Kramer

Michael Richards, who played Seinfeld's funny neighbor Kramer on Seinfeld, is in some deserved hot water. Frustrated with two hecklers during a set at a comedy club, Richards burst into a racist tirade. Not surprisingly, we have an immediate apology, but what an apology it is. Richards says that he lost his cool and, I can't believe this is part of an apology, adds "I'm not a racist. That's what's so insane about this." Instead, he wants us to just know that he was really angry and, because of that anger, said the wrong thing. Pardon me, but this is straight out of Mel Gibson's anti-Semitism routine. The only positive that came out of Mel Gibson's excuse ("I only said it because I had too much to drink.") was a joke ("Well, he must have been plastered when he made The Passion of the Christ!").
Who is satisfied by these non-apologies? Lowered inhibitions, by alcohol or anger, don't change your worldview; they just reveal what is usually kept hidden. It's like people who become real jerks when they've had too much to drink. We at History Is A Weapon do occasionally drink and while we might get a little out of control and set a police car on fire (or maybe we get tired, tell corny jokes, and fall asleep), but our politics don't change. Richards is an adult and he needs to act like one instead of lying with petty excuses. Anything else isn't funny.

Spam-a-rama

Before I go any further, History Is A Weapon is not now starting up an online pharmacy. Nor will we ever. Unfortunately, some enterprising fool has decided to send out a million emails that claim to be coming from our domain. Instead of sending out a million emails about the importance of attacking landlords, they're trying to sell viagra. We apologize, but are unsure what we can do about it at the time.

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Added two Three new pieces:
The Social Functions of the Prisons in the United States by Bettina Aptheker and Political Prisoners, Prisons, and Black Liberation by Angela Y. Davis and Malcolm X on Afro-American History

What a day

Clearchannel AND Reader's Digest are getting bought, the same day that Milton "The Chilean Miracle" Friedman dies.

Bush: Better than Jesus

Before I went in the shower this morning, I turned on the radio. It sounded like classical music and I was a little drowsy, so I left it on. Well, it wasn't just classical, it was some sort of christian station. Well, lo and behold, on came an interesting segment of bible education. They had something on Jesus and Matthew 5:38-44. My bible knowledge is a little stale, but I've heard about this one before: Jesus says to not love thy friend and hate my enemy, but to love thy enemy as well.

Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shall love thy neighbor, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.

Now, I'm sure that we're all familiar that who the guys in charge have referred to as "enemies" aren't necessarily our enemies (activists, the Vietnamese, Martin Luther King, Jr.), but nonetheless, they've had an unusually warm friendship with a whole rogues gallery of baddies. The American government has, at times, supported the apartheid governments of South Africa and Israel*, Noriega, Saddam Hussein, the Contra death squads (Reagan, that old devil, referred to them as "freedom fighters"). Not only that, but in various guises, the U.S. government has supported drug cartels and "official" state enemies (we remember the Iran-Contra crime). So, they seem to have the whole Love thy Enemy thing done down pretty pat. We are a Christian nation after all. We haven't even begun to mention all the enterprises that we'd cast as enemies that these guys seem to love (capitalists, wall street, the military industrial-complex, etc...)
But I think the rulers might have taken it a step further. Starting with "Love your neighbors, hate your enemies," they moved to "love your neighbors, love your "enemies"," and now have transcended to "Loath your neighbors, Love Your Enemies." Our evidence? Hate your neighbor legislation like their antifamily homophobic mistitled "defense of marriage," hate your neighbor's kid by sending them off to war for global hegemony and short-term profit, hating your neighbor by lying to them through capitalist media, killing your neighbor by polluting them to death for short-term profit, hate your women neighbors with anti-choice crusades and a promoting a culture of misogyny, hating your neighbors of color by demonizing them for election victories and to mobilize the majority with fear. Hate your neighbor. Hate hate hate.
So I figure that these guys, so much smarter than us non-experts, have one-upped Jesus after all these years and have added a slight edit in on the guy after two millennium. I just don't understand why that isn't Bush's tagline: Bush: Better than Jesus!


In case this is read as disrespectful to Christianity, we have no blanket beef with Christianity. There is a lot of Christianity that we support enthusiastically, e.g. the scriptures of Liberation Theology. We just believe that Bush is as Christian as any tent charlatan.








*History Is A Weapon is a proudly anti-zionist site. This bothers some people who confuse anti-zionism (against a Jewish state) with anti-semitism (against Jewish people). We love Jews (some of us even are Jews!), but we stand in total opposition to Israel and the apartheid policies directed at the Palestinian people.


History Is A Weapon is on MySpace! Be our friend because that Tom guy creeps us out!

Two points to Goff

Stan says what we've been saying around the office all week. Go read:

"Any time you hear the term bipartisan, check “your six” and check your wallet. It means the ruling class is united and on the move. Given the history of this term, I can’t imagine why it doesn’t send shudders down our collective spine. They call it bipartisanship; but it’s more like The Bipartisan Ship — the primary war vessel of the ultra-elite."

Updates

The updates have been weak as of late because something that we want to post that will be beatiful is not ready yet and it is driving us nuts.
So, interim updates and a slight request:
First, not one, not two, not three, not four, but five new articles:

1. First, Genora (Johnson) Dollinger Remembers the 1936-37 General Motors Sit-Down Strike


2. Fannie Lou Hamer speaks about organizing for Civil Rights in the South and the role of the State (and police)


3. Women in Prison: How It Is With Us, Assata Shakur's essay on Women in Prison


4. Lynch Law By Ida B. Wells


5. And then, finally, The Crime of Poverty by Henry George

All are excellent and were inspired by Zinn and Arnove's Voices of a People's History of the United States.


In other page-related news, a quick question. We've been debating the style to feature the content in the various "Chapters" on the main page. If you look at them, there are several different styles: a big block of titles, author and title on opposite sides, author below and to the right of title. Is there consensus on any of them being better? Tomorrow, America votes. Feel free to vote with History Is A Weapon on which style you like best.