War on activism
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Some of the examples in Treating dissent as treason are also appropriate to this article.
Activism, and dissent, have been redefined to now include what formerly was a normal education in style, technique, values, and literature.
- "the mere teaching of creative writing has come to feel, for the first time in my life, like a positively dissident line of work. ... -- David James Duncan [1]
- Creative writing requires a dual love of language and of life, human and otherwise. The storyteller then sculpts these raw loves with acute observation, reflection, creative struggle, allegiance to truth, merciless awareness of the foibles of human beings, and unstinting empathy toward human beings even so.
- Not only have these strategies foundered in the post-9/11 rhetoric of the Bush administration, they look to me to have been outlawed by two recent federal documents: the "2002 National Security Strategy for the United States" and the 107th Congress's "Patriot Act."
- Another example of how the New America forces literature into a dissident position is Bush's presumption (stated in the National Security Strategy, page 5) that it is the New America's "clear responsibility to history" to "rid the world of evil." As a lifelong student of the world's wisdom literature, it is my duty to inform students that "ridding the world of evil" is a goal very different from any recommended by Jesus, Buddha, or Muhammad, though not so different from some recommended by the Joseph Stalin and McCarthy and by Mao Tse Tung. In wisdom literature the principal evil to be attacked by the person of faith is the evil in oneself, and a secondary evil to be opposed is the power of anyone who victimizes the weak.
There is, fortunately, much more in the full article wherein the author shares his perspective on "the impossibility of teaching creative writing under the pretentious new National Security Strategy without seeming dissident."
"A judge presiding over the cases of free trade protesters said in court that he saw no less than 20 felonies committed by police officers during the November FTAA demonstrations" in Miami. [2]
Related SourceWatch articles
- blaming the victim, Kent State 1970
- Guantanamo Camp Xray
- media reform
- Plan Condor, alive and well in the U.S. of A
- reckless escalation of adversity
- Threshold rights
