Month: January 2005

Dear Mr. Moses:

In your article “Every Hero a Killer?…Not”, you use certain video games as an example to make your point about “heroism” and violence. I don’t disagree with the article, and videogames are certainly open to criticism in this respect. However, you call Metal Gear Solid 3 an example of Pro American ideology. You cite an Amazon reviewer who described how the game shows America’s greatness. First of all, Amazon reviewers are hardly an authority on anything, including the storylines of videogames. If this reviewer had paid attention to the story, he or she would learn that it does anything but show “America’s greatness.”

The story does involve the player controlling an American agent, but by the end of the game you see that the plot is much more than simply Good Americans vs Evil Russians. In fact, you realize that your character is being used, for somewhat nefarious purposes. The game also portrays Kruschev in a good light, and the main villain, while Russian, is a rogue who is trying to overthrow the Soviet government, and ends up killing many Russian soldiers. Another major character in the game, who is supposedly an American defector to the Soviets, turns out to be acting as a triple-agent, and when certain events occur, the US government abandons her, and orders her killed. You, as the main character, end up carrying this out and killing her. It is a very bittersweet ending, and when this soldier returns to a hero’s welcome in Washington, he at first refuses to shake President Johnson’s hand, in front of the cameras. Afterwords, he goes to visit this female soldier’s nameless grave, and salutes the tombstone.

As this game is actually a prequel to the other games in the series, fans know that this character ends up disillusioned by the government he serves, and ends up becoming a mercenary. Whether this changes your opinion of the game or not, I hope that I have at least showed that the game is not as ideological as you may have thought, at least not in the pro-American, neo-conservative kind of way. The game was also made by Japanese designers, as well as written and directed by a Japanese producer. Other games in the series have dealt with Gulf War syndrome, the American hypocrisy with nuclear non-proliferation, and corrupt US Defense Secretaries. There is even a question raised about “videogame soldiers,” and whether they are being desensitized to the horrors of war. These games are certainly not full of right-wing ideology, and while they are violent, they are rated Mature, and the violence is not thrust upon you. There is always a non lethal option to take.

So, like I said, I don’t disagree with your article, but as a big fan of the game, I don’t agree with your using Metal Gear as an example. Hopefully I’ve made my case. Thanks for reading.

Desmond Dapena

Originally Titled: The Most Rev. Dr. Al’s “I’ve Had a Nightmare” speech excerpts

“I’ve had a nightmare that the only place where the sons of sharecroppers and the sons of slave-owners may sit down at the table of brotherhood is in the racially-integrated mess tents constructed on the depleted-uranium tainted soil and sand of oil-rich and militarily stategic nations subjugated by the Amurrakin Empahr all over this God-forsaken planet. I’ve had a nightmare this night!

“I’ve had a nightmare that these sons will unite in a strange and terrible botherhood, not to share the wealth of freedom and peace for all, but to create a plantation spanning the four corners of the globe wherein are imprisoned the new slaves of all nations under the watch and lash of an amoral and malevolent oligarchy. I’ve had a nightmare this night!

“I’ve had a nightmare that scholars, intellectuals, and fence-sitters all across the socio-economic strata of our society will wait until we are past the detour sign on the road to ruin and there is no sustenance left, save serving the war machine involuntarily for one’s daily bread and shelter and uniform; and a flag-draped coffin becomes fair currency for a young life and a family’s tears. I’ve had a nightmare this night!

“I’ve had a nightmare that we may, indeed, have to let our heretofore peaceful and creative protests degenerate into physical force against the unresponsive Leviathan that is beholden, on paper, to follow the lead of the consenting governed; though it may be too late to defuse the whirlwind we may reap as the fruit of our inaction, based on fears, based on lies. I’ve had a nightmare this night!

“I’ve had a nightmare that I may someday soon thank God Almighty that I am dead, dead; dead already…”

Peace, Rev. Al (Alright, so I’m Jewish–so sue me!!)

Remember, we stole it first at Peacefile

My Dear Mr Moses:

I read your article in Counterpunch (Jan 17) with with bemusement and frustration. Rev King was a rare abberation in the history of Christianity. In the main, Christians love peace like wolves love vegetarianism. I don’t have the answers — I barely have the questions. But I do know that the humans as an organism and an organisation will change and embrace peace only after they reject organised superstitious tyranny. Christianty is based on the notion that someone must lose for me to win, a value system that can never bring peace. Thanks, Jack

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Aloha Mr Moses,

You are absolutely correct when you state that “a leftist rejection of the Christian left in America is a certified guarantee of defeat.” Far too much time is spent deriding Christians, as if we were all of the Robertson/Falwell “Christianist” ilk. We’re not.

While I agree that Christian Zionists and other Fascists for Jesus deserve a real thumping, there are groups, like CMEP, and pastors like Jim Wallis of Sojourners, who are making (at least) a dent in the insanity, and doing so in a manner that jives with what they believe. Our support of these people could counter the nasty, hateful neocon version of Christianity spewed by the likes of Coulter, Delay, Dobson and of course Robertson and Blow Them All Away in the Name of the Lord Falwell.

Thanks for reminding the readers of CounterPunch that King was a Christian — and a radical. Reminds me of someone else.

K Lowell
Hawaii

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Subject: Virgin Birth

Dear Greg: Maybe it’s because of the tendency to believe in, rather than to know, “truths,” that people are so easily misled. A guy heard a burning bush talking? And took its words to heart? And then people took the man seriously? Come now… And there are definitely WMD; and the “turris” hate our freedoms. And the moon is green cheese and that irresistable tingle in your naughty bits is bad bad bad–let’s have a “two minutes’ hate” (“1984”) instead of a real release. We are definitely doomed if people keep waiting for the Big Parent in the sky to protect them. Any real faith in one’s ability to handle life must, and does, come from within anyway: “God” helps those who help themselves; or as Islam says: tie the camel to the hitchin’ post (don’t just “trust” it to Allah) AND pray to Allah that all we be well. The great Christian believer (and questioner), Hermann Hesse, said in his book, “Demian”, that “…we create gods, and they bless us.” We make up friends to hold our hand in the terrifying icy impersonal universe of “black velvet futility” as Kurt Vonnegut put it in “Sirens of Titan”. You cannot count on people who believe in magic. They have no backbones–or else they keep marching off the cliff (or pushing others off) with religious fury. They are so easy to manipulate when so deluded. Peace, Al

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Thanks Greg for that article. I’m a menno in NYC and passed this around to some of my friends here. I hate to see the religious right lay claim to the moral high ground, and it’s good you remind us of history. I see both sides, being from the conservative evangelical camp before I evolved into this very left wing stuff. The polarization of this political thought lately is just obscene. We have no dialogue. It will have to swing back and it’s good to remind the left to look for support within the ranks of the “enemy.” Anyway, just thanks for writing and thinking. Susan in NYC.

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There are occasionally religious leftists who have both courage and intellectual integrity like MLK. However they do not believe in power to the people, they believe in power and glory to Almighty God, the same god that has oppressed people all over the world throughout history. The religous have deluded and cretinized the population to accept their power systems and their positions in it. Religion has traditionally been an anti-people ideology which conceives people as sinful, willful and above all disobedient to the Devine and earthly authority people are supposed to obey.

That 80% of the US people give lipservice to the delusions of religion is simply part of the overall political and ideological false consciousness of the population, since a non-corporate political party is not permitted in the political arena in the US power system.

Morley, L.A.

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One of the above writers in reply to my asking permission to post comments says: “Sure, use it anyway you want. I’m surprised you want to. I tend to comment on CounterPunch and Z- net articles to clarify my thinking. I don’t know what I think unless I read what I write. You are only the second person out of many who is actually interested in the topic s/he is writing about. I don’t think Americans are interested in ideas. Certainly academics aren’t, they’re too busy doing research.”

So I’ll reply with an idea. In evaluating widespread belief in the virgin birth of Jesus, do we allow for a religious mode of belief? On this question, I think fundamentalists (of the right) and atheists (of the left) speak with a solid front: no such thing as a religious mode of belief. But I think King, following Alain Locke (whether explicitly or not I don’t know) certainly worked with a religious mode of belief that neither atheists nor fundamentalists would be able to share. In this way, either one can speak of faith as a mode of experience or most likely one is not a religious leftist of any sort, whether Christian, Muslim, or Buddhist. There is an art to this mode of belief, but again, you’d have to have a certain view of art to grasp its essential nature. We’re not talking home deco here, although William James does allow the home deco religionists their place as the “happy minded” sort in his Varieties.

No Lip Service to Nonviolence Here

By Greg Moses

ILCA Online / CounterPunch / Dissident Voice

All religions, said Simone de Beauvoir, have “embarrassing flexibility on a basis of rigid concepts.” Practitioners and believers who swear to core principles find themselves fighting each other from opposite extremes of the political spectrum.

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/debeauv2.htm

At the time she said it, in the second chapter of The Second Sex, Beauvoir had three great religions in mind: Christianity, Marxism, and Psychoanalysis. In each case there were right wingers and left wingers then, and in each case there are right and left wingers still.

Today, as we blow out 76 candles to celebrate the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr., I am thinking that in a nation where 79 percent of the people believe in the virgin birth of Jesus, there is no good reason not to imagine the possibility of a revived and renewed Christian left.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6650997/site/newsweek/

My thoughts today are drawn to fresh reflections on the New Year’s day activism of Chicago trainees for Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT), who challenged a toy store on the question of marketing violent video games. The activists are training to go to places like Hebron, Colombia, Iraq, and Grassy Narrows, Ontario, where epidemics of violence rip through bodies and forests alike.

But the CPT action is less than half of what’s on my mind this morning. I’m more concerned about what happens in a country that is 80 percent Christian when left activists refuse to pay attention to the Christian left, simply because it is Christian. In terms of hardball shrewdness, if nothing else, a leftist rejection of the Christian left in America is a certified guarantee of defeat.

As King once warned bourgeois America that we must not be afraid to say that Du Bois was a Communist, so we might warn the American left: we must not be afraid to remember that King was a Christian.

Paco Michelson, a CPT trainee from Huntington, Indiana, tells me by telephone that he has played “all the games” that he was protesting against on New Year’s Day. He was the one who pretended to play video games upon a coffin, as activists read the names of Americans and Iraqis killed in war.

“I still think the games are fun,” says Michelson. But as a matter of social conscience, he also thinks it would be better if these killing games, rated M for Mature and singled out for violent content, were not sold as toys.

Michelson understands how the image of Christian inspectors is bound to make folks wary. What CPT did in Chicago, taking things off shelves, looks a lot like censorship. But on this birthday of King, our great national icon of nonviolence, we have to demand an answer to the question: so what are we doing about our cultural addictions to violence? especially as the consequences of that sickness are so clearly played out in the body counts of Iraq?

“It’s a conflicting issue for Americans, our addiction to violence,” says Michelson. “I don’t think it’s a very popular thing to think about.” He wrote the CPT press release that claimed a “direct connection between ongoing violence in the Middle East and the impact of violent toys on children.”

Amy Knickrehm served as emcee for the street theater, orchestrating readers who called off the names of people killed: three Iraqis for every American. Knickrehm explains that the ratio of Iraqi to American casualties of war is actually closer to a hundred to one, but the group wanted to cover the names of Illinois natives killed, and if they had read 100 Iraqi names each time, it would have been a very long day.

Although Knickrehm has many friends who play the video games, and although she sees no effects that the games have on her friends, she thinks that keeping the more violent games away from kids is something that her friends would support.

Seven years ago, Knickrehm joined one of the peace churches, the Church of the Brethren, partly because she kept seeing the red baseball caps on the heads of Brethren activists at Chicago street actions. For peace churches such as The Brethren, Anabaptists, Mennonites, or Quakers, a commitment to pacifism goes back to the time of Menno Simons (1536-1561) for whom the Mennonites are named. But that is another story.

What’s crucial for today, King’s birthday, is a reminder to the American left that there are some Christians who have been persistently organized against war for more than 400 years, and they have often been as isolated as they were two weeks ago when they asked a toy store to stop selling war games to children.

When the living King talks about nonviolence, he has a radical and comprehensive vision about a global way of life. For King, the education of our children is seamlessly connected to the violence of our war zones. Toy stores are socially and morally intertwined with Falluja and Hebron. And King often expresses that vision in the language of his Christian faith.

Today, on his birthday, as we survey the eighty percent of Americans who subscribe to Christian concepts, the left cannot afford to ignore those who have never just paid lip service to King.