Politics

I’m about to head up to Central Park for this. I hope to see some of you there. Actually, maybe I hope it’s so big that it’s hard to find anyone I know.

Read James’s account of our encounter with the “Jews hate Bush” lady.

I just saw this story, as I was looking through news upon my return.

Director Abbas Kiarostami, one of international cinema’s biggest names, is blocked from attending the New York Film Festival and speaking at Harvard.

This is terrible. We’re sending the message that the only way for countries to communicate with each other is through war. He had visited the U.S. seven times in the last ten years.

New York Film Festival spokeswoman Ines Aslan said that festival organizers, along with the two universities involved, tried “very, very hard” to convince officials at the U.S. Embassy in Paris, where Kiarostami had applied for a visa, to make an exception for the filmmaker. “It wasn’t that they could not make an exception,” Aslan said. “It was that they did not choose to. It is very sad.” Officials at the embassy told the festival that they would require at least 90 days to investigate Kiarostami’s background — which is well known to film scholars and fans, and contains little in the way of political activity — and process the visa paperwork.

The rush towards war with Iraq is a horrifying thing to watch via the German newspapers — it’s the top story in all of the papers here, even though a national election will be held in two days. I sit in restaurants here in Munich, and I can hear that people are talking about Bush and the U.S. Regarding war and the politicians, I bring you a selection from Mark Twain:

The loud little handful – as usual – will shout for the war. The pulpit will – warily and cautiously – object… at first. The great, big, dull bulk of the nation will rub its sleepy eyes and try to make out why there should be a war, and will say, earnestly and indignantly, “It is unjust and dishonorable, and there is no necessity for it.”

Then the handful will shout louder. A few fair men on the other side will argue and reason against the war with speech and pen, and at first will have a hearing and be applauded, but it will not last long; those others will outshout them, and presently the antiwar audiences will thin out and lose popularity.

Before long, you will see this curious thing: the speakers stoned from the platform, and free speech strangled by hordes of furious men…

Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.

Mark Twain, “The Mysterious Stranger” (1910)

Why of course the people don’t want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don’t want war neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country. — Hermann Goering

Found here.

Today’s quote is courtesy of James Ridgeway.

They have always taught and trained you to believe it to be your patriotic duty to go to war and to have yourselves slaughtered at their command. But in all the history of the world you, the people, have never had a voice in declaring war, and strange as it certainly appears, no war by any nation in any age has ever been declared by the people.” —Eugene Debs, Socialist candidate for president, June 16, 1918.

The speech led to Debs’s being stripped of his citizenship and sent to jail for 10 years.

Get Fuzzy rocks.