The U.S. Military's 1947 Warning on Intolerance

by Janet Ritz

A film produced by the U.S. Military in 1947 was meant to present the case for the desegregation of the armed forces. Though not initially intended for broadcast to the general public, it speaks to the divisions present in society today.

The production is dated by current standards. The message is prescient given the current strife and division: the ostracization of the "other," whether through protests of mosques, by Glenn Beck's scheduled through-the-looking-glass rally at the Lincoln Memorial on the anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, or by the funding of climate science denial and extreme tea party activism against the current administration by the Koch Brothers, two of the biggest polluters on the planet.

The film was shot to convince members of the military that desegregation was the right idea. The subsequent integration of African-Americans into the armed forces has since become an integral part of the command structure with our strategy in war. (See: Powell Doctrine).

The YouTube version now serves as a warning to the future as produced by a military that had fought years of heartbreaking war where millions had lost their lives due to prejudice and intolerance.

In this anti-fascist film produced by US Military in the wake of WWII, the producers deconstruct the politically motivated social engineering of Germany by the Nazi regime.

From the film:

You see, here in America, it is not a question of whether we tolerate minorities. America is minorities. And that means you and me. So, let's not be suckers. We must not let the freedom or dignity of any man to be threatened by any act or word. Let's be selfish about this. Let's forget about "we" and "they." Let's think about us.

During the war, the military had used propaganda as a tool to get their message out to those trapped behind enemy lines. That same office produced the film. The technique is obvious; the message is worth consideration. Over 50 million died in World War II. Before they died, there was a systematic dismantling of individual rights and freedoms that began with the ostracization of the "other."

Propaganda Techniques:

Edward Filene helped establish the Institute of Propaganda Analysis in 1937 to educate the American public about the nature of propaganda and how to recognize propaganda techniques. Filene and his colleagues identified the seven most common "tricks of the trade" used by successful propagandists.

• Name Calling: Propagandists use this technique to create fear and arouse prejudice by using negative words (bad names) to create an unfavorable opinion or hatred against a group, beliefs, ideas or institutions they would have us denounce.

• Glittering Generalities: Propagandists employ vague, sweeping statements (often slogans or simple catchphrases) using language associated with values and beliefs deeply held by the audience without providing supporting information or reason. They appeal to such notions as honor, glory, love of country, desire for peace, freedom, and family values. The words and phrases are vague and suggest different things to different people but the implication is always favorable. It cannot be proved true or false because it really says little or nothing at all.

• Transfer: Transfer is a technique used to carry over the authority and approval of something we respect and revere to something the propagandist would have us accept. Propagandists often employ symbols (e.g., waving the flag) to stir our emotions and win our approval.

• Testimonial: Propagandists use this technique to associate a respected person or someone with experience to endorse a product or cause by giving it their stamp of approval hoping that the intended audience will follow their example.

• Plain Folks: Propagandists use this approach to convince the audience that the spokesperson is from humble origins, someone they can trust and who has their interests at heart. Propagandists have the speaker use ordinary language and mannerisms to reach the audience and identify with their point of view.

• Card Stacking: Propagandists use this technique to persuade the audience to follow the crowd. This device creates the impression of widespread support. It reinforces the human desire to be on the winning side. It also plays on feelings of loneliness and isolation.

• Band Wagon: Propagandist uses this technique to make the best case possible for his side and the worst for the opposing viewpoint by carefully using only those facts that support his or her side of the argument while attempting to lead the audience into accepting the facts as a conclusion. In other words, the propagandist stacks the cards against the truth. Card stacking is the most difficult technique to detect because it does not provide all of the information necessary for the audience to make an informed decision.

More on the techniques of propagandists at this link.

It is and always has been a risk in free societies that those interested in power or ideology will take advantage of those freedoms to deny the same to others. Watch the film with an open mind, despite the dated style, and listen to the message. Then, the next time someone tells you to hate the "other," ask yourself if that "other" could one day become you.

In the film, the "others" are created by splitting minorities into groups to create disunity. The narrator refers to a priest who ended up in a concentration camp for speaking out against the strategy. His name was Martin Niemöller and his speech has become well known:

"First they came ..." is a famous statement attributed to Pastor Martin Niemöller (1892-1984) about the inactivity of German intellectuals following the Nazi rise to power and the purging of their chosen targets, group after group:

"They came first for the Communists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.

Then they came for me
and by that time no one was left to speak up."

Niemöller's speech has been used and overused (and misused). Historically, it should not be forgotten that the first time he gave it was at his church in Dahlem, an affluent district of Berlin, as the Nazis marched to arrest him for the speech. He spent the years following at a concentration camp, where he was liberated by American troops at the end of the war.

Niemöller was trying to warn his parish of a lesson hard-learned. He had been a decorated submarine (u-boat) commander during the First World War. Niemöller had supported Hitler as a strong leader to take the German people out of the despair of unemployment following the double devastation of the Versailles Treaty (where Germany was economically penalized for the First World War) and the Great Depression. He was an educated and devout man who was vulnerable to the message of the other until he realized that he and everyone eventually becomes the other when such misuse of power goes unchecked.

Here's an example of the misuse of Pastor Niemöller's speech as Glenn Beck rails against those who have decided to boycott the advertisers of his show:

Recognize those techniques?

American has been the beacon of freedom for many around the world since its inception. It was founded on the principle of freedom of religion by Puritans leaving England because they could not worship as they wished. Waves of immigrants have followed, each facing their own tough road to acceptance. With African-Americans it was a journey of hell and not by choice that required a civil war to right -- followed by decades of prejudice and the stigmatization of the other that denied opportunities to so many. With the Irish, it was anti-Catholicism. With the Chinese, it was race. So many have come and have pushed through the prejudice.

Now, there is a growing prejudice against the devout of Islam. Fear of radical extremism is understandable; we are involved in war and we were attacked. But that does not excuse the broad brush assigned to all Muslims, including the many who died at 9/11 in the tower attack and those working to bridge the gap of understanding between cultures. And, it's not smart. We're in a war, whether we want to be or not. There is nothing our enemies would like better than the propaganda victory to be able to say: See, America is not tolerant, even of moderate Muslims who are American citizens and contributing members of their society.

Wherever a mosque may be, our constitution guarantees the freedom of religion and our society was built on the idea that we must not allow the ostracization of the "other." If you don't like Muslims or Jews or African Americans or Hispanics or Asians or members of the LGBT community or the unemployed...; if you want them to have less rights than you, if you decide to hate them because of something someone told you on the radio rather than from your own experience, are you being a sucker? Do you care about our country's founding philosophy or are you apathetic to what it will become if you undermine the power of the first amendment?

For reference: the first amendment of the constitution:  

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

Speaking out is good. Speaking out to prevent others from exercising their civil rights because of intolerance, prejudice or the desire for political power may be as protected by the Constitution as is the right to protest against such hate speech. It should also be recognized for what it is and how it has been used historically with the consequences therein,

Cross-posted on The Huffington Post.

LABELS: HISTORY, INTOLERANCE, NAZIS, POLITICS, PREJUDICE, RELIGION

Historic Aerial Footage Reveals the Scope of the BP Gulf Oil Disaster (VIDEO)

On June 21, 2010, Photographer John L. Wathen of Hurricane Creek Keepers went on an extended flight over the Gulf with South Wings pilot, Tom Hutchins and author, David Helbar, to give us the clearest view yet of the BP Gulf Oil Disaster.

The video is heartbreaking but vital for the understanding of the scope and enormity of the disaster.  It shows the sea and the operations underway at the site of the blown well and compares the mitigation efforts to the true size of the disaster and its impact on wildlife:

John Wathen: "This was the most emotionally disturbing video I have ever done. A flight over the BP Slick Source where I saw at least 100 Dolphins in the oil, some dying. I also photographed a Sperm Whale covered in oil all around it's blow hole."

Mr. Wathen asks that concerned parties visit two Gulf funds listed on the video, The Gulf Coast Fund (where impacted residents can apply for a grant) and Save our Gulf. There are also several wildlife organizations active in the rescue effort including the Tri-State Bird Rescue, the World Wildlife Fund, and The Nature Conservancy. 

A live video feed of twelve cameras on the Gulf floor is at this link (may be slow to load).

A remarkable video explaining why the sharks are congregating at the shore (oxygen depletion in the Gulf) and its impact on the wildlife there is at this link.

More Gulf Oil Disaster articles are at this link.

Please share this page. 


LABELS: BP, Climate Change, ENVIRONMENT, FAUNA, FLORA, GULF OIL DISASTER, GULF OIL SPILL, History, Hurricane Creek Keepers, SCIENCE, South wings

NASA's Images of the Gulf Oil Spill

by The Environmentalist's Staff

NASA's Earth Observatory has been tracking the oil disaster in the Gulf with day-by-day pictures from its satellite (click on the picture to see more):

The Deepwater Horizon owners, finally, after urging by the White House and Congress, has begun releasing videos.  The leak (gusher) on the ocean floor:



and their failed attempt to place a large dome over the leak:



NASA's satellite images:  http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards/event.php?id=43733


The politics involved with this disaster:  The Gulf Oil Spill: an ecological disaster years in the making  

LABELS: BP, DEEP HORIZON, ENVIRONMENT, GULF OIL DISASTER, HALLIBURTON, HISTORY, NASA, OIL,TRANSOCEAN

Searching for Relevancy in an Obama World

by Janet Ritz

I spoke with a friend the other day, one of those rare individuals who'd passed his 87th birthday with a clear perspective on life that went beyond even his years, and heard from him frustration that has been echoed both by others of his generation and by those who are not yet of age to drink or vote.

The question they've been asking is: what happened?

What happened to the values for which the WWII generation fought and died? What happened to our principals about saving money and living within our means? What happened to fighting for freedom of religion and thought and tolerance? What happened to personal responsibility and the willingness to sacrifice to meet a shared goal? What happened to the moral centers of those in charge for the last few decades that made them think they could use the earth as their personal or corporate garbage dump, their offshore bank account, their property to pillage?

My friend bemoaned the generation that had followed his as trust-fund babies given every opportunity after a hard-won victory, who did not understand or care about the sacrifices made to provide them with the right to become something more than their fathers.

Instead, he complained, they squandered it for short term gain and immediate gratification.

I have heard the same from those younger than me. How could so much have been lost so fast? What about us? What will happen to our lives and our children now that our fathers and mothers have spent their inheritence? Who broke America, who broke the world, who is going to fix it?

The answer most people in America give, according to the polls, is Barack Obama. There is a lot to be said for his accomplishments in so short a time -- increased national debt notwithstanding (given the enormity of the problems he has inherited) -- but that's not, I suspect, the answer he would give. The president would say (and has said) that we all have to change to get out of this mess.

We have to go forward in a new way.

I would say we also have to look backward to those of the WWII generation who acted with such responsibility toward our country and the world and who thought the victory they were leaving to their children would be safe in our hands.

Sadly, that wasn't to be the case.

I had a strange reaction to President Obama's election (after the cheering stopped). I sat down and asked myself: what now? So much of the last eight years for me and many of my colleagues has had to do with what we were fighting against. The Orwellian tactics of the "Blue Skies Initiative" that supported polluters. The Jungian sense that something horrible was taking place in their preemptive wars (now proven to be prescient) for which we would have to account.

Corporations did not help. There, many of the same generation that was leading us into the abyss came to the table as if at a feeding trough set out of a sense of entitlement. Some were cognizant of their impact and tried to do the right thing, some did not care, and others were like Daisy in the Great Gatsby, unaware of their arrogance as they insisted that a cold winter in their backyard meant climate change wasn't real (ugh) and wondered why people losing their jobs through no fault of their own would think they had a right to refinance.

After all, weren't they now bad risks?

No thought to the fact that the bad risks had been those in the banks who had gambled on credit default swaps or mortgage-back securities set to fail, all of which led them to cut off credit, in some cases, to businesses with customers but with no way to finance their payrolls, who then had to lay off those that the Daisys of the world are now citing as the bad risk.

And don't get me started on the second mortages pushed by banks with assumption of the ability to refinance down the line (can anyone spell: bait and switch?), which the president is now trying to address before the prime rate rises and tens of millions of homeowners find themselves unable to meet their monthly payments when a simple consolidation that was either promised or alluded to at the time the line was granted would keep them in their homes.Add that waiting shoe to drop to upcoming credit card defaults and the anticipated (by some) crash of commercial real estate, and you can see that we're not out of the woods or the forest or the trees that we have trained ourselves over time not to see.

But what do people like my 87 year old friend, who do know the forest for the trees, and my 17 year old friends still in school and myself and my colleagues who fought so long and hard to acheive a new paradigm see now that the party's over?

I've watched the reaction in the blogosphere to some of the more controversial decisions made by our new president. The release of torture memos, the reversal of same on pictures and military tribunals, the appointment of an environmental lawyer who works for General Electric (which needed a better headline than: Superfund Lawyer gets nominated. Anyone care to mention she had served in the DOJ environmental role

during the Clinton Administration and we may need to see some vetting before we pass judgment?), the go-ahead for mountain-top removal mining (grrr).

I'm not happy about much of that. In fact, I'd venture to say I'm confused, worried and waiting for an explanation that makes sense. But I do not feel the requirement to become both enraged and outraged, whether through the insistence of the 24 hour news cycle or by those in the blogosphere. This is what I mean by my search for relevancy: Eight years of having someone to point at (Bush/Cheney, et al) and say: See! There's the problem (and it was), was an easier proposition than looking in the mirror and asking the question:

How am I the problem?

That changed for me after I read a remarkable poetry collection by American writer, George Witte, entitled Deniability, which forced me to explore my inner experience of the last eight years. How much had I acknowledged? How much had I denied? How much was in favor of writing the gotcha article that would point out the deficiencies in others' behaviors without any understanding of my own part in the events upon which I was reporting?

These are questions that cannot be answered and then forgotten. They must become part of a paradigm shift that is necessary for everyone if were are to survive as the nation and world our grandparents fought to preserve: What am I doing to combat climate change? How have I saved instead of spent today? What will happen if I don't spend in a consumer economy? Is my business, my office, my home as green as it could be?

How do I fight policy I do not like with a president I like very much?

What is my part in this new paradigm?

It is easier to find someone about which to complain than to contemplate one's own part in the mess in which we find ourselves.

The truth is that we were all at the party. Some of us were in the proverbial smoke-filled rooms where torture was sanctioned and they must not be sanctioned for their choice in that. Others were downstairs at the chips and dip table where they used their credit cards to get extra guacamole they could have done without, while either closing their eyes and ears to the screams coming from halfway across the world or protesting against it as they put down plastic for yet more chips and dip.

We don't know how to fight against bad policy after the last eight years without demonizing those with which whose policies we disagree. Instead, we post our outrage that the fantasy Obama we have constructed in our minds does not meet up to our shaky version of reality.

President Obama, in my opinion, is doing the best he can in what are the most difficult circumstances since President Roosevelt inherited the legacy of Hoover. He is not perfect. He will not always, maybe not even often, come up with policies that please my sense of purity. But I acknowlege that he is the president of us all and that he has been tasked to govern responsibly in a globalized world. I know that means I won't get everything I want right away and I am willing to give him some (not unlimited) time to work it out.

Which brings me my path to relevancy in an Obama world. I will be a responsible investigative journalist who reports on policy and shenanigans and all the things that come with the Daisys and the Toms in the Gatsby of our fractured world. I will question policies even from those I support if those policies deserved to be questioned. But I will not look for a way to turn those for whom I've voted into a demonized figures upon whom I can then comfortably focus my unresolved emotional issues of the past eight years (in lieu of my own culpability) instead of doing my part to see that good policy is passed in our shared effort for a better future.

This is what my 87 year old friend had expected of his children and what his grandchildren must see happen if they are to have anything to work with from our legacy. The party isover. The bill has come do. We have a participatory democracy again thanks to the courage of one man who ran for office despite the danger that represented to him and his family.

Now we must all participate if we want to be relevant in an Obama world.

Cross-published on The Chicago Sun-Times, The Huffington Post, Austin American Statesman, Palm Beach Post, Huston Chronicle

LABELS: BARACK OBAMA, CLIMATE CHANGE, COMMENTARY, DENIABILITY, ENVIRONMENT, GEORGE WITTE,GREEN OFFICE

Deniability: Facing the War on Terror through Poetry

by Janet Ritz

There are times in history when it is best for a people to move on from past mistakes. There are other times, such as now, when the past cries out to be explored. For those who are searching for meaning to the last eight years, a new book by American poet, George Witte, Deniability, is the place to start. This is not only for the writing that is spectacular in its simplicity, its perfect placement of each word, its prose, but for its bravery in peeling back the layers of the war on terror as an eight year journey that is stark and unforgiving in its verse.

It is, in this writer's opinion, required reading before we move on, an inner truth and reconciliation to the last eight years that serves as an important reminder of what we must face and not allow again.

George Witte's Deniability begins with the fall of the Twin Towers, a poem appropriately entitled: Uh-Oh, reflecting the feeling so many experienced as they watched the attacks on 9/11, and proceeds chronologically through the physical, actual and psychological journey that would come to be known as the war on terror.

UH-OH (excerpt): No photograph records that day's unmasking roar / Things ripped from skins, words from definitions. / Letters distilled until incomprehensible.

I first became familiar with Witte's work when I stumbled across his previous collection, The Apparitioners, and was so impressed by its form and substance, its free-flowing exploration of American life that led one reviewer to refer to Witte as the "Frost of the Suburbs," that I purchased several copies for friends and have reread it many times since. It was therefore with anticipation that I awaited my copy of Deniability as a new and unique linguistic presentation that would cause me to think about American life.

What I found was a chronological exploration of American conscience through the last eight years of war and terror that makes Deniability more than just a great book of poetry (and it is). George Witte's new collection is the best opportunity I've seen for Americans to peel back the layers on their own experience of the last eight years as Witte, with his unparalleled imagery, speaks for us all of both the inner implications of everyday life:

PAGING (excerpt): In hospitals and airports, places where arrival or departure collect us, one is called, the intercom invades most private nooks--graffitied restroom stall, a chapel's narrow pew of whisperers. Though ours is not the name announced, we look up curious from books, hush children still, tilt ears toward ceiling grates where the speaker's secreted, though its voice sounds everywhere. We wait.

And the wider consequence of alliance with a superpower:

NEXT (excerpt): By popular demand, dictators flee aboard a private plane, cower into holes, from which they're yanked in hirsute infancy and whisked away, location undisclosed. Our asset's now a liability requiring diplomatic solution: exile, jail, or roadside execution.

Deniability is a journey from beginning to end that allows the reader a connection to their own experience. It is a book I will read many times and then reread again, and, yes, I will get copies for friends. I'd send it classrooms and libraries if I could and to those who are tasked to decide whether or not to prosecute the past and how to proceed in a future made more dangerous for our eight years of Deniability:

DENIABILITY (excerpt): Officials fashion lullaby from lie, commitment into exit strategy, conveyed in semaphore, averted eyes a silent language undercutting words. Truth's relative as beauty, circumstance our ever-shifting standard, as an urn's exhumed pastoral darkness to reveal a priest receiving sacrificial girls with oil and fire, their moistened limbs consigned to greater good, the glaze that purifies. You turn it, passerby, obliged to none, witness without testimony, faint sough of bone and ash inside this artifact the only evidence you can't deny.

Link to Deniability on Amazon.