October 30, 2003 - January 7, 2004
Haiti: Do it now!
Posted: Wednesday, January 7, 2004
by Bukka Rennie
It makes you tired. Haiti, the first black republic in the Western Hemisphere, the only society of African slaves to have completely freed itself with blood, iron and guts, is now 200 years old.
She, Haiti, since then became the pariah society of the West, to be isolated, boycotted, blockaded trade-wise and even forced to pay compensation in gold to masters from whom they freed themselves.
Haiti freed itself but the world was not yet ready for such a Haiti and that has been to date Haiti's great tragedy. No society can develop in isolation. Isolation enhances stagnation.
Much like a family that is incestuous, blocking out or resisting in every which way the influx or injection or intrusion of new strains, such a family's tree of life is severely weakened and is thereby placed in jeopardy.
The analogy is not tight because whereas the incestuous family's isolation is voluntary and self-inflicted, Haiti's isolation was quite the opposite. And whereas the resulting weakness of the incestuous family is biological and genetic, the weakness of Haiti is structural and socio-economic.
What depths of reality do we have to plumb before we can come to understand that we owe it to Haiti, the flag-bearer of Caribbean freedom and self-determination, to have stood in solidarity with her since the very initial days of political Independence?
Did we have to wait until Bush told us, just as we seem to be waiting on Giuliani for a strategy to deal with crime? What manner of people are we?
I refuse to accept any suggestion that we are impotent because of some peculiar accident of history or because of some flaw in our cultural matrix from which we are yet to escape. Or because of our legacy of dependence and "unresponsibility" that emanates from our rites of passage that took us on a journey from being slaves to proletarians to clerks. And in the process instilled in us some uncanny, extremely unique, weird and peculiar inability and incapacity to fathom how this place works.
We living here, existing here, managing and negotiating the complexities of numerous daily relationships, creating all kinds of things out of nothing, making space where there is no space, yet we are told in the same breath that we are incapable of comprehending Caribbean reality. How can we be located at such extreme poles at the same time? What a contradiction!
True to say if such were indeed the case then we would have to be the dumbest sons of bitches to have ever walked this planet, Earth. I cannot be party to any such postulations. I have great difficulty with this and I must say so. Probably those who engage in such histrionics and captious sophistry, do so because of some driven obsession with the desire to be eternally "original".
In fact there is nothing wrong with such an obsession. Seeking to be original and to think divergently are diamond assets that are not very common and should be complimented wherever they appear. Such thinking is exactly what our schools and campuses require urgently.
Yet one must acknowledge that there is much to this world that is universal precisely given the fact that, in the last 500 years, capital and capitalist relations comprise the dominant objective socio-economic force that have structurally pulled the globe into a tight whole.
Still the original question has to be answered. Why are we yet to embrace Haiti as a responsibility?
During the years of Caribbean slavery, no revolt was isolated, and the action always spread to other islands in the chain. That exhibited the height of consciousness and the level of preparedness of slaves for combat, notwithstanding the cases of sell-outs on the part of house-slaves.
And when, at the turn of the century, the agenda of the "proletarians" was on the front burner, no one had to tell Caribbean workers about the necessity for regional solidarity. In fact the demand for a Caribbean nation is in fact a proletarian demand.
Ask the female traders and hagglers of the Caribbean who do business from one end of the chain to the other for the survival of their children. It is though a systemic problem for the "clerks" who inherited power after Independence, programmed no social transformation and became the new "governors" with a morbid fear of an empowered people.
What reality is there to be plumbed? The system has to be rooted out lock, stock and barrel. Only the "clerks" do not know or do not wish to know that. The people from below will have to push up for their voices to be heard. It is the only way to get Caricom on the road and for Haiti and Cuba et al to be embraced fully.
According to CLR James, the reality is that our people were mis-educated and our political consciousness twisted and broken, our sense of self-confidence and political dynamism poisoned and corrupted by imperial schooling in the immediate 50 years before Independence.
The "Kingdom of Clerkdom" has been the result. The settling for zones of comfort, basic cowardice and the lack of will to get up and do what is necessary, the fear of engaging and challenging the people, the constipated fear of fear itself, are all hallmarks of "clerkdom".
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Sex across the Color Line
Posted: Tuesday, January 6, 2004
by Tim Wise
This is the story of a real American tragedy. The kind they make movies about.
The victim - and let there be no mistake that is the only word that fits here - is Marcus Dixon: a young man who was an 'A' student in high school, a member of the National Honor Society, one of the best defensive football players in the United States, who scored above a 1200 on his SAT, and had signed a letter of intent to attend Vanderbilt University as a student-athlete in the most complete sense of the word. And yet today, Marcus Dixon sits in a prison cell in Georgia, staring at a 10-year sentence, because - and let there be no mistake about this either - Marcus Dixon is black, and that makes all the difference.
Barring a reversal of his sentence by the state Supreme Court, Dixon, who lived in Rome, Georgia, about an hour northwest of Atlanta (but farther away than that, one suspects, in cultural terms), is going to spend the next decade of his life in prison for having consensual sex with a white girl. That is not a misprint and it is not a matter of opinion. That is ultimately why he was expelled from school, why his scholarship was rescinded, and why he may not see freedom until the age of 28.
Though Dixon was accused of raping the young woman in question, a jury of nine whites and three blacks took all of 20 minutes to dispense with the charge, as absurd as it obviously was. The Rome District Attorney had brought the case to trial based on the claim of the supposed victim, but was soundly undone by witnesses who said the girl had admitted the sex between she and Dixon had been consensual. Apparently she feared that her father, a virulent racist, would kill both Dixon and herself if he learned that she had willingly slept with a black guy. So she changed her story, but not before undercutting her own credibility, and not before re-enacting one of the longest-standing Southern traditions on record: that of a white female falsely claiming to have been raped by a black man in order to save face with daddy.
It's a tradition that speaks to the way sexism and racism have long interacted: white men in this case, maintaining their own domination of white women by rigidly circumscribing the sexual freedom of the latter in explicitly racial terms, thereby hoping to keep blacks in line as well as their own daughters, wives and sisters.
Like I said, it took 20 minutes to throw out the rape charge; so at least that much has changed about the South. Needless to say it would have taken fewer than that to lynch Marcus Dixon 100 years ago - so good for us; we have become a little more civilized it appears.
Or maybe not.
Because civilization, after all, is a relative concept.
And when expectations rise about how civilized people are supposed to treat others, the fact that they proceed to be dashed in a manner slightly less bloody than might once have been the case is little comfort to the injured.
And at the end of the day, the jury was still forced to convict Dixon on the lesser-included charge of aggravated child molestation - yes, child molestation - because at the time of the consensual sex he had just turned 18 and the female in question was 2 years and 7 months his junior, making him eligible for prosecution under Georgia's Child Protection Act, which makes any sex between such persons a felony.
The Act's author is adamant that his legislation was not intended to punish willing sex between teenagers, but to the Rome D.A. it matters little. Neither does he seem to find it worthy of comment that no other teens in Georgia have ever been prosecuted under this law, despite the almost certain likelihood that somewhere, as I write this, the law is being broken by several couples up and down the length of the Peach State, including somewhere in his jurisdiction.
That such a charge would never have been brought against a white boy who had engaged in consensual sex with the same girl is so obvious as to be totally unworthy of further discussion or debate. Likewise, had Marcus Dixon had sex with a black girl instead of one who is white, he would be sitting in a dorm room a few minutes drive from my house right now, and not in a prison cell.
But Marcus Dixon violated one of the oldest taboos in the book, which contrary to popular belief has not yet been expunged from the heart of Dixie, or the larger national consciousness in many ways. Marcus Dixon, not unlike, say, Strom Thurmond, crossed the sexual color line. But very much unlike Ol' Strom, has the misfortune of being on the darker side of that line, thereby lacking the power to keep his activities secret.
By acquiring carnal knowledge of a representative of so-called southern virtue, however willing said flower may have been, Dixon crossed the line in a way almost guaranteed to bring about his doom.
The saddest fact of all being that he likely had no clue as to the risk he was taking, no idea of the racial minefield onto which he had stepped.
Which sadly brings us to an important if under- appreciated aspect of this case; one that in part explains why Marcus Dixon was likely not to fully understand, despite his genuine intelligence, the danger of his tryst. Namely, Marcus was being raised by white parents, or at least white guardians, who all but legally adopted him at the age of eleven, thereby we are told "saving" him from a dysfunctional home environment.
But Ken and Peri Jones, for all their love, and for all their "stability" were profoundly unprepared to raise a black male child in this country. Many black parents aren't prepared either - after all, how can one ever be fully ready for all the traps and snares that remain in the path of African Americans even at this late date - but at least they know the drill.
They're less likely to be blindsided by the racism of white people, having learned to expect it long ago.
At least they aren't silly enough to think that love is all it takes to raise a child into a healthy adult.
At least they would have warned Marcus; warned him that to be black, and male, and 6'5" and 265 pounds, is to be the walking, talking embodiment of white anxiety; it is to trigger every known stereotype in the book: stereotypes that trump the straight-A grades and render utterly moot the SAT score, because they are the kinds of lies that are more powerful than truth, merely because they are believed by people for whom truth means little and power everything.
Don't misunderstand. I'm not suggesting the Joneses were wrong to take Marcus in. Nor am I saying that white parents should never adopt or become guardians for black children or other children of color. I am only saying that before white parents decide to "rescue" black and brown children from homes they consider dysfunctional (and which may well be), perhaps they could take a moment to consider their own dysfunction: the kind that doesn't manifest itself in terms of poverty or daily neighborhood violence perhaps, but which manifests as ignorance, as a Pollyanna-like optimism about the power of love alone, and an uncritical trust in America - the kind most people of color long ago learned to temper with caution.
For while Marcus Dixon is first and foremost a victim of an overzealous prosecutor playing to white fears, and a racist father of the girl with whom he had sex, he is also the victim of white naiveté and good intentions.
Yes, the Joneses are good people, who on balance did a good thing by taking Dixon in at a time when his mom seemed unprepared to raise him, and his father wanted nothing to do with him. They may well have saved his life; they surely improved it. But by virtue of their own innocence, and I use that term in only its most ironic sense here, they put this child at risk in a way that his black family likely would not have.
They seemed to honestly believe that people were more decent and the society in which they lived more decent than they, or it, really were and are. That kind of preciousness is bad enough when parents allow it to blind them to the problems of their white children, but at least then it isn't likely to end in those children's destruction. However, for a black child to be raised amidst that kind of cheery naiveté is to play fast and loose with his or her life. At the very least it teeters on the brink of neglect.
It would be comical were it not so insidious. Consider how truly amazed the Joneses seem to have been when Kenneth's own mother moved out of their home in disgust at their decision to take Marcus in, and when his brother virtually disowned him because of his dislike for any form of "racial mixing."
Or how Peri couldn't believe it when a longtime family friend said, after the charges were made against Marcus, that raping white girls was "just what niggers do," and suggested that the Joneses shouldn't be surprised. "I didn't know she felt that way," Peri lamented in a recent television interview.
Now this is stunning, even in a society whose majority is fairly characterized as infantile in their understanding of race and its meaning. I mean, let us really reflect for just a second on the subtext of such wide-eyed amazement, indicating as it does that at no point in their longstanding friendship with this person had they apparently ever discussed matters of race - a remarkable if unintentional admission of the magnitude of white privilege, which privilege renders the issue of race and racism utterly off the radar screens of members of the dominant group.
The Joneses and their white friends have been able to go through their whole lives never thinking about race, in a way that no black person could possibly do, and in a way that Marcus, for his own protection needed desperately not to mimic. Yet their assumption that race wasn't an issue - for their friends, for their community, for their own family - was completely without foundation, as they now realize perhaps a bit too late.
Or maybe they still don't fully realize it. Ken, for his part, doesn't appear ready to say that racism has anything to do with Marcus's predicament. When asked the question directly he merely says "I have no idea of what is going on." Truer words have never been spoken.
Nor, given the circumstances, will we often hear words more heartbreaking.
Yet behind that truth and heartbreak lay a lesson, if only we are prepared to grasp it. A lesson for Ken and Peri Jones, for white America more broadly, and specifically for all the nice, open-minded, loving white parents out there who are adopting or thinking of adopting children of color. Parents who are rushing off to China, or Korea, or South America, or the 'hood closest to their own hometown, trying to fulfill their own desires for a child, and also give a kid a good home who otherwise might not have one.
It is a lesson about how much they have to learn, and how little they know at present.
Perhaps they will now understand that to raise their black or brown child the same way they raise their white children, if they have them, or as they would raise a white child if they did, is to set in motion a process that may well end in tragedy. It is to ill- prepare those children of color for the real world; a world in which they will too often not be treated like their white siblings; a world in which they will too often not be as warmly accepted by some family members or neighbors, or teachers, or cops. And all because of race, which thing is not a card dear friends, (oh, if only it were that simple and insignificant) but rather the whole deck. Don't get it twisted.
No, not every black child raised by whites will fall victim to the kind of institutional evil that has descended upon the life of Marcus Dixon like fog on a cool Georgia morning. Not every black child raised by white parents will face the kind of viciousness to which he has been subjected. Many, indeed, will thrive.
But that is not the point.
What most assuredly is the point is that so long as whites continue to wallow in our ignorance, continue to believe in the principle of color-blindness (which almost always means being blind to the consequences of color even when those are profound), continue to believe that our neighbors, our families, our colleagues and our countrymen place higher priority on justice than on the color of their skin, we and any persons of color whose lives we touch will be at risk.
So long as we are allowed to exercise the privilege of cross-racial adoption without proving that we know anything about racism and how that poison might now destroy our newly-interracial home, we will be setting the brown-skinned objects of our affection up for a fall.
And please note that here I am not speaking of the importance of something we famously call "cultural competence." It is most certainly not sufficient to show that one has read a book about Kwanzaa, or bought some Miles Davis CDs, or learned how to cook Hoppin' John, or purchased some African artifacts, the meaning of which one doesn't even comprehend, or filled one's closet with Kente.
For the culture white folks so desperately need to understand, if we are going to have any constructive interactions with black people, let alone raise them in our homes, is our own; not the ways of black folks but the ways of white folks, for it is the latter and not the former that will pose the danger to our black and brown friends, colleagues, or in this case, children.
Had the Joneses understood the ways of the white folks in charge of the justice system, even on a local level, there is no way Peri would have advised Marcus to be cooperative with police and "tell them anything they wanted to know," even without an attorney in the room.
Few black parents would have told their black male child, suspected of raping a white girl, to do such a thing, and precisely because they would understand the intrinsic danger of the lamb trying to make nice with the wolves who have encircled it.
Indeed, it was in those early discussions that Dixon, fully aware of the racism of his sex partner's father, initially denied even knowing the girl, let alone having sex with her. When he later told the truth he was, in effect, snaring himself in a lie, thereby making his story seem less credible to a DA already likely predisposed to thinking the worst. It's a mistake he wouldn't have had the chance to make had he been taught a bit of self-defensive cynicism - the kind rarely practiced by those who can afford the luxury of thinking the system is fair and just, but which comes as second nature to those who can't.
Had the Joneses truly appreciated the ways of white folks, and especially the ways in which sexual predator stereotypes push so many buttons for so many whites still today, then they could have given Marcus the kind of lessons at home that he was not likely to receive in school.
After all, for Marcus to receive that 'A' he got in history class, he no doubt had to memorize a lot of dates: like 1776, and 1787, and 1863. The one he needed to know, however, was 1955.
For in truth, Marcus Dixon's life and those of other black men like him have never hinged on whether they knew the correct year of the American Revolution, the passage of the Constitution, or even the Emancipation Proclamation. But his life (and little did he know it) most definitely did hinge on whether he knew the year when Emmett Till was murdered. And more than the year, the reason for which his body was thrown off a bridge, into the Tallahatchie River, weighted down by a 75- pound cotton gin fan tied tightly around Till's neck.
One suspects that the Joneses never told Marcus Dixon about Emmett Till, about how he was murdered because he said "bye baby" to a white woman behind the counter of a store in the heart of the Mississippi Reich. Perhaps they don't know the story themselves. Many white folks don't.
And needless to say Till's story wasn't likely to have been prominently featured in any American history class that Dixon might have taken. Not in Rome, Georgia, where probably more than most places American history is a collection of triumphalist narratives about the greatness of the country in which its students live.
Dixon's 'A' in the class signifies that he must have learned well the glories of the nation into which he was born, and he must have regurgitated those glories upon demand for his teachers. But like most American high school students, Dixon was taught a lie. That he is now paying for that lie with his freedom, if not his life, is merely the latest obscenity in a state, in a region, in an empire that views the lives of black people as expendable.
Unless the lies and phony innocence stop, however, it is unlikely to be the last.
Tim Wise is an antiracist essayist, activist and father. This article was originally published in the Black Commentator
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Sovereignty bigger than individual leaders
Posted: Wednesday, December 31, 2003
By Caesar Zvayi, www.herald.co.zw
UNCLE SAM'S forces captured Saddam Hussein on December 13, and the Texas gunslinger, that son of a bush, was beside himself with thirst for blood.
He immediately pronounced the death sentence on Saddam, inspite of the fact that Saddam's "crimes" are yet to be documented, whilst his crimes have been televised for all to see by his very own embedded journalists!
Bush has broken international law by launching pre-emptive strikes on two nations whose populations are 50 percent children. He has also violated the 1949 Geneva Convention on the protection of civilians during hostilities and treatment of prisoners of war (POWs). Most importantly he has trashed the United Nations and launched unprecedented genocide using banned weapons particularly cluster bombs which are still maiming innocent Iraqi children today. If anyone deserves the hangman's noose, it is George Bush himself.
Unfortunately, no one dares bell the cat.
Like the Texas villager he is, he thought he had at last found justification for his war and a major boost for his first election, as he bears the unenviable tag of being the first un-elected US president.
Political opponents, however, quickly brought him down to earth by reminding him that Saddam's capture was not the reason for going to war, moreso no weapons of mass destruction (WMD) have been found, and the war is proving costly in financial and human terms as the US has spent a staggering US$177 billion on the war to date, whilst back home the economy is on the decline.
Meanwhile, more bodies continue hitting US shores as more than 200 soldiers have been killed since Bush declared the end of the war on May 1.
Saddam's blood thus, cannot wash the egg off Bush's face.
US administrator Paul Bremer waxed lyrical that Saddam's capture spelled the end of the "terror" attacks on US troops.
Really?
So it is only terror if it is US troops or citizens at the wrong end of the gun?
Anyway, we all know of their double standards. Ironically, before the cameras stopped rolling at the Press conference, Bremer choked on his words as more US troops were gunned down across Iraq.
Bush and Blair celebrated on July 22 2003 when hundreds of troops, dozens of aircraft and vehicles cut down, in cold blood, Saddam's sons Uday and Qusay, including Qusay's 14-year-old son Mustapha. Suffice to say the Hussein brothers were only armed with AK47 rifles.
When asked why they had not simply captured them, top US military Commander Ricardo Sanchez sanguinely bragged that, "Our mission is to find, kill or capture." (Note the order of the priorities)
With this bloodthirstiness, they thought they had dealt a coup de grace to the Iraq resistance, but the attacks actually intensified, as they are still intensifying after Saddam's capture.
The whole world saw how the so-called watchdogs of human rights subjected Saddam to cattle inspection in camera, ostensibly to warn all other defiant leaders not to cross Bush's path.
How naïve?
As one analyst put it, "US troops 'defeated' Saddam Hussein, but not the Iraqi people." Iraqis continue to eliminate the infidels whose death toll is reported to be much higher than the official figures of one US soldier a day, as an average of 17 attacks are directed at US troops daily.
The US and its media would want the world to believe that all these attacks, which are mostly suicidal, manage to claim just one soldier a day!
Anyway we know that the first casualty of any war is the truth.
Uncle Sam is in deep trouble but like a typical bully he will not tip his hand since no one will brook bullying once it is known that the owl has no horns but just tufts of feathers!
Apart from showing the world that the Anglo-Saxons are strangers to the truth, human rights, democracy, international law among other values, the Iraq war has clearly shown that defence of sovereignty cannot be condensed to one individual or a country's leadership, but is national in nature.
Saddam and his Baath party had just won a new mandate from the Iraqi people before Bush decided he knew better who should govern Iraq.
This is indicative of the sickening prejudice of the Westerners who regard all other races as child races who do not know what is good for them as such they have to be dictated to.
This chauvinism led the West and their local proxies to believe that they have the right to decide who should rule our country inspite of the resounding affirmation the electorate gave Zanu-PF and President Mugabe in the June 2000 legislative and March 2002 Presidential elections, and subsequent by-elections.
Indeed the Defence and Security Chief's Joint Statement on January 9 2002 spoke for the people where they said:
"We will not accept, let alone salute, anyone with a different agenda that threatens the very existence of our sovereignty, our country and our people . . . we wish to make it very clear to all Zimbabwean citizens that the security organisations will only stand in support of those political leaders that will pursue Zimbabwean values, traditions and beliefs for which thousands of lives were lost in pursuit of Zimbabwe's hard won independence."
Even though no names were mentioned in the statement, those who wished to advance alien interests immediately cried foul, and cried even harder when the people rejected them at the polls. The tears even dug potholes on some of their faces!
The West and their mongrels believe that if they do away with President Mugabe, they have won the Zimbabwean war.
What myopia?
They need only look at what is happening in Iraq for insight, or better still what happened during our Second Chimurenga war when the nationalist leadership was jailed for decades but the war was not abandoned.
As one analyst put it after Tsvangirai's treason tapes were aired, "If they assassinate Mugabe, there will be 13 999 999 Zimbabweans willing to carry the revolution to its logical conclusion." Give or take a few sellouts.
Inspite of their spirited demonisation of the President, he continues to enjoy massive domestic and international support. This has baffled the detractors who then began pinning their hopes on his health; once again they were in for a big disappointment as the man is as vivacious as ever.
The president continues to prevail over the country's enemies because he is smarter than all of them put together, more so he is fighting on the side of justice, thus no matter how mighty or formidable the enemy might seem, good always prevails over evil since the days of David and Goliath.
It took us 90 years to gain political independence, economic independence may not take that long but it will take some time, and it won't come on a silver platter.
The imperialists survive on our resources and they won't give up without a fight, but as long as we make the necessary sacrifices and rally behind our leaders we will prevail.
We did it before; we can do it again.
Reproduced from:
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Racist Terrorist Groups in the Heart of the USA
Posted: Saturday, December 27, 2003
www.blackcommentator.com
The Bush men decorate our holidays in Homeland Security yellow, orange and red, while demonizing Islamic green as the color of the most implacable foes of Western "civilization." Yet official silence conspires to hide genocidal maniacs in our midst who have sworn to erase the Black presence from the landscape of the United States: White Terror.
Tens of thousands of members of a racist legion operate openly in every corner of the nation – men, women, juveniles, extended families, cells, gangs, churches, clans, militias, border armies, all engaged in what they consider to be a war to the death against non-white America.
George Bush and John Ashcroft don't want you to hear about White Terror, understandably fearing that the lyrics of white supremacy strike the same racial chords as the Pirates' own War on Terror theme, itself a rearrangement of the many martial tunes written throughout American history in praise Manifest Destiny. Less than a decade ago Timothy McVeigh's band of terrorists got carried away with the logic of America as a White Man's Country, and may have cost the Republicans the White House in 1996. That's why the homeland security colors didn't change in May of this year, when federal agents arrested a white racist couple dealing in weapons of mass destruction in a small town near Tyler, Texas. The feds seized a cyanide bomb capable of unleashing a deadly, poison cloud, chemicals and components for additional WMDs, gas masks, 100 conventional bombs, an arsenal of automatic weapons, silencers and half a million rounds of ammunition.
The bust went unreported last Spring, although George Bush was said to have been regularly briefed about the "ongoing" investigation. Finally, the Dallas-Fort Worth CBS affiliate broke the story on November 26, when longtime militiaman and traveling gun merchant William J. Krar and his common-law wife pled guilty to possession of a chemical bomb and lesser charges. Local Channel 11 news producer Todd Bensman thought he had a huge national story on his hands, but CBS network refused to pick up his report. "I guess they didn't think it was important enough," Bensman told David Neiwert, a Seattle-based journalist who has covered right-wing terrorism since 1978. In fact, the national news blackout was near-total, as reported online by The Memory Hole.
The only media that saw fit to report about this terrorist plot within the US were a few newspapers and TV stations in Texas. The Web-based news outlet WorldNetDaily ran a story about it, but Google News shows that there hasn't been a word in the New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, or any other big media outlet. Why have the media decided that this is a non-story? It's hard to say, but we can say with certainty that if Muslims had been caught with these weapons of mass destruction, fake I.D., gas masks, and books on making explosives, it would've been front-page news for days.
A huge array of weapons, ammunition, bomb-making equipment, and racist literature were discovered in the Tyler arrest.
The New York Times got around to the story on December 13, not on the news pages, but through a back door Op-Ed article titled "Enemies at Home." Daniel Levitas' piece passed the Times' blandness test. "Americans should question whether the Justice Department is making America's far-right fanatics a serious priority," Levitas wrote. "And with the F.B.I. still struggling to get up to speed on the threat posed by Islamic extremists abroad, it is questionable whether the agency has the manpower to keep tabs on our distinctly American terror cells. There is no accurate way of analyzing the budgets of the F.B.I., Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security to discern how much attention is being devoted to right-wing extremists. But in light of the F.B.I.'s poor record in keeping tabs on the militia movement before the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, one wonders whether the agency has the will to do so now."
What apologetic nonsense. The federal police are acting just like their predecessors under J. Edgar Hoover, who for decades denied there was such a thing as the Mafia. Hoover knew full well that the Italian-American syndicate existed, since the Bureau had used gangsters countless times as lethal instruments against leftists in the union movement. The FBI was a friend to the Mafia until deep into the Sixties and – the movie, Mississippi Burning notwithstanding – sheltered and immunized far more Klansman than it ever arrested. The Bureau does as it is told, and it has been instructed to hide White Terror from view.
Indeed, there are striking similarities between the FBI's modus operandi with the Ku Klux Klan in the Sixties and the Bureau's behavior towards today's white terrorists; the feds watch, but don't do much of anything to stop them. There is no question that the Aryan Nations, National Alliance, Christian Identity, various reconstituted Klans, skinheads and hundreds of other homegrown Nazi organizations have been heavily infiltrated by various law enforcement agencies. After all, they are full of criminals of the kind that routinely trade evidence for extended sojourns outside of prison. In addition, the American domestic arms trade is a roadmap to the violent Right, a national grid full of above ground gun markets and fairs. All it takes is some cash to join the circuit and meet the folks.
Terrorists With Impunity
The feds met William Krar around the time of the Oklahoma City bombing. According to the November 26 television report from Dallas-Fort Worth: "In 1995, the ATF investigated Krar and another man on weapons charges. The other suspect told authorities at the time that he and Krar shared an abiding hatred of the federal government and had been planning to bomb government facilities, court records show. But the suspect later recanted the story about plotting terror attacks with Krar. Krar denied the allegation and was not arrested, according to records.
There is little to indicate that the feds wanted to make anything stick to Krar. On the day after 9/11, an employee at a New Hampshire storage site where the weapons dealer kept his regional customers' stock reported Krar's "wicked anti-American" remarks to the FBI, which filed a report but did – nothing! When the feds finally moved on Krar and his companion in Noonday, Texas a year and a half later, the arrest warrant said he was "actively involved in the militia movement…a good source of covert weaponry for white supremacist and anti-government militia groups in New Hampshire," his native state. How long had this been known to the FBI? It's a moot question, since such activities were clearly not of great interest to the Bureau.
Geoge Bush was not reported as saying that groups like these, and their right-wing political allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the USA.
Four months after 9/11, in January 2002 the feds stumbled on Krar's network through no smarts of their own when a package meant for New Jersey militiaman Edward Feltus was mistakenly delivered to a Staten Island, New York address. "The package contained more than five false identification documents, including a North Dakota birth certificate, a Social Security card, a Vermont birth certificate, a Defense Intelligence Agency Identification card, and a United Nations Multinational Force Identification card," said the East Texas U.S. Attorney's office. But no attempt was made to halt Krar's activities, which continued until May of this year.
The U.S. Attorney's statement claims that after the New Jersey package turned up, a "subsequent investigation" discovered that Krar "had accumulated dangerous chemical weapons," an apparent reference to a Tennessee Highway Patrol stop of Krar's car a full year later, in January 2003. State Police – not federal agents – found dangerous chemicals and a note that "appears to represent instructions for carrying out some kind of covert operation," Channel 11 reported. "It lists code words for cities where meetings can take place at motels."
The cities where the conspirators would presumably meet were called "zones" and included: Chattanooga, Bristol, and Knoxville, Tennessee; Scranton and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Winchester and Roanoke, Virginia; Jackson, Mississippi; and Shreveport, Louisiana.
The TV story continued: "Other codes appear to be warnings about how close police might be to catching the plotters. 'Lots of light storms are predicted,' for instance, means 'Move fast before they look any harder. We have a limited window remaining.'"
The FBI and other federal agencies had left the "window" open for mad white bombers Krar and Bruey for two whole years, but you'd never know it from the U.S. Attorney's press release. "Through the cooperative effort of the FBI, ATF, the Army CID and the Criminal Investigative Service, these defendants were identified and their activities pinpointed and neutralized. We live in a safer world because of the efforts of these agencies."
Honest lawmen see things differently. Channel 11 warned that "authorities familiar with the case say more potentially deadly cyanide bombs may be in circulation."
The Right Rampages, Again
The Oklahoma City bombing killed 168 people in 1995, most of them white and many of them children. For a time, the white public recoiled from the harshest rhetoric of their race-crazed kin, and it appears that many rank and file supremacists shrank away in shame, becoming inactive. Bill Clinton's political fortunes rose dramatically on the sea change of public revulsion at the Right, and he defeated Bob Dole decisively in the 1996 election. Thomas Sowell, Republican Uncle Tom Emeritus, still complains about that period. "The Oklahoma City bombing was immediately blamed on conservative talk show hosts, even before the perpetrators were known," Sowell wrote in a November, 2002 column, exaggerating as usual.
However, as the William Krar saga indicates, at no time have federal authorities treated white hate groups as clear and present dangers to national security. The lethal threat to Black America failed to spur Bill Clinton to any serious action against these very visible networks. Krar kept selling his wares, and apparently grew more sophisticated and deadly.
The Bush election 'victory', and the appointment of John Ashcroft as Attorney General, was like manna from white heaven for racist groups in the USA.
Then came September 11. Racism was back with volcanic vengeance, unbound by any notions of shame – the Great Mobilizer of White Americans. The horror of Oklahoma City had provided only a respite, after all. This time, the Republicans are determined to ride the tidal wave of white fear and hate to its ultimate, ordained destination: world conquest. And there will be no reminders of the despised Tim McVeigh to break the triumphalist spell – not if Attorney General Ashcroft can help it.
On the December 5 edition of Democracy Now! University of Texas journalism professor Robert Jensen attempted to explain the silence over racists armed with WMDs. "Cases like this – of domestic terrorism, especially when they involve white supremacist and conservative Christian groups, don't have any political value for an administration, especially this particular administration," said the professor. " Therefore, why – if one were going to be crass and cynical, why would they highlight this?
"On the other hand, foreign terrorism and things connected to Arab, South Asian and Muslim groups, well those have value because they can be used to whip up support for military interventions, which this administration is very keen on."
Jensen understates the case. The Noonday, Texas WMD story was squashed by the Bush Administration with the active collaboration of editors throughout corporate media. The December 10 issue of Intelligence Squad got it just about right: "Suddenly it becomes clear why John Ashcroft isn't going to make a big deal out of nailing these guys: they are essentially a more extreme version of Ashcroft himself." The Bush men conceal the existence terrorists, as if embarrassed by their own kind.
Reporters at Channel 11 in Dallas-Fort Worth were told, "federal agents have served hundreds of subpoenas across the country in a domestic terror investigation" since May. Yet there have been no subsequent news reports of such events and only three people are in custody: Krar, Bruey and the New Jersey militiaman, Edward Feltus. If the hundreds of persons suspected of terrorist activities were Arabs or South Asians, we might assume they were locked away incommunicado in the twilight Gulag created since September 11. But these are white Americans with special dispensation to engage in an ancient yet familiar rampage. They can hide in plain sight, because nobody's really looking.
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Reparations In Repairing The Damage
Posted: Thursday, December 25, 2003
By Ras Tyehimba, Africa Speaks
All across the world, from Latin America, to the US, to Europe, to the Caribbean, to Africa and Asia, the roll call of Globalisation echoes, heralding the growing wealth of developed countries and the increasing economic strain and exploitation faced by developing and underdeveloped countries. The overwhelming debt faced by a lot of developing places them deeper in servitude to the IMF, the World Bank, and imperialistic 'developed countries'. Big Multi-national Corporations are the order of the day, siphoning resources including raw materials and cheap labour from the cash-strapped developing countries. It has been a little more than 500 years since the first slave ship sailed from Afrika, and now Afrikans all across the globe are becoming more explicit and proactive in their struggle to obtain reparations for the past injustices that have been meted out to Afrikan people.
Reactionary elements even within the black community often jeer and scathingly ask: why should reparations be paid. To those that choose to overlook and ignore the Afrikan Holocaust, I have this to say: the enslavement of Afrikans was a crime against humanity and international law recognizes the moral and legal obligations of those who commit crimes against humanity to pay reparations. Slavery and colonialism has wreaked havoc across the globe especially in Afrika which is the richest continent in the world. This twin force has been responsible for the mass material wealth of Europe and America. Their wealth and Industrialization has been gotten from the inhumane exploitation of Afrika's resources, both natural and human;it has been gotten from the blood, sweat and tears of millions and millions of Afrikans. Colonialism has wreaked havoc on the social structure of continental Afrika, stealing and killing skilled craftsmen, leaders, farmers, healers, making Afrikan villages unable to cope with the challenges of day to day life. Precious Minerals, mines, fabulous treasures, breathtaking artifacts, rich land has all been dispossessed from the indigenous Afrikans who have been existing in their high cultures for thousands and thousands of years before the coming of the Europeans.
The process of colonialism which included chattel slavery and the slave trade, uprooted indigenous Afrikans from their homes and transplanted them in the new world, forcing them to undergo deliberate and brutal processes of dehumanisation and brainwashing. As a result, Afrikans both on the Continent and in the Diaspora have become disconnected from their true self, forced to function in systems rampant with racism, gender discrimination, poverty, self-hate, drugs, crime, mis-education and white supremacy. Bombarded by a conglomeration of the aforementioned forces, many have grabbed (or in many cases forced to grab) onto a very Eurocentric form of Christianity, and indeed a very Eurocentric way of life that has transformed many many individuals into ignorant house-slaves, burying their heads in the dregs of Western civilization. It is a fact that Afrikan enslavement was sanctioned in the name of 'converting the heathens to Christ' and the very first slave ship was even named the S.S. Jesus Christ.
Reparation is not solely about money, not at all, it's about transferring technological resources and expertise to those that have been downtrodden by the technologically minded countries that have sought to rule the world with their superior armaments. Reparation is about putting mechanisms in place to provide equal opportunities to those that have laboured long and hard (without just reward) to build up what is known today as Western Civilization. In recent times, the Maori people, survivors of the Jewish Holocaust Native Americans, Aboriginal peoples, Japanese Americans, Korean sex-slaves, have all received some sort of Reparation for grave injustices that have been meted out to them. The Afrikan Holocaust on the other hand, despite being far more damaging, brutal and long lasting has yet to receive any favorable redress from the countries that are responsible for these atrocities against humanity. In fact most countries haven't even recognized the Afrikan Holocaust as being a crime against humanity. Is it because Afrikan people are not seen as being part of humanity?
No amount of money could ever quantify the damage that was done, and no amount of compensation will be able to fully repair the trauma that has resulted. However, Reparations will help to provide new opportunities for growth and help bridge the disparate gap between rich developed countries and poor Afrikan countries that have suffered immensely because of the underdevelopment forced upon them by European power. If for example the digital divide is left to increase at the present alarming rate, then the force of globalisation will have an even worse disastrous impact on the Afrikan economies.
A proper understanding of history will reveal that Western countries will not pay Reparations to Afrikans unless their survival utterly depends upon it. In fact a lot of whites claim that since it was their ancestors that perpetuated the crimes against humanity, they (the present White population) cannot be held accountable for compensating those disadvantaged... In making this outrageous claim they ignore one fundamental fact; that Western countries and their white populations has and is still benefiting from the ill gotten gains of slavery and colonialism. Reparations is a moral issue related intimately with a wider movement for equal rights and justice, and Western countries have shown time and time again that they are not motivated by morality, truth and justice, but rather by money and power.
The US, one of the most racist countries in the world walked out of the World Conference against Racism because they were not prepared to deal expeditiously with the issues at hand. With this in mind, the Reparations movement must not take place within a vacuum; it must not be the main thrust of the Pan Afrikan Movement. Allocation of scarce resources has to be a major concern of both Afrikans on the continent and those in the Diaspora. The main thrust of the movement and where the most resources should be allocated is in terms of the re-education of ourselves in the interest of reclaiming our divine identity. In reclaiming our identity and becoming more aware of ourselves, we will be in a better position to do what needs to be done in the interest of equal rights and justice. Where are the Afrikan schools teaching Afrikan history and the diverse range of culture that has been practiced on the continent for thousands of years? Re-educating ourselves will put us in a better position to utilize the vast resources that we have already at our disposal and also the face the global challenge of surviving as an Afrikan people in these perilous times. Reparations must not become an excuse to forget our spirituality that has kept us alive throughtout challenging situations. We mus remind the world that no peace will ever be possible unless the injustices that have been perpetuated have been addressed in a meaningful manner.
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Paleontologists Discover Pterosaur Fossils In Sahara
Posted: Wednesday, December 24, 2003
Source: University Of Chicago
A new species of pterosaur with a 16-foot wingspan has been discovered in the southern Sahara by a team led by University of Chicago paleontologist Paul Sereno. "This find puts African pterosaurs on the map," said Sereno, who is also an explorer-in-residence at the National Geographic Society. Previous finds of these winged reptiles in Africa had been limited to individual bones or teeth.
The 110-million-year-old fossils include most of one wing and several slender teeth from its over-sized jaws. "To find a wing composed of a string of paper-thin bones in a river deposit next to the sturdy bones of dinosaurs is a remarkable feat of preservation," Sereno said. The bones and teeth were found in Cretaceous-age rocks in Niger that were deposited by ancient rivers. Near the pterosaur site, Sereno's team also found bones of the 35-foot-long, sail-backed fish-eater Suchomimus and the enormous crocodile Sarcosuchus, dubbed "SuperCroc."
"Definitely a fish-eater," remarked Sereno, who will describe and name the new species with David Blackburn, an expedition member from the University of Chicago and now a graduate student at Harvard University. Like its contemporaries Suchomimus and Sarcosuchus, it dined on the abundant fish in the rivers, as evidenced by its long and slender teeth. As the jaws closed, the teeth interlocked to snare fish, leaving signs of wear on their sides.
"Somehow this huge species was able to fish on the wing. We imagine a pterosaur soaring over the water and somehow stalling to snag a fish," Sereno said. "It was a tremendous animal." Based on numerous trackways, paleontologists now believe that pterosaurs were relatively clumsy on land or in shallow water, walking slowly on all fours. The African species preserves sharp hand claws on the front edge of the wing, which probably helped it climb when on land.
The African pterosaur resembles another species discovered previously in the highlands of Brazil. When the Niger species lived, 110 million years ago, South America and Africa were just beginning to separate. "Pterosaurs wouldn't have had much trouble getting across at that point, so it's not surprising to find a close relative over there," Sereno said.
A life-size skeleton and flesh reconstruction of the new pterosaur, the first for a species from Africa, will go on display in Chicago's Garfield Park Conservatory, 300 N. Central Park Ave., as part of the "GIANTS" exhibit. The exhibit, created by Sereno's educational organization Project Exploration, opens Dec. 20 and will run through Sept. 6, 2004.
The flesh model incorporates the latest information on pterosaurs. "Pterosaurs are close cousins of the dinosaurs but had a very different look and lifestyle. Their bodies were covered by hair-like structures that arose independently from the hair we know today on mammals," Sereno said. The flesh model also has translucent wings, as scientists now believe from detailed impressions that the skin forming the wing would have allowed light to pass through.
For more information about the "GIANTS" exhibit, see www.dinogiants.org.
The original news release can be found here.
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Taking back BLACK HISTORY MONTH
Posted: Tuesday, December 23, 2003
The following statement has been issued by Hackney Black Peoples Association, London:
Black History Month (BHM) in Britain is becoming like Kwanzaa in he USA. Kwanzaa was drawn up by a committee and was said to be a holiday for North American Africans (African Americans). The US government paid a large sum of money to the alleged founder of Kwanzaa and thus it became a holiday for all Americans. So it does not matter whether a person is of European or Asian descent, they can claim Kwanzaa as their holiday too.
Local authorities seeking to ride on the tide of popularity engendered started BHM in Britain by public Black History lectures organised by Black Community Organisations. Its popularity led to some local authorities making budgetary arrangements for BHM while some others went through the motions of supporting BHM. For Example, Hackney Council appointed a white woman to organise BHM.
Then we saw the Home Office, through its arm the Commission for Racial Equality, publishing glossy BHM booklets targeted at recruiting young Blacks into the ranks of the army and the police.
Next came the National Lottery Commission, which put up £0.5million for BHM in 2002, with most of the money going to the British Museum and the National History Museum.
This year, we had the spectacle of London Mayor Ken Livingstone and his flunkey Lee jasper trying to bask in the glory of the history of the African peoples of the world with their First Voices Conference. They were forced by Jews and Zionists to withdraw an invitation Professor Tony Martin, the world's foremost scholar on the Honourable Marcus Garvey, thus causing outrage and anger within the Black Community.
What is also now creeping in is the discredited idea of multi-culturalism, so that Asians and mother none-Africans can be funded to organise BHM events. The demand of Black children that they be taught their history in English schools has been completely ignored.
Given that Carter G. Woodson established BHM in the USA for the education of Blacks about their own history; not as seen by whites as the story of the conqueror for the conquered, then Black organisations in the UK have a duty and a responsibility to maintain and defend that position. We should not let those with vast financial resources take control of BHM and then use it against us.
To this end, the Hackney Black Peoples Association proposes the following:
1. That a committee representing the widest spectrum of organisations be established to maintain the continuity of BHM for its original purpose.
2. That letters be written to the Mayor, the CRE and the national Lottery Commission telling them to butt out of BHM.
3. That every year, the Committee organises an African Peoples as a BHM event where we discuss a particular aspect of our history to determine what lessons can be learned for present times.
4. Given the furore over the dis-invitation of Tony Martin, that for BHM 2004, he be recalled to speak at a BHM African Peoples Assembly on the History and Legacy of Marcus Garvey and the UNIA, then lessons to be learned for implementation, and the APA decides to establish one project that everyone will work to establish.
5. That in the meantime, demonstrations/pickets be held outside the offices of the Jewish Chronicle and the Board of Deputies of British Jews to protest the ant-African racism of Jews and demand Reparations for slavery.
Proposed by: Hackney Black Peoples Association
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Primer on White Supremacy
Posted: Monday, December 22, 2003
Published, December 20, 2003 by CommonDreams.org
by Kimberle Williams Crenshaw
The blank-faced reaction to revelations that arch segregationist Strom Thurmond fathered a daughter with his family's 16-year old African American maid marks the third time in recent months that progressives have been stymied by the yawning hypocrisy on the Right on matters of race, justice, and basic integrity. Strom Thurmond now joins Rush Limbaugh and Bill Bennett in providing perfect examples of the breathtaking contradictions within the Right wing agenda that have been inadequately challenged by the progressive community.
Perhaps many potential critics are left speechless in the face of this outrage in part because Essie Mae Washington-Williams herself seems so forgiving of her father. Many have taken this to mean that Strom Thurmond wasn't as committed to the cause of segregation as he might have appeared. Yet the belief that segregationists should be viewed sympathetically simply because they sustained family ties with Blacks obscures the true meaning of white supremacy. Neither slavery nor formal segregation was ever grounded in the principled separation of the races or on unyielding racial hatred. Segregation and the rhetoric that supported it were simply a means toward the larger enterprise of insulating and brutally protecting the supremacy of white male power in dictating the terms of political, economic, social and, of course, sexual intercourse. Once this logic is comprehended, nothing about Strom Thurmond's behavior in impregnating Carrie Butler, nor his subsequent relationship to Essie Mae Washington-Williams, seems out of the ordinary.
Washington-Williams' decision not to derail Thurmond when he was most vulnerable was, of course, hers to make. Yet judgment about the historical consequences of that decision remains squarely within the realm of public debate. To comprehend the full implication of that personal decision, it is important to recognize that Strom Thurmond was far more than a fellow traveler on the road to massive resistance to racial equality. Thurmond was a chief architect, principle leader, and key symbol of Southern intransigence in the service of white supremacy.
Despite a stint as a progressive politician, Thurmond's early political influences made it no surprise that he developed into the political hero of the most virulently racist political forces in the South. Thurmond's earliest political role model was "Pitchfork" Ben Tillman, a virulently racist leader of the bloody redshirt campaign that punished Blacks and their supporters and obliterated their political power in South Carolina. Scores of Blacks were viciously killed in the campaign. Tillman once bragged about the murder of a Black state senator while he knelt in prayer. Thurmond's father was Tillman's political operative in Edgefield County, a place with a particularly violent reputation. Indeed, Thurmond's father killed a drunken political opponent in the town square in broad daylight. In this political culture, Thurmond was exposed to, and later sought to emulate, those politicians who could stir up a frenzied crowd, often through the racial demonization of their Black neighbors. The conflict among white politicians then was not over "whether" to promote white supremacy, but rather, as one commentator has put it, "who can yell nigger the loudest."
Having drafted the Southern Manifesto declaring unyielding opposition to the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, Thurmond galvanized, courted and threatened Southern politicians to stand behind the declaration. In that manifesto are the key components of the defense of segregation that continue to frame resistance to equality agendas to this day. Indeed it was Thurmond's leadership, first in becoming the presidential candidate for the segregationist Dixiecrats, and then his later delivery of this influential cohort to the Republican Party, that polarized the parties on civil rights issues and set the stage for a massive political realignment that still centers race as its major fault line. If Washington-Williams' recollection serves her, Thurmond's defense was that he merely inherited a way of life that as a politician he was expected to defend. But this benign epitaph ignores the fact that Strom Thurmond raised the heat on the racial cauldron well beyond its boiling point.
As Washington-Williams' mildly suggested to her father, Thurmond could have led America down a remarkably different path, one that might have found peace in squarely confronting the democratic illegitimacy of white supremacy. He might have used his considerable political gifts to demonstrate to the masses an acceptance of the inherent equality of American citizens based not on outside coercion but on internalized principles. One can only imagine what the nation might have been spared had Thurmond chosen to get ahead of the game by sowing racial justice in the fertile soil of the South's progressive tradition rather than becoming a dangerously divisive reactionary in the face of modest federal steps to alleviate the suffering of African Americans. Had Thurmond so much as attempted to exercise this courage, he would truly deserve the iconic status he now enjoys. That Thurmond chose not do so, even in the face of a familial relationship with a woman who was susceptible to the torrent of hate that these politics unleashed, discredits all efforts to portray him as a sympathetic character in America's racial drama.
Kimberle Williams Crenshaw (aapf@law.columbia.edu) is Professor of Law at Columbia University and UCLA and is the Co-Founder and and Co-Director of the African American Policy Forum (www.aapf.org).
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America's arrogance knows no bounds
Posted: Sunday, December 14, 2003
By Raffique Shah
Trinidad and Tobago, www.trinicenter.com/Raffique
DEPUTY US Ambassador to this country, Albert Nahas, and his boss Roy Austin, must really believe that we Trinis are a bunch of "chupidees" that we are an uneducated, uninformed people. I should add here that they probably rank us alongside their own (Americans), most of whom are dumb when it comes to geography, they know little of their own history, and far less about the world beyond their continental boundaries. But I won't be nasty, so I shall not elaborate on that.
Last week Wednesday, at a seminar on the International Criminal Court (ICC), Nahas, speaking for his government (that has chosen to stay out of the jurisdiction of the court), said: "The US believes the ICC is built on a flawed foundation. Those flaws leave it open for exploitation and politically motivated prosecution. The US believes its citizens are at special risk for prosecution by the ICC because of the unique US role in global politics and US participation in military operation and peace-keeping process."
At the same seminar ex-President Arthur NR Robinson, an architect of the ICC, hitting the flawed US nail on the head, told the audience: "Having regard to the growing importance, development of destructive power, the only answer to that development of destructive power is the resurgence of our humanity all over the world without distinction of race, class and economic power." Robinson did not need to read and spell for the benefit of his audience. Clearly he was referring to the US using its economic and military might to subjugate any nation it chooses to, and to those who use terrorism as the only response to the New Empire.
The ICC, whatever its weaknesses--and I'm sure there will be many during its teething stages-is intended to regulate the behaviour of governments or individuals towards their own people, and the way they treat with others, especially during hostilities. Any deviation from the norms of civilisation, like the presumption of innocence until one is found guilty of a crime, or the treatment of prisoners of war in keeping with the Geneva Convention, could lead to prosecution before the ICC. When one looks at the atrocities that have been committed in the name of governance or war, institutions like the International Criminal Tribunal based in the Hague and the ICC seem like a godsend to the families of tens of thousands who were slaughtered in Bosnia or Burundi by men so powerful, they thought they were beyond the reach of justice.
It's much too late to have these institutions bring to justice murderous despots like Pol Pot (Cambodia) or Idi Amin or the many Latin American graduates of Fort Benning who committed unspeakable atrocities during the era of US-installed dictators on the continent. Benning, unlike Sandhurst (where we were taught to abide by the Geneva Convention), unleashed terrorists-disguised-as-officers who raped and murdered nuns and killed an Archbishop in Honduras and El Salvador to the North, to as far South as Chile and Argentina where men like Pinochet liquidated thousands of ordinary Chileans. Many of these criminal elements were granted safe haven in the US after the bloody regimes they were part of were removed from office by "people power".
The US has good reason to steer clear of the ICC, but these have nothing to do with the ICC being "flawed". As someone wrote recently, if the yardstick used at Nuremburg to try (though not necessarily bring to justice) scores of Adolf Hitler's generals and lackeys for war crimes, then George Bush, Tony Blair and hundreds of their aides and allies would be hauled before the ICC or the Hague-based Tribunal. As war criminals, that is. Indeed, several other presidents of the New Empire, including Eisenhower who unleashed the only nuclear weapons ever in the history of mankind, just to "try it out" on a Japan that was on its knees, or Reagan who invaded a defenceless Panama and killed thousands of innocent people, would have been deemed war criminals.
But the sanctimonious set in the White House have taken their arrogance the distance by refusing to subject their own people to what they expect everyone else to be subjected to, the rule on international law. What international court, staffed by jurists of almost impeccable integrity, would convict people based on race or class or religion? So Nahas knew he was spewing raw sewage when he proffered that feeble excuse at the seminar. He and Austin also know that the US has also refused to sign or ratify a host of other international agreements that other countries have done. For example, ex-President Bill Clinton signed the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1996, but it was rejected by the Senate in 1999. In 2001 the US withdrew from the Antiballistic Missile Treaty. In that same year its delegation walked out of a London meeting where a protocol to strengthen the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention was on the table. Later it would accuse Libya, Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Sudan and Syria of violating the Convention.
I can go on about its withdrawal in 2002 from the 1969 Vienna Convention, its refusal to sign the Land Mine Treaty of 1997, or Bush declaring the Kyoto Protocol for controlling greenhouse gases dead in 2001. But then the US has always flouted any international treaty or convention that stood in its bullying ways towards weaker nations, the ICC being only the most recent. Under what law, one might ask, is that concentration camp (oh yes, that's what it is-maybe gas chamber et al!) at Guantanamo in Cuba, set up? British law lord Steyn recently described as "a monstrous failure of justice" the decisions of the US courts not to consider credible evidence of torture in cases coming from Guantanamo. "Trials of the type contemplated by the US government would be a stain on US justice. The only thing that could be worse is simply to leave the prisoners in their black hole indefinitely," Steyn said, as quoted by Observer writer David Aaronovitch.
Another writer in the Guardian, James Meek, who spent a month talking with ex-inmates of that camp, described it this way: "In the two years since it opened it has (become) a full grown mongrel of international law, where all the harshness of the punitive US prison system is visited on foreigners, unmitigated by any of the legal rights US prisoners enjoy." Guantanamo, which lies not far away from us in Caricom, offers us a glimpse into Bush's New Empire in which there is one law for Americans and another for everyone else in the world.
Continue : Controlling the 'Fourth Front'
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Response to Howard Dean's Speech
Posted: Friday, December 12, 2003
From the Official Howard Dean Weblog, December 7, 2003
"Restoring the American Community", delivered by Governor Howard Dean in Columbia, South Carolina.
Response by Rootsie, www.rootsie.com
December 11, 2003
Well Governor Dean, as that 'different Republican president' also said 150 years ago, "You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time. But you can't fool all the people all the time."
You talk about Nixon/Reagan/Bush era politics, saying they "fracture the very soul of who we are as a country." And just what might that be, that 'soul'? The sickness in the very soul of the United States is what the Nixons, Reagans, and Bushes express. They are the mainline of U.S. History, not deviations from the norm. When was there ever racial justice here? The American Revolution itself was fought for the benefit of slave merchants. There was a hideous civil war back then fought on the frontier by poor settlers who knew this Revolution would not be of benefit to them.
When in the history of this country has the wealth NOT been 'concentrated at the very top'? You talk as if the Republicans are the sole architects and sole beneficiaries of this system. Well it takes two to tango. The gap between rich and poor opened up to unprecedented levels during the Clinton years.
But you can say anything you want really, and spin your rhetoric, because we have a broken educational system that graduates illiterates, let alone producing citizens who have some sort of grasp on their history. History. That's the thing. No one in this country wants to talk about history.
"There are no black concerns or white concerns or Hispanic concerns in America. There are only human concerns." What country do you live in? And the hundreds of millions who live 'south of the border', who also consider themselves 'Americans,' might be surprised to hear that their concerns are not Hispanic ones.
This is the way the liberals think to get around the issue of race. They talk about 'celebrating diversity' and our 'multicultural heritage', as if these pretty phrases can obscure the truth of United States history. And really, how long has corporate media North America been 'celebrating diversity' anyway? I suppose the fiends who dragged Richard Byrd along the highway a few years ago until his head was torn off don't matter in the equation of 'American progress' any more than the black children in Mississippi who are being tortured in 'training schools' as I write this. 40 years ago these stories went untold, that's true. So I suppose one could say that there has been some improvement. But to say that there is no such thing as black issues, as Native American issues, as Hispanic issues, is the worst kind of political demagoguery.
"We're going to talk about justice again in this country." Again?? When was the first time we talked about a level playing field for blacks? When was the first time we talked about restoring an iota of what was stolen from Native Americans? Whatever progress those groups have made certainly did not originate from the top. It was empowered individuals from those groups who fought and shed blood for what little justice they have received. If we find it hard to go on our merry way these days without a thought for the Richard Byrds of this world, the Leonard Peltiers, it is because of them, and not because of any reform or cry for basic justice that issued from our 'leaders.' Abraham Lincoln was a racist all his life, and anything he did for blacks was not out of love for them. The sharecropping system that replaced slavery and still exists in some places in the South today worsened the condition of blacks. At least if you own a horse, you will see to it that it stays relatively healthy.
You accuse your opponents of 'turning America into a battle of us versus them.' But Governor Dean, you are 'them'. By virtue of your skin color alone. You speak of the poor white children. I work with some of them. But I very well know there would be no political will at all to address poverty if poor whites did not exist. This you seem not to understand. You do not understand that you benefit directly from this system, that you are a true product of it. There can be no 'talk' of 'building' this and 'building' that without straight talk about race. We have to address the rot in the foundation before we can think to build a thing. I would like to hear a politician just once say 'I benefit directly from the system of white supremacy. I want to devote my excess resources to dismantling this system.' That is the only solution. Whites have to be willing to surrender their privilege. Period.
These empty calls for unity rouse much emotion in ignorant people. But to achieve true unity there has to be a reconciliation with history. Some great truth-telling must take place.
"United together, you can take back your country." When did this country ever belong to all of its people? Never yet.
"Because it is only a movement of citizens of every color, every income level, and every background that can change this country and once again make it live up to the promise of America." I remember the words of chief Red Cloud of the Lakota: "They made many promises. More than I can remember. But one they kept. They promised to take our land and they took it." You can't eat promises. We think a little patriotic rhetoric and flag-waving will suffice to bring this country into line with its many promises. What golden age of America are you referring to anyway?
40,000,000 Americans voted for George Bush. This time it will be more. There is no New Englander who can win in the South or the Midwest. There is no Democrat who can defeat George Bush. Hilary Clinton knows this. Otherwise she would be running. The Democrats cannot defeat George Bush because they do not legitimately wish to dismantle the system of global corporate colonialism for which he is the figurehead. It's a two-party gravy train. And those millions without the education and the civic engagement to see the fraud being perpetrated on them-what can be said of them? What can be said of the millions who are rich and want to stay that way, and damn everybody else?
What did you say about NAFTA and GATT? Did you say you want to dismantle them? If basic justice were your concern this is what you would say. You made some vague comments about paying foreign workers more.
I can't believe I'm saying this, but I prefer George Bush right where he is. At least we citizens have to look at the worst face of what we have done to the world every single day.
I am saddened that blacks in the United States are falling for this typical Democratic bill of goods. I wish they would remember Clinton and the million jail cells. Because Democrats are the masters at putting a 'kinder gentler' face on capitalist piracy, they tend to put dissent to sleep. Like any disease, this needs to come to a crisis in order to be cured. A doctor should know this.
There is such a thing as race. There is such a thing as issues that are specific to specific groups. Rhetorical cries for unity ring pathetic at this point. There is no unity without truth.
It is so typical for a white to run on a platform of 'race doesn't matter.' But the fact that there are some blacks falling for this is ominous.
It is not possible to 'restore' what has never been.
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Stand firm Robert Mugabe!
Posted: Sunday, December 7, 2003
by Davy de Verteuil
When Zimbabwe withdraws form the commonwealth then I wish to surrender my commonwealth citizenship and become a Zimbabwean citizen. (I am for real)
The Commonwealth will always be for commoners while the elites go off to Iraq and Afghanistan and murder tens of thousands over their resources and strategic locations.
Not a single resolution calling for these barbarians expulsion for the unwarranted illegal unlawful destruction of another country mass murder and genocide.
The Commonwealth in my view is a band of arse lickers that revered even the vilest criminal white establishment as nearer to God than the Prophets of God.
I wish I had the power to renounce my status as a commonwealth citizen as I abhor the gutless hypocrisy of independent Nation leaders that continue to kowtow before Britain, New Zealand, Australia and Canada.
Not for any moment in history these known unrepentant criminal nations have materialistically, constitutionally and monetarily apologize, and or reverse their gains from the brutal oppression and occupation of member commonwealth countries, and the countries they continue to occupy.
Why can't Canada return to the Native Indian nation their ancestral homeland now called Canada? New Zealand and Australia should do the same. What is the moral meter- threatening, and cajoling a bunch of dirty bloodied corrupt Africans leaders with the exception of South Africa and the Southern neighbors?
India is no more a democracy than Israel. India occupies Kashmir, and has killed a thousand times more of the inhabitants there than Zimbabwe has in the latter struggle for National integrity. India sees herself as Japan did 45 years ago, and is steadfastly heading in the direction of those that once colonized and slaved them.
President Oba Sanjo thinks he is the new African statesman, and will play the role of an obedient house nigger while western multinational corporations run amok as though Africa was never really won.
Malaysia though not African in nature has shown greater principle and understanding in keeping the vultures at bay. Although Malaysia may have it's short comings, it has not kowtowed but formed an alliance with Zimbabwe, even rivaling South Africa in brotherliness against what it sees as western victimization from the common thuggery against Zimbabwe.
The Commonwealth is a department of Windsor where the Queen is King, and it's none white members aren't really members but subjects with a false sense of independence.
Call to restore Mugabe
By Tom Allard, Abuja, Nigeria
December 7, 2003
The Sun-Herald, via www.smh.com.au
Australia's hopes for a quick resolution of the debate over Zimbabwe at the Commonwealth leaders' summit have been dashed, with mounting calls from African countries for the regime of Robert Mugabe to be re-admitted to the forum, forcing the hasty creation of a six-nation committee to hammer out a compromise solution.
Prime Minister John Howard is one member of the committee of "wise men", which also includes the leaders of Canada, South Africa, India, Jamaica and Mozambique.
Among the proposals being considered is for Zimbabwe to have the opportunity to rejoin the 54-member body before the next Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in two years.
The committee's deliberations reflect the fact that the consensus on Zimbabwe's future that Mr Howard had been so optimistic about on his arrival in the Nigerian capital for the summit has evaporated. Continue...
Copyright © 2003. The Sydney Morning Herald
This extract was reproduced for fair use only.
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Why I Hate Thanksgiving
Posted: Saturday, November 29, 2003
First Genocide, Then Lie About It
By MITCHEL COHEN
With much material contributed by Peter Linebaugh and others whose names have over the years been lost.--MC
The year was 1492. The Taino-Arawak people of the Bahamas discovered Christopher Columbus on their beach.
Historian Howard Zinn tells us how Arawak men and women, naked, tawny, and full of wonder, emerged from their villages onto the island's beaches and swam out to get a closer look at the strange big boat. When Columbus and his sailors came ashore, carrying swords, speaking oddly, the Arawaks ran to greet them, brought them food, water, gifts. Columbus later wrote of this in his log. Here is what he wrote:
"They brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks' bells. They willingly traded everything they owned. They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features. They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of sugar cane. They would make fine servants. With 50 men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want."
And so the conquest began, and the Thanotocracy -- the regime of death -- was inaugurated on the continent the Indians called "Turtle Island."
You probably already know a good piece of the story: How Columbus's Army took Arawak and Taino people prisoners and insisted that they take him to the source of their gold, which they used in tiny ornaments in their ears. And how, with utter contempt and cruelty, Columbus took many more Indians prisoners and put them aboard the Nina and the Pinta -- the Santa Maria having run aground on the island of Hispañola (today, the Dominican Republic and Haiti). When some refused to be taken prisoner, they were run through with swords and bled to death. Then the Nina and the Pinta set sail for the Azores and Spain. During the long voyage, many of the Indian prisoners died. Here's part of Columbus's report to Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain:
"The Indians are so naive and so free with their possessions that no one who has not witnessed them would believe it. When you ask for something they have, they never say no. To the contrary, they offer to share with anyone." Columbus concluded his report by asking for a little help from the King and Queen, and in return he would bring them "as much gold as they need, and as many slaves as they ask."
Columbus returned to the New World -- "new" for Europeans, that is -- with 17 ships and more than 1,200 men. Their aim was clear: Slaves, and gold. They went from island to island in the Caribbean, taking Indians as captives. But word spread ahead of them. By the time they got to Fort Navidad on Haiti, the Taino had risen up and killed all the sailors left behind on the last voyage, after they had roamed the island in gangs raping women and taking children and women as slaves. Columbus later wrote: "Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold." The Indians began fighting back, but were no match for the Spaniard conquerors, even though they greatly outnumbered them. In eight years, Columbus's men murdered more than 100,000 Indians on Haiti alone. Overall, dying as slaves in the mines, or directly murdered, or from diseases brought to the Caribbean by the Spaniards, over 3 million Indian people were murdered between 1494 and 1508.
What Columbus did to the Arawaks of the Bahamas and the Taino of the Caribbean, Cortez did to the Aztecs of Mexico, Pizarro to the Incas of Peru, and the English settlers of Virginia and Massachusetts to the Powhatans and the Pequots. Literally millions of native peoples were slaughtered. And the gold, slaves and other resources were used, in Europe, to spur the growth of the new money economy rising out of feudalism. Karl Marx would later call this "the primitive accumulation of capital." These were the violent beginnings of an intricate system of technology, business, politics and culture that would dominate the world for the next five centuries.
All of this were the preconditions for the first Thanksgiving. In the North American English colonies, the pattern was set early, as Columbus had set it in the islands of the Bahamas. In 1585, before there was any permanent English settlement in Virginia, Richard Grenville landed there with seven ships. The Indians he met were hospitable, but when one of them stole a small silver cup, Grenville sacked and burned the whole Indian village.
The Jamestown colony was established in Virginia in 1607, inside the territory of an Indian confederacy, led by the chief, Powhatan. Powhatan watched the English settle on his people's land, but did not attack. And the English began starving. Some of them ran away and joined the Indians, where they would at least be fed. Indeed, throughout colonial times tens of thousands of indentured servants, prisoners and slaves -- from Wales and Scotland as well as from Africa -- ran away to live in Indian communities, intermarry, and raise their children there.
In the summer of 1610 the governor of Jamestown colony asked Powhatan to return the runaways, who were living fully among the Indians. Powhatan left the choice to those who ran away, and none wanted to go back. The governor of Jamestown then sent soldiers to take revenge. They descended on an Indian community, killed 15 or 16 Indians, burned the houses, cut down the corn growing around the village, took the female leader of the tribe and her children into boats, then ended up throwing the children overboard and shooting out their brains in the water. The female leader was later taken off the boat and stabbed to death.
By 1621, the atrocities committed by the English had grown, and word spread throughout the Indian villages. The Indians fought back, and killed 347 colonists. From then on it was total war. Not able to enslave the Indians the English aristocracy decided to exterminate them.
And then the Pilgrims arrived.
When the Pilgrims came to New England they too were coming not to vacant land but to territory inhabited by tribes of Indians. The story goes that the Pilgrims, who were Christians of the Puritan sect, were fleeing religious persecution in Europe. They had fled England and went to Holland, and from there sailed aboard the Mayflower, where they landed at Plymouth Rock in what is now Massachusetts.
Religious persecution or not, they immediately turned to their religion to rationalize their persecution of others. They appealed to the Bible, Psalms 2:8: "Ask of me, and I shall give thee, the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession." To justify their use of force to take the land, they cited Romans 13:2: "Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation."
The Puritans lived in uneasy truce with the Pequot Indians, who occupied what is now southern Connecticut and Rhode Island. But they wanted them out of the way; they wanted their land. And they seemed to want to establish their rule firmly over Connecticut settlers in that area.
In 1636 an armed expedition left Boston to attack the Narragansett Indians on Block Island. The English landed and killed some Indians, but the rest hid in the thick forests of the island and the English went from one deserted village to the next, destroying crops. Then they sailed back to the mainland and raided Pequot villages along the coast, destroying crops again.
The English went on setting fire to wigwams of the village. They burned village after village to the ground. As one of the leading theologians of his day, Dr. Cotton Mather put it: "It was supposed that no less than 600 Pequot souls were brought down to hell that day." And Cotton Mather, clutching his bible, spurred the English to slaughter more Indians in the name of Christianity.
Three hundred thousand Indians were murdered in New England over the next few years. It is important to note: The ordinary Englishmen did not want this war and often, very often, refused to fight. Some European intellectuals like Roger Williams spoke out against it. And some erstwhile colonists joined the Indians and even took up arms against the invaders from England. It was the Puritan elite who wanted the war, a war for land, for gold, for power. And, in the end, the Indian population of 10 million that was in North America when Columbus came was reduced to less than one million.
The way the different Indian peoples lived -- communally, consensually, making decisions through tribal councils, each tribe having different sexual/marriage relationships, where many different sexualities were practiced as the norm -- contrasted dramatically with the Puritan's Christian fundamentalist values. For the Puritans, men decided everything, whereas in the Iroquois federation of what is now New York state women chose the men who represented the clans at village and tribal councils; it was the women who were responsible for deciding on whether or not to go to war. The Christian idea of male dominance and female subordination was conspicuously absent in Iroquois society.
There were many other cultural differences: The Iroquois did not use harsh punishment on children. They did not insist on early weaning or early toilet training, but gradually allowed the child to learn to care for themselves. And, they did not believe in ownership of land; they utilized the land, lived on it. The idea of ownership was ridiculous, absurd. The European Christians, on the other hand, in the spirit of the emerging capitalism, wanted to own and control everything -- even children and other human beings. The pastor of the Pilgrim colony, John Robinson, thus advised his parishioners: "And surely there is in all children a stubbornness, and stoutness of mind arising from natural pride, which must, in the first place, be broken and beaten down; that so the foundation of their education being laid in humility and tractableness, other virtues may, in their time, be built thereon." That idea sunk in.
One colonist said that the plague that had destroyed the Patuxet people -- a combination of slavery, murder by the colonists and disease -- was "the Wonderful Preparation of the Lord Jesus Christ by His Providence for His People's Abode in the Western World." The Pilgrims robbed Wampanoag graves for the food that had been buried with the dead for religious reasons. Whenever the Pilgrims realized they were being watched, they shot at the Wampanoags, and scalped them. Scalping had been unknown among Native Americans in New England prior to its introduction by the English, who began the practice by offering the heads of their enemies and later accepted scalps.
"What do you think of Western Civilization?" Mahatma Gandhi was asked in the 1940s. To which Gandhi replied: "Western Civilization? I think it would be a good idea." And so enters "Civilization," the civilization of Christian Europe, a "civilizing force" that couldn't have been more threatened by the beautiful anarchy of the Indians they encountered, and so slaughtered them.
These are the Puritans that the Indians "saved", and whom we celebrate in the holiday, Thanksgiving. Tisquantum, also known as Squanto, a member of the Patuxet Indian nation. Samoset, of the Wabonake Indian nation, which lived in Maine. They went to Puritan villages and, having learned to speak English, brought deer meat and beaver skins for the hungry, cold Pilgrims. Tisquantum stayed with them and helped them survive their first years in their New World. He taught them how to navigate the waters, fish and cultivate corn and other vegetables. He pointed out poisonous plants and showed how other plants could be used as medicines. He also negotiated a peace treaty between the Pilgrims and Massasoit, head chief of the Wampanoags, a treaty that gave the Pilgrims everything and the Indians nothing. And even that treaty was soon broken. All this is celebrated as the First Thanksgiving.
My own feeling? The Indians should have let the Pilgrims die. But they couldn't do that. Their humanity made them assist other human beings in need. And for that beautiful, human, loving connection they -- and those of us who are not Indian as well -- paid a terrible price: The genocide of the original inhabitants of Turtle Island, what is now America.
Let's look at one example of the Puritan values -- which were not, I repeat, the values of the English working class values that we "give thanks for" on this holiday. The example of the Maypole, and Mayday.
In 1517, 25 years after Columbus first landed in the Bahamas, the English working class staged a huge revolt. This was done through the guilds. King Henry VIII brought Lombard bankers from Italy and merchants from France in order to undercut wages, lengthen hours, and break the guilds. This alliance between international finance, national capital and military aristocracy was in the process of merging into the imperialist nation-state.
The young workers of London took their revenge upon the merchants. A secret rumor said the commonality -- the vision of communal society that would counter the rich, the merchants, the industrialists, the nobility and the landowners -- would arise on May Day. The King and Lords got frightened -- householders were armed, a curfew was declared. Two guys didn't hear about the curfew (they missed Dan Rather on t.v.). They were arrested. The shout went out to mobilize, and 700 workers stormed the jails, throwing bricks, hot water, stones. The prisoners were freed. A French capitalist's house was trashed.
Then came the repression: Cannons were fired into the city. Three hundred were imprisoned, soldiers patrolled the streets, and a proclamation was made that no women were allowed to meet together, and that all men should "keep their wives in their houses." The prisoners were brought through the streets tied in ropes. Some were children. Eleven sets of gallows were set up throughout the city. Many were hanged. The authorities showed no mercy, but exhibited extreme cruelty.
Thus the dreaded Thanatocracy, the regime of death, was inaugurated in answer to proletarian riot at the beginning of capitalism. The May Day riots were caused by expropriation (people having been uprooted from their lands they had used for centuries in common), and by exploitation (people had no jobs, as the monarchy imported capital). Working class women organizers and healers who posed an alternative to patriarchal capitalism -- were burned at the stake as witches. Enclosure, conquest, famine, war and plague ravaged the people who, in losing their commons, also lost a place to put their Maypole.
Suddenly, the Maypole became a symbol of rebellion. In 1550 Parliament ordered the destruction of Maypoles (just as, during the Vietnam war, the U.S.-backed junta in Saigon banned the making of all red cloth, as it was being sewn into the blue, yellow and red flags of the National Liberation Front).
In 1664, near the end of the Puritans' war against the Pequot Indians, the Puritans in England abolished May Day altogether. They had defeated the Indians, and they were attempting to defeat the growing proletarian insurgency at home as well.
Although translators of the Bible were burned, its last book, Revelation, became an anti-authoritarian manual useful to those who would turn the Puritan world upside down, such as the Family of Love, the Anabaptists, the Diggers, Levellers, Ranters, and Thomas Morton, the man who in 1626 went to Merry Mount in Quincy Mass, and with his Indian friends put up the first Maypole in America, in contempt of Puritan rule.
The Puritans destroyed it, exiled him, plagued the Indians, and hanged gay people and Quakers. Morton had come over on his own, a boat person, an immigrant. So was Anna Lee, who came over a few years later, the Manchester proletarian who founded the communal living, gender separated Shakers, who praised God in ecstatic dance, and who drove the Puritans up the wall.
The story of the Maypole as a symbol of revolt continued. It crossed cultures and continued through the ages. In the late 1800s, the Sioux began the Ghost Dance in a circle, "with a large pine tree in the center, which was covered with strips of cloth of various colors, eagle feathers, stuffed birds, claws, and horns, all offerings to the Great Spirit." They didn't call it a Maypole and they danced for the unity of all Indians, the return of the dead, and the expulsion of the invaders on a particular day, the 4th of July, but otherwise it might as well have been a Mayday!
Wovoka, a Nevada Paiute, started it. Expropriated, he cut his hair. To buy watermelon he rode boxcars to work in the Oregon hop fields for small wages, exploited. The Puget Sound Indians had a new religion -- they stopped drinking alcohol, became entranced, and danced for five days, jerking twitching, calling for their land back, just like the Shakers! Wovoka took this back to Nevada: "All Indians must dance, everywhere, keep on dancing." Soon they were. Porcupine took the dance across the Rockies to the Sioux. Red Cloud and Sitting Bull advanced the left foot following with the right, hardly lifting the feet from the ground. The Federal Agents banned the Ghost Dance! They claimed it was a cause of the last Sioux outbreak, just as the Puritans had claimed the Maypole had caused the May Day proletarian riots, just as the Shakers were dancing people into communality and out of Puritanism.
On December 29 1890 the Government (with Hotchkiss guns throwing 2 pound explosive shells at 50 a minute -- always developing new weapons!) massacred more than 300 men, women and children at Wounded Knee. As in the Waco holocaust, or the bombing of MOVE in Philadelphia, the State disclaimed responsibility. The Bureau of Ethnology sent out James Mooney to investigate. Amid Janet Reno-like tears, he wrote: "The Indians were responsible for the engagement."
In 1970, the town of Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts held, as it does each year, a Thanksgiving Ceremony given by the townspeople. There are many speeches for the crowds who attend. That year -- the year of Nixon's secret invasion of Cambodia; the year 4 students were massacred at Kent State and 13 wounded for opposing the war; the year they tried to electrocute Black Panthers Bobby Seale and Erica Huggins -- the Massachusetts Department of Commerce asked the Wampanoag Indians to select a speaker to mark the 350th anniversary of the Pilgrims' arrival, and the first Thanksgiving.
Frank James, who is a Wampanoag, was selected. But before he was allowed to speak he was told to show a copy of his speech to the white people in charge of the ceremony. When they saw what he had written, they would not allow him to read it.
First, the genocide. Then, the suppression of all discussion about it.
What do Indian people find to be Thankful for in this America? What does anyone have to be Thankful for in the genocide of the Indians, that this "holyday" commemorates? As we sit with our families on Thanksgiving, taking any opportunity we can to get out of work or off the streets and be in a warm place with people we love, we realize that all the things we have to be thankful for have nothing at all to do with the Pilgrims, nothing at all to do with Amerikan history, and everything to do with the alternative, anarcho-communist lives the Indian peoples led, before they were massacred by the colonists, in the name of privatization of property and the lust for gold and labor.
Yes, I am an American. But I am an American in revolt. I am revolted by the holiday known as Thanksgiving. I have been accused of wanting to go backwards in time, of being against progress. To those charges, I plead guilty. I want to go back in time to when people lived communally, before the colonists' Christian god was brought to these shores to sanctify their terrorism, their slavery, their hatred of children, their oppression of women, their holocausts. But that is impossible. So all I look forward to the utter destruction of the apparatus of death known as Amerika -- not the people, not the beautiful land, but the machinery, the State, the capitalism, the Christianity and all that it stands for. I look forward to a future where I will have children with Amerika, and they will be the new Indians.
Mitchel Cohen is co-editor of "Green Politix", the national newspaper of the Greens/Green Party USA,, and organizes with the NoSpray Coalition and the Brooklyn Greens.
In memorium. Lest we forget. The First Thanksgiving
From the Community Endeavor News, November, 1995, as reprinted in Healing Global Wounds, Fall, 1996
The first official Thanksgiving wasn't a festive gathering of Indians and Pilgrims, but rather a celebration of the massacre of 700 Pequot men, women and children, an anthropologist says. Due to age and illness his voice cracks as he talks about the holiday, but William B. Newell, 84, talks with force as he discusses Thanksgiving. Newell, a Penobscot, has degrees from two universities, and was the former chairman of the anthropology department at the University of Connecticut.
"Thanksgiving Day was first officially proclaimed by the Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1637 to commemorate the massacre of 700 men, women and children who were celebrating their annual green corn dance-Thanksgiving Day to them-in their own house," Newell said.
"Gathered in this place of meeting they were attacked by mercenaries and Dutch and English. The Indians were ordered from the building and as they came forth they were shot down. The rest were burned alive in the building," he said.
Newell based his research on studies of Holland Documents and the 13 volume Colonial Documentary History, both thick sets of letters and reports from colonial officials to their superiors and the king in England, and the private papers of Sir William Johnson, British Indian agent for the New York colony for 30 years in the mid-1600s.
"My research is authentic because it is documentary," Newell said. "You can't get anything more accurate than that because it is first hand. It is not hearsay."
Newell said the next 100 Thanksgivings commemorated the killing of the Indians at what is now Groton, Ct. [home of a nuclear submarine base] rather than a celebration with them. He said the image of Indians and Pilgrims sitting around a large table to celebrate Thanksgiving Day was "fictitious" although Indians did share food with the first settlers.
Originally published in counterpunch.org
Reproduced with permission from the author.
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Dr. TONY MARTIN TO SPEAK TO AFRIKANS IN LONDON
Posted: Thursday, November 27, 2003
www.blacksandjews.com/TMartin.London.html
NO LONGER SHALL THEY KILL OUR PROPHETS WHILE WE STAND ASIDE AND LOOK
On behalf of Bro. Ldr. Mbandaka and the ALKEBU-LAN REVIVALIST MOVEMENT.
TENDAI MWARI
Gone are the days when Afrikans will tolerate the persecution of our truth tellers, or the paternalism of those who have a vested interest in the perpetual oppression and exploitation of our people. The massive international outrage of Afrikan people, sparked by the dis-invitation of Baba Tony Martin, from the Mayor of London's 'First Voice' conference - 25th October 2003 - is a case in point.
Leading Pan-Afrikan organisations in Britain have responded by inviting Baba Tony Martin to address the Afrikan community - live in London - on Sunday 30th November and Monday 1st December. The Afrikan United Action Front (AUAF - a Pan-Afrikan coalition), Alkebu-Lan Revivalist Movement, New Black Panther Party and Afrikan-Caribbean Leadership Council pooled their resources in organising and promoting an action packed weekend involving radio appearances, a press conference and a reception dinner in honour of our master teacher - Baba Tony Martin.
The organisers have the firm, active and or moral support of the Black United Front Parliament, Nation of Islam, Ethiopian World Federation, Global Afrikan Congress, Pan-Afrikan Youth Organisation, Ethiopian Afrikan Black International Congress/Bobo Shanti, Hackney Black People's Association, Galaxy Radio and Power Jam - Nubian Forum. The event has also been sponsored by the following community businesses: Yemanja - A Window To Afrika, Cyber Kitchen Internet Café, Yum Yum Restaurant and Takeaway, Hylton Estates Consultancy Services, Meroe Jewellery, Audio Visual Media Services, Maarifa Books, Cummin' Up Caribbean Caterers & Take Away, Kwazen Books and Nubian Minds. Other sponsors wish to remain anonymous, whilst individuals have volunteered contributions to ensure the success of the events.
The overwhelming, widespread response is not only an act of defiance but self-determination - emphasising that we are our own masters and that we have taken back the power of life and death we once gave others over us. It also explodes the myth propagated by the 1990 Trust that supporters of Tony Martin were "a small number". In fact, we are confident that the Afrikan community will turn out in a tremendous force to affirm our love and appreciation of Baba Tony Martin, as well as to send a clear message to the powers that be.
Predictably, the Jewish lobby has been quick into action, bellowing threats and demands down our telephone. The "London Jewish News", on seeing our promotional leaflet, wanted confirmation as to whether the events were 'actually' going ahead. When we did not reply, at 11:24 am on Wed 12th November, they issued us a deadline for "12:00 noon or 1:00pm" - by when they would expect a response.
This smacked of intimidation and harassment which should come as no surprise to any of us who is aware of the Jewish onslaught against Baba Tony Martin, Nana Kwaku Duah, (Dr. Leonard Jeffries), Minister Louis Farrakhan, Al Sharpton (even Jesse Jackson and Cornel West), etc. it was as though they presumed to give us a chance to repent of our sins before they pronounced our eternal damnation.
This exposes disingenuous attempts to underplay the dominant role of the Jewish lobby in instigating the infamous dis-invitation and highlights the sheer gallantry of Bro. Lee in taking the 'flak'. Furthermore, although Bro. Lee and co. denied that Baba Martin was being accused of anti-Semitism, the Jewish Chronicle of 17th October 2003, boasted on its front page: "Livingstone ban anti-Jewish historian from conference.
Is a woman anti-male, because she reports her rapist? Of course not! Why then are Afrikans "anti-Semitic" for reporting the facts about Jewish involvement in the Maafa (Afrikan enslavement and oppression). In context, Jewish hostility towards Baba Martin or any outspoken Afrikan is no less sinister than a psychopathic racist who stalks, defames, incarcerates or eliminates his victims to prevent them from exposing him.
Paradoxically, the conference was entitled "First Voice" -- a seemingly apt title for a conference concerning the history of the 'first people'. Yet the voice of the foremost scholar on the legacy of our most outstanding historical figure - Marcus Garvey - was silenced.
Such contradictions reflect the very insidious nature of the Maafa. Afrikans enslaved: whipped, raped, maimed, murdered, massacred, worked from sun up to sun down without pay - all in the name of God, humanity and civilisation. Afrikans bound and shackled in ships named Integrity, Brotherhood, Humanity, Mission of Mercy and of course; "The Good Ship Jesus" - captained by the Rev. Sir John Hawkins. Afrikan women called wench, bitch, belly warmer, etc. yet made to breast-feed little white babies.
Thus, in the name of all things good and pious, was the total dehumanisation of Afrikan people institutionalised, denying us, inter alia, the right to speak the unspeakable, to stand tall with our heads up, our backs straight, and the look "the man" in the eye -- called reckless eyeballing. Violators of such codes were called "uppity niggers" and had their tongues and eyes gorged out, or their back mutilated by the enslavers whip or torch. In more recent times, they have been murdered, incarcerated, vilified, deported or banned - Omowale Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King Jr., Fred Hampton, Mumia Abu Jamal, Kwame Ture, Louis Farrakhan, Tony Martin, etc., etc., etc.
But, "How long shall they kill our prophets, while we stand aside and look?" The voice of the Afrikan community says: "No longer!" We will stand firm, with our heads high and our backs straight. We will look "the man" straight in the eye and defend the right of our teachers to teach, our leaders to lead and our people to know and speak our truth and 'yet' stay alive.
We are our own liberators! We have the power to transform oppression into opportunity and this malady into a miracle. The miracle of Afrikan people coming together in the true spirit of Umoja - unity; Kujichagulia -- self-determination; Ujima - collective work and responsibility; Ujamaa -- co-operative economics; Nia -- purpose; Kuumba - creativity; Imani -- faith; toward fulfilling our Pan-Afrikan object - the total liberation and unification of Afrika and all African people, under a just Afrikan World system.
Come one! Come all! The drums of Afrika call!
Lee Jasper Now Wants To Share A Platform With Professor Tony Martin
A month after banning the internationally renowned scholar - Professor Tony Martin - the world's leading authority on the life and work of Marcus Mosiah Garvey - from the First Voice Conference on 25 October 2003, on the basis that Professor Martin had "shared platforms" with those holding "anti-Semitic" views, it now appears that Lee Jasper wishes to share the same platform with Professor Martin.
The remarkable about turn - which coincided with the announcement by
leading UK based Pan Africanists of Professor Martin's impending lecture tour visit to London - was revealed in an announcement made on a radio programme hosted by Henry Bonsu and broadcast by BBC Radio London on Sunday 23 November 2003.
In what has been viewed by some as an attempt to divert the community's attention from Professor Martin's lecture tour, it was announced that Mr Bonsu's backers were attempting to organise a studio "debate" between Professor Martin and Jasper, who at the time of the announcement was already participating in the broadcast by telephone. Bonsu, who had previously made no reference to the widespread storm of controversy sparked by the ban on Professor Martin in his weekly broadcasts (see: www.blacksandjews.com), suggested to Jasper that he might like to debate the issues surrounding the ban with Professor Martin. Jasper, whose lengthy CV boasts memberships of many organisations virtually unknown to the community, including The Black Jewish Forum, responded by saying that arrangements for any such debate should be made "through his office".
Already some in the community have expressed fears that any such broadcast studio "debate" will take the form of some sort of attempted high tech lynching of Professor Martin at the hands of carefully selected and organised lobbyists from outside the African community with the many thousands of Africans who were outraged by the ban imposed on Professor Martin being excluded from participation in the phone-in. A number of people have already drawn attention to the fact that Jasper has refused a number of requests to publicly debate the reasons for Professor Martin's ban on London community radio station, Galaxy Radio.
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Black groups defy ban on Tony Martin
Posted: Friday, November 14, 2003
by Terry Joseph
TRINI Professor Tony Martin, banned last month from addressing a Black History Month conference in London by Mayor Ken Livingstone will, in two weeks' time, address the very community denied an opportunity to hear him on October 25.
Professor of Africana Studies, Wellesley College, USA and internationally acclaimed scholar and authority on the life of Marcus Garvey, Dr. Martin was invited to speak at the London conference but later "dis-invited", Mayor Livingstone's advisor on race relations, Lee Jasper, citing Dr. Martin's presence on platforms described as habouring anti-semitic sentiments.
Jasper wrote: "Having confirmed with you that you attended and spoke at David Irving's "Real History Conference" in 2001 and the Institute for Historical Review's annual conference in 2002 and that both of these conferences included speakers known for their anti-Semitic and racist activities including Holocaust denial, the Mayor's Office had decided to withdraw its invitation to you to address the First Voice conference on Saturday 25 October."
The distance between the Mayor's office and London's black community widened after a front-page article in a Jewish newspaper headlined the October 17 issue with: "Livingstone bars 'anti-Jewish' historian from conference."
The Jewish Chronicle quoted correspondence between Louise Ellman (Labour MP for Liverpool Riverside and vice-chair of the Inter-Parliamentary Council against Anti Semitism) and Jasper, saying the exchange constituted the basis both for his "prompt and appropriate action" and noted Ellman's "delight at the mayor's quick move."
A furore quickly erupted worldwide.
Trinidad and Tobago's Emancipation Support Committee joined the protest, sending a scorcher of letter to Jasper, signed by chairman Khafra Kambon, expressing abhorrence at the withdrawal of the invitation to Dr. Martin, calling it an irony in Black History Month and demanding Jasper's resignation.
Hitting back at the ban, a consortium of black-oriented organizations has invited Dr. Martin to London to speak on November 30 and December 1.
Dr. Martin advised The Express that he has accepted and will, in the first assignment, talk on the Jewish Onslaught: Exposing the Jewish role in the Black Holocaust - the very topic at which Jasper and Livingstone took offence. The talk takes place at Trini's on Rye Lane in Peckham. Also on the agenda that day is a performance of the play Anansi & King Bling.
http://www.trinicenter.com/Terryj/
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Bolivia in Historical and Regional Context
Posted: Thursday, October 30, 2003
By Forrest Hylton, www.counterpunch.org
Slave driver
the table has turned
Catch a fire
you're gonna get burned.
--Bob Marley, Slave Driver
On October 17, the Day of National Dignity-which commemorates the greatest achievement of socialist martyr Marcelo Quiroga Santa Cruz: the nationalization of Gulf Oil in 1969-former Bolivian President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, his family and inner circle (Minister of Defense Carlos Sánchez Berzaín, Minister of Government Yerko Kukoc, and Minister of the Interior Jose Luis Harb) fled to Miami, though not before looting $85 million from the Bolivian Central Bank of course. The party that had designed and implemented neoliberalism in Bolivia, the National Revolutionary Movement (MNR), had finally been broken by overwhelming, non-violent popular opposition, though at great human cost. In less than a month, troops under the command of the MNR killed more than 84 civilians and 15 conscripts who refused to fire on unarmed protestors. The MNR disappeared some 40 people, injured more than 500 and detained an untold number in a desperate effort to maintain power and preserve the neoliberal status quo. The "gringo," as Sánchez de Lozada was called, had gone home. What had, until recently, been a clever piece of graffiti became a reality, and the Bolivian majority-not multinationals and their tiny minority of compradors-had decided to determine the fate of the second-largest gas reserves in Latin America. Since the Spanish "discovery" of Cerro Rico in Potosí in 1545, laboring Bolivians have suffered from the looting and export of their natural resources for the benefit of others. Their memory is long, their patience has run out, and their resilience is unspeakable.
As darkness descended on the Plaza San Francisco, the symbolic heart of the nation's capital, truckloads of miners and Quechua-Aymara peasants from Oruro and Potosí arrived to march and celebrate their triumph. They chanted, "Yes we could!"-a parody of "Sí se puede!", Sánchez de Lozada's campaign slogan-and, "Goni! You bastard! The people have defeated you!" Earlier in the afternoon, in the Plaza San Francisco Alteños (people from the Aymara city of El Alto, located on the upper rim of La Paz); neighborhood groups from the steep hillsides of La Paz; along with miners, teachers, students, market women, butchers and bakers, truckers and taxi drivers; staged the largest rally in Bolivian history. Estimates run as high as 500,000. The Wiphala-considered the flag of the oppressed, indigenous Bolivian nations-flew side by side with the Bolivian flag, as insurgents re-appropriated national symbols from the dominant race/class, effectively laying claim to the nation that has never been willing to make a place for them as political equals and stewards of an economy based on collective labor, land use, and rational use of natural resources.
On October 18, when truckloads of miners and Aymara-Quechua community peasants ascended from La Paz and passed El Alto on their way home, thousands of Alteños lined the streets to cheer them on, provide them with food and water for punishing trip, and express gratitude for the solidarity they had received. Architects of the eleven-day general strike that brought the capital to a standstill-especially after a general strike was called in solidarity with the twenty-six Alteños massacred on October 12, the 511th anniversary of the genocide initiated by Columbus-Alteños knew that they, the proletarianized peasantry, along with brother and sister Aymara community peasants in the Lake Titicaca region, could not have overthrown the government without practical support from rest of the country's social movements. These are listed in descending order of impact: 1) coca growers from the eastern Chapare lowlands, 2) Quechua-Aymara community peasants from the southern highlands and valleys of Potosí and Sucre, 3) the miners from Huanuni, Oruro, 4) the multi-ethnic, cross-class civic movements that shut down Cochabamba, Sucre, Potosí and Oruro on the 14th and 15th 5) prominent middle-class intellectuals, human rights activists, professionals, students and citizens who launched a hunger strike on the afternoon of October 15.
Many analysts see recent events as part of a clear pattern established in Ecuador in 1999 and repeated in Argentina and Peru in the new millennium, whereby loose coalitions of popular movements, mobilized against the neoliberal model and the political parties and/or politicians associated with it, overthrow governments without being able to impose an alternative economic model and a new set of political arrangements. While superficially plausible, such comparisons overlook the depth and sources of the insurrectionary tradition in Bolivia, elide the question of the distinctive characteristics of the armed forces in each country, and miss the potential significance of the "October Days" for the Bolivia's future. A tradition of Aymara-Quechua community peasant insurgency stretches back to the late eighteenth century and was transformed through successive struggles over collective land rights and self-government in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; as historian Adolfo Gilly has pointed out recently in La Jornada, it forms the bedrock of a tradition of popular insurrection without parallel in the hemisphere.
Bolivians are now living through the most radical moment of republican history since the National Revolution of 1952, in which Trotskyist-led tin miners militias triggered and urban insurrection that defeated the Bolivian army-which decomposed rapidly-as peasant militias in the western highlands and especially in the valleys of Cochabamba staged land takeovers and smashed landlord rule in the countryside, handing power to the MNR. President Victor Paz Estenssoro-like many MNR leaders, a middle-class intellectual from Cochabamba-ratified the land takeovers, which would provide the MNR with deep reservoirs of support in the countryside for decades, and nationalized the country's major tin mines, like Siglo XX and Cataviri. Opposed to imperialism and the oligarchy composed of merchant-miner-landlords, the MNR seized control of the insurrectionary movement for its own benefit, but also imposed significant structural reforms. They aimed to modernize the economy, create an internal market and "civilize" the Aymara-Quechua peasant communities through compulsory schooling and military service. They helped bury the memory of the traditions upon which the revolution was ultimately built.
Trapped between mounting US imperial pressure and a tin miners' trade union movement led by Trotskyist and Stalinist parties-which formed the center of gravity of the Bolivian Workers' Central (COB) that aglutinated of civil society-splintered into warring factions above and, through clientelist control of peasant trade unions, below. The MNR grew progressively weaker vis-à-vis both the US government and the COB, and with the backing of the US government, René Barrientos became the first military leader to highjack the revolution. Since he spoke fluent Quechua and employed classic forms of populist demagoguery to great effect, he solidified a clientelist following in the countryside loyal only to him, mobilizing peasant militias to crush miners' strikes in what was known as the "military-peasant" pact. Though under Juan Jose Torres and the Popular Assembly (1969-71), proletarian-led radicalism enjoyed a brief upsurge, the military-peasant pact lasted through the neo-fascist dictatorship of Hugo Banzer Suárez (1971-78), and the question of self-determination for Aymara and Quechua peasant communities had just begun to be raised.
The emergence of a radical Aymara peasant trade union federation (CSUTCB) out of clandestinity in 1979 rejuvenated the COB, which, together with Left political parties, overthrew two violent-albeit short-lived-dictatorships, electing a center-left coalition (the UDP) in 1982 that was to go beyond "the incomplete revolution" toward some version of state-led welfare capitalism (known in those days as "socialismo"), but with a new demand: self-determination for Aymara-Quechua peasant communities.
Instead, with the MNR and the MIR (Revolutionary Leftist Movement) engaging in Parliamentary warfare against Left opposition parties, and the miners' movement increasing in militancy and radicalism, the UDP proved unable to govern, and popular hopes of national sovereignty-rekindled throughout the 1970s by Marcelo Quiroga Santa Cruz among others-were buried. With inflation running at 24,000% annually, in 1985, Victor Paz Estenssoro took his last turn in office and dismantled dependent state capitalism, calling on a young, American-educated technocrat-Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada-to redesign the relationship between the State, society and the economy, which resulted in a neoliberal blueprint: DS 21060. The tin mines were privatized in one swift motion, the miners' movement crushed with state terror, and 20,000 miners were "relocalized" (a euphemism for firing and displacement). Lacking strong allies in the proletarian movement, and rent by internal divisions and sectarianism, the CSUTCB fell into decline. Meanwhile, the coca growers' movement of peasant colonizers in the eastern lowlands of the Chapare-led chiefly by ex-miners-turned into the most militant and confrontational of Bolivia's social movements just as George H.W. Bush had begun to ratchet up the intensity of the "drug war" in the Andes. Current US Ambassador David Greenlee, then a CIA agent working as an attaché, designed the counterinsurgent strategy of forced coca eradication.
Because of the thoroughness of his privatization programs, during Sánchez de Lozada's first term as president (1993-97), the IMF and the World Bank held Bolivia up as a model for "LDCs" around the world, and until 2000, the neoliberal political parties-MNR, MIR, CONDEPA, UCS, NFR-enjoyed a monopoly of legitimate political representation. However, with the fight against privatization in the Cochabamba "water wars," the popular movements scored their first victory in almost two decades. This was reinforced by an Aymara resurgence in the highlands under the direction of Felipe Quispe and more combative CSUTCB. As the neoliberal façade began to crack under President Hugo Banzer Suarez, the former dictator, state terror increased and the political parties began to watch their legitimacy erode. This is the context in which the coca growers, Aymara highland peasants, proletarianized peasants from El Alto and La Paz, along with disaffected middle class professionals and intellectuals, voted for two new opposition parties, Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) and the Indian Revolutionary Movement (MIP), which between them picked up forty-two seats in Parliament-a historic first. Evo Morales, leader of the coca growers' trade union federations and their political vehicle, MAS, lost the presidential elections by less than 1.5%.
In October, led by the proletarianized Aymara peasantry of El Alto, Aymara peasant communities of the western highlands; and reinforced by the Quechua-Aymara peasant communities of the southern highlands and valleys, as well as the Quechua-speaking mestizo coca growers' and colonizers of the eastern lowlands; plus the urban middle classes of La Paz, Cochabamba, Santa Cruz, Tarija and Oruro who took to the streets and the airwaves, long and distinguished traditions of insurrection have enjoyed a renaissance, and there can be no doubt which sector was the driving force.
What began as the most important highland Aymara uprising in Bolivia since the Federal War of 1899 became, in a matter of days, become a nationwide, non-violent insurrection-a national revolution in march. Unlike the national revolution of 1952, which brought Sánchez de Lozada's MNR to power on the back of insurgent miners' and peasants' militias, were it to materialize, the new revolution would hold out the possibility that the colonial contradiction that has structured the Bolivian republic since its inception-the economic exploitation, political domination and racist oppression of the Indian peasant and proletarianized majority-will finally be resolved. It is important to emphasize that the new nationalism in anything but an atavistic, separatist and racially exclusive backlash against neoliberal imperialism. If, at the macro-level of the state and public policy, the new revolution recognizes the demands for popular sovereignty and self-government, and the forms of trade union and Indian community organization from which those demands arise, it will be a world-historical first that with repercussions throughout Latin America, Africa, India and Southeast Asia. In spite of the colonialist terror that has descended on the new millennium in the Middle East and Central Asia, the poorest, most indigenous and most geographically isolated country of the South American continent may well provide a beacon of light to the rest of the world.
The new revolutionary process, whose outcome is of course uncertain rather than guaranteed, demands an end to multinational and US imperial domination, rejects the FTAA, insists on the right to grow and commercialize the coca leaf as well as control and regulate the use of natural resources for the benefit of the majorities that produce Bolivia's wealth. It also includes the demand for political autonomy, representation and self-government for highland and lowland native groups whose forms of social reproduction and political struggle are non-liberal and even non-capitalist.
One thing is certain: the era of the MNR-led coalitions is over, and with it, the neoliberal political-economic system implemented in 1985-86. The relation of the State to the economy and society will change, but it is much too early to say how or when. Though neither Evo Morales nor Felipe Quispe led the struggles of the "October Days," the rank-and-file, especially in El Alto, have shown what they can accomplish on their own initiative. This means that there will be two Constituent Assemblies and a form of dual power: one will take place in Parliament among delegated political representatives, and another in the streets, neighborhoods, trade unions, Indian peasant communities; among miners, coca growers, students and, perhaps, even middle-class intellectuals and personalities. There is a country, if not yet a world, to win.
Forrest Hylton is conducting doctoral research in history in Bolivia. This article originally appeared in the South African paper This Day. He can be reached at forresthylton@hotmail.com.
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