By pattrice | 25th Dec 2008 | Filed under
EssayBy pattrice jones
Written on Christmas Day in 2002, this essay has been widely published and reprinted.
As the Christians gather to celebrate the birth of the founder of their religion, I find myself asking a question that I wish Christians would ask themselves: Who would Jesus kill?
Lately many Christians have been using the simple question, “What would Jesus do?” to help them make ethical judgments that are consistent with their religious beliefs. This holiday season, as Americans discuss the prospect of war over dinner tables groaning with factory farmed meat, the most apt variant of “What would Jesus do?” is: Who would Jesus kill?
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By pattrice | 27th Nov 2008 | Filed under
FeatureGloating and Gluttony Then and Now
by pattrice jones
Originally published 2004 on various IndyMedia sites.
Revises 2003 essay originally published by Press Action.
Thanksgiving, 2003 — Bush the executioner grins and pardons a turkey before flying to Iraq. He’s earned that self-satisfied smirk. All over his United States, citizens celebrate conquest over platters of flesh. Too full of turkey to think and too full of themselves to question, they let out their belts and watch TV. Tomorrow they go shopping!
November, 2004 – Homophobia hands GWB four more years. Seizing the day, he orders his Conquistadors to take Falluja. US troops blockade the city, announcing that any man under 45 who remains will be presumed hostile and that no man under 45 will be permitted to leave. Any man having the audacity to have been born in a city the Americans want to occupy is about to discover what the original inhabitants of the Americas learned long ago.
***
“Body parts are everywhere!” That’s what one US soldier had to say about the saddest city in Iraq, according to an AFP report. It’s also an apt description of the state of US dinner tables during the festival of gloating and gluttony known as Thanksgiving.
This year, the United States celebrates Thanksgiving in the wake of the taking of Falluja. Waving “drumsticks” and fighting for “wishbones,” complacent Christians will gorge themselves without fear, safe from the threats of gay marriage and Iraqi self-determination. Stuffing themselves beyond satiation, they and their children will partake of the proud Puritanical tradition of ruthless, reckless expansion.
Colonization is nothing to crow about. When Columbus blundered into a hemisphere populated by 70-100 million people and countless unique species of flora and fauna, he set into motion a chain reaction of repression and rebellion that continues to this day.
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pattrice jones
Originally published in the Summer 2005 issue of Impact Press.
Review of The Voltairine de Cleyre Reader edited by A.J. Brigati (AK Press)
Quick — name two 19th century female anarchists. If you got stuck after Emma Goldman, then it’s time for you to meet Voltairine de Cleyre. Born into poverty in Michigan in 1866, converted to anarchism by the 1887 execution of the Haymarket martyrs, and active as a popular speaker and writer from the 1890s until her premature death in 1912, Voltairine de Cleyre was called by Emma Goldman “the most gifted and brilliant anarchist woman America ever produced.”
Like Goldman, de Cleyre condemned the objectification and exploitation of women with the same urgency with which she challenged the legitimacy of governments. Speaking with more force and honesty than many self-proclaimed feminists manage to muster today, de Cleyre dared to denounce marriage laws that permit husbands to rape their wives as “sex slavery.”
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by pattrice jones
Originally published in Fall 2005 issue of Impact Press.
Review of War Made Easy by Norman Solomon
“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”
So goes the old saying. But when it comes to war, we’ve been fooled over and over again, with the same tricks serving the same purposes every time.
When does credulity become complicity? That’s the question that arises for me after reading Norman Solomon’s War Made Easy.
People in the United States like to think of themselves as peaceful and friendly lovers of liberty. Despite that innocent and pacific national self-image, the USA always seems seems to be fighting somebody, often by means of torture and treachery. In my lifetime, the United States has invaded Afghanistan, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Iraq, and Panama; bombed civilians in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Iraq, Kosovo, Lebanon, and Vietnam; and sponsored reactionary paramilitary violence in Afghanistan, Angola, Cuba, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Nicaragua and heaven-only-knows where else.
How is it that peace-loving people are so frequently inspired to march to war?
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