What To do When You See Your Nation Going Fascist?

Gary G. Kohls, MD: 'What would you do if you saw your nation going fascist?'
Date: Tuesday, March 28 @ 10:05:52 EST
Topic: Commander-In-Thief


Gary G. Kohls, MD, Online Journal

Okay, so you call yourself a patriot. But what exactly do you think that word means?

Is it the patriotism that says, "My country, right or wrong?" Is it the patriotism that says, Might makes right? Is it the patriotism of Samuel Johnson who defined it as "the last refuge of the scoundrel?"

Is it the patriotism of the 16th century Protestant "reformers" who believed that every leader of any "Christian" nation was ordained by God, no matter how much that leader promoted the satanic mass slaughter of fellow children of God, and, therefore, Christians were to be unconditionally obedient to that leader? (See Psalm 137.)

Or are you the type of patriot that loves your country so much that you won't let tyrants or the super-rich or the mega-corporations take it over out of their greed for more power and wealth? Are you the type of patriot that is willing to have a lover's quarrel with your beloved country that may be temporarily under the control of those that are close to being indicted as international war criminals?



In order to find out which type of patriot you might be, you should read the following "hypothetical" situation; and then you can judge for yourself.

Suppose you are a white, God-fearing, church-going citizen in a country that prided itself on its inventiveness, its literacy, its art, its culture, its glory in past wars and its superpower status, and suppose you saw your democratic institutions and the human rights of your neighbors being degraded by the lawmakers of your nation.

Say that you saw a bunch of powerful legislators and corporations, who lied consistently to enrich themselves and who were obsessed with the desire to wage aggressive war. Say that they started to grab control of our country's legislature, judiciary and military. Say these cunning politicians, with the support of ruthless financiers, gained control of the highest office in the land -- without winning the majority vote in any fair election -- and started taking away, in rapid succession, the rights of many of its minority citizens, declaring left-wing peacemakers traitors, purging anti-fascists and other resistance groups from their positions of power, eviscerating its democratic institutions, silencing the "liberal" sectors of the press, working to weaken and eventually violently destroy all political opposition, censoring or usurping the open-minded media and marginalizing and silencing the artists, the poets, the writers and the creative thinkers.

You would be in 1930s Germany and the tyrants would have been Adolf Hitler's cunning henchmen. And what would you have done in that situation?

If you were an average white, affluent, employed citizen, with all the privilege and power granted to you by that majority status, you would have said virtually nothing in opposition, even as the rights of the Nazis targeted minority groups were legally being taken away, disappearing into the gulag of prison and mental institutions.

As an average Bible-believing Christian, you would probably have obeyed your German war-supporting bishops or pastors, almost all of whom had pledged a solemn oath of loyalty to the Fuhrer, duty-bound to follow him instead of their "Lord and Savior," the nonviolent Jesus of Nazareth. Because of an out-of-context single passage in the Epistle to the Romans you, as an obedient German Christian would have been inclined to obey St. Paul and therefore the existing rulers in Berlin in the time of crisis rather than courageously and faithfully following Jesus, who forbade homicidal violence, said that all are equal in the eyes of God and that the followers should love -- instead of kill -- their enemies.

If you were an average white lawyer, physician or psychiatrist, you would have joined the Nazi Party, for doing otherwise would have jeopardized your practice. And you would have kept your mouth shut when witnessing the anguish of your Jewish, Slavic, Gypsy, socialist, liberal, or gay clients as they were forced to march toward -- and disappear into -- the concentrations camps and gas chambers.

But the question remains -- would you have been a good patriot? Or would you have been on the wrong side of justice by being obedient to the Fuhrer ("Leader") and to the cloth flag (swastika) that symbolized his rule?

Knowing that any German citizen seen helping the "enemies of the state" was guilty of treason, on whose side would any of us have stood? Would we have taken the side of the innocents -- those oppressed or outcast -- or would we have stood with the fascists?

Knowing that revering the flag was regarded as a crucial act of patriotism would we have saluted along with the victimizers or would we have resisted?

On whose side would we have been, the freedom-fighting groups (labeled "terrorists" by the State) who were courageously and patriotically trying to save their beloved nation from fascism, or would we have been on the "safe" side with the militarists and corporatists and right-wing politicians who looked like they were going to be the winners? Our answer will reveal our politics -- and our theology.

Now fast forward to America 2006 . . . but that shouldn't be necessary, for the point has been made.

Dr. Kohls is a Duluth, Minn., physician and a peace and justice activist who has an aversion to human slaughter, for any reason, in times of war or in times of "peace." He is also a member of the faith-based peace organization, Every Church A Peace Church.

Copyright (c) 2006 Online Journal

Source: Online Journal
http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_638.shtml

The URL for this story is:
http://www.SmirkingChimp.com/article.php?sid=25446

US Marines Slaughter Entire Town in Iraq

Iraqi Video Details End of Alleged Attack By BASSEM MROUE, Associated Press Writer

A videotape taken by an Iraqi shows the aftermath of an alleged attack by U.S. troops on civilians in their homes in a western town last November: a blood-smeared bedroom floor and bits of what appear to be human flesh and bullet holes on the walls.

An Iraqi human rights group condemned the bloodshed in the town of Haditha, saying Tuesday that it could be "one of dozens of incidents that were not revealed."

The video, obtained by Time magazine and repeatedly aired by Arab televisions throughout the day, also showed bodies of women and children in plastic bags on the floor of what appeared to be a morgue. Men were seen standing in the middle of bodies, some of which were covered with blankets before being placed in a pickup truck.

The images were broadcast a day after residents of Haditha, 140 miles west of Baghdad, told The Associated Press that American troops entered homes and shot dead 15 members of two families, including a 3-year-old girl, after a roadside bomb killed a U.S. Marine.

Last week, the U.S. military announced that a dozen Marines are under investigation for possible war crimes in the Nov. 19 incident, which left at least 23 Iraqis dead in addition to the Marine.

Talal al-Zuhairi, who heads the Baghdad Center for Human Rights, said his organization feared the troops, if convicted, will not be punished severely enough.

"This incident shows that the forces are committing, every now and then, operations that harm civilians," al-Zuhairi told The Associated Press.

"What we are worried about today ... (is that) a U.S. soldier may be discharged from the military or jailed for two years," said al-Zuhairi. "This would in no way be sufficient punishment for wiping out a whole family or killing of a large number of people through an unjustifiable act."

The allegations against the Marines were first brought forward by Time, though the magazine noted that the available evidence did not prove conclusively that the Marines deliberately killed innocents.

The magazine said it obtained the video, taken by a Haditha journalism student inside the houses and local morgue, two months ago.

A U.S. military statement in November had described the incident as an ambush on a joint U.S.-Iraqi patrol that left 15 civilians, eight insurgents and a U.S. Marine dead in the bombing and a subsequent firefight. That statement said the 15 civilians were killed by the blast, a claim residents denied.

The residents said the only shooting done after the bombing was by U.S. forces.

Al-Zuhairi called on the Iraqi government to investigate.

"We hope that this scandal will produce a reaction among Iraq's politicians. They should review their calculations in dealing with American troops and take into consideration that deadly mistakes are committed against Iraqis," al-Zuhairi said.

Copyright © 2006 The Associated Press.

Here I Sit With Oxygen Tube in my Nose, etc

As I told you here, a couple weeks ago shortness of breath combined with a heart attack put me in Jane Phillips Medical Center in Bartlesville, OK for several days. Since getting out, although I have felt a little better, I am still plagued with a shortness of breath, an inability to rest in bed without my breathing getting more labored, and in general just a very painful very mixed up life style. No quality of life as the saying goes. I went over to Dr. Walker, my physician at MPG today, and he laid down some very definite laws for me to follow, at least for the duration: I have a nebulizer and something similar to (but stronger than) albuterol to be used several times daily.

Needless to say, as much as I dislike it, smoking cigarettes is out of the question. Tonight has to be the lat night for those. This is the part that really frightens me ... Everyone says I will get better eventually, but I just dunno about it. I also have plastic oxygen tubes stuck in my nose, but if all goes according to schedule, the first two or three days with no cigarettes will be the hardest, and everyone says tonight I will get the best night's sleep I have had in weeks, without having to wake up an hour after I fell asleep gasping for air.

Please ... keep me in your thoughts over the next couple weeks at least.

PAT

Convicted Murderer Becomes Episcopal Priest in California

My topic today is an illustration of how 'penitentiaries' can and should be operated in the United States if only the 'Corrections Industry' would allow it to happen ...


By phone from prison, James Tramel preaches at a Berkeley church. The convicted murderer has been ordained and hopes to be paroled.

By Steve Chawkins, Times Staff Writer
March 4, 2006

VACAVILLE, Calif. — Four times a year, the Rev. James Tramel preaches via collect call to Berkeley's Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd.

"The way of Jesus is radically inclusive," he said one morning last summer. "The grace of God as manifest in Jesus Christ is a grand love that embraces sinners, outcasts and strangers."

Beeps from taping equipment punctuated his oration. Every few minutes, a recorded voice said: "You are on the phone with an inmate at Solano State Prison."

Good Shepherd has offered him a job as assistant pastor, but there is a good chance that Tramel will not be showing up for work soon. Tramel, believed by many church officials to be the only U.S. inmate ever ordained as an Episcopal priest, is a convicted murderer.

The state Board of Prison Terms in 2004 recommended that Tramel, by then an Episcopal deacon, be paroled. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger reversed the board, saying that Tramel still posed a danger to the community.

By last October, Tramel had been ordained a priest, and the parole board again recommended his release. The governor must rule by March 24.

For Schwarzenegger, who has stressed the aim of rehabilitation in the prison system, the case poses difficult questions: How can redemption be measured? If becoming a priest in prison isn't a sign of rehabilitation, then what is?

Tramel, 38, once was the youngest prisoner in San Quentin.

He and a friend were convicted of killing a homeless man in Santa Barbara — a crime so infamous locally that homeless activists wore lapel pins with the victim's dying words: "No, my friend, no!"

In 1985, Tramel and David Kurtzman, both 17, were students at Northwestern Preparatory School, a school that sent many graduates on to the military academies. Tramel was the son of a former Green Beret and had been provisionally accepted at the Air Force Academy. Kurtzman was an Eagle Scout who aimed to attend the U.S. Naval Academy.

One August night, members of a Latino gang had gotten into a confrontation with some of their classmates. The next night, Tramel and Kurtzman led a group that went out looking for the gang. According to his own account, Tramel egged on his friends, instructing them in martial arts moves. When Kurtzman wanted to bring along the 6-inch folding military knife he would sharpen during idle moments in the dorm, Tramel readily agreed.

After hours on the prowl, the band of avenging angels came down to just Tramel and Kurtzman, clad all in black.

They found no gang members, but returning to school for their 1 a.m. curfew, they cut through Alameda Park, where music wafted from a radio beside a man bunking down in the gazebo.

For a brief time, the pair chatted with him. The homeless man was Michael Stephenson, 29. He was not Latino. Tucked inside his sleeping bag, he was anything but hostile. As Tramel leaned against a railing with his back to Stephenson, they talked about the cold weather.

"Several seconds later, I heard Michael say, 'No, my friend,' and then I heard what sounded like coughing," Tramel wrote in an account for his 2005 parole hearing.

"When I turned around, Michael was on his hands and knees, and Kurtzman was leaning over him. Then Michael suddenly collapsed onto his side, I saw the knife in Kurtzman's hand, and before I could say or do anything, I saw Kurtzman cut Michael's throat. My body froze in horror, and I gasped, 'Dave, stop!' Kurtzman looked up at me with a crazed look in his eyes, and he was trembling."

Kurtzman gave an account at his trial that mirrored Tramel's. Earlier, he told investigators that killing Stephenson was like slaughtering a pig. Kurtzman stabbed him 17 times.

Back at the dorm, the two swore their pals to secrecy, and Tramel promised a skeptic $50 if their story turned out to be a hoax. Their disbelieving friends visited the park later that morning and called police.

Tramel's first trial ended in a hung jury. He was convicted of second-degree murder in the second. Both he and Kurtzman received sentences of 15 years to life.

"The prosecutor made a good analogy at my trial," he told the parole board in October. "Kurtzman was a gun that I had loaded and cocked…. That makes me culpable for what Kurtzman did; that makes me responsible for Michael's death."

By Tramel's account, it was another death that changed his life.

In August 1993, he was working in the Solano prison hospital, sitting up with an inmate suffering from stomach cancer. The man talked about how much he wanted to see his kids.

"At around 1 a.m., the nurse told me his lungs were filling with fluid and he was going to die," Tramel recalled.

The two talked through the night of life and death.

"With really still eyes, he looked at me and said, 'James, what do you believe?' "

"I took a deep breath," Tramel said, "and told him what I'd been afraid for some time to claim — that Jesus is the son of God and had died for our sins, and loved us immensely and was ready to forgive us."

Tramel held the inmate's hand. He wasn't a priest then, or even a deacon, but he improvised a baptism. Then the man died.

"In that space," Tramel said, "there was a very tangible holy presence."

At his parole hearing the next year, he said that he wanted to enter the Episcopal ministry — an aim requiring years of study, extensive psychological testing and rigorous interviews. Skeptical, officials told him to try earning a college degree first.

By 1998, he obtained a bachelor's degree in business from Thomas Edison State College in Trenton, N.J. By a vote of the faculty, he was admitted to Church Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley, one of 11 Episcopal seminaries in the U.S.

"Any skepticism I may have had dissolved," said the Rev. Louis Weil, a liturgical-studies scholar who became Tramel's faculty advisor and now describes him as "like a son to me in many ways."

Over the next five years, Weil and other faculty members spent hours instructing Tramel by phone. Students taped lectures, paid for Tramel's books and drove to Vacaville to help him with his studies. Without regular access to a computer, he wrote his 85-page master's thesis sitting on his prison cot. He dedicated it to Michael Stephenson.

He focused his thesis on the redemption of convicts, and how far U.S. prisons had veered from their religious roots. "I am in the unique position," he noted dryly in his paper, "to offer an analysis informed by 17-plus years of firsthand, empirical evidence."

[Editor's Note: Indeed, the original name of such places was 'penitentiary' and they were intended as places to learn about and practice penitence. How far we have strayed from that original goal; no longer does the 'corrections industry' in the United States even make any pretense at reforming the lives of inmates. In fact, for the survival of the 'industry' it is essential that there be a lot of repeat offenders, a condition they almost assure by the way inmates in custody are dealt with. PAT]

A fellow student, Stephanie Green, started visiting him in her second semester. Their explorations of Augustinian metaphysics soon evolved into something else entirely. On Christmas Day in 2000, they were engaged, and they plan to marry if Tramel is released.

"I told myself this was crazy," said Green, 38, who was ordained a priest last year and is pursuing a doctorate in medieval studies. "I'm from Iowa and I went to Bryn Mawr, and a relationship with an inmate was just not part of the picture."

From early on, she said, Tramel wanted her to know as much as she could about his crime, sending her transcripts of parole hearings, psychological reports, documents on his prison behavior.

"This was a terrible, terrible thing he was working through," she said, "something he needed to fix and incorporate into the fabric of his being, and be responsible to it."

Tramel looked for redemption where others have long sought it. He said he pored over the parable of the prodigal son. He pondered the life of the Apostle Paul, who, he pointed out, instigated a murder when he was still "among sinners, the foremost."

Last June, Episcopal Bishop William Swing, whose diocese spans the Bay Area, conducted the ordination of Inmate D-55752.

No sacramental wine was allowed inside the penitentiary, so a delegation of high-ranking clerics made do with grape soda from a vending machine. The celebrants of Tramel's rise from predator to priest included his fiancée, his parents, his friends from the seminary, a number of inmates and a few of their wives.

At one point, the bishop asked the ritual question about whether any "impediment or crime" should disqualify the candidate. He was answered with the customary silence.

"It was a powerful silence," Swing recalled. "It was quite a poignant silence."


Tramel has told parole officials that he has led his life to honor Stephenson's memory. He has sent letters of contrition to Stephenson's relatives, who refuse to read them.

"A change of heart on their part would be an act of grace," he said in a recent interview. "But I have absolutely no entitlement to their forgiveness."

The prosecutors who put him away are convinced that Tramel should go free. A prosecutor in Santa Barbara County for 35 years, Assistant Dist. Atty. Patrick McKinley has seen his share of phony jailhouse conversions but feels confident about Tramel's. "I admit the possibility, theoretically, that it's all a sham, but I would bet everything except my life that it isn't," McKinley said. "I don't think you can fake that for close to 20 years."

The victim's family is unimpressed.

His father, Edward Stephenson of Newport Beach, has attended numerous hearings to oppose Tramel's parole. The man he sardonically calls "this Christian missionary prisoner" should preach all he wants — but only behind bars, he has told officials.

Bernice Bosheff, Michael Stephenson's aunt, has also opposed Tramel's release.

"Tramel is prison-smart," she said from her Riverside County home. "He knows just what to say, when to say it, and who to say it to. He's taken in the Episcopal diocese — and the D.A. is in the same corner."

Whether Tramel has found God is irrelevant, Bosheff said: "It's not for me to know. But I wouldn't go to his church. This man is going to offer me Communion and tell me that my sins are forgiven? I don't think so."

[Editor's Note: But one thing Ms. Bosheff is overlooking is that Tramel is not, or will not be 'forgiving sins on his own'. He will be speaking as a servant of God, the same as my priest or your priest. Should any priest's personal imperfections or sins be held against him? His personals sins are between him and God ... PAT]

At Solano, Tramel assists at services for several dozen Episcopalians. To keep inmates from amassing too much authority, prison rules forbid them to act as full-fledged clergymen.

One cold morning in January, Tramel helped a visiting deacon celebrate the feast of the Epiphany. The service in the cinder-block chapel of Complex A, Facility 3 was delayed three hours so guards could make sure none of the more than 6,000 inmates had slipped away in the fog.

In interviews, a number of inmates spoke of Tramel praying with them in hard times.

"He's very much one of us," said Michael Ward, a legally blind 63-year-old lifer who plays piano at Sunday services.

Last December, Tramel renewed the marriage vows of an inmate and his desperately ill wife. After conferring with his bishop, Tramel performed the ceremony in a prison visiting area for Steve Orthel, 46, and his wife, Sherry, 56.

"Having him do it made it more personal," Orthel said. "It brought the church closer to us."

The governor's rejection of Tramel's parole in 2004 prompted an angry sermon the next day from Bishop Swing. It was Easter Sunday.

"Governors of California are good at executions," Swing said from the pulpit at San Francisco's Grace Cathedral. "Governors of California are 90-pound moral weaklings when it comes to the restoration of human beings."

Since taking office in 2003, Schwarzenegger has freed about one-third of the inmates up for parole, including more than 100 convicted of murder. His predecessor, Gray Davis, allowed parole for just eight of 294 prisoners.

In his rejection letter, Schwarzenegger pointed to the crime's random brutality.

The governor also cited what he thought was Tramel's spotty record in prison, alluding to alleged escape attempts from the California Youth Authority, two minor infractions at Solano, and fights in 1990 and 1999.

However, corrections officials long before had concluded that Tramel had nothing to do with any alleged escape attempts. Tramel and other inmates say he was defending himself in the fights, although that still violates prison rules. The other violations were for being 15 minutes late to work.

The governor bases his parole decisions largely on reports from a team of staff attorneys headed by his legal affairs secretary. Andrea Hoch has held that job since October.

A spokeswoman for the governor declined to comment on what Hoch's panel might recommend.

Tramel's plans for a post-parole life — marriage, studying, serving a congregation — are detailed in a document with more than 190 glowing blurbs from guards and counselors, members of Good Shepherd and seminary instructors.

"I know that we Christians can sometimes be dreamy idealists, but as a Calvinist I think I am quite realistic about human sinfulness," wrote Don Compier, a former professor at Tramel's seminary. "I'm not easily fooled. James has passed my test."

Copyright 2006 Los Angeles Times

Discuss this topic, prison reform in our Social Issues IRC Forum

A Heart Attack Takes Me Off Line a Few Days

Late on the evening of February 24 -- a couple hours after posting my previous message discussing 'fraud' in the gay rights movement from the perspective of am 'ex-gay', very anti-gay writer dealing with 'the writers were a cover for the porn', I had a very bad experience of my own. About 4 AM Saturday morning (2/25) I experienced some severe shortness of breath. Raymond called for an ambulance, I was carted off in the wagon to Mercy Hospital here in Independence. I fell unconscious on the way; woke up naked on an examining table in examining stall 3 in the Emergency Room. (If you have not yet read that essay, please do so, right below this note.)

Apparently, my return to consciousness caused some body motions on my part which in turn triggered whatever it is the ER people monitor; they saw/heard whatever and came running in to my stall. They found me conscious, albiet confused; I tried to explain abou my shortness of breath, but the doctors said not only that but you also suffered a heart attack on the way over. . Well! They said I would have to go to Jane Phillips Medical Center in Bartlesville, the closest cardiac
place. Jane Phillips is 45 miles away, and is a good heart place.

I was in the hospital five days, Saturday through the following Thursday. They put a 'stent' in my heart, and re-routed several blood vessles which were plugged up. I was awake the whole time, in a procedure which took about an hour, which is just amazing. The Thursday following -- six days later -- I was permitted to come back home, albiet sort of sore and groggy. Now, about a week since I got back home, I am starting to feel like my old self, at least a little. That's me, then staunch old Episcopalian whose priest (Fr. Gerry Eycheson) just happens to coincidentally be the chaplain at Mercy Hospital. I remember very well that early Saturday morning when one of the ER workers (who recognized me) came by and said "do you want to have (Father) Gerry come around to see you?". I said yes, thinking at that time I might not even live the day out, as horrid as I felt, with pain, etc.

He got there five minutes or so later, I thought maybe I should have last rites given, that's how awful I felt. Anyway, I obviously lived to see another day, and now am thinking, maybe that heart attack was God striking me down or punishing me for my commentary on ex-gays earlier the same day as shown here on the February 24 entry.

PAT