[lbo-talk] 2004 Sydney Peace Prize lecture delivered by Arundhati Roy

[Mike Ballard]

In New Iraq, privatization has broken new ground. The
US Army is increasingly recruiting private mercenaries
to help in the occupation. The advantage with
mercenaries is that when they're killed they're not
included in the US soldiers' body count. It helps to
manage public opinion, which is particularly important
in an election year. Prisons have been privatized.
Torture has been privatized. We have seen what that
leads to. Other attractions in New Iraq include
newspapers being shut down. Television stations
bombed. Reporters killed. US soldiers have opened fire
on crowds of unarmed protestors killing scores of
people. The only kind of resistance that has managed
to survive is as crazed and brutal as the occupation
itself. Is there space for a secular, democratic,
feminist, non-violent resistance in Iraq? There isn't
really.

That is why it falls to those of us living outside
Iraq to create that mass-based, secular and
non-violent resistance to the US occupation. If we
fail to do that, then we run the risk of allowing the
idea of resistance to be hi-jacked and conflated with
terrorism and that will be a pity because they are not
the same thing.

full: 
http://f2.org/fred/diary/2004/11/03.html

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Jesus is a mythical figure in the tradition of pagan mythology and almost nothing in all of ancient literature would lead one to believe otherwise. Anyone wanting to believe Jesus lived and walked as a real live human being must do so despite the evidence, not because of it.

-C. Dennis McKinsey, Bible critic (The Encyclopedia of Biblical Errancy)

 
The gospels are very peculiar types of literature. They're not biographies.

-Paula Fredriksen, Professor and historian of early Christianity, Boston University (in the PBS documentary, From Jesus to Christ, aired in 1998)

The gospels are not eyewitness accounts

-Allen D. Callahan, Associate Professor of New Testament, Harvard Divinity School

http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal

		
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