On Friday I hopped on the Metro North for an hour long ride to Newburgh Airport to take advantage of a dirt cheap flight to Greensboro, NC. My airline was Skybus, a discount carrier that sold seats for as low as $20. For some reason that I never quite understood, they had chosen my hometown as it's headquarters. I must have had the honor of flying one of the last Skybus flights, because that night they declared bankruptcy. All of a sudden I was out a return flight home.
Skybus is only the latest airline to file Chapter 11. Three others went out of business this week as well. Aloha, ATA and Champion Airlines also won't be taking to the skies any longer. It seems that it is hard for discount airlines and small carriers to break even when oil prices have held steady over $100 since February.
Skybus had increased traffic at Greensboro's airport by 30 percent in January and February of 2008 compared to the same time last year. Now the airport is back to being the type of place where the TSA security agents have nothing better to do than measure all your liquids and search every bag you have. It's a shame, they used to be busy enough that every once in a while I could get away with sneaking my water bottle on board.
My beloved town of Greensboro, with a population of 225,000, has been experiencing a boom recently. By "boom" I mean that the city has successfully embarked on a project to remove all trees from the area. Outside of downtown, which has turned into a trendy area after being a ghost town for all of my childhood, the city looks like one big suburb. Greensboro has some of the worst urban sprawl in the country--meaning that developers keep expanding outwards instead of upwards. FedEx is opening a large hub there that has already brought 500 new jobs to the area in construction alone. When it opens they plan on hiring 1,500 employees. FedEx deserves some sort of award in efficiency for leveling 165 acres in what seemed like two or three months.
Who knows, maybe this economic slowdown will mean I'll still be able to find a few places around town where I can let my dog run around without a leash.
Monday, April 7, 2008
Back to Brazil
The photos of waterfalls that lined the walls were taken in various places in photographer Valdir Cruz’s native country,
Though she is Brazilian, artist Márcia Grostein’s website is available only in English, and she is very clear that her home is
Aristides Sergio Klafke has been a Brazilian for every one of his 55 years, but he believes his 22 as a New Yorker have been the most important. When asked about the ties to his home country in
An artist, Klafke has never shown his work in
Klafke’s girlfriend, Italian Matilde Damele, was very enthusiastic about the country, like the majority of the non-Brazilians at the gallery. Of course, she has a personal stake in the people of Brazil. When Damele mentions her Brazilian paramour to her friends, she said, they get very excited. Making a perfect red “o” with her mouth, Damele mugged: “Oh! A Brazilian!”
Damele has been living in
Are Invisible Eyes Watching Neoliberalism's Invisible Hand?
The map in the waiting room of Upwardly Global, an organization that provides job training and resources to immigrants in the United States, has been cut into small squares and rearranged at random.
The map represents the way in which globalization and economic foces send workers, factories, and products to all parts of the world—separating and intermixing according to today's neoliberal economic rules—often presented to us by the Bush administration as “natural” law.
However, with the current recession and the recent, massive government bailout of private investment bank Bear Stearns, it may be time to reassess just how “natural” these economic forces really are.
The Federal Reserve Bank used $29 billion in taxpayer dollars to save Bear Sterns, a move that flies square in the face of a self-correcting, free market-based economic policy.
In an LA times blog, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said, “If you want to say we bailed out the market in general, I guess that's true.”
This would be a worrying turn of events if it weren't for the warm, soothing air in the palms, the beautiful 1950's Fords cruising by, the perfectly rolled Havana...wait! We're still in the United States you say??
The government buying out a private enterprise is textbook socialism, like Chavez's recent move to nationalize Venezuela's cement industry, or President Evo Morales purchase of Bolivia's gas production.
However, the US Senate approved the buyout of Bear Stearns with a 94-1 vote. Because of the financial ties of so many companies to Bear Stearns, allowing it to fail “might have caused global markets to collapse,” reported the Economist.
Which raises the question, what does it mean when the free market fails us? Should we forge boldly ahead, purifying our free market strategy with even less regulation, or should we finally question our dependence on the invisible hand of the market?
In an editorial for the Christian Science Monitor, professor of economics James W. Brock sees a solution in the increase of antitrust laws.
“The consolidation process has raged through most major American industries, from telecommunications and oil to pharmaceuticals and defense weapons. In the banking and finance sectors, the urge to merge has spawned the very behemoths that the Fed is now compelled to prop up.”
As the two terms of George W. Bush come to a close, it is becoming apparent that complete deregulation can be harmful, just as harmful as Soviet-era governments relying on inefficient, state-run companies. Whether it is Clinton, Obama, or McCain, the economic policies under the next president will help us determine just how “natural” neoliberal economic policy ever really was.
The map represents the way in which globalization and economic foces send workers, factories, and products to all parts of the world—separating and intermixing according to today's neoliberal economic rules—often presented to us by the Bush administration as “natural” law.
However, with the current recession and the recent, massive government bailout of private investment bank Bear Stearns, it may be time to reassess just how “natural” these economic forces really are.
The Federal Reserve Bank used $29 billion in taxpayer dollars to save Bear Sterns, a move that flies square in the face of a self-correcting, free market-based economic policy.
In an LA times blog, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said, “If you want to say we bailed out the market in general, I guess that's true.”
This would be a worrying turn of events if it weren't for the warm, soothing air in the palms, the beautiful 1950's Fords cruising by, the perfectly rolled Havana...wait! We're still in the United States you say??
The government buying out a private enterprise is textbook socialism, like Chavez's recent move to nationalize Venezuela's cement industry, or President Evo Morales purchase of Bolivia's gas production.
However, the US Senate approved the buyout of Bear Stearns with a 94-1 vote. Because of the financial ties of so many companies to Bear Stearns, allowing it to fail “might have caused global markets to collapse,” reported the Economist.
Which raises the question, what does it mean when the free market fails us? Should we forge boldly ahead, purifying our free market strategy with even less regulation, or should we finally question our dependence on the invisible hand of the market?
In an editorial for the Christian Science Monitor, professor of economics James W. Brock sees a solution in the increase of antitrust laws.
“The consolidation process has raged through most major American industries, from telecommunications and oil to pharmaceuticals and defense weapons. In the banking and finance sectors, the urge to merge has spawned the very behemoths that the Fed is now compelled to prop up.”
As the two terms of George W. Bush come to a close, it is becoming apparent that complete deregulation can be harmful, just as harmful as Soviet-era governments relying on inefficient, state-run companies. Whether it is Clinton, Obama, or McCain, the economic policies under the next president will help us determine just how “natural” neoliberal economic policy ever really was.
WTC Crusader
-Mike Weiss
New York, April 4 - “Nearly 1,100 people remain missing - not one piece of DNA, not one piece of remains, in and around Ground Zero. Some of those remains are in the Fresh Kills dump on Staten Island,” said Sally Regenhard. This is an issue she knows all too well, because some of those remains belong to her son, 28-year-old firefighter Christian Regenhard.
Sally Regenhard is the founder and chairperson of the non-profit Skyscraper Safety Campaign (http://www.skyscrapersafety.org/) and she visited an NYU journalism class last week to describe her experiences and reactions soon after the attack on the World Trade Center.
“No elected official, nobody, said we needed an investigation. Not one person was questioning how this could happen in this city, the greatest city in the world.”
She was in shock soon after 9/11, both with the loss of her son as well with the incomprehension that nothing was happening on an official level to discover why the towers fell, why so many people were trapped inside, why so many firefighters had to die. So it was with relief that a month after 9/11, in October 2001, that she read an article in the Daily News by Joe Calderone. He was one of the first to describe the mismanagement of the rescue efforts and the need for an investigation. In opening up the topic and confirming her own feelings, the Skyscraper Safety Campaign was born.
Nights would follow camped out at Ground Zero protesting the building, and as the SSC started to form Regenhard met with victim’s families, relatives of firefighters, EMT and other workers at the site. She would meet with engineers, lawyers, attend government committees (“Listen, if you ever want to really suffer, join a code committee!”), organize demonstrations in Albany and protests in Washington and over the next six and a half years started pealing back the layers of secrecy to learn just exactly how government really works.
“9/11 was not only a massive failure level at the federal level but at the state level, the city level and especially the Port Authority level,” she said.
Regenhard criticizes the Port Authority for acting above the law in building towers that didn’t comply with local building and fire codes – codes which would have required each tower to have four stairwells instead of three. But this is just the tip of the iceberg of the glaring building code violations she would find.
She publicized the lack of preparation and planning at FDNY, who on 9/11 were still using antiquated radios which had proven to have problems at the first WTC bombing in 1993.
But her harshest criticism is reserved for Mayor Giuliani, who refused assistance from sources outside city government which not only delayed the rescue of possible survivors, but even hampered recovery efforts. Regenhard pointed out that there is an established US military agency called JPAC (Joint Prisoner of War and Missing in Action Accounting Command http://www.jpac.pacom.mil/) that has the expertise and facilities to recover the bodies of American servicemen anywhere in the world, but they were restricted from operating at the WTC site.
“They needed to make human remains a priority and they never did,” she said tearfully, one of several times during her presentation when she broke down and had to stop to recover herself.
“I was an innocent person, I believed in the system – a good Catholic school girl,” she said. “But at some point in your life you have to step out of your comfort zone to go after what is true, what is right.”
Sunday, April 6, 2008
Falsely imprisoned in Guantánamo: Murat Kurnaz’s story arrives in New York
- Michael E. Miller
New York, April 6 – Murat Kurnaz spent five years in a cramped cell in Guantánamo, an innocent man sold into captivity for $3,000. His story, one of circumstance and mistaken identity in the “war on terror,” bears all the marks of a tragic novel.
Sadly, however, there is nothing fictitious about it.
Kurnaz’s story was the subject of a panel discussion at the New York Public Library on Friday. Though freed in 2006, Kurnaz is still considered an “enemy combatant” by the United States—a label that his lawyers reject but that nonetheless bars him from the country.
The approximately two hundred people that attended the ticketed event heard actor and playwright Wallace Shawn read passages from Kurnaz’s newly published memoir, “Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantánamo.” Interspersed with comments by the panel’s five other discussants—including Kurnaz’s lawyers and the Muslim chaplain from Guantánamo—these passages traced the arch of Kurnaz’s ordeal.
Shortly after September 11, 2001, Kurnaz, then only 19 years old, left his native city of Bremen, Germany, to study Islamic scripture in Pakistan. He had just been engaged and wanted to learn more about his responsibilities as a husband and a Muslim. But shortly before leaving Pakistan, Kurnaz was pulled off of a bus and thrown into a secret U.S. prison in Afghanistan. Two months later, he was sent to the U.S. detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where a guard later told him that U.S. authorities had paid $3,000 for him.
He spent five years in Guantánamo, most of them without access to a lawyer. In his memoir, Kurnaz says that his guards routinely abused him, using electric shocks, sleep deprivation, and beatings in an effort to draw information from him. They pried him with questions, such as “Where is Osama?” before determining, as early as 2002, that he was an innocent man. Kurnaz was not released until August of 2006.
One of Kurnaz’s lawyers, Baher Azmy, called his imprisonment “absurd enough to make Kafka blush.”
“He was unable to see the evidence that was the basis for him being labeled an ‘enemy combatant,’” he said. “It’s impossible to shake that designation.” To this day, the U.S. government will not admit that it “released” Kurnaz because to do so would be to admit his innocence, and their mistake, Azmy said.
Azmy and Kurnaz’s German lawyer, Bernhard Docke, described the tremendous difficulty of freeing a man who had been disappeared into Guantánamo.
“All the legal means which ought to be self-evident for a state based on the rule of law were denied,” Docke said. “He was kept incommunicado for years” with no idea of the charges against him.
Philippe Sands, an essayist and professor of international law, also spoke on the panel. In “The Green Light,” an exposé in this month’s Vanity Fair, Sands shows how the Bush administration’s legal reasoning allowed for the abuse of Guantánamo inmates, including Kurnaz.
“Murat Kurnaz arrived at Guantánamo at a very crucial moment,” Sands said. His transfer from Afghanistan to Cuba coincided with Bush’s presidential order “that none of the detainees would have rights under the Geneva Convention,” he said.
The result was that the “rulebook was wiped clean” as far as detainees’ rights.
Michael Ratner, President of the Center for Constitutional Right and the event’s moderator, pointed out that approximately 275 detainees remain in Guantánamo, “with the U.S. still planning death penalty charges against a number of them.” Around 600 Guantánamo detainees have already been released, in large part due to the Center’s efforts.
The panelists were quick to point out that all Guantánamo detainees, regardless of guilt or innocence, deserve a fair trial—something Kurnaz never received. It was not until 2004, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the detainees had the right to see civilian lawyers, that Kurnaz met with Azmy. It took two more years for Kurnaz to be set free, despite the holes in the evidence against him. American authorities accused him of being the friend of a suicide bomber. His friend, it turned out later, was alive and well.
“In Guantánamo, the only decisions that ever mattered were those made by the military,” Azmy said. “It’s an enormously arbitrary process.”
Docke, the lawyer hired by Kurnaz’s mother in Germany, said that Germany was also responsible in his client’s wrongful imprisonment. German interrogators visited Kurnaz in Guantánamo in September of 2002 and decided, like the Americans, that he was most likely innocent.
“The door was half open in the fall of 2002 to get him back,” Docke said. Instead, the German administration at the time canceled Kurnaz’s right to stay in Germany. Born in Bremen to Turkish parents, Kurnaz is nonetheless a Turkish citizen under German law.
A recent Seton Hall study found that the Bush administration’s depiction of Guantánamo detainees clashes with U.S. military records. According to the study, only six percent of the detainees were captured by U.S. forces; 90 percent of them were turned over to the U.S. by the Aghani Northern Alliance, often in exchange for money. Only eight percent were alleged to be members of Al Qaeda.
In an interview after the event, Docke said that the Military Commissions Act, signed into law by President Bush in 2006, barred Kurnaz from seeking compensation from the U.S. government. His case looks more promising in Germany, though Kurnaz’s Turkish citizenship complicates things.
“In my mind, Germany bears a political and moral responsibility for his time in Guantánamo,” Docke said. “We are now considering a lawsuit.”
When Kurnaz returned to Germany after his release, he discovered that his fiancé had left him and that his country had deported him while he was in Guantánamo.
“He is doing pretty well, considering the hell he went through,” Docke said. But having lost five years of his life to a case of mistaken identity, having suffered beatings and electro-shocks on a daily basis, Kurnaz’s readjustment to freedom is no easy task. His story is a reminder of the dangerous ambiguities involved in the Bush administration’s “war on terror.”
Kurnaz may need counseling to overcome the years of abuse, Docke said.
“Somewhere in his body or brain, you have this dark history of Guantánamo.”
New York, April 6 – Murat Kurnaz spent five years in a cramped cell in Guantánamo, an innocent man sold into captivity for $3,000. His story, one of circumstance and mistaken identity in the “war on terror,” bears all the marks of a tragic novel.
Sadly, however, there is nothing fictitious about it.
Kurnaz’s story was the subject of a panel discussion at the New York Public Library on Friday. Though freed in 2006, Kurnaz is still considered an “enemy combatant” by the United States—a label that his lawyers reject but that nonetheless bars him from the country.
The approximately two hundred people that attended the ticketed event heard actor and playwright Wallace Shawn read passages from Kurnaz’s newly published memoir, “Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantánamo.” Interspersed with comments by the panel’s five other discussants—including Kurnaz’s lawyers and the Muslim chaplain from Guantánamo—these passages traced the arch of Kurnaz’s ordeal.
Shortly after September 11, 2001, Kurnaz, then only 19 years old, left his native city of Bremen, Germany, to study Islamic scripture in Pakistan. He had just been engaged and wanted to learn more about his responsibilities as a husband and a Muslim. But shortly before leaving Pakistan, Kurnaz was pulled off of a bus and thrown into a secret U.S. prison in Afghanistan. Two months later, he was sent to the U.S. detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where a guard later told him that U.S. authorities had paid $3,000 for him.
He spent five years in Guantánamo, most of them without access to a lawyer. In his memoir, Kurnaz says that his guards routinely abused him, using electric shocks, sleep deprivation, and beatings in an effort to draw information from him. They pried him with questions, such as “Where is Osama?” before determining, as early as 2002, that he was an innocent man. Kurnaz was not released until August of 2006.
One of Kurnaz’s lawyers, Baher Azmy, called his imprisonment “absurd enough to make Kafka blush.”
“He was unable to see the evidence that was the basis for him being labeled an ‘enemy combatant,’” he said. “It’s impossible to shake that designation.” To this day, the U.S. government will not admit that it “released” Kurnaz because to do so would be to admit his innocence, and their mistake, Azmy said.
Azmy and Kurnaz’s German lawyer, Bernhard Docke, described the tremendous difficulty of freeing a man who had been disappeared into Guantánamo.
“All the legal means which ought to be self-evident for a state based on the rule of law were denied,” Docke said. “He was kept incommunicado for years” with no idea of the charges against him.
Philippe Sands, an essayist and professor of international law, also spoke on the panel. In “The Green Light,” an exposé in this month’s Vanity Fair, Sands shows how the Bush administration’s legal reasoning allowed for the abuse of Guantánamo inmates, including Kurnaz.
“Murat Kurnaz arrived at Guantánamo at a very crucial moment,” Sands said. His transfer from Afghanistan to Cuba coincided with Bush’s presidential order “that none of the detainees would have rights under the Geneva Convention,” he said.
The result was that the “rulebook was wiped clean” as far as detainees’ rights.
Michael Ratner, President of the Center for Constitutional Right and the event’s moderator, pointed out that approximately 275 detainees remain in Guantánamo, “with the U.S. still planning death penalty charges against a number of them.” Around 600 Guantánamo detainees have already been released, in large part due to the Center’s efforts.
The panelists were quick to point out that all Guantánamo detainees, regardless of guilt or innocence, deserve a fair trial—something Kurnaz never received. It was not until 2004, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the detainees had the right to see civilian lawyers, that Kurnaz met with Azmy. It took two more years for Kurnaz to be set free, despite the holes in the evidence against him. American authorities accused him of being the friend of a suicide bomber. His friend, it turned out later, was alive and well.
“In Guantánamo, the only decisions that ever mattered were those made by the military,” Azmy said. “It’s an enormously arbitrary process.”
Docke, the lawyer hired by Kurnaz’s mother in Germany, said that Germany was also responsible in his client’s wrongful imprisonment. German interrogators visited Kurnaz in Guantánamo in September of 2002 and decided, like the Americans, that he was most likely innocent.
“The door was half open in the fall of 2002 to get him back,” Docke said. Instead, the German administration at the time canceled Kurnaz’s right to stay in Germany. Born in Bremen to Turkish parents, Kurnaz is nonetheless a Turkish citizen under German law.
A recent Seton Hall study found that the Bush administration’s depiction of Guantánamo detainees clashes with U.S. military records. According to the study, only six percent of the detainees were captured by U.S. forces; 90 percent of them were turned over to the U.S. by the Aghani Northern Alliance, often in exchange for money. Only eight percent were alleged to be members of Al Qaeda.
In an interview after the event, Docke said that the Military Commissions Act, signed into law by President Bush in 2006, barred Kurnaz from seeking compensation from the U.S. government. His case looks more promising in Germany, though Kurnaz’s Turkish citizenship complicates things.
“In my mind, Germany bears a political and moral responsibility for his time in Guantánamo,” Docke said. “We are now considering a lawsuit.”
When Kurnaz returned to Germany after his release, he discovered that his fiancé had left him and that his country had deported him while he was in Guantánamo.
“He is doing pretty well, considering the hell he went through,” Docke said. But having lost five years of his life to a case of mistaken identity, having suffered beatings and electro-shocks on a daily basis, Kurnaz’s readjustment to freedom is no easy task. His story is a reminder of the dangerous ambiguities involved in the Bush administration’s “war on terror.”
Kurnaz may need counseling to overcome the years of abuse, Docke said.
“Somewhere in his body or brain, you have this dark history of Guantánamo.”
Forty years after Prague Spring, all that’s left of communism is a babushka with an ominous overbite. Or is it?
Renting its space from McDonalds on one of the busiest streets in Prague is Museum of Communism. It shares a beautiful, Baroque building with a casino.
Haphazardly thrown into the corners of its rooms are artifacts – pieces of Soviet airplanes, propaganda posters, a time card puncher with a proletarian slogan– that bear witness to decades of communism in Czechoslovakia (today's Czech Republic), now almost 20 years gone. Huddled on the floor, the busts of communist leaders command neither fear nor reverie – nor
praise for a great aesthetic achievement.
praise for a great aesthetic achievement.Aesthetics may not have been the primary concern of the museum’s owner, American restaurateur Glenn Spicker who came to Prague in the early 90s, following the fall of communism. There was excitement in the air, Spicker remembers, and his thirst for adventure and a knack for business led him to open Bohemian Bagels in the city’s center. But a decade into it, the increasing expenses made him look for new ventures: the Museum of Communism.
“The idea was to create a museum that would be an expression of how Czech people feel – simple, objective and historical,” said Spicker who hired a Czech documentary producer Jan Kaplan, to help him with the set-up. Together, they scavenged the city’s antique shops for much of the museum’s paraphernalia. Several Czech historians and journalists wrote the text for the exhibition, which is divided into three thematic parts: “dream, reality and nightmare.”
Yet objectivity seems to be a relative concept. While the museum may be a helpful introduction to those who are not familiar with communism, for those more thorough students such as Sophie Schasiepen from Vienna, the approach appears polemic and irresponsible, peppered with commentary that has little to do with an objective look at the ideology.
“I was already shocked by the very sarcastic posters they are using as advertisements and that are printed in the guidebooks without any comment,” Schasiepen said. “The manner in which the presumably neutral texts in the exhibition where talking about Karl Marx, Lenin and communist ideas in general was outrageous. Calling Marx a ‘bohemian and intellectual adventurer, who started his life career as a romantic poet with an inclination towards apocalyptic titanism’ - I really don´t even know what to say to that.”
For a middle-aged couple from Hamburg, Germany, the museum was a reminder of a time they witnessed. “The museum was informative,” said Klaus Dernidinger, but the text, while trying to be objective, contained a “Western bias,” he added.
This year marks the 40th anniversary of the Prague Spring, a period of several months in 1968 when the new leadership of then Czechoslovakia's communist party headed by Alexander Dubcek attempted to introduce mild economic and social reforms. The Soviet Union, fearing the rebellion of its satellite state, sent troops in August of the same year. About 100 people died in the demonstrations that followed. In the protest of the clampdown, two youth Jan Palac and a month later, Jan Zajic, set themselves on fire and burned to death on Prague’s Vaclav Square.
The museum’s portray
al of the every day life under communism
The Velvet Revolution– a series of mass demonstrations in 1989 – brought communism in Czechoslovakia to an end. According to Spicker, unlike some other former Soviet satellite states that took pride in some of communism’s legacies –its monuments and artwork, for example – Czechs were eager to sever the connection, destroying many public markings.
However, the relationship to the time is not that clearly cut. In the aftermath of Velvet Revolution, today’s communist party in Czech Republic – Czech Republic’s Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia – is the only former ruling party of the Eastern Bloc that has not dropped “communist” from its title. It has consistently won an average of 12 percent of the votes in each parliamentary election since 1989.
“The idea was to create a museum that would be an expression of how Czech people feel – simple, objective and historical,” said Spicker who hired a Czech documentary producer Jan Kaplan, to help him with the set-up. Together, they scavenged the city’s antique shops for much of the museum’s paraphernalia. Several Czech historians and journalists wrote the text for the exhibition, which is divided into three thematic parts: “dream, reality and nightmare.”
Yet objectivity seems to be a relative concept. While the museum may be a helpful introduction to those who are not familiar with communism, for those more thorough students such as Sophie Schasiepen from Vienna, the approach appears polemic and irresponsible, peppered with commentary that has little to do with an objective look at the ideology.
“I was already shocked by the very sarcastic posters they are using as advertisements and that are printed in the guidebooks without any comment,” Schasiepen said. “The manner in which the presumably neutral texts in the exhibition where talking about Karl Marx, Lenin and communist ideas in general was outrageous. Calling Marx a ‘bohemian and intellectual adventurer, who started his life career as a romantic poet with an inclination towards apocalyptic titanism’ - I really don´t even know what to say to that.”For a middle-aged couple from Hamburg, Germany, the museum was a reminder of a time they witnessed. “The museum was informative,” said Klaus Dernidinger, but the text, while trying to be objective, contained a “Western bias,” he added.
This year marks the 40th anniversary of the Prague Spring, a period of several months in 1968 when the new leadership of then Czechoslovakia's communist party headed by Alexander Dubcek attempted to introduce mild economic and social reforms. The Soviet Union, fearing the rebellion of its satellite state, sent troops in August of the same year. About 100 people died in the demonstrations that followed. In the protest of the clampdown, two youth Jan Palac and a month later, Jan Zajic, set themselves on fire and burned to death on Prague’s Vaclav Square.
The museum’s portray
al of the every day life under communism in Czechoslovakia left Mrs. Card from St. Louis in the United States grateful for “having been blessed to live in America.” The most effective displays were a bleak lineup of a few cans on the store’s shelf and the eerie echo of the telephone ring in the model of an interrogation room where potential dissidents were often tortured.
While Spicker was hoping that many Czechs would visit, he had no illusions. “I knew that tourists would be the main people to come – Czechs are not that excited to talk about the past.”
While Spicker was hoping that many Czechs would visit, he had no illusions. “I knew that tourists would be the main people to come – Czechs are not that excited to talk about the past.”
Marian J. Kratochvil of Institute of Contemporary History in Prague disagrees. "The Czechs do not mind discussing things that happened during those 41 years of Communist rule, most of us are proud to have contributed to the resistance; others were, at least, 'non-belligerent." But, he added "the Museum is a damned pseudo-capitalist venture and no Czech would ever visit it."
The Velvet Revolution– a series of mass demonstrations in 1989 – brought communism in Czechoslovakia to an end. According to Spicker, unlike some other former Soviet satellite states that took pride in some of communism’s legacies –its monuments and artwork, for example – Czechs were eager to sever the connection, destroying many public markings.
However, the relationship to the time is not that clearly cut. In the aftermath of Velvet Revolution, today’s communist party in Czech Republic – Czech Republic’s Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia – is the only former ruling party of the Eastern Bloc that has not dropped “communist” from its title. It has consistently won an average of 12 percent of the votes in each parliamentary election since 1989.
According to Kratochvil, "the Communist electorate consists mainly of pensioners, born in 1920s -1930s, who witnessed the Nazi occupation and Communists were a smaller evil for them. Now, they lost their 'social securities' guaranteed by the state in the Communist era; they mutter, they are against everything, but they cannot present any solution."
Remnants of communism are in people’s attitudes, adds Spicker. “People still behave with innate cultural oddities. Arrogance in restaurants and bad customer service, for example – that all stems from communist background,” he said.
Remnants of communism are in people’s attitudes, adds Spicker. “People still behave with innate cultural oddities. Arrogance in restaurants and bad customer service, for example – that all stems from communist background,” he said.
Kratochvil agrees that traces of that time "are present in our hearts, the way people think, how shop assistants present their goods to their customers - mostly unwillingly, reluctantly, knowing their wages are under average." But the new generations have welcomed the changes, he adds. Most of them support either the Civic Democratic Party or the Social Democrats. "The Communist Party is predestined to die out, sooner or later, or merge with Social Democrats just as soon as their electorate would die out."
Chris Card, 17, of St. Louis, United States sees very little of that time in today’s Prague. “Prague is really capitalist – you have to pay for everything, even to go to the bathroom. It’s so un-American to have to pay to pee.”
Monday, March 31, 2008
Black Church Politics
New York, March 31—Standing before his congregation on Easter Sunday, the Rev. Dr. Thomas Stiers thanked the choir; he admired the bright flowers that adorned the pulpit; and he told the story of the resurrection, speaking slowly and deliberately, his voice filling the warm air within Riverside Church.
Then he started talking politics.
“How do we live after last Wednesday, a day that marked the fifth anniversary of that terrible, costly war that never should have been waged?” he asked. Stiers then spoke of Jeremiah Wright, the much-maligned pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ and friend of presidential hopeful Barack Obama. It was wrong, he said, for the American media to reduce “a loving pastor” to 60-second video clips. Stiers then turned his attention to Obama.
“He stood before the nation, he addressed the issues, and he showed a path out of the darkness,” he said of the Illinois Senator.
Speaking for only five minutes, Stiers, who is white, addressed the political firestorm surrounding Wright’s sermons and reinforced a point largely missed by the television news stations lambasting the Chicago pastor: for many Americans, blacks in particular, politics and church have always been one and the same.
“Church has always been that one place were blacks could go and feel like they were in control,” said Sarah Cunningham. At 82 years of age, She watched the number of black churchgoers at Riverside rise as both the church and Morningside Heights—a neighborhood near Columbia University on Manhattan’s Upper West Side—were swept up in the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Cunningham, who is white, has seen five senior ministers in charge of Riverside. The last permanent one, the Rev. Dr. James A. Forbes, was the first and only black man to hold the position.
“Black churches have always talked as much about politics as religions,” Cunningham said. A retired writer for religious publications, she said she first came to understand this overlap of politics and preaching as a child in rural Tennessee, where whites and blacks attended separate churches. After moving to New York, she watched Riverside’s congregation grow more diverse as the civil rights movement led to a broad shift towards integration. During Rev. Forbes’s tenure, the congregation was roughly 60 percent black, though now it is more evenly balanced, she said.
Stiers and Cunningham’s comments centered on the controversial sermons made by Wright, sermons which threaten to impugn Obama just as he looks to secure the Democratic presidential nomination. On March 18, Obama gave a speech in which he condemned many of Wright’s views.
“We’ve heard my former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, use incendiary language to express views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation; that rightly offend white and black alike,” Obama said in his speech.
But Obama also sought to frame Wright’s fiery sermons within the context of the black church, a place unfamiliar to a majority of Americans where the hardships of life as a minority sometimes give way to anger and politics. “Like other predominantly black churches across the country, Trinity embodies the black community in its entirety – the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former gang-banger,” Obama said. “The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.”
By linking Wright’s sermons to the lingering of serious inequalities in the U.S., Obama’s speech went beyond the debate over whether or not video clips of Wright on news programs and the Internet have been taken out of context, deliberately framed to misrepresent the underlying message. But by condemning Wright’s “profoundly distorted view of this country – a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America,” Obama refused to condone either Wright’s indignation or his linking the war in Iraq to racism in the U.S.
Obama’s carefully qualified relationship with Wright has, therefore, revealed the Senator’s unwillingness to cast himself in the mold of the black preacher-turned-politician. Obama may attend Wright’s sermons, but he does not share his political views or his rhetorical style. Obama may, as Wright himself said in one of his sermons, know “what it’s like to live in a country controlled by rich white people,” but as a presidential candidate, he has yet to fully embrace the sharp-edged oratorical style of Jessie Jackson, Malcolm X or even Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Like Wright, King spoke at Riverside on a number of occasions. On April 4, 1967, exactly one year before his assassination, King gave his famous “Beyond Vietnam” speech, in which he called the U.S. “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” He also linked U.S. militarism abroad to the abuse of civil rights for minorities at home, and argued that the U.S. was “on the wrong side of a world revolution.” Though he argued in the speech that his opposition to the war in Vietnam stemmed from the same non-violent principles as his crusade for civil rights, King was roundly criticized for enmeshing moral opposition to segregation with foreign policy.
It is, ironically enough, Wright, not Obama, the leading anti-war candidate, who most closely echoes the style and content of King’s anti-war speeches. In a speech shortly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Wright worried that the U.S. would respond to the attacks by lashing out at the world. The U.S. was, he argued, caught up in “the insanity of the cycle of violence and the cycle of hatred.”
In his weekly sermons, Wright has been a fierce critic of the war in Iraq. In a speech entitled “War on Iraq IQ Test,” he asked: “Which country do you think poses the greatest threat to global peace: Iraq or the U.S.?” and quoted King’s statement that “our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”
Then he started talking politics.
“How do we live after last Wednesday, a day that marked the fifth anniversary of that terrible, costly war that never should have been waged?” he asked. Stiers then spoke of Jeremiah Wright, the much-maligned pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ and friend of presidential hopeful Barack Obama. It was wrong, he said, for the American media to reduce “a loving pastor” to 60-second video clips. Stiers then turned his attention to Obama.
“He stood before the nation, he addressed the issues, and he showed a path out of the darkness,” he said of the Illinois Senator.
Speaking for only five minutes, Stiers, who is white, addressed the political firestorm surrounding Wright’s sermons and reinforced a point largely missed by the television news stations lambasting the Chicago pastor: for many Americans, blacks in particular, politics and church have always been one and the same.
“Church has always been that one place were blacks could go and feel like they were in control,” said Sarah Cunningham. At 82 years of age, She watched the number of black churchgoers at Riverside rise as both the church and Morningside Heights—a neighborhood near Columbia University on Manhattan’s Upper West Side—were swept up in the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Cunningham, who is white, has seen five senior ministers in charge of Riverside. The last permanent one, the Rev. Dr. James A. Forbes, was the first and only black man to hold the position.
“Black churches have always talked as much about politics as religions,” Cunningham said. A retired writer for religious publications, she said she first came to understand this overlap of politics and preaching as a child in rural Tennessee, where whites and blacks attended separate churches. After moving to New York, she watched Riverside’s congregation grow more diverse as the civil rights movement led to a broad shift towards integration. During Rev. Forbes’s tenure, the congregation was roughly 60 percent black, though now it is more evenly balanced, she said.
Stiers and Cunningham’s comments centered on the controversial sermons made by Wright, sermons which threaten to impugn Obama just as he looks to secure the Democratic presidential nomination. On March 18, Obama gave a speech in which he condemned many of Wright’s views.
“We’ve heard my former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, use incendiary language to express views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation; that rightly offend white and black alike,” Obama said in his speech.
But Obama also sought to frame Wright’s fiery sermons within the context of the black church, a place unfamiliar to a majority of Americans where the hardships of life as a minority sometimes give way to anger and politics. “Like other predominantly black churches across the country, Trinity embodies the black community in its entirety – the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former gang-banger,” Obama said. “The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.”
By linking Wright’s sermons to the lingering of serious inequalities in the U.S., Obama’s speech went beyond the debate over whether or not video clips of Wright on news programs and the Internet have been taken out of context, deliberately framed to misrepresent the underlying message. But by condemning Wright’s “profoundly distorted view of this country – a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America,” Obama refused to condone either Wright’s indignation or his linking the war in Iraq to racism in the U.S.
Obama’s carefully qualified relationship with Wright has, therefore, revealed the Senator’s unwillingness to cast himself in the mold of the black preacher-turned-politician. Obama may attend Wright’s sermons, but he does not share his political views or his rhetorical style. Obama may, as Wright himself said in one of his sermons, know “what it’s like to live in a country controlled by rich white people,” but as a presidential candidate, he has yet to fully embrace the sharp-edged oratorical style of Jessie Jackson, Malcolm X or even Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Like Wright, King spoke at Riverside on a number of occasions. On April 4, 1967, exactly one year before his assassination, King gave his famous “Beyond Vietnam” speech, in which he called the U.S. “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” He also linked U.S. militarism abroad to the abuse of civil rights for minorities at home, and argued that the U.S. was “on the wrong side of a world revolution.” Though he argued in the speech that his opposition to the war in Vietnam stemmed from the same non-violent principles as his crusade for civil rights, King was roundly criticized for enmeshing moral opposition to segregation with foreign policy.
It is, ironically enough, Wright, not Obama, the leading anti-war candidate, who most closely echoes the style and content of King’s anti-war speeches. In a speech shortly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Wright worried that the U.S. would respond to the attacks by lashing out at the world. The U.S. was, he argued, caught up in “the insanity of the cycle of violence and the cycle of hatred.”
In his weekly sermons, Wright has been a fierce critic of the war in Iraq. In a speech entitled “War on Iraq IQ Test,” he asked: “Which country do you think poses the greatest threat to global peace: Iraq or the U.S.?” and quoted King’s statement that “our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”
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