Showing posts with label Howard Zinn. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Howard Zinn. Show all posts

Thursday, January 28, 2010

Merchants of Fear


New World Notes News
Vol. 3, No.5 -- January 30, 2010

This Week in New World Notes, radio program #100, Feb. 2:

Merchants of Fear


Executive summary

Governments get citizens to act against their interets (e.g., by going to war) by scaring them bleepless. We'll hear a talk by historian Howard Zinn*, quoting Hermann Goering on the subject . . . a "public service" announcement and program warning of the imminent threat of terrorist attacks, which could be launched by anybody (from 2009!) . . . a warning from Postmaster General John E. Potter (2001) on the signs an envelope iin your mailbox could be full of anthrax. Plus a digression on an earlier P.G.'s comic anti-smut crusade.

Notes and Credits

Why the big increase in scary terrorism warnings in late 2009? Is this a prelude to a fake "trigger incident," followed by a war on Syria or Iran? (Or is Venezuela the next on the list?)

Don't miss Postmaster Potter's unintentionally hilarious list of 7 warning signs of an envelope containing anthrax in your mailbox. One is, "It comes from someone you don't know or are not expecting to hear from." And goes downhill from there.

New World Notes is produced under the auspices (Latin for "first floor") of WWUH-FM, a community service of that beacon of light in darkest Connecticut, the University of Hartford. Feedback to kdowst at hotmail period com.

This week's song

  • Buffalo Springfield, For What It's Worth

Coming Soon

  • February 9 -- The Top Ten
  • February 16 -- Not All Christians Are Evil!

Catch New World Notes (all times Eastern):


A note on the painting

"Whittling" was painted by (formerly local) artist David Weinholtz and published in our blog entry and newsletter for October 28, 2008--a week before the national election. A few words by me accompanied it:

Let's hope or pray that next year Whittling will require
updating, and the updating will require more than just
painting out the elephant and painting in a donkey.

So much for hoping and praying. What's left?

* Coda:

I just learned--after writing all of the above, and weeks after recording this program--that Howard Zinn died, at age 87, on January 27. For decades, Zinn has been a strong voice advocating democracy, justice, peace, . . . and the importance of learning history. His loss is a hard blow to us who share his values and to the great causes he struggled to advance. R.I.P.


Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Memorial Day Special

This week in New World Notes, #65, May 26 & 29:

Memorial Day is Monday, May 25, and this week's show commemorates it.

Just as the wrong sorts of people wave the flag, for all the wrong reasons--so the same people do their best to turn Memorial Day into a celebration of military service, unnecessary wars, belligerent foreign policies, and obscenely high and ever-increasing expenditures for quote-national defense-unquote.


Top: 2 flags.
Bottom: 20 flags

Personally, I prefer Christmas--the only national holiday in which the word "peace" is ever uttered, however insincerely.

And don't even get me started on Armistice Day! Originally a multinational holiday celebrating the end of the most gawdawful war in history, to that date. Now transformed into "Veterans Day" by our patriotic, peace-loving Congress. Quite a metamorphosis, eh?

This week, New World Notes offers an Alternative Memorial Day Celebration. The full title is, The Slippery Slope of Memorial Day.

First I elaborate on the main theme. To remember those whom the State caused to die is worthy. To celebrate a foreign policy consisting mainly of armed belligerance is unworthy. To call for ever more deaths and ever more killing so that "these honored dead shall not have died in vain" is obscene--the bottom of the slippery slope.

Guess where most conventional Memorial Day celebrations end up.

Top: Graphic by Eric Drooker
Bottom: "Spain, 1936" by Robert Capa


Then we hear veteran Middle-East correspondent Robert Fisk sharing his own thoughts on war.

Finally I'll read Howard Zinn's fine 1976 column on war and Memorial Day. At the time, he was a columnist for the Boston Globe. The day afterwards, he was no longer a columnist for the Boston Globe.

Well--to invert T.S. Eliot--at least he went out with a bang, not a whimper!

Happy motoring!
Ken


From The Phantom English Major:

Zinn's essay both begins and ends with a few words about drunken smashups. At the end, though, he's talking about more than just highway accidents. Clever.

This week's music:

  • Steppenwolf, Monster

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