only a few presidents (Lincoln was one) have shared Obama’s inclination to offer his fellow citizens a running class in American history and its meaning.
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shared by Javier E on 16 Jan 17
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The powerful word Obama could help Trump understand | The Washington Post - 0 views
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obama trump history rhetoric presidency principles philo
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Obama saw the complicated lessons of America’s saga as a road map for where it should move next. Obama, Kloppenberg wrote, “has learned congruent lessons from multiple sources,” and summarized them this way:
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Change in America is a work of decades, not months or even years. Obama also learned, from absorbing all these lessons, that a culture’s only home is to be found in its tortured history.
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“Democracy works best when rights are balanced against responsibilities. Democracy requires compromise, not because it is the path of least resistance but because people can learn from each other, and because lasting change demands widespread popular assent
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Obama’s conservative detractors regularly accused him of “apologizing” for America. In truth, he never stopped making the case for an America with an exceptional capacity for self-correction.
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Were Trump to try, he could learn from Obama’s respect for American history’s lessons and his appreciation for the country’s steady march toward inclusion and justice.
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Obama at Hiroshima: What to watch for - CNNPolitics.com - 0 views
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President Barack Obama will become the first sitting president to visit the city Friday, traveling there to offer a reconciliatory balm for the still-painful knowledge of the devastation countries can inflict upon one another.
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He also hopes to remind the world that nuclear weapons remain a global threat when placed in the wrong hands.
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Officials say Obama won't apologize for the decision to use an atomic bomb, which many historians insist was necessary to hasten the end of World War II and save lives.
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Such an apology would ripple to the U.S., likely igniting a political firestorm on the home front in the midst of the presidential race.
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Obama said Thursday he hoped to mark Hiroshima as a history-altering moment -- the U.S. is the only country to have ever used a nuclear bomb -- that humanity must avoid repeating.
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"The dropping of the atomic bomb, the ushering in of nuclear weapons, was an inflection point in modern history," Obama said during a news conference at the G-7 Summit in Japan.
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Obama further hopes his appearance at the site will serve to reinforce his bid to reduce global stockpiles of nuclear weapons, an effort that's had only moderate strides after seven years in office.
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Obama in Hiroshima calls for 'world without nuclear weapons' - CNNPolitics.com - 0 views
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Obama said that "71 years ago on a bright, cloudless morning, death fell from the sky and the world was changed."
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Obama was not expected to apologize for the U.S. action to hasten the end of World War II and he did not during his 20-minute-long remarks.
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Obama said there is a "shared responsibility" to look into the "eye of history" and ask what must be done to prevent another nuclear weapon being used.
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"The scientific revolution that led to the splitting of an atom requires a moral revolution as well," Obama said. "That is why we come to this place."
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The President called for an end to senseless wars, even as he reflected that violence has existed throughout human history.
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"Those civilizations have given the world great cities, magnificent art, thinkers that advanced ideas of harmony and truth, and yet the war grew out of the same base instinct for domination. Conflicts can cause conflicts among the simplest of tribes."
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"We do not need apologies," Tsuboi added. "I hope that he will present in Hiroshima what is good for the happiness of humankind. I would like to join hands with each other through the power of reason and beyond hatred."
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Reporter who says she was manhandled by Trump campaign manager resigns from Breitbart -... - 0 views
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Fields filed a report with the Jupiter, Fla. police department Friday, according to the Associated Press. That same day, she did an interview with Fox News’ Megyn Kelly explaining her decision. She said that she’d contacted her editor [Washington Political Editor Matthew Boyle] and told him what happened, and that Boyle contacted Lewandowski, who allegedly admitted to grabbing Fields.
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Fields said she was told she would receive an apology, but one never came. Instead, on Thursday campaign released a statement denying her allegations. “They have basically done a character assassination on me,” she told Kelly.
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In denying Fields’ allegations, Trump and Lewandowski have suggested that Fields was lying about the assault. “Perhaps she made the story up, I think that’s what happened,” Trump told reporters at the CNN debate Thursday.
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“They’ve been looking for a reason to disprove something when all the evidence from a Washington Post reporter’s firsthand account, to the bruises on Michelle’s arm, to all the photos and video clips that we’ve seen strongly suggest that Corey Lewandowski, Donald Trump’s campaign manager, was the one who did this. And there’s no reason to never support your own reporter.”
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“The central mission was fighting bullies,” he said. But current chairman Steve Bannon “has perverted the mission into one of personal ego-driven politics.”
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“What hurts me the most is the lying and smearing that the Trump campaign is doing,” she said. “… If they can do it to me, if they can lie about a conservative reporter, who knows what they’ll be able to do when they have power of the executive branch?”
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AIPAC's apology for Trump speech is unprecedented - The Washington Post - 0 views
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But no AIPAC speech had been criticized like Trump’s. Jane Eisner, the editor in chief of Jewish news source the Forward, wrote that she was “ashamed that any of my fellow Jews could applaud” Trump. “I am ashamed that they would succumb to the pandering lies,” she wrote. “Donald Trump ought to have been received civilly but silently by AIPAC. Instead, the applause spoke volumes.”
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Chemi Shalev, a correspondent for Israel’s Haaretz, left the Trump speech in shock and asked how fellow Jews could have applauded it. “The enthusiastic reception given Trump could very well deepen the fault lines inside the Jewish community that were uncovered over the summer in the bitter clash over the Iran nuclear deal,” he wrote, adding that “it was good enough to transform Trump from a morally repugnant presidential candidate into a run of the mill contender who deserves as much respect as the others.”
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It was the reaction — wild applause now available to view on Trump's campaign website — that was officially rejected by AIPAC.
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Why Do So Few Blacks Study the Civil War? - Magazine - The Atlantic - 0 views
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The belief that the Civil War wasn’t for us was the result of the country’s long search for a narrative that could reconcile white people with each other, one that avoided what professional historians now know to be true: that one group of Americans attempted to raise a country wholly premised on property in Negroes, and that another group of Americans, including many Negroes, stopped them. In the popular mind, that demonstrable truth has been evaded in favor of a more comforting story of tragedy, failed compromise, and individual gallantry. For that more ennobling narrative, as for so much of American history, the fact of black people is a problem.
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Honor is salvageable from a military defeat; much less so from an ideological defeat, and especially one so duly earned in defense of slavery in a country premised on liberty.
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The fallen Confederacy’s chroniclers grasped this historiographic challenge and, immediately after the war, began erasing all evidence of the crime—that is to say, they began erasing black people—from the written record.
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Having preserved the Union and saved white workers from competing with slave labor, the North could magnanimously acquiesce to such Confederate meretriciousness and the concomitant irrelevance of the country’s blacks. That interpretation served the North too, for it elided uncomfortable questions about the profits reaped by the North from Southern cotton, as well as the North’s long strategy of appeasement and compromise, stretching from the Fugitive Slave Act back to the Constitution itself.
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for my community, the message has long been clear: the Civil War is a story for white people—acted out by white people, on white people’s terms—in which blacks feature strictly as stock characters and props. We are invited to listen, but never to truly join the narrative, for to speak as the slave would, to say that we are as happy for the Civil War as most Americans are for the Revolutionary War, is to rupture the narrative. Having been tendered such a conditional invitation, we have elected—as most sane people would—to decline.
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With a firm foothold in the public memory and in the academic history, the comfortable narrative found its most influential expression in the popular media. Films like Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind revealed an establishment more interested in the alleged sins perpetrated upon Confederates than in the all-too-real sins perpetrated upon the enslaved people in their midst. That predilection continues. In 2010’s The Conspirator, the director Robert Redford’s Mary Surratt is the preferred victim of political persecution—never mind those whose very lives were persecution.
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“It was because we failed to do the thing we really have a genius for, which is compromise,” said Foote, neglecting to mention the Missouri Compromise, the Fugitive Slave Act, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and the fact that any further such compromise would have meant the continued enslavement of black people.
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Wilson executed a familiar act of theater—urging the country’s white citizens away from their history, while continuing to act in the spirit of its darkest chapters. Wilson’s ideas were not simply propaganda, but notions derived from some of the country’s most celebrated historians. James McPherson notes that titans of American history like Charles Beard, Avery Craven, and James G. Randall minimized the role of slavery in the war; some blamed the violence on irreconcilable economic differences between a romantic pastoral South and a capitalistic manufacturing North, or on the hot rhetoric of radical abolitionists.
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The celebrated Civil War historian Bruce Catton best sums up this sense when he refers to the war as “a consuming tragedy so costly that generations would pass before people could begin to say whether what it had bought was worth the price.” All of those “people” are white. For African Americans, war commenced not in 1861, but in 1661, when the Virginia Colony began passing America’s first black codes, the charter documents of a slave society that rendered blacks a permanent servile class and whites a mass aristocracy. They were also a declaration of war.
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African Americans understood they were at war, and reacted accordingly: running away, rebelling violently, fleeing to the British, murdering slave-catchers, and—less spectacularly, though more significantly—refusing to work, breaking tools, bending a Christian God to their own interpretation, stealing back the fruits of their labor, and, in covert corners of their world, committing themselves to the illegal act of learning to read. Southern whites also understood they were in a state of war, and subsequently turned the antebellum South into a police state
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In our present time, to express the view of the enslaved—to say that the Civil War was a significant battle in the long war against bondage and for government by the people—is to compromise the comfortable narrative. It is to remind us that some of our own forefathers once explicitly rejected the republic to which they’d pledged themselves, and dreamed up another country, with slavery not merely as a bug, but as its very premise. It is to point out that at this late hour, the totems of the empire of slavery—chief among them, its flag—still enjoy an honored place in the homes, and public spaces, of self-professed patriots and vulgar lovers of “freedom.” It is to understand what it means to live in a country that will never apologize for slavery, but will not stop apologizing for the Civil War.
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For the portion of the country that still honors, or traces its ancestry to, the men who fired on Fort Sumter, and thus brought war, the truthful story of the Civil War tells of a defeat richly deserved, garnered in a pursuit now condemned. For the blameless North, it throws up the failed legacy of appeasement of slaveholders, the craven willingness to bargain on the backs of black people, and the unwillingness, in the Reconstruction years, to finish what the war started.
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For realists, the true story of the Civil War illuminates the problem of ostensibly sober-minded compromise with powerful, and intractable, evil. For radicals, the wave of white terrorism that followed the war offers lessons on the price of revolutionary change. White Americans finding easy comfort in nonviolence and the radical love of the civil-rights movement must reckon with the unsettling fact that black people in this country achieved the rudiments of their freedom through the killing of whites.
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Confronted with the realization that the Civil War is the genesis of modern America, in general, and of modern black America, in particular, we cannot just implore the Park Service and the custodians of history to do more outreach—we have to become custodians ourselves.
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shared by Javier E on 23 Jul 12
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Rebecca Solnit: Apologies to Mexico - Guernica / A Magazine of Art & Politics - 0 views
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drugs Mexico Latin America pain economics US cultural values
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drugs, when used consistently, constantly, destructively, are all anesthesia from pain. The Mexican drug cartels crave money, but they make that money from the way Yankees across the border crave numbness. They sell unfeeling. We buy it. We spend tens of billions of dollars a year doing so, and by some estimates about a third to a half of that money goes back to Mexico.
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We want not to feel what’s happening to us, and then we do stuff that makes worse things happen–to us and others. We pay for it, too, in a million ways, from outright drug-overdose deaths (which now exceed traffic fatalities, and of which the United States has the highest rate of any nation except tiny Iceland, amounting to more than thirty-seven thousand deaths here in 2009 alone) to the violence of drug-dealing on the street, the violence of people on some of those drugs, and the violence inflicted on children who are neglected, abandoned, and abused because of them–and that’s just for starters. The stuff people do for money when they’re desperate for drugs generates more violence and more crazy greed
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No border divides the pain caused by drugs from the pain brought about in Latin America by the drug business and the narcotraficantes. It’s one big continent of pain–and in the last several years the narcos have begun selling drugs in earnest in their own countries, creating new cultures of addiction and misery.
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Many talk about legalizing drugs, and there’s something to be said for changing the economic arrangements. But what about reducing their use by developing and promoting more interesting and productive ways of dealing with suffering? Or even getting directly at the causes of that suffering?
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I have been trying to imagine the export economy of pain. What does it look like? I think it might look like air-conditioning. This is how an air conditioner works: it sucks the heat out of the room and pumps it into the air outside. You could say that air-conditioners don’t really cool things down so much as they relocate the heat. The way the transnational drug economy works is a little like that: people in the U.S. are not reducing the amount of pain in the world; they’re exporting it to Mexico and the rest of Latin America as surely as those places are exporting drugs to us.
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We give you money and guns, lots and lots of money. You give us drugs. The guns destroy. The money destroys. The drugs destroy. The pain migrates, a phantom presence crossing the border the other way from the crossings we hear so much about.The drugs are supposed to numb people out, but that momentary numbing effect causes so much pain elsewhere. There’s a pain economy, a suffering economy, a fear economy, and drugs fuel all of them rather than making them go away.
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We’ve had movements to get people to stop buying clothes and shoes made in sweatshops, grapes picked by exploited farmworkers, fish species that are endangered, but no one’s thought to start a similar movement to get people to stop consuming the drugs that cause so much destruction abroad.
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Here in the United States, there’s no room for sadness, but there are plenty of drugs for it, and now when people feel sad, even many doctors think they should take drugs. We undergo losses and ordeals and live in circumstances that would make any sane person sad, and then we say: the fault was yours and if you feel sad, you’re crazy or sick and should be medicated. Of course, now ever more Americans are addicted to prescription drugs, and there’s always the old anesthetic of choice, alcohol, but there is one difference: the economics of those substances are not causing mass decapitations in Mexico.
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Mexico, I am sorry. I want to see it all change, for your sake and ours. I want to call pain by name and numbness by name and fear by name. I want people to connect the dots from the junk in their brain to the bullet holes in others’ heads. I want people to find better strategies for responding to pain and sadness. I want them to rebel against those parts of their unhappiness that are political, not metaphysical, and not run in fear from the metaphysical parts either.
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A hundred years ago, your dictatorial president Porfiro Díaz supposedly remarked, “Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States,” which nowadays could be revised to, “Painful Mexico, so far from peace and so close to the numbness of the United States.”
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Politics - James Fallows - 'Apologizing for America': Finally the Parties Can Agree! - ... - 0 views
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Prior to that, every immigrant was neither legal nor illegal, as there were no laws that applied to them. And even from 1882 to 1921, every immigrant not covered by that law (so basically any non-Chinese and eventually non-Asian immigrant; nor covered by the 1875 Page Act, which restricted only prostitutes and convicted criminals) was still neither legal nor illegal, as they continued to fall under the jurisdiction of no law. I think this information makes a big difference, since so many of our arguments about immigration include the phrase "My ancestors came here legally" (meaning that they chose to follow the law), and it's almost always entirely untrue.
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White House apologizes for not sending top officials to Paris unity march - 0 views
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Hillary Clinton's Bizarre Critique of U.S. Foreign Policy - Peter Beinart - The Atlantic - 0 views
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For Hillary, America’s current problem is that once the Cold War ended, we “withdrew from the information arena.” As a result, across the world, a new generation no longer remembers the great things we supposedly did in the past, and America has stopped telling them about the great things we are still doing today. Her answer: “get back to telling” the story of America’s greatness, not only to the rest of the world but “to ourselves first and foremost.”
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For more than five years, the right has claimed the major problem with American foreign policy is that it’s not sufficiently grounded in the belief that America is an exceptional nation fated to lift up humanity by spreading its power, as it did in generations past. Now, bizarrely, Hillary Clinton is leveling the same critique. Which still doesn’t make it right.
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the really weird part of Hillary Clinton’s claim that America must “get back to telling” the story of how great we are “to ourselves” is how much it echoes the right’s attack on Obama. Since Obama took office, a parade of conservative politicians and pundits have accused him of insufficient faith in America’s greatness. Mitt Romney entitled his campaign book No Apology: Believe in America. In 2013, Dick Cheney declared, “I don’t think that Barack Obama believes in the U.S. as an exceptional nation.”
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The problem isn’t that Bush didn’t tell foreigners about all the good America was doing. It’s that in their eyes, Bush’s behavior massively contradicted his rhetoric
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The Halloween Costume Controversy at Yale's Silliman College - The Atlantic - 2 views
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Watching footage of that meeting, a fundamental disagreement is revealed between professor and undergrads.
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Christakis believes that he has an obligation to listen to the views of the students, to reflect upon them, and to either respond that he is persuaded or to articulate why he has a different view. Put another way, he believes that one respects students by engaging them in earnest dialogue.
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But many of the students believe that his responsibility is to hear their demands for an apology and to issue it. They see anything short of a confession of wrongdoing as unacceptable. In their view, one respects students by validating their subjective feelings.
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In “The Coddling of the American Mind,” Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt argued that too many college students engage in “catastrophizing,” which is to say, turning common events into nightmarish trials or claiming that easily bearable events are too awful to bear. After citing examples, they concluded, “smart people do, in fact, overreact to innocuous speech, make mountains out of molehills, and seek punishment for anyone whose words make anyone else feel uncomfortable.”
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As students saw it, their pain ought to have been the decisive factor in determining the acceptability of the Halloween email. They thought their request for an apology ought to have been sufficient to secure one. Who taught them that it is righteous to pillory faculty for failing to validate their feelings, as if disagreement is tantamount to disrespect? Their mindset is anti-diversity, anti-pluralism, and anti-tolerance, a seeming data-point in favor of April Kelly-Woessner’s provocative argument that “young people today are less politically tolerant than their parents’ generation.”
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This notion that one’s existence can be invalidated by a fellow 18-year-old donning an offensive costume is perhaps the most disempowering notion aired at Yale.
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It ought to be disputed rather than indulged for the sake of these students, who need someone to teach them how empowered they are by virtue of their mere enrollment; that no one is capable of invalidating their existence, full stop; that their worth is inherent, not contingent; that everyone is offended by things around them; that they are capable of tremendous resilience; and that most possess it now despite the disempowering ideology foisted on them by well-intentioned, wrongheaded ideologues encouraging them to imagine that they are not privileged.
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Here’s one of the ways that white men at Yale are most privileged of all: When a white male student at an elite college says that he feels disempowered, the first impulse of the campus left is to show him the extent of his power and privilege. When any other students say they feel disempowered, the campus left’s impulse is to validate their statements. This does a huge disservice to everyone except white male students.
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That isn’t to dismiss all complaints by Yale students. If contested claims that black students were turned away from a party due to their skin color are true, for example, that is outrageous. If any discrete group of students is ever discriminated against, or disproportionately victimized by campus crime, or graded more harshly by professors, then of course students should protest and remedies should be implemented.
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shared by katyshannon on 26 Jan 16
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2 Abortion Foes Behind Planned Parenthood Videos Are Indicted - The New York Times - 0 views
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abortion activists behind planned parenthood videos new york times texas indictment jury judge court US
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A grand jury here that was investigating accusations of misconduct against Planned Parenthood has instead indicted two abortion opponents who made undercover videos of the organization.
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Prosecutors in Harris County said one of the leaders of the Center for Medical Progress — an anti-abortion group that made secretly recorded videos purporting to show Planned Parenthood officials trying to illegally profit from the sale of fetal tissue — had been indicted on a charge of tampering with a governmental record, a felony, and on a misdemeanor charge related to purchasing human organs.
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That leader, David R. Daleiden, 27, the director of the center, had posed as a biotechnology representative to infiltrate Planned Parenthood affiliates and surreptitiously record his efforts to procure tissue for research. Another center employee, Sandra S. Merritt, 62, was indicted on a felony charge of tampering with a governmental record.
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The record-tampering charges accused Mr. Daleiden and Ms. Merritt of making and presenting fake California driver’s licenses, with the intent to defraud, for their April meeting at Planned Parenthood in Houston.
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Abortion opponents claimed that the videos, which were released starting in July, revealed that Planned Parenthood was engaged in the illegal sale of body parts — a charge that the organization has denied and that has not been supported in numerous congressional and state investigations triggered by the release of the videos.
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In a statement on Monday night, Mr. Daleiden said: “The Center for Medical Progress uses the same undercover techniques that investigative journalists have used for decades in exercising our First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and of the press, and follows all applicable laws. We respect the processes of the Harris County district attorney, and note that buying fetal tissue requires a seller as well. Planned Parenthood still cannot deny the admissions from their leadership about fetal organ sales captured on video for all the world to see.”
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The release of the videos last summer created a furor and gave new strength to the conservative drive to defund Planned Parenthood. The organization was forced to apologize for the casual tone that one of its officials had used to discuss a possible transfer of fetal tissue to what she believed was a legitimate medical company. But Planned Parenthood said the fees being discussed were to cover costs and were legal. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Advertisement Continue reading the main story
Donald Trump: No apology for questioning Ben Carson's Seventh-day Adventist faith - The... - 0 views
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Tony Blair says he's sorry for Iraq War 'mistakes' - CNN.com - 0 views
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Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair says he's sorry for "mistakes" made in the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, but he doesn't regret bringing down dictator Saddam Hussein.
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Blair acknowledged to Zakaria that there are "elements of truth" in the view that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was the principle cause of the rise of ISIS.
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The consequences of Bush's decision to to take America into Iraq has repeatedly reared its head this year among candidates vying for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination.
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"I find it hard to apologize for removing Saddam. I think, even from today in 2015, it is better that he's not there than that he is there
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Saddam was notorious for his ruthless oppression of Iraqi citizens during more than three decades of dictatorship.
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We have tried intervention and putting down troops in Iraq; we've tried intervention without putting in troops in Libya; and we've tried no intervention at all but demanding regime change in Syria,"
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shared by katyshannon on 13 Jan 16
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Iran demands apology after detaining US navy boat crews for 'violating' Gulf waters | W... - 0 views
www.theguardian.com/...two-us-navy-ships-persian-gulf
iran apology navy boat gulf waters detainment world news the guardian politics US crisis obama
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Iran has said the US should apologise after the crews of two US Navy boats were detained by Revolutionary Guards for “violating” Iran’s waters in the Gulf.
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Rear Admiral Ali Fadavi, said in an interview broadcast live on state television that foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif had taken a “firm stance” on the issue when contacting US secretary of state John Kerry.
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Earlier, US officials said they had received assurances from Tehran that the crew of two small US navy ships in Iranian custody would soon be allowed to continue their journey. Fadavi was quoted by the Tasnim news agency as saying “The final order will be issued soon and they will probably be released.”
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Fadavi blamed the incident on the American navigation system. “Investigation shows that [the] entry of American sailors into Iran’s territorial waters was due to mechanical problems in their navigation system and that issue is being resolved,” he said.
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The two small craft briefly went missing on Tuesday after transiting the Gulf from Kuwait to Bahrain. The Pentagon said the crews ended up in Iranian custody, sparking immediate fears of escalating tensions during a week when Iran is expected to receive the first wave of sanctions relief from the landmark nuclear accords.
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Plans were in place for Iran to return the crew to a US Navy vessel in international waters early on Wednesday, during daylight hours when it would be safer, a US defence official told the Associated Press. The exchange was reportedly set for 10.30am local time (7am GMT), but is yet to have happened.
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Iran’s semi-official Fars news agency reported that 10 Americans – including one woman – were arrested by the naval forces of the country’s powerful Revolutionary Guards after entering Iranian waters.
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Fars said the two American boats were 2km inside Iranian waters when they were detained close to Farsi island, which is home to a Revolutionary Guards base.
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The agency claimed GPS data on the American ships – reported to be on a training mission – also indicated they were on the Iranian side. Pentagon officials told the Associated Press the two boats drifted into Iranian waters after facing mechanical problems. Fars reported the Americans were carrying semi-heavy weaponry on board their craft.
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The episode comes amid heightened regional tensions, and only hours before Barack Obama was set to deliver his final State of the Union address.
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Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio reacted swiftly to the reports, calling on Iran to release the US sailors and navy boats immediately. “If they are not immediately released, and the boats are not immediately released, then we know something else is at play here,” Rubio said in an interview with Fox News on Tuesday.
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Paul Ryan, House speaker and the top Republican in Washington, withheld judgment, saying in a statement: “Our top priority is the safety and security of our servicemembers detained by Iran.
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A US defense department official played down the incident, saying the Iranians had sent indications of the “safety and wellbeing” of the sailors.
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Pentagon and Navy officials did not identify the naval craft, the number of detained sailors, their mission or a timetable for their release.
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Iran’s Revolutionary Guards patrol Iranian waters in the Gulf, especially near the strait of Hormuz, a vital passageway where a fifth of the world’s oil passes in tankers.
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Disputing Korean Narrative on 'Comfort Women,' a Professor Draws Fierce Backlash - The ... - 0 views
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In her book, she emphasized that it was profiteering Korean collaborators, as well as private Japanese recruiters, who forced or lured women into the “comfort stations,” where life included both rape and prostitution. There is no evidence, she wrote, that the Japanese government was officially involved in, and therefore legally responsible for, coercing Korean women.
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Although often brutalized in a “slavelike condition” in their brothels, Ms. Park added, the women from the Japanese colonies of Korea and Taiwan were also treated as citizens of the empire and were expected to consider their service patriotic. They forged a “comradelike relationship” with the Japanese soldiers and sometimes fell in love with them, she wrote. She cited cases where Japanese soldiers took loving care of sick women and even returned those who did not want to become prostitutes.
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Ms. Park’s book, published in Japan last year, won awards there. Last month, 54 intellectuals from Japan and the United States issued a statement criticizing South Korean prosecutors for “suppressing the freedom of scholarship and press.” Among them was a former chief cabinet secretary in Japan, Yohei Kono, who issued a landmark apology in 1993 admitting coercion in the recruitment of comfort women.
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Even then, however, Mr. Kono noted that the recruiting had been conducted mainly by private agents working at the request of the Japanese military, and by administrative and military personnel. For outraged South Koreans, the caveats rendered the apology useless.
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others said the talk of academic freedom missed the main point of the backlash. This month, 380 scholars and activists from South Korea, Japan and elsewhere accused Ms. Park of “exposing a serious neglect of legal understanding” and avoiding the “essence” of the issue: Japan’s state responsibility.
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Yang Hyun-ah, a professor at the Seoul National University School of Law, said that Ms. Park’s most egregious mistake was to “generalize selectively chosen details from the women’s lives.”
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Ms. Park said she had tried to broaden discussions by investigating the roles that patriarchal societies, statism and poverty played in the recruitment of comfort women. She said that unlike women rounded up as spoils of battle in conquered territories like China, those from the Korean colony had been taken to the comfort stations in much the same way poor women today enter prostitution.
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She also compared the Korean comfort women to more recent Korean prostitutes who followed American soldiers into their winter field exercises in South Korea in the 1960s through ’80s. (The “blanket corps,” so called because the women often carried blankets under their arms, followed pimps searching for American troops through snowy hills or built field brothels with tents as the Americans lined up outside, according to former prostitutes for the United States military.)
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“Korean comfort women were victims, but they were also collaborators as people from a colony,” Ms. Park wrote in one of the redacted sentences in her book.
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she added that even if the Japanese government did not directly order the women’s forced recruitment and some Korean women joined comfort stations voluntarily, the government should still be held responsible for the “sin” of creating the colonial structure that allowed it to happen.
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“Whether the women volunteered or not, whether they did prostitution or not, our society needed them to remain pure, innocent girls,” she said in the interview. “If not, people think they cannot hold Japan responsible.”
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Probe of U.S.-funded news network that called George Soros a 'Jew of flexible morals' f... - 0 views
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For nearly three decades, Martí has broadcast news and other programs promoting U.S. interests to audiences in communist Cuba, seeking to circumvent state-controlled media. Martí spent nearly $29 million in 2017 on its mission to provide “accurate, balanced and complete information” to the island’s residents.
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on Oct. 26, a U.S. researcher blogged about a nearly 15-minute “Special Report” on Soros that he spotted on Martí. The May report made sweeping and unfounded claims, including that Soros was secretly funding violent leftist uprisings to topple governments from Romania to Colombia. The report also falsely described Soros as “the architect of the financial collapse of 2008.”
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USAGM chief executive John F. Lansing, a former head of Scripps Networks, faulted the report’s “weak sourcing” and suggested that Judicial Watch may have been the only source.
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The video report, which aired in several installments, credited the U.S. conservative group Judicial Watch with “keeping an eye” on Soros.
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Judicial Watch also appears to have served as the foundation for the earlier Martí report on Soros, which was unknown to Soros’s organization until The Post shared a link to the story last week. The existence of the Martí article was first reported in El Nuevo Herald, a sister publication of the Miami Herald.
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Silber, the spokeswoman for Soros’s organization, said that the apology USAGM offered for the one, previously known broadcast is no longer sufficient.
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“We are deeply concerned to learn about additional content with the same nefarious, anti-Semitic undertones. USAGM needs to be much more forthcoming and Congress needs to conduct more vigorous oversight. In the end we want to know how this content got made, who made it, and who’s been held accountable so that it will not happen again.”
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Rob Porter's ex-wife: Is there life after disgrace? - The Washington Post - 0 views
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we would all benefit from taking time for a conversation about how people make amends. Barring legal prosecution, what are the requirements of rehabilitation and redemption? What is the anatomy of a genuine apology, and how can a person earnestly demonstrate doing the work? Is there a place for a person in public service after being involved in scandal and abuse? In short, is there life after disgrace?
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There may be no one correct way to walk the gantlet. But there is most certainly a different way to approach the road to recovery than we have so far seen.
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I know there is a better way. While we cannot see into another’s heart, and we cannot know the depths of their remorse, we do feel the truth when someone openly walks a path toward healing. We see their vulnerability. We recognize their honesty as they reveal their weaknesses. Fertile ground for forgiveness is sown as they humbly and unequivocally acknowledge past behaviors without mincing words. Trust is built as they offer apologies for misunderstandings while refraining from attacks based on minute details or differences.
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