Hi. I got these articles one after another, and it became a demonstration of theory/analysis and practice. I had to send them together. -Ed
The Faith Factor by BARBARA EHRENREICH The Nation [from the November 29, 2004 issue] http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20041129&s=ehrenreich Charlottesville, Virginia Of all the loathsome spectacles we've endured since November 2--the vampire-like gloating of CNN commentator Robert Novak, Bush embracing his "mandate"--none are more repulsive than that of Democrats conceding the "moral values" edge to the party that brought us Abu Ghraib. The cries for Democrats to overcome their "out-of-touch-ness" and embrace the predominant faith all dodge the full horror of the situation: A criminal has been enabled to continue his bloody work with the help, in no small part, of self-identified Christians. With their craven, breast-beating response to Bush's electoral triumph, leading Democrats only demonstrate how out of touch they really are with the religious transformation of America. Where secular-type liberals and centrists go wrong is in categorizing religion as a form of "irrationality," akin to spirituality, sports mania and emotion generally. They fail to see that the current "Christianization" of red-state America bears no resemblance to the Great Revival of the early nineteenth century, an ecstatic movement that filled the fields of Virginia with the rolling, shrieking and jerking bodies of the revived. In contrast, today's right-leaning Christian churches represent a coldly Calvinist tradition in which even speaking in tongues, if it occurs at all, has been increasingly routinized and restricted to the pastor. What these churches have to offer, in addition to intangibles like eternal salvation, is concrete, material assistance. They have become an alternative welfare state, whose support rests not only on "faith" but also on the loyalty of the grateful recipients. Drive out from Washington to the Virginia suburbs, for example, and you'll find the McLean Bible Church, spiritual home of Senator James Inhofe and other prominent right-wingers, still hopping on a weekday night. Dozens of families and teenagers enjoy a low- priced dinner in the cafeteria; a hundred unemployed people meet for prayer and job tips at the "Career Ministry"; divorced and abused women gather in support groups. Among its many services, MBC distributes free clothing to 10,000 poor people a year, helped start an inner-city ministry for at-risk youth in DC and operates a "special needs" ministry for disabled children. MBC is a mega-church with a parking garage that could serve a medium-sized airport, but many smaller evangelical churches offer a similar array of services--childcare, after-school programs, ESL lessons, help in finding a job, not to mention the occasional cash handout. A woman I met in Minneapolis gave me her strategy for surviving bouts of destitution: "First, you find a church." A trailer-park dweller in Grand Rapids told me that he often turned to his church for help with the rent. Got a drinking problem, a vicious spouse, a wayward child, a bill due? Find a church. The closest analogy to America's bureaucratized evangelical movement is Hamas, which draws in poverty-stricken Palestinians through its own miniature welfare state. Nor is the local business elite neglected by the evangelicals. Throughout the red states--and increasingly the blue ones too--evangelical churches are vital centers of "networking," where the carwash owner can schmooze with the bank's loan officer. Some churches offer regular Christian businessmen's "fellowship lunches," where religious testimonies are given and business cards traded, along with jokes aimed at Democrats and gays. Mainstream, even liberal, churches also provide a range of services, from soup kitchens to support groups. What makes the typical evangelicals' social welfare efforts sinister is their implicit--and sometimes not so implicit--linkage to a program for the destruction of public and secular services. This year the connecting code words were "abortion" and "gay marriage": To vote for the candidate who opposed these supposed moral atrocities, as the Christian Coalition and so many churches strongly advised, was to vote against public housing subsidies, childcare and expanded public forms of health insurance. While Hamas operates in a nonexistent welfare state, the Christian right advances by attacking the existing one. Of course, Bush's faith-based social welfare strategy only accelerates the downward spiral toward theocracy. Not only do the right-leaning evangelical churches offer their own, shamelessly proselytizing social services; not only do they attack candidates who favor expanded public services--but they stand to gain public money by doing so. It is this dangerous positive feedback loop, and not any new spiritual or moral dimension of American life, that the Democrats have failed to comprehend: The evangelical church-based welfare system is being fed by the deliberate destruction of the secular welfare state. In the aftermath of election '04, centrist Democrats should not be flirting with faith but re-examining their affinity for candidates too mumble-mouthed and compromised to articulate poverty and war as the urgent moral issues they are. Jesus is on our side here, and secular liberals should not be afraid to invoke him. Policies of pre-emptive war and the upward redistribution of wealth are inversions of the Judeo- Christian ethic, which is for the most part silent, or mysteriously cryptic, on gays and abortion. At the very least, we need a firm commitment to public forms of childcare, healthcare, housing and education--for people of all faiths and no faith at all. Secondly, progressives should perhaps rethink their own disdain for service-based outreach programs. Once it was the left that provided "alternative services" in the form of free clinics, women's health centers, food co-ops and inner-city multi-service storefronts. Enterprises like these are not substitutes for an adequate public welfare state, but they can become the springboards from which to demand one. One last lesson from the Christians--the ancient, original ones, that is. Theirs is the story of how a steadfast and heroic moral minority undermined the world's greatest empire and eventually came to power. Faced with relentless and spectacular forms of repression, they kept on meeting over their potluck dinners (the origins of later communion rituals), proselytizing and bearing witness wherever they could. For the next four years and well beyond, liberals and progressives will need to emulate these original Christians, who stood against imperial Rome with their bodies, their hearts and their souls. ***800 Civilians Feared Dead in Fallujah Inter Press Service By: Dahr Jamail {http://www.dahrjamailiraq.com/hard_news/archives/hard_news/000121.php#more} BAGHDAD, Nov 16 (IPS) - At least 800 civilians have been killed during the U.S. military siege of Fallujah, a Red Cross official estimates. Speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of U.S. military reprisal, a high-ranking official with the Red Cross in Baghdad told IPS that "at least 800 civilians" have been killed in Fallujah so far. His estimate is based on reports from Red Crescent aid workers stationed around the embattled city, from residents within the city and from refugees, he said. "Several of our Red Cross workers have just returned from Fallujah since the Americans won't let them into the city," he said. "And they said the people they are tending to in the refugee camps set up in the desert outside the city are telling horrible stories of suffering and death inside Fallujah." The official said that both Red Cross and Iraqi Red Crescent relief teams had asked the U.S. military in Fallujah to take in medical supplies to people trapped in the city, but their repeated requests had been turned down. A convoy of relief supplies from both relief organisations continues to wait on the outskirts of the city for military permission to enter. They have appealed to the United Nations to intervene on their behalf. "The Americans close their ears, and that is it," the Red Cross official said. "They won't even let us take supplies into Fallujah General Hospital." The official estimated that at least 50,000 residents remain trapped within the city. They were too poor to leave, lacked friends or family outside the city and therefore had nowhere to go, or they simply had not had enough time to escape before the siege began, he said. Aid workers in his organisation have reported that houses of civilians in Kharma, a small city near Fallujah, had been bombed by U.S. warplanes. In one instance a family of five was killed just two days ago, they reported. "I don't know why the American leaders did not approach the Red Cross and ask us to deal with the families properly before the attacking began," said a Red Cross aid worker, who also spoke on condition of anonymity. "Suddenly they attacked and people were stuck with no help, no medicine, no food, no supplies," he said. "So those who could, ran for the desert while the rest were trapped in the city." If the U.S. forces would call a temporary cease-fire "we could get our trucks in and get the civilians left in Fallujah who need medical care, we could get them out," he said. Mosques have organised massive collections of food and relief supplies for Fallujah residents as they did last April when the city was under attack, but these supplies have not been allowed into the city either. The Red Cross official said they had received several reports from refugees that the military had dropped cluster bombs in Fallujah, and used a phosphorous weapon that caused severe burns. The U.S. military claims to have killed 1,200 "insurgents" in Fallujah. Abdel Khader Janabi, a resistance leader from the city has said that only about 100 among them were fighters. "Both of them are lying," the Red Cross official said. While they agree on the 1,200 number, they are both lying about the number of dead fighters." He added that "our estimate of 800 civilians is likely to be too low." The situation within Fallujah is grim, he said. If help does not reach people soon, "the children who are trapped will most likely die." He said the Ministry of Health in the U.S.-backed interim Iraqi government had stopped supplying hospitals and clinics in Fallujah two months before the current siege. "The hospitals do not even have aspirin," he said. "This shows, in my opinion, that they've had a plan to attack for a long time and were trying to weaken the people." ========== 'This One's Faking He's Dead' 'He's Dead Now' By Andrew Buncombe The Independent U.K. Tuesday 16 November 2004 http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=583322 Fallujah: Video shows US soldier killing wounded insurgent in cold blood. The US Marine Corps launched an investigation into possible war crimes last night after video footage taken inside a mosque in Fallujah apparently showed a Marine shooting dead an unarmed Iraqi insurgent who had been taken prisoner. The footage showed several Marines with a group of prisoners who were either lying on the floor or propped against a wall of the bombed-out building. One Marine can be heard declaring that one of the prisoners was faking his injuries. "He's fucking faking he's dead. He faking he's fucking dead," says the Marine. At that point a clatter of gunfire can be heard as one of the Marines shoots the prisoner. Another voice can then be heard saying: "He's dead now." The footage was obtained by a team from the American NBC network that was embedded with the Marine Corps during last week's seven-day battle to capture the city of Fallujah, west of Baghdad, which military commanders say has been a focus of Iraqi resistance. The film was then pooled and made available to other media. On the footage that was broadcast last night, NBC correspondent Kevin Sites said that the five wounded Iraqi fighters had been left in the mosque after Marines had fought their way into that part of the city on Friday and Saturday. Ten other Iraqis had been killed in the battle for the mosque. Instead of being passed to the rear lines for treatment the wounded Iraqis were left in the mosque until a second group of Marines entered the building on Saturday, following reports that the building may have been reoccupied. Sites said that at this point one of the five Iraqis was dead and that three of the others appeared to be close to death. In his report accompanying the images, Sites said that one of the Marines noticed that one of the wounded men was still breathing before shouting that he was "faking it". "The Marine then raises his rifle and fires into the man's head. The pictures are too graphic for us to broadcast," said Sites. He added: "The prisoner did not appear to be armed or threatening in any way". Major Doug Powell, a spokesman for the Marine Corps in Washington, told The Independent: "It's being investigated - I can't say much more than that. It's being investigated for possible law of war violations. A naval criminal investigation team is looking into it." The footage - some of the first to show the situation inside Fallujah and the bloody nature of the street-by- street battle that has taken place there - is the latest to emerge from Iraq to contain possible evidence of war crimes perpetrated by the US military. Other footage has shown troops shooting wounded fighters lying in open ground as well as attacks on Iraqis - some said to be civilians - by US aircraft and helicopters. This latest footage is among the most shocking given that it apparently shows without obstruction the Marine shooting the prisoner in the head at close range. Kathy Kelly, a spokeswoman for the peace group Voices in the Wilderness, said last night that such images would "recruit more terrorists faster than they are being killed". "I don't think the US is paying much attention to the Geneva Conventions any more - that is the problem. This must be investigated," she said. NBC said in its report that the Marine who had shot the insurgent had apparently been shot in the face the day before and that one of his comrades had been killed the previous day by a booby-trap bomb that had been placed on the body of a dead insurgent. He has been withdrawn from the field and his unit removed from the front lines, officials said. Military experts said last night that rules of engagement prevented US troops from shooting an enemy where there was no threat being posed. Yesterday, the Marines said they had taken more than 1,000 prisoners in the battle for Fallujah. Colonel Michael Regner, operations officer for the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force at Fallujah, said at least 1,052 prisoners had been captured in the battle. No more than about two dozen of them were "foreign fighters", he said. ========== AP Photographer Flees Fallujah By Katarina Kratovac The Associated Press Monday 15 November 2004 http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1115-04.htm Witnesses U.S. helicopter kill fleeing family of 5. BAGHDAD, Iraq - In the weeks before the crushing military assault on his hometown, Bilal Hussein sent his parents and brother away from Fallujah to stay with relatives. The 33-year-old Associated Press photographer stayed behind to capture insider images during the siege of the former insurgent stronghold. "Everyone in Fallujah knew it was coming. I had been taking pictures for days," he said. "I thought I could go on doing it." In the hours and days that followed, heavy bombing raids and thunderous artillery shelling turned Hussein's northern Jolan neighborhood into a zone of rubble and death. The walls of his house were pockmarked by coalition fire. "Destruction was everywhere. I saw people lying dead in the streets, wounded were bleeding and there was no one to come and help them. Even the civilians who stayed in Fallujah were too afraid to go out," he said. "There was no medicine, water, no electricity nor food for days." By Tuesday afternoon, as U.S. forces and Iraqi rebels engaged in fierce clashes in the heart of his neighborhood, Hussein snapped. "U.S. soldiers began to open fire on the houses, so I decided that it was very dangerous to stay in my house," he said. Hussein said he panicked, seizing on a plan to escape across the Euphrates River, which flows on the western side of the city. "I wasn't really thinking," he said. "Suddenly, I just had to get out. I didn't think there was any other choice." In the rush, Hussein left behind his camera lens and a satellite telephone for transmitting his images. His lens, marked with the distinctive AP logo, was discovered two days later by U.S. Marines next to a dead man's body in a house in Jolan. AP colleagues in the Baghdad bureau, who by then had not heard from Hussein in 48 hours, became even more worried. Hussein moved from house to house - dodging gunfire - and reached the river. "I decided to swim ... but I changed my mind after seeing U.S. helicopters firing on and killing people who tried to cross the river." He watched horrified as a family of five was shot dead as they tried to cross. Then, he "helped bury a man by the river bank, with my own hands." "I kept walking along the river for two hours and I could still see some U.S. snipers ready to shoot anyone who might swim. I quit the idea of crossing the river and walked for about five hours through orchards." He met a peasant family, who gave him refuge in their house for two days. Hussein knew a driver in the region and sent a message to another AP colleague, Ali Ahmed, in nearby Ramadi. Ahmed relayed the news that Hussein was alive to AP's Baghdad bureau. He sent a second message back to Hussein that a fisherman in nearby Habaniyah would ferry the photographer to safety by boat. "At the end of the boat ride, Ali was waiting for me. He took me to Baghdad, to my office." Sitting safely in the AP's offices, a haggard-looking Hussein offered a tired smile of relief. "It was a terrible experience in which I learned that life is precious," he said. "I am happy that I am still alive after being close to death during these past days." ========== portside (the left side in nautical parlance) is a news, discussion and debate service of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. It aims to provide varied material of interest to people on the left. 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