whitebeard

Don't curse the darkness, light a candle.

Dante into the Casentino

 

Quando si guarda al Casentino, laggiù in basso, la Valle Chiusa stessa diviene pensiero, memoria.  Il passato emerge più vivido del presente ed il corso stesso del fiume diviene il simbolo,  l'immagine delle possenti correnti di vita e di passione che un giorno fluirono attraverso la Valle.  In giorni di un remoto passato il piccolo spazio circoscritto dai verdi colli, ora così pieno di  pace, rinserrò in sé alcune delle più strenue forze della storia d'Italia. La catena di alture irte  di castelli, lungo il corso del fiume e le torri di pietra che scrutano dalle balze ogni valle  laterale sottostante, rammentano il sistema feudale che in passato dominò l'Italia quando, nel diluvio generale, in cui rimasero sommerse legge ed ordine, dopo la caduta dell'Impero e le  successive invasioni del paese, il potere si ritirò sulla cima dei monti e fu impersonato dal  braccio armato del barone indipendente.   Il Casentino, tenuto da grandi Conti Palatini, i Guidi che, colla forza delle armi avevano esteso il loro dominio su tutte le vallate più alte dell'Appennino in entrambi i versanti e fino al cuore della Romagna, fu nell'Undicesimo e Dodicesimo secolo la sede di un potere al quale gli ancora deboli e insignificanti comuni confinanti prestavano omaggio ed obbedienza. Fu questo il periodo in cui la Vallata fu più strettamente collegata con il mondo esterno. Mercanti e viaggiatori frequentavano le montagne e i villaggi, oggi piccoli e modesti, quasi inaccessibili sulle cime pietrose, che erano allora importanti luoghi di passaggio e sui monti si ergevano numerose e grandi abbazie, ridotte oggi a mucchi di rovine perse nella foresta, sui più alti pendii visitati oggi solo da cacciatori, abbazie che furono un tempo centri di rapporti umani e di attività politiche. La Vallata era probabilmente più popolata allora di oggi: dove il principe aveva la sua sede gli uomini si sentivano sicuri e si riunivano.

And as one looks down into the Casentino, far beneath, the Valley Enclosed itself becomes a thought, a memory. The past grows more vivid than the present, and the course of the river below symbolises itself into an image of the strong currents of life and passion which once coursed through the Valley. In days long gone by, that little space circumscribed by the green hills, and now so peaceful, contained within it some of the most strenuous forces of Italian history. The chain of castled heights along the course of the river, and the rock-built towers that watch from their crags down each lateral valley, recall the feudal system which once dominated Italy, when in the general deluge, in which law and order were submerged after the downfall of the Empire and the successive invasions of the country, authority retreated to the hill-tops and lodged itself in the strong arm of the independent baron. The Casentino, held by the great Counts Palatine, the Guidi, who sword in hand had stretched their dominion over all the upper Apennine valleys on either side of the mountains and far into the Romagna, was in the eleventh and twelfth centuries the seat of a power to which the yet weak and insignificant communes around gave homage and obedience. This was the period when the Valley was most closely connected with the outer world. The traffic of life had not yet beaten out broad tracks and easy roundabout ways, but men on mule-back went straight over the face of the hills to their destination. Merchants and travellers frequented the mountains, and villages now mean and dwindled and almost inaccessible upon their rocks were then quite in the world's path, and there was many a great abbey, now but a heap of ruins lost in the forest far up the higher slopes, where only the hunter goes by, which was then a centre of human intercourse and political activity. The Valley was probably more populous at that time than now; where princes inhabited, men were sure to gather together.

27 gennaio 1302 In nome di Dio, amen. Io Messer Cante dei Gabrielli da Gubbio, onorevole Potestà della Città di Firenze … nell’anno del Signore 1302, al tempo del Santissimo Padre Papa Bonifazio VIII…   OMISSIS Essendomi venuto alle orecchie sulla base di pubbliche dicerie che Dante Alighieri, durante il tempo del suo Priorato o dopo, 1 -aveva commesso per sé o per altri Baratterie, illeciti lucri, inique estorsioni in denaro o altre cose 2 – che lui o chi per lui aveva ricevuto denaro o altra utilità per far eleggere Priori o Gonfalonieri, ufficiali di distretto, per stanziamenti a favore di rettori e ufficiali del comune di Firenze; 3 – che aveva fatto spendere denari contro il Sommo Pontefice e per impedire la venuta di re Carlo D’Angiò; 4 – che aveva commesso o fatto commettere frode, falsità, dolo, malizia, baratteria e grave estorsione e aveva operato per dividere la città di Pistoia causando l’espulsione da detta città dei Neri fedeli alla Chiesa Romana, staccandola dall’alleanza con Firenze, dalla soggezione alla Chiesa romana e a re Carlo, paciaro in Toscana;   ordino che detto messer Dante, insieme a Palmerio, Orlanduccio e Lippo,… venga multato di 5.000 fiorini piccoli, che restituisca quello che ha illegittimamente estorto. Se non obbedisca alla condanna entro il terzo giorno da oggi  che tutti i suoi beni siano confiscati, devastati e distrutti; e devastati e distrutti restino di proprietà comunale; che, anche se pagante, resti fuori della provincia di Toscana a confino per due anni; che sia escluso per sempre dai pubblici uffici come falsario e barattiere, che paghi la condanna o no. Tale è la nostra sentenza.         Condanna a morte                 p.47 del libro 10 marzo 1302 In nome di Dio, amen. noi Cante, predetto Podestà, diamo e proferiamo la sotto indicata Condanna: Messer Andrea de Gherardini Messer Lapo Saltarelli … Dante Allighieri … contro i quali si è proceduto a seguito della inquisizione del nostro ufficio e della nostra Curia per il fatto pervenuto alle orecchie nostre e della stessa nostra Corte sulla base delle pubbliche dicerie …che se qualcuno dei predetti in qualsiasi tempo cadrà in potere del detto comune, sia bruciato col fuoco finché muoia.

27 January 1302 In the name of God, amen. I, the undersigned Messere Cante dei Gabrielli from Gubbio, honorable Podestà of the city of Florence....in the year of our Lord 1302, at the time of our most Holy Father Pope Boniface VIII …   OMISSIS It having come to my ear from public rumours that Dante Alighieri, during his mandate as Priore or after 1 – had indulged, to his own or to other parties' benefit, in barter, illicit gains, iniquitous extortions of money or of other goods. 2 – that he, or others on his behalf, had received monies or other benefits to the effect that district officers should be elected as Priors or Gonfalonieri to make monies available to the rectors and officials of the commune of Florence. 3 – that he had caused the spending of monies against the Pope and in trying to prevent the coming of King Charles of Anjou; 4 – that he had committed, or caused to commit, fraud , falsehood, deceit, malice, barter and serious extortion and had endeavoured to divide the city of Pistoia, causing the expulsion of the Black Guelfs who were faithful to the Roman Church from the city, breaking its alliance with Florence, from its subjection to the Roman Church and King Charles, peacemaker in Tuscany; I rule that the above mentioned Messer Dante, along with Palmiero, Orlanduccio and Lippo..... be fined the sum of 5.000 small florins, and that he shall return whatever he has illegitimately extorted.  Should he not obey to the ruling within the third day from this, I order that all his assets shall be confiscated, devastated and destroyed; that thus devastated and destroyed they shall remain in the property of the commune; that even if he should pay the above mentioned fine, that he shall remain outside the province of Tuscany in confinement for two years; that he shall be barred from public offices as a forger and barterer, whether he pays the fines or not. Such is our ruling    Second ruling 10 March 1302 In the name of God, Amen. I, Cante, above said Podestà, pronounce and proffer the following Sentence: Messer Andrea de Gherardini Messer Lapo Saltarelli … Dante Allighieri … against whom we have proceeded following the inquisition by our Office and of our Jurisdiction concerning the fact reaching our ears and the “referred public knowledge” which has reached our Court; ... that if any of the above listed at any time should fall within the power of the said commune, be burned by fire till they do die.

posted by: Whitebeard at 23:05 | link | comments |
dante, noyes, casentino

No one wins in a war

Howard Zinn
 
Memo to Obama, McCain: No one wins in a war
Email|Print|Single Page| Text size – + By Howard Zinn
July 17, 2008
BARACK OBAMA and John McCain continue to argue about war. McCain says to keep the troops in Iraq until we "win" and supports sending more troops to Afghanistan. Obama says to withdraw some (not all) troops from Iraq and send them to fight and "win" in Afghanistan.

For someone like myself, who fought in World War II, and since then has protested against war, I must ask: Have our political leaders gone mad? Have they learned nothing from recent history? Have they not learned that no one "wins" in a war, but that hundreds of thousands of humans die, most of them civilians, many of them children?

Did we "win" by going to war in Korea? The result was a stalemate, leaving things as they were before with a dictatorship in South Korea and a dictatorship in North Korea. Still, more than 2 million people - mostly civilians - died, the United States dropped napalm on children, and 50,000 American soldiers lost their lives.

Did we "win" in Vietnam? We were forced to withdraw, but only after 2 million Vietnamese died, again mostly civilians, again leaving children burned or armless or legless, and 58,000 American soldiers dead.

Did we win in the first Gulf War? Not really. Yes, we pushed Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, with only a few hundred US casualties, but perhaps 100,000 Iraqis died. And the consequences were deadly for the United States: Saddam was still in power, which led the United States to enforce economic sanctions. That move led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, according to UN officials, and set the stage for another war.

In Afghanistan, the United States declared "victory" over the Taliban. Now the Taliban is back, and attacks are increasing. The recent US military death count in Afghanistan exceeds that in Iraq. What makes Obama think that sending more troops to Afghanistan will produce "victory"? And if it did, in an immediate military sense, how long would that last, and at what cost to human life on both sides?

The resurgence of fighting in Afghanistan is a good moment to reflect on the beginning of US involvement there. There should be sobering thoughts to those who say that attacking Iraq was wrong, but attacking Afghanistan was right.

Go back to Sept. 11, 2001. Hijackers direct jets into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, killing close to 3,000 A terrorist act, inexcusable by any moral code. The nation is aroused. President Bush orders the invasion and bombing of Afghanistan, and the American public is swept into approval by a wave of fear and anger. Bush announces a "war on terror."

Except for terrorists, we are all against terror. So a war on terror sounded right. But there was a problem, which most Americans did not consider in the heat of the moment: President Bush, despite his confident bravado, had no idea how to make war against terror.

Yes, Al Qaeda - a relatively small but ruthless group of fanatics - was apparently responsible for the attacks. And, yes, there was evidence that Osama bin Laden and others were based in Afghanistan. But the United States did not know exactly where they were, so it invaded and bombed the whole country. That made many people feel righteous. "We had to do something," you heard people say.

Yes, we had to do something. But not thoughtlessly, not recklessly. Would we approve of a police chief, knowing there was a vicious criminal somewhere in a neighborhood, ordering that the entire neighborhood be bombed? There was soon a civilian death toll in Afghanistan of more than 3,000 - exceeding the number of deaths in the Sept. 11 attacks. Hundreds of Afghans were driven from their homes and turned into wandering refugees.

Two months after the invasion of Afghanistan, a Boston Globe story described a 10-year-old in a hospital bed: "He lost his eyes and hands to the bomb that hit his house after Sunday dinner." The doctor attending him said: "The United States must be thinking he is Osama. If he is not Osama, then why would they do this?"

We should be asking the presidential candidates: Is our war in Afghanistan ending terrorism, or provoking it? And is not war itself terrorism?

Howard Zinn is author of "A People's History of the United States."

© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.

posted by: Whitebeard at 21:29 | link | comments |
us, war

Everybody is somebody's Jew

" And today the Palestinians are the Jews of the Israelis."

-- Primo Levi, cited in A Hard Case: The Life and Death of Primo Levi; The New Yorker, 17 Jun 2002.

But the more Levi shouldered his responsibilities as a Jew the more he got caught in the toils of the Holocaust culture. Like most Italian Jews, he believed in assimilation. And he did not consider the Jews to be heroes because Hitler had tried to exterminate them. As he saw it, they were merely human—Fascism's crime was to have deprived them of that status—and humanity was what we had to understand if we harbored any hope of a just world. Accordingly, he gave Israel no breaks. "Everybody is somebody's Jew," he told an Italian newspaper in 1982, "and today the Palestinians are the Jews of the Israelis." After the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon, and the massacres at Sabra and Shatila, he said that Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon were bringing down shame on the name of the Jews, and he called for their resignation. This brought a flood of letters accusing him of giving comfort to the enemy. In sum, Levi, the greatest soul, the greatest artist, of the "witness" writers, was not usable the way the others were. It was not Levi but his friend Elie Wiesel who got a Nobel Prize.

 

posted by: Whitebeard at 10:54 | link | comments |
israel, palestine

Mass Killings

U.S. Perpetuates Mass Killings In Iraq

By Peter Phillips

The United States is directly responsible for over one million Iraqi 
deaths since the invasion five and half years ago.  In a January 2008 
report, a British polling group Opinion Research Business (ORB) 
reports that,  “survey work confirms our earlier estimate that over 
1,000,000 Iraqi citizens have died as a result of the conflict which 
started in 2003…. We now estimate that the death toll between March 
2003 and August 2007 is likely to have been of the order of 
1,033,000. If one takes into account the margin of error associated 
with survey data of this nature then the estimated range is between 
946,000 and 1,120,000”.

This report comes on the heels of two earlier studies conducted by 
Johns Hopkins University published in the Lancet medical journal that 
confirmed the continuing numbers of mass deaths in Iraq.  A study 
done by Dr. Les Roberts from January 1, 2002 to March 18 2003 put the 
civilian deaths at that time at over 100,000. A second study 
published in the Lancet in October 2006 documented over 650,000 
civilian deaths in Iraq since the start of the US invasion.  The 2006 
study confirms that US aerial bombing in civilian neighborhoods 
caused over a third of these deaths and that over half the deaths are 
directly attributable to US forces.

             The now estimated 1.2 million dead, as of July 2008, 
includes children, parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, cab 
drivers, clerics, schoolteachers, factory workers, policemen, poets, 
healthcare workers, day care providers, construction workers, 
babysitters, musicians, bakers, restaurant workers and many more. All 
manner of ordinary people in Iraq have died because the United States 
decided to invade their country. These are deaths in excess of the 
normal civilian death rate under the prior government.

The magnitude of these deaths is undeniable. The continuing 
occupation by US forces guarantees a mass death rate in excess of 
10,000 people per month with half that number dying at the hands of 
US forces— a carnage so severe and so concentrated at to equate it 
with the most heinous mass killings in world history. This act has 
not gone unnoticed.

Recently, Dennis Kucinich introduced a single impeachment article 
against George W. Bush for lying to Congress and the American people 
about the reasons for invading Iraq. On July 15 The House forwarded 
the resolution to the Judiciary Committee with a 238 to 180 vote.  
That Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction and Iraq’s threat to 
the US is now beyond doubt. Former US federal prosecutor Elizabeth De 
La Vega documents the lies most thoroughly in her book U.S. Vs Bush, 
and numerous other researchers have verified Bush’s untrue statements.

The American people are faced with a serious moral dilemma. Murder 
and war crimes have been conducted in our name. We have allowed the 
war/occupation to continue in Iraq and offered ourselves little 
choice within the top two presidential candidates for immediate 
cessation of the mass killings. McCain would undoubtedly accept the 
deaths of another million Iraqi civilians in order to save face for 
America, and Obama’s 18-month timetable for withdrawal would likely 
result in another 250,000 civilian deaths or more.

We owe our children and ourselves a future without the shame of mass 
murder on our collective conscience. The only resolution of this 
dilemma is the immediate withdrawal of all US troops in Iraq and the 
prosecution and imprisonment of those responsible. Anything less 
creates a permanent original sin on the soul of the nation for that 
we will forever suffer.

Peter Phillips is a Professor of Sociology at Sonoma State University 
and director of Project Censored a media research group.  He is the 
co-editor with Dennnis Loo of the book Impeach the President: The 
Case Against Bush and Cheney.
 

posted by: Whitebeard at 08:18 | link | comments |
iraq, us, war, censored news

Voices of a People’s History

July 4th Special: Readings From Howard Zinn’s “Voices of a People’s History of the United States”

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/7/4/july_4th_special_readings_from_howard

posted by: Whitebeard at 22:31 | link | comments |
us, culture, democracy, resisters