Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Abortion Not A Sin

It's Easter.

For just one week, priests in Malta and Gozo will be able to grant forgiveness to sins related to abortion, heresy, apostasy, and schisms.
So Abortion is not a sin but a violation of church doctrine. Glad they cleared that up.

Heresy, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is a "theological or religious opinion or doctrine maintained in opposition, or held to be contrary, to the Roman Catholic or Orthodox doctrine of the Christian Church, or, by extension, to that of any church, creed, or religious system, considered as orthodox. By extension, heresy is an opinion or doctrine in philosophy, politics, science, art, etc., at variance with those generally accepted as authoritative."

One who commits apostasy is an apostate, or one who apostatises literature, the term typically referred to . In older Westernbaptized Christians who left their faith.

A schismatic is a person who creates or incites schism in an organization or who is a member of a splinter group.

You see in Malta abortion is morally and legally not sanctioned. Yet women will still get abortions regardless of male priests and male law makers. Because making abortion illegal is not only stupid it endangers womens health.

Blindness no excuse for abortion - Health Division

A woman who risks suffering blindness by going through with her pregnancy will not be allowed to carry out an abortion in Malta. This puts Malta in the same league as Poland – a country which was this week found guilty of violating the human rights of a 35-year-old mother, refused an abortion despite warnings that having the baby could make her go blind.

“Abortion in Malta is illegal and is not allowed under any circumstance,” Dr Ray Busuttil, Director General of the Health Division, told MaltaToday when asked whether abortion is allowed in cases where a Maltese mother risks blindness if she proceeds with her pregnancy.
On Tuesday, Polish resident Alicja Tysiac, an unemployed single mother of thee, was awarded EURO 25,000 (LM10,500) in damages by the European Court of Justice.

When Alicja Tysiac became pregnant in February 2000, three eye specialists told her having another baby could put her eyesight at serious risk. But neither the specialists nor her GP would authorise an abortion.

After giving birth later that year, Ms Tysiac suffered a retinal haemorrhage and feared she may go blind. She now wears glasses with thick powerful lenses, but still cannot see objects more than a metre and a half away. As a disabled single mother, she struggles to raise her three children on her meagre state pension.

The Strasbourg court ruled that the mother’s human rights had been violated when she was denied an abortion on therapeutic grounds. But the court ruling will not affect Poland’s strict abortion laws, which some right-wing politicians want to make even stricter.

According to Dr Michael Axiaq, the Nationalist MP and Opus Dei member who chairs the National Ethics Board Committee, in such cases one has to choose between “a lesser of two evils” namely the life of the baby and the disability of the mother. “In such cases, our choice should be that of protecting life.”


But priests don't care for the woman only for the product of her womb. She is still the sinful vessel, the child on the other hand is pure. Even if the woman is raped. The child is holy, the mother a harlot, the rapist; probably a priest.

Thank goodness such religious stupidity is against the law in the EU.

See

Abortion

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Gore Kulture

No not Al Gore.

Gore as in Grand Guignol as in a specific sub genre of horror movies; slasher films, blood and guts movies like Saw, Hostile, etc.


The Peculiar Charms of the Grand Guignol

by Gideon Lester

"At one performance, six people passed out when an actress, whose eyeball was just gouged out, re-entered the stage, revealing a gooey, blood-encrusted hole in her skull. Backstage, the actors themselves calculated their success according to the evening's faintings. During one play that ended with a realistic blood transfusion, a record was set: fifteen playgoers had lost consciousness. Between sketches, the cobble-stoned alley outside the theatre was frequented by hyperventilating couples and vomiting individuals."

-- Mel Gordon, The Grand Guignol:
theatre of fear and terror.

We can go back to Shakespeare to find the first real case of Grand Guignol in theatre;

Titus Andronicus is a play with "14 killings, 9 of them on stage, 6 severed members, 1 rape (or 2 or 3, depending on how you count), 1 live burial, 1 case of insanity and 1 of cannibalism--an average of 5.2 atrocities per act, or one for every 97 lines."


We seem to have moved from a rash of horror films to gore films in four short years. The gore phenomena is specific to the current mass culture we are experiencing.

We have seen an increase in horror films, just as we did during the depression and again during the Viet Nam war, horror films reflect the need for social catharsis during times of cultural stress.

The Gore film on the other hand was an underground phenomena, much like Grand Guignol. It first appeared not in film but in the fifties as crime and horror comics.

It existed since the early sixties, as a b-film phenomena in particular the films of Herschell Gordon Lewis, but became popular in the eighties with the works of Stuart Gordon and Sam Raimi. It expanded in the nineties with the work of Clive Barker, in particular the Hellraiser series, now coming to the small screen as a computer game.

But these were horror movies, there was gore, but there was also humour, atmosphere, the gore was incidental, there to frighten you as much as the thing that jumps out of the dark.

But today the movies are Gore for gore's sake. In that they hearken back to Herschell Gordon Lewis work and Romero's Night of the Living Dead. But unlike them they are major studio releases, a popular film phenomena on the big screen and the producers of the goriest of the gore films; Saw I, II and III are Canadian.

It is reflective of the current social crisis of sociopathology that is in the headlines.
Man kills and BBQs girlfriend

Take for instance the Picton murder case and its Edmonton counter part the serial killing of prostitutes, or this recent Edmonton case that was in the news for weeks;

Michael Briscoe, acquitted in the rape and murder of Nina Courtepatte, is haunted by his failure to intervene and try to save her when she was brutally attacked 2 years ago

Edmonton, with its record-high murder rate, is quickly losing its reputation as a safe city.

But it's not just the creeping crime wave that's spooking people. It's the grim reality that we are now known for one of the most odious killings in the country.

Malls are supposed to be places where young people hang out, shop and flirt - not where a strikingly pretty 13-year-old girl is chosen at random to be raped and slaughtered for kicks.

I fear we are raising a society of sociopaths - kids who are so adrift, amoral and inured to violence that they have become completely indifferent to evil. They are drawn to it, it seems, out of twisted curiosity and sheer boredom.

How else to explain how a group of young people could lure Nina Courtepatte from West Edmonton Mall on the pretext of inviting her to a party, only to rape her and beat her to death on a golf course?

Brutality, savagery, gore, and cannibalism all underlie Grand Guignol and the Gore film today, as it does the headlines in your daily paper.

AN ALCOHOLIC who strangled his friend and then told police he did it so he could be sent to prison to exact revenge on a cannibal killer who murdered his girlfriend, was yesterday jailed for life. Alan Taylor said he never got over the murder of Julie Paterson, who was beheaded and partially eaten by psychopath David Harker in 1998.

New Delhi, Mar 22: The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Thursday gave a clean chit to Mohinder Singh Pandher, co-accused in the gruesome Nithari serial killings in the outskirts of Delhi. CBI blamed his servant for the macabre killings and also confirmed cannibalism in him. It said Pandher's servant Surinder Koli was a psychopath and blamed him for the killings

A religious cult leader who raped, murdered and ate at least three women in Papua New Guinea has been captured by a group of villagers.

Steven Tari, 35, who called himself the "black Jesus" was beaten by locals from the village of Matepi before being handed over to police.

The failed bible student had gathered around six thousand followers as he travelled through mountain villages promising disciples gifts from heaven if they joined his congregation.

But communities discovered he was indulging in cannibalism, sacrificing young women, drinking their blood and eating their flesh.


The Gore phenomena begins with Slaughter of the Lambs, and its overwhelming popularity. It is about the brutality of a serial killer who skins his victims, and the anti-hero is a cannibal; Dr. Hannibal Lecter. It coincides disturbingly with pig farmer Robert Pictons brutal murder and dismemberment of women in Vancouver, and its implication of cannibalism.


The disturbing fact is that our fascination with the Picton case is the same as our fascination with Dr. Lecter. Cannibalism being the final taboo leading to the mass media phenomena of Hannibal the Cannibal.

I'm not alone in my fascination with cannibalism — why else would there be five Hannibal Lecter movies? Soylent Green is made of people; the living dead will eat your brains at any time of dawn, day, or night; and the biggest blockbuster of 2006, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, featured droves of flesh-hungry islanders.

In fact cannibalism is American as Apple Pie. Even before the infamous Donner party case, the founders of America engaged in cannibalism and capitalism.

Jamestown aims for historic reign over Plymouth

JAMESTOWN, Va. -- The first permanent English settlement in North America has more personality than many other historic attractions.
Capt. John Smith, the pint-sized adventurer, left a breathless narrative of his exploits.
Commerce took root here, and so did tobacco and slavery.
Then there was the cannibalism.
Still, as the country prepares to commemorate Jamestown's 400th anniversary in May, many see this swampy outpost on the James River only as a coming attraction to the Pilgrims' arrival at Plymouth Rock about 13 years later.
New Englanders, for example, point to the Thanksgiving feast, the Pilgrims' pure pursuit of religious freedom and the Mayflower.
Jamestown, on the other hand, "is the creation story from hell," Karen Ordahl Kupperman writes in her new book, "The Jamestown Project." Conflict, disease, horrific killings and starvation are all part of the back story of Jamestown, founded in 1607 as a business venture.
But if not for Jamestown, scholars say, there may not have been a Plymouth, and we all might be speaking Spanish. The Spanish, intent on spreading Roman Catholicism, were turned away twice from the nearby Chesapeake Bay during the early years of the Protestant Jamestown settlement.
"There's no question that Jamestown throws down the gauntlet to the Spanish," said James Horn, who wrote "A Land as God Made It: Jamestown and the Birth of America."
Now, during an 18-month commemoration, Jamestown finally could outshine Plymouth and fully embrace what historian and writer Nathaniel Philbrick calls its proper claim as "the rightful birthing ground of America."
"Not only was the [Jamestown] settlement found more than a decade before, but the colony that developed from those beginnings was, in many ways, more quintessentially American since it was all about making money," said Mr. Philbrick, the author of "Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War."



Another gore phenomena in media is the popularity of the Zombie. Zombie parties are occurring across North America. In Edmonton there is a Zombie club of folks who dress up in gory zombie costumes and wander the streets groaning and moaning.

At the University of Alabama they are offering a course on Zombies.

Do you hope that when you die, your corpse will return to life and shamble around, wreaking havoc? Have you ever wanted to taste human flesh? Or do you just want to be able to live your life without that crippling fear of someone eating your brains?

Those who said yes to any of those questions will find a kindred spirit in Sean Hoade, a UA instructor currently teaching creative writing, literature and English. In May, during the interim, he will be teaching EN 311-001, titled, Zombies! The Living Dead in Literature, Film and Culture.

Hoade said zombies are the perfect choice because they are the ultimate metaphor for human life.

"Anything that you look at," Hoade said, "the way we know people by sight but don't really know our neighbors ... race relations and class warfare - all of that is reflected in zombies. And that's why they've become so incredibly popular. [There are] zombie movies, zombie books, zombie graphic novels, so I think that it's only right for the English department to offer a class looking at all things zombie."

Hoade said the class will also discuss what zombies being reanimated corpses indicates about people's fears.

"Death is so sanitized now that [even] being around a dead body that isn't reanimated is incredibly spooky. So we're going to look at how the fear of the zombie is actually a fear not just of death, because we're all afraid of death, but a fear, actually, of the dead also."

The class won't strictly focus on the intellectual aspects of zombies. Students will also be able to participate in a variety of zombie-related activities.

"We're going to engage in mock cannibalism," Hoade said. "We're going to [have] human-flavored tofu. It's based on what people who had to resort to cannibalism, like the Donner party and that plane crash and things like that, what they said human flesh tastes like.

"I ordered putrescine, which is the chemical that dead things give off," he said. Putrescine, which is a chemical compound used by the body for cellular division, is responsible for the smell of rotting flesh.

"We're probably going to do a zombie walk, which is we're all going to get made up as zombies and walk around campus and terrorize it. I'll have to see if that's allowed. We're also going to eat Jell-O brains. [The purpose of the activities are] just to try to get into the zombie mindset ... We might go over to the graveyard and lie down on the graves."

Zombie mindset? Zombies have no brains, no minds, thats why they eat brains, they lack intelligence. Just like the folks at PETA.

The folks in charge of PETA love all of God's creatures—with a few notable exceptions. Asked by BlackBook whether the animal-rights group opposes human cannibalism, Dan Mathews, the group's outrage-provoking vice president, quips, "No, as long as the person being eaten is Anna Wintour." It's far from the first time PETA has gone after the Vogue editor in chief, whom it accuses of doing more than anyone else to keep the wearing of animal pelts in style.


The aristocracy has a history of fascination with death and haute coutoure, they go together like art and suicide.

WHEN Victoria Beckham heard that the flamboyant fashion guru, design muse and socialite Isabella Blow had attempted to kill herself in 2005 by throwing herself off a bridge in London, she remarked, "What genius!"

After school, Blow lived in a squat in London and took cleaning jobs. Then she went off to New York, where Brian Ferry, an old friend - introduced her to Vogue editor Anna Wintour. Blow hung out with artists Jean-Michel Basquiat, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, who wanted to know her when he saw she was wearing one pink and one purple shoe.

But for all the name-dropping, there have been two main role models in Blow's life. The first is the Duchess of Windsor, of whom a stylised portrait hangs in her hallway. "Wallis was ugly, like me, but she made the best of herself. I wish I'd lured a king." The other is Blow's aforementioned flesh-eating grandmother, Vera Delves Broughton, a photographer, explorer and big-game fisher. Until recently she held the record for catching the biggest fish in European waters (a tuna, which took 16 hours to reel in).

As for the cannibalism, Blow explains, "She was once in Papua New Guinea. She had some dinner and said, 'God, that was delicious. What was it?' It turned out to be a poor local tribesman who had been grilled up. In her Who's Who hobbies, my grandmother listed 'Once a cannibal'. Ha, ha! I'm so like her. Very wild!"
Christianity itself is based upon the disturbing concepts of cannibalism of its God and the idea of the Living Dead; the resurrection.

Or was Pope Benedict biding his time? Last week he published an Apostolic Exhortation on the Eucharist, Sacramentum Caritatis — The Sacrament of Love. In part it is a summary of the conclusions of the Synod of Catholic Bishops held in Rome in October 2005 — the start of the liturgical Year of the Eucharist promulgated by his predecessor, Pope John Paul II — and as such carries the authority of the whole Church. But it is also a theological tour de force showing the clarity and cogency that are particular to the writings of Joseph Ratzinger.

Sacramentum Caritatis opens with a lucid exposition of the Catholic belief on the Eucharist. The priest’s words of consecration during the Mass turn bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ — a transformation Pope Benedict describes as ‘a sort of “nuclear fission” which penetrates to the heart of all being, a change meant to set off a process which transforms reality, a process leading ultimately to the transfiguration of the entire world’.

This belief, with its connotations of cannibalism and human sacrifice, has always been hard to take. Even in Christ’s lifetime, many of his disciples, according to Saint John, regarded the idea as ‘intolerable ...and stopped going with him’. It was a defining bone of contention between Catholics at the time of the Reformation. Luther downgraded the change from transubstantiation (the bread and wine become the flesh and blood of Christ) to consubstantiation (bread and wine remain bread and wine but co-exist with the flesh and blood of Christ), and Calvin disbelieved it altogether.


The recent rash of zombie and gore films reflect a culture inundated with death. Senseless death, be it wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and through out the middle east, vast unimaginable death from starvation, mass rape and murder in Dafur, or disasters such as Tsunamis , hurricanes and earthquakes that slaughter thousands and decimate cities.

Our fears of death and the unknown are now amplified by our fear of pain. Gore movies are about pain. Blood and guts, yes but the Saw phenomena is about pain, torture and self inflicted pain.

It is Abu Gharib and Gitmo brought to the large screen. We know not what torture Arar Mehar went through, or those held in CIA black prisons. But when we watch Saw we get a gleaming, an inkling of what it feels like to be held incommunicado and tortured. For no good reason. What does the torturer want? Like those held in sensory deprivation in Gitmo, we do not know.

The horror film since its origins in the silent era was fear of the other, the monster. Today with the advent of the Gore film, the monster is us. We suffer the emotional plague of isolation and alienation in a capitalist culture out of our control and dashing headlong into oblivion.




See

Gothic Capitalism Redux

Jack the Ripper

Emotional Plague

Rape

Serial Murder


Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
, , , , , ,

LaRouche Takes Over Vive le Canada


There has been a disturbing trend over at Vive le Canada lately, it seems to have lost it's moderators for there can be no other explanation for the right wing conspiracy theorists that are now spamming it with their nut bar posts.

Here is the latest one from followers of the former Trotskyist turned conspiracy noodle head; Lyndon LaRouche. This appeared also on Progressive Bloggers because Vive le Canada is a member of the PB aggregator.

This article appears in the December 14, 2001 issue of Executive Intelligence Review. Dope, Inc. Is $600 Billion and Growing by Jeffrey Steinberg In the Summer of 1996, EIR conducted an exhaustive study of the worldwide illegal drug trade,

EIR is one of LaRouche's major publications. LaRoucheites came up with the slogan Nuke the Whales, since they are proponents of nuclear power and have used their private intelligence to attack the anti-nuke movement.

They are racists, LaRouche spent years attacking black culture, believing in a banking conspiracy they are Anti-Semites, they are homophobic AIDs deniers, they believe in the Anglo-American conspiracy theories, etc. etc. in other words they are a violent proto-fascist movement


evidence shows 'suicide' student was beaten to death
Duggan, from Golders Green, north-west London, had become involved with the Wiesbaden followers of Lyndon LaRouche, an American millionaire with virulent anti-Semitic views. Unaware of the group's leanings, the former Christ's Hospital pupil told followers that he was Jewish. At 4.20am on 27 March, 2003, Duggan rang his mother. His voice was hushed: 'Mum, I am in deep trouble.'

Worldwide LaRouche Youth Movement

Of course it doesn't help when anti-globalization publications like Michel Chossudovsky's Global Research.ca publish LaRouche sourced materials giving them undeserved legitimacy.


The LaRouche organization was also described by Norman Bailey, a former senior staffer of the National Security Council, as "one of the best private intelligence services in the world."

Global Research refuses to publish neo-fascist white racists who oppose globalization but will publish LaRouche via his followers. It shows that
Chossudovsky's conspiracy theory laden analysis of globalization is far closer to LaRouche than he cares to admit.

In that same vein the proto-nationalism of Vive le Canada with its opposition to Deep Integration allows it to fall into the same ideological trap as the anti-globalizationists, accepting conspiracy theories from the left and the right as long as they appear reasonable.

Folks get your act together and start monitoring those posts!


DISCREDITED former MP Ken Aldred was last night dumped as a Liberal candidate in the federal election over his links to far-right groups and his attacks on a prominent Jewish lawyer. Mr Aldred appeared before a specially convened meeting of the Liberal Party's administrative committee in Melbourne after he issued a legal threat to the party demanding the right to attend.

He tried to justify his past conduct in a statement that he read at the meeting, but the committee members - including Peter Costello and state Liberal leader Ted Baillieu - voted unanimously to dump him as the preselected candidate in the seat of Holt.

Liberal Party state director Julian Sheezel confirmed the result last night saying: "The administrative committee considered that he was an unsuitable candidate to receive endorsement."

John Howard had earlier written to members saying he did not think Mr Aldred - who has been linked to the far-Right US-based LaRouche organisation and its Australian arm, the Citizens Electoral Council - was a suitable person to stand for the Liberal Party.

Prominent Jewish lawyer Mark Leibler, who has led calls for the party to dump Mr Aldred, yesterday described Mr Aldred's preselection last weekend as an "embarrassment".

Mr Leibler, who was falsely accused by Mr Aldred in 1995 of being involved in a money-laundering scam run by Israeli spy agency Mossad, said yesterday: "It's not half the embarrassment it is to me as it is to the Liberal Party.

"This guy is a racist, an anti-Semite, he's presented fraudulent documents to the parliament. He is not the sort of person who would be supported by the Prime Minister or the Treasurer or any Liberal of standing."


The LaRouche Movement: American 'fascism' or something else?

The LaRouche movement is a clever organization: clever because it operates several independent divisions that are hard to connect with each other. The Schiller Institute, the Fusion Energy Forum, the Executive Intelligence Review, the Campaign to Explore Human Rights Violations in the U.S. (whose main interests seem to be the rights of Larouchians), Bread for the World, the Human Life Committee, the New Federalist , and 21st Century Science & Technology magazine are all part of the LaRouche organization. Currently, LaRouche is also connected to the ' Productive Triangle Program" (the 'Paris-Berlin-Vienna' axis) promoted by the International Progress Organization (IPO) in Central Europe, intended to promote economic development. Lyndon H. LaRouche has run (as a Democrat, no less) for president several times; in 1992 he is running from a jail cell, with the Rev. James Bevel (a SCLC founder and associate of Rev. King) as his vice presidential running mate. One might note, incidentally, that several LaRouchians do hold various offices around the country, and many LaRouchian groups have sprung up in Europe.

LaRouche is one of those political trippers that has managed to take the bend all the way around from the Far Left to the Far Right, without breaking his neck. In the 60s and 70s, he was "Lyn Marcus," head of the International Caucus of Labor Committees, an ultra-doctrinaire Marxist group with some strange disciplinary practices. Even back in the late 70s he was warning of impending financial crisis and cultural ruin. Today, Lyn(don) is a big promoter of the Strategic Defense Initiative, an implacable foe of world communism, a big supporter of a united Germany, and a borderline anti-Semite, who has attacked a whole bunch of Jews - particularly Roy Cohn, Henry Kissinger, and the heads of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai Brith - by saying they are really "Zionists," i.e. a particularly wicked bunch of Jews... anyone remember the Protocols of the Elders of Zion? (One might note that LaRouche has, on several occasions, attacked the Nazi-hunting branch of the Department of Justice (the OSI) as "witch hunters persecuting upright German citizens," some of those upright citizens being V2 rocket engineers smuggled into this country through Project Paperclip.) It is clear that his trip into the Far Right has left him with some discredited Far Left ideas.

LaRouche's main thesis is that the 'Anglo-American cabal,' which involves George Bush, the English monarchy, and some other ingredients, has decided to undertake a programme of genocidal IMF/World Bank-financed de-industrialization to deplete the population of the Third World. The cabal's plan includes "narcotrafficking"; environmental policies to prevent those countries from developing economically; 'Malthusian' population policies which incorporate birth control, abortion, and allowing disease and hunger free rein; profiteering through 'neo-colonial' resource control; the "lab-created" AIDs virus; and promotion of 'antifamily' ideals such as feminism, homosexuality, Satanism, and "the sex-drugs-rock and roll counterculture." This conspiracy theory, needless to say, is a grab bag of far right and far left nut worries. LaRouche believes that only massive industrial projects - nuclear power, huge irrigation canals dug with atomic bombs (!) in the Middle East, and similar high-tech developments - can free the Third World from the sinister grasp of the oligarchs' cabal.


See:

Conspiracy Theory or Ruling Class Studies

Bilderberg

Conspiracy Theory

Conspiracy


Ruling Class



Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Monday, March 26, 2007

Elizabeth May and Red Tories

Nice to see confirmation of my post about Elizabeth May choosing to run against MacKay.

“As a former Progressive Conservative, I am delighted that Elizabeth will be running in Central Nova, against the person who destroyed the party of Confederation.”

And as I said; Red Tories can be progressives too.


See:

Green Party

Elizabeth May


Peter MacKay


Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
, , , , , , ,

, , , , , , ,

, , , , , ,

Abolishing Slavery In Canada

Stephen Harper's statement on the 200th Anniversary of the British Abolition of Slavery. Once again engaging in historical revisionism.

On this day we should also recall the important role that Canadians played in the struggle against slavery, most notably the leadership of Lieutenant Governor John Graves Simcoe who persuaded the Legislature of Upper Canada to adopt the first meaningful restrictions on slavery within the British Empire in 1793; and those who made Canada the North Star of the Underground Railroad for thousands of escaped slaves.

Slaves were freed in Quebec, 1736, these included blacks, Irish, French and native slaves as well as indentured servants. Slaves in British/Tory controlled Canada were not freed until 1799.

In fact despite the degree of 1793, the Black Loyalists in Nova Scotia who had been promised freedom by the British found the conditions so bad that many had already left for Sierra Leone in 1792, see below.

While slavery was in effect abolished its function was replaced with indentured servitude for debt.

References:

JSTOR: The Slave in Upper Canada 1

JSTOR: The Slave in Upper Canada 2



Who were the Black Loyalists?

The Black Loyalists arrived in Nova Scotia between 1783 and 1785, as a result of the American Revolution. They were the largest group of people of African birth and of African descent to come to Nova Scotia at any one time.


 Miltary Buttons

Regimental buttons
for military uniforms
Photo by Richard Plander,
Learning Resources &
Technology.
Nova Scotia Museum.

In 1775, some people in the British North American colonies were arguing with the British government about how much control Great Britain should have over taxes and life in the colonies. The colonists wanted to influence decisions about laws and taxes but had no representation in the British Parliament. They declared themselves independent of Britain when they weren't able to come to an agreement. The American Revolution, also called the American War of Independence, was the result.

People of African birth, who were brought forcibly to the colonies to provide slave labour, and their descendants, were caught in this war. In the late 1600s and 1700s, the British had established rice, indigo, and tobacco plantations in the southern part of North America. Plantation owners required lots of labourers to do field work and other jobs. To reduce costs, they used slaves. At first they enslaved the native Indians but then used mostly African slaves.

In the northern colonies, slaves worked as farm hands or at various jobs as domestic workers or at semi-specialized trades, such as lumbering, mining, road-making, black smithing, shoemaking, weaving and spinning.

When Lord Dunmore, Royal Governor of Virginia, lost control of that colony to the rebels in the summer of 1775, the economy of Virginia was based on slave labor. Lord Dunmore issued a proclamation that any slave or indentured person would be given their freedom if they took up arms with the British against the rebels. As a result, 2,000 slaves and indentured persons joined his forces. Later, other British supporters in the colonies issued similar proclamations.

Then the British Commander-in-chief at New York, Sir Henry Clinton, issued the Philipsburg proclamation when the British realized they were losing the war. It stated that any Negro to desert the rebel cause would receive full protection, freedom, and land. It is estimated that many thousands of people of African descent joined the British and became British supporters.

When the Americans won the war and the Treaty of Paris was signed in 1783, British forces and their supporters had to leave the new United States. They gathered at New York, waiting to be evacuated. In the meantime, the Americans wanted their lost property returned. Sir Guy Carleton, the new British Commander- in-chief, refused General George Washington's demand for the return of those slaves who had joined the British before November 30, 1782. The two men agreed that the Americans would receive money instead.


 Certificate of Freedom

Certificate of freedom, 1783
Nova Scotia Archives and
Records Management.

The British-American Commission identified the Black people in New York who had joined the British before the surrender, and issued "certificates of freedom" signed by General Birch or General Musgrave. Those who chose to emigrate were evacuated by ship. To make sure no one attempted to leave who did not have a certificate of freedom, the name of any Black person on board a vessel, whether slave, indentured servant, or free, was recorded, along with the details of enslavement, escape, and military service, in a document called the Book of Negroes.

Between April and November, 1783, 114 ships were inspected in New York harbour. An unknown number of ships left New York and other ports before and after these dates. Over 3,000 Black Loyalists were enrolled in the Book of Negroes, but perhaps as many as 5,000 Black people left New York for Nova Scotia, the West Indies, Quebec, England, Germany, and Belgium.

A Difficult Life for Black Loyalists

Most Black Loyalists couldn't make a living from farming because either they had no land, or their land was unsuitable for growing crops. Black Loyalists with skills as blacksmiths, bakers, shoemakers, carpenters, teachers, ministers, coopers, boatbuilders, laundresses, seamstresses, tailors, military persons, midwives, domestics, cooks, waiters, sailors, a doctor, pilots of boats, and navigators were in a better position to make some kind of a living.

But Black workers were not paid as much as White workers. In July 1784, a group of disbanded White soldiers destroyed 20 houses of free Black Loyalists in Shelburne in what was Canada's first race riot, because the Black Loyalists who worked for a cheaper rate took work away from the White settlers.

Many of those who did not have a trade had to indenture themselves or their children to survive. Indentured Black Loyalists were treated no better than enslaved persons. Slavery was still legal and enforced in Nova Scotia at this time. People could still be bought and sold until 1834, when slavery was abolished in the British Empire. One of the biggest fears of Black Loyalists was to be kidnapped and sold in the United States or the West Indies by slave traders, who sometimes sailed along the coast of Nova Scotia. At the same time, since Nova Scotia did not have a climate to support the plantation system, many White Loyalists abandoned their slaves because they could not afford to feed them.

y 1791, Black Loyalists realized that the dream of a Promised Land, with freedom and security for their families, was not being fulfilled. Some of the Black Loyalists of Brindley Town, outside Digby, met and decided to send a representative to England with a petition asking the British government for the land they had been promised. While in England, their representative, Thomas Peters, a member of the Black Pioneers corps, was approached by a business group that had established a colony in Sierra Leone, West Africa. Peters was told that the Black Loyalists would receive free land if they were to settle there. He returned to Nova Scotia with Lieutenant John Clarkson of the Royal Navy, to convince Black Loyalists to leave Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.

On January 15,1792, 1196 Black Loyalists, including the notable leaders David George, Boston King, and Moses Wilkinson, left Halifax in fifteen ships, for Sierra Leone. This was slightly less than one third of the number of Black Loyalists who had arrived in Nova Scotia in 1783. It seems that neither John Clarkson nor Thomas Peters recruited in northeastern Nova Scotia, so none of the Black Loyalists from Tracadie went to Sierra Leone.

See:

The Truth Shall Set Ye Free

Slavery


Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,


The Truth Shall Set Ye Free

William Wilberforce was a classic liberal for his day who saw the abolition of the slave trade as producing 'free labour' and thus reducing costs for business. The end of slavery was required to end mercantilism and create the conditions for capitalism.


It is one of history’s enigmas that William Wilberforce, honoured in today’s bicentenary commemoration of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, did not share the same sense of outrage about the repression of British workers. The MP played a part in outlawing unions, introducing imprisonment without trial and reducing freedom of speech.

Wilberforce’s home town and political seat was Hull. Unlike many British ports, Hull was not dependent on slavery but on the Baltic trade that had made his family rich. So his campaign neither offended his family nor upset his constituents. And his wealth allowed him to follow his instincts as an independent Whig.

Wilberforce disarmingly argued that the owners of slave ships and plantations were not to blame for pursuing their lawful business, of which cruelty and inhumanity were the inevitable byproducts. Nation and parliament were to blame for making it lawful. Plantation owners had nothing to fear from abolition, he claimed, citing the death rate among slaves — and sailors — engaged in the trade.

After spending nearly £9,000 securing the goodwill of Hull, paying local merchants the standard 10 guineas each for their votes (other voters got £2), he was duly elected at the age of 21. Drink and the roulette tables began to pall and he fretted that he was wasting his life. Under the influence of Newton, now a rector in London, at 25 he became an evangelical, resolved to combat the evils of the day — sabbath-breaking, swearing, drunkenness and indecent books. The result was a Society for the Reformation of Manners that got books censored and moral reforms passed.

He was opposed to extending the vote to the working class, whose political aspirations he tried to curb through the Society for the Suppression of Vice and Encouragement of Religion.

This was the same reasoning used sixty years later to end slavery in America, by the Free Labour President; Lincoln.


"Free labor has the inspiration of hope; pure slavery has no hope. The power of hope upon human exertion, and happiness, is wonderful. The slave-master himself has a conception of it; and hence the system of tasks among slaves. The slave whom you can not drive with the lash to break seventy-five pounds of hemp in a day, if you will task him to break a hundred, and promise him pay for all he does over, he will break you a hundred and fifty. You have substituted hope, for the rod." Abraham Lincoln


Which is why to this day Free Labour is called wage slavery.



H/T to the Monarchist.



SEE

Slavery

Black History Month; P.B. Randolph

The Era Of The Common Man

Black Like Me



Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,


If Wishes Were Horses

If wishes were horses; Odds are Black will go free

It seems the Black Lord has a cheering section in Canada, of course it comes from the right. Surprise, surprise. Or perhaps it is less sympathy for him than for Lady MacBeth his wife and outspoken fellow traveler of the right.

Also See:


Conrad Black

Criminal Capitalism


Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
, , , , , ,
, ,
.

Look In Your Own Backyard

The recent American propaganda campaign about Iran providing IED weapons to Iraqi insurgents must be seen as suspect in light of last weeks revelations by the Government Accounting Office (GAO).

"Not securing these conventional munitions storage site has been costly, as government reports indicated that looted munitions are being used to make improvised explosive devices (IED) that have killed or maimed many people, and will likely continue to support terrorist attacks in the region," the GAO report summary reads.

Reports says the U.S. military does not know the scope of theft from prewar stockpiles and how many caches are at risk.

WASHINGTON — Four years after invading Iraq, the U.S. military still does not know how many tons of explosives were stolen from the country's massive prewar stockpiles or how many weapons caches remain unsecured, according to a government audit made public Thursday.

Many of the looted munitions have since made their way into the roadside bombs and other improvised explosive devices responsible for the bulk of U.S. troop deaths in Iraq.

The Government Accountability Office report cites a lack of manpower, inadequate planning and misplaced priorities in the military's failure to account for and immediately secure weapons during and after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. The number of unaccounted-for munitions "could range significantly from thousands to millions of tons," says an unclassified version of the report released at a congressional hearing.

The report warns that some weapons stockpiles still may be vulnerable to looting and could fall into the hands of insurgents and terrorists. As recently as October, government investigators could not confirm that all weapons sites had been physically secured, and said that there apparently had been no nationwide tally by the Defense Department.

WASHINGTON -- A newly declassified government report says that half of American troop deaths in Iraq have been caused by explosives left over from Saddam Hussein's regime and that even four years after the war began the US military has failed to conduct an adequate inventory of Hussein's weapons depots.

The assessment by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, found that Iraq remains awash in unsecured mortar rounds, shells, and grenades left over from the former regime and that "the looted munitions will likely continue to support terrorist attacks throughout the region."

In one case, insurgents repeatedly stole explosives from a well-known depot while the Iraqi government was supposed to be disposing of the arms, according to the report, which was written in December and based on field reports and secret intelligence.



See:

Iraq Inspector General

Another Privatization Failure

Conservative Nanny State

Another Privatization Myth Busted

Halliburton

Privatization of War

Privatization


Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
, , , , , , , , , , ,

Thank the Conservatives

Canada ranks "dead last" among developed nations in its spending on early childhood education – despite overwhelming evidence of how crucial the first six years of life are, says a new study by the country's foremost expert in the field.

See

Daycare


Childcare



Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Sunday, March 25, 2007

Cherniak Apologizes Sort Of

Jason Cherniak just cannot say; I am sorry, I was wrong, I won't do it again. Jason tries to use weasel words to justify what he did, even when he says he was wrong.

In a convoluted legalistic manner he does apologize sort of, after a whirlwind of protests from Progressive Bloggers of all political stripes. But first he whined about the protests;


For the record, I never expected this sort of reaction. The purpose of the post was to argue for a good compromise on the hijab issue. I only mentioned the Chow rumour because I thought it was the best example of why the hijab thing is about voter fraud and not about religion. In hindsight, I wish I had used a less controversial example because the real point was lost in all the yelling. Frankly, though, I didn't realize that so many bloggers were so clueless about the rumours out there.


Then he decided to publish a sort of retraction. And it took him till 11 pm EDT today to finally do it.

However he only links to his apology in a link in his original article and in his second article. Which is not identified as his apology, and is one link amongst many.

He has not removed the offending article perse, nor struck through, nor removed the offending statements about Olivia Chow. Nor has he attached a correction apology statement link at the beginning of the offending article. All these are the proper journalistic procedures to be done to avoid charges of libel and defamation in Canadian law. And as a lawyer and media consultant he should know that.

Instead he posted this;


UPDATE

I'm sorry if you read this and don't like me reporting the rumour about Trinity-Spadina, but it IS a real rumour. It is not the same as accusing her of having relations with sheep, because that is not a real rumour that is circulating in Toronto. Further, I am not demanding that she deny it.


And as you can see below he says in his post I Was Wrong that he made a mistake, but still no; I am sorry I was wrong. Because of course Jason can never be wrong.

Jason there is no such thing as good faith when you rumour monger.


I initially used the Chow rumour as an example because I have heard it a few times from reliable people and thought it was a fair example to give. As a partisan, I think I was too quick to just assume that the rumour was reasonable to believe. The people I have spoken too probably made the same mistake.

So, to be clear, I am sorry for using Trinity-Spadina as an example in my initial post. However, that does not change the fact that I made the mistake in good faith.

My error here was in failing to look more closely at the rumour before assuming that it was believable. The truth is that if the rumour were about a Liberal, I would have done more research and figured out that it was bogus before posting it.

Yes you would have and that shows your intolerance towards other progressive political competitors in the body politic . But the point is you posted it and still have not removed the offending post. So lets get with it and do the right thing, re- write your article and re-post it without the references to Olivia Chow.

See

Cherniak


Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
, , , , , , ,