Good piece by John Allen on Pius XII

.
John L. Allen, Jr., the ubiquitous fair-minded former Rome correspondent for the lefty National Catholic Reporter in his weekly flash as a very good piece on, get this… why Pope Pius XII ought to be beatified immediately.

1. I grew up with Pope Pius (he died when I was 16, but in those days before live television, he was a very remote figure to me, and probably most American Catholics).

   I have a question about the canonization process which is taking place at a time when many of the Vatican’s records from the World War II period are just being released and it will be many years before the records up until the year of his death in 1958 will be released.

   Have the officials responsible for the ultimate recommendation had access to all of those records still kept under lock and key?

   Pius’ role in World Affairs after the Soviet Union took over Eastern Europe and Mao took over China might be something need to be examined.

   I doubt that anything but laudable actions would be discovered.

   But I guess my real question is “Is it too soon for his canonization?”

   Comment by ray from mn — 8 June 2007 @ 3:03 pm

Holier Than Thou

.
Originally posted on AbbeyRoads2

Ray from MN Says:
June 5th, 2007 at 6:53 am

Well, now that you brought it up, Terry, I can no longer keep my silence on the matter.

I have raised the issue with a canon lawyer (who did not give me the courtesy of a reply).

No before you think I have gone off the deep end on this issue hear me out.

I have no problem with the Saturday (and Holy Day) vigil Masses. I’ve got other things to worry about.

But, being a constitutional conservative and legal literalist, there is a problem with the argument used to justify the vigil Masses.

Reverting to the pre-wristwatch days of the Old and New Testament, the canon lawyers have determined that the “day” lasts from Sundown to Sundown and accordingly, “Saturday at Sundown” is legally “Sunday.”

I won’t quibble about the 4:00 and 5:00 p.m. vigil Masses that take place long before Sundown, especially in the Summer months under Daylight Savings Time.

What I do wonder about are all those 5:00, 6:00, 6:30, 7:30 and 9:00 p.m. (in the Twin Cities) Masses that take place on Sunday Evenings.

Especially in the winter months here, aren’t those times legally “Monday?”

It seems to me that a strict interpretation of the Saturday Vigil Mass rule would declare that all of those who attend Sunday Evening Masses have missed their Sunday Mass Obligation.

What do you think?

"I'm O.K. with you being a Catholic, as long as you aren't actually Catholic"

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Originally posted on Recovering Dissident Catholic on June 4, 2007

Ray from MN said...

There are a lot of CINO's out there. And they feel threatened by ORCIMMN!'s out there (Orthodox Roman Catholic is my middle name!).

I have been volunteering at the local Veterans Hospital for the past few months. Frankly some of my most rewarding interactions with patients are with those who admit that they haven't been a good Catholic.

The honesty brings tears to my eyes.

Today a patient admitted that he hadn't been practicing his faith. It sounded like he had had almost no education in his faith. He was in for some major surgery and admitted that he had been near death.

That got him reminiscing a bit and he mentioned a time when he was in Vietnam and his Division was engaged in some kind of major movement and as the men moved by, a "Mexican Priest" stood on a high platform and "splashed water on us" and prayed the Hail Mary over them.

He claimed that he had always remembered the prayer and agreed to say it with me (but he didn't remember most of the words).

I later brought him a little prayer book with the words and asked him to pray "one Hail Mary a day."

Many of you might have heard Father Corapi tell how his mother send him a holy card with the Hail Mary on the back and asked him to do that when he was at his lowest in California. It worked.

June 04, 2007 4:51 PM

Change of Concentration

I haven't been posting anything here for over a year. I am going to start posting comments that I have made on other blogs and "letter to the editor" and other things like that here.

Suing the Church

Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap.

Copyright (c) 2006 First Things 163 (May 2006): 13-14.

Last summer, attorneys in Colorado filed the first sex-abuse lawsuits against the archdiocese of Denver since the national clergy abuse scandal began four years ago. All of the suits involved two men: one, a laicized former priest who left active ministry more than a decade ago, and the other, a priest dead for more than a decade. Several of the suits have since named individual parishes as targets along with the diocese. Every claimed incident of abuse occurred more than twenty-five years ago. Nearly all occurred in the 1960s and 1970s.

Under Colorado law, plaintiffs’ attorneys have a problem. So many years have passed since the incidents claimed by their clients that their suits may be barred by the statute of limitations. This frustrates victims who seek what they perceive as justice and closure. It also stymies attorneys who know that suing the Catholic Church can be extremely lucrative. Since the early 1990s, the flow of current abuse cases has steadily declined. Breaking open the past could provide a new and profitable frontier for continued sex-abuse litigation. But that requires changing the rules—and applying them retroactively.

And so in Colorado, and a dozen other states, a new and unsettling legal struggle has opened to eliminate or sharply revise the current statutes of limitations that govern lawsuits concerning the sexual abuse of minors. The outcome will have enormous implications for the future of Catholic life in the United States.

Statutes of limitations exist for good reasons: to protect justice, not prevent it. They were created to encourage a timely and fair resolution of claims, which is why law-enforcement officials support them. Over time, memories fade, witnesses die, evidence grows stale, and fraudulent claims increase. But state laws involve two different kinds of statutes of limitations: criminal and civil. Criminal statutes cannot be amended and then applied to past actions, since the United States Constitution expressly forbids retroactive criminal laws, known as ex post facto law. But some lower courts have ruled that civil statutes can be extended into the past. Civil lawsuits have a much lower threshold for proof than criminal cases. As a result, retroactive civil liability puts a huge defense burden on any accused individual or institution. In fact, just the possible cost of a legal defense can force a diocese into settlement talks. This serves plaintiffs’ attorneys and the persons they represent quite well. Whether it really serves justice is another matter.

Plaintiffs’ attorneys and victims’ groups often work together in this new strategy of amending the statutes of limitations. Victims’ groups may act as stimulants to sympathetic news media and state lawmakers. Plaintiffs’ attorneys may then offer help in drafting new legislation from which they themselves hope to benefit. This happened in California with Senate Bill 1779, which became catastrophic state law. The bill opened a one-year window to revive expired California sex-abuse claims, some from seventy years ago, and more than a thousand plaintiffs then filed previously expired claims. The California bill was developed with the direct assistance of attorney Jeffrey Anderson, who has very profitably sued Catholic dioceses and institutions across the country for years. A proposed Colorado version of the legislation is modeled directly on California’s.

Once the public is suitably sensitized by news media in a target area, pressure on lawmakers grows to provide “justice” for those victims whose claims have expired due to statutes of limitations. Some victims may say they were too frightened to come forward until now. Others may say they were so traumatized that they couldn’t remember their abuse until recently. Typically, attorneys will then argue that the only way their clients will get closure and peace is by litigating their expired cases. It’s an effective, appealing argument, and no one can dispute the real suffering that goes with the experience of abuse.

In judging it, however, we need to consider the bill’s basic fairness. Any revision to civil statutes of limitations must be comprehensive, fair, and equally applied. This almost never happens. The data clearly show that the sexual abuse of minors is not a disproportionately Catholic problem. In fact, some of the worst adult sexual misconduct with minors occurs in public institutions, particularly public schools. But in most states, those schools enjoy some form of governmental immunity. In other words, it’s far easier to sue a private institution, such as a Catholic diocese, than it is to sue a public-school district. It’s also a lot more lucrative since, even if governmental immunity were waived, public schools and institutions usually enjoy the added protection of low caps on damages (in Colorado, $150,000). For exactly the same sexual abuse in a public school and a Catholic parish, the difference in financial exposure is millions of dollars.

This has a clearly prejudicial impact on Catholics. But it’s also bad law for everybody. Hofstra University’s Charol Shakeshaft, the leading expert on public school sexual misconduct, testified to the Colorado General Assembly earlier this year that nearly 7 percent of students nationally report “being sexually abused in a physical manner by an educator in public schools.” That means, according to Shakeshaft, that “of the approximately 45 million students attending public and private K-12 schools, more than 3 million will have been the target of physical sexual exploitation by an employee of the school by 11th grade.”

If the sexual abuse of minors is so grievous—and it most certainly is—why should its punishment be harsh for Catholic and other private institutions, but soft for public schools where it occurs more frequently? Ironically, most current state laws hold public schools and institutions less accountable—precisely because citizens pay taxes for them. That makes no sense.

Worse, as Shakeshaft points out, “national data indicate that few [public school] administrators report educator sexual misconduct to the police or district attorney. When this abuse is reported to the criminal justice system, it comes from parents or others.” And reporting patterns in public schools “show that when students do report [educator sexual misconduct], they are often ignored. Teachers and other staff in public schools are often moved from school to school when allegations emerge, rather than the school attempting to remove the teacher from the district.” This is exactly what many Catholic dioceses have been accused of in the past, but with devastating financial consequences for the dioceses.

There is an inequity hardwired into the whole national discussion of sexual abuse. Catholics can live with hard laws if they serve the common good—but the laws need to be equally hard for all offending persons and institutions, with the same rules and penalties and no hidden escape clauses.

---

Revenge, Francis Bacon once warned, is “a kind of wild justice, which the more man’s nature runs to, the more ought the law to weed it out.” It makes no sense to hold innocent people accountable today for the evil actions of a small number of individuals from decades ago. Diocesan insurance policies, when they apply at all, cover only a modest portion of the crippling sex-abuse settlements that have now become routine. No secret vault of gold exists to bail Catholics out of this attorney-driven legal siege. The people paying for these abuse settlements are innocent Catholic families who had no part in events of the past. Revenge is not justice, no matter how piously one argues it. Punishing the innocent is wrong, yet that’s exactly what laws imposing “retroactive liability” are designed to do.

Then, too, settlements should be based on balanced restitution. They should be rooted in the facts of what will help a wounded person heal and find a fresh start—and not on a litigation “market price” based on the last highest settlement paid by another institutional defendant. Justice is a right balance of competing legitimate rights and obligations; it is not a form of auctioneering. Communities of faith have an obligation to generously help the people who have been hurt by their members, past or present. But they also have a right to maintain their mission of serving others and to be protected from predatory judgments designed to gut their resources and identity.

The current effort to amend the civil statutes of limitations governing sexual abuse—which really involves an effort to impose retroactive liability and a new wave of lawsuits on Catholic communities—will continue in more states in the coming months. It could easily decimate the remaining resources of the Catholic faithful in the United States and steal the religious future from a generation of Catholic young people.

In working to protect the future of the Catholic community, we always need to remember that innocent people and innocent families were hurt in the past by some members of the clergy who did terrible things. Some victims have recovered and moved on. For others, the wounds never heal. All of their lives are precious in the eyes of Jesus Christ, and therefore also in the eyes of Christ’s followers. Helping them, supporting them, praying for them, and seeking to understand their suffering—while also defending the Church—cannot be mutually exclusive, since all these things serve the truth. Caring for the victims of abuse and assisting them sacrificially is a good and urgent thing. So is fighting bad laws. We need to focus earnestly on both.

Most Reverend Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap., is the archbishop of Denver.

Cabinet Government: England v. U.S.

England's Prime Minister, the "Clintonesque" Tony Blair, is under tremendous pressure from his Labor Party backers to name that date when he will step down from his posts as party leader (since 1994) and Prime Minister which he has held since 1997. This is an interesting article from the Guardian that gives a cursory survey of the state of the Labor government today and the problems still facing Blair.

There are many things for which he can be given credit, not mentioned in this article, but surely Blair doesn't want to go out leaving his successor, whether Labor or Conservative, a mess to deal with.

The most interesting aspect of the article is the rundown of the names of the various cabinet ministers and the problems facing them. It appears that they are really important to the running of their departments and some are doing a much better job than others.

I would defy most Americans to name more than three or four American cabinet Secretaries in George Bush's "cabinet." Offhand, I can come up with only Rumsfeld and Rice. Back when "I really cared", and in days when it probably mattered more who they were, I used to be able to name them all.

I would wager that Bush hasn't had more than three "cabinet meetings" in six years and those were probably photo opportunities. All power seems to be located in the White House and most of the cabinet Secretaries are just message deliverers to the permanent staff of their department.

And this is in a government maybe 20 times bigger than England's and 100 times more important.




PM left with little room to manoeuvre
Patrick Wintour
Monday May 1, 2006

Guardian

As Tony Blair considers what is likely to be his last reshuffle, he finds himself in the curious position of having limited room for manoeuvre, with many more candidates for demotion than promotion. Yet this is a reshuffle that will reveal whether Mr Blair has either the agenda or the political authority to justify staying in office for more than another year.

Mr Blair's decisions are in the short term dependent on the fate of the home secretary, Charles Clarke, and his deputy, John Prescott. Mr Blair is reluctant to lose either man, but if one or other were to fall on his sword, it would give him more options. So would a restructuring of the government machinery, possibly by breaking up the Home Office.

Shuffling the pack of existing middle-ranking cabinet posts is hardly likely to refresh or inject competence into a government that badly needs to do the once simple task of good administration again. Labour backbenchers are openly calling for the long-delayed reshuffle to follow the local elections, and to be widespread.

In the past three months, no fewer than seven of Mr Blair's cabinet ministers have been in the political doghouse. Mr Clarke is famously in the mire. There is also John Prescott's admission of an affair, and Patricia Hewitt is in danger of losing the support of NHS staff as she pushes through reforms that will expose troubling financial deficits in NHS trusts at a time of record investment.

The education secretary, Ruth Kelly, has looked more confident recently, but has been criticised for allowing sex offenders into Britain's schools and for failing initially to sell the education bill to her own backbenchers. The party chairman, Ian McCartney, has been attacked for not being abreast of the party's finances in the cash for peerages row. The culture secretary, Tessa Jowell, has separated from her husband, David Mills, following allegations about his business relationship with Silvio Berlusconi, and the chief whip, Hilary Armstrong, was accused of mislaying a large government majority in the Commons. Even the industry secretary, Alan Johnson, is accused of blotting an impressive copybook by mishandling pension negotiations with public-sector workers. To cap it all, the long-serving and normally impressive environment secretary, Margaret Beckett, has a farmers' revolt on her hands due to messing up the new system of rural payments.

The best ministers these days seem to be those who court little publicity, such as the defiantly uncharismatic transport secretary. Alistair Darling, the steady leader of the Commons, Geoff Hoon, or the bright but currently low-profile Europe minister Douglas Alexander. One backbencher claimed the Cabinet Office was proving to be the best-run department - it has not had a cabinet minister for four months.

Many of the other ministers not in trouble have portfolios that require them not to move. David Miliband is currently writing the local government white paper, but may be needed in extremis elsewhere. The work and pension secretary, John Hutton, is in the middle of fraught and detailed talks with the Treasury over the future of pension reform following the recommendations of the Turner commission. If he is to be shifted, possibly back to health where he served for many years as an admired minister, only Mr Johnson, a previous work and pensions secretary, or Mr Hutton's current deputy responsible for pensions, Stephen Timms, would be credible replacements. The Department for Work and Pensions has been through five cabinet ministers in five years, and all in a sphere requiring long-term planning. The only other possible replacements include Ms Hewitt, who understands the technical details of pensions and would impress the pensions industry. Ruth Kelly also knows pensions from her time at the Treasury. But Mr Hutton is also responsible for an important bill on incapacity benefit, an area he has handled well so far by forestalling a potential backbench rebellion.

Equally, Peter Hain, the Northern Ireland secretary, has shown competence but is in the middle of make-or-break talks to restore power sharing to the province. John Reid, the firefighting defence secretary, has Afghanistan and Iraq on his plate.

The cabinet minister most likely to be promoted is Hilary Benn, the international development secretary, a man who exudes much-needed moral authority. He has avoided the great Brown-Blair battles, and impressed both camps by his commitment to Africa. Outside the cabinet, there will be a shakeup at health, promotion to cabinet for Hazel Blears, possibly as party chairman, and possibly a step up for the schools minister, Jacqui Smith, and cabinet office minister Jim Murphy. New or further ministerial postings look likely for others of the best and brightest such as Ed Balls, John Healey, David Cairns and Ed Miliband.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

Obscenities in Foreign Languages

[Me: from Gen Dobry, a monthly Polish Genealogy Newsletter put out by Author Fred Hoffman]

* * * * * * * * * G E N D O B R Y ! * * * * * * * * *

Volume VII, No. 4 30 April 2006

Subject: Obscenity

[Editor -- Ray Marshall had a comment on a name I deleted from a list in the last issue because it happened to be spelled the same way as "the Queen Mother of all dirty words":]

I don't think this has to be printed, but you can make that decision. It does serve to point out the fact that in dealing with languages, it takes more than a dictionary sometimes to determine the "meaning" of a word and whether or not it should be used. I'm no linguist, but I can order a Bier and Kaeserahmschnitzel auf Deutsch.

With respect to the "Queen Mother of all dirty words," I recall that when I was stationed in the Army in a rural area in southern Bavaria in the 60s, that word was commonly heard in conversation in the Gasthaus. Not often, but no eyebrows seemed to be raised when it was heard. _Mist_ and _Scheisse_ were also used.

But you never heard blasphemies, or even the word _verdammt_, "damned," in that highly Catholic area.

Of course, none of those words would be seen in your average genealogical document. _Hoffentlich!_

Ray Marshall

[Editor -- This is something I've noticed, too, and somewhere I read a comment on it by linguists. In our culture we tend to regard as obscene both blasphemous language and language that refers to body functions. But in German culture, for instance, words for bodily functions are not that big a deal; references to _Mist_, "dung," or _Scheisse_, "s--t," while hardly welcome in polite society, are often heard. They're considered vulgar, but not terribly shocking. What really upsets people is any kind of blasphemy. You hear it sometimes, of course, but most people avoid it. I imagine they feel messing with God is taking on way more than any mere human can handle! This is especially true of areas where Catholicism has had a strong impact on the culture.
[I'm not sure about Polish culture, but I from what I can gather, Poles aren't too big on "four-letter words" of any kind. I suspect they, too, would regard blasphemy as much worse than an occasional scatological reference. But I don't know this for a fact.
[If anyone wishes to share his or her experience in this regard, I'd like to hear about it. Many people, of course, prefer not to even discuss this subject. But as a linguist I find obscenities fascinating, once you get past the shock value. They can tell you a lot about a culture!]

Whining Free Enterprise-Loving Insurance Companies Begging the Feds to Bail Them Out

Shell-shocked insurers retreat from coasts
Katrina losses may push future disaster costs onto taxpayers

By Spencer S. Hsu

The Washington Post

Updated: 9:51 p.m. ET April 29, 2006

Alarmed at the sharply rising cost of hurricanes and other disasters, home insurers are pulling back from some U.S. coastal markets, warning of gathering financial storm clouds over how the United States pays for the damage of catastrophe.

The development is yet another legacy of Hurricane Katrina, whose mounting toll of destruction along the Gulf Coast has crystallized a growing industry debate about the combined effect of climate trends and population growth in coastal areas. Some believe the two are creating a risk of losses so large that insurers could be pushed to the breaking point, leaving the government and taxpayers holding the tab for the next disaster.

Since Aug. 29 -- when the hurricane made landfall along the Gulf Coast -- Allstate Corp., the industry's second-largest company, has ceased writing homeowners policies in Louisiana, Florida and coastal parts of Texas and New York state. The firm has stopped underwriting earthquake coverage in California and elsewhere. Other firms have pulled back from the Gulf Coast to Cape Cod, notifying Florida of plans to cancel 500,000 policies.

Meanwhile, homeowners are moving to state-backed insurer plans of last resort, which tend to be subsidized by taxpayers, and whose costs also are rising.

Unusual alliance trumpets overhaul
As companies raise premiums, shed customers and battle homeowner claims in hurricane-damaged states, an overhaul of the industry is being promoted by an unusual coalition. It includes Allstate and State Farm Fire and Casualty Co. as well as a bipartisan group of state regulators, academic experts and former homeland security officials.

They propose establishing a greater role for the federal government in backing up new state catastrophe funds or private insurance firms when losses exceed a certain level, toughening state and local building codes and increasing premiums to accurately price risks.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12554207/

Isn’t it nice that the champions of “free enterprise” start whining to the government as soon as they start losing money?

The Epic of Iran - The Book of Kings"

April 30, 2006
Essay NYTimes

The Epic of Iran

By REZA ASLAN
FOUR hundred miles from the bustling metropolis of Tehran lie the magnificent ruins of Persepolis. Built some 2,500 years ago, Persepolis was the royal seat of an Iranian empire that, at its height, stretched from the Indus Valley to the Mediterranean Sea. Though the imperial city was sacked two centuries later by Alexander "the Accursed" (as Iranian chroniclers referred to him), the towering columns and winged beasts that still stand guard over the lost throne of Iran serve as a reminder of what was once among the most advanced civilizations on earth.

I first visited Persepolis two years ago. Born in Iran but raised in the United States, I knew the place only from dusty academic books about the glories of pre-Islamic Iran. I was totally unprepared for the crowds I saw there. Busloads of schoolchildren from nearby Shiraz filed through the complex of temples and palaces. A tour guide walked an older group up a stone stairway etched with row upon row of subject nations humbly presenting themselves before the king, or shah, of Iran. Families laid out sheets and napped in the shade cast by the intricately carved walls.

Breaking away from the crowd, I noticed a boy scrawling graffiti on the side of a massive stone block. Horrified, I shooed him away. When I moved closer to see what he had written, I immediately recognized a verse, familiar to many Iranians, taken from the pages of Iran's national epic, the "Shahnameh."

Damn this world, damn this time, damn this fate,
That uncivilized Arabs have come to make me Muslim.

Written more than a thousand years ago by Abolqasem Ferdowsi, the "Shahnameh," or "Book of Kings," recounts the mythological history of Iran from the first fitful moments of creation to the Arab conquest of the Persian Empire in the seventh century A.D. Ferdowsi was a member of Iran's aristocratic class, which maintained a strong attachment to the heritage of pre-Islamic Iran. According to legend, he composed the "Shahnameh" under the patronage of Sultan Mahmud of Ghazna, who promised him one dinar for every couplet. But when Ferdowsi presented the sultan with nearly 60,000 couplets, a flustered Mahmud offered him a fraction of his promised reward. Insulted, Ferdowsi rejected the money and returned home to the city of Tus, where he died impoverished and embittered. But his poem endured.

Numerous partial translations of the "Shahnameh" exist in English, but the only complete version went out of print more than 80 years ago. Now, Viking Press has published most of the poem in an accessible volume translated by the Iran scholar Dick Davis. A poet himself, Davis brings to his translation a nuanced awareness of Ferdowsi's subtle rhythms and cadences. His "Shahnameh" is rendered in an exquisite blend of poetry and prose, with none of the antiquated flourishes that so often mar translations of epic poetry.

The "Shahnameh" has much in common with the blood-soaked epics of Homer and with "Paradise Lost" and "The Divine Comedy." But in truth, it's difficult to find a literary equivalent, especially one that has had as profound an impact in shaping, and preserving, one nation's identity. Most Iranians have either read the "Shahnameh" or have heard it read. Its verses are sprinkled into everyday conversation. Children are named after its heroes and political enemies likened to its villains. For many Iranians, the "Shahnameh" links past and present, forming a cohesive mytho-historical narrative through which they understand their place in the world. The poem is, in a sense, Iran's national scripture, and Ferdowsi Iran's national prophet.

Ferdowsi wrote only in Persian, and his history of creation ignores traditional Islamic cosmology in favor of the "pagan" creation myths of his ancient Iranian ancestors. But this should not be seen as reflecting any hostility toward Islam. As Davis notes in his introduction, Ferdowsi was a pious Muslim; his epic speaks reverently of the Prophet Muhammad and his son-in-law Ali. Nevertheless, the "Shahnameh" displays an unmistakable antagonism toward the Arabs and the culture, if not the religion, they imposed on Iran. The book's first villain is an Arab — the Demon-King Zahhak, whose shoulders, kissed by Satan, sprout two voracious serpents that feast daily on the brains of young Iranian men. Zahhak is ultimately defeated by a noble Iranian peasant warrior named Feraydun, who imprisons him in Mount Damavand, where he will suffer eternally for daring to usurp the throne of Iran.

The message is hardly subtle. In fact, Ferdowsi's animosity toward the Arabs carries the poem to its tragic end, when the warrior Rostam stands before the invading Arab armies and laments,

When the pulpit's equal to the throne
And Abu Bakr's and Omar's names are known
Our long travails will be as naught, and all
The glory we have known will fade and fall.
The stars are with the Arabs, and you'll see
No crown or throne, no royal sovereignty.

Still, the marvel of Ferdowsi's poem is how it tries to strike a balance between the two dominant threads of Iranian cultural identity, Persian and Islamic. And yet throughout Iran's history, the "Shahnameh" has often been used as a weapon in the continuing struggle between the turban and the crown.

For example, the Pahlavi shahs, who came to power in 1925, promoted study of the poem as a means of de-emphasizing the country's Islamic heritage and thus stripping the clerics of their ideological authority. They built a magnificent mausoleum for Ferdowsi in Tus to serve as an alternative pilgrimage site to the tombs of the imams. They commissioned an official edition of the "Shahnameh" and compelled schoolchildren to memorize passages that emphasized the glories of kingly rule. In 1971, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi journeyed to Persepolis to celebrate 2,500 years of kingship with an opulent party for hundreds of international luminaries featuring plates of roast peacock stuffed with foie gras and 5,000 bottles of Champagne. Standing on that hallowed ground, surrounded by soldiers dressed as ancient warriors, the last shah brazenly linked his rule to that of the semi-divine kings of the "Shahnameh."

It was an extravagant gesture that alienated Iranians and hastened the shah's downfall. Eight years later, during Iran's revolution, he was forced into exile. Almost immediately, the clerical regime began a vigorous campaign to cleanse the new Islamic Republic of all references not just to the Pahlavis but more generally to the country's pre-Islamic past. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini considered the "Shahnameh" an offensive, even sacrilegious, text that explicitly endorsed monarchy. He discouraged public readings of it, declaring all nonreligious poetry as makruh, or "detestable." In 1979, Khomeini's right-hand man, the Ayatollah Sadegh Khalkhali, tried to bulldoze both Ferdowsi's tomb and Persepolis, before the provisional government stopped him.

Today, as a new generation of Iranians struggles to define itself in opposition to a widely reviled religious regime, the "Shahnameh" is re-emerging as the supreme expression of a cultural identity transcending all notions of politics or piety. Radio Tehran, "the voice of the Islamic Republic," begins every morning's broadcast with a reading from the poem. The country's most popular tourist attraction is not Khomeini's tomb or the tombs of the imams, but the ruins of Persepolis, where the government is currently rebuilding the gardens and pavilion built for the shah's infamous Persepolis spectacular.

When I visited, young Iranians were milling about the grounds in a trance, touching everything, as though a touch could transport them to another Iran. I stood with them in front of the palace walls, trying to imagine Persepolis as Ferdowsi must have seen it, recalling the eulogy he wrote a thousand years ago for a civilization he watched pass away in his mind's eye.

Where are your valiant warriors and your priests,
Where are your hunting parties and your feasts?
Where is that warlike mien, and where are those
Great armies that destroyed our country's foes? . . .
Count Persia as a ruin, as the lair
Of lions and leopards. Look now and despair.


Reza Aslan is an Iranian-American scholar of religions and author of "No god but God: The Origins, Evolution and Future of Islam."

Rant: U.S. seals deal on military bases in Bulgaria

[EMail to various folks today]

I think Bush is insane.

He's bogged down in Afghanistan.

He's bogged down in Iraq.

He wants to declare war on Iran

He's got some troops and air bases in Poland

He's got bases in Turkey

He's got bases coming to Romania.

He just signed a deal for bases in Bulgaria.

If you look at the map of the World, what does that mean? Why just that paranoid Russians (Russia being the ONLY country that is a real threat to the mainland United States) are under attack from the West and the South! (China wouldn’t dare attack us. If we cut off payments for their trade, they would go bankrupt within a month and there would be riots throughout the entire country).

I repeat, Bush is insane and should be committed.

He knows that no President can be considered “great” unless he wins a war. He wants to avenge his father’s mediocre reputation. So he’s desperate to have a war he thinks he can win in the next 2 ½ years.

U.S. seals deal on military bases in Bulgaria

Plan linked to U.S. efforts to move smaller bases closer to Middle East

MSNBC
Updated: 7:05 a.m. ET April 28, 2006

SOFIA, Bulgaria - The United States signed an agreement on Friday to establish three military bases in Bulgaria as it shifts troops from old Cold War positions to smaller installations closer to the Middle East and Africa.

Under the deal, the United States will deploy 2,500 soldiers on short rotations to Bulgaria as it draws down tens of thousands of troops from Cold War bases in Europe and Asia.

“The agreement indeed will enhance our cooperation, allowing the shared use of Bulgarian training facilities and strengthening our ability to operate militarily,” said U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice after a signing ceremony on the sidelines of a meeting of NATO foreign ministers in Sofia.

Bulgaria, an ex-communist country of 7.7 million, has been eager to repay Washington for supporting its 2004 NATO membership. It has backed the United States in Iraq despite widespread public opposition to the war.

The 10-year agreement includes the Bezmer airfield and Novo Selo shooting range, both near Bulgaria’s border with Turkey, and the Graf Ignatievo airfield in central Bulgaria.

U.S. forces will also have access to a storage facility near Bulgaria’s port of Bourgas. The total number of soldiers may double for short periods during rotations every six months.

The United States said the first troops would most likely arrive next year. Under the arrangement, Washington may launch attacks against third countries from the bases after consulting Bulgarian authorities. Both sides have said the facilities will be shared and used mainly for training.

The agreement must still be ratified by Bulgaria’s parliament, in which the three-party Socialist-led coalition holds a commanding majority.

A recent opinion survey showed 60 percent of Bulgarians were against the bases which are expected to bring tens of millions of dollars in badly-needed foreign investment and create jobs.

Bulgaria’s far-right opposition Attack party has been one of the loudest opponents. It mustered around 5,000 people in protests in Sofia on Thursday.

Rights groups have expressed concern over the bases following allegations the United States may have used installations in Romania, Poland and other European states as secret CIA jails.

The plan closely resembles a deal signed in December between Washington and Bulgaria’s northern Black Sea neighbor Romania.

Copyright 2006 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters.

Trying to Understand Angry Atheists

Why do nonbelievers seem to be threatened by the idea of God?

WEB-EXCLUSIVE COMMENTARY

By Marc Gellman

Newsweek

Updated: 1:28 p.m. ET April 26, 2006

April 26, 2006 - I think I need to understand atheists better. I bear them no ill will. I don't think they need to be religious to be good, kind and charitable people, and I have no desire to debate or convert them. I do think they are wrong about the biggest question, “Are we alone?” and I will admit to occasionally viewing atheists with the kind of patient sympathy often shown to me by Christians who can't quite understand why the Good News of Jesus' death and resurrection has not reached me or my people. However, there is something I am missing about atheists: what I simply do not understand is why they are often so angry.

So we disagree about God. I'm sometimes at odds with Yankee fans, people who like rap music and people who don't like animals, but I try to be civil. I don't know many religious folk who wake up thinking of new ways to aggravate atheists, but many people who do not believe in God seem to find the religion of their neighbors terribly offensive or oppressive, particularly if the folks next door are evangelical Christians. I just don't get it.

This must sound condescending and a large generalization, and I don't mean it that way, but I am tempted to believe that behind atheist anger there are oftentimes uncomfortable personal histories. Perhaps their atheism was the result of the tragic death of a loved one, or an angry degrading sermon, or an insensitive eulogy, or an unfeeling castigation of lifestyle choices or perhaps something even worse. I would ask for forgiveness from the angry atheists who write to me if I thought it would help. Religion must remain an audacious, daring and, yes, uncomfortable assault on our desires to do what we want when we want to do it. All religions must teach a way to discipline our animal urges, to overcome racism and materialism, selfishness and arrogance and the sinful oppression of the most vulnerable and the most innocent among us.

Some religious leaders obviously betray the teachings of the faith they claim to represent, but their sacred scriptures remain a critique of them and also of every thing we do to betray the better angels of our nature. But our world is better and kinder and more hopeful because of the daily sacrifice and witness of millions of pious people over thousands of years.

To be called to a level of goodness and sacrifice so constantly and so patiently by a loving but demanding God may seem like a naive demand to achieve what is only a remote human possibility. However, such a vision need not be seen as a red flag to those who believe nothing. I can humbly ask whether my atheist brothers and sisters really believe that their lives are better, richer and more hopeful by clinging to Camus's existential despair: “The purpose of life is that it ends." I can agree to make peace with atheists whom I believe ask too little of life here on planet earth if they will agree to make peace with me and with other religious folk who perhaps have asked too much. I believe that the philosopher-rabbi Mordecai Kaplan was right when he said, “It is hell to live without hope, and religion saves people from hell.” I urge my atheist brothers and sisters to see things as Spinoza urged, sub specie aeternitatis—“under the perspective of eternity.”

And to try a little positivity. Last Sunday I took two high-school girls to Cold Spring Labs to meet Dr. James Watson. One of the girls wants to be a research scientist, and the other has no idea yet, but I think she will be a great writer. I think they also both want boyfriends. I want them to stay smart and not dumb down to get a boy. Watson spoke and listened to the girls, and they left, I hope, proud about being smart. I know that Jim believes way more in Darwin than in Deuteronomy, but he also believes that at Cold Spring Labs the most important thing is not whether you are a man or a woman, not whether you believe in God. The most important thing, as he says, is “to get something done.” Now there's an atheist I can believe in.

© 2006 Newsweek, Inc. |

Plagiarism Epidemic

press box - SLATE
Why Plagiarists Do It
Because they can.
By Jack Shafer
Posted Wednesday, April 26, 2006, at 6:57 PM ET

Has any plagiarist ever owned up to stealing—deliberately—another writer's words? None that I can recall. Mostly they peddle apologies and excuses like the ones offered by Harvard student and novelist Kaavya Viswanathan, whom the Harvard Crimson busted this week for word thievery. Viswanathan tells the New York Times that the 29 cited instances in which she lifted from another novelist's language for her novel were "unintentional and unconscious."

Please! Pinching one or two phrases from another book in the course of writing a 320-page novel might be accidental. But by the time a novelist does it 29 times, the effort is transparently intentional and conscious. Unless, of course, Viswanathan composed her entire novel during Ambien-induced sleep-writing episodes.

I also dismiss the lame plea offered this week by Raytheon Co. CEO and book author William H. Swanson, who was caught plagiarizing a 1944 engineering text. Swanson now admits that he did "not properly credit" the source. Yes, he did not properly credit the source in the same way a shoplifter did not properly pay the store clerk for the George Foreman Grill he stuck under his sweatshirt. Why not come out and tell the truth: I ripped the 1944 text off because I thought nobody would catch me. My Slate colleagues Timothy Noah and David Plotz have amply chronicled similar obfuscations by historian-plagiarists Doris Kearns Goodwin and Stephen Ambrose.

The standard rundown of plagiarism excuses includes accidental copying, occupational or personal stress, and even mental illness, as in the case of former New York Times reporter Jayson Blair. I reject those excuses, too, and counter with a more plausible set of explanations that rely on neither psychobabble nor the DSM-IV.

Ambition Often Exceeds Talent: I know of very few examples in which an exceptional writer got caught plagiarizing. Sometimes writers accept jobs or assignments beyond their talents. When the deadline whistle blows, they find themselves facing this cost-benefit quandary: Shall I tell the truth and bail, damaging my career for sure, or shall I steal copy and only risk damaging my career?

Writing Is Hard Work: A corollary to ambition exceeding talent. Even prolific writers, who can toss off a thousand words an hour, complain about the difficulty of writing. Writing well is a difficult enterprise. So is writing poorly. With so many examples of good writing out there to "borrow," why suffer only to write poorly?

The Thrill Factor: As anybody who has ever shoplifted a pack of Bazooka bubble gum can tell you, people steal not only for material gain but for psychic gain. It's a gas to pad the company expense account, leave a restaurant without paying, or rifle though a friend's medicine cabinet to steal his most potent medications.

Evening the Score: If you hate your boss at the car factory, you might express your fury by sabotaging every tenth car on the line. If you hate your editor or your publication, perhaps you stick it to him by plagiarizing. It doesn't make sense, but neither does sabotaging every tenth car.

Force of Habit: If nobody catches you running stop lights in college or tickets you for doing the same at your first newspaper job, you eventually stop paying attention. One day, red, yellow, and green all mean "go."

Contempt for the Business: Show me the writer who calls himself and everybody he works with a "hack," and I'll show you a potential plagiarist.

Even If You Get Caught, You'll Probably Get Away With It: Trudy Lieberman reported in the July/August 1995 Columbia Journalism Review that many journalists caught plagiarizing paid little or no price for their transgressions. Lieberman describes a "circle-the-wagons" mentality in the news business when plagiarism breaks out. Providing a number of examples, she also notes the double standard of journalists who gave Sen. Joseph Biden holy grief when he committed plagiarism in a presidential campaign speech but cut their colleagues slack.

How severely will the book industry punish Kaavya Viswanathan? I predict that she'll weather the storm with all the grace and denial of Doris Kearns Goodwin.

******

Thanks to Rachel Shteir and others who let me pick their brains and promised not to accuse me of plagiarism. Send your plagiarism tips to slate.pressbox@gmail.com. (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.)

Jack Shafer is Slate's editor at large.



As a genealogist, I've "collected" thousands of images, articles and facts over the years. Some, I know where I got them, the early ones, I don't. I don't suppose a fellow genealogist would sue (for one thing, publishing genealogy stuff is a labor of love, not income), but it does one feel guilty when I see something that I value but I don't know who wrote it. I suppose the best thing to do, rather than ignore it, is to cite it this way (author unknown because I was too lazy to write it down).

You, To, Can Right Like a Blogger

Wired News

By Tony Long
02:00 AM Apr, 27, 2006

The Luddite

Sitting around the cafe the other day, pondering the many ways in which technology has contrived to screw up my otherwise placid existence, the talk of my table mates turned to the craft (or is it the art?) of writing.

"There's a case to be made that the internet has actually helped improve the quality of writing in general," said, well, we'll call him "Topsy." I leaned in close to see if any alcohol was present on Topsy's breath. Detecting nothing beyond the usual halitosis, I surmised that he was being serious.

"Make the case," I said.

Topsy's line of reasoning, as best I could follow (for nothing is ever simple in Topsy's world), is that the easy access and limitless nature of the web allow you to expose yourself to tons of writing, both good and bad. Presumably, the average educated swine will gravitate toward the good writing and, as a result, improve his own skills as he increases his knowledge. I expressed skepticism.

"Because our chief job in life is pattern recognition," Topsy said, pressing his point, "and the chief job of the internet, through googling, is pattern recognition, what we do by living on the internet is discriminate between good and bad writing. Bad writing is, by its genes, something that doesn't convey information, whether artful or factual.

"The question is, are there enough of 'us' out there (I presume he was referring to the aforementioned educated swine), through this passive-aggressive process, to make any difference at all in this overpopulated world?"

I looked longingly at the bottle of Chianti behind the counter, but resisted the urge. It's hard enough staying with Topsy's train of thought while nursing a latte. I was left to wonder, though. If he's right -- if only a relative few in our post-literate society can tell good writing from bad, whether it's online, in print or scratched in the mud with a stick -- then what's the point?

As a mere stripling, I was advised that if I hoped to become a good writer, I should write every day. More than that, I should read good writing every day. This can be accomplished on the internet as easily as it can by reading a book or magazine. But if you're the sort who prefers People to The New Yorker, well, again, what's the point?

So my riposte to Topsy was, while the internet may be a nifty vehicle for delivering one's polished prose and penetrating insights to an impatiently waiting world, it can't help you become a better writer if you, pardon my French, suck.

Moreover, the internet leads to all sorts of unsavory writing practices, like blogging. You know, the journal of the 21st century.

Keeping a diary or journal ("journaling" they now call it, thanks to the modern world's habit of turning perfectly good nouns into verbs) was common among the literate before television came along and hooked us up to the communal drool bucket.

A journal exists for its author to reflect on, well, anything. A fading love, political turmoil, a spat with a friend, the weather in Buffalo, New York, on June 10, 1946. The writer is free to express the most intimate thoughts, because the nature of keeping a journal is to keep it private.

Occasionally, if the journal belongs to a writer or an artist or a statesman, the writing is so compelling that it finds its way into print after the author dies. In the best of those, we are invited into the mind behind the creative process and we emerge with a deeper understanding of a masterwork, say, or the thinking behind a crucial political decision.

Most journals go unread, though, and that's the way it should be. The contents were only intended for the writer's eyes, after all.

A lot of people will tell you that blogging is merely journaling online. It is not. Blogging is not private, but very public. And very few blogs involve the kind of introspection that characterizes a serious journal. Most blogging is sheer exhibitionism, either the self-absorbed ramblings of an individual blogger or the corporate site that exists for the sole purpose of making money. (If anyone sees a disturbing parallel between blogging and column writing, kindly keep it to yourself.)

This doesn't mean blogs have to be badly written. It just means that most are.

But let's be fair and balanced, like Fox News. Of the 27 million or so "daily diaries" floating like space junk in the blogosphere, there are a handful that aren't bad. Some are well written and insightful. But understand that we're talking about a precious few needles in a mighty big haystack.

Were Truman Capote alive today he might be moved to say, "That's not writing. That's blogging."

- - -

Tony Long, copy chief at Wired News, cries plaintively, "Can't anybody out there diagram a sentence anymore?"


I'm a pretty decent typist and the worst part about writing while blogging is that my fingers can't distinguish homonyms/homophones well. Greatly increases the proofreading chore.

First East-West Non-Stop Trans-Atlantic Flight - April 2000

First East-West Non-Stop Atlantic Flight: The `Bremen'

April 2000

By Antonio Cormier

History has recorded the celebrated Atlantic crossing by the Spirit of Saint Louis in 1927, but few people are aware that the crossing of the ocean in the opposite direction was made under more spectacular conditions by the Bremen between April 12 and 13, 1928. Two German flyers and Irish Commandant accomplished this exploit.

At first The Bremen, a monoplane built in Germany by the Junkers Company in Dessau, landed at Ile Verte (Greenly Island) near Lourdes Blanc Sablon on April 13, 1928 at 6:08 PM, Greenwich Mean Time. It had left Baldonnel in Ireland the day before, April 12, 1928 at 5:38 a.m. Greenwich Time.

Nine years earlier, in June 1919, John William Alcock and Arthur Whidden Brown had made the first west-east crossing of the Atlantic from Newfoundland to Ireland. This time, 1928, news was flashed that the first east-west crossing of The Atlantic had been made.

History was made that time when two German flyers and an Irishman joined together to make the historic flight. The three aviators were Captain Herman Koehl, Baron Ehrenfreid Guenther Von Huenefeld and Commandant James C. Fitzmaurice.

Their exploit did much to further Trans-Atlantic flights. The numerous victims of previous attempts to fly the Atlantic had contributed nothing to public opinion with regard to the safety of such flights.

Even official opinion described such flights as useless and they should be banned. The facts of the time confirmed that opinion. Including Charles Nungesser and Francois Coli, 20 people had lost their lives trying to fly across the Atlantic. The intrepid trio knew what a challenge awaited them, and that death on some unknown icy plain might be their lot, the price of failure.

When the three flyers left Baldonnel Airport near Dublin on April 12, 1928, their planned destination was New York. From that moment until the end of their voyage, the task of piloting the Junkers was not just a dream but also required tremendous physical effort on the part of the two pilots. In order to make their trip as easy as possible they replaced each other at the controls every half-hour. One tried to sleep while the other worked.

The cockpit was sheltered from the worst of the elements, but there was no heating system in the plane, even in the cabin. There was no radio and once they left sight of Oul' Erin the rest of the world would hear nothing from them until their attempt became an accomplishment.

For 36 and a half hours of their flight, they fought an inch-by-inch battle. The very wind, which supported them in the air, became an invisible wall, reducing their speed to a 100 miles an hour for the greater part of the crossing.

On April 13, a gray and cloudy dawn slowly announced a new day. The pilots peered anxiously through the dimness trying to find a parcel of land which might serve as a geographical reference to give them their approximate landfall.

They were lucky: through the thickening snow an object suddenly appeared on the horizon. They took it for the funnel of a ship but passing over it, they were delighted to realize that it was a lighthouse. They knew they were over the Western Hemisphere, but where? That was the question. They were tired; gas running out, so they decided to land their machine somewhere. They took a short fly-over to find the right place.

There seemed to be a good spot near the lighthouse, but poor visibility played with their judgment. Hardly had the Bremen touched ground when its front wheels went through the ice, causing damage to the propeller. Happy that their landing had not been disastrous, the men descended to terra firma and within a few minutes the light keeper strode forward to welcome them.

The aviators were astonished at how far off course they had managed to go. They were certainly not on United States soil, far from it. They landed on Greenly Island, a tiny piece of land situated between the northern extremity of Newfoundland and Lourdes Blanc Sablon, Province of Quebec.

The incredulity of the lightkeeper reached a peak when the first man to meet Fitzmaurice, told them what he had learned. Johnny Letemplier met the plane and Fitzmaurice asked him where they were.

There was astonishment on both sides when the flyers learned where they were, and the Greenly Island men were told that the single motored plane arrived on a non-stop flight from the airport of Baldonel in Ireland. When my grandfather Alfred Cormier of Lourdes Blanc Sablon, the telegraph operator, was informed of their exploit he sent the news out immediately that the first east-west trans-Atlantic flight had been achieved.

The pilots thought that they were more or less abandoned in this near desert island. But help was not long arriving. Trans Canada Continental Airways Limited sent two Fairchild FC2W ski planes from Lake St Agnes near Malbaie in Quebec. The experienced bush pilots received orders to get to "Greenly Island as fast as possible," a distance of 700 miles, in order to collect the aviators and bring them all the help they needed.

The pilot Duke Schiller left in the first plane on April 14, and had on board Doctor Louis Cuisinier, technical director of Trans Continental Airways Limited and Eugene Thibeault, mechanic. Romeo Vachon piloted the second plane with a journalist and two New York photographers on board. They reached Greenly Island on the April 15 and 18 respectively after flying through snowstorms, with one obligatory stop.

At first, the men believed that they could repair the Bremen and fly it to New York. With this in mind, Schiller flew back to Lake St Agnes, taking with him James Fitzmaurice who would order the necessary pieces from New York.

In New York Hertha Junkers, the daughter of Professor Hugo Junkers, builder of the planes, filled the order with the collaboration of Otto Scherrer, chief engineer of the Junkers Corporation in America.

The pieces were sent by train to Montreal under the supervision of the mechanic Ernest Koeppen of the Junkers Company, and from Montreal to Lake St. Agnes

From Malbaie, Hertha Junkers ordered a plane flown in by Floyd Bennett and Bernt Balchen, a Ford Trimotor N114542. Its mission was to carry the pieces for the repairs on the Bremen to Greenly Island.

When the plane arrived in Malbaie, Floyd Bennett was sick with double pneumonia, and had to be brought to Jeffrey Hale's Hospital in Quebec City. Charles Lindberg flew a military plane to Quebec City with serum for Bennett but he arrived too late to cure the sick man of the aggravated condition of the pneumonia. Bennett died the following morning.

James Fitzmaurice then replaced Bennett as co-pilot with Berbt Balchen to fly to Greenly Island, on April 23, 1928. On board were the Junkers mechanic Ernest Koeppen, and American photographer, Charles Murphy. They spent the night at Sept-Iles and left at 5:30 A.M. the next day, arriving at Greenly Island six hours later.

On Greenly Island Koeppen and Thibeault got to work to repair the Bremen but they could not get the engine to work. Faced with the possibility of a long delay, and urged on by the desire of the aviators to be in New York for the burial of Floyd Bennett, the men decided to leave the responsibility of the Bremen in the hands of Doctor Louis Cuisinier and Eugene Thibeault.

The pilots of the Bremen then boarded the Ford airplane to go to New York with Ernest Koeppen. The Bremen was then towed to Lourdes Blanc Sablon and installed on the hill. A Loening OA-1 under an American Army Air Force commander was sent to this place. He was accompanied by the pilot Fred Melchior from the Junkers Company who was supposed to pilot the Brement to New York.

Since heavy ice prevented them from landing, they decided to drop the pilot in by parachute. Dr Cuisinier and Thibeault, still on site, had succeeded in getting the engine started, and boarded with Melchior. Unfortunately, there was not enough runway for the plane to take off. It hurtled over the cleared land and was badly damaged in the rougher terrain, undercarriage and propeller being broken into pieces.

The Bremen was consequently brought to Quebec City by the ship North Shore. >From there it was sent to Bremen in Germany on the ship Krefeld on September 17, 1928. It arrived there ten days later, and then was sent to New York on the ship "Columbus" on May 10, 1929.

Later on, Henry Ford acquired the plane for his museum, the Henry Ford Museum in Greenfield Village near Detroit, Michigan where it can still be viewed. The outcome of this daring feat is commemorated on Greenly Island by a stone monument, placed there by the Clarke Steamship Company of Montreal which used to carry passengers and goods for the Lower North Shore communities.

The dedication took place on August 14, 1928. Monseigneur Jean-Marie Leventoux, Catholic Bishop of the North Shore presided over the ceremony, Father Gallix of Natasquan, Father Francois Hesry of the parish of Lourdes Blanc Sablon, Alfred Cormier, telegraph operator of Lourdes Blanc Sablon as well, Captain J.A. Brie, Master, the officer and men of Clarke Steamship were present. Besides other Canadians present, there were tourists from the United States, as well as fishermen and residents of Greenly Island and their families.

The inscription on the monument marks an important event in the history of world aviation: On this island landed the Bremen, Friday April 13, 1928, after the first east-west non-stop flight, having left Ireland at dawn on Thursday April 12, 1928. The crew members were Baron Ehrenfreid Guenther Von Huenefeld of Germany, Major James C. Fitzmaurice of Ireland. Erected by the Clarke Steamship Company Limited of Montreal in recognition of this great exploit.

Had it not been for the generosity of president Desmond A. Clarke and his company which defrayed the cost of the erection of the monument, it is quite likely that this faraway spot where the Bremen landed might never have been recognized, and there would be an unfortunate gap in the history of aviation.

Antonio Cormier is a historian, based in Lourdes Blanc Sablon in the Province of Quebec. Translation was provided by Marianna O'Gallagher.

Slobodan Milosevic: Myth and Responsibility 16 March 2006

Slobodan Milosevic: myth and responsibility
Julie A Mertus
16 - 3 - 2006


The career of the Serbian leader who achieved power by exploiting the potency of the "Kosovo myth" carries a warning for Serbia’s and Kosovo’s future, says Julie A Mertus.


When I began studying Kosovo in 1993, few people had ever heard the name of the small province in southern Yugoslavia. I had been sent there on an investigatory trip for a major international human-rights group, and I couldn't get the dusty, decayed place out of my head. An eager, newly graduated human-rights attorney, I wanted to discover the facts that would expose, once and for all, the real truth about this strange place where the bubbling ethnic hatred between the Serb minority and the Albanian majority made an eventual explosion seem inevitable.

"Like rabbits, they sit on the hill and shoot at us like rabbits", began my first op-ed on Kosovo, published in 1993 in the International Herald Tribune. After about a dozen op-eds and journal articles explaining the plight of Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo, I realised that I had it all wrong. To explain the ethnic animosities in Kosovo required exposure not of truth as fact, but, rather, truth as myth. Serbs and Albanians based their behaviour on what they believed to be true, not on what anyone could guarantee was factually true.





Julie A Mertus is an associate professor of international relations at the American University in Washington, where she co-directs the ethics, peace and global affairs programme. Her six books include Kosovo: How Myths and truths started a War (University of California Press, 1999), The United Nations and Human Rights: A Guide for a New Era (Routledge, 2005) and Bait and switch: Human rights and U.S. Foreign Policy



The most important kind of myth informing Serb and Albanian identities structuring social relations concerned victimhood. After all – and in a pattern familiar in conflict situations across the world – it was the victims who could claim the moral high ground, and thus absolve themselves from any responsibility for being perpetrators. So, in the hot days of the mid-1990s, I set aside all my human-rights reportage and began asking questions about Kosovo myths.

I knew I was on to something when, almost immediately after I changed my approach, my life was threatened. Myth-raking was dangerous business.

The reason soon became evident. The myths of Kosovo were far more than random collections of individual stories: they were internally consistent worldviews capable of accommodating diverse experiences, drawing on real events, while spinning them into a pattern that reinforced the perspective of one side of a social fracture. The ability of powerful figures to mobilise those myths only became fully apparent later; what was clear was that in Kosovo, the myths were central to the politics.

The path to power

Both communities in Kosovo nourished their myths, but two factors made the Serbian "myth of Kosovo" the more potent: the fact that behind it lay an apparatus of statehood and political power, and the way that Kosovo operated as the historic locus of Serb nationhood. During the heyday of Slobodan Milosevic's political career, Kosovo became the single most important myth informing the Serbian collective imagination during Milosevic's heyday; it remains the single most important myth determining the future direction of the Serbian state and nation.

The historical centrepiece of the myth is an incident before the battle at Kosovo Polje (the "field of blackbirds", near modern Pristina) in June 1389 between the Ottoman army and the resisting Serb forces led by Prince Lazar. Lazar, the tale goes, was offered a choice between a heavenly kingdom or an earthly one. The brave Serb warrior chose the heavenly kingdom. With righteousness on their side, the prince and his troops bravely went to battle and were slaughtered by the Turks. From that day, Kosovo has been Serb "holy ground" under divine providence, territory to which Serbs are forever linked and from which they should never be sundered.

Milosevic did not create the myth of Kosovo, nor was he the first in the late 20th century to use it to justify Serb political demands. That bright idea came from within Serbia's academic elite, namely a group of intellectuals within the prestigious Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences (Sanu). In a lengthy "memorandum" leaked to the press in 1986, they lamented alleged Serbian victimisation in Kosovo under the federal Yugoslav state that had granted considerable autonomy to the region, and called for constitutional revisions to allow for greater centralised control from Belgrade.

The memorandum contained allegations of violence, forced expulsion and desecration targeted against the Serb minority in Kosovo. It provoked a huge political storm; many saw in it the appearance in public life of a dangerous new discourse of nationalist self-assertion among Yugoslavia's pivotal nationality.

Slobodan Milosevic, then an unremarkable communist functionary, was one of the few among the communist elite who did not publicly condemn the memorandum (on Milosevic's "ambiguous" stance, see Jasna Dragovic-Soso, "Saviours of the Nation": Serbia's Intellectual Opposition and the Revival of Nationalism [C Hurst, 2002]). In its wake, he started to develop a new platform for renewed Serb control over Kosovo. At a rally in 1986 in Kragujevac, an industrial city on the border with Serbia and the main initial destination for Serbs leaving Kosovo, Milosevic warned that changing the status of Kosovo would be difficult to achieve, because "other areas and individuals will be against the change".

The Kragujevac speech was only a warm-up. In January 1987, Milosevic staged a rally near Belgrade in which he called for a reduction in the autonomy of Kosovo, using the fighting words: "Serbia will be united or there will be no Serbia". In April, Milosevic was sent to Kosovo by his boss, Ivan Stambolic (later one of the many victims of his rule, abducted and murdered while jogging) to hear firsthand the complaints of Kosovar Serbs. A large public protest of angry Serbs greeted him in Kosovo Polje, and amid the confused uproar and cries that the local Serbs were being beaten, Milosevic can be caught on film uttering words that would earn him heroic status and catapult his career: "no one has the right to beat you!" (sometimes rendered as "no one shall ever beat you again!").





Also in openDemocracy after the death of Slobodan Milosevic on 11 March 2006:

Misha Glenny, "Milosevic's last victory"

Tom Gallagher, "Understanding Slobodan Milosevic: between the cold war and Iraq"

Dusan Velickovic, "Milosevic and I"

Anthony Dworkin, "The Hague tribunal after Milosevic"

Marko Attila Hoare, "Slobodan Milosevic: the spirit of the age"


If you find this material enjoyable or provoking please consider commenting in our forums – and supporting openDemocracy by sending us a donation so that we can continue our work for democratic dialogue



The last myth

Through his commanding response to the "Kosovo question" and other strategic political actions, Milosevic propelled himself to power in Serbia and, subsequently, Yugoslavia. In the late 1980s, he solidified his control by pushing through constitutional changes and instituting emergency rule, which gave Serbia ironclad control over Kosovo. An extraordinary moment in this period was the commemoration at Kosovo Polje of the 600th anniversary of the 1389 battle, marked by a speech where Milosevic ominously announced to an enormous gathering of Serbs: “Six centuries later, we are again engaged in battles. They are not armed battles, though such things cannot be excluded”.

By 1990, Milosevic was in position to extend the methods he had used in Kosovo to other parts of the Yugoslav federation. In expanding his drive for power and domination to Croatia and Bosnia, Milosevic had to add only two more ingredients – tighter control over the media and a few staged "incidents" in which Serbs were harmed. Then, the number of Serbs willing to fight would increase exponentially.

Milosevic was indeed a great manipulator. To blame Milosevic alone for the bloodshed in the Balkans, however, would be a grave mistake. He had many willing executioners. The death of Milosevic does not signal the end of the myth of Kosovo, nor of the wider complex of chauvinistic nationalisms of which it forms a part.

In my book, Kosovo: How Myths and Truths Started a War – published in March 1999, just as the modern conflict over Kosovo was approaching its latest climax – I argued that Serbian nationalism has always had some degree of autonomy that preceded and shaped the political struggles of Milosevic's time. Milosevic was able to tap into the already existing chauvinistic nationalism as a theory of political legitimacy to justify the political reality he would create. To recognise this is to reject two notions: both that politics is the cause of everything and that nationalism has nothing to do with it, and that conflict in the Balkans is simply the result of age-old, primordial hatreds which no one can salve until – well, until these people stop killing each other.

One factor that makes the continuation of Serb-Albanian violence in Kosovo likely, as long as the two communities coexist in the area in substantial numbers, is the continuation of chauvinistic nationalism on both sides. Milosevic is gone and he can no longer fan the flames of hatred through his references to Serb victimisation. Nor can the people of the Balkans continue to blame him for all their troubles.

Milosevic leaves the scene with the future constitutional status of Kosovo uncertain and open to high-level negotiation involving Serbs, Albanians and the international community. But in any case, the future of Kosovo was never his to determine. Certainly, Milosevic's myth-mongering has been instrumental in ensuring Kosovo's "loss" to Serbia. But, ultimately, the map for Kosovo's future has always been a matter for the people who would have to find a way to live together, or break apart.

The frenzied nationalism that Milosevic exploited and channelled was also not his to abandon. It too was a matter for the Serb people, many of whom – albeit with many honourable exceptions, including human-rights workers, journalists, students and civilians in all walks of life – embraced this destructive ideology long before it was resurrected by the Serbian academy in 1986 and given political shape and leadership by Milosevic. The low-key reaction to Milosevic's death may have demonstrated how few Serbs today publicly endorse such a worldview, but this may also owe something to the fact that the former leader had made the myth an instrument of catastrophic Serb defeat. At a deeper level, the ideology and the myth it embodies is still espoused by enough people to make a peaceful solution to the status of Kosovo very difficult.

Milosevic's myth-mongering must, as a matter of course, be a component of Serbs' self-examination after his demise. The Serb myth has poisoned the Serb reality. Nations can't live without myths, but they need to be rooted in realities and inspire the kind of constructive, creative national projects that promote long-term peace and justice. When the Serbs truly realise this, Slobodan Milosevic will finally have died.




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