Bozosity

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day

Today is a holiday in much of the US, in honor of a man once simultaneously hailed as a prophet and reviled as a public enemy, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and hounded by the FBI with charges of Communism.

John Kennedy said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable." He meant the Communist countries, of course. It turned out to apply to the Civil Rights struggle, where non-violence mostly won out, and even more to Vietnam, where repression escalated to ever more violence. It also threatened to undo many of the gains of the Civil Rights movement by siphoning off money, attention, and will from social programs, among other ills that fell disproportionately on the poor in general and Blacks in particular. Kennedy's statement remains applicable today.

Who were the people making peaceful revolution impossible in Kennedy's time?

The segregationist South was keeping Blacks down, of course, but so were a lot of people up North. Dick Gregory summed it up, saying, "In the South they don't care how close you get, 'long as you don't get too big, and in the North they don't care how big you get, 'long as you don't get too close."

Then of course, the US, the Soviet Union, and their allies fighting the Cold War, made sure that almost every country in the world was under either a Communist or anti-Communist dictatorship. More particularly, the US and its allies vs. North Vietnam and its allies, messed up Vietnam, and then Cambodia, Laos, and other neighboring territories.

This was nothing new, of course. Slavery created violent revolution in many countries, notable Haiti early in the 19th century. France put the new nation under embargo, and so did the United States. The President, George Washington, and the Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson, were both slave owners, with a far greater horror of slave uprisings than sympathy for fellow revolutionaries and fighters for human rights. The US is still at it, blocking development loans to Haiti from the International Development Bank.

There are many other such remnants of repression of peaceful revolution. Hungary and Czechoslovakia tried to reform their respective varieties of Communism, resulting in counter-revolutionary Soviet invasions.

Fighting continues against remnants of repression of social change and human rights, and outright murder, all over the world, and people still live with the damage done in previous centuries. Here are just a few examples.

• Japan took over Korea in 1905, and outlawed the Korean language in 1935. The Japanese have not apologized, and the Koreans have not forgiven.


• England took over Ireland starting in 1170. The violence has not entirely subsided.


• Kurds are not allowed to use their own language in Turkey and Syria.


• Albanians were not allowed to use their own language in Yugoslavia as a whole, or in several of the Yugoslav republics, including Serbia and Macedonia, after Yugoslavia broke up.


• King Leopold of Belgium, once the most hated man in the world, ruled the Belgian Congo as his personal property, under the general rule that Belgian forces could kill anybody who got out of line on the spot. In the 1960s those who had not paid any attention around the world were astonished by the resulting savagery of the Congolese rebellion, which continues in the form of frequent civil war to this day.


• Catholics and Protestants have not gotten over the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, which resulted in the Thirty Years War and innumerable further persecutions, wars, and rebellions.


• Some Muslims are still fighting the Crusaders who taught them an utterly barbaric and lawless mode of warfare.


• Repressive Arab regimes try to blame everything on the US, but the terrorists try to bomb their Arab rulers as much as they try to bomb the US.


• Numerous factions in Israel and Palestine are keeping the pressure on everybody (not just the "other" side) to keep up the violence.


• British colonial rule and its aftermath gave us revolution and civil war in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Iraq, and many other places.


• French colonial rule gave us the Algerian rebellion, the war in Vietnam, and other issues.


• The Soviet Union taught its allies and puppets to rule with savage brutality. North Korea is still at it, and Chechnya is still trying to escape it.


• The United States taught its allies and puppets in Latin America and some other places to rule with savage brutality. Guatemala, among others, has not yet recovered.


• The Iranian revolution and the current theocracy are direct results of the CIA overthrow of an elected government in Iran and the restoration of the Shah.

Violent revolution continues in varying degrees (sometimes moderated by truces) in the Congo, the Sudan, Peru, Nepal, Turkey, Northern Ireland, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Liberia, Israel, Russia, China, and other countries.

Why do people make peaceful revolution impossible? Fear, I suppose, is the immediate motive. Somehow, people seem to assume that peaceful revolution is inherently impossible, and will always turn violent. Then they repress it, and then they get violent revolution, and then they say, "See? We told you so!"

So bogosity, Us vs. Them, seems to be the real problem. It is after all obvious that We are more important or more worthy, and They don't count, and of course can't be trusted. They aren't even really human, the way We are, and They are inherently violent, unlike Us inherently peace-loving people.

Oddly enough, when the European Union demanded that Turkey stop oppressing the Kurds in Turkey if they wanted to have any chance of entering the EU, and the Turks did lighten up, the Kurds stopped bombing Turks.

I could cite other examples, but I rest my case, and President Kennedy's and Dr. King's, and Gandhi's.

The Library of Bozosity

There are so many wonderful books on bozosity that I can't list all the ones I know of, but here are a few good starting points. There is also a good deal on bozosity of various kinds in the Bible, especially in the books of Ecclesiastes, Proverbs, and Job, and in Aristophanes and the early Dialogues of Plato.

The Experts Speak
by Christopher Cerf, Victor Navasky
Did you know that the stock market had reached a "permanently high plateau" in October 1929? You would have thought so, had you listened to the experts back then. Christopher Cerf and Victor Navasky of the "Institute of Expertology" have made it their mission to compare the actual statements of of professional prognosticators with the events following their predictions. Knowing better than to comment directly, they let the reader decide about the (ahem) reliability of the experts.

Trust Us, We're Experts
by John Stauber, Sheldon Rampton
Fearless investigative journalists Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber (Toxic Sludge Is Good for You! and Mad Cow U.S.A.) are back with a gripping exposé of the public relations industry and the scientists who back their business-funded, anti-consumer-safety agendas. There are two kinds of "experts" in question--the PR spin doctors behind the scenes and the "independent" experts paraded before the public, scientists who have been hand-selected, cultivated, and paid handsomely to promote the views of corporations involved in controversial actions.

The Ship of Fools (Das Narrenschiff)
by Sebastian Brant (1494)
There are other translations, of course. A highly influential Renaissance Christian view of bozosity, which is still thought-provoking even when you don't agree with the author.

The Ship of Fools
by Katharine Anne Porter
The insularity, hypocrisies, and pretensions of shipboard passengers en route from Mexico to Germany on the eve of World War II.

There are half a dozen other books with the title "Ship of Fools". Make sure of what you're getting.

Mathematical Cranks
Underwood Dudley
Underwood Dudley's book is great fun, especially if if you have ever tried to argue with someone impervious to reason. His very funny tales of encounters with mathematical cranks will probably sound familiar. You will also learn a lot about mathematical and scientific reasoning along with hilarious examples of how not to do mathematics. The author's points on how to identify and avoid cranks can serve readers well in all walks of life, not just mathematics.

They Never Said It: A Book of Fake Quotes, Misquotes and Misleading Attributions
by Paul F. Boller, John George
Boller and George examine hundreds of misquotations, incorrect attributions, and blatant fabrications, outlining the origins of the quotes and revealing why they should be consigned to the historical trash can. Some of the quotes, such as Charles Darwin's supposed deathbed recantation of evolution, are blatantly dishonest and falsify the historical record.

Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds
by Charles Mackay
Why do otherwise intelligent individuals form seething masses of idiocy when they engage in collective action? Why do financially sensible people jump lemming-like into hare-brained speculative frenzies--only to jump broker-like out of windows when their fantasies dissolve? We may think that the Great Crash of 1929, junk bonds of the '80s, and over-valued high-tech stocks of the '90s are peculiarly 20th century aberrations, but Mackay's classic--first published in 1841--shows that the madness and confusion of crowds knows no limits, and has no temporal bounds. These are extraordinarily illuminating, and, unfortunately, entertaining tales of chicanery, greed and naivete. Essential reading for any student of human nature or the transmission of ideas.