The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
My short notes on this incredible film:
* Possible for 1 man to detect evil early on, and to resist evil
* Bonhoeffer excelled at pointing out that for any man or nation to presume that God takes sides or endorses any particular position is very pretentious
* God is *community* — God is present to the extent that community of man thrives
* If the working poor turn away from the church, it is failing; if the petty bourgeoisie flock to the church it is failing and pretentious
* In times of economic crisis, fascism can be attractive to BOTH the industrial leaders AND the forlorn working poor
* New York fellowship focused him on social ethics, energized him with exposure to writing by black authors, pious singing within black churches
* Purpose of ethics and theology is to change the world for the better
* Adam Clayton Powell Senior made the black church in New York into a political and social force
* Black Christ has rapturous passion, contrasts sharply with white didactic Christ
* Friendships with pacifists taught him that “nothing in scripture permits man to destroy the body of Christ” (the community)
* For every person that is unemployed, 2-5 go hungry
* Hitler called on God, claimed God, Quoted God. For Hitler, God was a “completely ideological God” according to Bishop Wolfgang Huber, one of those interviewed
* Church in Germany was guilty of preparing the way for Hitler, setting the stage for an authoritarian or “acceptance” state
* At 27, Bonhoeffer addressed nation via radio, suggested that the leader as “idol” was sacrilegious. His broadcast was cut off.
* Bonhoeffer brought the Bible alive–taught his student to read the Bible as if God were *here and now* speaking to *you* personally.
* Hitler called on God, but he was actually in competition with God for the role of SAVIOR of the German people.
* Hitler legalized church prejudices against Jews going back to Martin Luther
* Must distinguish between anti-Judaism (conflict of faiths) and anti-Semitism (racism)
* According to Bonhoeffer, Church has three options in times of crisis and state abuse:
1) Ask the State if its actions are legitimate
2) Support the victims (Bonhoeffer is specific in saying Church must support all victims, even if not part of the Church)
3) Oppose the State
His work focused on the ease with which false loyalty (e.g. to a President rather than a Constitution), false Church is a easy path for most.
Catholic Church signed a Concordat with Hitler, agreeing not to resist.
Others did resist–Pastors Emergency League, claimed 7,000 members out of a possible 27,000
Bonhoeffer was so exceptional that he was invited by Gandhi to visit him
“Peace is the opposite of security” (one is actual, the other is enforced)
* Study, service, prayer.
* Oppressed people of color have piety and also have something to teach to all Christians.
* What cost oppression? The cost is the loss of God.
* War, and the persecution of Jews, are injustice incarnate. “One is not true to God when one has a lax conception of war or of justice,” This according to Bishop Albrecht Schonherr
* Bonhoeffer was a double agent, engaged in plot to kill Hitler
* Ethics is situational–will of God has infinite variations. Ethics is less about principles and more about flexibility. Ethics is an act of faith–every minute, every day.
* Hitler dominated Germany for over a decade.
* Bonhoeffer was marched naked to the gallows and hung. His last words, “For me this is the beginning of life.”
* His message: live completely in this world–thus do we throw ourselves into the hands of God–take ALL suffering seriously.
This was a moving DVD. It offers superb organization, superb visuals, and superb choral music in the background. This DVD was so thoughtful I found myself replaying sections 3X to 5X.
This was so good it has focused me on my next book–instead of national security (forced peace)–I am going for INFORMATION PEACEKEEPING: Ethics, Theology, and Collective Intelligence (inherent peace).
If you've gotten this far, you need to see this DVD. Available at Blockbuster and also well worth buying as a recurring reflection piece .
See also, with reviews:
Gandhi (Widescreen Two-Disc Special Edition)
The Snow Walker
The Last Samurai (Two-Disc Special Edition)
March Or Die
The author opens with an examination of how the “story of Israel” has gone from core reality (a place so barren it makes the Congo look good, Palestinians kicked off their land after Israeli terrorists expelled the British occupying power) to a “land of milk and honey” with deserts made prosperous by Israeli industry–he neglects to mention that Israeli agriculture contributes 3% of the GDP while using 50% of the water, and that most of the water is being stolen by Israeli from underneath land outside Israeli territory.
From an “information operations” perspective, this is a really fascinating and well-told story of how Israel created several myths that sold not only in the USA but all over the world. I write in the margin, “Israel is the ultimate Potemkin village.” The author is also good at exploring the early signs that these myths are being exploded, the world is catching on, and US support for Israel may be on the verge (within five to seven years) of being withdrawn.
As he is both an American Jew and a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, I give this author special marks for combining a loyalty to his faith with a loyalty to the truth. The Islamic-oriented review from New Jersey adds a frame of reference I am not qualified to comment on, but I recognize it as valuable. Among the most important observations the author makes early on are these: 1) when Israel became an occupying power and got into the business of assassination as a routine method, censorship of Jews by Jews became commonplace–this was the “new aspect” of the Israeli regime. 2) At the same time, in America, self-censorship and popular protest of Jewish readers against Jewish writers critical of Israel, became more marked. The Jews of America–at least the vocal ones cited by the author–simply do not want to hear the truth–they are blindly bonded to the myths.
Sharon is slammed in this book many times over. The author credits Sharon with being the original Israeli army sponsor for assignations, and the several pages on Israeli assassination history and policy are alone worth the price of the book (pages 39-51). Sharon is recalled in the book by General Pundak as “a disgraceful officer–a liar, cheater, a swindler and suck-up, a killer and a coward.” I believe this–sounds like Chalabi and Arafat–the three were made for each other and disgrace us all.
The author explores a second crime against humanity characteristic of the Israeli bureaucracy: collective punishment. He builds a bridge from this–a policy that is explicitly forbidden by the Geneva Convention–to Israel's collective loss of shame and loss of emotional commitment to the “all for one and one for all” attitude that marked the early years. Now it is everyone for themselves, never mind what the authorities do “in our name.”
The chapter on why Palestinians do not have a state is full of interesting observations, including the author's view that the US audience simply does not know the Palestinian side of the story; that the occupation is costing 18% of Israel's GDP (just 1% over the 17% of the Israeli government budget that we provide them out of the US taxpayer's pocket–two different stacks of money, but the comparison needs to be made); and that the isolation of Gaza, and the honeycomb nature of the walls and barriers, are so grotesque as to be both Kafkaesque and Warsaw ghettoish–the victim has indeed become the perpetrator, and Israel cannot be seen, in its treatment of the Palestinians, as anything other than fascist and abusive.
Having torn apart the Israeli side, the author then moves to the Palestinian side, and two major ideas stay with me: first, the concept of honor so deeply rooted in Arab culture, an honor that the Israeli's are attacking with every humility they can impose; and second, the utter contemptible corruption of Arafat and the Palestinian security authorities.
The book moves to a conclusion with a retrospective look at the bargain with the devil made by the Israeli security authorities very early on, when they accepted a dictatorship of the government from the zealot orthodox rabbis. He also explores the various “tribes” now within Israel, concluding that two thirds of the “new Jews” are not Jews at all, but simply Russian and other opportunists who have succumbed to the global covert and overt action operations of the Jewish state seeking to bring in more bodies as part of a demographic campaign plan.
The author can be shocking. He makes a case that is the Jews of Israel who bear the bulk of the responsibility for starting “the hate” and that it is the Israeli government that originally funded Hamas as an alternative to Arafat–an unfortunate reminder of US government funding for Islamic fighters in Afghanistan who have now turned on us.
The author's note and acknowledgements at the end of the book are worth reading carefully, and includes a list of other books on this topic.
I expect a lot of negative votes on this review–that is the price we pay for offering honest opinions in a forum where a deliberate Jewish bloc attacks those like the author–and this reviewer–for seeking to move a balanced dialog forward. Amazon has new algorithms for detecting “hate votes” and “organized negative votes,” we shall see if those work here.
9-11 focused some of us, but not enough of us, on the monumental issues of war and peace such as have not occurred since World War II–the Cold War being, as Derek Leebaert documents so well in “The Fifty Year Wound”, a false war, one with enormous costs to all mankind.
I bought this video recently–having seen it many years ago–to refresh my memory on the essence of Gandhi and his proven concept of non-violent resistance. The DVD capped several years of reading in the non-fiction national security arena (see my other 470+ reviews on war and peace), and has proven to be the ultimate primer as well as the ultimate Master's Seminar.
This is the movie to watch if you want to get down to fundamentals; Gandhi's three basic lessons of war and peace as shown so beautifully here are these: 1) the only devils are in our own minds; 2) the separation of Pakistan and India, like the separation of Palestine and Israel, violated the civil order between Muslims and Hindus, and destroyed all that Gandhi had achieved: peaceful coexistence of peoples within a single nation; and 3) in the end, after great pain, truth and love inevitably triumph.
Although I was tempted to fast-forward to the current six-front 100-year war between radicalized Islam and militarized America on the one hand, and between impoverished billions and corporate America on the other, I paused to reflect on the past first. It was the Spanish who first committed genocide against the American Indians, who expelled the Muslims and then the Jews, who sponsored the Inquisition and the Crusades. It was the British who stupidly pitted Muslim against Hindu in their attempts to assert their imperial will–nothing makes them look as stupid as the movie's coverage of how the “Empire” forbade the locals to take salt from their very own sea: the Indian Sea.
Now I fast forward to our current circumstances, with special reference to Jonathan Schell's “Unconquerable World,” perhaps complemented by Clyde Prestowitz' “Rogue Nation” (the US), and Chalmers Johnson “Sorrows of Empire”–and the other 470+ books relevant to war and peace today. Bottom line: boy, have we screwed this up. First off, invading Afghanistan made Al Qaeda stronger, not weaker. Second off, invading Iraq has made America weaker, not stronger, and inflamed the Middle East, Central Asia, Eastern Africa, the Pacific Rim, and the Muslim populations in the Americas.
We need a Gandhi. I cannot think of any modern leader who is even close, although the current Pope has certainly tried. This movie depicts, in terms stark and relevant, the opposite of 9-11–the clash of mobs driven by ideology or religion, completely oblivious to the core facts that Gandhi tried to teach: non-violence, love, truth, the Golden Rule. All else is evil.
If you have time for just one serious DVD, this is it.
This is the first of three “must read” books that I am reviewing today, and it is first because the other two are best appreciated after absorbing this one. The other two books are “IMPERIAL HUBRIS” and “OSAMA'S REVENGE.”
The main weakness of this book is the author's lack of strong criticism of Pakistan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, and of other states that are corrupt, repressive, and therefore a huge part of the problem. Having said that, here are some of the key points:
– “West” pioneered genocide, expulsions, and religious wars, with Spanish genocide of Indians in Americas, and Spanish expulsion of first the Jews and then the Muslims as critical starting points in understanding Muslim rage today
– America adopted terrorism as a preferred means of fighting proxy wars in both Central America and Africa, when Reagan began “rollback” with the same neo-conservative advisors that guide Bush II today.
– West has four dogmas as summed up by Edward Said (who is admired by the author): 1) that Orient is aberrant, undeveloped and inferior; 2) that Orient is inflexibly tied to old religions texts, unable to adapt; 3) that Orient is inflexibly uniform and unable to do nuances; and 4) Orient is either to be feared (Green or Yellow or Brown Peril) or controlled.
– Fundamentalism actually started in the US among the Christians seeking to insert religion into the state's business and ultimately demanding faith and loyalty as the litmus tests for acceptance.
– Earlier generations of Islamic reformists disavowed violence, but ended up adopting violence after being in state prisons (e.g. Egypt).
– Earlier incarnations of a Muslim revival were in the open literature in the 1920's and then in the 1960's, and lastly in the 1980's to date–our national “intelligence” agencies appear to have missed the importance of all three
– Viet-Nam, Africa, and Central America all fostered extremely unhealthy connections between CIA covert operations and the drug trade, with CIA routinely condoning and often actively enabling massive drug operations and related money laundering, as the “price” of moving forward on covert operations.
– The obsession with winning the Cold War at all costs essentially destroyed U.S. foreign policy and set U.S. up as the enemy of the Third World [see Derek Leebaert's “The Fifty-Year Wound”].
– Morality in the US has been perverted, as the extreme right, joining with extreme Zionists, has “captured” the U.S. government in both Congressional and Executive terms. Orwellian “spin” together with the labeling of all dissent, made possible by media corporations “going along”, has destroyed any possibility of informed, objective, or actually moral dialog.
– The Central American campaign pioneered the privatization of terrorism and proxy war by the US, with secrecy and deception of the US public being the principal role of the US government.
– The US Government is explicitly accountable for introducing bio-chemical weapons into the Iraqi arsenal, and thus accountable for the genocide and war crimes attendant to their use.
– US (AID) sponsored textbooks, such as those created by the University of Nebraska, routinely used terrorism against Russians as examples in the mathematic and other textbooks being distributed in Afghanistan.
– CIA's main contribution to the destabilization of the world has been in its Afghan-related privatization of information about how to produce and spread violence, and its training of tens of thousands of jihad warriors from all over the world who have now returned home and are teaching and leading others.
– Under US leadership, Afghanistan has gone from providing 5% of the global opium production in 1980, to 71% in 1990, and even more today–much of which comes to the US.
– America not only accepts massive drug activities as part of the “cost of doing business”, but also ignores human rights in its rush to cozy up to corrupt dictators.
– From an Iraqi point of view, the 1.5 million or so children that died in Iraq due to the sanctions, must be seen as a major war crime and a form of terrorism, together with the air war with its indiscriminate murder of thousands if not tens of thousands civilians including women and children. The US has killed more civilians in Iraq than it did in Japan with two atomic bombs. Napalm and depleted uranium are disabling US troops as well as Iraqi civilians long after their use in the field.
– Economic sanctions, when they have the impact they did in Iraq, must be considered weapons of mass destruction, their application terrorism, and their results war crimes.
– The US Government's general disdain for the rule of law, but the incumbent Administration's particular focus on ignoring treaties and refusing accountability (e.g. for war crimes) sets a new low standard for immoral behavior by nation-states.
– The UN Secretary-General was forced by the US to ignore the Rwandan genocide because of a US desire to keep everyone focused on Sarajevo, and continues to us its veto power to prevent UN from being effective against racist Zionism, which is routinely committing crimes against humanity with its Palestinian campaign.
The author concludes, without sounding inflammatory, that America was built on two monumental crimes: the genocide of the Native Americans, and the enslavement of African Americans. His point: the US is in denial over this reality, while the rest of the world is completely aware of it. He agrees with Jonathan Schell, concluding as Schell does in “Unconquerable World,” that the challenge of our times is in “how to subdue and hold accountable the awesome power that the United States built up during the Cold War.” The last sentence is quite powerful: “America cannot occupy the world. It has to learn to live in it.”
With a foreword by no less than The Honorable Lee H. Hamilton, today a leader of the 9-11 Commission, the book drives a stake in the heart of secular “objective” negotiation and focuses on how faith (not zealotry, but earnest faith) can alter the spiral of violence in such places as Sudan, Kashmir, and the Middle East.
The editor and contributing author has assembled a multi-national and multi-religion cast of experts whose work in the aggregate completely supports the premise of the book: that the 21st Century will be about religion instead of ideology, and that what hopes we might have for reconciling “irreconcilable differences” lie in the balanced integration of religious dialog and conflict prevention, rather than in pre-emptive military action and unilateralist bullying.
I found two core concepts especially relevant to national security: the first is that we need an Office of Religious and Cultural Intelligence within the Central Intelligence Agency, and we need, as the authors suggest, to put religious attaches into every Embassy. The second, and this is a truly core concept, is “The price of freedom is cultural engagement–taking the time to learn how others view the world, to understand what is important to them, and to determine what can realistically be done to help them realize their legitimate aspirations.”
This is a brilliant, scholarly, practical, world-changing book. It joins Max Manwaring's various books, but especially “The Search for Security,” Joe Nye's earlier books on understanding the world and engaging the world with soft power, and George Soros as well as the several other books on my standard national security reading list. The conclusion of the book lists a number of means by which religion can impact on diplomacy and state-craft, and I for one have become a believer–this book completely altered my perspective on the role of religion as a peacemaker of substance and day-to-day practicality.
One note of concern: I am sick and tired of having “anti-semitic” accusations hurled by defenders of Jewish sanctity. “Anti-semitic” has become a censorship phrase. I myself was disinvited from National Public Radio (NPR) in Chicago because I spoke in a balanced and fair fashion about the Palestinian casualities that the US media never covers, and the need to both guarantee a Palestinian state alongside a Jewish state, and the need to provide US foreign aid to both sides equally while we build two new generations from kindergarten up, generations that know how to live in peace from birth. Neither the movie nor the book merit this Stalinist-like censorship, and I hope that non-Catholics will keep in open mind and not be scared away–as the Jews intend–from seeing the movie or buying the book. [I was most moved when Arab callers made the point that I was the first person on NPR Chicago to have been fair and balanced.]
To end on a fair and balanced note: the Catholic Church is guilty of great crimes–the crusades against Islam, the murder of millions of women unfairly cursed as witches, the Inquisition, the abuse of hundreds of thousands of children, and finally, aid to the Nazis during the Holocaust and in the aftermath of the war as some escaped through Church auspices. We would be fortunate indeed if there were movies and books that explored these historical aspects of Catholism, as well as the growing body of literature on Jesus having been married and having had children whose offspring survive today. Open mindedness, not censorship, is the path to understanding. This applies to Catholics as well as Jews and others of any faith.
