It’ll get us to think about difficult topics, like terrorism.
Parts of it are set in Yorkshire, England.
Awhile ago I noticed that a lot of news stories about Muslim radicals in England were coming from the midlands area. So those interested in early Quaker history can watch this movie as a travelogue for the area where the first Friends really got going.
We tend to think that Quakerism got started in the hinterlands of England, mainly up in the far north-west, an area now called the Lake District. But a lot of the early work of George Fox and others was in the middle part of the country, which had a lot of large towns and where, 1-2 centuries later (~1750-1850), the Industrial Revolution took hold.
Quakers who know a little of the early history tend to date the start-up of Quakerism from a day in 1652 when George Fox looked out from Pendle Hill, in Lancashire, toward the north-west and up into the countryside north of Morcambe Bay, seeing “a great people to be gathered.” Historical studies … show that Fox’s moment on the hill was rooted in at least a decade of careful and deliberate work by small groups of people in the East Midlands of England, particularly in Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, and spreading northward into the ‘West Riding’ of Yorkshire — to towns such as Balby, Tickhill and Wakefield.
Hopefully the movie will get fairly wide distribution in the U.S. It had a good reception at Sundance a few months ago, it’s been doing well in Britain, and it has an 84% rating on the Tomato-meter, but who knows?
A new book on the Cold War, and how close to the edge we were all skating, is mentioned in a post on the Daily Kos blog. The author, David E. Hoffman, is asked what part of the book he would recommend that President Obama should read if he had just a few minutes.
“Hands down, the answer is, I want him to read about Stanislav Petrov and the false alarm.”
That part is available online, but as a series of jpegs, without any links that I could find to follow from one page to the next. Titled “Nightwatch for Nuclear War,” it’s actually the second story of two, on pages 6 to 11 of the Preface. The first story (pp. 1-6) is also worth a read.
The full story is also told in Wikipedia, but not in so dramatic a fashion. I know I’ve heard the story before (and I’m sure, so has Obama) but this is a new retelling, in a book that brings out much new information on the massive build-up that we saw in the second half of the last century.
I lived in that time, and I’m glad to say: We lived through that time!
I. That the people of England, being at this day very unequally distributed by Counties, Cities, and Boroughs, for the election of their deputies in Parliament, ought to be more indifferently proportioned, according to the number of the inhabitants; the circumstances whereof, for number, place, and manner, are to be set down before the end of this present Parliament.
Today, Senators representing 37% of the population in the U.S. can apparently control the agenda and outcome of this nation’s legislature.
Update — The title of this post, quoted from the 1647 “Agreement of the People,” is pretty funny taken out of context. But “the people” refers to the whole population, or to be more precise, the body-politic of the United States.
So how might the people be better proportioned? Here’s a map showing new boundaries for fifty states, each with about 5.6 million, which would mean that the two senators from each state represent about the same number of people:
Neil Freeman’s map is included in a follow-up post by James Fallows in his blog at the Atlantic.
You gotta love some of those names. “Brownia” is presumably named for the abolitionist John Brown. And like the Quakers’ Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, the proposed state of Philadelphia encompasses southern New Jersey and maybe a bit of Delaware.
Mr. Phanor had traveled to Haiti to invest in land for an apartment building, and ended up trapped in the ruins of his room on the first floor of the Hotel Montana. He was buried for seven hours, with only one arm free, before members of a United Nations peacekeeping unit dug him out.
During that time, he listened to another guest and his daughter trapped in the rubble nearby. The man sang to his daughter until he died, said Mr. Phanor, who was flown to Miami with a broken arm, a fractured leg, a broken clavicle, a punctured lung and damage to his liver and spleen.
Since I first read those lines, that bit of a story has been on my mind. It is so powerful, and can be turned one way and another for more nuances. It stands alone, sufficient unto itself, and it begs a thousand questions — but what did he sing? Where were they from? How old were they? Did she live?
And for me, it’s also a universal. In how many ways, how many times, has a father sung to his daughter, until he died? A father-mother to a daughter-son? Or vice-versa? It turns in my mind, it churns in my guts.
I’ve been interested for awhile in the historic parallels between pirates (the English-speaking ones, especially in the Atlantic ocean) and Quakers. Of course, in a compare-and-contrast exercise, there’d be more contrast than comparison, but still…
Here’s an article that may spark some thoughts along those lines:
At eight o’clock, a watchman heard a rowboat. Snelgrave called for lanterns and ordered twenty armed sailors on deck, and others down into the steerage, where they could fire out of the ship’s portholes. He then hailed the approaching boat, whose occupants replied that they had come from Barbados on a ship with the soothing name Two Friends. But they were invisible in the dark, and Snelgrave was mistrustful. Rightly so: soon after Snelgrave’s crew brought him light, the strangers opened fire.
• • •
Friendships and working relationships linked pirate society across ships. Most captains knew one another personally, and many hunted together for a spell. Through their shared culture, they refined shipboard democracy. The supreme power aboard a pirate ship was the common council, which Marcus Rediker calls a “floating town meeting.” Whoever had sworn to the articles could vote. Captains were elected, and ate the same food as their men. Only when the ship was fighting or fleeing could a captain make decisions on his own, and he could be deposed if the crew thought him cowardly or his treatment of prisoners too cruel or too kind. In daily matters, his power was checked by that of another elected official, the quartermaster, who distributed food and booty and administered minor punishments.
Doesn’t that sound just like the Clerks and Elders of a Friends Meeting on the high seas, meetings for business, and the conviviality of the wider society of Friends in the same period — allowing for some minor adjustments to meet exigencies of setting and circumstance?
What were George Fox and his traveling companions concerned about, really, when the ship they were on, the Industry, was steadily run down by a pirate ship, hour by hour on a moon-lit Saturday night?
We do get a passing mention of “a democratic tradition that traces its origins back at least 800 years.” However, the revolutionary era of the mid-1600s is omitted in this account, as is the Glorious Revolution in 1688. Modern democracy in Britain is dated to reforms made in the mid-1800s:
[P]opular resentment [today] has reached proportions that are drawing comparisons to the situation 180 years ago, when the Great Reform Act of 1832 was speeded through Parliament by riots in several cities. That act laid the basis for modern democracy in Britain by widening the males-only franchise and shifting power to the country’s cities from the “rotten boroughs” controlled by rural grandees.
Without a constitutional balance of powers, such as we allow for in the U.S., the British system has inherent weaknesses.
[R]eforms that began in earnest in 1832 began to be rolled back as early as World War I, with governments claiming ever-widening statutory powers, and imposing their will roughshod through their control of pliant parliamentary majorities. The result, the critics say, has been an entrenchment of “parliamentary dictatorship,” with the only moment of meaningful accountability for governments coming at general elections that are held, in normal circumstances, every four or five years.
1830s to 1920s… Hmmm, how might we characterize Britain’s place in the world during the period that was, by this account, the high plateau of effective democratic parliamentary government?
I lived in England in 1977-78, and left shortly before the election of the Thatcher government, which apparently consolidated the high-handed top-down approach. Thatcher gets a nod here, however, for wielding her “relatively untrammeled power” to initiate “free-market reforms that rejuvenated Britain’s economy.” The Labour governments that followed, however, apparently haven’t used this power so well.
Especially since Tony Blair led Labor to power in 1997, cabinet government has given way to informal cabals of favored ministers and trusted aides, in what British tabloids have called “sofa government.” The independence of civil servants has been undermined, especially at 10 Downing Street, by political favoritism and the proliferation of American-style “special advisers” on the public payroll, who act as the prime minister’s acolytes.
Now a corruption scandal “involving at most £30 million to £50 million in dodgy claims over the past five years,” apparently threatens to bring the current system of arrangements to its knees.
The watershed, historically, may prove to have been Britain’s decision to join the United States in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, at a time when antiwar protests were drawing hundreds of thousands into London’s streets.
It certainly bothered me, watching from “over the pond,” how a Labour government managed to align itself with the U.S. Bush-Cheney regime and force a concocted war upon the people in Britain.
The reformers’ wish list reads like a primer from American experience. It includes fewer members of Parliament — Britain, with a population of 60 million, has 200 more members in its lower house than there are in the United States House of Representatives, which represents more than 300 million people. The list also includes parliamentary committees with real powers of oversight and investigation, in place of tame, government-controlled bodies; primary elections to select parliamentary candidates, superseding the closed, party-run selection system that operates now; and a return to the old traditions of cabinet government, ministerial accountability and civil service independence.
Well, we shall see how things progress in Britain, in this great social experiment called “democracy.”
The detainee
is lying on a gurney
that is inclined at an angle
10 to 15 degrees.
A cloth is placed
over the detainee’s face,
cold water is poured on the cloth.
The wet cloth creates
a barrier through which
it is difficult
or in some cases
not possible
for the detainee to breathe.
If the detainee
makes an effort to defeat
the technique
by twisting his head
to the side
and breathing out the
corner of his mouth,
the interrogator
may cup his hands around
the detainee’s nose and mouth
in which case it would not be possible
for the detainee to breathe.
(Oh, to breathe!)
But as we explained
in the section 2340A
Memorandum,
“pain and
suffering”
is best understood
as a single concept
not distinct concepts
of “pain”
as distinguished from “suffering”.
(Oh, suffering!)
The waterboard
which inflicts no pain
or actual
harm whatsoever,
does not in our view
inflict “severe pain
or suffering”.
Even if one were
to parse the statute
more finely
to treat suffering
as a distinct concept
the waterboard could not
be said to inflict
severe suffering.
The waterboard is simply (Ohhh suffering!)
a controlled acute episode
lacking the connotation (Severe suffering!)
of a protracted period of time
generally given to suffering. (Severe suffering!)
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow grills former Secretary of State Colin Powell on torture. He was one of the top officials at “principles meetings” where Bush administration policies and procedures were considered and (sometimes tacitly?) approved.
You can see what an excellent diplomat Powell is (and not always in the best sense of the word).
MADDOW: On the issue of intelligence tainted evidence and those things, were you ever present at meetings at which the interrogation of prisoners like Abu Zubaida and other prisoners in those early days where the interrogation was directed, where* specific interrogation techniques were approved? It has been reported on a couple of different sources that there were principles meetings, which you would have typically been there where those interrogations were almost play by play discussed.
POWELL: They were not play by play discussed, but there were conversations at a senior level as to what could be done with these types of interrogation. I cannot go further because I don‘t have knowledge of all the meetings that took place or what was discussed at each of those meetings, and I think it‘s going to have to be in the written record of those meetings what will determine whether anything improper took place.
[* - Transcribed as “were.”]
Colin Powell suggests that he’d have to be at all the meetings in order to answer a simple Yes-or-No question about whether he was ever at any of those meetings.
Maddow presses him further, and Powell falls back on quibbling with the word “torture” — a defense the Bush administration has used for the past several years.
MADDOW: I guess have to ask that — a broader question about whether or not you have regrets not about what the Bush administration did broadly in the years that you were secretary of state but the decisions that you participated in about interrogation, about torture, about the other things that are now so much [… Powell interrupts].
POWELL: There was no meeting on torture. It‘s constantly said that the meetings — I had an issue with this — we had meetings on what torture to administer. What I recall, the meetings I was in,[yes???] and I was not in all the meetings and I was not an author of many of the memos that have been written and some have come out and some have not come out.
The only meetings I recall was where we talked about what is it we can do with respect to trying to get information from individuals who were in our custody. And I will — I will just have to wait until the full written record is available and has been examined.
Notice how he gets to the edge of talking about specific meetings, but then stumbles away with one throw-away phrase after another, and finally punts the question to a time when “the full written record is available.”
Commenting on the interview, Rachel Maddow reflects:
MADDOW: That complete record, he says, will in due course come out.
And the question, of course, is — will it?
General Powell says he expects a written record was made of those discussions in the Situation Room and that record would show whether anything improper happened when senior White House officials discussed how to get information from individuals in our custody, as he said. He says he awaits whatever investigation that the government or the Congress intends to pursue with this in order to say if what happened in that Situation Room was a crime.
He‘s awaiting that investigation. Will that investigation happen? That‘s not up to the people who came up with these policies in the Bush administration. Now, it is up to Congress and to President Obama.
He starts by taking seriously an offhand account George Bush gave recently, of what his economic advisors have actually been telling him.
George Bush:
The question facing a President is not when the problem started, but what did you do about it when you recognized the problem. And I readily concede I chunked aside some of my free market principles when I was told by [my] chief economic advisors that the situation we were facing could be worse than the Great Depression.
Englehardt goes on to ask if the apparatus of U.S. government is really in shape to handle the sorts of programs that Obama campaigned on and reiterated in his speech today.
Tom Engelhardt:
But what if the federal government slated to organize, channel, and oversee that spending is itself thoroughly demoralized and broken? What then? […] Who knows what condition the eviscerated Environmental Protection Agency is in, or the Housing Department, or the Interior Department, or the Treasury Department, or the Energy Department after these years of thoroughgoing politicization in which all those crony capitalist pals of the Bush administration and all those industry lobbyist foxes were let loose among the federal chickens meant to oversee them?
Good questions.
Meanwhile the hawks and wolves are already circling, and adding their hatred to the mix — e.g., in comments on the otherwise quite benign FiveThirtyEight.com site. (No slur intended on actual hawks and wolves, of course.)
The press release giving the content of Bush’s last press conference, by the way, is no longer available at the spiffy new whitehouse.gov.
“No se Registró Novedad Digna de Mencionar” / Nothing happened worthy of mention.
En diciembre de 1974, el Departamento de Investigaciones registra a Benjamín Ramírez Villalba, Amílcar Maria Oviedo y Carlos José Mancuello que fueron capturados junto a Rodolfo Ramírez Villalba. A mediados de 1976, los cuatro desaparecerían de la prisión policial.
///
In December of 1974, the Department of Investigations registers Benjamín Ramírez Villalba, Amílcar Maria Oviedo and Carlos José Mancuello who were arrested along with Rodolfo Ramírez Villalba. In the middle of 1976, the four would disappear from the police prison.
These young men were my contemporaries. I graduated from high school in 1974. In 1976 I joined Friends World College. During those years and later in the ’70s while I was living in Europe, at demonstrations sometimes I was handed leaflets appealing for attention to the ongoing dirty war in South America. My heart went out for the people mentioned, but I never did anything about it. Still, their condition has always been for me part of the texture of those times.
The NSA report uses original source documents to chart their passage through the system of police terror in Paraguay, until their disappearance almost two years later. They were officially listed as having “escaped.” The authorities stuck to this story ever since, until now when it has finally been demolished.
Sin embargo, las declaraciones del acusado Lucilo Benitez son contundentes y demoledoras pues “admite por primera vez circunstancias y hechos que eran decididamente negadas por los otros coprocesados.”
Las declaraciones de Benítez calzan perfectamente con los vacios y contradicciones de la historia oficial. El día 21 de Septiembre de 1976, dice Benítez, “…aproximadamente a las 21:30 el Señor Pastor Coronel, se retiró de su despacho, al retirarse me ordenó que me quedara en la Oficina de Guardia para proceder en compañía del Oficial [Celso] Cantero a la entrega de dichos detenidos… siendo aproximadamente las 22:30 de ese día llega una camioneta Kombi, color rojo hasta la oficina de Guardia del Departamento de Investigaciones, del cual desciende el Comisario Ramón Saldivar, [Julián] Ruiz Paredes y Salvador Mendoza.”
Benítez continúa “…fuimos hasta el calabozo No 1… de a uno los sacamos del calabozo… los esposamos y yo los conduje hasta la oficina de guardia donde les entregue al Comisario General Saldivar y sus acompañantes, quienes los alzaron en la camioneta mencionada. Terminado los tres Comisarios mencionados abordaron dicho vehículo y se desplazaron por [la calle] Presidente Franco doblando hacia [la calle] Chile, hacia el Paraguayo Independiente, desconociendo el destino y la suerte corrida por estos detenidos…”
The cover-up began the next morning.
El superior de los Oficiales de Guardia Celso Cantero y Jorge Pane, el Comisario Inspector Eliodoro Sánchez escribe a Pastor Coronel una nota extremadamente breve a las siete de la mañana del día 22:
“Comunico a esa Superioridad que durante mi servicio de Oficial de Ronda de la Unidad, establecida desde las 19 horas del dia de ayer a las 7 horas del dia de hoy NO SE REGISTRO NOVEDAD DIGNA DE MENCIONAR.” [Las mayúsculas son del original]
I won’t attempt a full translation of the above paragraphs, but leave it to readers with a bit of Spanish and/or the patience to work through the Babblefish translation. (Babblefish gives the title of this post.)
In gist, the day after the four prisoners were “disappeared,” a prison official carefully (and with his own capital letters) reported that “between 7PM last night and 7AM today, NOTHING HAPPENED WORTHY OF MENTION” — thus negating the future claim that the four had “escaped” with a first attempt to blot out what actually happened to these four young men.
