Bike for Peace and New Energies e.V.

[Konni.Schmidt]

Liebe FriedensfreundInnen,
einmal mehr finde ich eine - bisher die beste - Analyse zu den schrecklichen Nachrichten aus Norwegen, bei David Rovics.

Mein englisch reicht nicht aus, alles zu verstehen, aber genug, um es wert zu finden, es Euch weiter zu leiten.

Vielleicht findet sich unter Euch jemand, der es übersetzt?

Friedliche Grüße

Konni

Dear friends of peace,
not very often i like to use the mailing list for other themes then organizing our bike for peace ride.

But i suppose everybody in these days is shocked about that what happened in Norway.
The writing of our good friend David Rovics can help us a lot to understand and to not desesperate.
Too much politicians dont have the courage to entlighten the background of these events. Because they could find there own responsibility and must decide to change their politics.

David Rovics is a singer and songwriter. And a very great analysator of the present situation. Very often we, the friends of peace, are accused to be anti-americanists.
No, we are not. Americans like David Rovics, Pete Segger and so much more have the merit, to show us, the struggle is a worldwide struggle against racism and policy of war.
David is a great american and a great world citizen.

If you want to discuss with us about his words, you can it at our forum:

---------- Forwarded Message ----------

Subject: [David Rovics] "I'm A Better Anarchist Than You" ANIMATED... Thoughts on Norway...
Date: Tuesday 26 July 2011, 00:23:14
From: David Rovics <drovics@gmail.com>
To: bike4peace@web.de

"I'm A Better Anarchist Than You" ANIMATED punk rock version!
http://www.youtube.com/drovics#p/a/f/0/zvlWSnLxrrc

His last animation, for "Riot Dog," got over 40,000 views in the first
week. This one is even better. Here's Bj�rn-Magne Stuest�l's animated
version of "I'm A Better Anarchist Than You," from my recording, Big Red
Sessions.


The RANDOM button

As of yesterday, every time you visit (or refresh) www.davidrovics.com you
will encounter a different musical button to play if you want to... You
can also download Big Red Sessions there, too (just beneath the button).


The Massacre in Norway
On the web:
http://songwritersnotebook.blogspot.com ... orway.html

I'm as shocked as most other people are at the fact that there are people
in ourmidst who could be so socially alienated that they could justify the
killing of scores of young people on the basis that they are politically
progressive. Equally shocking is the scale of this slaughter.

The nature of this event reminds me both of Oklahoma City and Columbine,
which have their similarities in nature and their differences.

Every time a Columbine-style massacre takes place in the US, almost always
carried out by a young white man who resents females and other targets,
whose targets are always primarily young, I wonder if we are somehow going
to come to terms with the extent to which our society is flawed, how much
social alienation is becoming increasingly rampant, how so many people feel
left out, bullied, side-tracked -- while at the same time feeling like they
deserve better. These damaged people -- who usually made unobtrusive,
normal-seeming neighbors until they went to school with a machine gun one
day -- then seek out a way to put their feelings of alienation into some
kind of context.

Too often they find it in the form of rightwing, Christian ideologies that
systematically dehumanize whole ethnic groups and anybody who believes in
an inclusive, multicultural, egalitarian society. And while everybody and
their mother is, of course, denouncing the actions of this Norwegian
sociopath just as they denounced Timothy McVeigh and Dylan Klebold before
him, "mainstream" conservatives as well as ostensibly more progressive
parties throughout Europe, North America and elsewhere talk openly about
the "failure of multiculturalism" and of Europe's grand Christian
traditions.

The rise of the Right on both sides of the Atlantic has been fuelled by
duplicitous politicians and corporate interests who have been appealing to
the progressive nature of most people with talk of one big European family,
while they implement policies which result in the further impoverishment of
much of eastern Europe, continuing de-industrialization Europe east and
west (and North America), combined with a flood of immigrants coming from
places where job prospects are even more grim (such as eastern Europe,
North Africa, Mexico, etc.) or from places that have been destroyed by
European and North American foreign policy, such as Iraq and Afghanistan.

Then the political elite blames the socioeconomic situation they have
created on their victims, talking about the failure of multiculturalism,
urban crime, welfare cheats, lazy workers, corrupt unions, etc. And they
find lots of ways of saying we were all better off when society was whiter
and more moral.

Of course, the big news is that society was never more moral, only more
divided and stratified, before unions and multiculturalism. And Europe has
never been white nor Christian. Jews got there way before Christ did, and
the pagans long predated the Jews. Muslims have been there since the days
of Mohammed.

On the one hand I think it's important to emphasize that this guy is an
extreme sociopath, at least according to my definition of the word. But
equally, I think it's important to note that xenophobes who make all sorts
of wild and inaccurate generalizations about Muslims and progressives are
very easy to find throughout Europe, throughout society, from the streets
to the halls of power in Berlin, Paris, and London as well as Stockholm,
Copenhagen and Oslo, and this is not at all helpful in preventing the next
massacre.

It is not just the extreme right that needs to understand that, far from
representing more advanced civilizations than the societies from which many
of the immigrants are coming, Europe is, and has long been, a troubled
place. The right rejects multiculturalism and always has. Many progressive
people in Europe and North America talk about "tolerance" and inclusiveness
as if these are traditional European values. Of course, for many Europeans,
they are.

But the history of Europeans actively rejecting an inclusive, open society
is long and terrible in a way that is still unparalleled on our troubled
planet. While a multiplicity of ethnic, linguistic and religious groups
were living together comparatively peaceably for centuries of Ottoman rule,
in Europe the inquisitors and crusaders were slaughtering their fellow
Europeans for not ascribing to the right set of beliefs. While Jews were
fleeing the pogroms in Europe, their counterparts throughout the Muslim
world were prospering. And then decades later came the Nazi Holocaust, when
a man very much like Anders Breivik was running an empire, with lots of
little Anders Breiviks doing his bidding, using gas chambers along with
their machine guns.