Take a Deep Breath
Several bloggers have come unhinged about a teacher in Colorado leading a very provocative discussion of world politics. I know nothing about Mr. Bennish except what I have read in the blogs. The guy makes several good points and he seemed polite toward those of opposing views. Were his tone not a little frantic occasionally, I would have little problem with his lesson. BTW when some of the teachers at my daughters' high school have ranted about President Clinton I ridiculed them to my daughters, true, but I didn't try to get them fired.
One blogger found the teacher's comments "a screeching diatribe". This blogger says he "... taught communism and anti-Bush, anti-America thinking...". I do not know how this blogger reached these conclusions. I listened to the tape. It seemed strongly worded, occasionally too shrill, but always polite and open to opposing opinions, certainly not a "screeching diatribe". Suggesting that unbridled capitalism is not a panacea for poverty is not "teaching communism" - if it were then we would have to re-label Teddy Roosevelt and blast some rock off the side of a big hill in South Dakota. Does the writer find "anti-Bush" and "anti-American" synonymous. According to most current polls over 60% of Americans themselves would be anti-American by that definition.
The fact is, as this young teacher made clear, there are huge differences in Bush and and a certain mass murderer/dictator, but also some "...eerie similarities to the tone they both use...". I wish Bennish had avoided the incendiary comparison and used a more generic one. He presented the Fox "News" folks and the right wing blogs a way to cloud the issue. This week Sandra Day O'Connor said virtually the same thing about the Delay wing of the GOP but did it more gently. According to Justice O'Connor (criticizing the Republican attack on judicial independence) [See DailyKos]
"It takes a lot of degeneration before a country falls into dictatorship, but we should avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings."Some bloggers on the right have become so shrill in their frightened screeds concerning terrorism and Islam that you could not slip an onion skin between some of their rhetoric in regard to Islam and a Nazi's in regard to Judaism. A few are so frightened by the radical Islamics that they are ready to forsake all morals, ethics, and wisdom and wipe Islam from the earth. The time to make the dictator comparisons is not after the guy takes power, it is in the early stages of "degeneration". The current situation makes you realize how a you-know-who could succeed by playing on the fears of the Germans in the thirties and forties. Having taught a number of Islamic kids over the last several years, I worry about their treatment in a community where even some educated, church-going folk are so fearful of Islamic people they countenance suspending the Bill of Rights for them. I am not a Muslim. I do not believe Mohammed was a prophet. I find, obviously, mainstream Islamic beliefs unbelievable. I find radical Islamic beliefs laughable, superstitious, and barbaric. I am not a Catholic. I believe Joseph Ratzinger is just another guy. He ain't my pope. He's not my "Holiness". I believe he'd have a sunnier disposition if he had married and multiplied. I find much of orthodox Catholic belief unbelievable. I find the beliefs of some Catholics laughable, superstitious, and barbaric. I am a Methodist. I have found a belief system in mainstream Methodism that I can embrace, but I find some radical Methodists and some other radical Protestants, laughable, superstitious, and barbaric. All kinds of radicals are scary, of course. But I will not allow them to scare me into compromising basic American principles. The discussion that has the frantic right-wing blogosphere in such a dither represented 20 minutes out of, I suppose, a fifty minute high school world geography class on the day after the State of the Union address. Sounds like a natural discussion for that class on that day to me. Since all I know about this teacher is what you will read below, I'm not gonna go too far out on my limb for Mr. Bennish. He probably goes over the line a little, in tone at least, but the excerpt I read and listened to did not seem worthy of the reaction of the frightened right-wing. One commenter on the DailyKos quoted a church marquee:
The truth doesn't hurt unless it should.Several points Bennish makes raise questions that deserve to be dispassionately discussed by thinking people in America. Here are my discussion questions:
- Is unbridled free enterprise an absolute good?
- Does "preemptive war" undermine our position when we deal with, for example, a democratically-elected Hamas that wants to destroy a government that they think was forced undemocratically upon Palestinians?
- If we can use violence to impose our view of what is right on other nations, why can they not feel justified in doing the same to us?
__________
Bennish: Why do we have troops in Colombia fighting in their civil war for over 30 years. Most Americans don't even know this. For over 30 years, America has had soldiers fighting in Colombia in a civil war. Why are we fumigating coca crops in Bolivia and Peru if we're not trying to control other parts of the world. Who buys cocaine? Not Bolivians. Not Peruvians. Americans! Ok. Why are we destroying the farmers' lives when we're the ones that consume that good. Can you imagine? What is the world's number one single cause of death by a drug? What drug is responsible for the most deaths in the world? Cigarettes! Who is the world's largest producer of cigarettes and tobacco? The United States! What part of our country grows all our tobacco? Anyone know what states in particular? Mostly what's called North Carolina. Alright. That's where all the cigarette capitals are. That's where a lot of them are located from. Now if we have the right to fly to Bolivia or Peru and drop chemical weapons on top of farmers' fields because we're afraid they might be growing coca and that could be turned into cocaine and sold to us, well then don't the Peruvians and the Iranians and the Chinese have the right to invade America and drop chemical weapons over North Carolina to destroy the tobacco plants that are killing millions and millions of people in their countries every year and causing them billions of dollars in health care costs? [I have not studied this issue, but given the marketing worldwide of tobacco by American companies this is a great discussion question. Whatever the teacher's real position on the topic the question challenges students to explore their real convictions and think "outside the box." Bravo.] Make sure you get these definitions down. Capitalism: If you don't understand the economic system of capitalism, you don't understand the world in which we live. Ok. Economic system in which all or most of the means of production, etc., are owned privately and operated in a somewhat competitive environment for the purpose of producing profit. Of course, you can shorten these definitions down. Make sure you get the gist of it. Do you see how when, you know, when you're looking at this definition, where does it say anything about capitalism is an economic system that will provide everyone in the world with the basic needs that they need? Is that a part of this system? Do you see how this economic system is at odds with humanity? At odds with caring and compassion? It's at odds with human rights. [I believe that communism is a failed governmental system and socialism is a failed economic system. Of course pure democracy is impractical and unbridled capitalism is oligarchy of the rich. The US has somewhat balanced the need for incentive and freedom in the economic life of the country with support for the weak and underprivileged. There is certainly nothing particularly Christian about free enterprise or particularly unChristian about socialism.] Anytime you have a system that is designed to procure profit, when profit is the bottom motive -- money -- that means money is going to become more important potentially than what? Safety, human lives, etc. Why did we invade Iraq?! How do we know that the invasion of Iraq for weapons of mass destruction-- even if weapons had been found, how would you have known, how could you prove--that that was not a real reason for us to go there. There are dozens upon dozens of countries that have weapons of mass destruction. Iraq is one of dozens. There are plenty of countries that are controlled by dictators, where people have no freedom, where they have weapons of mass destruction and they could be potentially threatening to America. We're not invading any of those countries. [Awkwardly stated but true.] ------ I'll give you guys another minute or two to get some of these [definitions] down. I agree with Joey. Try to condense these a little bit. I took these straight out of the dictionary. Anyone in here watch any of Mr. Bush's speech last night? I'm gonna talk a little about some of things he had to say. ------- One of things that I'll bring up now, since some of you are still writing, is, you know, Condoleezza Rice said this the other day and George Bush reiterated it last night. And the implication was that the solution to the violence in the Middle East is democratization. And the implication through his language was that democracies don't go to war. Democracies aren't violent. Democracies won't want weapons of mass destruction. This is called blind, naive faith in democracy. ------- Who is probably the single most violent nation on planet Earth? Unidentified student: We are. [We have, as far as I know, the highest murder rate in the industrialized world, by far. The following is from President Carter's book, Our Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis: "The Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research reports that the rate of firearm homicide in the United States is nineteen times higher than that of 35 other high-income countries combined. In the most recent year for which data are available, handguns killed 334 people in Australia, 197 in Great Britain, 183 in Sweden, 83 in Japan, 54 in Ireland, 1,034 in Canada, and 30,419 in the United States." ] The United States of America. And we're a democracy. Quote-unquote. Who has the most weapons of mass destruction in the world? The United States. Who's continuing to develop new weapons of mass destruction as we speak? The United States. [Undeniably true. ] So, why does Mr. Bush think that other countries that are democracies won't wanna be like us? Why does he think they'll just wanna be at peace with each other? What makes him think that when the Palestinians get their own state that they won't wanna preemptively invade Israel to eliminate a potential threat to their security just like we supposedly did in Iraq? Do you see the dangerous precedent that we have set by illegally invading another country and violating their sovereignty in the name of protecting us against a potential future--sorry--attack? [Unintelligible.] [If we can force our beliefs on others, why can't they force theirs on us? ] ------ Why doesn't Mexico invade Guatemala? Maybe they're scared of being attacked. Ok. Why doesn't North Korea invade South Korea? They might be afraid of being attacked. Or maybe Iran and North Korea and Saudi Arabia and what else did he add to the list last night - and Zimbabwe - maybe they're all gonna team up and try and invade us because they're afraid we might invade them. I mean, where does this cycle of violence end? You know? This whole "do as I say, not as I do" thing. That doesn't work. What was so important about President Bush's speech last night--and it doesn't matter if it was President Clinton still it would just as important -- is that it's not just a speech to America. But who? The whole world! It's very obvious that if you listen to his language, if you listen to his body language, and if you paid attention to what he was saying, he wasn't always just talking to us. He was talking to the whole planet. Addressing the whole planet. He started off his speech talking about how America should be the country that dominates the world. That we have been blessed essentially by God to have the most civilized, most advanced, best system and that it is our duty as Americans to use the military to go out into the world and make the whole world like us. ------ Sounds a lot like the things that Adolf Hitler use to say. We're the only ones who are right. Everyone else is backwards. And it's our job to conquer the world and make sure they live just like we want them to. Now, I'm not saying that Bush and Hitler are exactly the same. Obviously, they are not. Ok. But there are some eerie similarities to the tones that they use. Very, very "ethnocentric." We're right. You're all wrong. [Sounds like... is not there yet, but now's the time to nip it in the bud. This guy tried to be careful here. He would have been wise to avoid the H word. These things need to be said: maybe less passionately, maybe better phrased, but they need discussion.] I just keep waiting. You know, at some point I think America and Mexico might go to war again. You know. Anytime Mexico plays the USA in a soccer match. What can be heard chanting all game long? ------ Do all Mexicans dislike the United States? No. Do all Americans dislike Mexico? No. But there's a lot of resentment--not just in Mexico, but across the whole world--towards America right now. We told--Condoleezza Rice said--that now that Hamas got elected to lead the Palestianians that they have to renounce their desire to eliminate Israel. And then Condoleezza Rice also went on to say that you can't be for peace and support armed struggle at the same time. You can't do that. Either you're for peace or war. But you can't be for both. What is the problem with her saying this? That's the same thing we say. That is exactly the same thing this current administration says. We're gonna make the world safe by invading and killing and making war. So, if we can be for peace and for war, well, why can't the Palestinians be for peace and for war? [Again, very provocative questions. Think kids. What do you think? If we are right let's articulate it! Let's know what we are sending our kids to die for! Think it through. This is our history and it's happening now. There is real blood flowing. If it continues a few more years some of you may help fight it: all of you will help pay for it. If you're gonna support a war, you ought to be able to articulate why!] ----- Student Sean Allen, who is taping Bennish: Isn't there a difference of, of, having Hamas being like, we wanna attack Israelis because they're Israelis, and having us say we want to attack people who are known terrorists? Isn't there a difference between saying we're going to attack innocents and we're going to attack people who are not innocent? [Good point kid. You're thinking about it. Let's consider that. So... what is a terrorist?] ----- Bennish: I think that's a good point. But you have to remember who's doing the defining of a terrorist. And what is a terrorist? Allen: Well, when people attack us on our own soil and are actually attempting to take American lives and want to take American lives, whereas, Israelies in this situation, aren't saying we want to blow up Palestine... Bennish: How did Israel and the modern Israeli state even come into existence in the first place? Allen: We gave it to them. Bennish: Sort of. Why? After the Israel-Zionist movement conducted what? Terrorist acts. They assassinated the British prime minster in Palestine. They blew up buildings. They stole military equipment. Assassinated hundreds of people. Car bombings, you name it. That's how the modern state of Israel was made. Was through violence and terrorism. Eventually we did allow them to have the land. Why? Not because we really care, but because we wanted a strategic ally. We saw a way to us to get a hook into the Middle East. [One man's terrorist is sometimes another man's freedom fighter. I live within half a mile of the former homes of two major Cherokee chiefs and a mile from the site of an ancient Mississippian burial mound. What if American Indians were to decide my house sits on their "promised land"? When they wrest my property from me how will I respond? Might I get a little violent? I don't oppose the Israelis but I'm not blind to the sometimes justifiable upset on the Palestianian side.] If we create a modern nation of Israel, then, and we make them dependent on us for military aid and financial aid, then we can control a part of the Middle East. We will have a country in the Middle East that will be indebted to us. Allen: But is it ok to say it's just to attack Israel? If it's ok to attack known terrorists, it's ok to attack Israel? Bennish: If you were Palestinians, who are the real terrorists? The Israelis, who fire missiles that they purchased from the United States government into Palestinian neighborhoods and refugees and maybe kill a terrorist, but also kill innocent women and children. And when you shoot a missile into Pakistan to quote-unquote kill a known terrorist, and we just killed 75 people that have nothing to do with al Qaeda, as far as they're concerned, we're the terrorists. We've attacked them on their soil with the intention of killing their innocent people. [More good points to consider that apply as well to Iraq. ] ----- Allen: But we did not have the intention of killing innocent people. We had the intention of killing an al Qaeda terrorist. [The road to hell is paved with good intentions, according to a reliable source.] Bennish: Do you know that? Allen: So, you're saying the United States has intentions to kill innocent people? Bennish: I don't know the answer to that question. Allen: But what gain do we get from killing innocent people in the Middle East? What gain does that pose to us? Bennish: Let me ask you this. During the 1980s, Iran and Iraq were involved in an 8-year-long war. The United States sold missiles, tanks, guns, planes, to which side? Unidentified student: Iraq? Bennish: Both. The answer is both. Why would we send armaments to two sides that are fighting each other. That seems to be self-defeating. Don't we want one side to win? Not always! Sometimes you just want there to be conflict! [It seems to me this guy is using pretty good Socratic method - to a point. Excellent questions for this discussion. He just needs to pose the questions, but draw more students into the discussion. ] The British -- this is one of the grand strategies of the British imperial system--was to play local animosities off each other. To prevent them is to divide and conquer. Do we really want the Middle East to unite as one cohesive political and cultural body? No! Because then they could what? Threaten our supremacy. We want to keep the world divided. Do we really want to kill innocent people? I don't know. I don't know the answer to that. I know there are some Americans who do. People who work in the CIA. People who have to think like that. Those kind of dirty minds, dirty tricks. That's how the intelligence world works. Sometimes you do want to kill people just for the sake of killing them. Right? Listen, between the years 1960 and 1962, the United States through the CIA conducted over 7,000 terrorist sabotage attacks against the small island nation of Cuba. Over 7,000 terrorist attacks were waged against just one little country called Cuba in a two year period, intentionally, let me rephrase that, intentionally blowing up medical supplies, intentionally burning down crops that feed their country, thereby creating starvation, right? Intentionally trying to make that system collapse. And we're willing to expend however many thousands of people died because we just want to get rid of Castro. And the sad reality is that there are some policy planners who are willing to let people die in order to achieve their objectives. [Again, war is sometimes necessary. But in a democracy we should KNOW why we're fighting and we should have the support of the nation or stay out of the fight.] ----- Now, do I think President Bush says 'I'd like to go kill some innocent Palestianians?' I don't think he thinks like that. But I also know that he's not the only one making decisions. I also know that after September 11, President Bush got on TV and he said, 'You will feel our wrath. You will feel the full force of the United States military. There will be paybacks.' He said it again last night. He said, 'We've killed a lot of top-ranking al Qaeda members. And for those who aren't killed yet, you're day will come!' Right? That kind of language to me is very obvious. ------ And when you go trying to kill one particular type of person, you know that you're gonna kill other people, too. And let me ask you this... Allen: Later in that, he stated that he's [Osama bin Laden] trying to kill innocents... Bennish: I understand that, but hold on, you have to understand something, that when al Qaeda attacked America on September 11, in their view, they're not attacking innocent people. Ok. The CIA has an office at the World Trade Center. The Pentagon is a military target. The White House was a military target. Congress is a military target. The World Trade Center is the economic center of our entire economy. [Americans need to know the truth about the attacks. The simplistic mottos of Bush and his right-wing supporters do not inform the topic. Why are these men willing to die to kill us? ] ----- The FBI, who tracks down terrorists and so on and so forth around the world, has offices in the World Trade Center. Some of the companies that work in the World Trade Center are these huge multinational corporations that are directly involved in the military-industrial complex in supporting corrupt dictatorships in the Middle East. And so in the minds of al Qaeda, they're not attacking innocent people. They're attacking legitimate targets. People who have blood on their hands as far as they're concerned. We portray them as innocent because they're our friends and neighbors, family, loved ones. One of my best friends from high school, elementary school, and birth, lives in lower Manhattan. You know, he was right there, he was four blocks away from it. So, anytime it comes close to home, you begin to see things differently. ----- In no way am I implying, I don't know, you got to figure this stuff out for yourself, but I want you to think about these things--you know, think about this right here. Here's the real homeland security. Fighting terrorism since 1492! Ok. I mean, to many Native Americans, that flag is no different than the Nazi flag or the Confederate flag. It represents the people that came and stole their land, lied, brought disease, rape, pillage, destruction, etc. So it all depends upon varying people's perspectives varying. And of course, we're going to see ourselves as being in the right , at least the majority of us, because that's us. Allen: But we were the ones that were attacked first. On September 11, 2001, we were the ones that were attacked. We were not attacking anybody until that point. Then we said ok, we're going into Afghanistan. Then we said ok, the Iraqi government has ties with al Qaeda. We're going to go into Iraq. We were the ones that were attacked. Bennish: In actuality, if you remember back to my first day, the Sept. 11 attacks were, according to bin Laden, a direct response to our 1) support of the nation of Israel, which they consider to be a terrorist regime that does not have the right to control the land that the Palestinians lived on for over 1,500 years, and they also did it because of what George Clinton did--Bill Clinton, not George Clinton, they had a little documentary on him on PBS last night I was watching--Bill Clinton, when he launched the missile attacks into Afghanistan and Sudan and killed thousands of innocent Africans and Afghanistan people - Afghanis - that had nothing to do with al Qaeda or anything. In fact, in Sudan, he blew up the country's largest pharmaceutical plant, which was producing medicines, alright, um, you know, that's as far as, in their eyes, that was retaliation for those attacks. And so this whole idea of who attacked who first, how far back in time do you wanna go!? This is the whole thing with the Arab-Israeli conflict. Well, who was there first? Well, if you believe the Bible, you say, well, God gave the land of Canaan to the Israelites. But who was in that land when they got there? The Canaanites, who some archeologists would argue are the ancient descendants of the Palestinians. You know. Other archeologists say the Hebrews didn't really come from Egypt. They were actually a group of Canaanites who decided they didn't like the other Canaanites and developed this story afterward to justify how they killed all their neighbors and took over the land. --- Alright, and so this becomes very, very muddled. And I'm not in any way implying that you should agree with me. I don't even know if I'm necessarily taking a position. But what I'm trying to get you to do is to think, right, about these issues more in-depth, you know, and not just take things from the surface. And I'm glad you asked all your questions, because they're very good, legitimate questions. And hopefully that allows other people to begin to think about some of those things, too.Over all it sounds to me that the teacher was sometimes serving as devil's advocate, a common discussion leader ploy, trying to provoke discussion. His own position is sometimes obvious. Sometimes he is just forcing the kids to think about the perspective of the "other side" whether or not he agreed with it. Pointing out the positions of the terrorists is not adopting their positions. It is obvious that he opposes many of Bush's positions, like most Americans. He said nothing here to indicate he is a communist. He said nothing here to indicate he is an Al Qaeda sympathizer. He said nothing here to indicate he is anti-American. Anti-Bush? Yeah. Me too.___________
No comments:
Post a Comment