home archives last week feedback Rolla Peace News February 8, 2022 |
Dear Friends:Editor's notes:In this newsletter is: 1. NOON VIGIL FOR PEACE: THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2022 2. THE MISFIT MATHEMATICIAN (Tom's column, http://tomsager.org)           a) From Our Readers: Hermann Goering           b) In Defense of Whoopi Goldberg 1. NOON VIGIL FOR PEACE: THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2022 We vigil for peace in front of the Rolla Post Office, THIS THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 10, FROM NOON TO 1:00 PM (and most subsequent Thursdays until Peace is established). Please join us this Thursday in saying NO MORE WARS — LET PEACE PREVAIL. The temperature is predicted to be around 40. If you do not feel comfortable joining us in front of the Post Office, please consider driving by and showing your support for our message by honking your horn and flashing a peace sign. Note 1: Since there are so few of us, generally 2 or 3, no need to cancel; but let's maintain social distancing. Note 2: In case of inclement weather, vigils may be canceled or terminated early. Note 3: This Thursday we will complete 15 years of weekly vigils for Peace at the Rolla Post Office. 2. THE MISFIT MATHEMATICIAN (Tom's column, http://tomsager.org)           a) From Our Readers: Hermann Goering           b) In Defense of Whoopi Goldberg From Our Readers: Hermann Goering A reader notes that the Hermann Goering quote I used last week is from an interview by Dr. Gustave Gilbert during the Nuremberg trials. Our reader writes: My response: This brings to mind a line from Solomon Song in the Threepenny Opera by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill: “I thought that brains were good — guess not.”“Gustave Gilbert was principal psychologist at Nuremberg. He also wrote a book containing psychological profiles of all the main Nazi defendants, Nuremberg Diary. All of them tested out very high in IQ, and even the abominable Julius Streicher was decidedly above average. So despised was Streicher, the other Nazi accused even refused to sit at the same table with him at lunchtime. Pretty interesting book, I've read it twice” In Defense of Whoopi Goldberg In this short essay, I am going to try to give Whoopi Goldberg a fair hearing, something that, to my knowledge, no one else has done.“At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, ... Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing.” First, what did she say that upset the “keepers of truth” and “guardians of beauty” so terribly? In speaking of the Holocaust, she opined: Why should this opinion upset people so much? The part about “man's inhumanity to man” hasn't (and in my opinion shouldn't) cause much controversy. However, the part about race was deemed “wrong and hurtful” by ABC president, Kim Godwin and Ms. Goldberg was forced to apologize and then suspended for two weeks.“The Holocaust isn't about race. It's not about race. It's about man's inhumanity to man.” So what is race anyway? Quoting from the abstract of an extensive article on Wikipedia: So, what have we here? Ms. Goldberg is being castigated for saying the Holocaust isn't about a term that has been deemed by many as naive, simplistic, ambiguous, and with no inherent physical or biological meaning; and indeed, with no universally accepted meaning whatsoever.“A race is a categorization of humans based on shared physical or social qualities into groups generally viewed as distinct within a given society.” This could have led to a serious discussion of race. It could have led to a serious discussion of the Holocaust and its place in history. Instead, Ms. Goldberg has been “silenced with surprising effectiveness” by the guardians of the “prevailing orthodoxy” (at least for now). ABC president Kim Godwin arrogantly told Ms. Goldberg “to take time to reflect and learn about the impact of [your] comments,” while doing everything possible to ensure that nobody learns anything from Ms. Goldberg's comments. Sven Lindqvist, In his inquiry into racism, Exterminate All The Brutes, gives us numerous examples of how Europeans used the concept of race to justify the extermination of whole populations, such as the pre-European Tasmanians. Here's one example from Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man (1871) Lindqvist also has much to say about the Holocaust. Here are a few short quotes:“At some future period not very distant as measured in centuries, the civilized races of man [meaning Europeans] will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races [meaning Africans, Asians, Americans and Australians].” And here we come to why the “keepers of truth” and “guardians of beauty” were so enraged by Whoopi Goldberg's comments:“Europe's destruction of the ‘inferior races’ of four continents prepared the ground for Hitler's destruction of six million Jews in Europe.” If we were to really discuss the Holocaust in a way in which even a “genuinely unfashionable opinion” is “given a fair hearing,” we might have to face our own complicity in the Holocaust. We might have to answer questions like: How does the extermination of 90 to 95% of the estimated 10 to 15 million pre-Colombian inhabitants of North America differ from the Holocaust? How does the trans-Atlantic slave trade in which millions died before even reaching the Americas differ from the Holocaust? How does the deliberate destruction of Iraq's ability to provide potable water, which led to the death of 5,000 Iraqi children each month for years differ from the Holocaust? Lindqvist ends his inquiry with this short paragraph: Whoopi Goldberg had the courage to try to understand and draw conclusions. Perhaps the rest of us can learn to be as courageous as Ms. Goldberg.“You already know that. So do I. It is not knowledge we lack. What is missing is the courage to understand what we know and draw conclusions.” I am reading rumors that Ms. Goldberg will be quitting The View. I hope she does. She can do much better than work for ABC. She certainly didn't deserve any of this ill-treatment. Perhaps, Ms. Goldberg will start her own show — one in which even a “genuinely unfashionable opinion” is “given a fair hearing.” Note: the phrase “you keepers of truth, you guardians of beauty” is from the Leonard Cohen song, A Singer Must Die.Wage peace, Tom yushasager (at) yahoo.com  |