Author: Ryan Richter

If progressivism fails, it seems to me it would be a good idea to have an idealogically independent replacement of some sort ready as a backup. Writing in 2024, I think of the present era in politics as the “old man in a hurry” age, in which everyone is fearful that their agenda is about to collapse, and so everyone has abandoned wisdom and decided they must get one cheap “win” – the details don’t matter – before everything goes south. I disagree with this. The ideas presented here are to be calmly contemplated for the future rather than urgently acted on in the present, and the form is strictly liberal ends by strictly liberal means. Here goes.

The idea is to start with a radical economic policy that tries to avoid the pitfalls of the tax-and-spend system that is the current basis of leftish policy, based on a remediation of an old idea by a 19th century american named Thomas Skidmore. The policy is a national inheritance, essentially a death-to-young-adulthood redistribution of private wealth which leaves the relative sizes of the public and private sectors unchanged, and which does not tax any company or living person, at least as far as domestic economic activity is concerned (a tariff is necessary, although not forever). It also comes with a way of gradually and reversibly transitioning our economy to that form, and can be implemented in any democracy by legislation and constitutional amendment. When the system is fully established, after a 60-70 year initiation, each citizen receives, on their 21st birthday, a sum of cash as near as practicable to their equal share of the national private sector (in reality probably 50-80% of this amount). It is to be paid for by basically confiscating private wealth at the moment of death of an individual, together with a rather complicated system of tracking obligation for paying what is called the “scot” (not a tax, as it doesn’t fund the public sector) so that the economic activities of firms are unaffected. The idea, very simply, is that this form of benefit does not create either the dependence on the state, or the political divisions and recriminations that are the hallmark of existing benefit systems.

The national inheritance demonstrates the nation’s trust in the citizen. The payment of the scot demonstrates the citizen’s trust in the nation and in their fellow citizens.

The political form is therefore a nationalism, but of a new mild and inclusive sort. Nobody is generically to blame. This proposal’s eventual success will depend critically on whether it’s as practicable as I say it is, so I want to get right to the details. But a few comments on ideology are appropriate here. I would like to suggest that there are in fact two incompatible forms of capitalism. The one we have I call wealth distribution capitalism, as it prioritizes the determination of a long-term highly-unequal distribution of wealth among families according, as is supposed, to pure economic competition based on their genetic identity. Prioritizes over what? My contention is that the determination of prices is compromised in wealth distribution capitalism, as a direct result of the highly unequal distribution of wealth. The national inheritance should bring about a different set of circumstances I call price determination capitalism. It will be objected that with so much state involvement as I require, I’m not describing any sort of capitalism. I have two responses. First, I declare that the eternity of propriety is conventional and not ideological, that inheritance is no market activity and therefore not subject to the ideology of free markets. Second, I object that in practice, wealth distribution capitalism does not lead to a small state as claimed, but to a large and corrupt state controlled by interests within the economy. Price determination capitalism ought to be more suitable to human habitaion and especially democracy.

OK, so how exactly do you pay for the inheritance? The basic idea is a multi-pronged sort of carrot and stick approach called modes of ownership. As I mentioned above, the tax is not really a tax in the usual sense because it doesn’t go into the fisc. A crucial point is that funds raised under what I’m calling the scot are never disposed by the whim of a bureaucrat or even an elected official. They go into a fund which may only be used to pay individual inheritances according to strict and dead-simple rules. There is only one stick, which is called money scot and which is like a flat annual money tax on all assets in the economy, equal to the rate at which the total population turns 21, called the asset scot rate. The imposition of money scot is made possible by a universal public registry of all assets and their ownership. Of course the idea is that the other forms of scot releive you of having to pay any money tax, and that in practice money scot should never be necessary. The primary alternatives to money scot are “no scot” for firms, “death scot” for the individual, and “un-scot” for ubiquitous things of small value that don’t belong on a universal public registry. The basic idea is that corporations can divide their ownership into listed shares, and designate the payment of all scot to fall on the shareholders avoiding the double-counting of ownership of assets universally, and allowing them to maximize their profit. Therefore properly organized companies are more or less unaffected, except in foreign operations. The unique part is death scot, which is a “personal corporation” which the owner has full managerial and proprietary rights, but to which at the same time the owner owes a fiduciary duty to profit on behalf of the nation’s interest in the scot, which is claimed by confiscating all death scot assets at the moment of death. A set of accounting rules determine the owner’s profit share which can be spent in any way. The death scot corporation is in some sense really a peculiar sort of retirement fund, although it can also function in a way very similar to the various devices in a large number of (not very convincing) old policy proposals for “individual retirement/medical/xyz accounts” all bundled into one. Of course I undersand that nobody wants this bizarre “death scot” thing for its own merits, but it’s the key to fitting these pieces together in a way that allows normal economic activity to take place while scrupulously tracking the scot obligation.

There are some other possibilities mentioned in the table below, but those are the big idea except the one gaping hole which is foreign trade. This is definitely the most difficult part of the proposal. The necessity of foreign scot – of tariffs and foreign financial transaction taxes paid to the inheritance fund – is based on the need to prevent evasion of the scot, in particular considering that other countries don’t have public asset registries. But this economic isolationism isn’t supposed to be permanent. After all, if it makes sense for one country to have this system, then it makes sense for others also. The idea is to encourage the spread of the system by negociating softer trade agreements with countries that also have asset registries, and in fact there is a roadmap to a new type of equitable and democratic globalization in the very long term – maybe 150 years or so. The sequence goes as follows: first, you negociate reductions in foreign scot rates in exchange for asset-registry sharing agreements – to shine the light on as the first advance aginst long-term organized evasion. Of course a foundational principle of these negociations is that democracies be rewarded ahead of authoritarian states. These reductions will be modest, but much greater reductions will follow with scot-sharing agreements, i.e. payments from the richer (in terms of per capita private sector wealth) country’s inheritance fund to the poorer country’s. Once the amount of the inheritance is equalized between the two countries, not only can the foreign scot be reduced to near zero, but immigration can be opened up as well, even allowing immigrants to inherit (at first, only the children of naturalized immigrants will be allowed to inherit). In this way Eurozone-like blocs can develop, although still with national governments and currencies, and the legal environment of the economy can be internationalized to a greater degree than today without the inequities that arise today when this occurs.

Modes of ownership (or the Mob o’ Scots):

• Money scot: annual (or other period e.g. decadal) money payment at asset scot rate (default for all asset types) Asset registry serves as the tax form.
• Time scot: agreement to forfeit asset in future (length of the life expectancy at 21) in exchange for non-payment in present. Establishes a rent rate by which the forfeiture date may be extended by payment at any time. Asset remains in time scot until forfeited, or until all “back scot” is paid, even when sold. Buyers can see time scot status and expiration on the public asset registry. (optional for real estate only)
• Death scot: the personal corporation or asset shelter scot-free until forfeited at death. Profits are yielded outside the shelter. Assets in the shelter may be freely bought and sold, but cash inside the shelter must only be used for profit-making expenditures, like corporate due diligence. Sheltered assets may be withdrawn only under certain circumstances, but may always be bought out to maintain the shelter’s value. Essentially a retirement plan. Profit is defined as capital gains plus income minus expenses, all deflated. Sheltered assets may be withdrawn for:
  • personal emergencies (food, shelter, medical)
  • tuition
  • a wage for up to ~10yrs total for job search and personal development
  • retirement, a modest wage (proportional to endowment) after age 65
  • a continuous wage (proportional to endowment) as portfolio manger (trivial in amount for beginning endowment, based on pros)
  The personal corporation is not allowed to take outside investment as such. If a business owned under death scot wants to take funding, it must be spun off and reorganized although an ownership share is retained under death scot. The original death scot was to give the dead man’s second-best suit of clothes to the local church or abbey. (optional for all asset types)
• Un-scot: lower-price movable assets are scot-free. There will still be poverty (hopefully greatly reduced), but poor people hold most of their assets in movable form. Bank accounts are on the registry but not physical currency. The total amount of movable assets excluded from the registry must be closely estimated and kept below a threshold. Occasionally narrow categories of movable assets must be registered to prevent scot-avoidance on a large scale.
• No scot: any share corporation with all shares appearing on the registry (domestic or foreign via registry sharing) has permanent scot-free posession of all assets. No double counting – the scot is paid by the shareholders via above methods. Taxed foreign investment can be accepted via a scot-paying domestic intermediary.
• Pre-scot: agreement to transfer asset into death scot later, with no payment Available only during the initiation period – see below. All assets eligible.
• Share scot: a share corporation periodically issues shares to the inheritance fund diluting existing shareholders, making share ownership scot-free for those shareholders. (theoretically possible – not clear anyone would buy these)
• Foreign scot: tax on foreign assets and investment (mandatory for these assets) Must be targeted to discourage scot-avoidance while allowing legit flows.

More needs to be said about all of that, but that’s the nub. Now for the gradual initiation process. First the idea is to order the population by birth date and start with the oldest person alive and go down the list one name at a time, paying a reduced inheritance of this value
(estimated age 21 inheritance amount)
x (remaining life expectancy at your age) / (rem. life exp. at 21)

Inheritances are paid only as funds become available at first, with the revenue sources started up gradually. The goal is to eventually proceed down the list at a steady clip, winding up reducing the age of inheritance all the way down to 21 within 60-70 years. There are two main parts to the gradual initiation of scot revenue. First the universal asset registry will not appear overnight, unfortunately. It will probably be best to add assets by some sort of categorization so as to avoid having one person or firm’s assets listed before another’s creating prejudice. Money scot, time scot, and others will only apply as assets are added to the registry. The second part is the creation of millions of death scot corporations, for which pre-scot is used. Simply, pre-scot is a rate which is ramped from 100% down to 0% throughout the entire initiation period, and is calculated for an individual as (total pre-scot asset value) / (total pre-scot + death scot value). On day 0 an empty shell of a death scot corporation is created for each individual, and as individuals’ assets are added to the registry they are first classified as pre-scot, for which no money scot payment is due and for which there are no restrictions on either posession or transaction. Assets under pre-scot in particular are still subject to old-fashioned inheritance. But as the pre-scot rate is gradually reduced over decades the individual must either transfer assets into death scot to meet the pre-scot requirement or else pay the asset scot rate on the excess.

It will likely be argued that the fiduciary duty entailed in death scot is contrary to the liberty of true capitalism. What does death scot give you? You have the ownership of the assets and the authority that ownership confers in managing as well as in buying and selling – note that selling itself is unrestricted. You also have the profit you can earn from the asset and its management, entire and unimpeded. The argument is that these features define what capitalism really requires – that the true essence of capitalism is the squeezing of incremental profits from the long-term stewardship of assets. The further right to sell everything and spend the proceeds in an entirely selfish way, including gifts to your children and the like, is not in fact necessary or even desirable from the democratic perspective, and it is this that death scot prohibits. I believe this is the first proposal to target that specific aspect of political economy while leaving the rest of the system in working order. By the way, the requirement to profit isn’t necessarily so restrictive as it may at first seem. Part of the idea is to encourage risk taking of a vaguely entreprenurial sort beyond the level we typically see it today. You are allowed to take any level of risk you desire in your death scot investments, you just have to live with the results.

Some miscellaneous remarks that didn’t fit elsewhere will follow. First, there is to be a constitutional guarantee that the value of an individual’s inheritance can depend on no personal data except citizenship and birthdate. This is the new and stronger form of political equality. Among the infinite list of details I’m intolerably papering over in this ultra-brief description, assets confiscated from death scot would have to be auctioned off somehow to raise cash for inheritances. There also need to be constitutional guarantees regarding the disposition of such assets and the conduct of the scot collection generally to ensure the separation between public and private sector. There are an enoumous number of economic research questions that this idea brings up. How much is the inheritance? How do you manage the tariff? How do you manage the macroeconomy? Then there’s the question of why age 21? Skidmore wanted 18 (he also wanted a universal income on top of the inheritance, which I would quite do without). The curious answer has to do with the possibility that the wage for unskilled labor could get too high. By the way I don’t believe in “AI”. So the idea is that you work a low skill job for a few years, and only go to college after you inherit, paying out of pocket. For any number of reasons I think this would be a better way of doing things. There’s the fraught question of immigration policy, although I outlined what I think is the basic solution above, that the children of naturalized immigrants inherit but not their parents. I should say something about avoiding global warming, but instead I’ll mention that this might be a way to pick up the pieces. There are some cultural questions about the formation of the universal ruling class. What is the future of the following institutions: the nation, existing political parties, labor unions, the public sector, corporate management, the non-profit, and many more? For a glimpse into the post-inheritance world of policy options, consider this idea: a universal scale of attourney’s fees. Isn’t economically rewarded meritocracy in the legal profession fundamentally antidemocratic? Finally, I can’t resist making the following argument for a universal early-adulthood equal inheritance: what’s the fair way to start a chess game?

There is a hell of a lot more to say, but I believe I have outlined basically how the thing is supposed to work. I can’t really write, so instead of boring you further I’ll provide a potent bibliography:

Thomas Skidmore, The Rights of Man to Property
The Mozi
Thomas Piketty, Capital in the 21st Century
Veronica Wedgwood, William the Silent (and others)
Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy
John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism (and others)
John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (and others)
Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice
Frank Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England
John McPhee, The Ransom of Russian Art
Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class
Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow
Jane Austen, Mansfield Park
Noel Coward, The Vortex

Article by Eric MacDonald

Conservative Christians are increasingly intruding themselves into matters of public concern about which they apparently either know nothing, or choose to ignore what they do know. The example that I will use is a short essay, recently published in the ultra-conservative Catholic journal First Things.1 Written by Thomas M. Ward, an associate professor of philosophy at Baylor University of Waco, Texas, the article shows all the hubris of conservative religion at its worst. It is written as though its author lives in a vacuum, without access to any other word than his own. It is as though no one else had written on his chosen specialist subject, so that he can simply make it up as he goes along, using words that seem to have no connexion with anything in the world.

As an example, consider the title: “Indi Gregory and the Future of Death on Demand.” Death on demand is something, apparently, already available. All Ward is doing is to spell out, given his starting point, the future of death on demand. And yet, despite beginning there, he provides no evidence that there is anywhere in the world where death on demand, as he calls it, is legally available. Nor does he even attempt to define what he means by this term of art, which gives him the liberty to hoover up anything that is even remotely associated with whatever it is that constitutes what he means by death on demand, giving him carte blanche to say anything at all that he thinks relevant to his purpose.

Even the examples that he uses do not provide any evidence of death on demand. One concerns a little girl in Britain, Indi Gregory, born on 24 February 2023, in Derbyshire, sadly afflicted by a mitochondrial disease, a genetic condition that, according to the Guardian’s Josh Halliday, the National Health Service says is incurable.2 In the end, the courts decided, based on medical argument of what was in Indi’s best interests, that treatments for her condition should cease, because it was only prolonging the suffering life of a child, and that Indi should be removed to a hospice and given comfort care until she died.

Had death on demand been available in England, what need was there to bring all this before the law courts in London? Why was Indi not killed immediately if demand were all that was required? Yet the case was argued before the High Court and the court of appeal,3 where it was deemed not to be in Indi’s best interests that treatment for her incurable condition should be continued, not only because of the costs of treatment which had no chance of success, but because of the cost to Indi in the suffering involved in needlessly prolonging her life. In the end specialists removed life support and Indi died.4

Despite this, Ward tries very hard to link Indi’s death, and the basis on which it was determined, with the choice of an Italian actor who, having no choice of assistance in dying in her native Italy, went to Switzerland where she was able to receive the assistance to die that she sought. “Italy did not want her to kill herself,” Ward says, “but Switzerland was indifferent.”

This is the type of argument in a vacuum that I mentioned above. What does he mean by saying that Italy did not want her to kill herself, but Switzerland was indifferent? The law certainly forbade it in Italy, but what did Italians think? And where are the thoughts of Italy recorded? Laws prohibiting assisted dying are often very unpopular. In Canada more than 80% of Canadians were in favour of its legalisation before the Supreme Court ruled that it was a human right. What does it mean to say that a whole country was indifferent to the choice of an individual to receive help to die? Especially in view of the fact that the Swiss are almost unanimous – and have said so in a referendum – that help to die should be provided, not only to Swiss citizens, but also to those who are not citizens; notwithstanding a few religious holdouts who condemn assisted dying for religious reasons. Indeed, the actor, Sibilla Barbieri, whom Ward takes as his example, like many others who come to Switzerland for this purpose, made a public occasion of her choice to highlight the injustice of laws in Italy which prohibit the practice, thus publicising her view of the injustice of preventing people who are suffering intolerably from choosing to die when that seems better to them than remaining alive in conditions of great misery. No doubt many Italians agree with her, is the case also in many other places; though the Constitutional Court in Italy has refused to allow the question to be addressed by a referendum. In the UK polls have shown that the approval rates vary from as low as 66% to a high in 2019 of 84%.

But now, mark the difference. Ward wants us to think that the cases of Indi and Sibilla are similar in relevant respects, although he seems to misjudge where the similarity lies. The similarity resides solely in his belief that to help someone die is a harm.5 For Ward, the question of choice is irrelevant. Ms Barbieri chose to receive help to die in Switzerland where assisted suicide is legal, and has been legal since 1942 — without, it needs to be added, the grim sequelae that Ward predicts.6 Little Indi Gregory was dying, and at some point attending physicians believed that it was time to withdraw life support. She could not have chosen, given her age, and it is ridiculous to suppose that this does not matter.7

Yet Ward thinks it germane to say:

On the surface, death and Italy are the only commonalities between the Barbieri and Gregory cases. But these events taken together grimly foreshadow a world that will become increasingly difficult for opponents of assisted suicide to navigate.8

It is hard to see what he means by the grimly foreshadowing premonitions that disturb his sleep. After all, supposing Italy a common factor derives solely from the decision of the Italian Prime Minister, in an effort to publicise her religious or moral bona fides, in a moment of drama granted Indi Gregory Italian citizenship, and a promise that Italy would carry on with experimental treatments that Britain refused. Sadly, Ward seems not even to notice that in both cases there was someone who was suffering grievously. Further, the assumption that there were experimental treatments that could have been tried is not explored by Ward,9 as it should have been, though it seems to me likely that the High Court and Court of Appeal in London did make sure of this. Nor does he weigh the human costs to Indi herself of using her as a guinea pig at this point in her short life.

The problem, for Ward, really has nothing to do with Italy or with death as such. This is simply window dressing. But Ward’s concern can be quickly stated. According to Ward it applies equally to Indi as it does to Sibilla:

Today, the Hippocratic orthodoxy to do no harm has become optional. In Canada, Holland, and a fifth of American states, doctors are now allowed to kill people who want to be killed.10 Slippery slope predictions are coming true: not just the terminally ill, but also those with physical disabilities and mental illnesses are choosing to die — and in some cases, being encouraged to die.

But it is in fact not true that the Hippocratic oath is now optional. Nor is it true that in the named places doctors can kill people because that is what individuals want. What has happened is that what is deemed to be a harm is undergoing change. It is no longer taken for granted that death is, as such, a greater harm than being forced to continue to live in conditions of intolerable suffering from which only death can set us free.11 Slippery slope predictions are only coming true if in fact we continue to think it appropriate to force people to prolong their lives if life has become intolerable to the suffering person. In Canada forcing a person to go on living without the option has even been declared a human right by the Supreme Court of Canada. Being forced to continue living is now reasonably considered a harm to a person whose life has become for them a living hell. Life is, in itself, no longer considered to be always a benefit. There may be religious beliefs — though Ward does not mention any — according to which a chosen death is always a harm, but there is no reasonable general basis for making this claim, and religion should keep to its own lane in this respect, instead of trying to foist its strange beliefs on others who do not share them.

Notice that this does not mean that help to die should be provided, as Ward so unjustifiably characterises assisted dying, simply on demand.12 Indeed, assisted dying strives to avoid providing on demand assistance in dying. To do this conditions are prescribed in the law in terms of which a request for help in dying can be honoured. It must not be done according to the demand of a person wanting to be killed. Since Ward does not think there is a difference between one act of helping to die and another, which are, he assumes, acts of suicide, or simple acts of killing, he he seems to believe that any provision of assistance in dying is already to stand on a banana peel, but nothing that Ward says shows that our footing is that insecure.

Since law is the operative condition for providing help to die, the scenarios explored by Ward, about freeing up beds that could be filled up with worthier patients than those with severe illnesses that cause great suffering, can be done simply by providing help to die to those who are … Well, yes, to those who are … what exactly? Ward is predictably unclear at this point, for he is really in a cleft stick here and does not want to deal with the options available to him. Who does he have in mind when he says that some beds “will be taking up valuable space that could be given to worthier patients?” A less worthy patient, he thinks, will be one who in the future will just be killed indiscriminately, because he thinks this is the inevitable result of legalising assisted dying. But no one who supports assisted dying laws governing assisted dying reasonably reject such callous disregard of the value of human life. Assisted dying is a matter of choice under the law. It is not something that is compelled, nor should it be encouraged.13 It is Ward, and not those who support assisted dying, who is making this kind of egregious comparison, and then excuses it because he believes this will be the consequence of permitting people to receive help to die when suffering is intolerable and irremediable. But that is because he knows nothing about assisting dying and its protocols.

Ward even goes much further than this, painting as lurid an imaginative picture as possible of what he surmises will happen under the governance of something he characterises as “socialised healthcare.” Despite his misunderstanding, socialised medicine is healthcare which is available to every citizen as a matter of right, so that, unlike the United States, patients do not need to impoverish themselves, as in the United States, to receive health care. Instead, it is free, because everyone has a right to healthcare, and everyone’s life is valued. In other words, if Ward wants to understand things better, socialised healthcare is not socialist health care, but healthcare that is provided to everyone as a matter of social justice. The misunderstanding that welfare states are socialist is a mistake that could be made only in the United States, where anything that provides assistance from state or federal resources is widely held to be socialist or even communist and thus deeply suspect.14

Nevertheless, having done the American thing by merely positing that where socialised healthcare is provided, dangers will abound, he continues undaunted on the wings of fancy. The debate about Obamacare looms when Ward says:

In places with socialized healthcare, like the United Kingdom, agents of the government (“death panels”) rather than insurance companies will determine the threshold at which interventions [to save lives] are impermissible.

The reference to insurance companies and imagined death panels derives from his equally imaginative idea that insurance companies (at least in the United States) will someday, because of the availability of assisted dying, likely “refuse to cover life-prolonging and life-improving interventions when patients are past the [quantifiable] threshold” of suffering15 as determined by insurance companies themselves. This is ridiculous, of course, because there is no way to quantify suffering. As Elaine Scarry says (The Body in Pain), pain and suffering are known with certainty by those who are suffering, and doubted by those who are not. Each person suffers in their own way; and there is no way to quantify it. Undaunted, however, Ward suggests that where medicine is “socialised” this function of judging the quantity of suffering will be performed by government “death-panels,” instead of by insurance companies. There is no basis for any of this speculation. His wings are beating furiously, but he has not achieved liftoff.

Of course – to continue along the same dream sequence for a moment longer – Ward assures us that the heartlessness of insurance companies will have no purchase in the United States, because in the US insurance companies “are still accountable to the law and its judges.” Does he really imagine that dreaded “socialism” in the United Kingdom means that insurance companies in England are not responsible to the law and its judges? The mind reels at the mere suggestion that the United States and Britain differ in the way imagined. Ah, but you are forgetting the chief difference — Ward will no doubt assist me at this point — that in socialist Britain, while what might be done by insurance companies in the United States can be reined in by the law, decisions by government death-panels in the United Kingdom will be done by government itself and will therefore be beyond the reach of the law. If that is what Ward really believes, then he is believing things in a vacuum that he established long before he began writing; for in a government ruled by law, even the acts of government are not beyond the law. The idea that where healthcare is free as a matter of justice there will be death-panels that will be beyond accountability “to the law and its judges” is absurd. There is no more reason in Britain that government will ever decide (socialistically, in Ward’s sense) when the sick will die than there is in the United States, for both are governed by law, and are not directed by the whim of either business or government. The case of Indi Gregory is not an example of England saying no, and Italy saying yes, as Ward avers; it is as clear a case as could be hoped for that matters like this are answerable to the law, since the decision was made by the High Court and upheld on appeal.

This was the entire reason that Ward raised the issue of Indi Gregory in the first place. For he thought it gave him reason to say that despite the willingness of Italian doctors and the Italian government to try additional experimental treatments and do their best for [Indi], England said no.

Actually, it was English medical authorities who argued before the High Court that further treatment was futile, and should not be done, because at the centre of the dispute was a dying child who continued to suffer while attempts to save her were fruitless, and could only prolong her suffering. Ward seems to forget the suffering child at the centre of the dispute. For him the use of experimental medicine on a dying child was not too long a moral reach, since death is for him an unquestioned harm, and further treatment, no matter the harm done, is always morally more acceptable without demonstration than helping to die or letting die. It never occurs to Ward that using little Indi as a guinea pig for experimental treatments is not obviously the best course to take when dealing with a child unable to make her own judgement about what she might prefer, were she able to say.

The rest of Ward’s article is devoted to highly imaginative scenarios that could only, it seems, be dreamed up by an American whose jaundiced view of government thinks that we are best served by individual action rather than by government sponsored services. Forget the fact that individual action in the United States allows more poverty in a highly developed and immensely rich industrial power than is tolerable anywhere else in the developed world, and increasingly in the developing world as well, while charity medicine is the only form of healthcare that is available in the United States to the lamentable poor, if it is available to them at all. Forget the fact that one of the political parties of record in the United States never stops trying to get federal sponsored health insurance (which the American poor cannot afford) declared unconstitutional, or attempts to do the same for social programmes that help the poor to survive at all.16 Forget the fact that there are more privately owned small arms designed for war in the hands of American citizens than there are in many militaries around the world, so that people can be killed indiscriminately by those upset by some trivial matter that accessible mental health care might mitigate. Also worthy of remark is that America is the only country in the world where school children are routinely murdered en masse to satisfy a lust for weapons that can be carried about as if the United States as a whole were modelled on the Wild West where every man (and now, as equal opportunity dictates) every woman too can walk the streets armed to the teeth.

As I say, Ward is resident in a vacuum, and has not allowed his highly charged imagination to range outside the limits of the prison house of his own mind. I cannot think of one “good” argument or one “reasoned” explanation in his article that can reasonably be thought able to survive outside of his fevered imagination. I say this with regret, but I say it sincerely believing it to be true. And all of this is offered to us in an orthodox Catholic journal for our instruction in the one true faith.

© 2023 Eric MacDonald

1 Accessible here: https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2023/12/indi-gregory-and-the-future-of-death-on-demand

2 This is of course careful newspaper speak for we cannot say that it is or isn’t, but that is what is claimed for it, even though it is doubtful that the court would have acted as it did had it not been established that, given available treatments, Indi’s condition was incurable.

3 The European Court of Human Rights declined the opportunity to hear the case.

4 This is not an uncommon thing to do when suffering is great, and no chance of survival is likely. Most of us have experienced the same or similar situations, and all Ward’s agonising over death on demand will not change this fact.

5 He suggests that the only relevant similarity is Italy, and, unbelievably, death, which is a palpable attempt to mislead us.

6But does he really forecast horrors? Or are his horrors what others think it is reasonable to plan for, and have been thought reasonable by some ever since Miguel de Montaigne and John Donne wrote about assisted dying, not to mention support for suicide in the classical world of Greece and Rome — by Plato and Epicurus, for example. Regarding the use of the term “assisted dying” here I am prepared to support the use by referring to the writings of both Montaigne and Donne where they speak clearly in terms of help to die.

7 I will only say here that the only thing that can justify assisting someone to die is choice, voluntarily made in conditions where the stability of the decision is known, and the conditions are such as to warrant it on the grounds that the person making the choice is suffering in ways that cannot be remedied, and that the choice is in accord with the laws that govern assisted dying in the jurisdiction concerned. Choice matters for assisted dying, as all the laws governing assisted dying declare.

8 My italics. A difficulty which we should celebrate, by the way. But notice Ward’s use of the term assisted suicide, which he prefers to assisted dying, even though assisted suicide has undesirable historical associations which assisted dying does not force upon us. Self-killing or self-homicide, which is what the word suicide means, are very different than being assisted to die, yet Ward insists on the former, as though this is what we must mean.

9 Or he might have argued, as is often done, that there is always the possibility, no matter how remote, that a treatment may soon be available – so we should wait.

10 My italics. This is strictly speaking not true. It is not wanting to be killed that justifies assisted dying, but choosing to be helped to die in situations of great and irremediable suffering. Wanting has nothing to do with it, for those who ask for help to die do not want to die, as such, but in their own view, need to die before living swallows up all value in life and leaves them with nothing but suffering.

11 There are important facts here about the increasing severity and frequency of suffering because of modern medicine and its success which I forbear to speak of here. I mention it simply to alert the reader to the fact that other factors enter into the issue of assisted dying that did not obtain before the increasing success of scientific medicine, which leads to the fact that more people now suffer from long-term degenerative conditions that were spared those who more often died of short-term acute conditions than is now the case.

12 I shall continue to use the term assisted dying instead of assisted suicide, or simply killing, as Ward prefers, since there is no reason to use any other term. Dying is something we can do, as many a martyr will testify. There is therefore no reason for supposing that it is not something we do or can be helped to do.

13 The problem with encouraging someone to seek help to die is that it confuses the issue for the suffering person. Assistance in dying must be both informed and voluntary, and anything that interferes with either condition must be avoided. Ward seems to be unaware of such limitations and that is because he is arguing about assisted dying in a vacuum.

14 Of course, Ward does not even mention the fact that in the United States the Catholic Church is making every effort to buy hospitals and other healthcare facilities so that people’s choices in extremis will be limited to those allowed only by Catholic doctrine. Even in Canada, where healthcare facilities are provided by our tax dollars, the Catholic Church still makes every effort it can to make sure that the church has an influence on medical options provided.

15 The problem here, which I will not discuss in detail, is that suffering is not quantifiable. The idea that there is a quantifiable threshold of suffering is simply to imagine such a thing without any sound basis for holding that there is such a metric, but it plays a crucial role in the vacuum which Ward inhabits. I wonder that he is not gasping for breath at this point!

16 Which ends up, for Ward, in describing individual action regarding health care in terms of “members of independent communities of medical care [which] would shoulder an enormous burden of practicing medicine in ways that are just”! And he says this without even a hint that he can see the almost dream-like irony of the idea in a country in which millions have to do without healthcare altogether.

Frederick Crews

Frederick Crews reviews In the Lions’ Den: The Penn State Scandal and a Rush to Judgment by Graham Spanier

494 pp., $24.95

Gryphon Eagle Press, 2022

1.

You remember Jerry Sandusky, right? He’s the former Penn State assistant football coach and pedophilic monster who started a foundation, The Second Mile, in order to gain sexual access to prepubescent boys, hundreds of whom he molested, until eight heroic ones stepped forward to tell a jury about their ordeals in 2012, resulting in the sixty-eight-year-old Sandusky’s thirty-to-sixty-year prison term.

If you recall anything else about the case, it is probably the wrenching story of the ten-year-old “little boy in the shower,” who, on February 9, 2001, was seen being raped by Sandusky in a Penn State athletic facility. For some reason the witness, a hulking former quarterback named Mike McQueary, didn’t intervene, but on the next morning he did go straight to the legendary football coach Joe Paterno and tell him about the sodomy. Paterno conferred with the university’s athletic director, Tim Curley, who then involved a vice president, Gary Schultz, and the president, Graham Spanier. Instead of reporting the crime to the police, however, the three officials conspired to cover it up, thus sparing scandal to their all-important football program. As for the rape victim, he couldn’t appear in person at Sandusky’s trial, because nobody knew who he was.

But there’s a problem with what you remember. It’s sheer folklore. True, Sandusky took a shower with a boy. That’s what he often did, quite openly, after a workout together, and the showers typically included innocent horseplay. That behavior had been commonplace in the recreation center where Sandusky was raised. As for the incident in question, Mike McQueary initially misremembered its date by more than a year, and then probably misdated it again; he wasn’t at all sure he had glimpsed a sex act, and that’s why he had done nothing to stop it; he evidently didn’t mention it to Paterno until weeks later, and then only in passing; and his subsequent inaction and cordiality toward Sandusky indicated that he had reconsidered his initial concern.

Most crucially, when a grand jury indictment mentioned sodomy, McQueary protested that his testimony, which prosecutors had been nudging him to make more graphic, had been misconstrued. The email he received in response from Deputy Attorney General Jonelle Eshbach said in part, “I know that a lot of this stuff is incorrect and that it is hard not to respond. But you can’t.” In other words, Eshbach and her team had suborned perjury and were still intending to nail Sandusky with it.

As it happened, they failed in that instance. The jury, reasoning that too much time had elapsed since an event that had no identified victim, and taking note of conflicting versions narrated by McQueary, acquitted Sandusky on the charge. This would be the single greatest irony of the many-sided Sandusky case. When the grand jury presentment became known in November 2011, an accusation that would fail to be sustained in July 2012 completed Sandusky’s demonization in the media. And within four days that same dubious story, automatically presumed to be true, brought about the firing of Curley and Schultz, the forced resignation of Spanier, the subsequent jailing of all three, and the removal from service of the eighty-five-year-old, mortally ill Joe Paterno––the longest-serving, “winningest,” and most revered football coach in America, whose reputation would now be soiled forever. All that to atone for an abomination that was never ascertained to have occurred.

A verdict of not guilty, of course, doesn’t exclude the possibility that a crime was committed. But in this instance, definitive proof of innocence lay at hand. Sandusky remembered the shower and the name of his companion, Allan Myers, who had been nearly fourteen, not ten, at the time; and Myers’s ongoing relation to Sandusky wasn’t that of a rape victim to a perpetrator. On the contrary, he was a virtual member of the Sandusky household both before and after the infamous shower. Jerry and his wife Dottie had taken Myers with them on two trips to California, and he had lived with them for months in 2005. At Myers’s request, Jerry had delivered the commencement address at his high school graduation; and they had been photographed arm in arm at Myers’s wedding.

But what if Allan Myers simply wasn’t “the little boy in the shower”? Not possible. At age twenty-four he, too, still remembered the incident, and when he learned that it figured in the criminal case, he gave a sworn statement to Sandusky’s lawyers:

I would usually work out one or two days a week, but this particular night is very clear in my mind. We were in the shower and Jerry and I were slapping towels at each other to sting each other. I would slap the walls and slide on the shower floor, which I am sure you could have heard from the wooden locker area. While we were engaged in fun as I have described, I heard the sound of a wooden locker door close. . . . I never saw who closed the locker. The grand jury report says that Coach McQueary said he observed Jerry and I engaged in sexual activity. That is not the truth and McQueary is not telling the truth. Nothing occurred that night in the shower.

Later we will see why Myers, who had previously been grilled by the police and had resisted their attempt to recruit him as a victim, didn’t testify for Sandusky or even identify himself at the trial. The answer will lead to a perspective on the whole Sandusky matter that challenges received opinion to its core.

2.

But first, we have an important book to consider: Graham Spanier’s In the Lions’ Den: The Penn State Scandal and a Rush to Judgment. The author served as Penn State’s president from 1995 to 2011. As the first extended statement by a principal figure in the events of 2011-12, and as a recital that rings true throughout, his book is a precious contribution to our understanding. And though the subtitle’s “rush to judgment” pertains chiefly to Spanier’s own ordeal, his revelations about mischief caused by other players shows how little confidence we can have in the authorities who took Sandusky down.

It may strike you as egotistical on Spanier’s part to be placing himself at the vortex of the Sandusky hurricane. To be sure, his two months in jail and the hatred directed at him year after year were unmerited, and they took a heavy toll. But they hardly compare to what Sandusky himself has endured: ten years in prison, the first five of which were passed in solitary confinement, and universal vilification that has never let up. But Spanier has a point. If he wasn’t the most abused party in the Penn State scandal, he was the most important target of a plot that I will set forth. And his removal as president, forestalling a due-process approach to the grand jury’s sensational charges, initiated a cascade of bad decisions and real cover-ups from whose consequences the university has by no means recovered.

As president of Penn State, Spanier compiled a superb record of upgrading both research and instruction. He can hardly be blamed for now emphasizing his accomplishments. More pertinently for the trustworthiness of his narrative, no one ever questioned his integrity. Nor, for that matter, had there been any prior complaints against Messrs. Curley, Schultz, and Paterno. Despite the crude popular belief that Penn State exists only for football, those who knew Paterno understood that he regarded himself as a teacher of ethics and that he characteristically put the university’s interests ahead of his team’s.

Who, then, unless in an atmosphere of general panic, could believe that those four men would jeopardize their honor by hiding the rape of a child by a man who hadn’t even been a university employee at the time? Spanier in particular is offended by the suggestion, for he underwent sadistic childhood whipping, and he reserves a special disgust for perpetrators.

All four of the accused testified that no one had informed them of a sex crime. Their conduct is consistent with no other supposition. They deemed it inappropriate on Sandusky’s part to be showering with kids on campus, and they admonished him never to do it again. And they notified the current head of The Second Mile that its founder had behaved imprudently. Those mild actions were proportionate to the information the four were given. Spanier is strictly correct in asserting that he, Curley, Schultz, and Paterno did nothing wrong.

When the grand jury’s indictment of Sandusky was made public in November 2011, however, it contained an explosive surprise: Curley and Schultz had been indicted, too, for “failure to report,” and an inference could be drawn that they had protected Joe Paterno’s football program. One of the anachronisms in Pennsylvania’s judicial system is that a grand jury charged with investigating one suspect can scoop up others as well. Curley, Schultz, and Paterno, all of whom had told the grand jury about their handling of the McQueary matter, had been given no inkling that they were targets. Thus the presentment, written by the prosecutors, not the jury, must have been intended to throw the Penn State community into the chaos that ensued.

Now, what could have caused the Pennsylvania attorney general’s team, which had assumed responsibility for the Sandusky case, to harbor a special animus against Penn State? By now the answer to that question, which Spanier lays out with admirable clarity and detail, is known to many people. The attorney general, Linda Kelly, had been hand picked by the Republican governor, Tom Corbett, who had himself been the attorney general preceding Kelly. Corbett had a contentious relation to Penn State in general and to Graham Spanier in particular, and a motive for getting Kelly to do his bidding.

It was common knowledge that Corbett disliked public higher education and was resentful toward Penn State. One of his early moves after assuming office in January 2011 was to announce a devastating cut of 52.4% in the university’s budget. Spanier immediately and dramatically protested, and the legislature took his side. In Corbett’s eyes, that was an unforgivable humiliation. But he had already contracted negative feelings toward Spanier. In October 2010, when running for office, he had gained the mistaken impression that Spanier was publicly favoring the Democratic candidate, Dan Onorato. Corbett was heard to say that after his election, he would have Spanier’s head.

The leading prosecutor of Sandusky was Frank Fina, chief of the criminal division in the attorney general’s office. The grand jury presentment was his and Jonelle Eshbach’s creation, and both of them were serving Corbett’s wishes as mediated by Attorney General Kelly. As Spanier now explains, the indictment of Curley and Schultz seems to have been motivated by two considerations. First, their status as accused criminals would prevent them from testifying in Sandusky’s favor with regard to the shower incident. And second, Fina, who was known for tactics of bullying and intimidation, expected that Curley and Schultz would save themselves from jail by turning on Spanier, whose indictment was already foreseen. The big fish to be hauled in wasn’t the ancient Joe Paterno, and it certainly wasn’t the insignificant retiree Jerry Sandusky; it was Spanier.

When the media began depicting Paterno as a co-conspirator with Curley and Schultz, Spanier knew that a voice of leadership was needed. He announced his personal faith in his accused subordinates, whom he knew to be innocent, and he prepared to call for calm and patience. But Penn State’s trustees were egged on by Governor Corbett, who told them by speakerphone, “Remember that little boy in the shower!” They forbade Spanier to say another word in public. And the new de facto chairman of the trustees, John Surma, a former CEO of U.S. Steel, saw an opportunity to settle a personal grudge against Paterno. (His troubled nephew had been dropped from the football team.) As State College erupted in riots after Paterno’s dismissal, Spanier grasped that his own fate had been decided as well. He quickly resigned, thus temporarily safeguarding some privileges and his pension.

The subsequent behavior of the leading trustees, from November 2011 until right now, offers a textbook example of how to make a bad situation worse. Rather than combat the fiction that Penn State had sacrificed children to the great god Football, they embraced it. They welcomed draconian sanctions from the National Collegiate Athletic Association, heaped disgrace on the dead Paterno, left Spanier, Curley, and Schultz to twist in the wind, and established a huge fund for the compensation of Sandusky’s as yet unproven victims, as if every one of them had been molested with an assist from Penn State. The idea was to make a show of remorse and penitence so as to turn a new page with alumni, parents, and donors––and, not incidentally, to keep the 2012 football season from being canceled. That last goal was met, but the stench of hypocrisy has remained in the air.

The trustees’ most craven action was to appoint an “investigative” body whose actual task was to justify their other measures by scapegoating Paterno, Spanier, Curley, and Schultz. The supposedly independent commission, formed at the joint urging of Governor Corbett and Louis Freeh, the former FBI director who was now seeking private employment, worked hand in glove with Corbett, the trustees, Linda Kelly’s point man Frank Fina, and the NCAA, all of whom shared an interest in presuming Sandusky’s guilt and the four sacked officials’ complicity in it.

The Freeh commission didn’t bother to interview principal figures in the case. Although the Federal Investigative Service reaffirmed Spanier’s top-level security clearance after its intensive study determined that the sodomy-in-the-shower tale was bogus, the Freeh commission stonewalled that finding. And it sketched a vulgar caricature of Spanier’s Penn State as a football-crazy institution whose actual boss had been the dictatorial Joe Paterno. The Freeh report is no longer taken seriously, but its uncritical acceptance in 2012 locked into place America’s media-fed misperception of the entire Sandusky matter.

Understandably, large portions of In the Lions’ Den are taken up with Spanier’s legal vicissitudes, from his indictment in 2012 through his nightmarish jail term in 2021. The saga is beyond Kafkaesque. Spanier was betrayed, in amazing fashion, by Penn State’s legal counsel Cynthia Baldwin, who pretended to act as his personal attorney. In reality, she was controlled by Frank Fina, who held over her a constant threat of prosecution for having ignored subpoenas to Penn State. Baldwin knew that Spanier was a grand jury target but convinced him otherwise, and at Fina’s insistence she later gave carefully rehearsed false testimony about his alleged orchestration of a cover-up. For their misconduct, Fina would be suspended from the practice of law and Baldwin would be formally censured and then ostracized by the entire legal community. But a new attorney general, Kathleen Kane, and then yet another one, the Josh Shapiro who is now a lesser-evil candidate for governor, kept the pressure on Spanier, eventually hounding him into jail despite the ruling of a federal appeals panel that the charges against him lacked any merit.

One reward for reading about Spanier’s eight years of legal torment is that one gets an up-close look at Pennsylvania’s judicial system in action. It’s a farce in which political ambition and personal rivalry can determine a defendant’s fate; in which collusion between prosecutors and judges is commonplace; in which some courtroom rulings are determined not by law but by a presumption of guilt; and in which incompetent judges summarily deny appeals in order to support their friends, other incompetent judges. A fitting symbol of the whole circus is an email network that came to light, consisting of racist, sexist, misogynistic, homophobic pornography that was shared between Deputy Attorney General Fina and various judges, including two justices of Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court.

3.

As we have seen, the only part of the Sandusky case that bears on Graham Spanier’s tribulations is the legendary shower and its aftermath. But it’s impossible to read In the Lions’ Den without realizing that it brings into question the fairness of Sandusky’s own prosecution and trial. Spanier and Sandusky were both implacably pursued by Linda Kelly, Jonelle Eshbach, and Frank Fina, who was not above threatening witnesses, making shifty deals with judges, and leaking grand jury testimony in order to pollute a jury pool. Although Spanier avoids the question of Sandusky’s guilt or innocence, he points out that the alleged pedophile’s trial was rushed; that the prosecution used an old trick in dumping possibly exculpatory documents on the defense when insufficient time remained to read them; and that the judge wouldn’t even allow Sandusky’s lead attorney to resign on grounds that he was unprepared to proceed. But as you could learn from chapters 14-17 of Mark Pendergrast’s indispensable book The Most Hated Man in America: Jerry Sandusky and the Rush to Judgment (Sunbury Press, 2017), that’s just a sampling of the travesty that ended in a foreordained conviction.

A knowledgeable student of the Sandusky case who reads In the Lions’ Den would be able to infer some previously unnoted linkage between Spanier’s fate and Sandusky’s. For example, in March 2011 the attorney general’s case against Sandusky was on life support. Kelly, Fina, and Eshbach had only two witnesses, Mike McQueary and Sandusky’s main accuser, Aaron Fisher, neither of whom could keep his story straight. But that was the month when Tom Corbett and Graham Spanier waged their battle royal over Penn State’s budget––a battle that ended by putting a target on the victorious Spanier’s back.

Suddenly, new momentum was imparted to the campaign against Sandusky, which was taken into the public sphere. On March 31, feloniously leaked grand jury material found its way into the first of cub reporter Sara Ganim’s lurid articles, which would bear such inflammatory titles as “Former Coach Jerry Sandusky Used Charity to Molest Kids.” And in the following weeks, twelve employees of the attorney general’s office and many state troopers set out to interview hundreds of ex-Second Milers, some of whom might be willing to declare that Sandusky had molested them. Each interrogated boy or man was told, falsely, that many others had already admitted to having been abused.

The dragnet, however, yielded only a file of tributes to Sandusky’s generosity and sterling character. As one officer grumbled in frustration, his interviewees “believe Sandusky is a great role model for them to emulate.” Here was precious evidence that Sandusky was no child molester. But Kelly and her team, apparently fired up by Corbett, were now playing hardball. Instead of supplying the police files to Sandusky’s attorneys as required by law, they withheld them and wrote insinuatingly, in their grand jury presentment, “through the Second Mile, Sandusky had access to hundreds of boys.”

By means of their Freeh commission and their lavish, no-questions-asked compensation fund, the Penn State trustees played a significant role in destroying Sandusky. The fund, established before his trial, attracted scammers who reinforced the impression that many more victims of the monster’s abuse were awaiting discovery. But that wasn’t all. Two local “sex abuse” lawyers, Andrew Shubin and Benjamin Andreozzi, sensed what was coming from Penn State and advertised their services to anyone who looked forward to making a claim.

All of the young men (not boys) who were being prepped to testify against Sandusky answered the call. And someone else did, too: Allan Myers. Just weeks after he had exculpated Sandusky in straightforward terms, he became Shubin’s client and was persuaded to affirm, in a statement evidently written by Shubin, that Sandusky had frequently molested him over a period of years. Then, as Spanier recounts, Shubin physically hid Myers for the duration of Sandusky’s trial, forestalling a catastrophic cross-examination. And prosecutor Joseph McGettigan, in full awareness of the truth, told Sandusky’s jury that only God knew the shower boy’s identity. When Sandusky was acquitted on the relevant charge, it didn’t matter to Myers and Shubin. They picked up a cool $6.9 million from Penn State.

The other accusers didn’t fare badly, either, sharing with their attorneys sums ranging from $1.5 to $20 million, depending on the extremity of their reported suffering. The highest settlement went to an accuser, a good friend of the Sanduskys through at least October 2011, who now said Jerry had assaulted him about 150 times and on one occasion had locked him in his basement, starved him, and raped him anally and orally over a three-day period while Dottie Sandusky, one floor above, ignored his screams. This was at a time when Jerry, already in his sixties, was suffering from prostatitis, dizzy spells, kidney cysts, a braIn aneurism, a hernia, bleeding hemorrhoids, chest pains, headaches, hypothyroidism, high blood pressure, and sleep apnea, to say nothing of his lifelong testosterone deficiency and of his shrunken testicles, unremarked by any accuser.

But there was another important outcome of the trustees’ munificence (with insurance money). Even after the attorney general’s office, partly with the help of a telephone hotline, had rounded up a handful of previously unconcerned “victims” to supplement the wavering McQueary and Fisher, those who actually knew Sandusky remembered him as a kindly mentor and hesitated to say anything against him. Worse, not one of them, in boyhood or thereafter, had ever disclosed abuse by Sandusky to anyone. And still worse, none of them, including Aaron Fisher, had gone to the police without being prodded or enticed. Most inconveniently of all, the pre-hotline “victims” harbored no memory of their molestation. They had to have their minds massaged by already convinced therapists, social workers, and cops. But once the prospect of multimillion-dollar payouts hove into view, “memories” began to flow in earnest. Penn State’s trustees deserve the credit for that.

Fisher had been brought around to “recalling” Sandusky’s depredations after many months of treatment by a recovered-memory therapist, Mike Gillum. As Fisher wrote in the book they later coauthored, “It wasn’t until I was fifteen and started seeing Mike that I realized the horror.” Now Shubin and Andreozzi decided to send their Sandusky-case clients to memory spelunkers, with Gillum as their principal resource.

The result was spectacular: an outpouring of “refreshed memories” so grotesque and ridiculous that they needed to be severely winnowed by Linda Kelly’s team. Then Kelly could exult, at a rally on the courthouse steps after Sandusky’s conviction, “it was incredibly difficult for some [victims] to unearth long-buried memories of the shocking abuse” Sandusky had inflicted on them. Whether the hostile witnesses were driven more by greed or by therapeutic suggestion is impossible to say. We can assert with confidence, though, that Penn State’s pot of gold, descried at the end of the rainbow by Messrs. Shubin and Andreozzi, helped to turn alleged misdemeanors into horrific felonies that would overawe an ingenuous jury.

4.

When no firm evidence can be found to adjudicate between clashing allegations, plausibility can serve as a deciding factor. If, for example, you say you were raped a previously unrecalled 150 times by the same person, you’ll be hard pressed to explain why, after the first devastating trauma, you put yourself in harm’s way on 149 further occasions. Did repression or dissociation cause each event to be immediately forgotten? But now you’re trafficking in pseudoscience, and your claim can’t be believed, much less allowed in court. (Except in Pennsylvania, that is.)

In the case of the little boy in the shower, sufficient evidence does exist to prove that Graham Spanier, not Frank Fina, was telling the truth about it. There can be no doubt that Allan Myers’s first statements on the matter were the authentic ones. But suppose Myers hadn’t presented himself in support of his benefactor. Then we would have had to choose whom to believe. Everything that is known about Spanier speaks to his credibility; the opposite must be said of Fina.

By the same token, it’s no contest between Fina and the Jerry Sandusky who was known to friends, associates, and the public before Sara Ganim’s Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism began smearing him in 2011. As Spanier puts it, Sandusky “was perhaps the second most admired figure in central Pennsylvania, and maybe the entire state, through the 1980s and 1990s.” The coaching of linebackers was subordinate to the help he provided, in person and through his foundation, to some 100,000 at-risk boys, whom he taught to play sports, shun alcohol, drugs, and early sex, and apply themselves to schoolwork. On his retirement from coaching, Sports Illustrated’s cover story named him “Saint Sandusky.”

In order to have molested children with impunity for decades, Sandusky would have had to deploy superhuman powers of stealth, guile, and intimidation. But if you watch interviews with him on YouTube, you will see an earnest, unsubtle man who has trouble even fathoming the questions posed to him. That picture is consistent with the Jerry known to his family, friends, and associates: a grown-up Boy Scout who eschewed alcohol and tobacco, and a Bible-reading Methodist who practiced the Golden Rule.

No one can say whether there was an erotic component to the affection Jerry showed to the relatively small number of boys he personally supervised. The point to bear in mind is that we don’t customarily send people to prison for their thoughts and feelings. And if it’s sexual abuse to hug an abandoned or neglected twelve-year-old, we’re all in trouble.

Sandusky, Paterno, Spanier, Curley, Schultz. They represent diverse levels of sophistication, but they all devoted themselves to Penn State and were betrayed by it. The university’s clumsy and then stupidly cruel trustees have tried to restore trust at those men’s expense. It hasn’t worked, because Paterno’s memory is still sacred to many. Next––we already see signs of it––they will ease up on Paterno alone, hoping that will do the trick. In the Lions’ Den will help in that effort by proving that Joe behaved honorably to the end. But another guiltless man is being left to rot in prison. Does anyone out there care about simple justice?

Frederick Crews’s most recent book is Freud: The Making of an Illusion (2017).

As part of the activities marking this year’s world humanist day, humanists are organizing a free medical outreach at the national stadium in Surulere in Lagos. The program is open to the public especially those who are unable to access basic medical care. A doctor and other health officials will be on hand for consultation, to conduct basic medical tests and provide evidence based medical counseling. This article takes a look at the significance of this medical program and its potential to transform the landscape of medical services in the country.

Religion and medical practices have always mixed. Both in its traditional and modern formations, medical care has been linked to some form of religious or supernatural belief. Medicine is believed to have a spiritual dimension and spirits are believed to have healing powers.

A local non-governmental organization, the Basic Rights Counsel Initiative (BRCI), in Calabar has just released horrific images of three children who were tortured for witchcraft in Cross River State in Southern Nigeria. Grace 3, Lillian 5, and Juliet 13 narrowly escaped death after their accusers tried to extract confessions from them.

According to local sources, the parents of Grace, Lillian and Juliet are dead. So the three children have until recently been living with their grandmother.  The grandmother has been ill for some time. She has AIDS and accused the children of being responsible for the ailment. She claimed that the children were sucking her blood at night, and that made her emaciate. The grandmother contracted two witch-finders in the community to help in neutralizing the witchcraft in the children.

On February 12, the grandmother lit some fire and the witch-finders burnt the knife until it was very hot. They place the knife on the bodies of the children, and they screamed uncontrollably. Grace, Lillian and Juliet sustained serious injuries in the process.  A member of the community who volunteers for the BRCI heard about the incident and contacted the organization. The BRCI intervened and has taken custody of the three children. The police have also intervened. They arrested the grandmother of the children but granted her bail on health grounds. The two witch-finders are currently at large.

Belief in child witches is widespread in this region and children who are accused are sometimes tortured and killed. Churches and pastors in this part of Nigeria preach and promote the idea that children can be witches. They often organize sessions where they claim to exorcise the spirit of witchcraft. State institutions have been slow in tackling witch-finding churches because many state actors believe that witchcraft is real. Also state institutions do not want to be seen to be anti-Christianity and anti-God. An effective public enlightenment campaign is needed in the region to educate the people, to reason them out of this dark and destructive superstition, and save the lives of innocent children.

The Cowboy, along with the Llanero, Caballero, Vaquero/ Vaqueiros, Gaucho, Paniolos, Huasos and Drover, in the animals that they tended produced a large quantity of calories and vital nutrients per unit of labor/worker, even though it was very low per unit of land. In film and literature, one is so bound up in the mystique of the Cowboy that one rarely notices that they were producing a critical nutrient and calorie input that facilitated a significant transformation in the urban industrial complex from the 1870s on into the 20th century. As with the American Cowboy, the Vaquero, Gaucho and Drover were mythologized while their more mundane but more vital role as producers of food, was somewhat ignored.

Edward Abbey’s Brave Cowboy might be seen as a more modern version of the Argentinian epic El gaucho Martin Fierro.

From their own ballads and legends a literature of the gaucho – la literatura gauchesca – grew and became an important part of the Argentine cultural tradition. Beginning in the mid-19th century, after the heyday of the gauchos, Argentine writers celebrated them. [Martin Fierro (1872) by José Hernández of Argentina]

The rural rebel, be it the hard-working Cowboy, the ruthless bandit, or the messianic cult leader, has been mythologized in many cultures, from those living in industrializing cities as they acquired amenities unavailable, to mythologized heroes. See, for example, the Brazilian epic by Euclides da Cunha, Os Sertões (Rebellion in the Backlands).

Richard Slatta points out that

this legacy of the cowboys has not been unimportant, however. In Argentina and Uruguay, for example, the once maligned gaucho was rehabilitated by the elite as a symbolic weapon against the perceived threat from urban immigrant masses. And in the United States, rodeos, Wild West shows, novels, toys, advertising, films, and television have transformed public perception of the cowboy from an uncouth rowdy to a national hero, so that identification with the cowboy helped Ronald Reagan become one of America’s most popular chief executives. [Cowboys of the Americas by Richard W. Slatta]

Anthropologists, particularly those who followed in the tradition of Emile Durkheim, recognized that myths and legends serve a social purpose and who propagates them largely determines who benefits from the belief system. The iconic Cowboy arose in the late 19th century in the U.S. with the huge influx of migrants from Southern (including both sets of my grandparents) and Eastern Europe including Russia. In order to eulogize the Cowboy as the icon of the real America, one had the herculean task of putting the entire history of the Cowboy (Vaquero) in a gigantic Orwellian memory hole along with all the other immigrant contributions to the U.S.

The legends of the Cowboys have not been dormant, being kept alive by films and other media. However, they have taken on new life with the rise of the virulent anti-immigrant ideas that have entered into mainstream American political culture. These immigrants from South of the border, it is claimed, are bringing hard drugs, crime and other forms of violence to our land. To the racists, they threaten not only our cultural purity but our racial purity.

The iconic Cowboy, not the real one, is being used to demonize immigrants in order to support policies that harm them and in the process, harm the country.

In addition to not recognizing what has come to us from abroad, we too often ready to blame others for the not so good things that may in fact be our responsibility.

THE U.S. IS BRINGING DRUGS AND CRIME TO MEXICO

REPEAT – THE U.S. IS BRINGING DRUGS AND CRIME TO MEXICO and not the Reverse – yes, you read it correctly!

Nearly two years ago, President Donald Trump opened his presidential campaign with his assertions about Mexicans – They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re bad hombres.

The crime claim has been refuted by numerous research studies and articles showing immigrants (including Mexicans) have lower crime rates.

To Trump’s assertion that they’re bringing drugs, nobody has seemed to ask the question: to whom are they bringing them? Too often ignored is the fact that a line of white powder and a straw has become the paraphernalia for the recreational drug of elite groups who can afford it, including many who live in expensive dwellings such as Trump Tower.

I was involved in the Caribbean in the 1990s when water transportation involving speedboats and even specially built submarines was the route of choice for drugs from Colombia via small Caribbean islands to be smuggled to the Florida coast.  Some of these islands were devastated by the relatively large amounts of cash to be used for bribery and the deaths that often resulted. It was fair to say at the time that the drug problems in the U.S. – the demand for drugs – created the drug problem in the Caribbean and not the reverse.

It was the Cali cartels that drove the illegal drug trade through the Caribbean. With the demise of the Cali Cartels but the survival of hard drug production areas in Columbia and further South along with the continued demand in the U.S. for them, a new land route had to be found for these drugs. Even so, the drug trade, including transit to Europe, remains a problem in the Caribbean.

It is a fundamental axiom to most economists that if something can be produced and/or is already being produced then a way will be found to get it those who are willing and able to pay all the costs – legal or otherwise, peaceful or otherwise. Mexico’s great sin was to have the long border with the U.S. as the only land route for smuggling became dominant. It gives a whole new meaning to the phrase:

Pobre de México, tan lejos de Dios y tan cerca de los Estados Unidos: Poor Mexico. So far from God, so close to the United States.

In the abstract, virtually all economists would agree that the blame for illegal substances is shared by those who produce it, those who traffic in it and those who buy it. All the while those who happen to occupy the areas where it is transited are the real victims. But without buyers at the end of the stream, the flow doesn’t happen. In our politicized political climate, the politics of a particular situation might alter or at least modify the belief of some economists that demand drives activities such as the drug trade.

Following the logic of the argument that I have presented, Mexico is the victim of our drug habits, and they have paid an enormous price for it. Estimates for the death toll over the last decade vary, with some so large I hesitate to repeat them, since I cannot verify them. Even without numbers, we can all agree that the death toll from the drug trade has been horrendous. The sizeable amounts of money involved make it possible for the gangs to acquire an array of lethal weapons.

Though most of the deaths are gang members – or so it is claimed – the loss of life by law enforcement officers and innocent civilians is significant and has become a national tragedy. The sums of money involved make it inevitable that there will sources of corruption. The concentration of resources fighting the drug trade has strained the law enforcement resources, making crime and violence in other sectors more difficult to control. And how does one even begin to measure the impact that this senseless violence has on the everyday life of Mexico’s citizens?

Mexico has not only paid a heavy price, they have cooperated completely with the U.S. to try to stamp it out. The continuing and escalating attacks against them and insults to their dignity are totally unwarranted. If relations between our two countries break down and the co-operation on the drug trade ends, our border problems in the U.S will be multiplied many times over and no wall would keep them out.

As far as I can learn, Mexico historically did not have a major hard drug problem. I stand ready to be corrected on this point. Whenever drugs pass through an area, it is inevitable that some of the drugs are peddled in the transit areas. I have no data on this, but I would be surprised if Mexico does not now have a hard drug problem in its own country.

If our language and songs have any validity, Mexico does have a history of growing and using marijuana as we do, especially where there are now increasing states where it has become legal.

While cocaine may be the drug of choice for Trump’s more affluent supporters, another hard drug addiction is devastating rural America (and parts of Urban America) in the very areas where Trump scored some of his largest majorities. “Today, the United States, which contains 5 percent of the world’s population, uses 80 percent of the world’s painkillers,” says Paul Offitt. This addiction does not come from Mexico but from your family Doctor (and an occasional illegal dealer including Doctors) in the form of a prescription for Opioid pain killers manufactured by leading pharmaceutical companies. Much of the cause of this wave of addiction is attributed to the despair over deteriorating economic conditions while others prosper. Trump got the votes of the despairing rural poor by promising to respond to their grievances and restore their lost jobs and economic status. His policies and current Budget proposal will almost certainly worsen their condition in spite of his promises to the contrary. He may be attempting to build a Wall to keep Mexicans and Central Americans out but he is definitely building a Wall to keep the less fortunate of his fellow citizens in their poverty. In the process, he will be polluting their water and air, lessening their educational opportunities, taking away their health insurance while giving tax cuts to those who do not need it. By some perversion of the language, this is being called Populism.

The Cowboy, along with the Llanero, Caballero, Vaquero/ Vaqueiros, Gaucho, Paniolos, Huasos and Drovers produced in the animals that they tended a large quantity of calories and vital nutrients per unit of labor/worker, even though it was a very low per unit of land. In film and literature, one is so bound up in the mystique of the Cowboy that one rarely notices that they were producing a critical nutrient and calorie input that facilitated a significant transformation in the urban industrial complex from the 1870s on into the 20th century. As with the American Cowboy, the Vaquero, Gaucho and Drover were mythologized, while their more mundane but more vital role as producers of food was somewhat ignored.

In a previous article – Cowboy – An English speaking Vaquero? – Hiding in Plain Sight! – I argued that everything aspect of Cowboy paraphernalia (except the six-shooter) came from immigrants, and except for the Levis, all came to the U.S. from south of the border.  I traced the lineage of many of the items back through Mexico to Spain and in some cases to the Arab/Muslim cultures and even back to Buddhist Mongolia. One important element I did not dwell on was the fact that there was no tradition either from Spain (or the rest of Europe or Africa) of managing cattle from horseback, which was necessary on the vast open range. In fact for Spain and the rest of Europe, riding horses was for the elite and for the military and not for those who tended cattle. In the New World, Spain banned “natives” from riding horses. Yet this capability was necessary for managing cattle on the open range, so a way was found via the Missions and cattle ranchers to allow an exception to be made for herding cattle.

Other than the basics of horsemanship, the natives and later mestizos had to create the technology for managing cattle on horseback. This is absolutely critical to emphasize since this inventiveness comes from a section of the population which, to this day, conventional wisdom and popular culture assumes has nothing to give but their labor and a continuing supply of labor through procreation (Proletariat  – “From French prolétariat, from Latin proletarius [“a man whose only wealth is his offspring, or whose sole service to the state is as father”], from proles [“offspring, posterity”]”).   They had to learn to capture and break wild horses. They originally used only blankets, but in time built their own saddles with the horn and eventually the dally (dally from the Spanish dar la vuelta, to take a turn) which was wrapped around saddle horn for the leverage for roping cattle.  They needed chaps to protect their legs when going into the chaparral (Spanish chaparreras, or chaparro) to retrieve a calf. The stirrups had to be transformed because there were different needs from their use by the military. They had a knife at the end of a long pole which they used to cripple cattle when they were harvested only for their hide. They became so proficient that the Spanish colonial authorities had to ban their use (with a major fine for violation) for fear that they would rid the plains of all cattle. They substituted a loop of rope at the end of the pole and eventually created the lasso or lariat (la reata) and the skills necessary to use them. They created the rodeo (Spanish – rodear– to surround or go around) to display their skills. We could go with a plethora of details but it is simply important at a time of anti- immigrant debate to correct the myth that the so-called unskilled have nothing to contribute but cheap labor. It is at our peril and theirs that we ignore the critical contribution that they made to “our American way of life.” It is an indicator of what they can continue to contribute. Humanitarian arguments should be sufficient to admit them and give them new opportunities, but some applied practical augments can also be helpful.

This vast amount of nutrient on the hoof is of little value unless it can be transported from the low population density countries or areas where is produced to the cities and countries where it is needed. For Argentina, Australia and New Zealand, it was refrigerated ships that could get their beef and mutton to the European market. For the U.S., it was first the railroads and later also trucks, and for exports it was also ships.

Unlike the hard-working Cowboys who brought the cattle to the railroads, those who built those railroads were either ignored or demonized. Their stories were “often omitted from the triumphant narrative of progress.”  The “suffering and survival of the workers who were treated as outsiders” was an untold story until recently. Ryan Dearinger examines the moving frontiers of canal and railroad construction workers in the tumultuous years of American expansion, from the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825, to the joining of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads in 1869. He tells the story of the immigrants and Americans—the Irish, Chinese, Mormons, and native-born citizens—whose labor created the West’s infrastructure and turned the nation’s dreams of a continental empire into a reality. Dearinger’s fine book follows in the tradition of  Common Labor: Workers and the Digging of North American Canals, 1780-1860.

We showed our gratitude to the Chinese who built the railroads going east from the West Coast by passing the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882).  This act provided an absolute 10-year moratorium on Chinese labor immigration. Sound familiar?

The large open ranges of the American West meant that herding cattle had to be done on horseback. Such large open ranges were absent east of the Mississippi and in the overseas sources from whence they came, the cattle herding horse culture had to be learned by those who went west to settle or just to be cowboys.

With the development of the railroad and industrial production, the horses became ever more important, pulling trolleys or wagon loads of beer or other goods, or for pulling the large-scale complex farm machinery that industry created, opening up large acreages to cultivation. These evolved into large specially-bred, powerful horse that did not have the agility needed for herding cattle on the open range.

The large-scale complex farm machinery that industry created allowed for large scale industrial agriculture in the Northern Plains. Like the Cowboy herding cattle (see below), we have agriculture producing not particularly high yields per unit of land but because of the machinery, it produced high yields per unit of labor. It was a marvelously reciprocal relationship with Industry providing better technology and agriculture providing more food to feel the Industrial cities. It is a dynamic relationship along with improved yields from plant breeding, synthetic fertilizer and pesticides which continues to the present. The railroads took the wheat to places like Minneapolis where it was milled (and after 1880s) packaged and sent off to make bread and other products. Prior to this time, Americans preferred maize to wheat because of its greater reliability. See Rachel Laudan’s wonderful essays Mutable Maize and The Mutability of Maize.

The large scale (industrial) production of wheat in the northern plains of the U.S. play a complimentary role to that of the Vaquero/Cowboy in changing diet and feeding the rapidly growing industrial cities. The U.S. went from pork to beef as the leading source of meat (and much more recently to industrially produced chicken) and from maize to wheat as the predominant grain. Pigs were often raised in the cities or nearby and were not as land intensive to raise as beef cattle. This mode of pork production would not have been able to keep up with the growth of the industrial cities as reformers were seeking to remove pigs from the cities for sanitation and other reasons – see for example  Taming Manhattan: Environmental Battles in the Antebellum City by Catherine McNeur. Similar  transformation in meat (including mutton as well as beef) and wheat production as increasing amounts of food were being produced for a growing urban population in industrializing cities in Europe, North America and to a lesser degree elsewhere. For the growing international trade in beef, mutton and wheat, refrigerated ships played the role that railroads played in the U.S.

We have seen the role that immigrant culture played in producing beef for the industrial cities of the U.S. It was Mennonite immigrants from the Ukraine (then part of Russia – the Mennonites were originally from Prussia) that brought the Turkey Red wheat that transformed the northern plains of the U.S. It was hardy and could be planted in Fall and harvested in Spring. The hard soils required the steel plough to work the land and steel rollers to mill. The “invention in 1873 of a steam engine that could grind wheat in such a way to produce fine white flour” facilitated the large scale production flour (along with the revolution in packaging occurring at the same time) which was shipped to cities to be baked into wheat bread which became a staple of the urban worker’s diet.

Later as large scale vegetable (and fruit) production became feasible in California to be shipped East to the Industrial areas of the country, it was the Chinese immigrant laborers who built the railroads from the West Coast, also were the ones who drained the marches, built the levees (dykes), dug the canals that drained the marches of the Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta and later the Central Valley hat transformed California in a great agricultural state. The Chinese Exclusion Act came along as the Chinese laborers were being replaced by power equipment in the 1880s.

From 1880 onward in Europe and North America, there was a sustained increase in life expectancy passing forty years for the first time in most Industrial areas. That improve nutrition played an important part is evidenced by the fact that there was also as sustained increase in average height from generation to generation.

The large-scale complex farm machinery that industry created allowed for large scale industrial agriculture in the Northern Plains. Like the Cowboy herding cattle (see below), we have agriculture producing not particularly high yields per unit of land but because of the machinery, it produced high yields per unit of labor. It was a marvelously reciprocal relationship with Industry providing better technology and agriculture providing more food to feel the Industrial cities. It is a dynamic relationship along with improved yields from plant breeding, synthetic fertilizer and pesticides which continues to the present.

In summation, we can argue the scientific/industrial revolution in Europe was built upon a foundation of knowledge and technology that came from Asia and the Arab world. The rapid growth in population in the Industrializing cities of Europe required the increasing yields from potatoes and maize that came from the “New World” to feed them. The increasing yields mined the soils so Europe and the U.S. had to import nitrates from Peru and guano from islands that they claimed. The latter was unsustainable until replaced by synthetic fertilizer in the 1900s.  In other words, we are all products of a continuous process of what we obtain from elsewhere from trade or other contacts or what immigrants bring us. What counts is how we refashion it, carry it forward and make it our own. We need to recognize the full richness of the process that got us to where we are now and the necessity of sustaining the openness in its many facets which is necessary to keep it alive and vital.

There is no more iconic American figure than the Cowboy. The generic English language terms when combined have lost their original meanings as  boys  possibly herding or milking a cow. Most anywhere in the world, the term cowboy refers to that ironically American (U.S.A. American) figure.

In recent years, there has been an upsurge in seeking to define the “real.” On the very extreme right is the American Renaissance which seems to believe that the real America was created and sustained by native (native in the sense of those who began coming to these shores in early 1600s and not those natives who were there to greet them) white English-speaking males. (See for example – Rep. Steve King warns that ‘our civilization’ can’t be restored with ‘somebody else’s babies’, By Philip Bump, Washington Post, March 12, 2017; Steve King Says Civilization Can’t Be Restored With ‘Somebody Else’s Babies’ By MATTHEW HAAG, The New York Times, MARCH 12, 2017;   and King defends controversial tweet: ‘I meant exactly what I said’ by Mallory Shelbourne – The Hill March13, 2017. The role of women (in a quaint form of long ridiculed Freudian beliefs about the role of women in procreation) was to continue the procreation of more white English speaking males who were creating American Civilization. The Freudian view in a new disguise has new believers; the American Renaissance has become its most devoted and devout followers.

One does not have to go that far to the right to find a vision of the real America being rural white English-speaking Americans. No group fits this image better than the romanticized iconic American cowboy of novels and films – not only in the U.S. but elsewhere in the world. The typical cowboy is a white English-speaking male. If in cowboy films there is any religion, it would be a nondenominational Protestant church in a Western small town.

This image spans the spectrum of U.S. politics. On the right, two brothers lead a group to take over a National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon, essentially asserting that they are more real American than the constitutionally established elected national government. They of course dress like cowboys to assert their claim visually. Though they may have been raised on a ranch in Nevada, one of them manages a valet car fleet in a Phoenix, Arizona suburb and the other is listed as owning a construction company in Utah and having frequent problems with the local government.

This romanticized image of the cowboy has its counterpart on the left of the political spectrum. The anarchist/naturalist Edward Abbey (who immediately preceded me as chairman of the Philosophy Club at the University of New Mexico) in his marvelous novel The Brave Cowboy: An Old Tale in a New Time  portrays the mid -20th century cowboy whose libertarian lifestyle cannot survive the restraints of the modern world. It was made into a superb movie – Lonely Are the Brave (1962) produced by and starring Kirk Douglas.  The screenplay for the film was written by Dalton Trumbo who had been “blacklisted and jailed after refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee.”

As would be expected, the iconic cowboy has become part of the debate over immigration and efforts to restrict it. Frederic Remington and Charles Russell are considered to be the two greatest artists of cowboys and the American West that they inhabited. In an evening TV news story showing President Trump signing one of his decrees on immigration, one of Frederic Remington’s famous bronze sculptures, Bronco Buster, was visible on the President’s desk.

Similarly, Daniel Pipes, in a rant defending President Trump’s policy of restricting immigration from six predominantly Muslim Middle Eastern countries, uses the image of Charles Russell’s Smoking Them Out.

It is interesting to note that Remington’s 1889 visit to Mexico is rarely mentioned in accounts of his life or merely mentioned in passing as if it were of  little significance. Yet he wrote extensively on it and the Mexican Vaqueros whom he studied. His drawing Mexican Vaqueros Breaking a ‘Bonc’ appears to be the model for his bronze Bucking Bronco (or Bucking Broncho as it was originally spelled). In other words, the Bucking Bronco statue on the President’s desk (replications of which can often be found around the world) may actually been a Vaquero and not a Cowboy?

A BBC News story on 23 February 2017 opens with an image – “In the middle of a packed arena a cowboy clings on to a wildly bucking bronco” in which every everything seen in that image except the rider himself (and of course the pants he was wearing) originally came to the U.S. across what is now the border where a wall is to be built. When posted online the rider on a bucking bronco is not shown, though the accompanying text has the above quote.  No mention either that the very word Rodeo comes from Spanish as does the Rodeo itself. It does open with a man standing in front of a Burrito (little burro) sign voicing support for the deportations underway and of course, the wall.

The hats they wore would have come from Mexico and were decedent from hats worn by the (Buddhist) Mongols. J.B. Stetson took “sombreros” East, made some changes, and sold them around the world, including the American West, as Stetsons. The settlers coming from the East wore Derbies. The cattle in the picture would have been descended from those brought North with the settlers, got loose, and went wild, and which were much later crossed with Herefords which were brought from the East. Everything else in the pictures and statues, from the hat to the boots to the saddle and the horses, came to the American West via Mexico.

There is a biting irony in these images at a time when issues of the U.S.-Mexican Border and the deportation of “illegal” immigrants is so much in the news.  Essentially everything depicted in the sculptures and everything in the paintings came from across what is now the U.S. –Mexican Border, except that the pistol in a cowboy’s hand, which appears to be a Colt 45 Peacemaker, and the pants. Only the gun would have been brought West across the Mississippi. The pants would have been a product of two Jewish immigrants who may have entered the U.S. in the East but who set up shop in California (San Francisco) and Nevada (Reno) where the pants – Levi’s – were created and manufactured. Levi Strauss was born in Bavaria and Jacob Davis (nee – Jacob Youphes) was from Riga, Latvia which was then part of the Russian Empire.

In 1598 when Don Juan de Oñate y Salazar crossed the river at El Paso Del Norte and followed the Rio Grande northward, he had settlers, horses and cattle. For the Vaqueros who drove the 7000 head of cattle, one could claim that they were among the first Cowboys in what was to become the United States. From Santa Fe (La Villa Real de la Santa Fe de San Francisco de Asísi) which he founded in 1609, the settlers spread out over what is now Northern New Mexico and Southern Colorado. In 1680 when the Pueblo Indians rose up and drove the settlers out, many of the cattle and horses became feral and began stocking the region with Mustangs and Longhorns. The Spaniards successfully and brutally returned in 1692.

Many of the settlers were Conversos – recently converted Jews. In the last few decades, it has been increasingly understood that many of these Conversos in fact retained their Jewish religious practices in their home and in many cases, may have secretly retained their Jewish faith. Recently some in the region have reclaimed their Jewish faith. All this has opened up a new area of scholarly inquiry with Ph.D. dissertations, books and articles. This means that the Cowboy heritage not only includes the Catholicism of the Spaniards but the Judaism of the Conversos. Given the antisemitism of many of the real America proponents, it would be a supremely delicious irony if the first Cowboys in what is now the U.S. were Jews.

That was 1598. The emergence of the iconic Cowboy after the Civil War is another story. We are just recently beginning to learn of the ex-slave slaves and other Black Cowboys. If there were significant numbers of Jewish Cowboys, it is a story yet to be told. In our era of celebrating multi-culturalism, I expect and look forward to future research finding more ethnic, racial, religious and other diversity than we now recognize. Whether Jewish Cowboys are found is as yet unknown but we can still celebrate them as the first American (north of what is now the U.S. Southern Border) Cowboys.

The horses that the Spaniards brought to the New World were brought to them by the Moors (Arabs and Berbers) who were Muslim. Given that the horse was absolutely essential for herding cattle on an open range, one could argue that, fully understood, the Arab Muslim contribution to the Cowboy culture was more important than anything that came from East across the Mississippi River.

In New Mexico where I spent my formative years through the completion of my Master’s Degree in Economics, the Hispano population claim to be the originators of the Mexican-American cuisine and that Tex-Mex, for example, is merely a derivative of what they created. I have never been able to find a decent sopapilla (also spelled sopaipilla or sopaipa) outside of this region.

As Rachel Laudan has cogently demonstrated, much of what we consider to be the Mexican (and following from that New Mexican) cuisine is an adaptation of cuisine that was brought to Spain by the Moors. This cuisine has roots that extend all the way back to Persia, and passes through the Middle East and North Africa. Immigration from some of the countries that now occupy this region may be “temporarily” banned but the product of their culinary arts is welcomed throughout the Southwest United States. From Hurriyet:

These cooking traditions were carried to Mexico by the first Spanish conquistadors, followed later by many Middle Eastern immigrants after the break of the Ottoman Empire. The latter is more responsible with el Pastor being a popular street food in Mexico, just like the Döner Kebab in Turkey, Souvlaki in Greece or Shawarma (from Turkish çevirme-to rotate) in Syria or Lebanon.

The famous Fart Scene in Mel Books’ Blazing Saddles begins by showing a plate of beans. These beans were either the common bean – Phaseolus vulgaris (which originated in South America and is now grown on every continent except Antarctica —or the Tepary bean – Phaseolus acutifolius – which along with maize and squash formed the fabled Three Sisters of Mexican (aka Aztec) and North American agricultural row sequencing and rotation. One or the other beans probably became one of the crops of the settlers. In Spain, they are called judias o frijoles blancos. Whatever flatulence came from the East, it was not from either of these nutritious beans.

Increasingly, after 1868, the Tabasco Sauce that the Cowboys put on their beans would have been produced on Avery Island in Louisiana; the Tabasco peppers (Capsicum frutescens var. tabasco) from which they were then and are now made originally came from the Mexican state of Tabasco. The McIlhenny Company claims to have formulated the sauce in 1868.

In trying to understand the diverse cultural, racial and ethnic origins of the cowboy, one must not forget the important role that ex-slaves played after the Civil War.  Estimates of the number Black Cowboys are as high as 5,000 or about one in four. In one video documentary, the claim is made that cowboy was originally a derogatory term directed towards Blacks who herded cows. No evidence was offered so we will have to leave that nugget as a very interesting hypothesis. Among the many  sources on the Black Cowboy are the following:

• America’s forgotten black cowboys
• African American Cowboys by Roger D. Hardaway
• Black Cowboys
• Who Were The Cowboys Behind ‘Cowboy Songs’?

Addendum on the Real America

My Real America is a nation of immigrants that takes what is brought to it and makes it their own be it 100% from one group or a bringing together of traits from different groups.  As such, the Cowboy can be seen as 100% American because we in America have made it our own. My Real America recognizes the various heritages that have allowed us to shape our country including the Vaquero heritage that created the modern Cowboy. Recent research is adding new diversity to our Cowboy heritage. In my Real America, the richness of the human endeavor allows us to violate (this one time only) basic arithmetic and allow someone to be 100% American and still have another heritage or even multiple other heritages. These multiple heritages enrich our culture and give it added strength and resilience. It is a dynamic interaction that doesn’t end with the initial appropriation but continues in a culture continuing to be receptive to new ideas. It definitely does not demonize or demean and seek to cut us off from those who brought us such a precious heritage as the Cowboy. One of the great strengths of our multiple heritages is that immigrant groups have continued to evolve their cultural contribution where it frequently flows back to the originating homeland and to the world. A view of the Cowboy as being uniquely an American creation falsifies it and denies its rich heritage. Walling ourselves off from any part of our rich, diverse heritage implies that we as a nation do not have the capacity to separate out that which is beneficial and that which is not. It provides only the delusion of strength but in the long term it cuts us off from the ongoing transformation that is necessary for success in our ever changing 21st century.

“In the field of world policy I would dedicate this nation to the policy of the good neighbor—the neighbor who resolutely respects himself and, because he does so, respects the rights of others.”  President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. 1933

 

The recent case of a traditional priest in Ghana who was fatally wounded in the process of testing his supposed anti-bullet charms has once again illustrated the dangers of superstitious beliefs in Africa. This incident has amply shown the imperative of skeptical thinking and scientific outlook in the region, and the fact that a dearth of critical temper could damage and shorten the lives of people. Nana Tolofasito, the traditional priest, claimed to have spiritual powers and went ahead to test these powers. He asked somebody to shoot him with a gun in order to demonstrate the efficacy of his anti-bullet medicine. He sustained serious injuries from the gunshot because his so-called medicine could not protect him. Fortunately, the bullet only pierced through the upper part of the left arm and left a gaping hole. This indicated that there was no shred of anti-bullet power in his charm. The supposed medicine could not stop, counter or reduce the ravaging impact of the bullet.

The graphic photo of Nana Tolofasito receiving treatment while some blood was gushing out of his body at a clinic in Ghana should serve as a lesson in the wages of superstition. It should be a gruesome reminder of the destructive power of such irrational and paranormal claims. But the question is: Will this incident ever persuade people across Africa, both the educated and the non-educated alike, to give up believing in anti-bullet charms? Will it stop people in Ghana and in other West African countries from taking seriously this absurd and dangerous claim that some charm could neutralize gun shots? I do not think so. And this is the reason why I said that.

This is not the first time that the process of testing anti-bullet medicine has led to tragic results. Sadly many of these cases of death or injuries go largely unreported. This is not the first time that a test had shown the claim of an ‘African’ bullet proof to be baseless. In Nigeria, there have been several of such instances where traditional medicine men or some potential buyers and actual users of anti bullets charms  have died in the process of testing the ‘medicine’.

Still, the belief in ‘African’ bullet proof remains pervasive and people continue to use and market anti-bullet charms. These charms come in various forms and shapes. They could be in the form of a ring that a person can put on the finger or in the pocket or on the waist. The anti-bullet medicine could be in form of liquid which people would drink or rub on their bodies.

However, there is no shred of evidence at all that any of these formations of ‘African bullet proof’ is effective.

That notwithstanding, traditional priests such as Nana Tolofasito continue to risk their lives to demonstrate the purported efficacy of these charms. Anti-bullet medicine remains a silent killer of Africans.

What is most worrisome is that some African intellectuals continue to promote and defend claims of African anti-bullets charms. They argue that these charms are demonstrations of ‘African science’ despite several tragic cases where these claims had been proven to be demonstrably false.

The unfortunate thing is that, even when anti-bullet charms are shown to be evidently false, some people remain adamant and unconvinced. They still hold on to their belief. These people rather argue that in this case Nana Tolofasito did not use the genuine or potent brand of the charm. This pattern of thinking sustains the irrational belief trend and makes it difficult to eradicate superstition.

So there is an urgent need to promote critical evaluation of paranormal claims in Africa. Efforts are needed to dispel this erroneous impression that African science stands for superstition and irrationalism. In fact this idea of African science exoticizes Africa because it makes it seem as if the term, science, means something different to Africans and therefore should be abandoned. The standards of science in Africa, what is regarded as science or scientific in Africa, should not be different from what applies in other parts of the world.

A process of enlightenment is required to dissuade other Africans from endangering their lives or the lives of others by producing or agreeing to test and market anti-bullet charms. The claim of anti-bullet charms and amulets has no basis in reason, science or in reality.

Disclaimer: If “Nazi” can be considered shorthand for actual “fascist”, then I’ve punched a Nazi. More than once. More than one Nazi, actually.

This sounds like braggadocio and I’m not sure how to convey it any better, but the reality of it all is, like a lot of violence, actually rather pathetic. A couple of years after some of the horrible incidents mentioned in my last anonymous guest post, during which I was probably dealing with undiagnosed PTSD, the brother of an acquaintance decided that I needed to take responsibility in protecting white women – namely my mother – from being raped by black men.

In practice, this supposedly meant that I needed to accept Nazi Bro as my sensei. (I leave it to you to ponder the irony of a man vehemently opposed to Asian immigration wanting to be anyone’s sensei).

I wasn’t keen on the idea, one thing lead to another, which led to punching. In as far as anyone can win these kinds of things, he got the upper hand and my kidneys took a few blows. Nobody went to hospital.

He’s not the only fascist I’ve had a dust-up with since, even though I don’t try looking for trouble. Nowadays Nazi Bro can be found featuring on footage published by a couple of anti-fascist YouTube accounts, although I’ll not link to them in order to maintain my own anonymity. While I haven’t seen or heard from the guy in over 18 years, there still aren’t all that many degrees of separation between us.

Twee

Another disclaimer: On some level I’m fond of the Blue Monday remix of Richard Spencer being sucker punched; I don’t like Nazis and I do like New Order. It’s a matter of akrasia though; it’s not helping anything worthwhile at all for me to like it, and enjoying violence, or normalizing the enjoyment of violence, risks enabling the crossing of lines.

I hope this doesn’t come across as overly-confected principle. That’s not my intent. My set of principles is pretty minimal, actually.

There is of course a cloying line of appeasement that’s been doing the rounds that says you should never punch a Nazi. This is patently ridiculous and tantamount to the kind of twee, Hitler-appeasing rubbish you’d find in the lead-up to, and even during, World War II. (It doesn’t help that we now also have John Lennon memes in the mix).

And God, Slavoj Žižek, redefining Gandhian passivism as a form of justified violence, just comes across as a motivated attempt at reframing inaction as a form of dignified machismo.

There are situations when not using force against fascism will just end in one kind of catastrophe or another. If you were to find yourself in a context genuinely equivalent to Nazi Germany, it’d possibly be better to forgo the ethics of punching Nazis, and to start considering the logistics of hiding Gestapo bodies.

And if they came for your family… well, it sounds asinine even just to suggest that people are allowed to defend themselves. Of course they are.

There are two points I’d like to suggest before moving on; abstaining from hitting a Nazi can be the right thing to do, but such restraint is not universally desirable, and possibly, it’s worth distinguishing between “force” and “violence”, because not all force entails violation.

All the ideating

People want to feel some degree of solidarity, even in the best of times, and globally speaking we’re not in the best of times. Some of us just don’t realize it yet.

But I have to wonder what the hell some people think solidarity is. Apparently it’s a suitable hashtag to accompany pictures of Maajid Nawaz, posing for the camera all on his lonesome, despite solidarity apparently having something to do with a plurality of people.

At other times, there’s a crowd, but without any clear indication of what unites it – an atomized, neo-liberal mass. Folks slap “solidarity” on that too.

“What do we want? Like… good stuff, and affirmation of being good. When do we want it? We’ll get back to you on that, but likely now, only we’re yet to draw up a program!”

Last year I had a dilettante from one of the more performative of local socialist cults, aggressively try to convince me that the attempted hijacking of an anti-racism protest by said cult, was an act of solidarity with anti-racists. (Said cult is notorious for its hijacking attempts in other progressive circles too – marriage equality campaigns, you name it).

So what’s up with a lot of the violent emoting about Richard Spencer’s head being punched, and what’s it got to do with solidarity?

A lot of what I’m seeing from where I am, which is not to say all of what I’m seeing, is arch-patriarchal, or unthinkingly tribal, or pure fantasy, dressed up as solidarity of one form or another; a lot of people not knowing why they support it, or how it relates to what they stand for, or even what they stand for to begin with. This meaning, that if you have any qualms, even just qualifications to add to nominal support for Nazi punching, then you can be declared not a part of the team. Even if you have actually punched a Nazi, and nobody on the “team” has.

Rank tribalism isn’t solidarity, at least, not in the left-wing sense of the term. It can’t be. If it could, then racism could qualify as left wing, which is something not even worth considering. Sexism could be left wing – brocialism and socialism ridiculously being one and the same. Base group celebration of the use of force, rather than a measured sanctioning of it in certain contexts for certain ends, is just another rank tribalism.

It’s been the thrust of a number of recent critiques – Nick Cohen’s What’s Left? for example – that the left has forgotten what it stands for. It shouldn’t surprise anyone then, if there’s any truth to the notion that the left has a crisis of values, when rank tribalism is the best attempt folks can come up with when attempting, or affecting, “solidarity”. Rank tribalism around the issue of punching Nazis presents itself as just a recent example.

It also bears repeating that “fascist” and “Nazi” and other political demarcations of far-rightism aren’t just terms that have been thrown around too loosely over the years, but are also terms that are amenable to being thrown around. Just ask Orwell’s neck.

Take the urge to make punching Nazis a categorical, universal good, for reasons undefined, and couple it with the ability to be equivocal about who is and is not a Nazi, or fascist, or sympathizer, and you basically have a recipe for “punch whoever the fuck I want”. Consider the use of that rubric in the hands of folks who are hungry for violence, or fantasy, or power, or who are just too damn confused about what they want to defy groupthink.

I’ve already seen people soft-policing others’ opinions on Facebook comments threads, congratulating folks for arriving at the correct prescriptions, not only without regard for their reasoning, but with the implication that any further reasoning would be suspect. While people, especially those with a public platform, can be expected to support the arguments they publish, they aren’t obliged to become certified by the next random person off of social media.

The implication, especially when force is on the menu, isn’t too opaque.

I’ve seen an anti-racist activist, along with their cohort, go full on in the support of disinhibited violence against vaguely defined “fascists”, coupled with a none-too-un-aggressive ideation directed at anyone failing to agree. If this doesn’t raise an eyebrow, consider that this anti-racist activist, who on top of also being a person employed in a role tangential to helping vulnerable single mothers, is equivocal, confused and entirely – but also unwittingly – flip-floppy about trans-activist aspirations to open women’s shelters to trans-women.

Imagine escaping out of an abusive domestic situation only to wind up in or adjacent to that particular mix of threat and ambiguity.

A little clarity

In all of this, the only clarifying agents I can suggest are a few crucial questions. What do you hope to achieve in a given situation by punching a Nazi or Nazi-like figure? How do the likely outcomes gel with your values? What are your values and aims, exactly, and why should we find them compelling?

This last question will probably be the most vexing, but answers tantamount to “something something revolution” shouldn’t be able to pass muster, especially not in the context of left-wing politics. Not because all force is verboten, but because sanctimony can license abhorrence, and because on a practical level, when things get this vague, it’s often not clear when a purported leftist is left, nor a purported fascist, fascist.

If more people could learn to spot violent pantomime for what it is, as distinct from serious campaigning or consideration of the use of force, that’d be great. Punching-on against fascists may be necessary at times, but the purpose isn’t fun, and in my experience, certainly hasn’t been – I’d caution folks to be wary of people who treat it all like an adventure or a football match.

The Sultan of Sokoto, Sa’ad Abubakar (lll) has made it clear that hatred, inequity, injustice and discrimination against women define the Islamic establishment, which he represents in Nigeria. This was evident in his reaction to the gender equality bill that is currently going through the legislative process at the Senate.

For some time now, there has been a debate on the status of women in Islam or under sharia law in Nigeria. There have been conflicting views and opinions on the issue. This debate, often provoked by issues regarding family inheritance and marriage in muslim majority states, has led to confused notions as to whether men and women are equal in Islam or if Muslim men are more equal than women under sharia.

However, the Sultan of Sokoto seemed to have sealed this debate. He has actually resolved the controversy. The Sultan of Sokoto has made it clear that it was against the religion of Islam to treat men and women equally.

Otherwise, how else would one interpret the outrageous remarks of this head of Muslims in Nigeria on the gender equality bill and his stiff opposition to its enactment as law?

First of all, let us take a look at the provisions under this bill. The bill seeks equal inheritance for men and women. That means female children will not be discriminated against in sharing family property or wealth. It also ensures a widow’s custody of the children unless such a measure conflicts with the interest and well being of the children.

The bill further provides that a widow can choose to remarry or live at the home of the late husband and is entitled to a ‘fair share’ of the late husband’s property.

Now, what is wrong with these provisions that any enlightened practitioner of religion, nay Islam, should oppose them?

The Sultan in his reaction stated that the bill was against Islamic religion and that Muslims would not accept it. But if I may ask, what actually is against Islam in this bill? Is it equal inheritance for women? Is he saying that what is in agreement with Islam is inequality and discrimination against female folks? Is that what the Sultan of Sokoto said that Muslims should accept?

Now Musims, will you accept that? The Sultan further stated that Islam was “our total way of life” and that they would not accept a change of what Allah had permitted them to do. Really? Look, no one disputes the fact that Islam informs the way Sultan Abubakar (III) and other Muslims live. But when he said that nobody should alter what Allah had decreed, what did he mean?

Did he mean that Allah permitted the discrimination against women and girl children in Islam? Can a spirit determine what human beings do? Except for self-styled spokespersons such as the Sultan, has Allah the capacity to dictate or decree how women and girls should be treated or what they should inherit?

The Sultan of Sokoto should stop using the name of Allah to sanction gender inequity and injustice. He should desist from employing the idiom of Allah to legitimize his misogynistic viewpoints and then use such oppressive Islamic formation to undermine a bill that would empower women, and guarantee liberty and justice for all.

I mean, Mr Sultan, why are you afraid of gender equality? What do you stand to lose if women and men are treated equally in all areas of human endeavour? How does discrimination against women dignify you and your Islam?

In addition, the Sultan went further to identify his hateful, discriminatory and anti woman Islam as a ‘peaceful religion’. Peaceful religion?

Now Mr. Sultan, do you really understand what a peaceful religion is? Look, justice is a pre-requisite for peace and your misogynistic Islam cannot bring or ensure peace among muslims because it is a form of war against women and against universal human rights. Your version of Islam is ideologically compatible with that of the Boko Haram. In fact your position on women rights as shown in your reactions to the gender equality bill is extreme and does worse harm and violence to the dignity and well being of women and girl children. I therefore urge all progressively minded muslims an non muslims alike to speak out against Sultan Abubakar’s misogynistic Islam, his opposition to equal inheritance for men and women, and to rally support for a bill that ensures gender equity and justice for all in Nigeria.

As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side, and they were alarmed. ‘Don’t be alarmed,’ he said. ‘You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. …. He is not here.’  Mark 16.6f.

Whether or not National Geographic has found where they “really” laid the body of Jesus is a hot and controversial topic right now.  But right or wrong, it is certain that he keeps popping up.

First the good news for believers:  Diggers (let’s not call them archaeologists) working within the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the Old City of Jerusalem have discovered what they claim is the tomb of Jesus.  Again.  It seems like only yesterday (2008) everyone was talking about a bone box (or ossuary) reported to be the limestone burial case of Jesus, from Talpiot outside Jerusalem.  After about a year of discussion, the discovery was forgotten as yet another ploy by  publicity hungry director, James Cameron, and an accomplice, Simcha Jacobovici to mislead the media–in this case, CNN, which produced a lavish docu-mystery culminating in an unveiling of the box–and resulting in a letter of repudiation by  50 leading biblical archaeologists, including the estimable Oxford historian Geza Vermes: who said that the arguments for the Talpiot tomb discovery are “not just unconvincing but insignificant.”

Since then, the “discovery” has been derided at a symposium at Duke University as a hoax unleashed on a credulous public by an unscrupulous alliance of hucksters and scholar accomplices.

After a respectable period of mourning for the death of this piece of nonsense, which I eulogized in these very pages at the time, we find ourselves once again at the door of the tomb.  But not a tomb two-odd miles away from the old tomb—back at the door, or rather the top, of the old tomb.

For the first time in centuries, scientists have exposed (uncovered) the original surface of what is traditionally considered the tomb of Jesus Christ.  Located in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the Old City of Jerusalem, the tomb was often raided, compromised and even destroyed in 1009 by Fatimid caliph Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah, who ordered the church levelled.  The damage left few original parts remaining.

The tomb has been covered by marble cladding since at least 1555 CE.  Frederik Hievert, National Geographic’s resident archaeologist and promotionalist in Israel writes, “The marble covering of the tomb has been pulled back, and we were surprised by the amount of fill material beneath it. It will be a long scientific analysis, but we will finally be able to see the original rock surface on which, according to tradition, the body of Christ was laid.”

Cautious readers will note that Dr Hiebert folds a number of assumptions into his headline, the most outrageous of which is that he’s digging in the right place for the right guy using the right information. That does not prevent him from showing more than average enthusiasm for what he thinks he’s found: “I’m absolutely amazed. My knees are shaking a little bit because I wasn’t expecting this…We can’t say 100 percent, but it appears to be visible proof that the location of the tomb has not shifted through time, something that scientists and historians have wondered for decades.”

While Dr Hiebert regains control of his knees, it might be worth pointing out that the place where he stands is probably no more than a cemetery annexe where scores of tombs were loaded with the bones of dead Jews during the occupation of Jerusalem that began with the end of Hasmonean rule and the beginning of Roman direct-control of the province between 63BCE and 35BCE.  Crucifixion was a Roman, or more precisely, Hellenistic,  practice, which was used extensively in the region even before the Romans took control. One especially grisly description from about 75BCE, when the Maccabeans were in charge, gives us this concerning king Alexander Jannaeus:  “As he was feasting with his concubines, in the sight of all the city, he ordered about eight hundred [rebels] to be crucified; and while they were living, he ordered the throats of their children and wives to be cut before their eyes.” (Josephus, Antiquities 13.14.2)  Crucifixion as a form of judicial terrorism, and the mass burial of the victims, is not in doubt.

What is in doubt is where.  The site of Golgotha is only known by legend.  The church associated with the crucifixion and  “deposit” of Jesus’ body, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (where the digging is happening) was created at a time when legend-making was at its absolute peak in early imperial Christianity, and Jerusalem was a warehouse for memorabilia.  To make matters worse, the site of “Calvary” (the hill atop which Jesus was supposedly crucified, aka Golgotha or place of the skull) is not attested in Latin sources from the period.  And both the sites of the crucifixion and of the burial are enclosed within the precinct of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, based on a pious geographical sense that one must have been close to the other. The first mention of Golgotha outside the gospels comes from an early third century work by Tertullian against the heretic Marcion (Against Marcion, 2).

The information that provides the NatGeo team with their treasure map comes from the Gospels, all four of which tell basically the same short story with minor but important variations.  No geographical detail whatever is provided.  The overlaps do not signal concurrence or agreement from independent witnesses but the fact that they were all copied from a single source; two of four got their story from the writer of the gospel of Mark who was, as far as most scholars can reckon, the first one to tell the tale of Jesus’ burial.  It goes like this:

Mark 15.46:  [Pilate] gave the body to Joseph [of Arimathea]. 46 So Joseph bought some linen cloth, took down the body, wrapped it in the linen, and placed it in a tomb cut out of rock. Then he rolled a stone against the entrance of the tomb.

Matthew 27.59f.: 59 Joseph took the body, wrapped it in a clean linen cloth, 60 and placed it in his own new tomb that he had cut out of the rock. He rolled a big stone in front of the entrance to the tomb and went away.

Luke 52ff: Going to Pilate, [Joseph] asked for Jesus’ body. 53 Then he took it down, wrapped it in linen cloth and placed it in a tomb cut in the rock, one in which no one had yet been laid. 54 It was Preparation Day, and the Sabbath was about to begin.

A fourth writer, named John by tradition, has a little more to say and adds a character named Nicodemus to the scenario:

John 19.39ff:   Nicodemus brought a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about seventy-five pounds. 40 Taking Jesus’ body, the two of them wrapped it, with the spices, in strips of linen. This was in accordance with Jewish burial customs. 41 At the place where Jesus was crucified, there was a garden, and in the garden a new tomb, in which no one had ever been laid. 42 Because it was the Jewish day of Preparation and since the tomb was nearby, they laid Jesus there.

Unfortunately what John reports is in direct conflict with Mark’s later comments, that the body had not been anointed and that this omission is what  brought women to the tomb on the morning of the third day, when they found the tomb empty (the Holy Sepulchre Church contains chapels for each of these details, including one called the Anastasis, where Jesus is thought to have stood when he was raised from the dead, and a slab called the “stone of anointing” where the anointing of the body was supposed to have taken place). Some of the details are accurate enough: aromatic spices were used to lessen the stench of deciduous flesh but also had a religious and ritual significance by Jesus’ day.  But the horror of anointing  bodies days after death would have prevented any effort to correct a ritual omission.   Mark’s story is based on the idea that during the Sabbath, anointing would have been forbidden, asur; John’s on the horror of suggesting that a body not being anointed according to custom made it impure, tamei.  The two tales are irreconcilable and originate in a contest of taboos. Both cannot be right, inviting the conclusion that no one knew anything about what process had been followed, much less had any idea about where the events happened.

As for the location of the tomb.  National Geographic in its press release gushes that “the accounts consistently describe how Christ [sic] was buried in a rock-cut tomb belonging to Joseph of Arimathea, a wealthy Jewish follower of Jesus….Jewish tradition forbade burial within the walls of a city, and the Gospels specify that Jesus was buried outside of Jerusalem, near the site of his crucifixion on Golgotha (“the place of skulls”).”  But that is a bit like saying that it is certain that some apple orchards in the Midwest were planted by Johnny Appleseed and others by other farmers. Since no one knows where Golgotha was (and it cannot be deduced from the location of the Church), it seems moot to discuss whether the tomb itself was inside or outside the revamped walls of Jerusalem during the time of Jesus.  Some early Christian writers and Josephus seem to imply a shift in the city walls.  But they do not say that the shift had anything to do with accommodating cemeteries or execution sites, and the idea that they did seems absurd.

The best guess is that by the fourth century the excavations for the tomb on a site previously dedicated to Venus, were conducted inside the existing walls.   But logic dictates the real reasons for the use of the site is that it was an attempt by newly empowered  Christians, following on Constantine’s edict of toleration in 313CE, to commandeer a popular pagan site—a pattern of expropriation which would endure in the Middle East throughout the Middle Ages when Christian churches were converted into mosques.

NatGeo says that the body of Jesus Christ was “laid on a shelf or burial bed hewn from the side of a limestone cave following his crucifixion by the Romans in A.D. 30 or possibly 33. Christian belief says Christ was resurrected [sic] after death, and women who came to anoint his body three days after the burial reported that no remains were present.”  Actually, the gospels say nothing about a shelf and as we have seen the anointing story is not just problematical but contradicts the chronology of the fourth gospel.  It doesn’t really give us much to go on.

It all comes down to one question:  What is the evidence for this being the right place, the tomb where Jesus was laid to rest? 

The evidence is, to say the least, flimsy and uncompelling.  Fourth century stories and legends recounted by the eminently credulous Christian bishop and writer Eusebius of Caesarea, tell us that Constantine’s mother, Helena, was directed to the precise tomb by tour guides eager to please the emperor’s emissaries, and especially his mum, who had become a relic collector of the first magnitude after her conversion.

The story in Christian tradition is that the emperor Hadrian (117-138) had a Roman temple erected over the site of the tomb during his reign in order to assert Roman power over Jerusalem and to discourage Christians worshiping there.  But the evidence points in the opposite direction: Hadrian’s Jerusalem was a city in ruins and in need of rebuilding.  He was discouraged from restoring the Jewish temple which he regarded as a warren of sedition during the Bar Kochba rebellion of 135.  The place of worship that was the focal point for him was the Temple Mount, not a Christian site but a ruined Jewish one. The Sepulchre site is referenced in no Roman writer from his time but only two centuries later by Christians like Eusebius.  The writers of the fourth century were interested in stressing the Christian character of the “new” city of Jerusalem as a Roman city with Christian associations that could be exploited for religious and political gain.

Constantine, Eusebius’ exact contemporary, was the first Christian emperor; Christians in his reign could be regarded as good Roman citizens and not as aliens or derivative Jews, as in the old days.  Having a church like Holy Sepulchre even though an archaeological fiction (hagiography in stone), would replace in the Latin imagination the centrality of the Jewish temple—indeed, could become the focal point for the new religion, which is exactly the propagandistic value it came to have when the Muslims built their own shrine, the Dome of the Rock and Al Aqsa mosque, on the spot where Muhammad supposedly ascended into heaven on his “Night Journey” from Arabia.

The key to the mythical nature of Holy Sepulchre as a “real” location is in the sources, not in the rocks or limestone–a  bit like the key to Noah’s Ark is not in the work of schlock archeologists using the Bible as a treasure map, but in the Gilgamesh epic written 1000 years before it.

The legendary beginnings can be traced back to the person who started it all, a pious woman named Helen. Constantine’s mother was a peasant from Nicomedia (called a stabularia, which may mean inn-keeper or prostitute).  Later tradition, since debunked, tried to make her the daughter of a British prince, but the historical Helen was a superstitious woman who married Constantius Chloris and gave birth to their only child, the future emperor, in 274.

Chloris, rising in the ranks, divorced her and married Theodora, the daughter of the emperor Maximentius.   Constantine, according to some dicey sources, remained faithful to his birth mother, called her to court on the death of his father, and even had coins struck with her image.  But he seemed happiest when she was out of town, and gave her seemingly tons of money to build Christian churches all across the empire—in Rome, Trier, other parts of Europe, and all over Palestine.  The merest rumor that a saint had prayed in a local garden or a martyr’s blood had been spilt in a stadium would cause Helena to spring into action, the biggest prize of all being finding the place of the crucifixion and the burial site of Jesus. “She lavished on that land her bounties and good deeds, she explored it with remarkable discernment and visited it with the care and solicitude of the emperor himself.”  But with respect to Holy Sepulchre there are very many issues   Eusebius does not place Helena at the site of the excavation, nor does he mention the finding of any crosses. He simply says she was convinced that it was the right place. But later writers like Rufinus and Socrates Scholasticus find this inadequate.  In fact as time passes, more details are added to make the site the irrefragable place of the burial of Jesus.  By the end of the fourth century there are plenty of accounts of people venerating relics of the cross of Jesus –said to be found with two others near the place of the tomb, and references to a church being built on the site where they were found, which of course has nothing to do with their authenticity or the accuracy of Helena’s pious sleuthing. Before long, it was possible also to venerate the crown of thorns, the pillar at which Christ was scourged, and the lance that pierced his side. The entire operation is called into question by the narratives themselves, and especially by the deafening silence of the gospels in respect of details.

Socrates Scholasticus (born c. 380), in his Ecclesiastical History, gives a full description of the discovery. I think it is important to quote the whole extract from this writer since on it the entirety of the pious tradition associating the archaeological site, stirring the imagination, and weakening the knees of the National Geographic team depends on it:

{Helena the emperor’s mother} found three crosses in the Sepulchre: one of these was that blessed cross on which Christ had hung, the other two were those on which the two thieves that were crucified with him had died. With these was also found the tablet of Pilate, on which he had inscribed in various characters, that the Christ who was crucified was king of the Jews. Since, however, it was doubtful which was the cross they were in search of, the emperor’s mother was not a little distressed; but from this trouble the bishop of Jerusalem, Macarius, shortly relieved her. And he solved the doubt by faith, for he sought a sign from God and obtained it. The sign was this: a certain woman of the neighborhood, who had been long afflicted with disease, was now just at the point of death; the bishop therefore arranged it so that each of the crosses should be brought to the dying woman, believing that she would be healed on touching the precious cross. Nor was he disappointed in his expectation: for the two crosses having been applied which were not the Lord’s, the woman still continued in a dying state; but when the third, which was the true cross, touched her, she was immediately healed, and recovered her former strength. In this manner then was the genuine cross discovered. The emperor’s mother erected over the place of the sepulchre a magnificent church, and named it New Jerusalem, having built it facing that old and deserted city. There she left a portion of the cross, enclosed in a silver case, as a memorial to those who might wish to see it: the other part she sent to the emperor, who being persuaded that the city would be perfectly secure where that relic should be preserved, privately enclosed it in his own statue, which stands on a large column of porphyry in the forum called Constantine’s at Constantinople. I have written this from report indeed; but almost all the inhabitants of Constantinople affirm that it is true. Moreover the nails with which Christ’s hands were fastened to the cross (for his mother having found these also in the sepulchre had sent them) Constantine took and had made into bridle-bits and a helmet, which he used in his military expeditions. (NPNF 2,02.17)

In short, the entire tradition of Holy Sepulchre derives from this piece of typical fourth century hagiography, a miracle story that is (as archaeologist like to put it) an etiology of devotional practices that grew up around a local shrine, and in turn validated the significance of the shrine.  But of course devotion is not history.  The chances that a superstitious stable girl turned Christian, sent on mission by her wavering son to satisfy her religious appetites, stumbled three centuries on to the location of the execution and burial of Jesus—that possibility must approach statistical zero.

And there is a larger point.  Media concerns like National Geographic, a subsidiary of Fox News, and the History Channel and the Discovery Channel have learned long since that credulity and gullibility sells: that people like myths and monsters more than they like facts and probability.  And that is the great disservice these programs do to people who watch them.  In a time when critical thinking was never more talked about and less practiced, sensations like this make the careful separation of fact and fiction that much more difficult for those of us who prefer fact.   In fact, we do not know when Jesus died, where he died, or where he was buried.  Even if we knew one of these things, we do not know the other two, and pious veneration has made the knowing all but impossible. Indeed, if I were a Christian, I think I would say, What does it matter?  The whole point is, he wasn’t there very long, was he?

That being the case, you will not be surprised to learn that the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, built over a site almost certainly legendary, was founded by Helena in 327 after she was assured by local pilgrims that she had—exactly the right spot.  Alas, however, modern research has shown that the cult of Adonis-Tammuz originated the shrine and that it was the Christians who took it over, substituting the worship of Jesus.

She is from Ndola in the self-proclaimed Christian country, Zambia, but currently, Cynthia lives in one of the European countries where she works as a school teacher. Not too long ago, Cynthia came out as a non-theist. She has joined the growing number of African women who openly and publicly identify as non-religious. I spoke to Cynthia some months ago and she narrated to me her tortuous journey from religion to irreligion. It is a journey that took this brave, thoughtful and curious woman across different Christian denominations but also across continents.

Cynthia was born into a ‘religious’ family in her native country Zambia and had a religious upbringing. The mother was a Seventh Day Adventist, and as a child, Cynthia attended her mother’s church. However, she told me that her father was indifferent to religion. In fact, she claimed that she owed her intellectual awareness and insatiable curiosity to him. “My father encouraged me to read and ask questions, he urged me to question all claims and beliefs without fear,” Cynthia told me as she recounted her evolution as a non-religious and secular person.

Even as a child, Cynthia noticed the contradictions in the teachings of the different Christian denominations, and wondered why such conflict existed. Though she attended a Seventh Day Adventist church, Cynthia went to a Catholic school where she was exposed to different Christian teachings. However, the conflict in the doctrines of these two churches set her on the path of doubt and critical inquiry. She became suspicious and mistrustful of religious dogmas.

According to Cynthia the Seventh Day Adventist taught her that the Roman Catholic Church was an evil church, and that the papacy was the mark of the beast. Her education at a different mission school gave Cynthia an opportunity to compare the teachings of the Catholic Church and that of the Seventh Day Adventist. And she noticed that the Adventist church was fundamentalist in its approach. “They preached so much about the end of the world,” she stated.

Cynthia had issues with Catholic prayers, in particular the Hail Mary. She queried why such prayers should be said. The conflicts and contradictions in the teachings of the two churches were confusing to her. Hence she never found any strong reason to belong either to the Seventh Day Adventist or the Catholic Church. In fact, at a point she decided to suspend going to any church until she became convinced of what to believe in and which church to attend.

During this break from religious worship and church attendance, Cynthia came in contact with members of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. They gave her a book on questions people ask.  Cynthia expected that the book would provide answers to the questions that have perturbed her and agitated her mind but it did not. In fact the teachings of the Jehovah’s Witness added to her confusion.

Members of Jehovah ’s Witness tried to persuade her to join their religion but Cynthia said she was not convinced of their teaching. Later she went back to her mother’s church, the Seventh Day Adventist, and tried to get baptized. The church agreed to baptize her but on the condition that she stopped wearing ear rings but she refused. So she could not be baptized.

Some years ago, Cynthia moved to Europe where she is living at the moment and tried joining the Seventh Day Adventist church in her region in the quest for family and community feeling. However the religious romance was short-lived because after watching a BBC report on witchcraft-related abuse of children by Christian churches in Africa, the scales of transcendental illusion fell from her eyes. She literally woke up from her dogmatic, supernatural and theistic slumber.

Cynthia said that she later listened to the audio book of Carl Sagan, and after reading other books by Isaac Asimov, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens, she could no longer continue to identify as a religious and god believing person. Reason overtook religion in her quest for truth, knowledge and meaning. Cynthia eventually found the courage to come out and openly identify as a freethinking non-religious African woman.

Witchcraft related abuse is a very serious problem in African migrant communities in the UK. There is documented evidence that these abuses are linked to activities of African pastors and African initiated churches. Unfortunately efforts to address this problem are bogged down by concerns over racism, minority rights and abuse of religious liberty. We should not allow such concerns to distract us from addressing this problem.

Vulnerable members of the African migrant communities in the UK, particularly children, are at risk of being tortured and murdered by relatives who accuse them of witchcraft. Many of such horrific treatments in the name of witchcraft go unreported because victims are often defenseless infants, and the abuses take place in the name of religion, particularly Pentecostal Christianity. Pentecostal churches are spreading rapidly across the African migrant communities in the West.

The reactions that have trailed the decision by the Buhari government to subsidize this year’s Hajj, despite the fact that the Nigerian economy is in recession, underscores the necessity of separating church (mosque) and state. Last year, President Buhari announced the discontinuation of state sponsorship of both Muslim and Christian pilgrimages as a cost cutting measure. He made it clear that stopping state funding of pilgrimages would save some money that could be devoted to development programs.

But Buhari has refused to make good this pledge and his government has continued to subsidize pilgrimages and engage in these wasteful schemes. Now instead of seeing how state subsidization of pilgrimages, whether Christian or Muslim, is impoverishing the country and further destroying an economy that is already in the doldrums, many segments of the Nigerian population particularly those who feel that their religion is favoured by this current decision of the Buhari government, are tendering flimsy reasons and excuses to justify what is clearly a policy blunder, and a mark of governmental ineptitude.

From their comments and reactions Nigerians who are in support of state subsidization of Hajj have made it seem as if those who are opposed to this decision are Christians who did not protest when such subsidy was extended to them last year by the same government. In fact many Nigerians who are pro-Hajj subsidy think that those who are protesting are pro-Jonathans who could not speak out against such measures when Goodluck Jonathan was in power and who have yet to get over the pain of defeat at last year’s election. Particularly if one bears a name such as mine, there is a tendency to put the person in the box of those who never see anything good in what Buhari does. As I have sown in this piece, the peddlers of these narratives have not really taken a critical look at the proposal to subsidize pilgrimages.

Unfortunately, these misplaced and mistaken persuasions continue to re-echo in the discussions of both illiterate and semi-illiterate Nigerians, as well as in the debates by so called educated and apparently enlightened persons in the country whom one thinks should know better. Many people across Nigeria are still trapped in their ethnic and religious cocoons and find it difficult to rise and reason beyond their parochial, ‘tribal’, clannish and sectarian interests, and begin to appreciate and embrace collective and common supra-ethnic and supra-religious decencies by rallying against divisive, authoritarian, oppressive, dogmatic and exploitative religious policies as in this case.

Hence, I would like to reiterate that this author is not a Christian or a Muslim and one needs not be before speaking out for or against a policy that negatively affects us all. Again, it is not all Nigerians who are Christians or Muslims who support state subsidization of religious pilgrimages. There are millions of Nigerians who are traditional religious worshippers and adherents of other faiths, religions or philosophies. In fact a proper census would actually reveal the millions of Nigerians who are non-religious – including atheists, agnostics and freethinkers.

Having said that, the issue remains: Why do some Nigerians think that the government is justified in subsidizing religious pilgrimages, in this case I mean both Christian and Muslim pilgrimages?

First of all let us look at the theological aspect of the issue. Both Christians and Muslims believe that God or Allah exists and is omnipotent. That means God or Allah is capable of doing anything. And this is why they go to pilgrimages to the holy lands, the earthly homes – to revere him/her (still not sure of the gender). Now why can’t the Christian and islamic God provide them with the means to go for pilgrimage?

Why are Muslims and Christians interested in getting worldly state financial support when they truly believe that there is an otherworldly provident God whom they worship and who provides and can provide for and satisfy all human needs particularly of those who worship it? Has the state now turned into the God or Allah whom Muslims and Christians worship? Why do you need the earthly dollar rates whether it is at 160 or 197 naira? What kind of believers are you, Christians and Muslims of Nigeria, because for me this is the time to show your faith in the heavenly God or Allah? And you are not doing that. Instead of proving that your Jesus or Allah-God is one who provides for his people, you are putting your faith in the state subsidy. State subsidy? Not Allah subsidy? Not Christ subsidy?

Now Muslim friends, what do you need state subsidy for when Allah is there? You believe that Allah is omnipotent right? So why can’t you go to him? Why can’t the almighty and benevolent Allah get Saudi Arabia to send chartered planes or air tickets to come and convey you to the holy land? Or you have forgotten that you spend precious time about five times daily talking to this Allah? Now why can’t you ask him to send you money for Hajj? I mean why are you hankering over state money? Why are you bickering over dollar rate and making it seem as if your faith and fate now lies in dollars, not in Allah?

Now my Christian friends, you believe in Jesus as the savior and as a miracle worker, am I correct? So why do you need a state subsidy to travel to Jerusalem? Why can’t Jesus send you the money, after all he was the one whom you believe turned water into wine in Galilee right? Jesus fed multitudes with five loafs and two fish and later died and rose from the dead? Can’t he prove that he is still the alpha and Omega now and send you dollars for pilgrimages like manna from heaven? Or has Jesus suddenly stopped working miracles and wonders?

Why can’t Jesus send his angels to come and take you to Jerusalem for the pilgrimage, please? Or has Jesus’ mystical capacity been suddenly disabled? Has it expired? I mean, this is the time to hold you all both Christians and muslins to account, because for some time you have been peddling these narratives which you don’t put into effective use when the time comes.

You have been indoctrinating young Nigerians with all sorts of religious nonsense and getting people to believe that Allah and Jesus are really all powerful supernatural entities, when they are not. You have sanctioned, imprisoned or killed many Nigerians for their unbelief, for blaspheming, for insulting your God or Allah and now when it comes to showing the potency and existence of this your god, you have chickened to a corner asking for subsidy. Is this not a classical demonstration of lack of faith? Do you Muslims and Christians want the government to subsidize the supernatural power of your Jesus God or Allah? Or you want the government to substitute for the putative supernatural power of God or Allah?

So, theologically pilgrimage makes no sense, because after all God or Allah is supposed to be everywhere. So why travel to the holy land? Why? To go and do what? In that case, pilgrimage is just like travelling to ‘meet’ in Mecca or Jerusalem somebody who is already in Nigeria. Is that not absurd? Why embark on this patently futile venture? Why engage in such a self-ridiculing undertaking that, going by recent events, exposes you to the risk of losing your life?

Now assuming you want to embark on such superfluity, why ask for state subsidy and go about it in ways that expose your religious redundancy to public scrutiny? Even if out of cheer curiosity, you want to embark on such a mission, shouldn’t it have been more appropriate to do so as strictly a private affair and at the expense of the bearer of this religious burden, not at the state’s. In fact it is advisable not to notify the public that you need taxpayers’ money to go and throw stones at the devil in Saudi Arabia. This wise counsel is just to avoid being scrutinized and pilloried in ways that might ‘offend’ religious sensibilities that have been hard wired to fantasy and profligacy.

That leads me to the penultimate point, state sponsorship of pilgrims makes no economic sense for a poor country with a distressed economy such as Nigeria. Going to pilgrimage to Mecca or Jerusalem does not contribute to the economy of the country. In fact state funding of pilgrimages depletes the nation’s resources and to see a government that blames the prevalent economic hardship in the country to reckless spending by the former regime embark on the luxury of subsidizing pilgrimages is shocking. Worse is seeing many Nigerians laud such a scheme as a mark of sterling leadership.

First, the economies of the destination countries of these pilgrimages – Saudi Arabia and Israel – are far better than that of Nigeria and pilgrimages benefit them and their economies because these religious tours bring in foreign exchange earnings. Without state subsidy many Nigerian religious tourists would definitely travel for pilgrimages and contribute to these economies. So giving state subsidy is making additional contributions to the economies of the destinations countries at the expense of our own distressed economy. Is that not a shame? Which reasonable government does that?

Those who govern Nigeria at this point in time should be utterly ashamed of themselves for making this country a laughing stock. Look at the situation throughout the country. There is hyperinflation, scarcity of food, lack of jobs, violent crimes, limited power supply, decaying infrastructure etc. And here we are talking about subsidizing Hajj and Christian pilgrims.

Think Nigerians Think. Wake up, People of Nigeria wake up.

Why can’t Nigerians read in between the lines? Why is it that even the most educated within the Muslim community are often silent when it comes to speaking out against the injustices and exploitations in the name of Islam? Why are the Christians not speaking out against the subsidy of pilgrimages to Jerusalem at a time people are dying of hunger and preventable diseases? Why can’t Nigerians understand that state sponsorship of pilgrimages is impoverishing and underdeveloping their economy? In 2014, there were claims by the largely Muslim elite in Northern Nigeria that Boko Haram violence had nothing to do with Islamic fanaticism but every thing to do with the economic impoverishment and marginalization of Northern Nigeria.

They put the blame mainly on the government of Jonathan and saw the election of Buhari as an opportunity to address this situation. Now instead of Buhari giving concessions to small-scale business schemes or to those studying in Nigeria or overseas he is giving subsidy to Hajj and Christian pilgrims. Is subsidizing pilgrimages a way of tackling poverty and addressing economic marginalization in Northern Nigeria?

Unfortunately people who think that this recent decision favours their religion are of the view that those protesting the decision are doing so because they are angry that the subsidy benefits Muslims. Look, pro-subsidy Nigerians, whether they are Muslims or Christians, should bear in mind that if the Nigerian economy is good, it is good for everyone whether one is a Christian, Muslims or non-religious. In fact if the economy is robust enough, Christians and Muslims can afford to travel to Jerusalem and Mecca, Muslims can do main Hajj and lesser Hajj as many times as they want without any state subsidy. That leads me to my last point.

As I noted earlier, Nigeria is a culturally diverse country and as a religiously pluralistic society, it is imperative that the state be secular, that is unbiased for or against any religion. This principle is enshrined in article 10 of the nation’s constitution, which says that no part of the Federation or state should adopt any religion as state religion. This article is enshrined to ensure the neutrality and impartiality of the Nigerian state in matters concerning religion. It prohibits official discrimination on the grounds of religious belief or unbelief. However, this is not practically the case. In Muslim majority states, Islam is the state religion and sharia is the state law. Non-Muslims are treated as second class citizens. The Nigerian state cannot fulfill its role as the impartial guarantor of the rights and liberties of the citizens when state managers make policies that imply the adoption of Islam and/or Christianity as the state religion. By subsidizing the pilgrimages of Christians and Muslims, the state has invariably adopted Islam and Christianity as state religions. State managers are in breach of the constitution because they are officially discriminating against Nigerians who profess other faiths or none. In fact, by subsidizing pilgrimages and privileging Christianity and Islam, the secularity of Nigeria is imperilled.

To delegates from the host country Kenya, and attendees from South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, Uganda, Malawi, Tanzania and Burundi; thank you for the honour of inviting me to address this meeting and for giving me the opportunity to contribute to strategizing against witch hunting in the region.

In the past weeks, I have pondered on what title to give this presentation in order to capture the urgency of the situation: In the course of my search and reflection, a popular line by an English poet, John Maxwell Edmonds, caught my attention. It says:

When you go home, tell them of us and say:
For your tomorrow; these gave their today.

On a second thought, I said, look we are not fallen soldiers yet. Instead we are standing soldiers and we are still fighting on. The issue we are tackling – witch hunting – is with us and affects us all directly and indirectly. The tomorrow we are fighting for is not distant or severed from us. The tomorrow we are fighting for is as much their tomorrow as it is our tomorrow. Let me say this on a more serious note: Youths of this continent, the tomorrow you are fighting for is your tomorrow. Never forget that witch hunting targets elderly persons and the youths of today are the elders and the targets of tomorrow.

Accusations of witchcraft are wreaking havoc in the lives of people across the region, among the educated and the non-educated, in families and communities, in rural and urban areas even as we are meeting here today. Witch hunting is silently destroying the future of our youths, and the future of our continent. We need to take a strong and decisive stand against it now. We need to make witch hunting history because whichever angle we try to look at this issue our youths are involved, African youths are both victims and victimizers. African youths are part of the problem. I ask you on this day: Will you join me in becoming part of the solution?

Now if you are undecided, consider this case in KwaZulu Natal where the police arrested in April last year 12 suspects between the ages of 18 and 30, I repeat 18 and 30, for burning an alleged ‘witch’ to death. These young people stormed the home of the alleged witch about 12.30 am, put tyres on his body and set him alight and in October last year two brother Donatus 28 and Eric 26 were sentenced to seven life terms plus 20 years for killing eight of their relatives including infants – a one year old, a three year old and a 4 year old following suspicions of witchcraft. Now, apart from wasting the lives of these innocent persons, have these youths not destroyed their future?

You can also take the case of Ali from Yendi in Northern Ghana. Ali finished high school and after some years could not find any meaningful job. In 2010, he consulted a diviner who told him that his step mother was responsible for his lack of progress. One early morning Ali confronted the step mother and stabbed her to death. The police arrested him and are prosecuting him for murder. He is currently on remand at Yendi prison. The trial is stalled because the witnesses have stopped coming to court. Look this young man may spend the rest of his life in jail. The late woman had children who were in primary school by the time she was killed and now have to grow up without a mother.

What about the case of Ayishetu, a 60 year old woman also from Ghana. She was enjoying her normal life till a younger woman in the compound fell down from a tree while she went to fetch firewood and died. Some relatives of the deceased went and consulted a diviner who declared that Ayishetu was responsible for the death. A male relative of the deceased went and attacked the woman with a matchete and inflicted deep cuts on her head and mouth. But she survived.

Last year Ayishetu asked a neighbor, Muhammad, to give her some soya beans after the harvest but Muhammad declined. He told Ayishetu that the harvest was poor and the beans were not enough. Two months later Muhammad took ill and died. While on sick bed, Muhammad recounted this experience to his family members and they threatened to kill Ayishetu. Not long after the death of Muhammad, Ayishetu came back from the market one day and found out that her chicken was missing. A neighbor, Musa, told her that he saw one young man, Kabiru, with the chicken. The woman went and confronted this young man but Kabiru denied having anything to do with her chicken and in the course of the exchange Ayishetu revealed the identity of the person who told her that Kabiru was the one who had stolen her chicken. The young man went and confronted Musa but Musa denied blatantly that he was the one who said so. Kabiru now returned with a gun and shot Ayishetu and nearly killed her. He said to her, “So you think you could kill me the way you killed Muhammad?” Ayishetu was rushed to Yendi hospital where the bullets were removed.

If you are still not convinced about the urgency of the situation, then need to listen to this. In Calabar in Southern Nigeria, Ben’s father woke up on July 3, some weeks ago and thought it was going to be like any other day. However it was not, because some hours later some youths stormed the compound with a ‘native doctor’ who pointed at him as one of those who were responsible for the death of young people in the community.

The youths seized the man and lynched him and destroyed his house. Ben fled the community and is now in hiding. Police have arrested some of the youths who were suspected to have lynched Ben’s father. The police would extort money from these suspects, detain and may later prosecute them. Friends, these young people who perpetrated these crimes and who are currently in police custody or at large, may never get to live ‘normal lives’ again. Ben may never get over the trauma of seeing his own father beaten and lynched by young people from his own community.

I tried getting my local contact person to reach out to other persons in Ben’s community who were affected by the incident but he told me that it was dangerous to go there because when the police officers went the coomunity to make arrests, a member of the gang shot and wounded one of the officers.

Young people make up the mobs that attack and burn witches in Kenya, Malawi Uganda, and Tanzania and in other parts of the region. Young people are mainly the witch hunters; they are also the children and relatives of the witch hunted.

African humanist youths, the world beckons on you to champion a movement against witch hunting. The world is looking up to you to provide leadership in this campaign for a rational Africa, a skeptical Africa, and yes for a secular Africa. The world needs you to foster critical thinking, skeptical rationality and other cognitive skills that are needed to interrogate and critically examine the use of witchcraft in explaining and making sense of misfortune. Will you rise up to this challenge?

African humanist youths, the world needs you to make other young Africans to understand that there is no connection between lack of job and witchcraft, loss of job and witchcraft, infertility and witchcraft, failure in exams and witchcraft, poverty and witchcraft, business failure and witchcraft, dreams and witchcraft, accidents and witchcraft, death and witchcraft, diseases and witchcraft. We need to make African youths aware that witches are imaginary beings and witchcraft is an imaginary crime. Nobody commits it and nobody should be punished for it. And I want to stress this, it is not only witches and witchcraft that are imaginary, but also God and godcraft, Allah and allahcraft, devil and devilcraft, jinn and jinncraft, Jesus Christ and christcraft, angels and angelcraft, demons and demoncraft, holy and evil spirits and spiritual craft, and other supernatural objects and formations which human beings have invented over the centuries and millennia to make sense of life, nature and experiences.

We need to challenge the magical, medicinal and religious establishments that peddle and propagate witchcraft narratives and schemes and use them to exploit people including the so called men and women of God or Allah, medicine men and women, the Nganga, Babalawo, Sangoma, Dibia, Bagha, Bouiglana and Tindana, Pastors, Mallams and Marabout, Prophets and Prophetesses and all who claim to have powers to diagnose and cure witchcraft, and to identify witches.

In addition, we need to robustly engage ‘scientific discourses’ on witchcraft in Africa because these debates often exoticize Africa. For too long, witchcraft has been used as the concept for studying and understanding Africa including African politics, economy, philosophy and science. When scholars tell us that witchcraft accusation is a mechanism for stabilizing the society or an idiom to make sense of modernity, let us draw their attention to the cases I have just cited and to the fact that witch hunting is a symptom of social dysfunction and lack of effective health care and strong modern state institutions

Friends, I am aware that to make witch hunt history in this region is not going to be an easy task. Sacrifices will be made. Dangers will be faced. Challenges will be met. Difficulties will be encountered. But more importantly history will be rewritten, and we shall be bending the arc of human progress towards enlightenment. So that it will eventually be said of us, it will be said of you, the African humanist youths and all who subscribe to the humanist outlook in this region, that for our tomorrow and for their tomorrow, we gave our today.

The Dallas shootings which claimed the lives of five people, and injured at least six others, were a long time coming.

That is not the same as saying that the cops who got shot deserved it, or that the shooter was justified, but rather acknowledging what has long gone on in America.

For years now we have been reading stories about black people getting killed by the police – and stories about the police getting away with it.

Tamir Rice was twelve years old when he was killed by a cop for playing with a toy gun in a park.

The shooting was deemed “reasonable” by outside experts.

Freddie Gray was arrested for having a switch blade, in a nation where they can’t even pass laws to keep rifles out of the hands of terrorists.

He fell into a coma and died of spinal injuries while in the custody of the police. There were officers facing charges on this.

Two were acquitted of all charges by the judge, a third ended up in a mistrial as the jury couldn’t reach a verdict – so he is to be retried in September, and the fourth’s case is still ongoing.

Quartz reports that more black people were killed by US police in 2015 – than the worst year in Jim Crow.

And society is not willing to convict.

We hear about how the victims were ‘no angels’, when a black man, or child dies we hear every single bad thing they ever did to kill our empathy.

And the killers get away with it.

It seems to always be justified, when the victim is black.

Philando Castile was murdered the other day.

“Oh my God, please don’t tell me he’s dead, please don’t tell me my boyfriend just went like that. You shot four bullets into him, sir,” Lavish Reynolds told his uniformed killer.

Castile was killed after he reached for his ID, after the officer told him to hand it over.

And who believes that a US jury would ever find his killer guilty?

So I look at Dallas, I hear the condemnations of the US president, and I see that this disaster was a long time coming.

Something has to change, and it has to change all the way through the system. A switch blade should not be a death sentence in a country where you can buy a sniper rifle, bullets should not be deployed against someone armed with Skittles.

Children should not be killed for playing in a park.

When the police kill, the public should expect justice. Without justice, there is only vengeance.