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Short picture book memoir

Empowering Clerks Network (ECN) Director Ori Alon creates various participatory art projects using social practice, street art and Clowning to initiate therapeutic experiences, critical thinking and improve joy rates.
Alon initiated the issuing of 500,000 Playful Paperwork documents worldwide such as Joy Permits, Forgiver's Licenses (A&B), Refurbished Report Card, Adults Special Achievement Stickers, Racism Release Forms, DIY Certificates of Recognition, Apology Declaration, OK Parent Award, Open Carry Permit for Musical Instruments, Compassion Cards and opened numerous Typewritten Letter Writing stations, co-created the #HiddenFortuneWheel street art for empathy, posted thousands Alternative Street Signs and dedicated benche in honor of victims of forgotten crimes like the war on drugs and McCarthy Witch Hunt www.JoyPermit.org

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Published by oribeacon, 2019-07-04 15:21:14

2014 - 2016 Comics by Ori Alon

Short picture book memoir

Empowering Clerks Network (ECN) Director Ori Alon creates various participatory art projects using social practice, street art and Clowning to initiate therapeutic experiences, critical thinking and improve joy rates.
Alon initiated the issuing of 500,000 Playful Paperwork documents worldwide such as Joy Permits, Forgiver's Licenses (A&B), Refurbished Report Card, Adults Special Achievement Stickers, Racism Release Forms, DIY Certificates of Recognition, Apology Declaration, OK Parent Award, Open Carry Permit for Musical Instruments, Compassion Cards and opened numerous Typewritten Letter Writing stations, co-created the #HiddenFortuneWheel street art for empathy, posted thousands Alternative Street Signs and dedicated benche in honor of victims of forgotten crimes like the war on drugs and McCarthy Witch Hunt www.JoyPermit.org

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
Führer), 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.


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