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Which is the best language to learn? Which is the easiest?
Two different questions, often uttered in the same breath. But that’s okay, because there will be only one answer. Whichever language you wholeheartedly choose to study will be both the best and the easiest. However, here’s some help choosing.

The choices.
Here is the Modern Language Association’s 2002 list of the most commonly studied languages at university level in the United States. I have not included ancient languages like Latin, Biblical Hebrew, or Sanskrit, special purposes languages like American Sign Language, or U.S. heritage languages, like Hawaiian or Navajo since the choice of those languages follows a different dynamic.:

1. Spanish
2. French
3. German
4. Italian
5. Japanese
6. Chinese
7. Russian
8. Arabic
9. Modern Hebrew
10. Portuguese
11. Korean
12. Vietnamese
13. Hindi/Urdu
14. Swahili

Difficulty, according to Uncle Sam
First, consider some cold facts. The U.S. State Department groups languages for the diplomatic service according to learning difficulty.:

Category 1. The “easiest” languages for speakers of English, requiring 600 hours of classwork for minimal proficiency: the Latin and Germanic languages. However, German itself requires a bit more time, 750 hours, because of its complex grammar.

Category 2. Medium, requiring 1100 hours of classwork: Slavic languages, Turkic languages, other Indo-Europeans such as Persian and Hindi, and some non-Indo-Europeans such as Georgian, Hebrew and many African languages. Swahili is ranked easier than the rest, at 900 hours.

Category 3. Difficult, requiring 2200 hours of study: Arabic, Japanese, Korean and the Chinese languages.

Will you get a chance to practice this language?
Now, consider another important factor: accessibility. To be a successful learner you need the chance to hear, read and speak the language in a natural environment. Language learning takes an enormous amount of concentration and repetition, which cannot be done entirely in the classroom. Will you have access to the language where you live, work and travel?

The 14 most popular courses according to a combination of linguistic ease and accessibility.

1. Spanish. Category One. The straightforward grammar is familiar and regular. It is also ubiquitous in the Americas, the only foreign language with a major presence in the insular linguistic environment of the U.S. Chances to speak and hear it abound. It is the overwhelming favorite, accounting for more than fifty percent of language study enrollment in the MLA study.

2. French. Category One. Grammatically complex but not difficult to learn because so many of it’s words have entered English. For this vocabulary affinity, it is easy to attain an advanced level, especially in reading. It is a world language, and a motivated learner will find this language on the internet, in films and music.

3. German. Category One Plus. The syntax and grammar rules are complex with noun declensions a major problem. It is the easiest language to begin speaking, with a basic vocabulary akin to English. Abstract, advanced language differs markedly, though, where English opts for Latin terms. It values clear enunciation, so listening comprehension is not difficult.

4. Italian. Category One. It has the same simple grammar rules as Spanish, a familiar vocabulary and the clearest enunciation among Latin languages (along with Romanian). Italian skills are easily transferable to French or Spanish. You might need to go to Italy to practice it, but there are worse things that could happen to you. It is also encountered in the world of opera and classical music.

5. Russian. Category Two. This highly inflected language, with declensions, is fairly difficult to learn. The Cyrillic alphabet is not particularly difficult, however, and once you can read the language, the numerous borrowings from French and other western languages are a pleasant surprise. It is increasingly accessible.

6. Arabic. Category Three. Arabic is spoken in dozens of countries, but the many national dialects can be mutually incomprehensible. It has only three vowels, but includes some consonants that don’t exist in English. The alphabet is a formidable obstacle, and good calligraphy is highly valued and difficult to perfect. Vowels are not normally written (except in children’s books) and this can be an obstacle for reading. It is ubiquitous in the Muslim world and opportunities exist to practice it at every level of formality.

7. Portuguese. Category One. One of the most widely spoken languages in the world is often overlooked. It has a familiar Latin grammar and vocabulary, though the phonetics may take some getting used to.

8. Swahili. Category Two Minus. It includes many borrowings from Arabic, Persian, English and French. It is a Bantu language of Central Africa, but has lost the difficult Bantu “tones”. The sound system is familiar, and it is written using the Latin alphabet. One major grammatical consideration is the division of nouns into sixteen classes, each with a different prefix. However, the classes are not arbitrary, and are predictable.

9. Hindi/Urdu. Category Two. The Hindustani language, an Indo-European language, includes both Hindi and Urdu. It has an enormous number of consonants and vowels, making distinctions between phonemes that an English speaker will have difficulty hearing. Words often have clipped endings, further complicating comprehension. Hindi uses many Sanskrit loans and Urdu uses many Persian/Arabic loans, meaning that a large vocabulary must be mastered. Hindi uses the phonetically precise Devanagari script, created specifically for the language. Predictably, Urdu’s use of a borrowed Persian/Arabic script leads to some approximation in the writing system.

10. Modern Hebrew. Category Two. Revived as a living language during the nineteenth century, it has taken on characteristics of many languages of the Jewish diaspora. The resultant language has become regularized in grammar and syntax, and the vocabulary has absorbed many loan words, especially from Yiddish, English and Arabic. The alphabet has both print and script forms, with five vowels, not normally marked. Vowel marking, or pointing, is quite complex when it does occur. Sounds can be difficult to reproduce in their subtleties and a certain amount of liaison makes listening comprehension problematic. It is not very accessible outside of a religious or Israeli context.

11. Japanese. Category Three. Difficult to learn, as the vocabulary is unfamiliar, and the requirements of the sound system so strict that even the many words that have been borrowed from English, French and German will seem unrecognizable. With three different writing systems, it is forbiddingly difficult to read and write. Also, social constraints may impede useful interaction.

12. Chinese. Category Three. Whether your choice is Mandarin or Cantonese (the MLA survey does not make a distinction, oddly enough). It is the most difficult language on this list. It includes all of the most difficult aspects: unfamiliar phonemes, a large number of tones, an extremely complex writing system, and an equally unfamiliar vocabulary. Personal motivation is absolutely essential to keep the student on track. On the positive side, it is easy to find, since Chinese communities exist throughout the world, and Chinese language media, such as newspapers, films and TV, are present in all these communities.

13. Vietnamese. Category Three. This language belongs to an unfamiliar family of languages, but it does borrow much vocabulary from Chinese (helpful if you already speak Chinese!). It has six tones, and a grammar with an unfamiliar logic. It’s not all bleak, however, Vietnamese uses a Latin derived alphabet. The chances of speaking this language are not high, though there are 3 million speakers in the USA.

14. Korean. Category Three. Korean uses an alphabet of 24 symbols, which accurately represent 14 consonants and 10 vowels. However, the language also includes 2000 commonly used Chinese characters for literary writing and formal documents. Speech levels and honorifics complicate the learning of vocabulary, and there is liaison between words, making them hard to distinguish. The grammar is not overly complicated and there are no tones. It borrows many Chinese words, but the language is unrelated to other languages of Asia.

The most important factor of all: personal motivation
The third, most important factor is up to you. The easiest language to learn is the one that you are most motivated to learn, the one you enjoy speaking, the one with the culture that inspires you and the history that touches you spiritually. It is useless to try to learn a language if you are not interested in the people who speak it, since learning a language involves participating in its behaviors and identifying with its people.

So, consider all three factors: motivation, accessibility and linguistic ease, in that order, and come up with the final list yourself. The bad news is that no language is really easy to learn, but the good news is that we humans are hard wired for a great amount of linguistic flexibility, as long as we know how to turn on the learning process. If the rewards and benefits of the language are clear to you, you will be able to get those rusty language synapses sparking in your head and start the words rolling. Bonne chance!

Dominic Ambrose is a writer and language educator. He presently works for an independent film company in Paris. Take a look at his other language articles on his website, at dominicambrose.com/linguistica dominicambrose.com/linguistica

Vincent Price plays Joseph Curwen, a man accused of being a warlock. The townspeople of the village of Arkham tied him to a tree and burned him. Joseph Curwen cursed the village people and vowed to return.

110 years later, the great-great grandson of Joseph Curwen, Charles Dexter Ward, also played by Vincent Price, along with his wife, Ann Ward, played by Debra Paget, returns to the town. Charles Dexter Ward had recently acquired his family home and upon his and his wife’s arrival, they meet Simon the caretaker, played by Lon Chaney Jr.

Charles and Ann decided to have a walk around town only to be greeted or should I say “not greeted” by some townspeople who looked deformed and weren’t very happy to see Charles and Ann. Befriended by the local doctor, Dr. Willet, who walks Charles and Ann to their home and joins them for dinner, he tells the Wards (Charles and Ann) the story about Joseph Curwen. Dr. Willet elaborates about Joseph Curwen’s practices of witchcraft and unholy experiments on humans, which cause the mutations on some of the townspeople and cause them to fear the Wards.

Feeling unwelcome, the Wards decided to leave Arkham only to have their decision changed by Simon the caretaker so the Wards spend the night at the family home. Upon looking at the portrait of Joseph Curwen, Charles Dexter Ward’s body is possessed by his great-great grandfather. Simon the caretaker is actually a friend of Joseph Curwen’s past and Simon along with a third friend named Jabez are reunited with Joseph Curwen. The three men want to unlock the secrets of the book of Necronomicon and unleash evil beings upon the world.

Ann Ward is frightened by her husband’s odd behavior and strange mood swings. Feeling frustrated by Ann’s refusal to fulfill her wifely duties, the possessed Charles Ward along with Simon and Jabez , bring Hester, a former servant and mistress of Joseph Curwen’s past, back to life.

The possessed Charles commit a series of murders as an act of revenge against the descendants of the townspeople who burned Joseph Curwen 110 years ago. Ann disturbed by the strange sounds at night, decides to look around the home. Unfortunately, she finds “Charles″ along with Simon, Jabez and Hester trying to bring back the “evil beings″ again. They give Ann a first hand look by making a sacrifice or rather a mating partner with these “evil beings″.

Fortunately, Dr. Willet makes a visit to the home. The “evil beings” cause a fire which burns the family home and Dr. Willet rescues Charles and Ann from it. Ann asks Charles “Are you sure you’re alright?” Charles replies with a possessed look upon his face towards the audience “Perfectly sure, my dear. Perfectly sure”.

FILM FACTS: This film was made in 1963. Roger Corman produced and directed this film. Francis Ford Coppola was an assistant to Roger Corman before his famous directing days. This film was based on an Edgar Allan Poe poem and a story by H.P. Lovecraft. This was Lon Chaney Jr.’s final film role before his death.

Michael Russell

Your Independent guide to films-guide.com/ Films

Many indie musicians are known for their anti-corporate stance. It’s not surprising then that the concept of “marketing” leaves a sour taste in many independent artists’ mouths. The fact is though, there are ways to build your fan base and increase people’s interest in and awareness of your music - without selling out. If you are an independent music maker, here are a few ways you can do some marketing without going corporate.

First, if your mindset is completely anti-marketing, you really need to change your tune. Marketing does not have to equal selling out or going corporate. Finding ways to expose your ideas and creations through your songs and music to more people - marketing - shows that you believe in what you are doing.

Just stop and think about it for a moment. Doesn′t what you create mean enough to you that you want to share it with other people? If not, why are you even pursuing music at all? Once you stop equating marketing with these negative connotations, you can finally move on and start finding ways to promote your band that are still in-line with your ideals as an independent artist.

For starters, remember that your fans are not only your target market, but also your best promoters. Many musicians avoid pursuing marketing because they think it means having to constantly deal with the media, promoters, record labels and other corporate types to help get the word out. If you′re not comfortable with that, just skip it and go straight to the people who already are your best advertisers - your fan base. Provide them with ways to spread the word about you and your music. They will do the best job at it - and for free. Think about marketing in terms of your fans spreading their passion about you and the word loses even more of it’s negative stereotype, doesn’t it?

With that in mind, increasing your marketing simply becomes a matter of increasing your fan base. What could be better than that? Make sure to find out what it is about your music that attracts the fans you already have. Make sure you can describe your style of music quickly and clearly. With these tools it becomes even easier to find others who would also be interested in your music and your message. Reach out to them.

As you can see, independent music marketing doesn’t need to be a dirty concept. Once you see it in terms of sharing who you are with even more people who will get pleasure from what you create, you can start using it to your advantage. Best of all you can do this using methods that don’t require selling out or forgetting about your roots.

Come discover even more about

Maya Angelou once said (I’m paraphrasing) ”the purpose of all life is to be able to live like a poet one day.” She went on to say that since poets already live like poets, their lives were not a postponed project, but the-ultimate-goal-realized by default.

How many times we have heard of those retirement dreams… the narratives that inevitably start with ”one day I’d like to …” and continues with a description of one idyllic state or another… a beach house in Key West… playing golf eight hours a day in Arizona… buying a summer house in Florida and moving for good… writing (ah, at long last) that great novel, the chapters of which are lying somewhere inside those moldy cardboard boxes in the basement… to take the oath of chastity and join a monastery or a yoga ashram… take that trip to the Far East… or perhaps even to throw oneself with passion into a cause that is much larger than one’s own limited life, like a political party, a crusade, a fund-raising juggernaut perhaps … on and on.

But underneath it all the aim is to arrive at that sublime state of inner peace and gentleness, something ill-defined but real, fuzzy but warm, a feeling that we feel is our birthright. Underneath it all don’t we all point the gyroscopes of our lives to that nebulous state of elation and redemption that we sometimes refer to as ”poetic” ?

The rest is mostly a life-long process of branding ourselves as a desirable product in this increasingly globalized and fickle marketplace.

A brand is a total image with a price, a consistent package with defined and perceived borders. We are engineers. Attorneys. Machinists. Singers. Doctors. Teachers. Experts. Go-to guys. Ministers. Project managers. Historians. Curators. Tank drivers. Chefs. Shrinks. Plumbers … and, yes, Poets. Poets come in branded varieties as well. There is even a ”Poet Laurate” for the whole United States (for the last few years we were extremely fortunate to have Billy Collins and Stanley Kunits and Ted Kooser as the PT Person).

All branding by definition shuns contradiction and ambivalence like a plague.

Fuzzy logic is fine for hi-tech digital cam-recorders but not for the experts that command healthy speaking fees. CEOs and four star generals are not supposed wear their troubling questions on their sleeves. Researchers at NIH do not get grants and medals for not knowing what to do in the face of a new virus strain.

If things do not make sense outside a certain framework, then a branded professional knows how NOT to step outside that framework. A brand provides reproducible solutions to carefully-worded questions. Existentialist panic does not command a premium price on the capitalist auction block.

Poetry, on the other hand, is a vulnerable exploration into everything that is left out by branding. It has no guarantees. No guidelines.

You can certainly encourage people to write poems. But I’m not sure at all if you can ‘’teach’’ how to write poetry with the kind of money-back-guarantee bravado that is commonplace for a successful brand.

It is the only Odyssey that each person has to take all alone, go out and wander in the world, meet his demons, take them on one by one, beat them and return home victorious… only to do the same all over again the very next day.

Poetry, to use an analogy that Billy Collins has used in an Alaskan Quarterly Review interview, is like finding something curious sticking out from the sand in a desert and removing all that sand to discover the rest of the intriguing object. In that, poetry represents a vast freedom to rediscover all that is hidden from or by power.

Poetry upholds all the in-between states and ambiguities censored by branding. So it is subversive by default.

However in that subversion there is also a deep affirmation of the most basic human value of all – freedom. That’s perhaps the only thing branding cannot buy and sell in the marketplace. A brand’s power depends only on consumption. Poetry, on the other hand, is free the moment it is produced.

Our world needs more poets get into branded power play. Certainly someone like Leopold Sedar Senghor, a poet who became a statesman, will be remembered for his uplifting and dignified approach to international conflict. And conversely, I hope more branded professionals get into poetry as a way to humanize the market place of good and services.

What if the United Nations held a Poetry Workshop for one day of the year, with mandatory participation for all heads of state?

What if everyone in the world voted for the best Power Poet of the year through the internet and the winner was declared on Valentine’s Day?

Or what if Fortune 500 companies had poetry classes for their managers? Wouldn’t that be the ultimate out-of-the-box thinking and problem-solving bonanza on steroids?

And what would happen if before one country attacked another, the presidents and top generals from both sides were forced to lock themselves in a room and write at least one poem, expressing why they hate the “other guys” and why they must fight? What if those poems were then distributed to the citizens of both nations and the world? Perhaps they would still go on and fight. And perhaps, just a tiny little shivering perhaps, they would not.

Without poetic possibilities, branding easily degrades into a repetition of the past. If you are building a bridge, repetition of the past experience might actually be a beneficial discipline since no one wants to re-discover trigonometry every time there is a river to cross.

But in much more complex affairs of the heart, of which I consider international politics to constitute just a small subset, the vulnerable freedom of a poem could be the only thing standing between our endangered humanity and the discovery of our birthright freedom — and even perhaps salvation.

Ugur Akinci is a writer with 20 years of experience. Visit his web site write𛶿.com write𛶿.com for more information.

A comic book, or comics for short, is a magazine or book containing sequential art in the form of a narrative. Since the formulation of the comic book format in the 1930s, young and old alike have enjoyed comics. However, the comic industry lost some of its popularity when it came down with a crash in the mid 1990s.

To promote its popularity once again the comic book industry is producing films based on the comic book stories. This method proved successful for few stories like Sin City, X-men and Spiderman but it failed miserably for other titles that flopped at the box office. So far this approach seems unable to rejuvenate the comic book industry.

Research shows that the main cause of downfall of the comic industry is the removal of comic books from shops and stores. But this cannot be the sole cause since comic books are now easily available on the internet, in movies and animations.

Another question that comes to mind is why Japanese animation or “manga” is doing better then traditional comic books? The answer is simple. The Japanese write a better story line and their animated movies are made for a wider audience. Often, Japanese comic books are framed as graphic novels containing 70 to 220 pages for a mature audience. The manga holds a more important place in Japanese culture, and is both well respected as an art form and also as a form of popular literature. On the other hand, comic books in Western countries are generally geared towards young teenagers rather than adults. This approach has made it tough for the Western comic industry to attain its dominant position.

Common misconceptions regarding comic books turning readers into out-of-touch delinquents have also hurt sale. Many parents fear that comics will brainwash children into believing that supermans and batmans actually exist in the world. For this reason, many parents forbid their children from reading comic books as in their view they carry no ethical or moral values. These attitudes have contributed to the lack of interest in comics as well as its drop in publication.

The comic book price guide also sheds some light on why comics are no longer sold. The price guide reveals that the cost of comic books has soared up with the success of movies like Batman, Spiderman, and Superman etc. making it unaffordable to many. Plus when it comes to buying storybooks parents prefer to buy their children fables or novels that will help them build up their vocabulary and learn proper English.

But these parents fail to realize that without fantasy and imagination as found in comics, a child’s creativity cannot develop. Comic books help break the monotony in children’s lives and refresh these young minds to face the challenges of daily life.

For more on comic-book-fan.info/sitemap.html Comic Books, visit comic-book-fan.info Comic Book Fan. Susan also enjoys writing on a wide range of topics at internet-and-communications-hub.info Internet and Communications.

Comics have existed for ages and have developed extensively, especially over the last century. The history of comics has had a boost after World War II as the popularity of comics increased sharply. People had more leisure time and most important: more money to afford luxury products such as comic books. Although cartoons can be seen as luxury goods, it also had other functions in society over time. The fun part of reading comic strips is likely to be seen as one of the most important features to their readers, nevertheless, most cartoons also have a message to share with their reader.

Comics need to be defined as the medium it is, as it has a deeper meaning than just the object, be it a comic book or a comic strip. A clear definition is that comics can be regarded as “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer”. This response is crucial as this can form the popularity of a specific comic and give information to the reader, which can be relaxing as well as informative in the sense of norms and values.

Many items can be considered a comic when studying the history of cartoons. The prehistoric cave painting could be regarded as the primary comic because it was meant to communicate although not all paintings formed a true story by subsequent pictures and language was not yet used. Later on the Egyptians developed hieroglyphs to count the harvest to register the amounts of tax paid and to organize their trades. The pictorial writing cannot be considered a comic, seeing that either the language is missing or the pictures. The rebuses are though very much alike. Another seemingly hystorical comic is the Bayeux Tapestry, an infamous seventy meters long tapestry that tells the story of the battle of Hastings. “Narrative strips, usually in the form of woodcuts, became a popular medium for the expression of religious and political ideas during the Reformation” (The Columbia Encyclopedia, 2003). The invention of the printing press contributed major to the world of reading, so too for comic books although only in a later stage. Another cause might be the huge metamorphosis comics went through during the inter bellum and especially after the second world war. At first comics were no longer accepted and even banned. However later on got their gratitude back and made the comic industry flourish as comics were very popular, again.

The Golden Age of comic books, from 1930 until 1951, was named this way as the comic book was incredibly popular item during this era. The reason for this occurence could be the cheap price of the product during World War II, probably due to unequal quality of stories, art and print quality. The demand for comics provided many unemployed with an occupation as well, although often at low wages and in sweatshop working conditions. Nevertheless, since comic books were primarily aimed at children, many adults still remember it now with warm feelings, as the hallmark of their youth. In the late 1940s and early 1950s most politicians and moral crusaders blamed comic books as a cause of crime, especially youth crime, moral deterioration, increased use of drug, and bad results at school. As a consequence of these concerns, schools and parent groups held public comic book combustion, and some cities even decided to ban comics. The industry of comic books decreased sharply as a result of the believe that comics had a bad influence.

Comic books has strongly stabilized its position as an artifact of nowadays culture; it can even be considered a mass media communication asset. Although comics are mainly intended as leisure, very often they contain a message for the reader.

Comic books are very popular by the youth, who see them as an ideal object for hours of fun. Typical fact is that, nowadays, more and more grown-ups like to read a comic strip as well. This has been quite different during history, as comics were seen as a bad influence that America brought along with the MacDonaldization of the world. Where the youth loved comics, the parents and politicians opposed to it, which made it even more interesting for the youth to keep reading them. An own subculture of comic books was created by the youth, the underground comics.

The view of the parents and politicians on American mass culture improved over time as they learned to accept the culture. Also, it became obvious that America was by far the only producer of comic books, and therefore could no longer be associated with American culture as such. Comics today are created all over the world and for this reason are not part of the MacDonaldization. The production of comic books in the Westernized world (Asia, Europe and America) can be seen as a joint venture of the coherent cultures. European comics are obviously not dominated by the Americans, but have an own identity and role in the world of comics. Nowadays comic books are accepted in our cultural society and have even become the subject of academic empirical research.

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The movie; Lord of War with Nicholas Cage is a great movie to help illustrate the kinds of things that go on behind the scenes in the arms trade business. It rationalizes all different points of view and explains situations that so often we as citizens are not willing to address. It shows how often we make judgments without understanding the reality and brutality of the rest of the world.

Indeed, it also shows the darker side of man and the obvious innate characteristics to wage war and kill his own species. The movie also goes into the thought processes of all the different players on all sides of the fence in the movement of drugs, diamonds, currency, arms and even oil. During this current conflict between Israel and Hezbollah many people are wondering how the international terrorists organizations get their arms and their money to securities arms, which end up killing innocent people.

This movie should be seen by people who simply watch the news and think they understand world affairs because it is rather obvious that the mass media has done a mass snow job on the reality of world events. The Lord of War with Nicolas Cage is a great action-packed movie and worth your time to view. Please consider all this in 2006.

“Lance Winslow” - Online WorldThinkTank.net/wttbbs/ Think Tank forum board. If you have innovative thoughts and unique perspectives, come think with Lance in the Online Think Tank and solve the problems of the World WorldThinkTank.net www.WorldThinkTank.net/

The annals of history are stained by an undeniable era of darkness; though the genocide remains unspoken, trivialized and sanitized – Africans and persons of color were the victims of an unimaginable holocaust that spanned 400 years costing between 50 and 100 million lives.

Cities and villages were burned and razed, cultural treasures and technological contributions were ravaged and destroyed; a continent was raped – her youth and potential stolen, her resources exploited, a history was erased and a people denied their purpose and worth.

Born royalty, princes and princesses were stripped of their birthright, and they with their people robbed of God’s priceless gifts of freedom, dreams and aspirations.

With their dignity stripped, their beauty and worth denied, and families cruelly torn apart, a proud people were made outcasts in hostile, foreign lands and reduced to material property to labor and toil by an unenlightened society. Bound in chains, an innocent people were stuffed in squalid ship holes to die of hunger and sickness, to drown in ferocious storms or to survive to live an existence of degradation and hell…[1]

When Union forces captured the South in 1865 and put a formal end to slavery and its cruel and degrading practices, President Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) and the federal government focused on restitution and reconstruction. The earliest reparations plan offered each freed slave 40 acres of land and a mule to work this land.

Under the auspices of this plan, General William Sherman (1820-1891) “set aside tracts of land in the sea islands around Charleston, SC”[2] exclusively for freed slaves. Within a short time, about “40,000 freed slaves [had been] settled on 400,000 acres in Georgia and South Carolina.”[3]

However, when President Lincoln was assassinated, his successor, Andrew Johnson (1808-1875), a southerner from North Carolina, rescinded the federal government’s promise and reversed the reparations program. Former slaves were then evicted from their new lands that reverted back to white ownership. Despite Johnson’s opposition, Congressman Thaddeus Stevens (1792-1868) made a feeble attempt in 1867 proposing an unsuccessful bill that again called for distributing land to freed slaves.

Ten years later, when reconstruction ended followed by the passage of repressive, restrictive laws (e.g. Jim Crow) and the formation of white terrorist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) in the south, plans to address “the atrocities of slavery” and compensate its victims were forgotten. Afterwards, African-Americans saw little justice, were denied their constitutional rights, and subjected to terrorism (e.g. the entire town of Rosewood, FL was destroyed in January 1923 by white mobs while local officials sworn to uphold the law watched and even participated, leaving up to 80 black men, women, and children dead) and illegal lynching for nearly 100 years until the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s finally liberated them.

By the time Lincoln’s “Emancipation Proclamation” was implemented through force, four million Africans and their descendants had been enslaved in the U.S. and its colonies from 1619 to 1865, which played an integral role in leading to and accelerating America’s rise in becoming the “most prosperous country.” With this fact, the original promise implemented by General Sherman, calculations of the “sum total of the worth of all the Black labor stolen through means of slavery, segregation, and contemporary discrimination” ranging from $5 to $24 trillion, and estimates of the original plots given to and then stolen from freed slaves being valued at about $1.5 million each,[4] the time for slave reparations is past overdue when the concept of “unjust enrichment” is pursued as advocated by Randall Robinson, the author of “The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks.”

Accordingly, despite many obstacles, including legal and low support among whites, the slavery reparations movement has been revived and is “gaining momentum.”[5] In 1989, Congressman John Conyers (b. 1929) introduced H.R. 40 “to examine the effects [that slavery and its remnants –] Jim Crow have had on African-Americans since emancipation,”[6] which to date lacks the necessary support required for passage. Next in 2000, based on careful research by Deadria Farmer-Paellmann (b. 1965), an Adjunct Professor of Law at Southern New England School of Law, who discovered evidence that Aetna wrote “policies on the lives of enslaved Africans with slave owners as the beneficiaries,” the company issued an “unprecedented apology” giving birth to the “corporate restitution movement.”[7]

By 2002, nine lawsuits had been filed, the most notable in the federal courthouse in Brooklyn, NY against FleetBoston Financial, CSX (a major railways firm) and Aetna for direct involvement in the slave trade. Currently cases are pending “against 20 companies from the banking, insurance, textile, railroad, and tobacco industries.” At the same time, California and twelve other states have enacted disclosure laws requiring insurance companies doing business within their boundaries to reveal “their role in slavery,” while boycotts are being staged against firms named in the Farmer-Paellmann litigation that are challenging restitution demands.[8]

Despite critics, the case for slavery reparations is convincing and strong:

The disparity between African Americans and Whites ($6000 vs. $88,000 net worth) would have been significantly smaller had President Johnson not rescinded Lincoln’s original promise or if the 1867 Reparations bill would have passed giving freed slaves “an economic foothold before waves of European immigrants poured into the U.S. during the latter decades of the 1800s.[9]

The United States has already given land away in its 230-year history. Approximately 246 million acres of “productive” land was given to about 1.5 million people through the Homestead Act. Ironically out of the 1.5 million beneficiaries that included many white immigrants, there were only 4000 native African Americans.

Internationally, land has also been awarded to compensate victims of injustices. The most notable example is the creation of Israel, which has benefited countless Holocaust (1938-1945) victims and their families.

Precedents also exist for monetary payments to victims of injustices. Since 1952, the German government and corporations (along with those of Austria and Switzerland, to name others) have paid more than $120 billion to fund early Israeli projects and compensate Holocaust survivors. Presently about 120,000 Holocaust survivors (once about 275,000) are still receiving lifetime reparation payments. At the same time, “Japanese-Americans interned during World War II are receiving reparation for their loss of property and liberty during that period” after filing a lawsuit under the Federal Tort Claims Act, which “waives the government’s ‘sovereign immunity’ in some situations,”[10] and American Indian tribes have and continue to receive compensation for “lands ceded to the U.S. by them in various treaties.”[11]

Many ask, “Would reparations for slavery be just?”[12] arguing that the practice was originally legal, “[n]ot a single person directly affected by slavery remains alive,”[13] the cost of tracing lineages to slaves would be unbearable, the process next to impossible, “no one alive today owned slaves,” and that “payments based on race alone would be perceived… as a monstrous injustice… setting back race relations”[14] without healing “the ills of the black community.”[15]

Considering that, while every slave and his/her direct family are deceased, African Americans continued to suffer disproportionately from segregation, discrimination, and barbaric attacks into the late 20th century, and at times continue to be the victims of bias (e.g. racial profiling when it comes to jobs, shopping, law enforcement and voting despite equal opportunity and equal protection laws and the 1964 Civil Rights Act), remain disproportionately disenfranchised when it comes to net worth and home ownership and still suffer from a sense of a lack of self-worth versus today’s black immigrants, slavery reparations are not only just but necessary.

Holocaust reparations continue to be paid even though the genocide that murdered more than 7 million, predominantly Jews along with opponents of Adolf Hitler’s (1889-1945) regime and other “non-Aryans” (persons with fair-skin, light hair, and blue eyes), was legal under the democratically elected Third Reich (1933-1945) government. Thus arguments that corporations should not be punished for “legal” acts are baseless. In reality, slavery was as morally repugnant as the Holocaust and “corporations that benefited from staling people, from stealing labor, from forced breeding, from torture, from committing numerous horrendous acts,” in the words of Farmer-Paellmann “should [not] be able to hold onto assets they acquired through such horrendous acts.”[16]

Back in 1999, more than 50 years after the end of the Holocaust, Jewish groups seeking at least $20 billion in new reparations called a $3.3 billion offer made by a German delegation representing the country’s government and corporations “disgusting.” They later agreed on a $5.2 billion “Nazi slave [compensation] fund” that was approved by the German Parliament in 2000. However, while these negotiations were being held, “the World Council of Orthodox Jewish Communities filed a[nother] lawsuit in the U.S. against Deutsche Bank, Germany’s second-largest bank, alleging that it funded and profited from Nazi atrocities.”[17]

Based on these two cases alone, the passage of time and existing “legalities” of the prevailing era, are irrelevant when it comes to redressing inhuman acts like the Holocaust and slavery if justice is to be served. “Slavery harmed slaves and thus, indirectly, their descendants.”[18] Furthermore, as there is no statute of limitations when it comes to the Holocaust, it can also be argued that none should exist when it comes to slavery especially since “African Americans were not allowed access to the courts in any meaningful way – even long after the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery was passed [in December 1865].” Also, consistent with California’s legislation that revised existing statutes of limitations to ensure that “certain Holocaust suits would not be time-barred,”[19] legislation can also provide extensions to African Americans so as not to perpetuate past injustices that were every bit as evil as those committed by the Third Reich.

Therefore, arguments that slavery reparations are illogical and “that tax dollars [and corporate holdings] should not be used for [this] compensation”[20] are equally as “disgusting.” Per Dr. Martin Luther King (1929-1968), the only practical route is for “all citizens [to] engage as full participants in a dialogue examining what is the cost of repairing our society to make it equally accessible to everyone”[21] rather than dismissing and denying the need for past due reparations to the African American community.

In addition, the commentary offered during the 1999 Holocaust compensation fight regarding monetary payments is as appropriate to slavery reparations as it was during these negotiations when it was stated, “how to quantify this in financial terms is a difficult question… Money itself cannot bring back the dead, nor can it erase the memory of years of forced labor, but those seeking compensation say it may be the best system there is.”[22] While no amount of money nor steps can redress the sins of slavery, such reparations with a formal national condemnation of and apology for the practice can bring justice and healing, boost the self-esteem of African Americans, reduce current racial net worth and private property ownership gaps, improve standards of life for black Americans, and provide them with new opportunities that might otherwise remain unattainable for generations to come.

Although it may be impossible to give direct compensation to most slave descendants, every effort should be made to locate and compensate those with confirmed direct lineages and to African Americans who had suffered under segregation. In addition, slavery reparations funds should contribute to black foundations, black scholarships, and black community projects aimed at improving infrastructure and standards of life, especially since precedents already exist for the latter. When Germany began Holocaust reparations payments, Bonn “funded about a third of the total investment in Israel’s electrical system… and nearly half the total investment in [Israel’s] railways, [consisting of] diesel engines, cars, tracks, and signaling equipment [along with] equipment for [agriculture, construction, expanding the country’s] water supply, for oil drilling, and for operating the [country’s] copper mines.”[23]

Based on the examples of national corporate and government contributions to Holocaust reparations funds, it is not impractical, nor unfeasible for the governments and corporations of the United States, United Kingdom and other European states that benefited from slavery to make payments to slavery reparations funds. When the United States is considered, many of the named firms that have directly and/or indirectly benefited from slavery have sufficient assets and annual profits while the national government has millions of acres of federal land and holdings to utilize for slavery reparations.

Furthermore, the federal government could add a line underneath the “Presidential Election Campaign” section that reads “Slavery and Civil Rights Reparations – Check here if you, or your spouse if filing jointly, want $3 to go to this fund” on every federal tax return while states, especially those in the south that benefited the most from the slave trade and labor, most of which already have contribution lines for causes ranging from breast cancer research to wildlife, could also add such a line.

In conclusion, the African American community and advocates for justice must stand united and demand slavery reparations as stridently as the Jewish community and advocates for justice have for Holocaust compensation. Both abominations require reparations and redress since they share great similarities – morally repugnant brutal treatment and forced labor considered legal in their respective times under ruling governments that perpetrated and encouraged them, and each has cost millions of lives. As the BBC states in “The long fight for Holocaust compensation” reparations are “particularly pertinent for a generation that has little direct memory of the Holocaust [since these financial payments are] akin to acknowledging the horrors of the past and the responsibility of the present generation for ensuring that it does not happen again” such payments are equally applicable for the past practice of slavery.

In the accurate and eloquent words of Kimberley Jane Wilson, “American slavery was a sin… The principles of liberty, justice and equality didn’t apply to the millions of Africans brought to America against their will. Our history is full of racial ironies. When Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) wrote, ‘All men are created equal,’ he owned 187 slaves. Patrick Henry (1736-1799) owned over 90 slaves when he shouted the famous words, ‘Give me liberty or give me death!’ Union General Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885) fought the Confederacy, but didn’t free his own slaves until Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Even after slavery ended, America – the beacon of freedom to people all over the world – still treated black Americans with indignity and, on occasion, savage cruelty.”[24]

Accordingly the long wait and many denials must end so that accruing damages can be mitigated and healing can begin. Slavery reparations must be made as soon as possible to establish greater unity with improved standards of life for all, including African Americans. Only then can racism, even if predominantly de facto in nature, be extinguished for once and for all.

__________

[1] William Sutherland. The Unspoken Holocaust. The International Who’s Who In Poetry. (The International Library of Poetry. Owings Mills, MD 2004) 3.

[2] Reparations for slavery. Wikipedia. 4 September 2006. 16 September 2006. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reparations_for_slavery

[3] Reparations for slavery. Wikipedia. 4 September 2006. 16 September 2006. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reparations_for_slavery

[4] William Reed. Blacks worth $6k whites $88k. Insight News. 12 September 2006. 16 September 2006. insightnews.com/business.asp?mode=display&articleID=2617

[5] Making Amends: Debate Continues Over Reparations for U.S. Slavery. NPR. 12 September 2006. 16 September 2006. npr.org/programs/specials/racism/010827.reparations.html

[6] William Reed. Blacks worth $6k; whites $88k. Insight News. 12 September 2006. 16 September 2006. insightnews.com/business.asp?mode=display&articleID=2617

[7] Reparations for slavery. Wikipedia. 4 September 2006. 16 September 2006. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reparations_for_slavery

[8] Reparations for slavery. Wikipedia. 4 September 2006. 16 September 2006. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reparations_for_slavery

[9] William Reed. Blacks worth $6k; whites $88k. Insight News. 12 September 2006. 16 September 2006. insightnews.com/business.asp?mode=display&articleID=2617

[10] Anthony J. Sebok. Should Claims Based On African-American Slavery Be Litigated In The Courts? And If So, How? FindLaw. 4 December 2000. 16 September 2006. writ.corporate.findlaw.com/sebok/20001204.html

[11] Reparations for slavery. Wikipedia. 4 September 2006. 16 September 2006. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reparations_for_slavery

[12] Would Reparations for Slavery be Just? The Claremont Institute. 5 May 2002. 12 September 2006. claremont.org/writings/020505erler.html

[13] Even if Millions Rally on the Mall, Reparations Won’t Heal Black America. Project 21 Press Release. 15 August 2002. 12 September 2006. nationalcenter.org/P21PRReparations802.html

[14] Civil Rights: Should Black Americans Receive Reparations Payments Because of Slavery? The National Center For Public Policy Research. 23 August 2004. 12 September 2006. nationalcenter.org/P21PRReparation𜑚.html

[15] Even if Millions Rally on the Mall, Reparations Won’t Heal Black America. Project 21 Press Release. 15 August 2002. 12 September 2006. nationalcenter.org/ὕPRReparations802.html

[16] Peter Viles. Suit seeks billions in slave reparations. CNN.com. 27 March 2002. 16 September 2006. archives.cnn.com/2002/LAW/03/26/slavery.reparations

[17] World: Europe Nazi slave offer ‘disgusting.’ BBC News. 7 October 1999. 12 September 2006. nws.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/468248.stm

[18] Civil Rights: Should Black Americans Receive Reparations Payments Because of Slavery? The National Center For Public Policy Research. 23 August 2004. 12 September 2006. nationalcenter.org/P21PRReparations802.html

[19] Anthony J. Sebok. Should Claims Based On African-American Slavery Be Litigated In The Courts? And If So, How? FindLaw. 4 December 2000. 16 September 2006. writ.corporate.findlaw.com/sebok/20001204.html

[20] Making Amends: Debate Continues Over Reparations for U.S. Slavery. NPR. 12 September 2006. 16 September 2006. npr.org/programs/specials/racism/010827.reparations.html

[21] Civil Rights: Should Black Americans Receive Reparations Payments Because of Slavery? The National Center For Public Policy Research. 23 August 2004. 12 September 2006. nationalcenter.org/P21PRReparation𜑚.html

[22] The long fight for Holocaust compensation. BBC News. 26 January 2000. 12 September 2006. nws.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/619896.stm

[23] Norman G. Finkelstein. Lessons of Holocaust Compensation. 2001. 12 September 2006. normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=4&ar=14

[24] Kimberley Jane Wilson. Reparations, Anyone? Project 21 New Visions Commentary. August 2001. 12 September 2006. nationalcenter.org/P21NVWilsonReparations801.html

_______________

Additional Sources:

$5bn Nazi slave fund agreed.’ BBC News. 14 December 1999. 12 September 2006. nws.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/565116.stm

Anthony J. Sebok. A New Dream Team Intends To Seek Reparations For Slavery Part I FindLaw. 20 November 2000. 16 September 2006. writ.corporate.findlaw.com/sebok/20001120.html

German Parliament Passes Nazi Holocaust Compensation Bill. People’s Daily. 7 July 2000. 12 September 2006. english.people.com.cn/english/200007/07/eng20000707_44925.html

Holocaust reparations. Wikipedia. 25 May 2006. 16 September 2006. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_reparations

Sara R. Parsowith. Austria begins Holocaust compensation process. Jurist. 16 December 2005. 16 September 2006. jurist.law.pitt.edu/paperchase/2005/12/austria-begins-holocaust-compensation.php

William Sutherland is a published poet and writer. He is the author of three books, “Poetry, Prayers & Haiku” (1999), “Russian Spring” (2003) and “Aaliyah Remembered: Her Life & The Person behind the Mystique” (2005) and has been published in poetry anthologies around the world. He has been featured in “Who’s Who in New Poets″ (1996), “The International Who’s Who in Poetry” (2004), and is a member of the “International Poetry Hall of Fame.” He is also a contributor to Wikipedia, the number one online encyclopedia.

The World must now yield to the next generation of leaders, but are they prepared to take mankind to the next step and to unite the World in a common cause?

Is the next generation more capable than the last? Are we comfortable in passing the torch? Some say the next generation could not possible botch it like the last one and yet here we are today in the greatest nation in the History of Mankind.

Yes, this is a great nation, but quite frankly it is not good enough and it has fallen down in some of the promises we were led to believe growing up. That does not mean we cannot create it and make those promise the reality and make good on those promises, yet we know we cannot rely on the present leadership to do it.

They are too busy throwing sticks and stones at each other in all their sound and fury in Congress and the Senate. In doing so they may gain a piece of personal power, but they do no good over all for the rest of us.

In fact they are tearing us down and dividing us into a pattern of bickering and in doing so accomplishing nothing, but winning personal brownie points for passing linear thought out brownie points. Perhaps you might consider this in 2006; The World Must Move Over for the Future Leaders to Make it all work!

“Lance Winslow” - Online WorldThinkTank.net/wttbbs/ Think Tank forum board. If you have innovative thoughts and unique perspectives, come think with Lance in the Online Think Tank and solve the problems of the World WorldThinkTank.net www.WorldThinkTank.net/

The history of astrological development is as foggy as the history of mankind. Definitely, there is a theory of biological evolution developed by Charles Darwin and others, stating that all species of organisms arise and develop through the natural selection of small, inherited variations that increase the individual’s ability to compete, survive, and reproduce. Also there is a not-fully-proven theory of an astrology development that our ancestors observed- they observed the star sky, wrote down everything, that occurred there, and as a result they came to the conclusion that, supposedly, some configurations in the sky correspond to some proceedings on the earth.

I do not wish to go deep into scientific disputes, but the theory of Mankind as a result of natural selection seems to me unreal. For the tens of centuries reflected in history, people changed very little. In the same way I do not consider possible the occurrence of astrology just from observation. Certainly, a lot of imperative astrological observations have been done in the past, especially in Babylon. However their purpose was not the discovery but only the acknowledgement of astrological laws.

We can ask then, from where have these laws come? I would answer: they have been the result of the practical appendix of certain philosophical-religious concepts. Of course we can continue from where these concepts came, etc. If we continue to do this we will go too far from our sphere of interests in a practical astrology.

There are many blank spots in the history of astrology. When you try to understand it very often there is an impression, that there once existed an extensive knowledge that was gradually forgotten. For example, there exists the evidence that the very deep and detailed understanding of astronomy (that is, actually, astrology as the astronomy at that time was an integral component of astrology) were around in Egypt in days of the Pyramids’ creation, that is about 2400 BC. Around that time (1650 BC) they created complex calendars and it looks like later on the Egyptians began to forget the astronomical basis of those calendars.

It is possible to tell that astrology has come to Europe (we shall concentrate on the European branch of astrology as the closest to us) from the Egyptian, Babylonian, and Persian sources. The middlemen in this process, also interpreters and distributors of astrological knowledge in the first century AD., were the Greek philosophers. The Greek books were a source of astrology for the civilized world of those times, including the Roman Empire. Astrology played an important role in the Roman Empire and by IV century AD, was finally stated as a public science.

However after the Roman Empire collapsed around 500 AD and the rise of the barbarian kingdoms in Europe (present-day Italy, France, Germany, etc.) the astrological tradition in Western and Central Europe stopped. And in the east, in the Byzantium Empire, religious and political conditions completely suppressed the practice of an astrology.

Then onto the stage came the Arabs. In 711 AD their empire extended from the territory of present Spain in the west up to India in the east. In VIII century the Arabian governors and leaders of the Muslim world motivated the intelligence of the country to study the Greek language and assimilate the scientific achievements of other nations. So Greek astrology along with other Greek sciences became a component of the Arabian Islamic science. In this condition astrology continued to develop, while in Europe during the six centuries, from 500 to 1100 AD, the practice of astrology was extremely complicated.

One of the major reasons for the decline of astrology in Europe was the degradation in the field of mathematical and other scientific formations that followed the fall of the Roman Empire. However by 1100 the West has realized, at last, the necessity of the development of a science - in the same way as it occurred in the Muslim East in VIII century. The mass translation of Arabian scientific (including astrological) texts to Latin language had begun.

The result became the revival of interest in astrology in Europe, which prolonged up to XVII century.

If you would like to learn more about astrology, especially mystical parts of astrology, visit the astrology-wisdom.com/ Astrology-Wisdom site.

Willie Krut is studying astrology and readily likes to share his knowledge. To subscribe to the free Willie’s Newsletter, visit astrology-wisdom.com astrology-wisdom.com