<a href=www.vheadline.com>Venezuela's Electronic News
Posted: Sunday, May 11, 2003
By: The Very Reverend Roger Dawson
Mothers' Day, May 11, 2003
sermon by The Very Reverend Roger Dawson
Dean of St. Mary's Anglican Cathedral, Caracas
"I never preach about women" a colleague once told me, "if you praise them they think you have other motives and if you condemn them you have enemies for life."
"Believe me" , he added "if you get close enough to stab one they all bleed."
So his advice was to stay well clear of what we call the fairer sex and the better half. He may well be right, of course, but I dare say the same advice could be directed towards any group, male or female or even mixed groups be they housewives, architects, footballers, doctors or road sweepers and dare I add, clergy?
Actually I stay away from as many groups of clergy as I can, as I think they are the oddest group of all God" s creatures. George Bernard Shaw is reported to have said that when he saw a clutch of clergy he knew that God had a sense of humor.
Love 'em or hate 'em, women are most definitely here to sta, and it seems to me that we should treat each person as an individua, not as the stereotype member of a group, clan, tribe, race or family.
When I look into the mirror in a morning, as I am frequently forced to do to see how many hairs I have missed whilst shaving, I cannot but help noticing that I get more like my father every day. My mother says I walk like him and she gets upset when she sees me from a distance, because I have become so like him and her mind slips back to the time when he was alive, and she thinks for a moment that he has come back to see her.
I want to repeat something that I said last week, when talking about the appearances of Jesus to the disciples. Did they actually happen, these appearances, or did the followers think that they happened and so were confused when they came to recall the events?
Not wishing to appear as liars, they made the stories more plausible by adding segments that seemed to them to confirm that he actually did come and be with them. Unknown to each individual was that the other apostles were doing the same, and so we finish up with a catalogue of conflicting accounts. Maybe it was images from the past that were confused and merged into present realities that made them think that Jesus was alive.
Just like my mother thinks that her husband of more than fifty years, but has been dead for more than a dozen, is alive again and come to see her, when it is in fact her son. Of course I carry many of his genes, but I am not my father, only my father's son, and we don't need a DNA test to prove it. In addition I have her genes also, and that makes me into a different and unique person ...as we all are different and unique.
Although I don't look so much like her, though I did have blond hair from her side of the family that escaped from the top of my head when I was in my twenties, I am probably more like her in the way I think.
A common jibe in our household is "oh, you are just like your mother." Many of us are, including my dear wife ... and that is hardly a surprise for many spend their first five years of life almost exclusively with their mothers. They shape the way we are and together with our inherited behavioral genes, the people we are is set by the time we go to school. It is pretty well the way it has always been.
Even when we were hunter-gatherers living on the edge of the forest, the children stayed with the females whilst the males ventured out into the grasslands to hunt. Various societies have attempted to change the system but have hardly dented it. The Greeks, as much as anyone, have experimented with schools for boys to turn them into warriors, killing the girls off as not much use but then they came unstuck when they lost a battle and most of their army and there were not enough women to bear them more children, so they fell under someone else's idea of how civilization should be ordered and run.
The big question is ... is the system of females baring the children and being largely responsible for their initial upbringing the exact system that God had in mind when homo sapiens was designed?
No one will doubt that they are physically designed to the task of developing the child from cell and sperm to the moment nine months later when the infant is big enough to manage breathing on its own in the world outside.
From then on, whose responsibility is it?
Again we must say that the mother with her exquisitely designed feeding system has to take the leading role. So important is this and so welcome to all individuals that only those who associate the body with guilt think that displaying such objects is a terrible sin.
Roman matrons would go deliberately to the baths to discuss with other mothers the merits of the young girls who went to swim. All this in an endeavor to arrange the best shapes married their sons. The girls themselves had a better view of their prospective partners at the athletics at which the participants were naked.
The present Bishop of Gloucester went to Borneo and at the Sunday Eucharist found himself surrounded by half-naked altar girls and wondered if such a pleasant experience could ever happen in England.
All this body display was a terrible sin to Semitic peoples ... both Jews and Arabs ... who never put on a public display of nudity; and to this day the women in Arab lands are dressed so as to be invisible to others.
It has left the Western world in a confused state ... decadence and debauchery has gone hand in hand with sexual liberty and license, so many people have come to the conclusion that things sexual and of the body are less than pure and thus are against God's design.
Of course they can't be wholly against God's design, otherwise the human race would die out in a generation if we followed that edict.
The answer to the future understanding of our sexuality lies, like almost everything else, with our mothers. I have heard it expounded that homosexuality in men and women is because mothers either have not allowed their children to move over to make relationships with their fathers, or fathers have not allowed them to leave their mothers.
I think there is more to it than this, but I believe that it is true that mothers have an incredibly important and crucial role in the development of their offspring.
We are what our mothers shaped us to be.
Generally speaking, we are pleased with the job she did because we don't like to criticize ourselves ... thus any change in the system is going to be slow.
If women have a greater role in western society now than a century ago, it is because their mothers have taught them that this is OK ... not because men have given in.
If you have been listening to a mere man, thank you.
Former US Ambassador to Venezuela named President of the Institute of the Americas
<a href=www.vheadline.com>Venezuela's Electronic News
Posted: Sunday, May 11, 2003
By: VHeadline.com Reporters
The US State Department's highest-ranking diplomat and most senior expert on Latin America and Venezuela has been elected to the presidency of the Institute of the Americas based in San Diego to focus on outreach and creating awareness of the Institute's programs. The Institute is "a California non-profit organization exempt from taxation under the Internal Revenue Code with the declared mission to be a significant catalyst for promoting development and integration, emphasizing the role of the private sector, as a means to improve the economic, political, and social well being of the people of the Americas."
Jeffrey Davidow is to join the Institute during "a period of rapid growth, renewed purpose and increased Institute participation and will report directly to the Institute's inter-American Board of Directors." He holds a bachelor's degree in American history from the University of Massachusetts, and a master's degree in American studies from the University of Minnesota.
Davidow had served as visiting fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, and was a visiting scholar at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. His State Department career spanned several decades, most recently serving as the US Ambassador to Mexico (1998-2002); Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America (1996-1998), Ambassador to Venezuela (1993-1996); Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Africa (1990-1993) and Ambassador to Zambia (1988-1990) where he worked closely on matters related to the eventual change of government in South Africa.
Davidow has the distinction of being a career ambassador ... one of only three in the United States ... Theodore E. Gildred, former US Ambassador to Argentina says Davidow "is not only a person with in-depth knowledge of Latin America, but he is a brilliant mind who has excellent managerial skills and has worked diligently to improve the operations of the US Department of State."
Gaston Luken, chairman to the board of the Institute of the Americas says "we conducted a thorough search for an individual who could carry the Institute to new heights, increase its exposure and broaden our programs." The Institute of Americas will celebrate its 20th anniversary later this month with the dedication of a new addition to its headquarters on the campus of the University of California, San Diego.
US Army School of the Americas ... perhaps one day history will get it right
<a href=www.vheadline.com>Venezuela's Electronic News
Posted: Sunday, May 11, 2003
By: Willy E. Gutman
Veteran journalist Willy E. Gutman writes: I was recently taken to task by an alleged journalist for my "dogged and virulent" attacks against the US Army School of the Americas (SOA) and for insisting that US "advisors" orchestrated the atrocities committed by its alumni in Latin America.
Opinions, the illegitimate offspring of proclivity and self-interest ... not fact alone ... predispose us to lean in one direction or another. Some of us, for example, are predisposed to glorify the SOA. Others, like me, who have documented its handiwork, witnessed the legacy it left behind and interviewed a number of its alumni, are predisposed to censure it. The truth, generally the stronger of two arguments, often rests on clever marketing and persuasive rhetoric aimed at an uninformed audience. Facts will bear me out.
Whether the US "ordered" the atrocities committed by a significant number of SOA graduates in Central and South America and in the Caribbean Basin, is irrelevant ... but I will return to this point further on. The indisputable fact remains ... and verifiable events confirm ... that SOA cadres were (a) trained by the US, (b) armed by the US, (c) funded by the CIA, (d) deployed in operations sanctioned by the US, and (e) coddled by regimes politically and economically subservient to the US
Co-founded by Argentinean strongman, General Leopoldo Galtieri, Honduran death squad Battalion 3-16, while staffed by Honduran officers, operated under direct US orders in "cleansing" forays approved by the Pentagon. I could cite a dozen other cases but, as a fellow journalist, my detractor should be familiar with the gory details.
I have interviewed ... and published the revelations of ... a number of Guatemalan and Honduran senior ranking officers implicated in well documented human rights abuses who affirmed that they had acted on orders of the US, sometimes under the supervision of US "advisors." These "advisors," I was told, did not take an active role in the various acts of barbarism perpetrated before their eyes; they merely "observed" the dastardly deeds from a safe distance.
One of these officers is a former Chief of Military Intelligence, now retired, and living on a fat US pension ... he and his cronies will never be called to answer for their crimes, he affirmed, "because the US has much to lose if we spill the beans."
Narco-trafficking schemes in which a number of SOA graduates were involved, have further helped tarnish the School's reputation. In Venezuela, General Ramon Davila Guillen, SOA class of 1967 (Irregular Warfare Operations) was indicted in November 1996 in connection with a shipment of one ton of cocaine into Miami in 1990, which he says was authorized by the CIA in an effort to catch drug dealers. In 1993, the CIA called the shipment "a regrettable incident" and dismissed the CIA agent involved. Several Colombian, Panamanian (among them Manuel Noriega), Honduran and Guatemalan SOA graduates were also implicated in narco-trafficking schemes as troops under their command were busy massacring their fellow countrymen.
I also interviewed two former SOA instructors whose sworn depositions confirm long-held suspicions that the SOA curriculum included training in "irregular warfare," with an emphasis on interrogation "techniques" (psychological and physical torture) as well as "pacification," a euphemism for brutal mass control of disenfranchised native populations.
Senators Joe Lieberman and Dodd, of Connecticut, with whom I have copious correspondence on the matter, expressed grave concern about the legitimacy and usefulness of the SOA, and about its abysmal human rights record.
Lastly, I had an opportunity to peruse an SOA Spanish-language manual adapted from a CIA handbook in which are prominently featured "persuasion methods" that clearly violate the Geneva Convention(s).
As a pragmatist, I am compelled to admit the value of military institutions and, on occasion the deplorable necessity for war. Years of extensive research into the SOA, however, suggest that there is nothing redeeming about that institution. After clamoring to have it shut down, I no longer advocate this course.
The SOA did "close," only to reopen the next day under a different and more sinister name ... The Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.
It will remain an arcane throwback of the Cold War and, like a chameleon, it will change its colors to suit its needs. It will never submit to accountability or transparency.
Perhaps one day history will get it right.
Willy E. Gutman
WEGUTMAN@cs.com
Willy E. Gutman is a veteran journalist.
He lives in southern California.