Good Witches

As a child I learned, from The Wizard of Oz, that there are good witches, and bad witches. From Caspar the Friendly Ghost I learned that not all departed spirits are to be feared. From Felix the Cat I learned that magic can be put to good use. From Kung Fu I learned that there is wisdom to be found in non-Christian religions.

Frank L. Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was first published in 1900. Baum famously included two "good witches" in this book. But the idea of "good witches" does not originate with Baum. A year earlier (1899) Charles Leland's Aradia: Gospel of the Witches, already appeared, but even before that (in 1892) he had come out with his Etruscan Roman Remains in which he writes in the Introduction:

"Here in Northern Italy a mountain district known as La Romagna Toscana, the inhabitants of which speak a rude form of the Bolognese dialect. These Romagnoli are manifestly a very ancient race, and appear to have preserved traditions and observances little changed from an incredibly early time .... Among these people, stregeria, or witchcraft -- or, as I have heard it called, "la vecchia religione" (or "the old religion") -- exists to a degree which would even astonish many Italians. This stegeria, or old religion, is something more than sorcery, and something less than a faith. It consists in remains of a mythology of spirits, the principal of whom preserve the names and attributes of the old Etruscan gods, such as Tinia, or Jupiter, Faflon, or Bacchus, and Teraina (in Etruscan Turnis) or Mercury. With these there still exist, in a few memories, the most ancient Roman rural deities, such as Silvanus, Palus, Pan, and the Fauns. To all these invocations or prayers in rude metrical form are still addressed, or are at least preserved, and there are many stories regarding them....

Closely allied to the belief in these old deities, is a vast mass of curious tradition, such as that there is a spirit of every element or thing created, as for instance of every plant and mineral, and a guardian or leading spirit of all animals; or, as in the case of silkworms, two -- one good an one evil. Also that witches and sorcerers are sometimes born again in their descendants; that all kinds of goblins, brownies, red-caps and three inch mannikins, haunt forests, rocks, ruined towers, firesides and kitchens, or cellars ...."

Even earlier still, Jacob Grimm's Teutonic Mythology appeared in 1835. In his chapter on Magic (in volume III) Grimm first makes clear that heathen (pre-Christian) Germans knew of both beneficial magic and harmful magic, but that this distinction became confused with the introduction of Christianity. According to the new religion "all heathen notions and practices were declared to be deceit and sinful delusion: the old gods fell back and changed into devils, and all that pertained to their worship into devilish jugglery."

From here, Grimm launches directly into a discussion of terminology associated with witchcraft: "Before proceeding with our inquiry, we have to examine the several terms that designated witchcraft in olden times." The reader is then treated to eight pages of words related to witchcraft, sorcery, conjuring, potion making, charms, spells, prediction, soothsaying, incantations, etc, in Old High German, Old Norse, Middle High German, Low German, Anglo Saxon, Norwegian, Dutch, Swedish, Icelandic, Old English, Gothic, etc, to all of which Jacob Grimm provides his equivalents in Latin and sometimes, for comparison, the Greek as well.

For example: "The AS [Anglo Saxon] also has the two forms: both wiccian fascinare [first he gives the AS italicized, followed by the Latin equivalent unitalicized], wicce saga, wiccungdom or wiccancraeft ars magica .... The English has witch = wicce; and the AS verb has survived its partic. wicked (perversus, maledictus), and Old English has an adjective wikke meaning the same ....."

Grimm also tells us that the modern (of his day) German word "hexe" could be given in Latin as saga, strix, striga, venefica, lamia, and furia. Grimm also points out that sometimes the hexe is assumed to be an old woman, while at other times she is young, and that the word "hexe" can also be used to complement a beautiful woman, or to mean "wise woman". The bottom line is that the ambiguity and multivalency of the modern English "witch" is not something that has been forced onto this word artificially and only as a result of a self-conscious campaign of politically correct revalorization. Nor have "good witches" been historically limited to the realms of story telling and story collecting, but have been with us always and ubiquitously as living human beings throughout European history, before, during and well "after" Christianization.

A Witch Burning in Ghana: How the role of Christianity has been obscured (Part One)

In November of last year, Ama Ahima, a 72 year old Ghanaian woman, was brutally murdered by a mob who accused her of being a witch. After holding her captive and abusing her violently for hours, they doused her in kerosene and set her on fire.

Although there are some conflicting accounts, the main facts of the case are not in dispute. It is important to emphasize that the following have been agreed to by the accused themselves (a number of sources are listed at the bottom of this post):

1. On November 20 Pastor Samuel Fletcher Sagoe accused Ama Ahima of being a witch.
2. Sagoe gathered together a group of six people (including other members of his family) to "deliver" Ahima, that is to conduct an exorcism. Alternatively, this has been described as an effort to forcibly make Ahima "confess" through torture.
3. The exorcism (and/or attempt to extract a confession) proceeded for several hours, until Ahima was doused in kerosene and set on fire.
4. At this point a neighbor intervened and Ahima was taken to the hospital, where she died the following day.

Amazingly, an concerted effort has been made to obscure the role of Christianity in Ahima's murder. Even more amazing is the fact that this has not only been largely successful, but at the same time many people have been convinced that African Traditional Religion, not Christianity, is to blame!

At first glance, this might seem to be an impossible attempt at full-bore Orwellian propaganda. After all, the accusation that Ahima was a witch was made by a Christian Pastor. The subsequent attempt to exorcise Ahima and/or force her to confess is in line with longstanding Christian traditional practice. Ahima's execution by burning is also part of Christian tradition with respect to the punishment of witches, heretics and others accused of being in league with Satan.

But there is, already in-place and ready to go at a moment's notice, a highly successful formula for damage control in situations like this.

1. First and foremost it is insisted loudly and repeatedly that this kind of horrific violence is the sad result of the inherent ignorance and irrationality of Africans themselves.
2. Then the role of Christianity is explained away by insisting that real Christians would never do anything like this, therefore what was at work was not real Christianity, but rather Christianity tainted by African ignorance and superstition.
3. If further obfuscation is required it is then implied broadly, or, if necessary, explicitly asserted, that the Christians involved were "Pentecostalists" or "Evangelicals" and, therefore, not representative of modern, enlightened, well-behaved, "mainstream" Christianity.

These days, of course, it is not fashionable to present Christian apologetics openly and plainly. But that is just as well, since the whole purpose of this line of "reasoning" is precisely to obscure the role of Christianity in the first place.

Therefore the whole presentation, while primarily constructed out of the above three elements, is embedded within a master narrative whose theme is not the spreading of the Christian gospel to the Heathen, but rather the noble upliftment of ignorant savages out of their native state of mental enthrallment, in which their their poor deluded psyches are darkened by magical thinking, up, up to the bright new day of Modern Western Reason.

When properly "spun" like this, a glaring example of Christian mob violence, such as the murder of Ama Ahima, is turned into evidence that Africans are in need of more missionaries, more NGO's, more "aid", etc, and that this will be the case until such a time, if ever such a time should come, that Africans are finally capable of thinking properly for themselves.

to be continued ....

Here are some of the media sources concerning this incident:

• Ghana Shocked by Witch Burning (David Amanor, BBC, November 26)
• Human Burning Case In Court (Rose Hayford Darko, Daily Graphic, November 28)
  
• My Mum Is Not A Witch (Della Russell Ocloo, Daily Graphic, November 29)
• 72-year-old grandmother burned alive in Ghana for being a ‘witch’ (Daily Mail, November 29)
• Ghanaian Woman Burned To Death For Being A 'Witch' (David Smith, Guardian, November 29)
• Ghana "Witch" Killing Points to a Broader Culture of Fear and Superstition (by Clair McDougal, Huffington Post, December 2)
• Autopsy Delays Burnt Woman's Case (Accra Mail, December 2)
• Don't Condemn Old Women As Witches (Vicky Wireko, Modern Ghana, December 9)
  
• Setting Ablazeof 72 Year-Old Woman Case Adjourned to Dec 23 (Della Russell Ocloo, Modern Ghana, December 22)
  
• Why are 'witches' still being burned alive in Ghana? (Cameron Duodo, Guardian, December 31)

Al Giordano on the Tucson shootings

If you've never heard of Al Giordano, well, it's high time you did. Below you can read an excerpt from his long and very thoughtful essay: "Tucson: An Eye for an Eye Blinds All", but you really should go to the link and read the whole darned thing.

I don't agree with everything Giordano has to say, but his is such a unique voice that this really should go without saying.

Much ado has been made in recent hours about Sarah Palin’s map that expressly “targeted” Arizona US Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’ district, and others, with graphic gun sights, and also of Palin’s (and others’) ham-handed attempts to “scrub” her own images and statements from the Internet, as well as similar use of lock-and-load ballistic language by Republicans, including by the 2010 campaign rival of Giffords who, contrary to the initial hurried media reports, still lives (for now) after a bullet went through her brain on Saturday. And, yes, all such propaganda was and is stupid and reckless, bad speech that can only be countered by good speech.

And certainly there is truth to the statement by Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik after Saturday’s shooting in his county: “I'd just like to say that when you look at unbalanced people, how they are—how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths, about tearing down the government, the anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous. And unfortunately, Arizona, I think, has become sort of the capital. We have become the Mecca for prejudice and bigotry.”

And yet the existence of good and decent Arizonans like Sheriff Dupnik, like Congresswoman Giffords, like the heroic intern Daniel Hernández and others at the scene of the crime who saved her life and subdued the shooter, also cuts against liberal bigotries and prejudices that arise when the word “Arizona” rings like Pavlov’s bell and liberal dogs begin to salivate so smugly that they are superior to conservative canines. The self-satisfied belief by so many coastal and urbane and “educated” Americans that they are superior to other countrymen and women not like them has been pricked once again by human events.

But if I had a nickel for every Facebook status update I’ve seen in the past two days directly calling Palin the “assassin” and saying, without a hint of nuance or irony, that “hate speech” caused the violence in Tucson, I might be able to buy Zuckerberg out and put the entire social network out of its misery. To this came the predictable calls to legislate or outlaw said “hate speech,” like that of US Rep. Bob Brady (D-Pennsylvania) who is getting media attention by announcing he’ll introduce legislation “making it a federal crime to threaten or incite violence against a member of Congress or a federal official.” (Interestingly, when Hugo Chávez backed similar laws in Venezuela, the US media called it an attack on free speech and democracy, which either it is or it isn’t in either country, but it can’t be one thing in Venezuela and a different thing in the United States, can it? How about, say, in Iran, where dissidents by the thousands shout “death to the dictator” from rooftops at nightfall? Is that "hate speech" that the State is justified to punish?)

Of course, the delicate matter of who decides what constitutes a threat or incitement to violence is the 900-pound gorilla in any such attempt to legislate what can or can’t be said. In that sense, Brady and others beating that drum are the 2011 versions of Ari Fleischer of 2001. Please, just look in the mirror: Have the past 48 hours turned you, too, into a "liberal" version of Ari Fleischer?

Jack Shafer at Slate – whose first instincts on matters of speech are almost always the best instincts an American can have – decries, “The awesome stupidity of the calls to tamp down political speech in the wake of the Giffords shooting," in his essay, yesterday, “In Defense of Inflamed Rhetoric”:

“For as long as I've been alive, crosshairs and bull's-eyes have been an accepted part of the graphical lexicon when it comes to political debates. Such "inflammatory" words as targeting, attacking, destroying, blasting, crushing, burying, knee-capping, and others have similarly guided political thought and action. Not once have the use of these images or words tempted me or anybody else I know to kill. I've listened to, read—and even written!—vicious attacks on government without reaching for my gun. I've even gotten angry, for goodness' sake, without coming close to assassinating a politician or a judge…

“Any call to cool ‘inflammatory’ speech is a call to police all speech, and I can't think of anybody in government, politics, business, or the press that I would trust with that power.”

Within weeks of the September 11 tragedy, I wrote similar thoughts in The Nation (“Never Shut Up, New York,” November 5, 2001), pushing back against efforts by the Bush administration and the media to silence dissent, wielding that moment’s trauma as its bludgeon. How heartbreaking to see, today, some of the same people who cheered that defense of speech against right wing efforts advocating to quell it now promote silence and censorship if inflammatory speech comes from the right instead of the left!

The national left-vs.-right political dysfunction in the United States has been on full display since Saturday. It’s so palpable that when Keith Olbermann, on Saturday, offered a nine-minute commentary on MSNBC, eight minutes criticizing the speech of right wingers like Palin, one minute of introspective self-criticism over times his own passions had caused him to say inflammatory things he now says he regrets, and zero minutes criticizing “the left,” that the reaction from many self-proclaimed “left” circles was to accuse him of stating “false moral equivalencies.” The vested interest among many of pinning the alleged homicidal acts of 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner on Republican politicians and their partisans reveals, I fear, more worrisome impulses among the accusers than among the accused. It is too many "progressives" today, revealing that their sense of politics is no more than another version of "an eye for an eye," the same as when it comes from their conservative adversaries.

Teddy Roosevelt Was A Socialist!!!!!

Teddy Roosevelt broke from the Republicans and ran as the "Bull Moose Party" (officially the "Progressive Party") candidate for President in 1912. The platform of the new party included a lengthy section on "Social and Industrial Justice." This included a pledge to establish "a system of social insurance".

See this article at the website politifact.com for a decent discussion of Barack Obama's claim that his Health Care Reform is in line with what Teddy Roosevelt envisioned almost a century ago. Their conclusion is "Clearly, Obama is on solid ground tracing the push for national health care back to Theodore Roosevelt."

Much of the Progressive platform was accomplished over the following years and decades. Women's Suffrage. Prohibition of child labor. Minimum wage laws. The establishment of a Department of Labor. Many of these reforms were actively opposed by the Supreme Court for many years based on the claim that they were all unconstitutional, and were only able to become law after FDR's famous showdown with the Supreme Court in 1937 (see the previous post The "Unconstitutional" Canard for more on that).

Here is the entire section of the Progressive Party 1912 Platform on "Social and Industrial Justice" and also the section on "Health" (link):

SOCIAL AND INDUSTRIAL JUSTICE

The supreme duty of the Nation is the conservation of human resources through an enlightened measure of social and industrial justice. We pledge ourselves to work unceasingly in State and Nation for:

Effective legislation looking to the prevention of industrial accidents, occupational diseases, overwork, involuntary unemployment, and other injurious effects incident to modern industry;

The fixing of minimum safety and health standards for the various occupations, and the exercise of the public authority of State and Nation, including the Federal Control over interstate commerce, and the taxing power, to maintain such standards;

The prohibition of child labor;

Minimum wage standards for working women, to provide a "living wage" in all industrial occupations;

The general prohibition of night work for women and the establishment of an eight hour day for women and young persons;

One day's rest in seven for all wage workers;

The eight hour day in continuous twenty-four hour industries;

The abolition of the convict contract labor system; substituting a system of prison production for governmental consumption only; and the application of prisoners' earnings to the support of their dependent families;

Publicity as to wages, hours and conditions of labor; full reports upon industrial accidents and diseases, and the opening to public inspection of all tallies, weights, measures and check systems on labor products;

Standards of compensation for death by industrial accident and injury and trade disease which will transfer the burden of lost earnings from the families of working people to the industry, and thus to the community;

The protection of home life against the hazards of sickness, irregular employment and old age through the adoption of a system of social insurance adapted to American use;

The development of the creative labor power of America by lifting the last load of illiteracy from American youth and establishing continuation schools for industrial education under public control and encouraging agricultural education and demonstration in rural schools;

The establishment of industrial research laboratories to put the methods and discoveries of science at the service of American producers;

We favor the organization of the workers, men and women, as a means of protecting their interests and of promoting their progress.

HEALTH

We favor the union of all the existing agencies of the Federal Government dealing with the public health into a single national health service without discrimination against or for any one set of therapeutic methods, school of medicine, or school of healing with such additional powers as may be necessary to enable it to perform efficiently such duties in the protection of the public from preventable diseases as may be properly undertaken by the Federal authorities, including the executing of existing laws regarding pure food, quarantine and cognate subjects, the promotion of vital statistics and the extension of the registration area of such statistics, and co-operation with the health activities of the various States and cities of the Nation.

Welcome to Pakistan?

It all started with those Town Hall meetings in the Summer of 2009. In case you've forgotten, here are some headlines:

• Health Care Town Halls Turn Violent (FOX News)
• Town Hall Meeting Turns Ugly (CNN)
• Health Care Town Hall Debates Stoke Outrage (ABC)
• Protesters Disrupt Town Hall Health Care Talks (Reuters)
• Rage Boils Over At Town Hall Meetings On Health Care (NY Daily News)

This was also the time when those ghoulish Obama "Joker" posters started popping up everywhere, with the caption "SOCIALISM."

Suddenly, a centrist Democrat, Barack Obama, was being labeled a "socialist" for supporting an idea first proposed by Teddy Roosevelt, a federal policy to provide universal health insurance for all Americans.

When Health Care Reform was finally passed, there were more yelling angry mobs, but now there were also physical assaults on Congressional offices, and death threats.

Then Sarah Palin came out with her infamous "cross-hairs" map. Here is what Gabrielle Giffords had to say about Palin's map:

"the way that she has it depicted has the crosshairs of a gun sight over our district, and when people do that, they've gotta realize there are consequences to that action."
[Gabrielle Giffords on MSNBC, March 25, 2010]

But the 2010 election got hotter still. By June, Sharon Angle was thinking out loud about resorting to "second amendment remedies" in order to "take out Harry Reid."

Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords managed to get re-elected, despite being targeted by Sarah Palin. Now she is fighting for her life, and six people, including a six year old girl and a Federal Judge, are dead.

"... bought it in an auction at the Mason's Lodge"

Opie Hendrix & the Texas Tallboys show how it's done on the mandolin:


Roger Allen shows how it's done on the guitar:


The Thunderbridge Bluegrass Boys show how it's done with only one microphone:


Chad Bentley shows how it's done with very low production values (this one is actually my favorite!):

Belief in Reincarnation in Sub-Saharan Africa

From the 2010 Pew study on Religion in Sub-Saharan Africa. The following are the percentages, by country, of people who answered "yes" to the question: "Do you believe in reincarnation -- that people will be born in this world again and again?"

Botswana 51%
Cameroon 43%
Chad 45%
DR Congo 38%
Djibouti 32%
Ethiopia 21%
Ghana 47%
Guinea Bissau 47%
Kenya 31%
Liberia 31%
Mali 28%
Mozambique 50%
Nigeria 37%
Rwanda 27%
Senegal 28%
South Africa 49%
Tanzania 32%
Uganda 51%
Zambia 17%

Consider this to be a follow-on to the post: A (very!) quick and dirty cross-cultural study of "supernatural" beliefs and experiences (with special attention to reincarnation).

Also, here is a handy map showing estimates for the degree to which there are "high levels of belief and practice" in African Traditional Religion in sub-Saharan Africa (reproduced from the post 200 Million African Pagans).

The "Unconstitutional" Canard

"We believe that the Constitution of the United States is the greatest charter of human liberty ever conceived by the mind of man."
[Article One, Platform of the States' Rights Democratic Party, 1948]

Prior to the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Supreme Court had repeatedly torpedoed all attempts to pass federal legislation outlawing child labor, regulating working hours, establishing a minimum wage, protecting the right of workers to form labor unions, and so forth. These were all deemed to be "unconstitutional"!

Even after FDR's election, the Supreme Court continued to strike down many provisions of the New Deal on the same grounds. Finally, Roosevelt reminded the Court that the Constitution allowed him, in theory, to appoint as many Supreme Court Justices as he pleased. At first the Justices thought he was bluffing. But as the Judiciary Reorganization Act of 1937 (sometimes called Roosevelt's "court packing plan") began to work its way through Congress, suddenly the nation's highest court began to change its tune. Eventually that bill failed, but so did the attempted judicial activism of right-wing Justices opposed to the New Deal.

In 1948, President Harry Truman ordered the desegregation of the US military and established the President's Committee on Civil Rights. Worse still, in the eyes of some die-hard bigots, the 1948 Democratic Convention adopted a Civil Rights plank, at which point a number of southern Democrats walked out of the Convention. These southern Democrats soon announced the formation of a new party, the first plank of whose unanimously adopted platform states proudly: "We believe that the Constitution of the United States is the greatest charter of human liberty ever conceived by the mind of man."

But the Civil Rights movement continued to make progress, all the while being opposed by those who proclaimed their undying love for the Constitution. When the University of Alabama was ordered, by a federal judge, to allow black students to enroll, then Governor George Wallace delivered his famous "school house door" speech in support of segregation, in which he used the word "Constitution" 18 times.

After delivering that speech, George Wallace stood aside to allow Vivian Malone Jones and James Hood, accompanied by federal marshalls and Alabama National Guard troops, to enter Foster Auditorium and register as students.

Investigating Islamic radicalization in the U.S.

According to survey data from 2010, extremist ideas and extremist groups have significant levels of support both in majority Muslim countries, and in Islamic communities throughout Europe.

In fact, this data (gathered by the Pew Research Center) suggests that Glenn Beck's claim that 10% of Muslims support terrorism is likely to be too low. Pew found that fully 18% of those surveyed in 6 Muslim-majority countries openly (at least to pollsters) proclaim their support for Al Qaeda. And the level of support for imposing the death penalty on apostates was found to be much higher than that.

Among Muslims living in Europe, Pew found that the extremist Muslim Brotherhood (the progenitor of most modern day Sunni Muslim terrorist groups) is extremely, if you will, popular. In fact, the Brotherhood is often viewed by European governments as a de facto representative of Muslim sentiment in Europe.

But we don't have to take the word of the Pew Research Center. We need look no further than Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf and Daisy Khan, both of whom have repeatedly warned about the dire threat of Islamic extremism. Daisy Khan has gone so far as to state plainly that Islam "has been hijacked by the extremists." Not to be outdone by his wife, Imam Rauf is currently touring the United States sounding the alarm about the dangers of extremism.

And it's always good to keep in mind the prophetic words written by Fareed Zakaria (a consistently liberal American Muslim journalist whose father was a respected Islamic scholar) just a few weeks after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks (although we now know that he was two orders of magnitude off in his estimation of the size of the problem): "The problem is not that Osama bin Laden believes that this is a religious war against America. It's that millions of people across the Islamic world seem to agree."

If one were very naive and had been living under a very large rock, then, one might suspect that a proposal to investigate "the radicalization of the American Muslim community and homegrown terrorism" in the US would be met with a combination of praise and sighs of relief. After all, the United States is not only home to approximately 5 million Muslims and 2,000 mosques, it is also the primary target for all Islamic extremists around the world.

But Peter King's announcement that he intends to conduct just such an investigation under the aegis of the Department of Homeland Security has been met with a predictable chorus of denunciations both from prominent American Muslim organizations and from prominent liberals.

Unfortunately we have quickly gotten to the point where this knee jerk reaction from "progressives" is only to be expected. But think about it. Why are liberals so blindly opposed to investigating the extent to which the world's most arch-reactionary terrorists are operating right here in the US under our noses? Why are liberals opposed to investigating the extent to which the most illiberal ideology imaginable, Islamic extremism, has gained a footing in the US, and is being actively spread by people with sympathies for and organizational links to terrorist groups openly at war with the US?

In fact, we not only have every right to know, but we desperately need to know the extent of Islamic extremist sympathy, organizing, recruiting, and other activities in the US. For examples: How many mosques in the US were not only bought and paid for in Saudi Arabia, but are staffed and run by Wahabist clerics? How many "Islamic Community Centers" are being used as meeting places for people who are actively planning terrorist activities in the U.S.? And so forth.

But let's not limit this to Islam. Let's also investigate every other religious denomination whose members are known to advocate and be engaged in such things as bombing Synagogues, massacring religious pilgrims, calling for a new Holocaust, hunting down and murdering cartoonists, killing anyone who wants to change their religion, etc.

Links:

On widespread Muslim support for extremist groups and extremist ideas:

• Who Supports Al Qaeda? Over 100 Million Muslims. That's Who.
• What Does the Muslim Brotherhood think of the new Pew report?
• "Islamism" widespread, deeply rooted among Muslims in Europe, according to Pew study

Daisy Khan, Imam Rauf and Fareed Zakaria on the dangers of extremism:

• Imam Rauf: Extremism a Global Threat
• "Our religion has been hijacked by the extremists." Daisy Khan
• "The Islamic Exception"
• Do Muslims really bear no responsibility at all for 9/11?