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Amazing Plan Surfaces: "We Need Ethno-Weapons!" David Price tells how top-flight US anthropologists eagerly obeyed US government's mandate to "think in a-moral terms". One scheme of OSS's willing executioners: target Japanese physical "weak spot", the respiratory tract, with anthrax germs. Gabriel Kolko asks What's so New About the Neo-Cons? If they had not existed, would the policies have been the same? Jeffrey St Clair digs up more dirt on Halliburton's secret history. Alexander Cockburn on why we need more "celebrity justice". Get the answers you're looking for in the latest subscriber-only edition of CounterPunch ... CounterPunch Online is read by millions of viewers each month! But remember, we are funded solely by the subscribers to the print edition of CounterPunch. Please support this website by buying a subscription to our newsletter, which contains fresh material you won't find anywhere else, or by making a donation for the online edition. Remember contributions are tax-deductible. Click here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now! or write CounterPunch, PO BOX 228, Petrolia, CA 95558 |
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Other Lands Have Dreams: From Baghdad to Pekin Prison by KATHY KELLY  Today's Stories July 2 / 4, 2005 Laura
Carlsen
July 1, 2005 Christopher
Brauchli Pat
Williams Gary
Leupp John
Stauber John
Chuckman Justicia
y Paz Cockburn
/ St. Clair
June 30, 2005 Kathy
Kelly John
Stauber Virginia
Rodino Jason
Leopold Dave
Lindorff Greg
Moses Norman
Solomon Joshua
Frank Alexander
Cockburn
June 29, 2005 Mike
Schaefer Roger
Burbach / Paul Cantor Sharon
Smith Sam
Husseini John
Stauber Ahmad
Faruqui Linda
S. Heard Stew
Albert Ray
McGovern
June 28, 2005 Paul
Craig Roberts Landau
/ Hassen John
A. Murphy Mike
Whitney CounterPunch
News Service Dave
Zirin Dave
Lindorff Patrick
Cockburn
June 27, 2005 Paul
Craig Roberts Mike
Marqusee Mark
Scaramella Leigh
Saavedra Kathy
Kelly
June 25 / 26, 2005 Alexander
Cockburn Jennifer
Van Bergen George
Corsetti Mark
Chmiel / Andrew Wimmer Kevin
Zeese P.
Sainath John
Stauber Scott
Handleman Tom
Barry John
Walsh Justin
E.H. Smith Alan
Wallis Ben
Tripp Frederick
B. Hudson Poets'
Basement
June 24, 2005 Ray
McGovern Jorge
Mariscal Desiree
Hellegers Zeynep
Toufe Joshua
Frank David
Lindorff Michael
Neumann Website
of the Day
June 23, 2005 Christopher
Brauchli Clay
Conrad Standard
Schaefer P.
Sainath Mark
Engler Norman
Solomon Cockburn
/ St. Clair Kathy
Kelly
June 22, 2005 Kevin
Zeese William
S. Lind Arsalan
Iftikhar Dan
Nagengast David
Krieger Kathleen
& Bill Christison
June 21, 2005 Brian Cloughley Mike Whitney Dave Lindorff Mark Weisbrot Matthew R.
Simmons Dave Zirin Virginia Rodino Paul Craig
Roberts
June 20, 2005 Alan Maass Tariq Ali Mickey Z. William Blum Gary Leupp Jason Leopold Dave Lindorff Alan Maass Uri Avnery Website of
the Day
June 18 / 19, 2005 Alexander Cockburn Greg Moses Benjamin Shepard Stan Goff Lee Sustar Jude Wanniski Diana Barahona Brian Concannon, Jr. Fred Gardner Mike Whitney Ahmad Faruqui Manuel García, Jr. Roger Howard Ron Jacobs Ben Tripp Poets' Basement Website of
the Weekend
June 17, 2005 Ricardo Alarcón Clay Conrad Marc Estrin Colin Brown Christopher
Brauchli Joshua Frank Norman Solomon Mary Rizzo Bond / Brutus
/ Setshedi
June 16, 2005 John Walsh Dave Lindorff Adrian Lomax Tom Crumpacker Jeffrey Kolakowski Julene Bair Michael Dickinson Francois Houtart / Isabel Parra,
et al. Tom Barry
June 15, 2005 Stan Goff Daniel Wolff Tim Wise Ricardo Alarcón Joshua Frank John Hilary Norman Solomon Alexander Cockburn
/ Jeffrey St. Clair Website of the Day
June 14, 2005 Paul Craig
Roberts Forrest Hylton Richard Gott Fred Gardner Steve Breyman Dave Zirin Robert Kent Paul Craig
Roberts
June 13, 2005 Gary Leupp Dave Lindorff John Stauber Fred Gardner Evelyn J. Pringle Norman Solomon Winslow T.
Wheeler
June 10 / 12, 2005 Alexander
Cockburn Sharon
Smith Brian
Cloughley Chris
Kromm Heather
Gray Kevin
Zeese Mickey
Z. Gary
Leupp Eli
Stephens Nick
Dearden Oscar
Olivera Robert
Fisk Michael
Dickinson Poets'
Basement Website
of the Weekend
Len
Colodny Christopher
Brauchli Ron
Jacobs Dave
Lindorff Katrina
Yeaw / Alex Schmaus Alan
Farago Saul
Landau
June 8, 2005 Jim
Hougan Alan
Maass Jason
Leopold Niranjan
Ramakrishnan Dave
Zirin Derrick
O'Keefe Diana
Johnstone Website
of the Day
June 7, 2005 Forrest
Hylton Greg
Moses / Susan van Haitsma Lenni
Brenner Col.
Dan Smith Joshua
Frank Dave
Lindorff Margot
Veranes / Adrian Navarro Michael
Neumann
June 6, 2005 Stew
Albert Paul
Craig Roberts Nicole
Colson Ali
Khan Jason
Leopold Charles
Walker Poff Ramzy
Baroud Rep.
John Conyers Evelyn
Pringle Gary
Corseri Website
of the Day
June 4 / 5, 2005 Alexander
Cockburn James
Petras Robert
Fisk Patrick
Cockburn Rev.
William Alberts Saul
Landau Mario
Lamo Jimenez Dave
Lindorff Lance
Selfa Tom
Crumpacker Joshua
Frank Fred
Gardner Michael
Dickinson Roger
Martin Reza
Fiyouzat Ben
Tripp Graeme
Greenback Poets'
Basement
June 3, 2005 Paul
Craig Roberts Joseph
Massad Jeff
Halper Tom
Barry Bruce
K. Gagnon Joshua
Frank Mickey
Z. Gary
Leupp Website
of the Day
June 2, 2005 Paul
Craig Roberts Forrest
Hylton Mike
Whitney Brian
Cloughley Mazin
Qumsiyeh Russell
D. Hoffman Norman
Madarasz Norman
Solomon David
Price Website
of the Day
June 1, 2005 James
Petras Justin
Delacour Edward
Jay Epstein Omar
Barghouti / Lisa Taraki Dave
Lindorff Kevin
Zeese Jason
Leopold William
S. Lind
May 31, 2005 Sen.
Mike Gravel David
Krieger Tad
Daley Joshua
Frank Richard
Gott Norman
Solomon Tom
Segev Walter
Brasch Diana
Johnstone
May 28 / 30, 2005 Alexander
Cockburn Richard
Lichtman Sharon
Smith Paul
Craig Roberts Dave
Lindorff Ramzy
Baroud Brian
Cloughley Fred
Gardner Lee
Sustar Joshua
Frank Justin
E.H. Smith Jackie
Corr Michael
Kimaid Toufic
Haddad Justin
Taylor Amir
Butler Ben
Tripp Poets'
Basement
May 27, 2005 Gary
Leupp Daniel
Estulin Kevin
Zeese Robert
Fisk Dave
Zirin Website
of the Day
Hot Stories Alexander Cockburn Subcomandante
Marcos Norman Finkelstein Steve Niva Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams Steve
J.B. Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber Wendell
Berry CounterPunch
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Independence
Day Weekend Edition Breaking the Chains of Monkish Ignorance and SuperstitionJefferson, God and the Fourth of JulyBy LENNI BRENNER America's July 4th holiday celebrates Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence. But only 2 percent of Americans consider him the greatest president, while 11 percent think William Jefferson Clinton deserves that title. If educated Americans are asked what the Declaration is all about, many quote: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." Among the most famous words ever written, yet a 10/03 poll told us that 66 percent of adult Americans don't know it's from the Declaration. (It also reported 53 percent not knowing that the first 10 amendments are the Bill of Rights.) George Gallup, Jr. is correct: "These findings are cause for deep concern. If knowledge of the basic components of American history and civics are lost, then the American system of representative democracy could be lost as well." Gallup's stricture must be amended to make it even harsher. Scroll Jefferson up to our day. He would say that our US already bears no resemblance to his hopes for his new republic. His last written words, in 1826, said of the Declaration,
Yet today's President prays daily, even as his air force and naval academies admit to gross violations of Jefferson's "wall of separation between Church and State." Still, Bush's fanaticism has its unintended positive effects. Intellectuals are reexamining church/state relations. Christopher Hitchens's Thomas Jefferson: Author of America is one of the more publicized works in the growing genre. Much contemporary writing on
Jefferson focuses on the reality that the author of "all
men are created equal" freed none of his slaves in his will
except his mistress, Sally Hemings, and their children. Hitchens
correctly points out that she was related to his late white wife
and that there was no rape involved. Indeed the real issue is
the fact that the man who didn't free his other slaves started
his political career in 1769, at 26, in colonial Virginia's legislature.
His first bill was "for the permission of the emancipation
of slaves," by Jefferson's early writings about slavery were sincere and sometimes sublime. Of course he saw what it did to the slaves. And slavery turned masters into mindless despots. But in the mix are prejudices no sane white still believes in. He gave his emancipation plan in his 1781 Notes on the State of Virginia. Blacks born after passage would be free-born. Educated, they would be colonized to a place under US protection, to become fully sovereign. "Why not retain them and incorporate the blacks into the state?" He lists "deep-rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained." These will "produce convulsions, which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race." He gives other objections, "physical and moral." Among these are Blacks' "own judgment in favor of the whites, declared by their preference of them, as uniformly as is the preference of the Oran-utan for the black woman over those of his own species." Blacks were dumb. And "the improvement of the blacks in body and mind, in the first instance of their mixture with the whites ... proves that their inferiority is not the effect merely of their conditions of life." But he was no kluxer. Science was still primitive. The Notes refutes the notion of George Buffon, Europe's prestigious scientist, that American animals are degenerate compared to European equivalents. Jefferson points to the absence of even one naturalist survey on Blacks or Indians. The cautious scientist takes over: "The opinion that they are inferior in the faculties of reason and imagination, must be hazarded with great diffidence. To justify a general conclusion, requires many observations... I advance it, therefore, as a suspicion only, that the blacks ... are inferior." His tentative belief in black inferiority was in no way a rationalization in favor of slavery. In 1784, in Congress, he proposed that slavery be prohibited in what are now Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky and the land north of the Ohio River. However, under the pre-constitution Articles of Confederation, seven state delegations had to vote for it. Because a delegate was ill, New Jersey couldn't vote and the bill failed: "The voice of a single individual ... would have prevented this abominable crime from spreading... Thus we see the fate of millions unborn hanging on the tongue of one man, and Heaven is silent in that awful moment!" With Article I, Section 9 of the 1787 Constitution, "importation of such persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the year one thousand eight hundred and eight," the slavery question went into political limbo. In our times it is possible for the oppressed to win. Therefore we are duty bound to fight for their liberation. But we can't condemn Jefferson, then, for not waging a Quixotic struggle for immediate emancipation. Lincoln put it perfectly: "To the extent that a necessity is imposed upon a man, he must submit to it. I think that was the condition in which we found ourselves when we established this government. We had slaves among us; we could not get our constitution unless we permitted them to remain in slavery; we could not secure the good we did secure if we grasped for more." In 1791, Benjamin Banneker, a free black, sent Jefferson a copy of the Almanac he had written, and called upon him to acknowledge black intellectual equality. Jefferson truthfully replied: "I thank you, sincerely, for your letter of the 19th instant, and for the Almanac it contained. No body wishes more than I do, to see such proofs as you exhibit, that nature has given to our black brethren talents equal to those of the other colors of men; and that the appearance of the want of them, is owing merely to the degraded condition of their existence, both in Africa and America. I can add with truth, that no body wishes more ardently to see a good system commenced, for raising the condition, both of their body and mind, to what it ought to be, as far as the imbecility of their present existence, and other circumstances, which cannot be neglected, will admit. I have taken the liberty of sending your Almanac to Monsieur de Condozett, Secretary of the Academy of Sciences at Paris, and Member of the Philanthropic Society, because I considered it as a document, to which your whole color had a right for their justification, against the doubts which have been entertained of them. History's tragic contradiction deliberately closed with a courtly, "I am, with great esteem, Sir, your most obedient servant." Hitchens doesn't give us a word of Jefferson's letter. Instead we have: "But he never quite believed that black poets or Black scientists, from Phillis Wheatley to Benjamin Banneker, were able to produce anything worthwhile on their own, or unaided by superior example." What the first great republican thinker of modern times couldn't foresee, precisely because none went before him, whose mistakes he could study, was that submission to necessity, contrary to his principles, slowly but surely distorted his ability to understand the evolution of southern slavery and the northern capitalism that ultimately destroyed the institution. He rejoiced at Banneker's letter. But he was then Secretary of State in a government protecting slavery. Later, as President (1801-17), he couldn't recognize Haiti, where Blacks killed or drove out their masters. And he, who had tried to stop slavery at the Alabama line, didn't try to ban it from Louisiana when he bought it from Napoleon. By 1820 he further capitulated. Missouri had been carved out of the Louisiana Territory and sought statehood. Under the Missouri Compromise, it was admitted as a slave state, but slavery was barred north of it. Jefferson, in retirement, usually ignored politics. "But this momentous question, like a firebell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the union ... there is not a man on earth who would sacrifice more than I would to relieve us from this heavy reproach, in any practicable way ... we have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go ... as the passage of slaves from one state to another, would not make a slave of a single human being ... so their diffusion over a greater surface would ... proportionately facilitate the accomplishment of their emancipation." Retired, his late 70s, with no feel for contemporary affairs, he saw the new attacks on slavery as a scheme by the Federalist enemies he defeated to make a comeback. He wanted slavery to end, but had no understanding re the mechanisms of economic evolution. Socially isolated at Monticello, he read, in Greek for preference, and he wrote incessantly. In 1819-20 he took a razor to the 4 Gospels, removing all traces of supernaturalism, producing The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. It is so coherent that readers must have a King James Bible handy. That's the only way to see how much he disposed of. Defeated by necessity on slavery, his thinking was as strong as ever re religion. He and Madison, his protege, then ally and successor, had triumphed, first in Virginia, where they disestablished the episcopalianism they were born into. Then he convinced Madison to author the Bill of Rights. Madison had initially felt it would only prove a parchment barrier. Then, in 1802, President Jefferson publicly defined the first Amendment as building "a wall of separation between Church and State." The Virginians didn't get everything they wanted. Once Madison was convinced of the need for the Bill of Rights, he wanted it to hold for the states as well as the national government. But, beyond Virginia, these would only enter the proposed new federal regime if they were allowed to keep their religious establishments and discriminations. (Application of the 1st Amendment to states only came in the 20th century via Supreme Court interpretation of the post-slavery 14th Amendment as enforcing it everywhere.) But Jefferson and Madison correctly felt that their spirit would triumph even in Federalist Massachusetts, the citadel of their pious Tory enemies, which indeed disestablished Congregationalism Church in 1833. Jefferson died feeling that the Declaration, announcing the first popular based republic in modern times, and his "wall of separation between Church and State" were his inseparable legacies. Truly so. But Hitchens' comments on this run from arbitrary to absurd:
Evidence for this? None. But surely his depiction of old Jefferson is his strangest notion:
Again Hitchens doesn't provide a speck of evidence for Jefferson the atheist. His Federalist enemies often accused him of atheism but Hitchens isn't denouncing him for it. Too the contrary, he suggests it because he is an atheist who wants Jefferson to be such as well. Hitchens invents worlds to suit himself. I ran into him after the then- leftist announced himself as an opponent of abortion. I asked what the response was: "I caught hell for it. So I've decided that it has to be legal under capitalism. But when we get socialism, it should be banned." Whether we will ever see socialism here is, at the least, iffy-maybe. But a socialist regime surprising its supporters by outlawing abortion, ranks as one of the most fantastic ideas imaginable. Narcissism, 'I want it, therefore it should be so,' was and is the core of his character. In addition to nonsense about oran-utans and black women, Jefferson also wrote that "Among the Mahometans we are told that thousands fell victim to the dispute whether the first or second toe of Mahomet was longest." After we see enough such from him and other serious thinkers, we are supposed to learn a profound truth: The burden of proof is always on the maker of a positive statement. We are absolutely forbidden to talk about anything we can't back up with evidence. Nonsense like this is rare in Jefferson. He usually writes intelligently, indeed memorably, about things he knows. But unsubstantiated speculation is Hitchens' core methodology. It helps to explain his decades-long career of crank political leaps like anti-abortionism. As to the real Jefferson, although the retired president never joined the movement, in 1822, well past any need for political caution, he "confidently" expected "that the present generation will see Unitarianism become the general religion of the United States." He didn't join because "I fear, that when this great truth shall be re-established, its Votaries will fall into the fatal error of fabricating formulas of creed and Confessions of faith, the engines which so soon destroyed the religion of Jesus." You don't need to read anyone's book about Jefferson. Read him. With his faults, he was a gifted writer. Come to your own conclusions as to his proper place in history. Until then, have a happy 4th of July. Lenni Brenner is the editor of Jefferson & Madison on Separation of Church and State: Writings on Religion and Secularism and a contributor to The Politics of Anti-Semitism. He also edited 51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis. He can be reached at BrennerL21@aol.com.
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