journalism, truth-telling
In In Case You're Counting on November 23, 2008 at 10:10 am
This piece comes to me via Lara J. Nettelfield, a professor at Simon Fraser University in Canada. It’s the story of one man trying to get a good count of the number of people who died in Bosnia, and the death threats he’s getting as a thank-you.
And this piece comes via Google Alerts, which get more depressing every day, and tells the story of a Congolese UN journalist who was murdered. Bullet-between-the-eyes murdered, not accidental-war-wound killed. The UN has an incredible radio program there called Radio Okapi, and their journalists, are rigorous, thorough, non-partisan reporters (despite the UN label and financing) who can get into the toughest places there and really get the word out.
Taking a little moment of gratefulness about the ease of blogging where I live….
language, Obama, politics
In Uncategorized on November 15, 2008 at 7:25 pm
Okay, people. I really don’t want to go here more than once. (And I haven’t, on the blog, but I have this conversation with people.) Let’s get the record straight: Fascists and Marxists…not the same. Both, in the eyes of some people like Republican Rep. (GA) Paul Broun, evil…but in a country with our level of college education, can’t we please distinguish between types of alleged evil?
Here’s what Broun said earlier this week:
“That’s exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany and it’s exactly what the Soviet Union did,” Broun said. “When he’s proposing to have a national security force that’s answering to him, that is as strong as the U.S. military, he’s showing me signs of being Marxist….We can’t be lulled into complacency[...]. You have to remember that Adolf Hitler was elected in a democratic Germany. I’m not comparing him to Adolf Hitler. What I’m saying is there is the potential.”
I’m not even going to touch the Hitler non/comparison. Except to say that Paul Broun apologized for calling Obama….a Marxist. But not for comparing him to Hitler.
One day after the Athens Republican told a radio talk show that he regretted calling Obama a “Marxist,” a spokeswoman for the Athens congressman said, “We have not issued any official apology” for comparing Obama’s proposals to the tactics of Hitler and the Soviet Union.
That’s right. He did say he apologized “to anyone who took offense at that”–and the “that” was the use of the word Marxist, not the non-comparison comparison to the architect of the Holocaust. Broun’s office did issue this non-apology statement, which you can’t find anywhere on Broun’s own website—transparency in government?—but if you Google enough different things, you can find reprinted in full on the website of a Georgia NBC affiliate.
It was a beautiful week-long respite from partisan hackery we had, but it has, apparently, passed. Now the hacks are back to being partisans, and vice versa, and it’s starting to feel a lot more like my country again, where socialists, Marxists, fascists, and Democrats are all, apparently, the same. Give or take a moustache.
