then why not just put that word in quotes? What about the 'safe' British tourists? Aren’t they either safe or not safe? Or is a matter of them being safe in the sense that they survived the earthquake but not safe in the sense that they are still in China and thus might be victims of Chinese nationalist violence? How about the rocket that 'bounced off' an army officer? Didn't it either bounce off or not? What about the fighting that 'continues'. Doesn't it either continue or not. Is there some sort of half continuation? Why aren’t there quotes on the sentence "Israeli fuel allows Gaza reprieve"? Many parts of this could be put in quotes. It could be 'Israeli fuel' allows Gaza reprieve. This would question whether or not the fuel was actually 'Israeli'. Can fuel have a nationality? R perhaps it could be: Israeli fuel allows Gaza 'reprieve'. This would question the degree of reprieve the Gazans were actually getting. Perhaps it isn't much. Who says they are getting this reprieve? What about these "Nine dead in Indian rebel attack"? How do we know it is nine? Government sources. So why not put it in quotes? How do we know they are rebels? Perhaps that should go in quotes?

There is absolutely no rhyme or reason to the excessive use of quotes by the BBC. Every other BBC headline gets quotation marks seemingly randomly inserted into it. Some death tolls get quotes, some do not. This is not because the BBC has confirmed some. It is simply random.

This is the sin of the use of the quotation mark. It is no longer something that identifies actual quotes. It is a political tool. The use of quotes express an opinion. When something is in quotes it is suddenly suspect. In the old days quotes were used to back up information. Now it is the opposite. They cause the information to be less worthy. Thus if someone says: "America is a free country" it rings true. But if instead we read: America is a 'free' country, we suddenly wonder 'how free is it?'

The quote is a pernicious political weapons that has been introduced by the media and writers in order to confuse reader sand distract them. It is used to great affect so that statements that have no truth to them are passed off as truth while those that are true are passed of as suspicious. Take the BBC's infamous editorializing on an article about the death of an SAS soldier in Iraq. The final line says "the SAS killed two 'bombmakers', they may have created many more." The author of this sentence, Paul Wood, should be ashamed. Why is bombmakers in quotes and the words 'many more' is not? The words 'many more' refers to the word bombmakers. Wood is saying in short 'by killing two bombmakers the army may have created many more bombmakers'. But once the word 'bombmaker' is placed in quotes it casts aspersions on the idea that the dead men were actually making bombs. SO by killing them what is being created? More quotation marks? More fictitious bombmakers? More real bombmakers? Who knows? We will never know because the use of quotes has obscured the truth and made an editorial seem true. There is no doubt left in the readers mind: the dead men might have been innocent but by killing them the army has created more terrorists. In truth the terrorists were guilty and the army hasn't created anything but two shallow graves that now need to be dug.

The state and the children
Seth J. Frantzman
May 23rd, 2008

They come in the night or in the day and they take your children. That is what the government does. That is what befell more than 400 children who were said to be in danger because their parents, so the media claimed, belonged to a ‘cult’. The evidence that this cult existed was that a few of the teenage girls had become pregnant and the ‘cult’ members were different clothing from the surrounding community. Difference was what go them in trouble. But if the government has the right to take all the children from any community of people based solely on the fact that a few of those children have been abused or become pregnant than where does that leave freedom? Could the government, based on the fact that a few Christians molested their children or a few teenage Christian girls became pregnant, take all the children of Christian families? Could they take away all the children of Jewish families if a few Jews were found to be abusing their children? What of secular people? When a teenage secular girl gets pregnant the government does not seize all the children of secular people based on the fact that a few children are abused by their secular parents. But why not? Secular society rapes children, molests children, imprisons girls in cellars, sells children into sex slavery and does a thousand other terrible bestial things to children. Why not remove all the children of secular families for their own protection based on the fact that 1% of the children of secular parents will be abused in some form or another? This was the ‘evidence’ required by Child Protective Services for removing the children from the Texas ‘cult’. A few children became pregnant so all were guilty.

When the state, the government, can come and remove all the children of a given community based on the fact that a few members of that community broke the law then there is no law. There is only brutality and the fascist government removing children, taking them hundreds of miles away, splitting apart families, splitting apart brothers and sisters and placing them in ‘foster’ care with adults the children have never met. There is actually a higher percentage chance that the foster parents will rape and abuse 1% of these 400 Texas children than there was a chance they would be abused while in the ‘cult’. Everyone knows what befalls foster children. They are sold into sex slavery, beaten, tied up, worked and used so that some, a minority to be sure, of foster parents can benefit from the state subsidies. Yet we do not remove all children from foster parents based on the failings of a few. This is because the state is behind the foster parent system. The state will not admit that it is itself to blame for running a virtual ‘cult’ by distributing children like chattel among people.

Where does the state derive its right to take children and distribute them like bread? When did the state acquire this right? What year? Where is it written that the state owns the children and that the children can thus be divided up as the state pleases? Where are the rights of a parent who brought the children into this world? The state glories in its ability, its power, to send mindless bureaucrats to remove the children of people. This is the ultimate power than man can have, the power to split up families. It was the most abhorred power of the slave masters during the time of slavery. The power to sell the mother or sell her children and not sell the rest of the family. It was among the most horrific aspect of Nazism was its assault on Jewish children who were torn from their parents arms and gassed immediately at the Death Camps. Yet the modern state now performs these actions in a similar way, without the brutality, but with the soft savagery of the government and bureaucracy. Once one is targeted by the government and its social workers there is no winning. As the Social Worker says to the parents “these children are mine now.” That is all too common saying by the government directed at its citizens. But the citizens never relinquished their right to their own children. Madison, Jay and Hamilton in the Federalist Papers never declared that the state shall have the power over the children.

On May 23rd, 2008 The Third Court of Appeals in Austin said the state failed to show the 440 youngsters removed from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints village known as the Yearning for Zion ranch in Eldorado, Texas, were in any immediate danger, the only grounds under Texas law for taking children from their parents without court action. Perhaps Texas has come to realize that the power of the state to remove children in danger does not warrant the blanket destruction of the lives of 440 children based on the fact that 1% of them were found to be pregnant. Otherwise one would like to see the government take such action against secular people and remove all the children of secular people in America since a much higher percentage of their teenagers are raped, prostituted and molested by their secular parents and uncles and cousins.
The case in Texas is but the tip of the iceberg. The state is a naturally coercive element. When given power from the people the state inevitably abuses that power. The media and the public are quick to lynch people they are told are ‘abusing children’. The same was true in the 1980s in the case of the McMartin trial. In the spring of 1984 at total of 360 children were said to have been abused by a daycare run by the McMartin family in California. After six years of trial the state was unable to prove that any of the allegations that included not only molestation and sodomy but outlandish allegations of rape on airplanes, rape of children in car washes and other bizarre events, were true. One child identified Chuck Norris, the film star, as an abuser during the trial. A similar sense of hysteria and wild accusations have surrounded the Texas ‘cult’.
But little by little things are starting to become clear. Attorneys for the state's Child Protective Services agency have been conceding, one by one, that many of the mothers authorities cited as evidence that the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints committed widespread sexual abuse of girls are actually adults. They had admitted by midday Thursday that 15 of the 31 mothers listed as underage are adults; one is actually 27. A few are as young as 18, but many are at least 20. Lets reiterate that. The state, in order to achieve its goal of abusing the people, took away more than 400 children and claimed as ‘evidence’ for the need to remove the children that underage girls were pregnant. Now it turns out the women removed as ‘teenagers’ are in fact adults.
The only remedy for a government that is abusive and out of control is to overthrow that government. In a democracy that means using the power of the vote. The Texas ‘cult’ has now requested voter registration cards for each of its members who reside in Schleicher County. That totals as of today some 600 new voters out of 2,800 member community. The sect property is the third-biggest taxpayer in the rural ranching county, accounting for roughly 18 percent of its tax base."As residents of the state, we have to take responsibility for part of this," said Willie Jessop, the leader of the church. "We were naive enough to believe there was good people in government to protect our rights." Indeed they were naive. They believed in America. They believed that they had a right to their property and a right to life and liberty. They believed in justice. But the media does not believe in justice. While the media fawns over Saudi Arabia and Muslim women in veils the media has crucified these people. CNN refers to them as “that polygamist cult.”(the same CNN that waxes poetic during the annual Muslim Hajj and speaks glowingly of the ‘exotic’ polygamy that takes place in Islam.) CNN also reports that the teenagers were ‘re-classified’ as adults. One does not ‘re-classify’ someone as an adult. If a person is over the age of 18 in the United States they are considered an ‘adult’. It is not a matter of ‘classification’. This is not science. A person has either lived 18 years or not. While it is true that adults can have the mental capacity of children and that children can, under circumstances, be tried as adults, they are not ‘re-classified’ as adults in the sense that they cannot suddenly vote and buy alcohol and cigarettes.

Society hates the polygamist cult in Texas and reviles it as a child molesters heaven. But society is wrong. Society is always wrong. The mass of humanity that condemn others is always wrong. Its hysteria is always incorrect. People may tease and cajole these ‘cult’ members for their clothing and speech. It is typical of secular society to point fingers. That is what secularism does. But should secularism point fingers when it is secular Europe that imports millions of female underage sex slaves yearly from Eastern Europe for the enjoyment of European men. Secularism is a putrid cesspool. Were secularism to be judged by the standards it judges others by, in the sense that it judges all these cult members as molesters because of the acts of a few, then secularism would truly need to be deprived of its children, for who can raise children in a place where beneath the homes of many are sex slaves and porn dens and rape rooms? One can point fingers. But each secular neighbourhood has a child molester. There is not a single block in any city in the world that is full of secular people and does not have rapists and child molesters living in it. There is not one block that does not have someone downloading child porn and downloading snuff rape movies and contains men who go on sex tours to Thailand. And yet secular people sit at home and point and say ‘these people!’.

2 comments:

Ellen said...

You make some valid points about the use of quotes. I used to write the term "honor" killing (i.e., putting only the word honor in quotes, to indicate I personally do not find such killings in any way honorable). It seemed less clumsy than writing over and over again so-called honor killing, while still using the phrase in a way most people understand. But lately I've just dispensed with the quotes and refer to them as dishonor killings.

Ellen R. Sheeley, Author
"Reclaiming Honor in Jordan"
http://www.redroom.com/author/ellen-r-sheeley

NG said...

You should visit the Vocabula Review.