Thank You, Howard Zinn, for being there during the civil rights movement, for teaching at Spelman, for walking the picket lines, and for inspiring such students as Alice Walker and Marian Wright Edelman.
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Howard Zinn, my hero, teacher, and friend died of a heart attack on Wednesday at the age of 87. With his death, we lose a man who did nothing less than rewrite the narrative of the United States. We lose a historian who also made history.
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To see a dramatic reading on “COURAGEOUS MARGARET SANGER” from Meg’s book “Courageous Women”, click here.
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Do atheists need humanist chaplains if they have a crisis? It seems the demand is growing for non-religious chaplaincy services, but whether we can afford them is another matter
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I find the article by Jende Huang in the HNN (1/13/10) shocking, to put it mildly, for many reasons.
His claim that Afghanistan and Iraq were “liberated” goes to the heart of his delusion that he is standing up for “solidarity with the oppressed” and seeking “the spread of Enlightenment values.”
The U.S. invasion of Iraq, to rid the country of one Saddam Hussein and his two sons (a total of three people), has been the cause of over one million Iraqi deaths (AFP 2008 ). The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan has left countless dead and maimed. Is this what Huang means by liberation? Where do these deaths of innocent people fit in the context of the Enlightenment values and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) that Huang is talking about?
Huang can’t get beyond the simplistic right/left dichotomy. It’s as if there is nothing in the middle. This goes along with his simplistic war/peace dichotomy and his UDHR/cultural relativist dichotomy.
People like Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela, and Mohandas Gandhi, who move mountains through peaceful means, should be a great example for Huang to learn from. But then perhaps he sees them as people on the left, who advocated peace, and who were cultural relativists?
He talks about liberating the young women in Afghanistan from the Taliban. I wonder if he knows that the women in Saudi Arabia, in Kuwait, in Somalia, and many other countries are being treated as badly as the women in Afghanistan under the Taliban. He talks about Saddam Hussein’s abuses. I wonder if he knows that there are many other countries in that region with dictators propped up by the United States who abuse their citizens. I wonder if he thinks we should also attack these countries to “liberate” their women and their citizens. This is the male-chauvinistic, self-righteous, and colonialist attitude of the 21st century advocates of “fundamentalist love” that comes through a machine gun or a bomb. It’s an oxymoronic way of thinking about liberation through killing people on humanitarian grounds.
He asks “Does my desire to see the liberation of Afghanistan and Iraq make me an adherent of militarism and a lover of war?” In my opinion, it does. Also, I may be wrong, but it doesn’t sound like Huang is writing this article while dodging bombs and bullets in Iraq or Afghanistan.
As an American and a person who has her roots in the Middle East, I am disturbed to see real human beings (mothers, fathers, children, brothers, sisters, grandparents, aunts, uncles, friends, husbands, and wives) killed in countries of this region funded by our tax dollars, cheered on by the likes of Huang, under the guise of defending human rights. I think this is nothing but an example of how humans can lack compassion, empathy, and justify just about anything in a shameless self-righteous rant.
In the Humanist Manifesto III, it says, “Humanists long for and strive toward a world of mutual care and concern, free of cruelty and its consequences, where differences are resolved cooperatively without resorting to violence. The joining of individuality with interdependence enriches our lives, encourages us to enrich the lives of others, and inspires hope of attaining peace, justice, and opportunity for all.” Clearly humanism and peace are synonymous. How could one be a humanist and advocate militarism and war?
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Combat rifle sights used by U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan carry references to Bible verses, stoking concerns about whether the inscriptions break a government rule that bars proselytizing by American troops.
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Jonathan Figdor, a Master of Divinity candidate from Harvard Divinity School, talks about his background and why he studied religion rather than more philosophy, what a Humanist Chaplain is and how valuable a Humanist Chaplain can be, and his vision for a Humanist community.
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James Workman, Yale graduate, speechwriter for Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt and Nelson Mandela, and the Palo Alto-born author of a new narrative nonfiction book, Heart of Dryness: How the Last Bushmen Can Help Us Endure the Coming Age of Permanent Drought, will tell the dramatic story of how he traveled to the ends of the earth in arid Africa, spent years following the oldest continuous people, besieged in the Kalahari Desert, absorbed seven secrets of how they thrive under extreme climate flux, and is applying those strategies here in Silicon Valley.
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In the week that two Malawians go on trial for violating anti-gay laws, Daniel Howden finds that their experience is all too common in a continent of legalised homophobia
Erwin van der Borght, the director of Amnesty International’s Africa Programme, says that unlike in the debate over the death penalty, this is not a matter of African leaders telling the public what they want to hear. Whereas many African leaders would in private actually like to abolish the death penalty but bow to public opinion, he believes that their homophobia — and the conviction that homosexuality comes from outside the continent – is genuine.
“We really feel it’s the politicians themselves who are pushing these harsher laws,” he says, pointing to Rwanda where the President, Paul Kagame, appears to be driving new criminal statutes on to the books.
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Religions derive their power and popularity in part from the ethical compass they offer. So why do so many faiths help perpetuate something that most of us regard as profoundly unethical: the oppression of women?
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