The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age
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    Cornel West Retrogrades

    By Orion on Tue, 12/25/2012 - 1:46pm |

    This is one for the books:

    ‎"Dr. Cornel West: Politicians Only Talk Gun Control When ‘Vanilla’ People Get Shot"

    “...it’s a good thing that we now have a discussion on gun control. We need one on drone control,” he continued, “not a peep, not a mumbling word when black folk get shot. But now, Newtown, Connecticut, vanilla side — low and behold we got a major conversation. That’s wonderful. Each life is precious but it just upsets me when we’re so deferential.” -- Dr. Cornel West

    This is just ridiculous. It is sad that Americans talk like this. Is he referring to Pakistanis as "black people?" Are there only white and black people in his weird world? Does he realize that many Muslims probably look alot like George W. Bush and are at risk of dying from strikes ordered by Barack Obama? That may be too complex for his world.

    I posted a picture of several Pakistani children with a sign sympathizing about the murders in Connecticut. Honestly, if children in a third world country that is being terrorized by American drone bombings and insane religious clerics can manage to be civilized, maybe Cornel West should try to do so. I lived in the developing world briefly and people there behaved alot better than me. That West feels free to openly talk like this just shows how blessed he is.

    Comments

    I disagree with West that its about 'vanilla people' but I do think news coverage is boosted because many media people can identify more readily with both sides in the Newtown tragedy than with 'others'.

    Same obsessiveness happens when blonde girls on holiday go missing or when something happens to anyone notable in the infotainment industry: OJ, Michael Jackson, Tim Russert....  

    It is not racist, only human.  Just wish they were self-aware about it enough to dampen down their very contagious hysterias.

     

     


    by EmmaZahn on Tue, 12/25/2012 - 6:17pm

    I agree. What is irritating about this, I think though, is that it seems like Cornel West is stepping up his vitriol lately for some reason. This plus calling Obama a "Rockefeller Republican in black face." He sounds like a rodeo clown.

    Did you see that picture of the Pakistani children I posted here? I think that pretty much showed empathy as it should be. I made that my Facebook profile even. So beautiful!


    by Orion on Tue, 12/25/2012 - 6:28pm

    "Blond Girls on Holiday"- new film by Russ Meyer? Takeoff on Audrey's "Roman Holiday"?


    by PeraclesPlease on Wed, 12/26/2012 - 10:23am

    Russ Meyer?

    Free associates with Vixen, the second and last porn movie I ever saw in theater.

    That and Audrey Hepburn's Roman Holiday certainly dates you. cheeky

     


    by EmmaZahn on Wed, 12/26/2012 - 10:43am

    Well, I just watched Rita Hayworth & Gene Kelly in "Covergirl"- that doesn't mean I saw it in a theater when released ;-)  Must confess to never seeing a Russ Meyer movie either - more inspired by bands inspired by Russ Meyer. Interesting background on Rita Hayworth BTW, didn't realize her story... Spanish girl turned anglo beefcake, what a little hair dye can do....


    by PeraclesPlease on Wed, 12/26/2012 - 5:48pm

    Or the right music for Fred Astaire & Gene Kelly...



    by PeraclesPlease on Thu, 12/27/2012 - 7:36am

    Huh? Thousands of brown skinned people get wiped out in the Mideast, and it doesn't make the papers.

    Staff Sgt. Robert Bales went out and massacred 16 Afghanis one night - we whisked him back to the US to avoid Afghan courts. Did we go through a national debate about violence and our purpose in Afghanistan, or was it just "boys (in blue) will be boys"? Do 10% of Americans even know about the incident, much less know the guy's name?

    No, it only matters when Vanilla people get shot. Deal with it. That's us, that's our priorities. 

    Note also that if a brown person kills someone or tries planning, it's religion-fomented "terrorism". If a white person carries out a massacre, we debate mental illness and try to understand his background. Tim McVeigh was the last Vanilla person accused of "terrorism" - now the word's reserved for Middle East Muslims. It's enough to be milling about looking suspicious - "breathing while brown". The NYPD put together a whole snoop program on Arab-American activity, tracking those dangerous falafel houses. Too bad they didn't uncover one case of actual terrorism in the planning, while missing others.


    by PeraclesPlease on Wed, 12/26/2012 - 7:07am

    Just less than a month before Newtown, an Egyptian train split in half a school bus full of kindergarteners killing 49.  Our media did cover it but without the histrionics they surely would have had it happened closer to them physically and socially.  Certainly there are other differences between the stories but what really drives the levels of coverage is demography and geography not race per se.

    Watching it all from way out here in southwest appalachia I really would have liked a little more coverage of the Egypt story and a little less of Newtown.

     


    by EmmaZahn on Wed, 12/26/2012 - 11:11am

    You are right.

    I think what I wrote here was more of a response to Cornel West's verbosity. He sounds ridiculous.

    It is a bit deeper than skin color, though, when you really think about it. It seems like people mentally avoid certain tragedies. White military personnel are committing suicide at a rapid rate and it is barely hitting the news at all - for some reason, people don't want to think about that either.


    by Orion on Wed, 12/26/2012 - 1:03pm

     

    West's problem is that his fury obscures his message. The focus is placed on the word "vanilla" rather than the observation that there have been a host of Black and Latino deaths in urban centers. He might as well have remained silent.
    There were "Vanilla" deaths in Colombine and Tucson. There were "cocoa" deaths in the Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. In each case we were told that is was "too early" to discuss gun control. The age of the victims and the savagery of the attack caused a shift in the intensity of the discussion after Shady Hook. A similar shift occurred in the Civil Rights era after the murder of young Emmett Till, another shift happened after hoses and police dogs were turned against child protesters in Birmingham in May 1963. Another escalation occurred  after the murders of three young girls at a Birmingham, Ala. church in September 1963. Children intensify outrage.
    We ignore the deaths of US military of all colors, let those of combatants and civilians in the Middle East.
    The issue at hand is that our dear brother Cornel West has become a diversion more than an effective force for good. I say this out of love. When Cornel uses " blackface" and "vanilla" he sounds as irrational as Jesse Jackson did with the "Hymietown" comment. Just as no one can remember what Rev.Jackson was objecting to with his incendiary comment, West's comments paper over any coherent message.
    West has to be challenged to do better.

    by rmrd0000 on Wed, 12/26/2012 - 5:59pm

    I'll leave it to you to comment on blackface, but I can handle Vanilla Ice (1:40) or vanilla/whitey comments coming out of Malcolm X, Dick Gregory, Eldridge Cleaver, Richard Pryor, George Clinton, Chuck D, Jesse Jackson or Sistah Souljah without thinking them "irrational". I was raised on whitebread Reader's Digest, but I put it away when I left home.


    by PeraclesPlease on Thu, 12/27/2012 - 7:45am

    Malcolm X was transformed after experiencing Mecca and noted Muslims with blues eyes who were worthy of respect. Richard Pryor experienced a similar transformation after traveling to Africa and seeing beautiful black people and noting that none of them were n*gg*rs.I have only seen Dick Gregory recently at Tavis Smiley's State of the Black Union farces. he seems to have cleaned up his act somewhat.

    George Clinton, Chuck D and Sistah Souljah are entertainers, best known for past work. I don't consider them in the forefront of current activists.. If you want really harsh, politically charged lyrics, try the Last Poets, they may be too much for someone bred on Reader's Digest. The Last Poets were of a past age. A new era calls for new tactics. Cornel West ia relic of the past.

    The bottom line is that when Cornel speaks the focus is on his ill-chosen words rather than any message. He is making himself irrelevant. While I was listening to a jazz station broadcast from an HBCU, the DJ noted the controversy surrounding West's recent comments. There was no mention of West's intended message, just a comment that it was time to move on. West has become an afterthought. He cannot find an audience for the radio show that he shares with Tavis Smiley, more evidence of loss of importance.

    Normally, I tend to round after round with you on these issues. In this case, you can continue to argue your point, I have made mine. Black voters are not as depressed and forlorn as you desire. They are rejecting Cornel and Tavis. In the face of voter suppression, blacks stayed in line even after the election had been decided to send  message. They are not about to take advice from those who felt it was a waste of time to vote.

    Cornel West is marginalizing himself.

     

     


    by rmrd0000 on Thu, 12/27/2012 - 10:15am

    I spent enough time around the hood to not faint at the word "Vanilla". Scratch that, I was never so lily white polly purebred that I'd get the vapors at anything that silly. Instead of spending all this time trying to get offended by words, how about trying to figure out the meaning behind the words and see if there's anything valuable.

    No, Cornel West's words are not "ill-chosen" - he's just speaking, not that tough to understand. People are well able to obsess on the trivial, and conveniently distort, as seen with Susan Rice over Benghazi. She didn't say anything wrong - she reported accurately the info available and the significant uncertainty and the likelihood that the attackers were "terrorists" or insurgents of some sort. That even assholes from the left have managed to shave off 2/3 of what she said to draw some stupid conclusion is not her fault. It's the nature of our idiotic times.

    They're not going to do fuck-all about what West complains about anyway. We're going to stay in Afghanistan another 5 years at least, we're not going to get rid of drones or be much more careful about where we shoot, we're not going to focus on poverty rather than austerity in the face of GOP grandstanding, we're going to cut Social Security through some kind of "grown up" fiscal trick to save us from the non-existent "fiscal cliff"... So who gives a damn whether he says "motherfucker" or "mother may I please"- it'll still be the same shit in the end?

    PS - Cornel West was very clear, despite your misrepresenting him - he said he was getting out to vote for Obama and protest later, and others should too - he didn't say it was a "waste of time to vote". I don't know why you have to lie to make your point, but it's your option. Does not increase respect for you, though.

    http://www.vice.com/read/cornel-west-plans-to-vote-for-obama-in-november...


    by PeraclesPlease on Thu, 12/27/2012 - 10:46am

      Bales' massacre was in the news and I'd bet that more than ten percent of Americans know about it, even if they don't remember his name(his name is really the least important part of the story).

     There is a debate about Afghanistan and a majority of Americans are now opposed to the war.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/27/world/asia/support-for-afghan-war-fall...


    by Aaron Carine on Thu, 12/27/2012 - 5:31pm

    Oh yes, they're so opposed to it. I'm sure the war occupied those pre-Christmas dinner parties and family get togethers and upcoming New Years celebrations just like the war in 1969.

    American opposition now means waiting for a pollster to approach you, or perhaps tweet a link to an article you agree with if you're especially outgoing. God forbid someone would chain themselves to the White House fence or organize a riot in the street or even threaten a candidate with withholding support.

    (but be careful, because the FBI now tracks even peaceful movements, because they might incite violence - i.e provoke the police to beat them."Terrorism" is a word-gift that keeps on giving.)

    But yes, you're right, there was reporting about Bales in the US, and in the "Vanilla" tradition, lots of guesses about what causes and turmoil provoked him to the act, vs. the "they hate us for our freedoms" response when a brown person kills (or is entrapped in yet another FBI sting where they foment Muslim disgruntlement and encouraged to dream about unlikely ridiculous plots as part of an easy indictment or just those caught up in our selectively enforced anti-terrorism money laws when they amount to $1500 vs millions we excuse). 

    And by whisking Bales out of Afghanistan and preventing interviews about what happened on the ground, we'll likely never know the real extent of the massacre, just like we managed to cover up how Adnan Latif died at Gitmo or what Raymond Davis was up to when he was arrested for murder in Pakistan. But certainly there was much more outcry about our ambassador in Benghazi than there was about any of those murders of foreigners.

    Okay, enough bah humbug for one response.


    by PeraclesPlease on Fri, 12/28/2012 - 4:41am

      You probably shouldn't be comparing the level of activism to 1969, but to 1972-73, when there also wasn't much. Afghanistan differs from Vietnam in the number of casualties(American and foreign), and in the fact that they attacked us.

     I doubt PTSD contributed to any of Al Qaeda's crimes. They hated us for several reasons, most of them not good ones, and Western values are probably one of the reasons.

    They haven't prevented journalists from investigating the massacre. If more than 16 were killed, we probably would have heard about it. Maybe something has been covered up in the Davis case, but your link didn't demonstrate that.


    by Aaron Carine on Fri, 12/28/2012 - 8:35am

    By 1972 our troop strength was down from a half million to 24,000, and by 1973 it was down to effectively 0. In current planning, we'll never be down to 0 in Afghanistan.

    Al Qaeda ≠ Taliban, and while the Taliban was stupid for sheltering OBL, the Taliban has never been a threat to the US. But here we have disgraced jackasses like the Kagans and Max Boot declaring we need to keep 34,000 troops in Afghanistan after 2014, what was there when Bush left office, because horror of horrors, Taliban would be an hour's drive from Kabul. Like I give a fuck what they do in Kabul, as if that's our concern or any worry. A "Sandanista's only 2 days drive from the Texas border" moment? These people should be gang-raped repeatedly for cheerleading the Iraq fiasco, dragged through the streets like in Black Hawk Down and run out of town, but instead they're treated seriously, get prime real estate at WaPo, and likely will convince our Conceder-in-Chief that it's grownup to leave more troops in Afghanistan - "forever, and ever, and ever" as they said in The Shining.

    Re: Al Qaeda's crimes, I'm talking about the arrest of stupid Arabs in the US who got trapped by the FBI into talking about some kind of ill-conceived and unlikely revenge plot for the continual US occupation & bombing of Muslim countries. No, they don't have PTSD (though people in Waziristan and parts of Afghanistan and Yemen might) - they have a legitimate beef with the US declaring permanent war against Islam, and a judicial system that now has different rules for brown people. 

    Re: the 16, it's partially whether Bales acted alone. With Davis, we don't even know who was involved or much detail at all.


    by PeraclesPlease on Fri, 12/28/2012 - 1:03pm

       The United States has not declared war on Islam, and we certainly hadn't before 9/11.  If we do have different rules for brown people(as a result of 9/11), that wasn't one of Bin Laden's beefs in 2001. (The National Defense Authorization Act provides for different rules for people suspected of engaging in hostilities or supporting them, not for "brown people").

      The Taliban aren't comparable to the Sandinistas. The Sadinistas weren't harboring and subsidizing people who had murdered thousands of us, and they were far more enlightened than the Taliban. But I agree that we shouldn't remain in Afghanistan because the Taliban are there.

      I'm not as pessimistic as you; I think we will be down to 10,000 troops in 2014, and they will probably be in noncombat roles.

      My almanac of American history says there were 43,000 troops in Vietnam on August 12, 1972(when Nixon withdrew ground troops).There were more earlier in the year.

     

     

     

     


    by Aaron Carine on Fri, 12/28/2012 - 4:18pm

    Can you say crusades?

    The United States has not declared war on Islam, and we certainly hadn't before 9/11

    No, you haven't heard a public declaration "We declare war"

    The war has been going on for centuries; long before the birth of the United States of America, a former colony of the British empire.

    As we look back through history, so as to get a bigger picture.

    Excerpts from

    http://www.crethiplethi.com/the-crusades-and-islam/global-islam/2009/

    The Crusades were not the first major clash between Islam and Western Christendom, if Western Christendom is defined in this case, as it must be, as non-Orthodox Europe during the Dark and Middle Ages. There had been many, starting long before the Crusades.

    • Didn’t the Islam take Antioch and Alexandria from the Christians in 633?
    • Didn’t the Arabs conquer Gaza in 635 and made Damascus capital of the Caliphs?
    • Didn’t the Arabs conquer Jerusalem in 637?
    • Didn’t the Arabs attacked Armenia in 639 and destroyed the library of Alexandria in 641?
    • Didn’t the Arabs destroyed the Persian Empire in 641 and Islam replaced the religion of Zoroaster?
    • Didn’t the Muslims conquer Tripoli (Libia) in 643?
    • Didn’t the Arabs conquer Cyprus in 649?
    • Didn’t the Arabs attack North Africa in 670 and destroyed Carthage (Tunis) in 697?
    • Didn’t the Arabs siege Constantinople (Istanbul) in 671?
    • Didn’t the Arabs reach the Indus River (Pakistan) in 674?
    • Didn’t the Arabs finally overrun Armenia in 694?
    • Didn’t the Arabs conquer Algiers (Algeria) in 700 and wiped out Christendom in North Africa?
    • Didn’t the Arab Gen. Tarik ibn Ziyad defeat King Roderic in a decisive battle in 711 that brought most of Spain into the Arab domain?
    • Didn’t the Arabs conquer Lisbon in 716?
    • Didn’t they move into Sardinia in 720, and grab a foothold in France at Narbonne in 720?
    • Wasn’t Charles Martel’s victory over the Arabs at Tours (or Poitiers, in the traditional understanding) in 732 one of the pivotal battles in Western history and halting the Arab advance in Europe that every educated person, including those who get jobs at U.S. News, has read about at one time or another in their lives?
    • Wasn’t Charlemagne himself returning from a campaign against the Muslim Saracens in 778 when his rearguard was ambushed and decimated by the Basques, in a massacre memorialized forever in the Chanson de Roland?
    • Didn’t the Arabs conquer Crete in 826, plunder the Greek Isles and take Sicily and Sardinia in 827?
    • Didn’t the Arabs conquer Marseille in 838 and settle in Southern Italy?
    • Didn’t the Arabs sack Rome and damage the Vatican in 846?
    • Didn’t the Arabs conquer Malta in 869?
    • Didn’t Muslims sack Salonika (Greece) in 904?
    • Didn’t the Arabs destroy the Monastery of Monte Cassino in 994 and sack Pisa in 1004?
    • Isn’t it the case, as Paul Fregosi reminds us in his book, “Jihad in the West,” that during the Islamic expansion, “a large part of Europe was taken, occupied for centuries, sometimes devastated, and some of it was Islamicized. Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, Sicily, Austria, Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia, Hungary, Rumania, Wallachia, Albania, Moldavia, Bulgaria, Greece, Armenia, Georgia, Poland, Ukraine, and eastern and southern Russia were all Jihad battlefields.”
    • Isn’t it true that the Arabs took the Islamic expansion also to the east as far as Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and China?
    • Isn’t it finally true, as Piers Paul Read observes in his book “The Templars,” that “From the time of the Prophet Mohammed’s first razzia, the Christian’s perception was that wars against Islam were waged either in defense of Christendom or to liberate and reconquer lands that were rightfully theirs“?

    Fast forward to within the last few hundred years

    Both the original outpost of Rome (Britain) and her former colony (America),  have fought side by side, in two World Wars, they've worked together to form the League of Nations and the United Nations, as a continuation of Rome’s Pax Romana.

    Together they form the Anglo /American World power, both work together, to control the world, for the benefit of Christendom and not for Islam.


    by Resistance on Fri, 12/28/2012 - 5:07pm

      You're talking about  wars that are a thousand years old. What does that have to do with the United States(or modern Europe)? In World War I, the Ottoman Turks were fighting alongside Western, Christian countries.

      The United Nations is nothing like the Pax Romana. It was meant as a medium for international cooperation, not for conquest and imperialism. At one time, it was pretty hostile to the West.


    by Aaron Carine on Fri, 12/28/2012 - 5:15pm

    Not only that, but Chicago just hit the 500 homicide mark this past Thursday, I believe. Where's lamestream media on this pathetic milestone?

    I usually agree with Dr. West's observations, but in this case he's a bit off. The reaction of media, and more importantly the reaction of our political "leaders" to the Aurora massacre was tepid, more or less "meh, business as usual in America". This in spite of the fact most, if not all of the Aurora victims were white, and I believe one infant was killed.

    The uproar over the Newtown shooting, and the uproar over Dr. West's statement is more or less moot, since Congress is a disaster-- it's unlikely they are going to do anything re: "gun control". It took them well over a year just to finally pass a transportation bill this year-- something that in the past probably took six weeks at the most.

    The notion Congress is competent enough or willing to tackle meaningful gun control is a total farce.


    by demunchained on Sat, 12/29/2012 - 9:04am

    In the aftermath of Newtown, there are more calls for President Obama to create a focus on the carnage in Chicago by either coming to Chicago to attend a funeral or by specifically making a public statement about the violence in Chicago. Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass made such an appeal on CNN. Kass noted that the deaths were being ignored and the the city ws financially incapable of mounting a response to the homicides.

    Reverend Jesse Jackson Jr. made an identical appeal on CNN on Friday the 28th. Interestingly, Jackson faced an interviewer who repeatedly asked why other cities with high gun homicide rates should consider gun bans since Chicago, which has one of the country’s strictest gun ban laws, is unable to stem the tide of gun deaths. The interviewer completely missed Jackson’s point that since the guns were coming from outside Chicago, laws were needed nationwide to blunt gun violence.

    No distracting “vanilla” or “blackface” comments from Kass or Jackson just blunt appeals and commentary.


    by rmrd0000 on Sat, 12/29/2012 - 12:07pm

    Again, gun violence/deaths in cities like Chicago and Oakland, CA appear to just be accepted as a "normal" state of affairs in our nation-- and nothing much can be done about it; sort of like acts of nature like a hurricane or tornado.

    Making things worse of course is the bogus war on drugs-- I recently read one of Mexico's more notorious drug cartels has made Chicago one of their major distribution hubs for the midwest.

    Thus what we have really is a perfect storm of stupid/bad policies and laws, near total lack of economic opportunity, combined with ineffective law enforcement-- and this has been going on for decades and has now turned into a Frankenstein monster.

    if the answer is to bring in 2,000 National Guardsmen and finally clean up Chicago's gang problem, then that's what should happen. Obviously for whatever reason(s) there's a lack of political will/leadership to make this happen.


    by demunchained on Sat, 12/29/2012 - 2:01pm

    414 homicides in NYC is considered a “record” 40 year low.

    Bringing in troops harkens back to the military presence in urban areas during the roits. I doubt that troops would be welcomed with open arms. Remember the cheers that Gen. Russell Honore received when NOLA police officers were ordered to lower weapons trained on unarmed Katrina victims? A military presence would worsen tensions.

    Kass, the Tribune columnist, suggests that the city’s financial straits make increased policing impossible.  Rev. Jackson points to poverty, a lack of jobs and poor education. I think the solution lies in removing criminals while letting the community know that the educational system and employment situations are being improved.


    by rmrd0000 on Sat, 12/29/2012 - 2:44pm

    About that 414 number:
    Short term variations in homicide rates have significance and they can be used as evidence when evaluating recent policy changes. When you compare such rates over a long term such as forty years the figures must be adjusted to be meaningful. Whereas dollar cost of a product can be adjusted for inflation over time quite accurately, homicide rates have been subject to variables that must be quite hard to accurately quantify but which direction can be known definitely.
     Battlefield deaths have dropped greatly because of the ability to get the wounded to high level care quickly. Injuries that used to kill very often do not do so any more. Similarly, when someone is gunned down on a city street there is likely a 911 call going in before the victim hits the ground. An ambulance with well trained EMT's or a helicopter is quickly dispatched to get the victim to better facilities with more experienced and better trained physicians. I have seen an estimate that homicides might be ten times higher in the U.S. if assault victims died at the same rate from similar injuries as they did in the late fifties. Now, many of them are saved. I expect that that ten-times estimate is high but am confident that it is in the right direction. The exact same shootings would have killed many more people in times not that far past.


    by A Guy Called LULU on Sat, 12/29/2012 - 3:39pm

    Really?

    I doubt Chicago citizens who recently endured their children cut down "accidentally" by gangs spraying bullets in their neighborhoods would protest the presence of the National Guard. This in the least is a response/action, whereas not much is being done right now.

    And I'm not suggesting this as a permanent solution-- 60-90 days ought to be enough to clean up most, if not all of the gang problem. And the Chicago police department must step up too. Once a gang is cleared from a neighborhood, Chicago police need to monitor that neighborhood to ensure another gang does not move in.


    by demunchained on Sat, 12/29/2012 - 6:02pm

    We have police to fight crime. We don't have troops treat citizens as the enemy. Communities want criminals arrested. No one want wants militarily patrolled urban neighborhoods. 

    Al Capone and the Chicago mob were brought down by law enforcement, not the military.


    by rmrd0000 on Sat, 12/29/2012 - 9:10pm

      Are you talking about "clearing" gang members out of a neighborhood if they haven't been convicted of a crime? I hope not, because the Constitution says you can't do that.


    by Aaron Carine on Sat, 12/29/2012 - 10:09pm

    Well, they'll just change the Constitution then, won't they?

    The Right to assemble, was so yesterday; everyone'  got a phone, use them; so we can monitor your associations.

    You can no longer go to the Church of Wright, they don't follow the NEW and Improved Constitution.

    Those drones you see over your neighborhoods are not a standing army, stupid; their flying.   Doh!


    by Resistance on Sun, 12/30/2012 - 1:38am

    I don't remember seeing the faces on the news, of the seventy-six men, women and children, burned by the government, during the Waco siege.


    by Anonymous (not verified) on Wed, 12/26/2012 - 3:43pm

    I was initially a bit taken aback by the West quote - for a couple of reasons; and I'm not entirely certain I agree with him even still. But I am most struck by the fact that you imagine Pakistan is the only (or even primary) place where American drones are currently being deployed - killing identified targets and innocent civilians alike.

    Regardless how one feels about his choice of verbiage, the fact that the analysis/takedown here fails to even acknowledge the existence of African-continent victims in Obama's drone war seems to prove Dr. West's point in a rather dramatic fashion. Doesn't this go well beyond "not a peep" about them into flat-out implying such victims do not exist at all?

    While I think Emma's point on proximity being a significant factor in the level of focus an event gets here in America is well made (as are a few others) ... Pakistan really isn't particularly closer to us than Somalia is. There clearly has to be more to it than that just proximity and tendency to avoid whacking holy cows such as military men.

    Personally, I think perhaps a root to the blindness vis a vis pundits/politicos and the extent/nature of our drone policy has much to do with a Democratic president and related rounds of mass denial from the former Bush-era opponents of this type of militarism. If one pretends we aren't bombing in Africa, it is easier to avoid facing the glaring contradiction between what liberals used to stand for and enthusiastically supporting Barack Obama as a politician.

    And for the record, IMO Chuck D absolutely deserves a place among contemporary activists and thinkers. Academia is hardly the only (or even best) vantage from which to establish understanding of or engage with the realities of contemporary cultural interactions.


    by kgb999 on Fri, 12/28/2012 - 11:12pm

    I think a good deal of the left got co-opted post-9/11, wanting to be "reasonable". I spent time with foreigners in the lead-up to Iraq explaining that while it looked cowboyish, the low-tech 9/11 attack made the idea of leaving Hussein & the Mideast as-is was no longer a reasonable risk. From that leap of faith, every risk became too much. A lot of liberals really get their patriotic boots on with any mention of Al Qaeda or concomitantly Taliban - not that Taliban didn't exist for 10 years with no threat to the US sans OBL.

    The other issue is that our values were always about US casualties more than foreigners'. I imagine if US dead & wounded in Vietnam were much lower than the 58,000 dead, we simply wouldn't have cared, and would have as a majority approved pouring more and more napalm into the forests and mines into Cambodia. That may not be completely Vanilla, but we've got our primarily European heritage to consider, and anything that's not part of that is relatively irrelevant - from Hiroshima on down.

    So drones are out of sight, out of mind, only moderately interesting vs. taking off shoes & getting scanned at an airport - an affront we'll call our Congressperson about.


    by PeraclesPlease on Sat, 12/29/2012 - 8:58am

      There's a natural tendency for people everywhere to worry more about their own war casualties than those of the enemy--it's a human quality, not an American one.

      The Taliban where a threat because they were sheltering and subsidizing Al Qaeda. Now that Al Qaeda in Afghanistan is pretty much crushed, the Taliban are less of a problem.


    by Aaron Carine on Sat, 12/29/2012 - 9:37am

    Feels like you are erasing an entire decade. Come 2006, it becomes increasingly difficult to ignore that Democratic partisans were out in force decrying every single aspect of the Bush approach to foreign intervention. All of it. And very vocally.

    While perhaps a generalized royal "we" tends to make their values assessments primarily based on US casualties, the specific Democratic-liberal "we" has traditionally tended to a bit loftier ideal, no? Their rhetoric certainly has.

    Anyhow. You don't address my primary point. Here we have a direct issue raised by Dr. West asserting that African casualties of our drone policy are completely ignored. Regardless national tendencies, the point was *specifically* placed front-and center to the extent that Orion decided to write an article addressing it directly. This article simply highlights the "not blackness" of Pakistanis and the fact that individual humans in Pakistan have shown empathy for the suffering of Americans, ostensibly to negate West's point.

    As far as that goes, it is not really a question of the issues you address here. You can't pretend Dagbolggers live in some dispassionate vacuum where their own actions/beliefs are isolated from the rest of Americana. It really seems that West was talking specifically about you guys - not the random "stupid American voter" that serves as preferred proxy for personal accountability in Democratic circles these days.

    So, let's leave aside this imaginary mass of people that none of us know, who's motivations none could possible truly fathom and discuss the specific case of those politically active within the Democratic family - such as those at here at Dagblog. You know ... folks that are fully engaged and well informed about the actions of our government who spend no small quantity of time discussing such actions.

    How do you explain the case we're dealing with here in the specific? This is a proactive article that acknowledges West's criticism and addresses our drone program specifically. At the same time this post pretty much flat-out denies that black casualties of such a program even exist. Wouldn't you agree that this appears to exactly personify West's criticism?

    Do you think this is a product of legitimate ignorance? If so, how does a group of formerly well-informed political activists fall so far behind what is common knowledge within the entire spectrum of other political watchers? Or is it something else at work? As one who has participated with many of y'all in political discussions for years ... the increasing ignorance (or ignoring) of basic pertinent information in analysis seems rather inexplicable.


    by kgb999 on Sat, 12/29/2012 - 1:34pm

    Feels like you are erasing an entire decade. Come 2006, it becomes increasingly difficult to ignore that Democratic partisans were out in force decrying every single aspect of the Bush approach to foreign intervention. All of it. And very vocally.

    "And very vocally".

    Huh? I suppose that "partisan protest" had nothing to do with the upcoming election in 2008?

    Who's rewriting history here? The fact is post 9/11, more than a few democrats in Congress jumped on the war mongering bandwagon with their repug brethren. voting for the AUMF which OK'd the invasion/occupation of Iraq-- all of this in spite of the fact "madman" Hussein had zero to do with 9/11, the state department indicated there was no al Qaeda in Iraq (Hussein's thugs kept them out), and nobody could actually prove Hussein had WMD's.

    If the "partisans" protested Bush policy five years later-- it's more or less irrelevant, since the damage in Iraq had been done by then.


    by demunchained on Sat, 12/29/2012 - 6:16pm

    I'm not sure if you meant to be responding to my comment or someone else's.

    I've certainly noticed that Sierra Leone can be ignored while Libya takes front-and-center even for Obama-supporting "liberals".

    I've brought up time and again our war in Yemen with ambassador-speaking-as-proxy-president, and occasionally note Somalia as part of our drone region. (as we have CIA projects in Mexico now, I don't know how much we're using drones & whatever other military techniques - but like most things drug war related, it won't receive too much review)

    The long war in the Congo is the worst atrocity in recent times, but it's simply not in any big foreign policy equation, but we're supposed to get vapors over Qaddafi, Ahmadinejad.... And somehow that determination over Qaddafi failed to appear in an oil-less country like Syria trying to oust Assad - just like with Sierra Leone, we can suddenly wait a year no problem.

    Rahm Emmanuel & others pushed a just-go-along pro-war or at least war-accomodating strategy in 2004. Didn't help - Democrats still got whacked as being soft on security and whatever, and meanwhile lost their moral compass. Some protests in 2006, but I think it was Bush fatigue & my pack vs. your back, as much as any principled disgust with war/surge, even though there was certainly a large bloc of principled liberals who never lost their opposition to our rush-to-war-on-terruh. Come 2008/9 and Obama's able to continue pretty much the same policies without too much howling - public seems to go along with loss of freedom and indefinite detention and what not.

    As for Dagblog, YMMV - overall I just doubt that many liberals exist in ideas like liberal democracy and true tolerance - there always seems to be some catch that allows us to suspend our supposed principles and engage in  or support petty vindictive or barbaric behavior this-time-only. Lots of "other side does it" rationale as well as simply allocating a whole lot of trust to government in areas you'd think we'd be skeptical.


    by PeraclesPlease on Sat, 12/29/2012 - 8:11pm