Checkpoint Charlie Patriot Act Hitler & Me Philatelic Meditations Postage Stamps Comics by Ori Alon
Ori Alon is an artist, writer and a homeschooling father of three. Besides developing and issuing Joy Permits, Forgiver’s Licenses, OK Parent Awards, Compassion Cards, Pain Deeds, Open Carry permits for musical instruments, Racism Release Forms, Apology Declarations, Refurbished Report Cards and other Playful Paperwork documents he has created a series of comics using postage stamps. He is the author of a children’s book series, The Magic Bagel and numerous other works of poetry and prose. See more of his work at www.supportivebureaucracy.org
CHECKPOINT CHARLIE Postage Stamps Comics by Ori Alon January 2016 www.alfassibooks.com
A short time after the building of the Berlin Wall, 18-year-old Peter Fechter tried to escape East Germany and was shot by the guards next to Checkpoint Charlie, the main crossing between East and West Berlin. He fell between the wire fence and the cement wall, and due to mutual fear, received no medical treatment from either side. He was bleeding for 59 minutes before he died. This collection is dedicated to his memory.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, many people in the West began using Neil Young’s Keep on Rockin’ In The Free World as the unofficial anthem to celebrate the victory. Most of them enjoyed the catchy chorus but didn’t know that the song was actually a harsh criticism of the Reagan and Bush administrations and the despair, poverty and violence that were the results of their policies (“there’s a lot of people sayin’ we’d be better off dead… We got a thousand points of light for the homeless man, we got a kinder, gentler, machine gun hand.”) This celebration through self-criticism was an ultimate example of the freedom of speech that didn’t exist in the Eastern Block. 25 years later, Un-American presidential candidate Donald Trump also misused the song for his rally. The Cold War dissolved into the War on Drugs and the War on Terrorism, but perhaps all of these are just parts of one big war we’re living with. Enjoy reading, Ori
In some countries children are fearful of blue sky and prefer grey ones, as US drones cannot attack in cloudy weather. Learn more at bit.ly/1vqXTV1
At the age of 17, Freddie Mercury fled the war in Zanzibar into the UK. At the same age Adolf Hitler tried twice to enter the Vienna Academy of Arts and sold his paintings in the streets of Vienna. Hitler also took his art supply to WWI and used to draw in his free time as a soldier. Both Hitler and Mercury had a powerful (and somewhat similar) stage presence that mesmerized tens of thousands of people during rock concerts and public speeches.
Both Gandhi and Chaplin had sexual interactions with teenagers.
“Sorry� After WWII, West Germany took complete responsibility for the crimes committed by Nazi Germany. Over the years West Germany and later Germany paid 772 million Euros to individual Holocaust survivors and approximately 24 billion dollars in support of the state of Israel. Economists claim that the German financial support to Israel in the early fifties was vital to the building of the new state and just recently Germany gave Israel a 382-million-dollars discount on the sale of a large missile boat. This is a unique phenomenon in human history, as no other nation ever provided such level of compensation and apologized so thoroughly for a large-scale crime. The US apology and compensation for slavery, Jim Crow, genocide of Indigenous People and Agent Orange are merely symbolic compared to Germany’s financial, political, cultural and educational response to the Holocaust.
One People, One Nation, One Leader (Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein FĂźhrer), the most popular Nazi slogan that appeared on countless posters and in publications. Recently Hebrew signs with that slogan and a Jewish star were used in an extreme Right rally in Tel Aviv. Adolf Hitler won only a third of the votes, and the Nazi Party had only 2 million members (3% of the population) in the last democratic election in 1933, and that was enough to establish a totalitarian regime. If fascist leader Trump is nominated to be the 2016 GOP presidential candidate, he's likely to get about half of the votes in the General Election, including the 30 million GOP members (more than 10% of the population) who are unlikely to leave the party if lead by a fascist. That means that today in the US, there are far more active and passive fascists than there were in Germany in 1933. The majority of the people who voted for Hitler, as well as the millions of soldiers of the Wehrmacht, weren't psychopaths, perhaps just light racists who experienced some financial difficulties. The SS and the Gestapo had about 400,000 members - fewer than 1% of Germans which is the normal rate of psychopaths in a society. They were the ones who terrorized most of Europe, enslaved millions of people in forced labor camps and ran the death camps in which 11 millions Jews, leftists, Roma and homosexuals died.
(The Boxer / Simon & Garfunkel) Poverty is a common catalyst for great humor and great violence. Chaplin, Hitler and Stalin all experienced poverty growing up.
Peace Corps Torah (see next page)
Recently, The Hebrew School where I teach visited a nearby military base, as many educational institutions often do. It was the first time in 11 years I entered a military base, and my reaction was unexpected and intense and led me to revisit some painful memories from my “service”. Militarism can be expressed through dropping bombs, but it is more frequently done so through the subtle details of human interaction- - the tone of voice and silly jokes an American veteran shares with me just because I'm an Israeli veteran; the casual bullying a younger cadet experiences at the hands of his seniors; the sexism; the look in children’s eyes when they see soldiers; the fact that it's OK for army recruiters to harass teenagers in shopping malls and in telephone calls. In Peace Corps Torah (Torah = Bible or any form of spiritual teaching) we see reality as it is - human rights, compassion, humor, science and justice are more noble and important than fascism, violence and mass shootings. However, If we read reality through the lens of militarism, we may see the importance of things upside-down. I covered the faces of the soldiers and students to symbolize the invisibility of PTSD. Many of the people we meet have been through serious traumas, as veterans, victims of domestic violence, car accidents and more, and we’re usually not aware of it. After the visit I expressed my deep disappointment that my spiritual community had endorsed the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and idolized the army. The silence and the verbal response I got show how deeply uncomfortable liberal people are talking about Militarism in our society. At the age of eighteen I was forced to hold a gun and got training to kill other human beings. Comfortable or not, it’s my duty to talk about it.
Almost every hour a US veteran commits suicide, more than 6,000 a year. In many years there are more deployed soldiers who commit suicide than die in combat. Like 30% of soldiers in duty, I too have reached such a level of despair that I considered that option. I don't think I'll ever forgive the army for making me face that question, and I vow to share these numbers and stories as widely and provocatively as possible, especially with teenagers and people who support and promote wars. We have warning notes on cigarettes and cough syrup. I see no reason why military recruiting teams don't inform the teenagers they interact with in public spaces about the emotional, moral and physical dangers of the product they're selling them. And if they don't do it, perhaps we can inform the teenagers in our lives about it.
Hitler and I have a lot of things in common. We both had bad experiences with art schools, weren't satisfied with our army service and spent our free time there creating art, we both had some form of PTSD, both of us lost our fathers at a young age, and both of us have a history of revoking people's basic rights*. I don't know why he became a mass murderer and I became a guy who writes silly things on Facebook.
*The revocation of Congressman Sean Patrick Maloney Forgiver’s License Class A over his vote against Syrian refugees created a delicate situation for the Empowering Clerks Network. Many recipients of services supported the ECN resolution, but others criticized the act which they considered to be a violation of ECN regulations. In order to resolve this complex question, the Center for Supportive Bureaucracy nominated a special emergency committee that concluded that according to 78954/A-6, the right to forgive is irrevocable. This was by far the largest crisis in the history of the Playful Paperwork movement, with more than 30 comments on Facebook, the majority of them regarding grammar mistakes I made in the revocation letter. Bottom line, like Hitler I lead an organization that has a problematic history of revoking basic rights.
In January 2015 Islamic fundamentalists killed 11 people in Paris, most of them French cartoonists of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. More than 40 world leaders and 3.7 million people gathered to protest the attack. Some of the leaders who marched have violently and consistently oppressed journalists themselves (see list here - bit.ly/1BkUQSs.)
“This is the truth that bleeds through the lines in Alon’s Checkpoint Charlie. The title Checkpoint Charlie at first appears to be a reference to the ever famous American clown Charlie Chaplin, and it is in a way. Alon, like Bretch, is a huge fan of Chaplin and his disarming humor. Yet, then you turn the page your learn about the real Checkpoint Charlie… it is a place where an innocent man, a refugee from an oppressive society, was shot between the lines of two nation-states, and was left there to bleed to death between the lines, because everyone was too afraid to help or say something. And this is where this art leaves us, bleeding between the lines of nation-states, those peculiar entities, in which all sensible people believe, which all purport to their citizens to exist as some sort of center for supportive bureaucracy. This art exposes the repulsiveness, absurdity, and pain beneath human fear. Fear is what killed Peter Fetcher (the man who was trying to escape East Germany through Checkpoint Charlie). Fear is what Ori Alon seeks for us to first feel (in the repulsion), then laugh at (in the humor), and then understand (in the bleeding through the lines on the page). This is a comic book about America (and Israel), from an Israeli-American artist who deeply loves the people of those two places, as he deeply loves humanity, and his desperate cry to help us see each other as people again, and end war and militarism, and their mutual progenitor, fear. Fear is what is killing what was once great about the dream of America, even if the reality never existed. Repulsion at the absurd, laughter at the insane, and finally understanding of the pain we are all experiencing, are what will allow us to actualize the fading dream of a world where all people respect each others’ irrevocable rights to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and forgiveness.” From Bleeding Between the Lines, a review of Checkpoint Charlie by Mordechai Zalmen of the Great Red Oak Press
PATRIOT ACT
Ori Alon October 2015
Digging through a large stamp collection I purchased in an estate sale, I came across a familiar face. At first, I was perplexed, frozen. I feared that touching, not to mention licking an actual object of the Nazi evil machine will somehow affect me, that a stamp can be contagious. Having created Philatelic Meditations, a comic strip of dialogues between Abe Lincoln and Jimi Hendrix stamps, I made sure that the Hitler stamp I found properly apologize, convert to Judaism and join the Israeli extreme Right. But as Hitler & Me series was done, many more world leaders came to me and demanded to join the conversation, and with a few exceptions I agreed. I hope that you'll enjoy such patriotism. Ori Alon
At the end of WWII, with the approval of Stalin as many as two million German women were raped by Russian soldiers in the largest mass rape in human history. On the western front, American soldiers raped approx. 11,000 women.
As kids, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin were regularly beaten by their alcoholic fathers. It was common for Stalin to have blood in his urine due to the heavy beatings.
Both Hitler and Stalin suffered from severe manic-depressive personality disorder. Hitler’s personal doctor, Theodor Morell, prescribed him with more than 70 types of drugs, including cocaine, crystal meth and bull semen injections. As Hannah Arendt suggest, it’s not about lunatic dictators, but about the banality of millions of ordinary people who follow them.
In order to deprive the guerrillas of their rural support base by destroying the ability of peasants to feed themselves in the countryside, the U.S army sprayed nearly 20 million gallons of poisonous chemicals on farmland and forests during Vietnam War. As a result, hundreds of thousands in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos experienced starvation and malnutrition, millions of people are still suffering from various illnesses and the Red Cross estimate that 150,000 birth defects have occurred. Only forty years after the war the US took limited responsibility for the act.
Lamb Eat Wolf
59% of Americans support torture as a tool to acquire intelligence.
Immediately after fighting together to defeat the Nazis, the US and USSR began fighting one another.
On September 18th, 1952, Charlie Chaplin was deported from the US.
Hitler & Me
Ori Alon June 2015
First printed 100 copies of Hitler & Me had an original Hitler stamp and typewritten speech bubble of Hitler apologizing.
Perhaps no other person influenced Judaism and Israel in the last century more than Adolf Hitler. His actions and words are behind every book and in the background of every shul. They are the soundtrack in invisible speakers on the beach of Tel Aviv, at the Western wall in Jerusalem and in the checkpoint at the West Bank. I want to have a dialog with the guy.
“Shma Yisrael�, Listen, oh Israel, the most important Jewish prayer, stating the unity of God.
Flower Girl My older one She's not even six yet I can tell her that Hitler Was a flower girl, A famous one. She'll believe me, She wouldn't question my authority. I'd be her own personal Holocaust denier. I'll protect her from knowing I'll keep the gas chambers away From her precious little soul.
Flowers! Flowers for Shabbat!!
Freud: And then what, Adolf? Hitler: He was, like, with the belt... Adolf Hitler was heavily beaten by his alcoholic father, Alois. Freud escaped Austria after the Nazi annexation and four of his sisters died in the Holocaust. A meeting between Freud and Hitler could have saved the lives of approximately fifty million human beings.
“Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain” (the third commandment, Exodus 20:6). According to 2013 Pew landmark survey, 73% of American Jews consider “remembering the Holocaust” as an essential part of their own sense of Jewishness. 19% cite “observing Jewish law” as essential and 42% see "having a good sense of humor" as an essential part of their Jewishness. In 2014 the Israeli Ministerial Committee for Legislation approved a new bill making the use of Nazi symbols and any illegitimate use of the word “Nazi” punishable. This legislation would be the most far-reaching hate crime law yet introduced in Israel, carrying a six-month prison sentence and NIS 100,000 ($28,000) fine for offenders. Arab, Israeli and American leaders compare one another to Hitler on a regular basis.
Without Hitler, my grandparents wouldn't have immigrated to Israel and my parents wouldn't have met. Without Hitler there would be no Israel and no Israeli Palestine conflict, and I wouldn't have done a mandatory army service. Without the army service I wouldn't have become a writer and artist. I wouldn't visit the US with a Jewish Arab theatre group, wouldn't meet Ana there and wouldn't have Maayan, Sasha and Zakai. Thank you, Adolf.
“Traitor!” In 1997 Benjamin Netanyahu told a famous Rabbi that the Israeli left forgot what it is to be Jewish. In 2008, a short time before I left Israel I saw a big red sign in Jerusalem that said “Leftists are Traitors”. It affected me deeply. In the past few years there were numerous cases of verbal and online life threats towards leftists, including calls to send them to the gas chambers. Recently participants in an anti-war rally were beaten in Tel Aviv.
“Death to Arabs!, Death to Arabs!, Death to Arabs!�, a common call in Kahane and other right wing groups demonstrations in Israel.
Gott ist der größte
“The wolf will live with the lamb” (Isaiah 11:6) Gandhi wrote two letters to Hitler, urging him to reconsider his actions. in the second letter (Dec. 24, 1940) he discuss the possibility of switching the British heel for a German one. Gandhi describe to Hitler the Indian nonviolent resistance that “can without doubt match itself against a combination of all the most violent forces in the world.” He signed both letters “your sincere friend, M.K. Gandhi.”
Hitler and you
Philatelic Meditations
Ori Alon Alfassi Books Beacon, NY January 2015
Dear recipient, The relationship between Abraham Lincoln and Jimi Hendrix started as a joke. But after their first interaction, they asked to meet again, and again, discussing various issues in different languages. Many letters were returned to me, I guess the post office didn’t like it. But I hope that you’ll enjoy it, I know that Abe and Jimi had fun. Ori
Lincoln: Immigrants are like chameleons Hendrix: Indeed Lincoln: Put them anywhere, they’ll change color Hendrix: Change is God, Death - its prophet Lincoln: Frost? Hendrix: Yehuda Amichay
Hendrix - Saying Kaddish, the mourner’s prayer Lincoln - Continue the prayer Hendrix: Are you also mourning? Lincoln: Of course Hendrix: Grand Grandma? Lincoln: No, this Netanyahu, he buried Zionism
(Arabic in Hebrew transliteration) Lincoln: Salem Aleykum ya Jimi! Hendrix: Aleykum a-Salem my friend Ibrahim!
Hendrix: Ohh there’s still a sail out on the horizon (old Israeli folk song) Lincoln: Ohh enough Jimi! it’s a different world now…
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Stalin: (in Yiddish) "Two noblemen got into a fight. One wrote to the other: 'if you beat my Jews, I'll beat yours.'" Hitler: ha ha ha!
(In Yiddish) Stalin: What’s the suitcase for, Adolf? Europe isn’t safe anymore, Yosl...
Hitler:
With love and joy to Ana, Maayan, Sasha and Zakai Thanks to Ana Joanes, Michael O’Brien, Norman Fischer, Deb Davidovits, Jessica Simkovic, Yoav Segall, Brent Spodek, Amir Harash, Victor L. Lewis, Joshua Hathaway, Eric Trump, Alison Rich., Eugene Fleischman Sotirescu, Herb Levine, Zivar Amrami, Yosaif August, Beacon NY USPS branch. Special thanks to Abe and Jimi and Joseph and Adolf. Visit the Center for Supportive Bureaucracy, a worldwide organization specializes in issuing official documents by Empowering Clerks such as the Forgiver’s License (Class A&B), Joy Permits, DIY Certificates of Recognition, Refurbished Report Cards, Certified Apology Declarations, Pain Deeds, Adults Special Achievement Stickers and more, read A Jew Killed, The Magic Bagel children book series and more works by Ori Alon at www.supporivebureaucracy.org If you enjoyed this booklet, please consider contributing via PayPal to oribeacon@gmail.com or pay it forward to another cause you believe in. Thank you. If you’re interested in publishing this collection in any format other than your personal social media page please contact me with a brief description of your publication, an explanation of why your publication right for my work and if you’re interested in sharing, tell me a little bit about your childhood. Please send a $2.99 submission fee via PayPal with your application. Due to the large number of applications I won’t be able to reply to each one personally.
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If you enjoyed this book please consider making a PayPal donation here or at www.upportivebureaucracy.org to support my work or Pay it Forward with time/money to another cause. Thank you Ori
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