Fausta's Blog

American and Latin American Politics, Society, and Culture

Archives for February 2007

February 23, 2007 By Fausta

Amazing Grace opens today

Several years ago I was very sick with blood sugar problems, and since it was not diabetes it took months before the condition was diagnosed correctly. By the time it was diagnosed I was bedridden, needing help to get to the bathroom, and fainting frequently. I had also lost 30 lbs from my usual weight, to the point where the clothes I’m wearing would hang as if on a hanger. I was so weak that I despaired of ever being able to return to a normal life.

In a word, I was desperate.

In the depths of my desperation I tried to hang on to any positive thought, and for some reason the words of the hymn Amazing Grace (which I posted yesterday), particularly,

The Lord has promised good to me.
His Word my hope secures.
He will my shield and portion be
As long as life endures.

kept returning to my mind, like those pesky songs that get in your head and play over and over.

I do not know how I recalled those words since I’m not particularly religious, don’t remember hymns or lyrics and most of the time I don’t even understand the words being sung, but I held on to those words as a means to my regaining my health.

And, thank God, I was able to find the way to get better. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, by far, which was complicated by the fact that I had a completely inept doctor and was given bad medical advise by him and other members of his staff.

It took me nearly five years before I could carry a normal schedule.

A few years later, one Sunday in church the rector held his annual sing-along service, where he’d ask people to request their favorite hymn. I asked for Amazing Grace, of course, and before we sang, he told the story of the song.

I don’t cry often, but I cried when I heard it. I had no idea it was connected to the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade, which the British accomplished in the nineteenth century. March, 2007 marks the 200th anniversary of the slave trade’s abolition in Britain.

While I still frequently sing the hymn (quietly to myself, since I sing like a frog), I totally forgot the story behind it until I saw the trailers for the movie a couple of weeks ago.

This morning I was taking care of personal matters when I read an email from Caitlin Bozell,

Hi Fausta,

I would like to let you know that, today, the epic story of abiding faith and uncommon courage, Amazing Grace, comes out in theaters everywhere. It tells the story of William Wilberforce and a community of abolitionists as they awaken the conscience of a nation by taking on the most powerful interests of their day to end the British slave trade. It is the true story of a reluctant leader called to do the impossible in order to allow truth and justice to prevail

Many inspiring global crusades have been launched in order to finish the work that Wilberforce started over 200 years ago. Behind the film Amazing Grace is a movement against modern-day slavery called The Amazing Change campaign, created to make freedom a reality the estimated 27 million slaves in the sex and labor industries today.

The Amazing Change website has information on present-day slavery, among them the fact that there are more slaves in the world today than during all 400 years of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

I have posted about slavery for a few years now. Let’s hope this film will bring new energy into the work that’s needed to end this horrible crime.

Maria sent me the NYT review.

I’ll try to see the movie today or tomorrow.

Update: Peggy Noonan writes about how Wilbeforce was driven by Christianity, and the hymn itself (emphasis added):

It is thus fitting that John Wesley happened to write his last letter–sent in February 1791, days before his death–to William Wilberforce. Wesley urged Wilberforce to devote himself unstintingly to his antislavery campaign, a “glorious enterprise” that opposed “that execrable villainy which is the scandal of religion, of England, and of human nature.” Wesley also urged him to “go on, in the name of God and in the power of his might, till even American slavery (the vilest that ever saw the sun) shall vanish away before it.”

Wesley had begun preaching against slavery 20 years before and in 1774 published an abolitionist tract, “Thoughts on Slavery.” Wilberforce came into contact with the burgeoning antislavery movement in 1787, when he met Thomas Clarkson, an evangelical Anglican who had devoted his life to the abolitionist cause. Two years later, Wilberforce gave his first speech against the slave trade in Parliament.

As for the hymn “Amazing Grace,” from which the film takes its name, it is the work of a friend of Wilberforce’s named John Newton (played in the movie by Albert Finney). Newton had spent a dissolute youth as a seaman and eventually became a slave-ship captain. In his 20s he underwent a kind of spiritual crisis, reading the Bible and Thomas a Kempis’s “Imitation of Christ.” A decade later, having heard Wesley preach, he fell in with England’s evangelical movement and left sea-faring and slave-trading behind. Years later, under the influence of Wilberforce’s admonitions, he joined the antislavery campaign. The famous hymn amounted to an autobiography of his conversion: “Amazing grace . . . that saved a wretch like me.” In the most moving moment of the film–and one of the few that addresses a Christian theme directly–the aged and now-blind Newton declares to Wilberforce: “I am a great sinner, and Christ is a great savior.”

This idea of slaving as sin is key. As sociologist Rodney Stark noted in “For the Glory of God” (2003), the abolition of slavery in the West during the 19th century was a uniquely Christian endeavor. When chattel slavery, long absent from Europe, reappeared in imperial form in the 16th and 17th centuries–mostly in response to the need for cheap labor in the New World–the first calls to end the practice came from pious Christians, notably the Quakers. Evangelicals, not least Methodists, quickly joined the cause, and a movement was born.

Thanks to Wilberforce, the movement’s most visible champion, Britain ended slavery well before America, but the abolitionist cause in America, too, was driven by Christian churches more than is often acknowledged.

Go read it.

Wintley Phipps;

Update, Saturday 23 February How Faith Moved a Nation

Abolition was, strictly speaking, impractical. According to Adam Hochschild’s history of abolition, “Bury the Chains,” Britain was a country “where profits from West Indian plantations gave a large boost to the economy, where customs duties on slave-grown sugar were an important source of government revenue, and where … the trade itself had increased to almost unparalleled levels, bringing prosperity to key ports, including London itself.”

How to overcome all this? The abolitionists called on the British people to live up to their professed faith. If they believed that all men were created in the image of God, how could they sanction treating some of them as chattel? They pushed the public’s nose down into the facts of what happened on the slave ships, countering the propaganda about slaves enjoying their journey. They mobilized public opinion in an unprecedented way, producing petitions signed by hundreds of thousands of people.

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Filed Under: Amazing Grace, movies, music, slavery, Wintley Phipps

February 23, 2007 By Fausta

How not to do it, and today’s items

Via Humberto, How Not to Do It: Nothing works in the omnicompetent state.

The scheme in Britain is, of course, rather different. (It is not necessary to believe that such schemes have been consciously elaborated, incidentally; rather, they are inherent in the statism that comes naturally to so many politicians because of their self-importance.) The hoops that bind the government to the consultants who advise it in its perennially failing schemes of modernization are those of gold. As Craig demonstrates (though without understanding all the implications), the consultants need failure in Britain to perpetuate the contracts that allow them to charge so outrageously and virtually ad libitum (Craig suggests that $140 billion has disappeared so far, with no end in sight); and, in turn, the government benefits from having this rich but utterly dependent clientele.

The beauty of the system is that dependence on expensive failure reaches quite low levels of the administration: for example, all those “civilians” (as nonpolice workers for the police are called) in P.C. Copperfield’s police station, as well as the educational psychologists whom Frank Chalk derides. The state has become a vast and intricate system of patronage, whose influence very few can entirely escape. It is essentially corporatist: the central government, avid for power, sets itself up as an authority on everything and claims to be omnicompetent both morally and in practice; and by means of taxation, licensing, regulation, and bureaucracy, it destroys the independence of all organizations that intervene between it and the individual citizen. If it can draw enough citizens into dependence on it, the central government can remain in power, if not forever, then for a very long time, at least until a crisis or cataclysm forces change.

At the very end of the chain of patronage in the British state is the underclass, who (to change the metaphor slightly) form the scavengers or bottom-feeders of the whole corporatist ecosystem. Impoverished and degraded as they might be, they are nonetheless essential to the whole system, for their existence provides an ideological proof of the necessity of providential government in the first place, as well as justifying many employment opportunities in themselves. Both Copperfield and Chalk describe with great eloquence precisely what I have seen myself in this most wretched stratum of society: large numbers of people corrupted to the very fiber of their being by having been deprived of responsibility, purpose, and self-respect, void of hope and fear alike, living in as near to purgatory as anywhere in modern society can come.

The books Dalrymple mentions in his article are available through Amazon.co.uk:
Wasting Police Time: The Crazy World of the War on Crime
It’s Your Time You’re Wasting: A Teacher’s Tales of Classroom Hell

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Good News Bad News

Good news on Iraq: Senate Democrats are moving to rewrite history, by limiting the Iraq war authorization they voted in 2002.  Good news how?  Well, if you are a surrender enthusiast, it’s a step in the right direction!  But if you believe the United States must fight and win in Iraq as in all the theaters of this generational war on Islamic extremism, then every move the anti-war Democrats make to undercut a wartime president and troops in the field is a shot in the foot that will drive Americans farther from them.   

More good news about Iraq: Sen. Joseph Lieberman says the Democratic measure to undercut the troops could make a Republican out of him. This highly principled Democrat’s moral stance is an example the rest of them should follow, but the bad news is, they won’t.  But Hillary’s new embrace of defeatism may be just the thing to underscore what a bankrupt position it is.  She’s not the only 2008 hopeful playing politics with war.

Read the rest. (h/t Larwyn)

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Dan’s asking, Are SC Pols Pay To Play? (h/t Larwyn)
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Town Commons looks at Iran
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Return to the Third World

In a very short while, nearly 70% of Christians will be in the non-European world.

.04% Of Our Military Is Against The War

I’m a little behind this morning but will be blogging more later. Thank you for your patience.

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Filed Under: Christianity, Iran, Iraq, religion, schools, UK

February 22, 2007 By Fausta

Early evening blogging: Ma na ma na

By popular request,

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Filed Under: humor, movies, Muppets

February 22, 2007 By Fausta

18 Doughty Street looks at Ken Livingstone

This is the third ad campaign from 18DoughtyStreet.com and this week’s two minute ad attacks the high spending, low delivery record of London Mayor Ken Livingstone. Everything the advert says is sourced here.

At that link, I find items 8, 9 and 10 particularly interesting,

8 Al-Qaradawi is the strongest force for the modernisation of Islam
“Unbelievably, Mayor Livingstone asserted in the question period that Yusuf al Qaradawi was the “strongest force for modernization of Islam – he is the future of Islam.”
9 Qaradawi describes suicide bombing against Israel as duty
‘Recently he told Al-Jazeera that he was not alone in believing that suicide bombings in Palestinian territories were a legitimate form of self defence for people who have no aircraft or tanks. He said hundreds of other Islamic scholars are of the same opinion. In this respect, he is very much in tune with what the vast majority of people in the Arab world believe. Defending suicide bombings that target Israeli civilians Sheikh A-Qaradawi told the BBC programme Newsnight that “an Israeli woman is not like women in our societies, because she is a soldier.’

Go to the link for item 10, and all the others.

And 18 Doughty Street doesn’t even mention Hugo

Livingstone also spent taxpayer’s money suing Aleksander Boyd of VCrisis. Here’s the latest from VCrisis: Guardian’s Comment is Free censors Vcrisis

Cross-posted at MNM
Digg!
technorati tags Ken Livingstone, London, terrorism

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Filed Under: Ken Livingstone, London, terrorism, Venezuela

February 22, 2007 By Fausta

ShrinkWrapped posts on abortion

ShrinkWrapped continues his series on abortion, Abortion on Demand: Reverberations and Vicissitudes (Part II) I can not do justice to his post if I cut and paste a fragment, so please read the whole post.

Following that, I read Sigmund Carl and Alfred’s devastating account of his experience. I did a brief post on it and later deleted it because I could not come up with any words of consolation.

Which is why I so admire The Anchoress.

Update: ShrinkWrapped has posted Abortion on Demand: Reverberations and Vicissitudes (Part III)

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Filed Under: abortion, blogs, ShrinkWrapped, Sigmund Carl and Alfred, The Anchoress

February 22, 2007 By Fausta

"Cough up the money!", and today’s items

The Anchoress posts about Hillary’s demand that Obama return the money he’s raised,

Well, slap my ass and call me Sally, but it seems to me that a strong and confident campaign does not demand that other candidates denounce their supporters and return contribution checks to them, but this is what Hillary Clinton’s campaign does all the time! Particularly if an opponent’s donor has dared to say something mean about poor old Hillary, who is just a girl and should be treated nice, because politics is about niceness and sweetness, and she would never, never indulge in a scorched earth, slash-and-burn sort of politics, herself.

Yet another reason not to vote for Hillary.

Falling on Geffen’s ears, and Daschle to Endorse Obama

As Hillary said, “You don’t have to fall in love, you just have to fall in line”.

Meanwhile, “It was from the heart. It was unbelievable.”

Thanks to Larwyn and Maria.
Update, another one from Maria, CLUELESS LIB STICKS HIS LEADING MAN WITH A STINKER

One night in Hollywood and it’s all blasted to hell.

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Gerard, another one of my four favorite bloggers, An Ash Wednesday Confession with Eliot’s Ash Wednesday

BEING ONLY A MAN, I often tire of the endless things of man; of his vanity and his violence which, as all the things of men must, resides in me as well as in you.

A wonderful post.

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The love-for-oil-fest continues. This time is Venezuela-Argentina, again.
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Town Commons looks at Nancy’s sense of outrage.
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(PDF file) Entrepeneurs are the heroes of the world
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I really want to see this movie,
Amazing Grace

Amazing Grace
Words by John Newton 1779

Amazing Grace! How sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found
Was blind, but now I see.

‘Twas Grace that taught my heart to fear,
And Grace my fears relieved.
How precious did that Grace appear
The hour I first believed.

Through many dangers, toils, and snares
I have already come.
‘Tis Grace hath brought me safe thus far
And Grace will lead me home.

The Lord has promised good to me.
His Word my hope secures.
He will my shield and portion be
As long as life endures.

When we’ve been there ten thousand years
Bright shining as the sun,
We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise
Than when we’d first begun.


Slavery continues in our day.

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Filed Under: Amazing Grace, Argentina, Barak Obama, Democrats, Hillary Clinton, Latin America, movies, Nancy Pelosi, politics, religion, Republicans, slavery, Venezuela

February 21, 2007 By Fausta

The return of Fernando Araujo

Fernando Araujo was Colombia’s Minister of Development when was kidnapped by the Colombian FARC narcoterrorists on December 4, 2000, while he was jogging. He survived for six years tied up to a hammock until his escape last December 31, 2006, wondering through the jungle until he was rescued. Last Monday Colombian President Alvaro Uribe named him Foreign Minister.

Investor’s Business Daily explains what this means in the context of the war on terrorism,
Proof Of Life In A Latin American Ally
War On Terror: Why would a sensible ally like Colombia pull a bit of magic realism and name a recently escaped hostage its new foreign minister? Because it’s trying to tell us something.

But patriotism prompts people to do heroic things. This willingness to put nation before self may be the new role Araujo can play in helping Colombia persuade the U.S. Congress and the rest of the world to support its need for victory. It might be a brilliant choice for Uribe.

Putting a former hostage forward seemed to be Uribe’s intention. He noted that Araujo “himself suffered our national tragedy, which we are committed to ending.”

The message is important because not everyone outside Colombia understands. Leading the pack is the new Democrat-controlled Congress. It controls the $586 million in anti-terror funding the U.S. has earmarked for Colombia, money that’s vital to the survival of an embattled ally and critical to our own national security.

Instead of focusing on that, Democrats like Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, who chairs the appropriations subcommittee that funds assistance to Colombia, are chiefly interested in criticizing our leading ally in South America.

The new majority wants to cut Colombia’s aid at a time when Colombia is seeking more. If the Democrats succeed, they will be squandering a chance to deliver a potential death blow to Colombian narcoterrorists.

Democrats have complained about Colombia’s human rights record, demanding pristine standards from a nation that has been in a full-blown war since 1966. They also want to renegotiate a U.S.-Colombia free-trade pact, kvetching about labor rules, salaries and benefit packages.

They’ve even come up with a new one — blaming Colombia for global warming because of an increase in air shipments of its roses. Never mind that those commercial rose fields were once illegal coca patches.

Nitpicking is one thing, but these Democrats are the same people who have increased aid to Ecuador as that country pursues failed socialist models and turns into the nastiest anti-American regime this side of Venezuela.

Worst of all, Democrats like Leahy try to micromanage Colombia’s war, demanding that Uribe fight all factions with equal vigor instead of first taking on the most deadly enemies, like FARC. That’s why Uribe lost his last foreign minister. Her brother was accused of involvement with paramilitaries, but she had no involvement herself.

Uribe and Araujo are from different political parties, but both are determined to win Colombia’s war against terror. Their willingness to put aside political differences to achieve victory is admirable. If only congressional Democrats would do the same.

You can watch until 2PM EST France2’s interview of Araujo here, under Bogota: portrait de Fernando Araujo. The France2 anchorman refers to Araujo’s new post as a “symbollic gesture”. Nonsense. It is an act of courage.

A brave man, and a hero.

Digg!
technorati tags Colombia Fernando Araujo FARC

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Filed Under: Colombia, FARC, Fernando Araujo, terrorism. Latin America

February 21, 2007 By Fausta

Le Monde loves Fidel, and today’s items

Via No Pasaran,

Le Monde Diplomatique Director Ignacio Ramonet is gathering a “consencus” of French journalists to write an “authorized” retrospective of Castro’s paradise on earth.

Joe is not amused

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Did you listen to my latest Blog Talk Radio?
blog radio
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One of my childhood heroes, Buzz Aldrin, has an article at PJM, Let’s go back to the moon
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ShrinkWrapped is discussing Abortion on Demand: Reverberations and Vicissitudes. Sigmund, Carl and Alfred has an absolutely heartbreaking post on the subject.

Do Women Have A Right To Informed Consent?

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Town Commons posts on the Muslim Council of Britain’s guidelines for special treatment of Islamic children in the state school system:

  • Allowance for girls beginning at the primary school level to wear the hijab
  • seperation of the sexes in any sort of physical activity that would allow touching or that involves swimming
  • special changing areas for muslim children to change clothes in private
  • if you have a school field trip to a farm, muslims must not be allowed to touch a pig
  • Parents can withdrawal their children from music classes
  • Muslim children should not be asked to draw pictures of humans

Go read the rest.

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Via Larwyn, Hillary Clinton’s Confederacy Hypocrisy. Hillary can’t remember celebrating Confederate Flag Day back in Arkansas. How convenient.

Terrorists not allowed to use Constitution against us

War Power Game
The coming constiutional crisis

Edwards: Greatest Threat to World Peace is Israel

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Via Maria,
Russian missile “blackmail” won’t work, Czechs say

The Czech Republic said on Tuesday it would not be intimidated by Russia over plans to site parts of a U.S. missile defense system on its territory and said attempts at “blackmail” by Moscow would backfire.

Czech Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg said threats by Russian officials over the plans, which would involve placing a radar system on Czech land and a missile battery in Poland, would only make Czechs more determined to defend themselves.

Dennis Prager on Happiness Is a Moral Obligation

These PU students are making someone happy!

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Cinnammon writes about When Awards Become Politicized
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In a lighter mode,
Accessorize, accessorize I just bought myself one of these:

Handbag and lunch bag in one. And the red matches my nail polish, too.

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Filed Under: abortion, Blog Talk Radio, Cuba, Czech Republic, Democrats, Fidel Castro, Hillary Clinton, Pajamas Media, Princeton University, Sanity Squad, ShrinkWrapped, Sigmund Carl and Alfred, terrorism

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