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blaise_glowiak

ANKARA, Turkey: Turkey and the Islamic State: Clash of interests feeds suspicions | Syr... - 0 views

www.mcclatchydc.com/...d-the-islamic-state-clash.html

turkey ISIS

shared by blaise_glowiak on 28 May 15 - No Cached
  • blaise_glowiak on 28 May 15
     
    ANKARA, TURKEY - Governments throughout the Middle East and well beyond look with suspicion on Turkey's role in the war against the Islamic State. "Turkey's policy is either a double or triple game,"  a former top Jordanian intelligence official was more direct. "They are collaborating with Daash, but they just don't say it," he said of Turkey, referring to the Islamic State by its pejorative Arabic acronym. Turkish officials see a different issue. "The question is not where Turkey is," the official said. "The question is who will be with Turkey when the mayhem starts. Our soldiers will be the primary target. And we don't want to be the heroes . . . we don't want to be left alone with this problem at the end of the day."
Javier E

The Profound Contradiction of Saving Private Ryan - John Biguenet - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...371539

war morality gratitude patriotism movie community contradiction

shared by Javier E on 06 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • a handpicked squad of Rangers are sent to extricate a paratrooper, James Ryan, from the intense fighting behind enemy lines because his three brothers have been killed in combat. Despite the efforts of his subordinates to dissuade him from authorizing the mission, General George C. Marshall determines to save Ryan's mother from a fourth telegram of condolence
  • The great bulk of dialogue in Saving Private Ryan not directly connected to the prosecution of battles is dedicated to an ongoing debate about the morality of the squad's mission. No one makes a case that their mission is heroic. It is idiocy and, as far as the soldiers are concerned, immoral idiocy.
  • Over and over again, the fundamental theorem of war—that one is sacrificed to save many—is examined
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Saving Private Ryan offers not a single word about love of country. Generals may still talk like their Civil War counterparts, but soldiers in the field have ceased to cloak their duty in such sentiments.
  • The mission can't be justified on moral or patriotic grounds, and yet the toughest soldier in the squad, Sergeant Horvath, says saving Private Ryan might be the one decent thing they "were able to pull out of this whole godawful, shitty mess."
  • Spielberg never suggests that we are any better than our enemy or, to put it more generously, that they are any worse than we are.
  • this is not a patriotic film; if anything, it argues that patriotism is beside the point in modern warfare. Even the mission itself has no heroic or patriotic aim; there is no hill to be taken, no redoubt to be stormed. Its goal, according to Captain Miller, is public relations.
  • there is no shortage of cruelty and brutality. Nazis move through battle-scarred streets indifferently finishing off wounded Americans, but, early in the film, we have witnessed callous GIs mowing down surrendering Germans with a laugh.
  • Schindler's List and Amistad are, in fact, about guilt and responsibility. They are not, as many imagine, noble memorials to the millions of victims of the Holocaust and slavery; rather, they are agonized meditations on all of those somehow implicated in those vast human tragedies.
  • How can the sentimental tableau of a weeping old man, his wife, his son, his daughter-in-law, and his grandchildren possibly serve as a fit conclusion to so savage and unsentimental a film?
  • he described his father's own war stories: "I was supposed to wave the flag and be patriotic and say that without his efforts I wouldn't have the freedoms I had or even the freedom to have the bicycle I was riding." Only later did the director realize that it wasn't "a bunch of bunk he was telling me."
  • Private Ryan, a dazed kid surrounded by the bodies of men who were absurdly ordered to their deaths to save him, is given the equally absurd command by the dying hero, Captain Miller, to "earn this" and must now bear the terrible, impossible order until his own death.
  • at the end of Saving Private Ryan, as a grandfather and his son and grandchildren pay homage to those whose deaths we have just witnessed, the living are called not merely to bear witness to the achievement of fallen heroes; the living are, in fact, the achievement itself. Like Private Ryan, we cannot help but ask what we've done to deserve such sacrifice by others and beg their forgiveness for what we have cost them. And like James Ryan, all we can do to justify that sacrifice is to live our lives as well as we are able.
  • Saving Private Ryan is not about those who suffered; it is about those who have been spared suffering. Spielberg's subject, in the end, is not the courage of the soldiers who fought at Normandy; his subject is the debt owed them by their children and their children's children.
jlessner

Heroes and Bystanders - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...tof-heroes-and-bystanders.html

shared by jlessner on 01 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Witold Pilecki, an officer in the Polish resistance to the Nazi regime, deliberately let himself be captured by the Germans in 1940 so that he could gather information about Hitler’s concentration camps. Inside Auschwitz, he set up resistance cells — even as he almost died of starvation, torture and disease.
  • Then Pilecki helped build a radio transmitter, and, in 1942, he broadcast to the outside world accounts of atrocities inside Auschwitz — as the Nazis frantically searched the camp looking for the transmitter. He worked to expose the Nazi gas chambers, brutal sexual experiments and savage camp punishments, in hopes that the world would act.
  • Finally, in April 1943, he escaped from Auschwitz, bullets flying after him, and wrote an eyewitness report laying out the horror of the extermination camps. He then campaigned unsuccessfully for an attack on Auschwitz.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Eventually, he was brutally tortured and executed — not by the Nazis, but after the war, in 1947, by the Communists. They then suppressed the story of Pilecki’s heroism for decades (a book about his work, “The Auschwitz Volunteer,” was published in 2012).
Javier E

Please Don't Thank Me for My Service - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...t-thank-me-for-my-service.html

veteran soldier gratitude psychology

shared by Javier E on 22 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Who doesn’t want to be thanked for their military service?
  • What's worse is the majority of America that doesn't enlist doesn't seem to care. What happened to the notion of shared sacrifice? If it's important enough to go to war then ALL Americans should sacrifice. If we don't all sacrifice then don't go to war.
  • To these vets, thanking soldiers for their service symbolizes the ease of sending a volunteer army to wage war at great distance — physically, spiritually, economically.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Mr. Garth, 26, said that when he gets thanked it can feel self-serving for the thankers, suggesting that he did it for them, and that they somehow understand the sacrifice, night terrors, feelings of loss and bewilderment. Or don’t think about it at all.
  • Mr. Freedman, 33, feels like the thanks “alleviates some of the civilian guilt,” adding: “They have no skin in the game with these wars. There’s no draft.”No real opinions either, he said. “At least with Vietnam, people spit on you and you knew they had an opinion.”
  • But doesn’t their sacrifice merit thanks? “Patriotic gloss,” responded Mr. O’Brien, an unofficial poet laureate of war who essentially elevates the issue to the philosophical; to him, we’re thanking without having the courage to ask whether the mission is even right.
  • They are being thanked for risking their life on the off chance we are actually under attack here. They need to stop assuming the people thanking them know nothing. I get the same thing from my son, who is a Marine. I told him he is not being thanked for what he did, but for the potential and for doing what the person thanking is not doing. I think he understands a bit better now.
  • To some recent vets — by no stretch all of them — the thanks comes across as shallow, disconnected, a reflexive offering from people who, while meaning well, have no clue what soldiers did over there or what motivated them to go, and who would never have gone themselves nor sent their own sons and daughters.
  • Instead of uttering this insipid phrase how about thanking a teacher or a doctor. Better yet get educated about politics and government and participate in it so we can stop electing the people who promote this sort of nonsense while doing their best to avoid actually putting on a uniform.
  • for paying your taxes, it's how I bought this motorcycle / Challenger, took this vacation, etc."And if we talk any further, it's to communicate that service doesn't automatically anyone a hero, and being a hero doesn't make someone good or decent or nice. Oh, and to ask them to think long and hard every time they vote.
  • If my countrymen were all that grateful they'd be storming Congress to demand fast efficient medical care for veterans and the most generous possible educational benefits.
  • His ideas about the need to prove himself slipped away, along with any patriotic fervor. He hates it when people dismiss the Taliban as imbeciles when he saw them as cunning warriors. To Mr. Garth, the war became solely about survival among brothers in arms.
  • He struggled to explain his irritation. “It’s not your fault,” he said of those thanking him. “But it’s not my fault either.”
  • So what to say to a vet? Maybe promise to vote next time, Mr. Freedman said, or offer a scholarship or job (as, he said, some places have stepped up and done). Stand up for what’s right, suggested Mr. O’Brien. Give $100 to a vet, Ben Fountain, author of the “Billy Lynn” book, half-joked, saying it would at least show some sacrifice on the thanker’s part.
qkirkpatrick

Gunman Panics Canadian Capital, Killing Soldier in Rampage - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...canada-parliament-gunfire.html

canada capital killing rampage politics crisis islam terrorism

shared by qkirkpatrick on 23 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • The heart of the Canadian capital was thrown into panic and placed in lockdown on Wednesday after a gunman armed with a rifle or shotgun fatally wounded a corporal guarding the tomb of the unknown soldier the National War Memorial, entered the nearby Parliament building and fired multiple times before he was shot and killed.
  • It was the second deadly assault on a uniformed member of Canada’s armed forces in three days
  • Law enforcement authorities in Washington said their Canadian counterparts had identified the assailant as Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, who had changed his name from Michael Joseph Hall, and said he had been a convert to Islam
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • The shootings came amid heightened concern among Canadians about terrorist attacks
  • As the police locked down buildings in downtown Ottawa and asked stores to close, an eerie still, broken only by screaming emergency sirens, descended on the district.
  • The easy access to the grounds of Parliament Hill reflected the general Canadian view that an attack was unlikely. Mr. Harper and other members of his cabinet, however, have frequently warned that terrorist attacks might come to Canada.
  • “If you can kill a disbelieving American or European — especially the spiteful and filthy French — or an Australian, or a Canadian, or any other disbeliever from the disbelievers waging war, including the citizens of the countries that entered into a coalition against the Islamic State, then rely upon Allah, and kill him in any manner or way however it may be
  • qkirkpatrick on 23 Oct 14
     
    A Gunman entered the Canadian Parliament building and opened fire. He killed a Canadian armed forces man before being shot and killed. The attacker appeared to have been motivated by Islamic Extremism, which is also the second deadly event in 3 days in Canada. Many people are becoming panicked over the recent events.
  • mollyharper on 23 Oct 14
     
    http://www.cnn.com/2014/10/22/world/canada-shootings-hero/index.html?hpt=wo_c1 Kevin Vickers is being called a "hero" for taking down the gunman.
rachelramirez

Taliban Gun Down 10-Year-Old Militia Hero in Afghanistan - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...an-taliban-child-soldiers.html

taliban afghanistan crisis

shared by rachelramirez on 04 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Taliban Gun Down 10-Year-Old Militia Hero in Afghanistan
  • Wasil Ahmad was 10 years old.
  • enrolling in school as a fourth grader.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • his commission continues to receive reports of child soldiers in the Afghan forces, particularly in the Afghan Local Police militias
  • But he also condemned the Taliban’s killing of Wasil because the boy had moved to a civilian life.
  • The Taliban claimed responsibility on their website, saying they had killed a stooge militiaman.
rachelramirez

Trump University's Shady Faculty - The Daily Beast - 0 views

www.thedailybeast.com/...niversity-s-shady-faculty.html

trump trump university politics US

shared by rachelramirez on 08 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Photo Illustration by The Daily Beastwritten by
  • The Shady Faculty of Trump University
  • According to seminar transcripts filed in one class-action lawsuit against Trump University and reviewed by The Daily Beast, Harris told students that at 19, he found himself homeless and was forced to seek shelter in the grimy New York City subway. But his life changed, he said, when he met a “nice gentleman” who taught him about the real estate business.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • From the outset, Trump University’s roster of brainy professors was a selling point. In a promotional video
  • When he was hired in 2008, he was already a convicted felon—for aggravated assault, recent depositions in the Trump University case reveal. And according to 2011 divorce filings in Gwinnett County, Georgia, Harris threatened to kill his ex-wife and tried to have her Range Rover repossessed the day after she filed for a restraining order.
  • The school, which has been defunct since 2011, is currently the subject of two class-action lawsuits in California and a $40 million suit brought by Eric Schneiderman, the Attorney General from New York.
  • Trump University began in earnest on May 23, 2005, a for-profit venture with a website, TrumpUniversity.com, and a collection of courses—on entrepreneurship, real estate, and marketing—available on CD-ROM for $300 a pop.
  • Despite becoming the top instructor at an institution that billed itself as a university, he didn’t have a background in education or even, according to his story, a college degree.
  • Sonny Low, who paid $25,000 for a Trump mentorship in 2010, reported that Nowlin didn’t even “appear knowledgeable” about real estate or investing, according to one class-action lawsuit against Trump University.
  • Attendees were required to sign a waiver promising not to sue the company if they later faced legal troubles, the Enquirer reported.
  • Students started with a $1,495 three-day seminar, before some instructors, according to court papers, goaded them into buying mentorship packages totaling up to $34,995.
  • The lawsuits against Trump University claim some pupils, encouraged to increase their credit limits and to max out their credit cards, paid twice as much.
  • Trump decided to go in another direction, according to Schank. There would be no more online courses, no more lectures from ivy league professors, no more books—just seminars, with speakers like Harris
  • On social media, he posed for photos in a plush, white bathrobe on a manicured lawn, flanked by a shiny silver Hummer and Mercedes-Benz. He told students they could live like him, too, and vowed to teach them to earn $25,000 a month, according to court filings.
  • At some point, Harris was also employed by Armando Montelongo Seminars, a venture similar to Trump University and also facing lawsuits from disgruntled students who claim they were scammed.
Javier E

WWII Hero Credits Luck and Chance in Foiling Hitler's Nuclear Ambitions - The New York ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...hitlers-nuclear-ambitions.html

role model history

shared by Javier E on 21 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • He said he worries today about a newly assertive Russia and what he sees as the reluctance of many in Europe to understand that “it is not a stable world” and that peace is not guaranteed. “It ought to be obvious to people that peace and freedom have to be fought for,” he said. “Politicians seem to have forgotten this.”
Javier E

Opinion | Inside the World of Racist Science Fiction - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...of-racist-science-fiction.html

alt-right white supremacy literature

shared by Javier E on 31 Jul 18 - No Cached
  • The point is not that there is a direct line between, say, “The Turner Diaries” and the Oval Office. Rather, it’s that the tropes that define the Trump administration’s rhetoric and policies — apocalyptic xenophobia, anti-Semitic conspiracies, racist fear-mongering — are also the tropes that define white-supremacist literature.
  • To the hundreds of thousands of fans of Mr. Kendall, Ms. Williams and other writers, Mr. Trump must seem like a character out of racist central casting: a rule-breaking white knight who will stop at nothing to root out the conspiracies and take on their race’s enemies. No wonder the bond between Mr. Trump and the far right is so strong:
  • Not only is he a hero out of their novels, but in supporting him, they have become heroes themselves.
Javier E

Kent Sorenson Was a Tea Party Hero. Then He Lost Everything. - POLITICO Magazine - 0 views

www.politico.com/...then-he-lost-everything-220522

redemption politics gop

shared by Javier E on 23 Sep 18 - No Cached
  • Having experienced an odyssey unlike any other in modern political history, Sorenson says he is equipped with a new set of convictions—though most of them are not inherently political.
  • The most important lessons learned along his journey, Sorenson says, are “don’t take anything for granted” and “give people the benefit of the doubt.” Being incarcerated taught him both. “When I first got to prison, I looked at people and judged them. But then I got to know them, who they were, and they were nothing like they first appeared. Don’t throw people away.”
Javier E

The Churchill row is part of the glib approach to history that gave us Brexit | Simon J... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-history-brexit-john-mcdonnell

history culture lessons blame judge moral judgment

shared by Javier E on 15 Feb 19 - No Cached
  • As history is raided, indeed raped, by identitarians and populists, glib judgments on the past become fodder for every tribal grievance.
  • I have come away from working on a history of Europe convinced that it is senseless to pass moral judgment on men and women of past times and past cultures.
  • Fake history may be a clever way to engage the empathy of the young with otherwise difficult material. But if the purpose of history is to offer lessons for the future, distorting it is fraught with danger.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The current cult of identity politics is to rifle through the past careers of great men and women, not to ascertain accuracy but to sort them into friends or foes.
  • The idea of history as composed of heroes and villains is infantile. Inside every hero lurks an opposite. The best answer to a stupid question is no answer
  • Awarding long-dead people berths in some transient heaven or hell is merely to conscript them to some current grievance.
  • I am convinced a historic British aversion to the Germans, rehearsed annually on Remembrance Day and in movies and bestseller lists, underpins much current Brexit sentiment. So does ancient antagonism towards the French.
  • Fake history is worse than no history. It is better to forget than partially to remember. We should live for today and move on.
Javier E

Quote by Lawrence Ferlinghetti: "Pity the nation whose people are sheep, and who..." - 0 views

www.goodreads.com/...-are-sheep-and-whose-shepherds

us trump history culture politics poetry

shared by Javier E on 20 May 19 - No Cached
  • Javier E on 20 May 19
     
    "Pity the nation whose people are sheep, and whose shepherds mislead them. Pity the nation whose leaders are liars, whose sages are silenced, and whose bigots haunt the airwaves. Pity the nation that raises not its voice, except to praise conquerors and acclaim the bully as hero and aims to rule the world with force and by torture. Pity the nation that knows no other language but its own and no other culture but its own. Pity the nation whose breath is money and sleeps the sleep of the too well fed. Pity the nation - oh, pity the people who allow their rights to erode and their freedoms to be washed away. My country, tears of thee, sweet land of liberty." ― Lawrence Ferlinghetti
manhefnawi

Hero or Tyrant? Henry III, King of France | History Today - 0 views

www.historytoday.com/...r-tyrant-henry-iii-king-france

Monarch Henry III France

shared by manhefnawi on 11 May 18 - No Cached
  • assassinated by one of his own subjects, Henry’s legacy has often been derided
  • The last of the Valois monarchs to take the throne, Henry III seemed to embody the worst traits of a dynasty in decline, in sharp contrast to his celebrated Bourbon successors
  • He is now portrayed as an intelligent and cultured individual who sought (but failed) to bring about much-needed financial and judicial reform in his kingdom
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • elected king of Poland
  • one of early modern Europe’s most notorious and intriguing monarchs
nrashkind

Andrew Cuomo: The surprising rise of the New York governor - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by nrashkind on 29 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo's daily coronavirus pandemic press conferences have become must see television. Democrats have been praising them, and some have even floated him as a 2020 presidential contender.
  • The rise of Cuomo shows that times of tragedy can make very unlikely political heroes.
  • It's not that Cuomo was previously regarded as a bad manager -- it's that he was an unpopular one.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • The lack of enthusiasm for Cuomo nationally was reinforced by how lukewarm his support was in his home state. When matched up against other political figures from New York early in 2019, just 17% said Cuomo would make the best president in a Quinnipiac University poll.
  • Cuomo's 2018 reelection performance was not what I would categorize as strong.
  • this is New York state in a very good year for Democrats nationwide.
  • Sometimes, though, the traits that make others perceive you as a bad leader in one context can make you be seen as a strong one in another context. One of the biggest negative adjectives normally prescribed to Cuomo is that he is "heavy-handed." That's exactly the leadership style that can work very well during a crisis.
  • The progressive Working Families Party endorsed his rival Cynthia Nixon of "Sex and the City" fame. Cuomo won that primary by a little over 30 points, though pre-election polling indicated that he likely lost among self-identified very liberal Democrats.
  • The 2018 election also marked the second time in a row where he faced a primary challenge from the left.
  • Giuliani's reaction to the 9/11 attacks made him a hero to many, as Cuomo's actions regarding the coronavirus pandemic has made him one to many. Of course, Giuliani wasn't ultimately able to transfer that popularity into winning higher office;
  • His 2008 presidential bid floundered
  • What happens eventually with Cuomo's political future is anyone's guess. For now, Cuomo is getting more plaudits than he has in a long time.
Javier E

Coming Soon: Donald Trump As the Hero of COVID-19 - The Bulwark - 0 views

thebulwark.com/-trump-as-the-hero-of-covid-19

trump pandemic lies timeline crisis

shared by Javier E on 02 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • onald Trump could not resist touting his own foresight: “I felt it was a pandemic before it was called a pandemic.”
  • Trump’s claim of foreknowledge is even more remarkable than it seems. Effectively, Trump is admitting to deliberately endangering his fellow citizens by squandering precious time while spreading falsehoods and Panglossian palliatives for his near- term political ends—thereby inducing his followers to stake their lives on his own callous blather.
  • We have seen the markers of Trump’s pathological narcissism since the first day of his candidacy: The demented sense of self-importance. The unwarranted belief in his own superiority. The total inability to recognize the humanity of anyone else.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Now, he informs us, he’s “a wartime president”—clearly re-imaging himself as a leader who, like FDR, will repel the Asian invader who has assaulted our shores. Indeed, “I think we’re going to do it even faster than we thought, and it’ll be a complete victory.”
  • The compulsion to lie so routinely that objective truth loses all meaning. The proliferation of inconsistent statements and behaviors dictated by his needs of the moment. The incapacity to think beyond the immediate or learn from his own mistakes. The congenital failure to assess the consequences of his actions in new or complex situations.
  • The need always to be right. The refusal to acknowledge error. The inability to brook criticism or critics. The compulsion to conform his ever-shifting sense of the world to satisfy his innermost cravings.
  • Never mind that Trump’s administration stripped the NSC of its global-health arm, established to fight global pandemics—a loss that Dr. Fauci bemoaned. In its place Trump has continued to tout phantom miracle cures. Yet he is strangely reluctant to invoke his very real authority to accelerate production of essential medical supplies.
  • With luck, Trump’s self-preservation instinct will occasionally compel him to do something right
  • Will it work? As Bill Kristol notes: “If you’re willing to go further than any predecessor in deploying federal resources, unembarrassed to take advantage of disinformation and misinformation, and eager to collaborate with foreign powers, then your chances of victory simply can’t be ruled out.”
  • it takes a special man to so blithely obliterate two months of willful lies and disinformation which endangered the lives of several million Americans amidst billions— or trillions—of dollars in economic devastation. But then, Trump is very special indeed.
  • that sentence may be the most frightening Trump ever uttered: It is so transparently false, so shamefully self-contradictory, so baldly contemptuous of freshly-curated reality, that it lays bare the infinitude of his crippling pathology—and, one worries, our own.
malonema1

Americans' Net Worth Hits All-Time High as Debt Rises | Economy | US News - 0 views

www.usnews.com/...ts-all-time-high-as-debt-rises

US economy

shared by malonema1 on 10 Jun 17 - No Cached
  • Americans' Net Worth Hits All-Time High as Debt Rises Household net worth hit nearly $95 trillion in the first quarter, but debt levels are also on the rise.
  • The Federal Reserve on Thursday afternoon reported Americans' net worth climbed to $94.8 trillion in January, February and March – a 2.5 percent jump from the fourth quarter of 2016
malonema1

Senate Republicans Skeptical About Ability to Pass Health Care Bill | Health Care News ... - 0 views

www.usnews.com/...ility-to-pass-health-care-bill

obamacare trump US obama

shared by malonema1 on 10 Jun 17 - No Cached
  • Senate GOP Doubt Health of Obamacare Replacement They can afford to lose no more than two from their ranks, and at least one is ‘irretrievably gone.’
  • Republican senators returning from a week at home in their states are signaling that they may not be able to pass health care overhaul legislation. On Tuesday, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., told reporters he believes the Senate's efforts to craft a bill that would repeal the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, were failing.
malonema1

James Clapper: Donald Trump's Embrace of Russia is Bigger Than Watergate | Politics | U... - 0 views

www.usnews.com/...ussia-is-bigger-than-watergate

trump US russia

shared by malonema1 on 10 Jun 17 - No Cached
  • Clapper: Trump ‘Inexplicable’ Pro-Russia Stance Bigger than Watergate The former director of national intelligence said Trump’s intelligence sharing with Russia is either ‘ignorance or disrespect.’
  • Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said President Donald Trump's warmth toward Russia is potentially leading the nation toward a scandal of historic proportions – even bigger than Watergate.
saberal

Opinion | Some Statues Tell Lies. This One Tells the Truth. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...statues-billy-frank-jr.html

US history Politics

shared by saberal on 30 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • It’s shameful that a mob fringe has even come for Abraham Lincoln. His statue was torn down by extremists in Portland last fall.
  • Washington State has chosen to immortalize Billy Frank Jr., a Native American truth-teller, genuine hero and role model, who died in 2014, at the U.S. Capitol in the National Statuary Hall Collection.
  • Replacing the statue of Marcus Whitman, an inept Protestant missionary who tried to Christianize the natives, with a Native American who was arrested more than 50 times for practicing his treaty rights to fish for salmon is a karmic boomerang.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • I could tell him about the Presidential Medal of Freedom awarded Mr. Frank, a leader of the Nisqually tribe, during the Obama administration, or how his struggle led to a monumental 1974 federal court ruling on resource equality known as the Boldt decision, awarding his people 50 percent of the salmon in their waters.
  • If culture is an expression of our refined and uplifting impulses, he spread many ripples in the heritage of humanity. He’ll join Dwight Eisenhower, Samuel Adams, Helen Keller as well as several other Native Americans in the Capitol not because it’s his turn. But because his life exemplifies the best values of a nation’s shared stories.
  • “The people need to know the truth,” he used to say, by way of explaining an 1854 treaty between the tribes of Puget Sound and the American government that guaranteed tribal fishing rights for eternity.
  • The same cannot be said of the Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, a man who was indicted on a charge of treason, and another traitor, his vice president, Alexander Stephens — both of whom are still in Statuary Hall, even after waging war on the United States. Mr. Stephens said the Confederacy was founded “upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.”
  • The outgoing statue of Mr. Whitman in buckskin and a Bible is a totem to the Big Lie that he saved the Oregon Country from the British, a founding myth of the Pacific Northwest. “It was the kind of lie that many Americans still love — simple, hero-driven, action-packed, ordained by God,” Mr. Harden told me. “Replacing Marcus Whitman with Billy Frank Jr. is sweet symbolic justice.”
  • But I also wanted to summon the spirit of the man I knew as just Billy — his guts, his wisdom, his unbroken big heartedness. “Being with Billy is like floating on a steady, easy river,” his wife Sue Crystal, who died of cancer in 2001, once said. “He’s the happiest person I know.”
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