Friend and frequent commenter on these pages, Don Larson, recently introduced me to Robert Newman’s “History of Oil”. This video is 45 minutes of stand up comedy on the serious topic of oil in international politics and war. In this video, released in April 2006, Mr. Newman talks about history from the last 100 years or so culminating in why the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003.
I hope you enjoy it.
by Robert M. Katzman © April 5, 2008
This unlikely story of pre-adolescent solidarity is about one hour, during one day, on one quiet South Side Chicago street, in which an astonishing assault was mounted to stop one sadistic adult from tormenting one child.
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I don’t believe abused children ever really recover. I believe they burn. A low flame perhaps, but it’s on, all the time. Some evil person who thinks they’re safe, in control and free to do as they please with one of them never knows when that low flame will burst into a wildfire…and consume them. This story is about one of those times.
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When you read my story, a harsh story, think about what you would have done, if I had come to your door that mild summer day, fifty-five years ago, to ask you to leave your home to come help me.
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It may be harder than you imagine to answer my question, once you find out what really happened, in the end.
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But first, some essential historical background:
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In 1960, I lived on the South Side of Chicago, near 87th and Stony and I went to the Charles P. Caldwell Grammar School, where at ten I was in the fifth grade.
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My neighborhood was solidly Jewish and Irish. Growing up at that time, it was as common for me to hear Yiddish accented English from Warsaw, and Gaelic accented English from Cork, as it is to hear to hear Spanish accents today from Mexico, Costa Rica and Honduras on the streets and stores of Chicago.
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The Irish arrived here first in very large numbers, more than a million after the 1848 Potato Famine devastated the lives of the poor in British-Protestant controlled Catholic Ireland. Many died of starvation and disease and many more fled to America for a new start.
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Then came the great 1880-1914 wave of Jewish immigrants, my ancestors, fleeing the poor and terror ridden shtetles of Eastern Europe, an area then known as the Pale where Jews from various bordering countries were forced to live in a narrow geographic corridor and who were periodically attacked and killed by rampaging Cossacks with the blessing of the Czarist government. Over two million came past Miss Liberty, on ships.
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The Jews and the Irish had much in common. Both lived in terror of a merciless enemy too powerful to defeat and both saw America as the promised land, where all that mattered was how hard you worked and not where you were from and what God you believed in. At least, that was the dream.
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I just came across a great 15 minute video by Dan Dennett titled “Ants, terrorism and the awesome power of memes.” For me it tied together in a scientific way, a number of concepts brought out in “The Power of Nightmares” and by Neal Stephenson‘s book “Snow Crash.”
Memes can be thought of as infectious ideas. Mr. Dennett compares the role of memes in the interaction of cultures to the role of germs as described by Jared Diamond in “Guns, Germs and Steel.” He suggests that we try to reduce the virulence of our memes in an attempt to protect cultures to which they are toxic.
We often try to protect endangered species because we believe that biological diversity is good (another meme). Since I also believe that cultural diversity is a good thing, it should follow that I would want to protect other cultures from the potentially toxic memes of my own culture. On the other hand, I do not want to be shielded from foreign ideas, I just don’t want them forced on me. (Read on …)
The Power of Nightmares is a 2005 BBC documentary. To my knowledge, it has never aired on U.S. TV. It is a three part (3 hours) series that traces the current Islamic Fundamentalism and Neoconservatism movements to their origins in the 1940s and 1950s and shows how they have become intertwined. If it has become more difficult to make people believe in ideologies, it has become easier to make them fear the future.
I highly recommend you take the time to view these three videos.