On September 11, 2002, Kurt Vonnegut and Malachy McCourt were among the
speakers at St Matthew's Church on 10th St & 2nd Ave in Manhattan, at an
anniversary evening with Rev Billy & the Stop Shopping Choir in honor of
peacemakers. Kurt Vonnegut said this:


  Dearly beloved; the text tonight is from the gospel of Matthew.
  "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the
  children of God."


  There has so far been only one nation crazy enough to detonate
  atomic weapons in the midst of civilian populations, turning
  unarmed men, women and children into radioactive soot and bone meal.
  Let us pray, in this holy place:
  "Dear God, please don't ever let there be another nation like that."

  The world will little note nor long remember what we say here.
  This is because we are powerless. Peace has no representative in
  Washington, D.C.  Why not? Peace is not entertaining. What is
  entertaining? Well, take it from this old hack writer: revenge,
  like sex, is very entertaining.
  "Closure, gimme closure! Raaarghh!"

  George W Bush, with his no frills education, may believe that God
  or Jesus or Moses or somebody said this for a commandment:
  "An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth."

  But in fact, the Babylonian king Hammurabi said it. And he wasn't
  urging his own people to be more ferocious, more blooodthirsty;
  he was trying to make them less so. He was saying
  "If you must seek revenge, you are entitled to this much and not
  one bit more. Otherwise, everyone in Babylonia is going to be
  seeking closure, and our once great country will go down the
  toilet of history."

  Which it did.


This week on Realistic Utopia (see the bottom of the page for scheduling
details), you can watch Vonnegut reading the above speech; also this
week we continue with our look back at the burning of Smyrna in 1922.

On September 9, 1922 Mustafa Kemal's army set fire to Smyrna. In the
days and weeks that followed, over 100,000 Greeks and Armenians were
killed and 2 million Greeks were expelled from Asia Minor, where their
ancestors had lived for three millenia. During this ethnic
cleansing the western powers either did nothing or else abetted the
atrocities, acting in the interests not of the victims, but of oil
companies.

On Monday nights this September, Realistic Utopia presents an interview
with Professor Marjorie Housepian Dobkin, whose Pulitzer Prize-
nominated book "Smyrna 1922: The Destruction of a City" remains the
definitive account of this dark episode in 20th century history.
Accompanying her story is 80 year old newsreel footage of the fire
itself, and of the refugees fleeing the burning city, setting out into
Smyrna harbor in frail rowboats.

In this week's portion of the interview, Prof. Dobkin describes the
physical layout of the city, the various communities, and the beginning
of the end of a 3,000 year old Greek city. She also tells of how she
tracked down and interviewed not only residents of the city who survived
the burning of the city, but also sailors from the US navy who had been
on shore duty during the fire.


Realistic Utopia is on Monday nights at midnight on the internet and on
cable TV in Manhattan.

Internet:
Go to www.mnn.org at midnight Monday night & click on channel 34.

TV (only on Manhattan cable):
Channel 34 (Time Warner) or channel 107 (RCN) at midnight monday night.