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The Black Book of U.S. Imperialism: Ward Churchill's Roosting Chickens
Todd Gitlin, Paul Berman and assorted intellectuals of the “decent left” have earned their keep arguing that anti-imperialism is nothing but an echo chamber of nihilism, oedipal rage and tacit support for whomever the governing class declares the enemy. Once upon a time their kind derided the Communist left as window dressing for the gulag; now they argue with parallel duplicity that anti-imperialists are shills for “Islamo-fascist” death cults and suicide bombers. As the gate-keepers of acceptable dissent, that is to say “none,” they rarely take time to note what it is, this America, they’ve declared their loyalty to and what it is exactly the “anti-Americans” oppose.
------------
REVIEW:
On the Justice of Roosting Chickens
By Ward Churchill
AK Press, 2004
------------
Todd Gitlin, Paul Berman and assorted intellectuals of the “decent left” have earned their keep arguing that anti-imperialism is nothing but an echo chamber of nihilism, oedipal rage and tacit support for whomever the governing class declares the enemy. Once upon a time their kind derided the Communist left as window dressing for the gulag; now they argue with parallel duplicity that anti-imperialists are shills for “Islamo-fascist” death cults and suicide bombers. As the gate-keepers of acceptable dissent, that is to say “none,” they rarely take time to note what it is, this America, they’ve declared their loyalty to and what it is exactly the “anti-Americans” oppose.
Although his book isn’t dedicated to them, Ward Churchill’s On the Justice of Roosting Chickens is a necessary intervention into not just the debates on the “new imperialism,” but the plot and themes of the United States of America on the stage of world history. Extensive and carefully documented, Churchill’s chronology catalogues America’s genocides and conquests from the Indian Wars up through the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. He wasn’t surprised they happened, just that it took so long.
Churchill’s impatience with the official delusions of eternal innocence, inherently “good intentions” and American exceptionalism goes beyond scapegoating the current cabal running the show. He approaches his atrocity list of American misdeeds from Malcolm X’s basic premise: “We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock. Plymouth rock landed on us.”
What emerges “is the portrait of a country which has not experienced a time when it was actually ‘at peace’ since its inception. Each and every year for the past 226 years, the U.S. military has been in action somewhere, and quite often in a lot of places simultaneously. Far from comprising the history of ‘the most peace-loving of nations,’ the record is that of one of the most constantly belligerent countries—perhaps the most—in the annals of humankind. Far from ‘fighting for freedom and democracy,’” Churchill writes, “the U.S. has with equal consistency fought to repeal it anywhere and everywhere, not excluding the domestic sphere of the U.S. itself. The American public may be conveniently oblivious to these realities, but the rest of the world is not.”
Did we have the attacks of September 11 coming? Well, it depends on who “we” are.
---------------------
WHICH WE?
In the shadow of the towers on Sept. 10, all the inequalities and waste of the American empire were on triumphant display.
Entitled and oblivious, arrogant and thrilled that they owned the world, the ruling classes and their courtiers walked the streets at ease, drinking their Colombian coffee, sweetened with Haitian sugar, flavored with African cocoa, from cups made in China – all prepared by Mexican migrants in the back of the house. The neighborhood brothels were busy because times were good for the men with $200 for a lunchtime fuck from some recent Russian immigrant trying to buy her freedom in this, the best of all possible worlds.
Looked at from this angle, September 11 was the loudest alarm clock that ever went off. The battle between “us and them” isn’t the one advertised on TV.
“Americans will either become active parts of the solution to what they and their country have wrought, or they will remain equally active parts of the problem. There is no third option,” writes Churchill.
As with his prior books, particularly Pacifism As Pathology, Churchill reserves a special spite for the self-styled progressives who acknowledge some, or even all of imperialism’s horrors in order to demonstrate the ultimate justice of the system. Undercutting his critique is the strange satisfaction he finds in the idea of “two, three, many 911s” should we not rise to his standard of effective dissent.
That might make sense if millions of Americans weren’t horrified with the path the country is on or that the most obvious beneficiary of terrorism isn’t consistently the most reactionary elements of every society that has faced it. Some people got their karmic backlash on September 11. Some of us were collateral damage.
None of that matters to Churchill because he writes off not just “America” as an enterprise ever-drowning in its original sins, but the “unending ranks of average Iowa farm boys who have so willingly pulled the triggers, launched the missiles and dropped the cluster bombs.”
For all his righteous anger, the tragic flaw throughout his entire history as provocateur author is to discount, or at least seriously downplay, the possibility that everyday people can rise above the mendacity of our rulers.
If Iowa’s farmboys are beyond hope, even Churchill’s most damning evidence is little more than justification for the cynical paralysis of passive support for terrorism. Flipping America the bird might be satisfying, but it fails to engage the matrix of conflict within America or see any positive path those taking responsibility for the crimes of empire can engage. As Arundhati Roy recently put it, “Anti-americanism is the anti-imperialism of fools.”
In a sense, the Gitlins and Churchills of the world deserve each other. They agree that the only options for allegiance are between the same “us” and “them” that Bush served up.
---------------------
Dealing With the Real
Emerging from the charnel house of the first world war, the most successful anti-war movement in history not only pulled Russia out of the war, but brought down the Tsar that turned farmboys from Ukraine into killers. If they could do that back then, then I’m not willing to give up on Iowa (or Brooklyn) just yet.
In that same spirit, Monthly Review Press’ anthology "Pox Americana" delivers a three-pronged analysis of the current situation: informative histories of U.S. imperialism, what has and hasn’t changed with the rise of the Neo-conservatives and a half-dozen well-grounded essays on the possibility and challenges of building a popular anti-imperialist movement inside the USA from some of the people who are trying.
The depth and diversity of the contributors, including Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Immanual Wallerstein, Barbara Epstein and Bill Fletcher reminds us that we’re not starting from zero. America’s history isn’t just a slaughter bench, but a constant struggle. With eyes to the future, "Pox Americana" is ammunition for the coming war.
REVIEW:
On the Justice of Roosting Chickens
By Ward Churchill
AK Press, 2004
------------
Todd Gitlin, Paul Berman and assorted intellectuals of the “decent left” have earned their keep arguing that anti-imperialism is nothing but an echo chamber of nihilism, oedipal rage and tacit support for whomever the governing class declares the enemy. Once upon a time their kind derided the Communist left as window dressing for the gulag; now they argue with parallel duplicity that anti-imperialists are shills for “Islamo-fascist” death cults and suicide bombers. As the gate-keepers of acceptable dissent, that is to say “none,” they rarely take time to note what it is, this America, they’ve declared their loyalty to and what it is exactly the “anti-Americans” oppose.
Although his book isn’t dedicated to them, Ward Churchill’s On the Justice of Roosting Chickens is a necessary intervention into not just the debates on the “new imperialism,” but the plot and themes of the United States of America on the stage of world history. Extensive and carefully documented, Churchill’s chronology catalogues America’s genocides and conquests from the Indian Wars up through the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. He wasn’t surprised they happened, just that it took so long.
Churchill’s impatience with the official delusions of eternal innocence, inherently “good intentions” and American exceptionalism goes beyond scapegoating the current cabal running the show. He approaches his atrocity list of American misdeeds from Malcolm X’s basic premise: “We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock. Plymouth rock landed on us.”
What emerges “is the portrait of a country which has not experienced a time when it was actually ‘at peace’ since its inception. Each and every year for the past 226 years, the U.S. military has been in action somewhere, and quite often in a lot of places simultaneously. Far from comprising the history of ‘the most peace-loving of nations,’ the record is that of one of the most constantly belligerent countries—perhaps the most—in the annals of humankind. Far from ‘fighting for freedom and democracy,’” Churchill writes, “the U.S. has with equal consistency fought to repeal it anywhere and everywhere, not excluding the domestic sphere of the U.S. itself. The American public may be conveniently oblivious to these realities, but the rest of the world is not.”
Did we have the attacks of September 11 coming? Well, it depends on who “we” are.
---------------------
WHICH WE?
In the shadow of the towers on Sept. 10, all the inequalities and waste of the American empire were on triumphant display.
Entitled and oblivious, arrogant and thrilled that they owned the world, the ruling classes and their courtiers walked the streets at ease, drinking their Colombian coffee, sweetened with Haitian sugar, flavored with African cocoa, from cups made in China – all prepared by Mexican migrants in the back of the house. The neighborhood brothels were busy because times were good for the men with $200 for a lunchtime fuck from some recent Russian immigrant trying to buy her freedom in this, the best of all possible worlds.
Looked at from this angle, September 11 was the loudest alarm clock that ever went off. The battle between “us and them” isn’t the one advertised on TV.
“Americans will either become active parts of the solution to what they and their country have wrought, or they will remain equally active parts of the problem. There is no third option,” writes Churchill.
As with his prior books, particularly Pacifism As Pathology, Churchill reserves a special spite for the self-styled progressives who acknowledge some, or even all of imperialism’s horrors in order to demonstrate the ultimate justice of the system. Undercutting his critique is the strange satisfaction he finds in the idea of “two, three, many 911s” should we not rise to his standard of effective dissent.
That might make sense if millions of Americans weren’t horrified with the path the country is on or that the most obvious beneficiary of terrorism isn’t consistently the most reactionary elements of every society that has faced it. Some people got their karmic backlash on September 11. Some of us were collateral damage.
None of that matters to Churchill because he writes off not just “America” as an enterprise ever-drowning in its original sins, but the “unending ranks of average Iowa farm boys who have so willingly pulled the triggers, launched the missiles and dropped the cluster bombs.”
For all his righteous anger, the tragic flaw throughout his entire history as provocateur author is to discount, or at least seriously downplay, the possibility that everyday people can rise above the mendacity of our rulers.
If Iowa’s farmboys are beyond hope, even Churchill’s most damning evidence is little more than justification for the cynical paralysis of passive support for terrorism. Flipping America the bird might be satisfying, but it fails to engage the matrix of conflict within America or see any positive path those taking responsibility for the crimes of empire can engage. As Arundhati Roy recently put it, “Anti-americanism is the anti-imperialism of fools.”
In a sense, the Gitlins and Churchills of the world deserve each other. They agree that the only options for allegiance are between the same “us” and “them” that Bush served up.
---------------------
Dealing With the Real
Emerging from the charnel house of the first world war, the most successful anti-war movement in history not only pulled Russia out of the war, but brought down the Tsar that turned farmboys from Ukraine into killers. If they could do that back then, then I’m not willing to give up on Iowa (or Brooklyn) just yet.
In that same spirit, Monthly Review Press’ anthology "Pox Americana" delivers a three-pronged analysis of the current situation: informative histories of U.S. imperialism, what has and hasn’t changed with the rise of the Neo-conservatives and a half-dozen well-grounded essays on the possibility and challenges of building a popular anti-imperialist movement inside the USA from some of the people who are trying.
The depth and diversity of the contributors, including Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Immanual Wallerstein, Barbara Epstein and Bill Fletcher reminds us that we’re not starting from zero. America’s history isn’t just a slaughter bench, but a constant struggle. With eyes to the future, "Pox Americana" is ammunition for the coming war.
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Oh fuck Ward Churchill. The guy's book is a sick apology for mass murder. I'm sorry that so many "radicals" line up behind this clown.
"For all his righteous anger, the tragic flaw throughout [Churchill's] entire history as provocateur author is to discount, or at least seriously downplay, the possibility that everyday people can rise above the mendacity of our rulers.
"If Iowa’s farmboys are beyond hope, even Churchill’s most damning evidence is little more than justification for the cynical paralysis of passive support for terrorism. Flipping America the bird might be satisfying, but it fails to engage the matrix of conflict within America or see any positive path those taking responsibility for the crimes of empire can engage. As Arundhati Roy recently put it, 'anti-Americanism is the anti-imperialism of fools.'
"In a sense, the Gitlins and Churchills of the world deserve each other. They agree that the only options for allegiance are between the same 'us' and 'them' that Bush served up."
"If Iowa’s farmboys are beyond hope, even Churchill’s most damning evidence is little more than justification for the cynical paralysis of passive support for terrorism. Flipping America the bird might be satisfying, but it fails to engage the matrix of conflict within America or see any positive path those taking responsibility for the crimes of empire can engage. As Arundhati Roy recently put it, 'anti-Americanism is the anti-imperialism of fools.'
"In a sense, the Gitlins and Churchills of the world deserve each other. They agree that the only options for allegiance are between the same 'us' and 'them' that Bush served up."
"Gitlins and Churchills of the world deserve each other."
The main similarity is that neither really believe what they say and make money and gain publicity by saying things more intended to provoke than inform. I wouldnt be surprised if both agreed 100% politically if you ever got them to drop the act.
Churchill posses as very radical outlaw stalked by the government and speaking truths that could get him in trouble but in reality he is a "Professor of Ethnic Studies and Coordinator of American Indian Studies at the University of Colorado" and "Associate Director of the Center for Studies of Ethnicity and Race in America at the institution" (see http://www.speakoutnow.org/People/WardChurchill.html ). I tend to like what he says even though I think hes a phoney and his rants that offend people are more in the style of Eminem or Marilyn Manson than a real revolutionary. I mean how seriously can you take someone who refers to those in the WTC as little Eichmann and lectures on COINTELPRO but at the same time is a well paid state employee (in a pretty conservative state).
Gitlin is even funnier in that he tries to both appear to be a leader of the left and denounce everyone else on the left as too radical. At one level he is just a cranky old teacher (at NYU http://www.nyu.edu/fas/Faculty/GitlinTodd.html ) who hates his job and keeps talking about how good the old days were compared to now than. But he does seem to like the cameras and has gotten a good amount of publicity in the last year or so mainly whining on camera. His actual views are probably the same as Churchill's actual views but instead of complaining that "the kids these days" have moved to far to the right (as is Chuchill's schtick) he likes to complain they have moved to far to the left. Both seem to fall into the midlife crisis category in terms of seeing their own youth and later decline reflected in society rather than realizing the change was mainly in themselves.
The main similarity is that neither really believe what they say and make money and gain publicity by saying things more intended to provoke than inform. I wouldnt be surprised if both agreed 100% politically if you ever got them to drop the act.
Churchill posses as very radical outlaw stalked by the government and speaking truths that could get him in trouble but in reality he is a "Professor of Ethnic Studies and Coordinator of American Indian Studies at the University of Colorado" and "Associate Director of the Center for Studies of Ethnicity and Race in America at the institution" (see http://www.speakoutnow.org/People/WardChurchill.html ). I tend to like what he says even though I think hes a phoney and his rants that offend people are more in the style of Eminem or Marilyn Manson than a real revolutionary. I mean how seriously can you take someone who refers to those in the WTC as little Eichmann and lectures on COINTELPRO but at the same time is a well paid state employee (in a pretty conservative state).
Gitlin is even funnier in that he tries to both appear to be a leader of the left and denounce everyone else on the left as too radical. At one level he is just a cranky old teacher (at NYU http://www.nyu.edu/fas/Faculty/GitlinTodd.html ) who hates his job and keeps talking about how good the old days were compared to now than. But he does seem to like the cameras and has gotten a good amount of publicity in the last year or so mainly whining on camera. His actual views are probably the same as Churchill's actual views but instead of complaining that "the kids these days" have moved to far to the right (as is Chuchill's schtick) he likes to complain they have moved to far to the left. Both seem to fall into the midlife crisis category in terms of seeing their own youth and later decline reflected in society rather than realizing the change was mainly in themselves.
I agree about churchill--he's a phony, a smart phony, but still a phony.
He has an "interesting" resume. Didn't he fight in Vietnam and write for Soldier of Fortune magazine?
When 911 happened he came out with rhetoric that sounded like the type of shit reactionaries were trying to tar all dissidents with. He seems to derive sick pleasure equating "Iowan farm-boys" with the "white ruling class"--that's some dumb-ass, counter-revolutionary shit.
He has an "interesting" resume. Didn't he fight in Vietnam and write for Soldier of Fortune magazine?
When 911 happened he came out with rhetoric that sounded like the type of shit reactionaries were trying to tar all dissidents with. He seems to derive sick pleasure equating "Iowan farm-boys" with the "white ruling class"--that's some dumb-ass, counter-revolutionary shit.
"When 911 happened he came out with rhetoric that sounded like the type of shit reactionaries were trying to tar all dissidents with. He seems to derive sick pleasure equating "Iowan farm-boys" with the "white ruling class"--that's some dumb-ass, counter-revolutionary shit. "
Iowan farm boys may be yummy and its probably not nice to denounce them, but both Gitlan and Churchill are teachers and thus probably hate Iowan farm boys for falling asleep in class.
Iowan farm boys may be yummy and its probably not nice to denounce them, but both Gitlan and Churchill are teachers and thus probably hate Iowan farm boys for falling asleep in class.
Good to see that people are catching onto Churchill. Unfortunatelty there are probably some naive 20 somethings out there that will believe in this phoney and do some stupid shit.
"l believe in this phoney and do some stupid shit"
Ward may come across as being more radical than thou when it mainly an act, but he never really advocates anything action-wise. His thing about violence vs non-violence has a pretty positive message to get people to stop being so self-righteous His whole schtick about 9/11 creates a reaction that is pretty good at filtering out those who can think from those who just like to go around pretending moral outrage.
Ward may come across as being more radical than thou when it mainly an act, but he never really advocates anything action-wise. His thing about violence vs non-violence has a pretty positive message to get people to stop being so self-righteous His whole schtick about 9/11 creates a reaction that is pretty good at filtering out those who can think from those who just like to go around pretending moral outrage.
To all the cute nicknamed anti-ward churchill commentators: What the fuck have you done lately? Churchill has written in defense of Leonard Peltier, worked to advance understanding of the oppression of native people, and helped remind people that there are still victims of COINTELPRO in prison. So what if he is a paid employee of a university. What do you do for a living and who are you helping by attacking churchill and trying to discredit him? Some folks like to attack Churchill because he's been on target in his attacks on spies in the movement, psuedo radical poseurs, and apologists for the status quo. If you have some legitimate gripe, use your real name and let's see what you've done lately.
Well, I wouldn't take his book so strongly. He has a number of books where the quality of historical coverage is just great, with footnotes and primary sources etc., and moreover, it hasn't been adequately covered by anyone else at all. His other books, like about indian films and how almost every last one done by hollywood is a piece of crap, and on indian law, where he really clarifies what the laws are and how they were broken, are really useful. You don't need to read Pacifism as Pathology, which is a more minor editorial book, and he is really clear that it isn't 'Pacifism is pathology', but that in the hands of certain people, it can be pathological... like where protesters against wars in the 70s and 80s often clapped themselves on the back even though they chose methods that didn't make a dent.
I was just shocked when I read the Cointelpro book that was mainly all these Freedom of Information Act documents that showed things like the fact that the FBI kept sending letters to Martin Luther King to try to get him to kill himself. I mean... once he just demonstrates this stuff in print, not in his own words but by printing the partly blacked out documents they were able to get, you can ignore the author, and just focus on the real history, because the facts are not the result of his biased perspective.
Additionally, I think Churchill is entitled to be a bit bitter... I mean, for godsake.. his roommate was killed in the same room where they illegally killed Fred hampton by indiscriminately firing through the outside wall of the apartment while they were asleep. he was in Vietnam. He had all these friends and associates on the south Dakota reservation where people were being illegally bumped off right and left by what was essentially a military conflict, and ordinary people were all dying young of externally imposed poverty causing a public health crisis. He can be grumpy about that. He never told someone to go do anything irrational.
I was just shocked when I read the Cointelpro book that was mainly all these Freedom of Information Act documents that showed things like the fact that the FBI kept sending letters to Martin Luther King to try to get him to kill himself. I mean... once he just demonstrates this stuff in print, not in his own words but by printing the partly blacked out documents they were able to get, you can ignore the author, and just focus on the real history, because the facts are not the result of his biased perspective.
Additionally, I think Churchill is entitled to be a bit bitter... I mean, for godsake.. his roommate was killed in the same room where they illegally killed Fred hampton by indiscriminately firing through the outside wall of the apartment while they were asleep. he was in Vietnam. He had all these friends and associates on the south Dakota reservation where people were being illegally bumped off right and left by what was essentially a military conflict, and ordinary people were all dying young of externally imposed poverty causing a public health crisis. He can be grumpy about that. He never told someone to go do anything irrational.
yeah, I might have my voice on the CD they did at the AK press warehouse asking a question along those lines... that his assertion that pacifism isn't always appropriate is fairly easy to demonstrate. 90%+ of people agree that defense is acceptable, and it would have been okay to knock off Hitler before he got so far.
but the *real* question is when and how much nonpacifism to use. This is far more difficult. One can't just say that because we all agree that armed defense was okay in one very clear situation, that anyone can just do what they feel is best. for instance, what if you suffer from being crazy and out of touch with reality.. it's not okay for a schizophrenic who iis the only one who perceives a threat, or one cult group that is not accountable to the community to decide they have to sort things out. Can Churchill or anyone else clearly lay out in a couple paragraphs the 'when' and 'what' guidelines.
but the *real* question is when and how much nonpacifism to use. This is far more difficult. One can't just say that because we all agree that armed defense was okay in one very clear situation, that anyone can just do what they feel is best. for instance, what if you suffer from being crazy and out of touch with reality.. it's not okay for a schizophrenic who iis the only one who perceives a threat, or one cult group that is not accountable to the community to decide they have to sort things out. Can Churchill or anyone else clearly lay out in a couple paragraphs the 'when' and 'what' guidelines.
academics theorizing about politics, civil disobedience and violence, with people taking it seriously without distilling it through the filter of their own experience
the old adage about the distinction between "book learning" and "common sense" is worth remembering here
--Richard
the old adage about the distinction between "book learning" and "common sense" is worth remembering here
--Richard
"who are you helping by attacking churchill and trying to discredit him?"
Churchill's 9/11 stuff was presented at public events in a way that strongly suggests he wanted to provoke people. His arguments were reasonable but the way he structured certain of the things he quoted from his own work reveal an effort to proke a response for publicity purposes. I dont think this is that bad or takes away at all from his academic work but I do think its troubling that both the far-right and far-left take the out of context sound bites way too seriously. Perhaps comparing Churchill to Eminem is going a little far but his promotion of his own work does resemble the PR trick used by Paris on the cover of Sonic Jihad (its not soley a way to court publicity theough controversy but also to show people that is possible to say certain things that people at the time might have assumed one just couldnt say)
I'm not sure if I see much positive comming out of respecting our elder Leftist leaders (or anyone soley for actions they took in the distant past). Sure Churchill went though a lot and did good work in the past but so have a lot of people who were never rewarded with a comfy middle class lifestyle. Today Churchill is a mid mannered middle-class (perhaps even upper-middle class) professor and writer who courts publicity (and makes a good amount of money) off radical white youth by playing to white-guilt. Some of the white youth he likes to talk down to are probably from worse off backgrounds them him and many could have been through even more hardship (from childhood sexual abuse to who knows what). I agree with a lot of what he says and does but his overall tone at events is a little bothersome especially when you think about how well his life is now. Some of the tone is just the normal corruption of a celebrity but the race and class based guilt tripping by an upper middle class man of an audience that is almost surely poorer than himself is a little bothersome.
Churchill's 9/11 stuff was presented at public events in a way that strongly suggests he wanted to provoke people. His arguments were reasonable but the way he structured certain of the things he quoted from his own work reveal an effort to proke a response for publicity purposes. I dont think this is that bad or takes away at all from his academic work but I do think its troubling that both the far-right and far-left take the out of context sound bites way too seriously. Perhaps comparing Churchill to Eminem is going a little far but his promotion of his own work does resemble the PR trick used by Paris on the cover of Sonic Jihad (its not soley a way to court publicity theough controversy but also to show people that is possible to say certain things that people at the time might have assumed one just couldnt say)
I'm not sure if I see much positive comming out of respecting our elder Leftist leaders (or anyone soley for actions they took in the distant past). Sure Churchill went though a lot and did good work in the past but so have a lot of people who were never rewarded with a comfy middle class lifestyle. Today Churchill is a mid mannered middle-class (perhaps even upper-middle class) professor and writer who courts publicity (and makes a good amount of money) off radical white youth by playing to white-guilt. Some of the white youth he likes to talk down to are probably from worse off backgrounds them him and many could have been through even more hardship (from childhood sexual abuse to who knows what). I agree with a lot of what he says and does but his overall tone at events is a little bothersome especially when you think about how well his life is now. Some of the tone is just the normal corruption of a celebrity but the race and class based guilt tripping by an upper middle class man of an audience that is almost surely poorer than himself is a little bothersome.
that's a big draw.
The most interesting speaker in recent years was Zerzan who started off by dissing the people who spoke before them and saying he didn't appreciate nonanarchists being invited.
Some people in other countries have different perspective on this. Go look at Greece. They lived through the dictatorship in the 70s, and WWII, so the people there are really feisty about preventing that again.
When Alex Cockburn spoke on sproul plaza during free speech remembrance week at Berkeley, there were about 15 people there. Nobody had heard of the schedule- only the big Howard Dean event.
The most interesting speaker in recent years was Zerzan who started off by dissing the people who spoke before them and saying he didn't appreciate nonanarchists being invited.
Some people in other countries have different perspective on this. Go look at Greece. They lived through the dictatorship in the 70s, and WWII, so the people there are really feisty about preventing that again.
When Alex Cockburn spoke on sproul plaza during free speech remembrance week at Berkeley, there were about 15 people there. Nobody had heard of the schedule- only the big Howard Dean event.
"...That might make sense if millions of Americans weren’t horrified with the path the country is on..."
WE IN THE U.S. ARE LUCKY TO GET EVEN 1 MILLION PEOPLE *COMBINED* IN ALL THE MAJOR CITIES (AND USUALLY MOSTLY IN S.F. AND N.Y.) OF THE U.S. -- A COUNTRY OF *280* MILLION PEOPLE -- IN ONE DAY OF MAJOR STREET PROTESTS.
WHEREAS BRITAIN -- A COUNTRY OF APPROXIMATELY 58 MILLION PEOPLE -- CAN TURN OUT AT LEAST 1 TO 1-1/2 MILLION ANTI-WAR PROTESTERS IN LONDON ALONE.
ITALY -- A COUNTRY OF APPROXIMATELY 58 MILLION PEOPLE -- CAN TURN OUT ONE TO TWO MILLION ANTI-WAR PROTESTERS IN ONE ROME.
SPAIN -- A COUNTRY OF ONLY 40 MILLION PEOPLE -- CAN TURN OUT OVER A MILLION ANTI-WAR PROTESTERS IN ONE CITY ALONE.
HAVE LIBERALS/PROGRESSIVES/LEFTISTS SYSTEMATICALLY DONE ANY TEACH-INS IN AMERICA'S RURAL OR MILITARY TOWNS?: THOSE NO-NAME PLACES THAT PROVIDE CANNON FODDER FOR THE U.S. MILITARY MACHINE? NO.
SO FAR, THE ONLY THING THAT WILL REACH MOST GAS-GUZZLING, HIGH-RIDING, SUV AMERICANS INTO TURNING AGAINST THE WAR, IS WHAT IS ALREADY STARTING TO REACH THE MILLIONS THAT WE COULD NOT PUT OUT ON THE STREETS: DEAD SOLDIERS COMING HOME.
REGARDING, "As Arundhati Roy recently put it, “Anti-americanism is the anti-imperialism of fools.” "
I DON'T KNOW IF THE ABOVE QUOTE IS TRUE, BUT LET ME SAY THIS:
ARUNDHATI ROY (AND TARIQ ALI) **OPENLY** SUPPORTS THE IRAQI RESISTANCE. HOW MANY AMERICAN PROGRESSIVES/LEFTISTS ARE DOING THAT?
CAN YOU IMAGINE WHAT A PSYCHOLOGICAL BLOW THAT WOULD BE TO THE U.S. GOVT'S WAR PROPAGANDA -- AND WHAT AN EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITY THAT WOULD BE FOR THE REST OF THE COUNTRY -- IF MORE PROGRESSIVES/LEFTISTS DID THAT!?
ARUNDHATI ROY OPENLY OPPOSED THE 'GOOD COP, BAD COP', "IVORY SOAP [GENTLE BRAINWASHING] VS. TIDE DETERGENT [OXYPOWER BRAINWASHING]" CORPORATE-SELECTED, SO-CALLED, 'CHOICES' GIVEN TO US BY THE REPUBLICRATS FOR US TO MERELY RATIFY.
THIS, WHILE THE LEADING PROGRESSIVE/LEFTIST INTELLECTUALS AND POPULISTS (LIKE NOAM CHOMSKY, HOWARD ZINN, MICHAEL PARENTI, ETC., AND MICHAEL MOORE) WERE WASTING THE LEFT'S TIME GETTING IT TO CHASE ITS ASS AND RALLY AROUND KERRY -- THE TROJAN HORSE OF THE ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT.
SO, IF THE CHOICE IS BETWEEN FOLLOWING ONE OF THOSE "PEACE-LOVING" SCARED FAIR-WEATHER LEFTISTS (CLOSET LIBERALS BY ANOTHER NAME) OR WARD CHURCHILL, I'LL FOLLOW WARD ANY DAY. AT LEAST I KNOW THAT HE STANDS FOR SOMETHING.
AND IF YOU DON'T STAND FOR SOMETHING REAL, YOU'LL FALL FOR ANYTHING FAKE.
AND IF SOMEONE CAN'T TELL THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN GITLIN AND CHURCHILL, THE LEFT AND THE ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT DOESN'T NEED THAT SOMEONE ANYWAY.
WE IN THE U.S. ARE LUCKY TO GET EVEN 1 MILLION PEOPLE *COMBINED* IN ALL THE MAJOR CITIES (AND USUALLY MOSTLY IN S.F. AND N.Y.) OF THE U.S. -- A COUNTRY OF *280* MILLION PEOPLE -- IN ONE DAY OF MAJOR STREET PROTESTS.
WHEREAS BRITAIN -- A COUNTRY OF APPROXIMATELY 58 MILLION PEOPLE -- CAN TURN OUT AT LEAST 1 TO 1-1/2 MILLION ANTI-WAR PROTESTERS IN LONDON ALONE.
ITALY -- A COUNTRY OF APPROXIMATELY 58 MILLION PEOPLE -- CAN TURN OUT ONE TO TWO MILLION ANTI-WAR PROTESTERS IN ONE ROME.
SPAIN -- A COUNTRY OF ONLY 40 MILLION PEOPLE -- CAN TURN OUT OVER A MILLION ANTI-WAR PROTESTERS IN ONE CITY ALONE.
HAVE LIBERALS/PROGRESSIVES/LEFTISTS SYSTEMATICALLY DONE ANY TEACH-INS IN AMERICA'S RURAL OR MILITARY TOWNS?: THOSE NO-NAME PLACES THAT PROVIDE CANNON FODDER FOR THE U.S. MILITARY MACHINE? NO.
SO FAR, THE ONLY THING THAT WILL REACH MOST GAS-GUZZLING, HIGH-RIDING, SUV AMERICANS INTO TURNING AGAINST THE WAR, IS WHAT IS ALREADY STARTING TO REACH THE MILLIONS THAT WE COULD NOT PUT OUT ON THE STREETS: DEAD SOLDIERS COMING HOME.
REGARDING, "As Arundhati Roy recently put it, “Anti-americanism is the anti-imperialism of fools.” "
I DON'T KNOW IF THE ABOVE QUOTE IS TRUE, BUT LET ME SAY THIS:
ARUNDHATI ROY (AND TARIQ ALI) **OPENLY** SUPPORTS THE IRAQI RESISTANCE. HOW MANY AMERICAN PROGRESSIVES/LEFTISTS ARE DOING THAT?
CAN YOU IMAGINE WHAT A PSYCHOLOGICAL BLOW THAT WOULD BE TO THE U.S. GOVT'S WAR PROPAGANDA -- AND WHAT AN EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITY THAT WOULD BE FOR THE REST OF THE COUNTRY -- IF MORE PROGRESSIVES/LEFTISTS DID THAT!?
ARUNDHATI ROY OPENLY OPPOSED THE 'GOOD COP, BAD COP', "IVORY SOAP [GENTLE BRAINWASHING] VS. TIDE DETERGENT [OXYPOWER BRAINWASHING]" CORPORATE-SELECTED, SO-CALLED, 'CHOICES' GIVEN TO US BY THE REPUBLICRATS FOR US TO MERELY RATIFY.
THIS, WHILE THE LEADING PROGRESSIVE/LEFTIST INTELLECTUALS AND POPULISTS (LIKE NOAM CHOMSKY, HOWARD ZINN, MICHAEL PARENTI, ETC., AND MICHAEL MOORE) WERE WASTING THE LEFT'S TIME GETTING IT TO CHASE ITS ASS AND RALLY AROUND KERRY -- THE TROJAN HORSE OF THE ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT.
SO, IF THE CHOICE IS BETWEEN FOLLOWING ONE OF THOSE "PEACE-LOVING" SCARED FAIR-WEATHER LEFTISTS (CLOSET LIBERALS BY ANOTHER NAME) OR WARD CHURCHILL, I'LL FOLLOW WARD ANY DAY. AT LEAST I KNOW THAT HE STANDS FOR SOMETHING.
AND IF YOU DON'T STAND FOR SOMETHING REAL, YOU'LL FALL FOR ANYTHING FAKE.
AND IF SOMEONE CAN'T TELL THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN GITLIN AND CHURCHILL, THE LEFT AND THE ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT DOESN'T NEED THAT SOMEONE ANYWAY.
" When Alex Cockburn spoke on sproul plaza during free speech remembrance week at Berkeley, there were about 15 people there. Nobody had heard of the schedule- only the big Howard Dean event."
AND *WHO* DID ALL THOSE FAMOUS FSM LEFTIST ORGANIZERS [ I CAN ASSURE YOU *NOT* ALEX COCKBURN OR LENNI BRENNER] BRING IN TO BE THE STAR SPEAKER?: **HOWARD DEAN** -- ANOTHER MILQUETOAST PRO-WAR REPUBLICRAT (THAT 'PARTY ANIMAL').
HOWARD DEAN!!??: SYMBOLICALLY ON THE CAR THAT MARIO SAVIO SPOKE ATOP!?
WOULD HOWARD DEAN *EVER* SAY THE LIKES OF WHAT SAVIO SAID!!??: THAT WE MUST THROW OURSELVES UPON THE GEARS OF AN ODIOUS SYSTEM AND DENY IT OUR COOPERATON!!
DID ANY OF THOSE POLICE CAR TOP FSM STAR "LEFTISTS" ADDRESS THE NO.1 INTERNATIONAL PROBLEM, REGARDING WAR AND PEACE, FACING THE WORLD TODAY?: THE PALESTINIAN-ISRAELI CONFLICT -- THE PROBLEM THAT EVERY REPUBLICRAT WHITE HOUSE ADMINISTRATION PLANS THE WORLD'S INTERESTS AROUND. NOT THAT I HEARD.
NO WONDER MOST OF THE BERKELEY STUDENTS WALKED OFF AFTER HOWARD DEAN -- A CELEBRITY THEY KNEW FROM TV -- SPOKE. THERE WAS NOTHING ELSE TO HEAR EXCEPT PSEUDO-LEFTIST PLATITUDES.
AND *WHO* DID ALL THOSE FAMOUS FSM LEFTIST ORGANIZERS [ I CAN ASSURE YOU *NOT* ALEX COCKBURN OR LENNI BRENNER] BRING IN TO BE THE STAR SPEAKER?: **HOWARD DEAN** -- ANOTHER MILQUETOAST PRO-WAR REPUBLICRAT (THAT 'PARTY ANIMAL').
HOWARD DEAN!!??: SYMBOLICALLY ON THE CAR THAT MARIO SAVIO SPOKE ATOP!?
WOULD HOWARD DEAN *EVER* SAY THE LIKES OF WHAT SAVIO SAID!!??: THAT WE MUST THROW OURSELVES UPON THE GEARS OF AN ODIOUS SYSTEM AND DENY IT OUR COOPERATON!!
DID ANY OF THOSE POLICE CAR TOP FSM STAR "LEFTISTS" ADDRESS THE NO.1 INTERNATIONAL PROBLEM, REGARDING WAR AND PEACE, FACING THE WORLD TODAY?: THE PALESTINIAN-ISRAELI CONFLICT -- THE PROBLEM THAT EVERY REPUBLICRAT WHITE HOUSE ADMINISTRATION PLANS THE WORLD'S INTERESTS AROUND. NOT THAT I HEARD.
NO WONDER MOST OF THE BERKELEY STUDENTS WALKED OFF AFTER HOWARD DEAN -- A CELEBRITY THEY KNEW FROM TV -- SPOKE. THERE WAS NOTHING ELSE TO HEAR EXCEPT PSEUDO-LEFTIST PLATITUDES.
WARD CHRUCHILL WILL BE AT CITY LIGHTS BOOKSTORE (S.F.) ON SUNDAY, JANUARY 23, AT 5:00PM.
http://www.citylights.com/events.html
(He's usually at AK Press too when he's in the Bay Area, although I don't yet seem him listed on their events calendar.)
http://www.citylights.com/events.html
(He's usually at AK Press too when he's in the Bay Area, although I don't yet seem him listed on their events calendar.)
Where are the millions? New York City is currently opposed to the war, 80% are against the Bush presidency and have shown it over and over again -- but then again, we're the ones who got bombed.
I guess the "All Caps" crowd will continue loving Churchill because they hate common people. That was the point of the review.
I hope All Caps alienation works out for him. In the meantime, people who want to end imperialism might start trying to figure out how to mobilize the massive opposition into an effective force. For Churchill, that might mean "two, three, many 911s." But we can see how effective the first one was in MAKING common people identify the very system that brought the attacks.
I guess the "All Caps" crowd will continue loving Churchill because they hate common people. That was the point of the review.
I hope All Caps alienation works out for him. In the meantime, people who want to end imperialism might start trying to figure out how to mobilize the massive opposition into an effective force. For Churchill, that might mean "two, three, many 911s." But we can see how effective the first one was in MAKING common people identify the very system that brought the attacks.
yeah... the FSM week stuff was interesting. Some of the earlier speakers were quite good. I don't dislike Howard Dean myself, in the pragmatic sense. A week later, there was a $5 Ralph Nader event. Reading the nat'l press and all the negativity given to him from the left that year, I thought people would throw fruit, but instead there were huge lines an hour ahead of time and they sold out the 1000+ Zellerbach, there were few walkouts when we had to sit through an ISO guy talking while Ralph was stuck in traffic on the freeway, and even when his assistants came out to totally plumb the crowd for money, people gave him money. This was objectively more shameful than what Howard Dean did. I disagreed with that Michael D.. guy who had been around in the 60s, the one with the feather hat, and he apparently was so disappointed that Dean gave his typical rouse the crowd for the democrat party speech that he went up and called him a 'son of a bitch' right afterwards. This was completely ridiculous. What did he expect.
<<I don't dislike Howard Dean myself, in the pragmatic sense.>>
what's there to like about howard dean?
as governor of Vermont he was the center-right neo-liberal par excellance.
as a presidential candidate he (shrewdly) staked a nominally anti-war stance and sucked up a lot of anti-war energy into the vortex of his failed campaign.
once he lost his bid to become the democratic nominee he then made sure to funnel his minions toward the non-nominally pro-war kerry campaign, which then proceeded to lose to a guy with mashed potatoes for brains and an approval rating hovering around 49%!
in the meantime, the anti-war movement took an extended vacation, atrophying in the process.
that's the sort of "pragmatism" you go for, cp?
what's there to like about howard dean?
as governor of Vermont he was the center-right neo-liberal par excellance.
as a presidential candidate he (shrewdly) staked a nominally anti-war stance and sucked up a lot of anti-war energy into the vortex of his failed campaign.
once he lost his bid to become the democratic nominee he then made sure to funnel his minions toward the non-nominally pro-war kerry campaign, which then proceeded to lose to a guy with mashed potatoes for brains and an approval rating hovering around 49%!
in the meantime, the anti-war movement took an extended vacation, atrophying in the process.
that's the sort of "pragmatism" you go for, cp?
["...That might make sense if millions of Americans weren’t horrified with the path the country is on..."
WE IN THE U.S. ARE LUCKY TO GET EVEN 1 MILLION PEOPLE *COMBINED* IN ALL THE MAJOR CITIES (AND USUALLY MOSTLY IN S.F. AND N.Y.) OF THE U.S. -- A COUNTRY OF *280* MILLION PEOPLE -- IN ONE DAY OF MAJOR STREET PROTESTS.
WHEREAS BRITAIN -- A COUNTRY OF APPROXIMATELY 58 MILLION PEOPLE -- CAN TURN OUT AT LEAST 1 TO 1-1/2 MILLION ANTI-WAR PROTESTERS IN LONDON ALONE.
ITALY -- A COUNTRY OF APPROXIMATELY 58 MILLION PEOPLE -- CAN TURN OUT ONE TO TWO MILLION ANTI-WAR PROTESTERS IN ONE ROME.
SPAIN -- A COUNTRY OF ONLY 40 MILLION PEOPLE -- CAN TURN OUT OVER A MILLION ANTI-WAR PROTESTERS IN ONE CITY ALONE.
HAVE LIBERALS/PROGRESSIVES/LEFTISTS SYSTEMATICALLY DONE ANY TEACH-INS IN AMERICA'S RURAL OR MILITARY TOWNS?: THOSE NO-NAME PLACES THAT PROVIDE CANNON FODDER FOR THE U.S. MILITARY MACHINE? NO.]
Overall, I share your dismay at what has happened to the antiwar movement in America. And, I have said, both here on my KDVS radio program, that the Iraqi resistance is legitimate.
You might consider this inadequate, but, as Rahul Mahajan discussed recently on his website, empirenotes.org, people should be careful about associating themselves with any specific aspect of the Iraqi resistance because many of the groups are unknown, and some of them have values that are antithetical to the left.
For example, there is a serious question as to whether al-Zarqawi should be considered part of the resistance at all, because, as both Mahajan and Zeynep from Under the Same Sun have noted, al-Zarqawi appers to be exploiting the banner of the resistance for the purpose of killing Shiites to foment a Sunni/Shia civil war. It is also evident that a lot of Iraqi resistance groups openly oppose al-Zarqawi.
Of course, these factional issues shouldn't prevent the left from saying that the occupation is illegitimate and that the Iraqis have the right to resist it, violently if necessary, because the occupation was imposed on them, and continues to be imposed upon them, through violence, violence much greater than what the Iraqis have directed towards the US and Iraqi collaborators. A left that suggests non-violence as the only method of resisting an occupation that has turned to leveling cities and the proposed use of death squads is politically irrelevant.
Thus, there is a important distinction: the left should support the Iraqis in their efforts to free themselves from the occupation, where reserving the right to speak against particular elements of the resistance in regard to their domestic agenda for the country.
As for what should be done domestically, I think that we have do something different than rallies, marches and teach-ins. All that has been done, although perhaps not often in suburban and rural areas (although, you might be surprised if you check out the local newspapers for some of these places, there's more happening than you think, and it tends to have the advantage of being indigenous and not contaminated by the cultural arrogance of outside activists), and the impact of them has been depreciated.
Something important is happening, however, and we tend to ignore its importance. People are increasingly refusing to serve in the military, the guard and the reserves, and their actions tend to personal, spontaneous and apolitical. Here lies the real threat to the war, and the left should find ways to encourage it whenever possible. A million people marching down Market Street appear on the news and then go home. But people who develop a grassroots network for confronting the recruitment efforts of the military and supporting those who want to escape service, that has a permanent, ongoing impact.
--Richard Estes
WE IN THE U.S. ARE LUCKY TO GET EVEN 1 MILLION PEOPLE *COMBINED* IN ALL THE MAJOR CITIES (AND USUALLY MOSTLY IN S.F. AND N.Y.) OF THE U.S. -- A COUNTRY OF *280* MILLION PEOPLE -- IN ONE DAY OF MAJOR STREET PROTESTS.
WHEREAS BRITAIN -- A COUNTRY OF APPROXIMATELY 58 MILLION PEOPLE -- CAN TURN OUT AT LEAST 1 TO 1-1/2 MILLION ANTI-WAR PROTESTERS IN LONDON ALONE.
ITALY -- A COUNTRY OF APPROXIMATELY 58 MILLION PEOPLE -- CAN TURN OUT ONE TO TWO MILLION ANTI-WAR PROTESTERS IN ONE ROME.
SPAIN -- A COUNTRY OF ONLY 40 MILLION PEOPLE -- CAN TURN OUT OVER A MILLION ANTI-WAR PROTESTERS IN ONE CITY ALONE.
HAVE LIBERALS/PROGRESSIVES/LEFTISTS SYSTEMATICALLY DONE ANY TEACH-INS IN AMERICA'S RURAL OR MILITARY TOWNS?: THOSE NO-NAME PLACES THAT PROVIDE CANNON FODDER FOR THE U.S. MILITARY MACHINE? NO.]
Overall, I share your dismay at what has happened to the antiwar movement in America. And, I have said, both here on my KDVS radio program, that the Iraqi resistance is legitimate.
You might consider this inadequate, but, as Rahul Mahajan discussed recently on his website, empirenotes.org, people should be careful about associating themselves with any specific aspect of the Iraqi resistance because many of the groups are unknown, and some of them have values that are antithetical to the left.
For example, there is a serious question as to whether al-Zarqawi should be considered part of the resistance at all, because, as both Mahajan and Zeynep from Under the Same Sun have noted, al-Zarqawi appers to be exploiting the banner of the resistance for the purpose of killing Shiites to foment a Sunni/Shia civil war. It is also evident that a lot of Iraqi resistance groups openly oppose al-Zarqawi.
Of course, these factional issues shouldn't prevent the left from saying that the occupation is illegitimate and that the Iraqis have the right to resist it, violently if necessary, because the occupation was imposed on them, and continues to be imposed upon them, through violence, violence much greater than what the Iraqis have directed towards the US and Iraqi collaborators. A left that suggests non-violence as the only method of resisting an occupation that has turned to leveling cities and the proposed use of death squads is politically irrelevant.
Thus, there is a important distinction: the left should support the Iraqis in their efforts to free themselves from the occupation, where reserving the right to speak against particular elements of the resistance in regard to their domestic agenda for the country.
As for what should be done domestically, I think that we have do something different than rallies, marches and teach-ins. All that has been done, although perhaps not often in suburban and rural areas (although, you might be surprised if you check out the local newspapers for some of these places, there's more happening than you think, and it tends to have the advantage of being indigenous and not contaminated by the cultural arrogance of outside activists), and the impact of them has been depreciated.
Something important is happening, however, and we tend to ignore its importance. People are increasingly refusing to serve in the military, the guard and the reserves, and their actions tend to personal, spontaneous and apolitical. Here lies the real threat to the war, and the left should find ways to encourage it whenever possible. A million people marching down Market Street appear on the news and then go home. But people who develop a grassroots network for confronting the recruitment efforts of the military and supporting those who want to escape service, that has a permanent, ongoing impact.
--Richard Estes
"For Churchill, that might mean "two, three, many 911s."
Churchill never said that he *wanted* more 9-11's: he said the same thing that MLK said in his anti-war speech -- that that's what it might take (MLK said that one day someone would reach out and deal America a lethal blow), and that, if we Americans as a group (not as a few) don't wake up, we *will* get more 9-11's.
"we can see how effective the first one was in MAKING common people identify the very system that brought the attacks."
*DEAD BODIES* coming back from Vietnam eventually caused common people to stop identifying with the pro-war system then.
After that, we started beating our chests having CIA wars and one-day or one-week attacks over the poorest of the poorest nations/people. Now, as the one GI said in the movie "Platoon", we've been kickin' everyone else's ass so long that it's time to get our asses kicked (again) by another swarthy people.
Eventually *DEAD BODIES* coming back will make "the common people" stop identifying with the pro-war system again.
NOW, ARE *YOU* GOING TO BE THERE TO CHALLENGE CHURCHILL AT CITY LIGHTS -- WHERE HE CAN RESPOND FOR HIMSELF?
=================================================================
"Overall, I share your dismay at what has happened to the antiwar movement in America."
It was hearty -- I was certainly a regular part of it -- but out of 280 million people, it was never really that large -- certainly not compared to Europe (or even South Korea!).
" And, I have said, both here on my KDVS radio program, that the Iraqi resistance is legitimate."
Great! I didn't know you had a rado program. I'll look up KDVS for a program website and tune in (over the air or internet) if I can find you.
"people should be careful about associating themselves with any specific aspect of the Iraqi resistance because many of the groups are unknown, and some of them have values that are antithetical to the left."
Arundhati Roy already addressed that (I'm sure you can find that essay somewhere on the web). She said that we can't expect a perfect resistance. And I forgot where she went from there, but where I go from there is: nothing else -- no higher sociopolitical advancement -- will be possible until the "Sam's" ass is run out of town.
And as for those groups that have values which may be antithetical to the left, it's often because, as with, say, the Taliban or Hamas, those are the groups that the U.S. or Israel once cynically boosted -- and often against the secular and more open democratic forces whose values we would more identify with. So, that's another case of chickens coming home to roost. So, if for now, it's the fundamentalists that have the mojo to whip Sam's ass, then I support them whippin' Sam's ass.
I can't respond in as much detail as I would like right now (I'm supposed to be off to lunch), but I once talked to an Iraqi Kurdish woman. She said that the only people talking up a civil war in Iraq are the *Americans* (govt, military, media). Now, I think that -- especially if Sam's ass is whipped -- the U.S. might try to instigate a civil war on the way out (the British were often adept at this when leaving their colonial enterprises), and some Iraqis suspect this. Anyway, the Kurdish woman I spoked to hipped me to the realization that Iraqis aren't all neatly and distinctly divided up the way our govt and media make it sound. There are mixed areas, cities, neighborhoods, families, and even individuals.
Iraq is not a (socioculturally and educationally) backward and ( geographically and economically) backwater country (as is, in many ways Afghanistan -- way off the beaten world trade tracks with no resources to offer that I know of, except opium). Iraq is a central country in the Middle East and the Arab world (a secular state having land, oil, water, and a sizeable, fairly educated/skilled population; it even once had a fairly good social services program).
"Thus, there is a important distinction: the left should support the Iraqis in their efforts to free themselves from the occupation, where reserving the right to speak against particular elements of the resistance in regard to their domestic agenda for the country."
Yes, I would support the resistance, in general, without necessarily supporting all the resistors, in particular.
As for what you say is being done in suburban or less populated cities and areas of our country. I hope you're right. And, while I know what you mean about potential outside arrogance from the big cities, I haven't seen or heard of any big-city anti-war organizations going to those, especially, military towns to do teach-ins. But, I last lived in a midwestern city -- St. Louis -- and I can tell you that -- even there -- the difference in the amount of informational resources (like free liberal/progressive/leftist pubications, progressive radio stations, lefty micropower radio, and all the progressives on the lecture/bookreading circuit, a tradition/legacy of political activism, a more multicultural thought ferment) is almost like the difference between day and night.
"People are increasingly refusing to serve in the military, the guard and the reserves"
YEAH, THAT'S 'CAUSE DEAD AND MULIATED BODIES ARE COMING HOME!!
--KIDS IN THEIR OLDER TEENS AND YOUNGEST TWENTIES -- OFTEN NEWLY MARRIED (SOMETIMES WITH KIDS) -- JUST STARING OUT AS ADULTS. (WHAT HAPPENS TO THE SEX LIFE OF A VERY YOUNG MAIMED/MUTILATED SOLDIER AT THE BEGINNING OF HIS MARRIED LIFE? THAT'S WHEN IT'S SUPPOSED TO BE THE BEST IN THEIR MARRIAGE!)
AND THINK ABOUT THIS!: IN ALL THE MUD AND GRIT AND HEAT AND CARNAGE AND DEATH OF VIETNAM, EVEN IN VIETNAM SOLDIERS KNEW THAT IF THEY JUST KEPT THEIR HEADS DOWN AND TRIED TO KEEP OUT OF HARM'S WAY -- AND FRAG THE OFFICERS WHO TRIED TO PUT THEM IN HARM'S WAY -- THOSE SOLDIERS WOULD BE HOME IN 12 MONTHS.
AND THOSE SOLDIER'S -- GOING IN -- KNEW THAT VIETNAM WAS NOT A WALK-OVER.
IN ALL THE SAND AND GRIT AND HEAT AND CARNAGE AND DEATH OF IRAQ, AMERICAN SOLDIERS IN IRAQ DON'T KNOW *WHEN* THEY'LL *EVER* BE COMING HOME!! -- OR HOW!! THEY'RE TOLD IT MIGHT NOW BE *THREE* OR *FIVE* YEARS!!
AND *THOSE* SOLDIERS WERE TOLD THAT IRAQ *WAS* GOING TO BE A WALK-OVER. TOLD, WAY BACK WHEN, BACK IN KUWAIT: "THE WAY HOME IS STRAIGHT THROUGH BAGDAD!"
NOW, WHEN THOSE SOLDIERS SEE ONE OF THOSE 'MINI-NUKE' CAR BOMBS GOING OFF JUST AHEAD OF THEM THAT JUST DESTROYED EVEN A NEWLY-ARMORED HUM-VEE -- OR EVEN A FULLY-ARMORED BRADLEY!! -- THAT COULD HAVE BEEN *THEM*!! -- OR WHEN WE SEE IT ON TV, WHAT THE HELL DO YOU *THINK* ANYONE WITH A BRAIN BACK HOME IS GOING TO DO!? RUN AND SIGN UP!!?
IF IT WERE *ME* AND IT CAME TO IT, I'D RATHER SPEND 4, 6, 8, OR 12 MONTHS IN SOME MINIMUM SECURITY PRISON, DOING TIME BACK HOME!! AT LEAST I KNOW THAT I WOULD PHYSICALLY, MENTALLY, EMOTIONALLY, AND SPIRITUALLY COME OUT IN ONE PIECE -- AND WOULD THUS STILL BE OTHERWISE EMOTIONALLY CAPABLE OF HAVING A LOVING WIFE AND KIDS.
AT LEAST I'D COME OUT WITH TWO ARMS AND TWO LEGS AND BOTH EYES!
(AMY GOODMAN ONCE SAID THAT THE DRAFT RESISTORS THAT DON'T GO PUBLIC, DON'T DO MUCH TIME IN PRISON -- IF ANY AT ALL!)
Other than that, I agree, we don't necessarily need regualar mass marches/mobilizations anymore: that was just, IMO, to show the WORLD that Bush was WRONG when he used to say that, "American speaks with one voice -- mine"; to show the world that we Americans weren't *all* a bunch of bloodthirsty, MOAB crazies who loved to see swarthy people vaporized/incinerated in spectacular, "awe"-inspiring, Strangelovian mega-explosions; and to show people with anti-war sentiments on the other coasts and in smaller cities and more isolated parts of our country that they were not alone.
I agree, more shoe-leather, local and community grassroots networking -- and regular teach-ins (to advance our knowledge and to deny the corporate elite our bodies to use as cannon fodder) -- all across the country is what we most need now -- punctuated, perhaps, by an occasional mass march/demo/rally to keep spirits up and everyone enthused. We need our non-violent, but fairly organized/networked and highly creative resistance movement at home to compliment the ones in Western Europe, and to support, in principle, the armed struggle in Iraq.
(Take care, I'm off to lunch!)
Churchill never said that he *wanted* more 9-11's: he said the same thing that MLK said in his anti-war speech -- that that's what it might take (MLK said that one day someone would reach out and deal America a lethal blow), and that, if we Americans as a group (not as a few) don't wake up, we *will* get more 9-11's.
"we can see how effective the first one was in MAKING common people identify the very system that brought the attacks."
*DEAD BODIES* coming back from Vietnam eventually caused common people to stop identifying with the pro-war system then.
After that, we started beating our chests having CIA wars and one-day or one-week attacks over the poorest of the poorest nations/people. Now, as the one GI said in the movie "Platoon", we've been kickin' everyone else's ass so long that it's time to get our asses kicked (again) by another swarthy people.
Eventually *DEAD BODIES* coming back will make "the common people" stop identifying with the pro-war system again.
NOW, ARE *YOU* GOING TO BE THERE TO CHALLENGE CHURCHILL AT CITY LIGHTS -- WHERE HE CAN RESPOND FOR HIMSELF?
=================================================================
"Overall, I share your dismay at what has happened to the antiwar movement in America."
It was hearty -- I was certainly a regular part of it -- but out of 280 million people, it was never really that large -- certainly not compared to Europe (or even South Korea!).
" And, I have said, both here on my KDVS radio program, that the Iraqi resistance is legitimate."
Great! I didn't know you had a rado program. I'll look up KDVS for a program website and tune in (over the air or internet) if I can find you.
"people should be careful about associating themselves with any specific aspect of the Iraqi resistance because many of the groups are unknown, and some of them have values that are antithetical to the left."
Arundhati Roy already addressed that (I'm sure you can find that essay somewhere on the web). She said that we can't expect a perfect resistance. And I forgot where she went from there, but where I go from there is: nothing else -- no higher sociopolitical advancement -- will be possible until the "Sam's" ass is run out of town.
And as for those groups that have values which may be antithetical to the left, it's often because, as with, say, the Taliban or Hamas, those are the groups that the U.S. or Israel once cynically boosted -- and often against the secular and more open democratic forces whose values we would more identify with. So, that's another case of chickens coming home to roost. So, if for now, it's the fundamentalists that have the mojo to whip Sam's ass, then I support them whippin' Sam's ass.
I can't respond in as much detail as I would like right now (I'm supposed to be off to lunch), but I once talked to an Iraqi Kurdish woman. She said that the only people talking up a civil war in Iraq are the *Americans* (govt, military, media). Now, I think that -- especially if Sam's ass is whipped -- the U.S. might try to instigate a civil war on the way out (the British were often adept at this when leaving their colonial enterprises), and some Iraqis suspect this. Anyway, the Kurdish woman I spoked to hipped me to the realization that Iraqis aren't all neatly and distinctly divided up the way our govt and media make it sound. There are mixed areas, cities, neighborhoods, families, and even individuals.
Iraq is not a (socioculturally and educationally) backward and ( geographically and economically) backwater country (as is, in many ways Afghanistan -- way off the beaten world trade tracks with no resources to offer that I know of, except opium). Iraq is a central country in the Middle East and the Arab world (a secular state having land, oil, water, and a sizeable, fairly educated/skilled population; it even once had a fairly good social services program).
"Thus, there is a important distinction: the left should support the Iraqis in their efforts to free themselves from the occupation, where reserving the right to speak against particular elements of the resistance in regard to their domestic agenda for the country."
Yes, I would support the resistance, in general, without necessarily supporting all the resistors, in particular.
As for what you say is being done in suburban or less populated cities and areas of our country. I hope you're right. And, while I know what you mean about potential outside arrogance from the big cities, I haven't seen or heard of any big-city anti-war organizations going to those, especially, military towns to do teach-ins. But, I last lived in a midwestern city -- St. Louis -- and I can tell you that -- even there -- the difference in the amount of informational resources (like free liberal/progressive/leftist pubications, progressive radio stations, lefty micropower radio, and all the progressives on the lecture/bookreading circuit, a tradition/legacy of political activism, a more multicultural thought ferment) is almost like the difference between day and night.
"People are increasingly refusing to serve in the military, the guard and the reserves"
YEAH, THAT'S 'CAUSE DEAD AND MULIATED BODIES ARE COMING HOME!!
--KIDS IN THEIR OLDER TEENS AND YOUNGEST TWENTIES -- OFTEN NEWLY MARRIED (SOMETIMES WITH KIDS) -- JUST STARING OUT AS ADULTS. (WHAT HAPPENS TO THE SEX LIFE OF A VERY YOUNG MAIMED/MUTILATED SOLDIER AT THE BEGINNING OF HIS MARRIED LIFE? THAT'S WHEN IT'S SUPPOSED TO BE THE BEST IN THEIR MARRIAGE!)
AND THINK ABOUT THIS!: IN ALL THE MUD AND GRIT AND HEAT AND CARNAGE AND DEATH OF VIETNAM, EVEN IN VIETNAM SOLDIERS KNEW THAT IF THEY JUST KEPT THEIR HEADS DOWN AND TRIED TO KEEP OUT OF HARM'S WAY -- AND FRAG THE OFFICERS WHO TRIED TO PUT THEM IN HARM'S WAY -- THOSE SOLDIERS WOULD BE HOME IN 12 MONTHS.
AND THOSE SOLDIER'S -- GOING IN -- KNEW THAT VIETNAM WAS NOT A WALK-OVER.
IN ALL THE SAND AND GRIT AND HEAT AND CARNAGE AND DEATH OF IRAQ, AMERICAN SOLDIERS IN IRAQ DON'T KNOW *WHEN* THEY'LL *EVER* BE COMING HOME!! -- OR HOW!! THEY'RE TOLD IT MIGHT NOW BE *THREE* OR *FIVE* YEARS!!
AND *THOSE* SOLDIERS WERE TOLD THAT IRAQ *WAS* GOING TO BE A WALK-OVER. TOLD, WAY BACK WHEN, BACK IN KUWAIT: "THE WAY HOME IS STRAIGHT THROUGH BAGDAD!"
NOW, WHEN THOSE SOLDIERS SEE ONE OF THOSE 'MINI-NUKE' CAR BOMBS GOING OFF JUST AHEAD OF THEM THAT JUST DESTROYED EVEN A NEWLY-ARMORED HUM-VEE -- OR EVEN A FULLY-ARMORED BRADLEY!! -- THAT COULD HAVE BEEN *THEM*!! -- OR WHEN WE SEE IT ON TV, WHAT THE HELL DO YOU *THINK* ANYONE WITH A BRAIN BACK HOME IS GOING TO DO!? RUN AND SIGN UP!!?
IF IT WERE *ME* AND IT CAME TO IT, I'D RATHER SPEND 4, 6, 8, OR 12 MONTHS IN SOME MINIMUM SECURITY PRISON, DOING TIME BACK HOME!! AT LEAST I KNOW THAT I WOULD PHYSICALLY, MENTALLY, EMOTIONALLY, AND SPIRITUALLY COME OUT IN ONE PIECE -- AND WOULD THUS STILL BE OTHERWISE EMOTIONALLY CAPABLE OF HAVING A LOVING WIFE AND KIDS.
AT LEAST I'D COME OUT WITH TWO ARMS AND TWO LEGS AND BOTH EYES!
(AMY GOODMAN ONCE SAID THAT THE DRAFT RESISTORS THAT DON'T GO PUBLIC, DON'T DO MUCH TIME IN PRISON -- IF ANY AT ALL!)
Other than that, I agree, we don't necessarily need regualar mass marches/mobilizations anymore: that was just, IMO, to show the WORLD that Bush was WRONG when he used to say that, "American speaks with one voice -- mine"; to show the world that we Americans weren't *all* a bunch of bloodthirsty, MOAB crazies who loved to see swarthy people vaporized/incinerated in spectacular, "awe"-inspiring, Strangelovian mega-explosions; and to show people with anti-war sentiments on the other coasts and in smaller cities and more isolated parts of our country that they were not alone.
I agree, more shoe-leather, local and community grassroots networking -- and regular teach-ins (to advance our knowledge and to deny the corporate elite our bodies to use as cannon fodder) -- all across the country is what we most need now -- punctuated, perhaps, by an occasional mass march/demo/rally to keep spirits up and everyone enthused. We need our non-violent, but fairly organized/networked and highly creative resistance movement at home to compliment the ones in Western Europe, and to support, in principle, the armed struggle in Iraq.
(Take care, I'm off to lunch!)
The US' modus operandi in Iraq has been to cry crocodile tears about the threat of a civil war, sanctimoniously positing itself as the force that can stand in the way of such an event.
A friend of a friend of mine who was in Baghdad during the American attack (working as a nurse) said that in the months that she was there she never saw any evidence of conflict between the various religious/ethnic groups. She worked with Shi'ites and Sunnis and others who worked with one another without the tensions that the average American has been lead to believe are waiting to explode at any moment.
Now, that's not to deny that there are any tensions between different groups--just that they are massively over sold and simplistically depicted by the American mass media. There are obvious propaganda points to be scored by portraying Iraqi society as barbarous and fratricidal.
The recent reports that the US has plans to mount a "Salvador solution," using Kurdish Peshmergas and Shi'ite units to fight Sunni insurgents, flies in the face of America's claims to want to create harmony between different religious/ethnic groups in Iraq. It has previously been reported that the Kurdish Peshmergas comprised a disproportionate number of the "Iraqi Forces" that accompanied the US in its demolition of Fallujah.
Perhaps the US has already put into effect step one in its civil war plan for the "liberated" peoples of Iraq.
A friend of a friend of mine who was in Baghdad during the American attack (working as a nurse) said that in the months that she was there she never saw any evidence of conflict between the various religious/ethnic groups. She worked with Shi'ites and Sunnis and others who worked with one another without the tensions that the average American has been lead to believe are waiting to explode at any moment.
Now, that's not to deny that there are any tensions between different groups--just that they are massively over sold and simplistically depicted by the American mass media. There are obvious propaganda points to be scored by portraying Iraqi society as barbarous and fratricidal.
The recent reports that the US has plans to mount a "Salvador solution," using Kurdish Peshmergas and Shi'ite units to fight Sunni insurgents, flies in the face of America's claims to want to create harmony between different religious/ethnic groups in Iraq. It has previously been reported that the Kurdish Peshmergas comprised a disproportionate number of the "Iraqi Forces" that accompanied the US in its demolition of Fallujah.
Perhaps the US has already put into effect step one in its civil war plan for the "liberated" peoples of Iraq.
"The US' modus operandi in Iraq has been to cry crocodile tears about the threat of a civil war, sanctimoniously positing itself as the force that can stand in the way of such an event."
YES, THE U.S. (AFTER IT DIDN'T GET WHAT WAS NEVER THERE -- WMD'S -- AND AFTER IT GOT WHAT WAS THERE -- SADDAM), THEN USED THE WHIPPED UP EXCUSE OF "A CIVIL WAR" (IF THE U.S. LEFT) TO STAY.
THAT PRETEXT EVEN BROGHT A LOT OF SUBCONSCIOUSLY LIBERAL-RACIST "WHITE MAN'S BURDEN" WHITE LIBERALS/PROGRESSIVES ON BOARD, EX POST FACTO, TO THE REPUBLICRAT'S *BIPARTISAN* IMPERIALIST WAR: "WE *CANNN'T* LEAVE *NOWWW*..."
IN FACT, THE U.S. TALKED ABOUT "A CIVIL WAR" SO MUCH THAT IT SHOULD MAKE ANY THINKING PERSON WONDER: WHY DOES THE U.S. KEEP HARPING ON "A CIVIL WAR"?
SOMETHING THE U.S. HAS **PLANNED**??? -- IF IT DIDN'T GET IT'S WAY.
YES, THE U.S. (AFTER IT DIDN'T GET WHAT WAS NEVER THERE -- WMD'S -- AND AFTER IT GOT WHAT WAS THERE -- SADDAM), THEN USED THE WHIPPED UP EXCUSE OF "A CIVIL WAR" (IF THE U.S. LEFT) TO STAY.
THAT PRETEXT EVEN BROGHT A LOT OF SUBCONSCIOUSLY LIBERAL-RACIST "WHITE MAN'S BURDEN" WHITE LIBERALS/PROGRESSIVES ON BOARD, EX POST FACTO, TO THE REPUBLICRAT'S *BIPARTISAN* IMPERIALIST WAR: "WE *CANNN'T* LEAVE *NOWWW*..."
IN FACT, THE U.S. TALKED ABOUT "A CIVIL WAR" SO MUCH THAT IT SHOULD MAKE ANY THINKING PERSON WONDER: WHY DOES THE U.S. KEEP HARPING ON "A CIVIL WAR"?
SOMETHING THE U.S. HAS **PLANNED**??? -- IF IT DIDN'T GET IT'S WAY.
When are you on the radio. I'll check out your program.
(I looked up the station program grid and didn't see your name under Richard/Estes/RWF.)
(I looked up the station program grid and didn't see your name under Richard/Estes/RWF.)
[Richard Estes & Ron Glick
FRI 05:00 PM -06:00 PM
Speaking in Tongues
Public Affairs
Emphasizes peace, environmental, civil rights and social justice issues in these turbulent times, with a focus upon grassroots perspectives, through interviews and the occasional whimsical musical interlude.]
previous shows are also archived for one week after broadcast, if you go to the Schedule/Archives link on the top left side of the KDVS homepage, http://www.kdvs.org , click on Basic Schedule link and go to our show listed at 5pm to 6pm on Fridays, you should be able to listen to the archived program with either RealPlayer or MP3
last week, we interviewed Leisa Faulkner Barnes, who recently completed a 3 month sentence for protesting at the School of the Americas, and visited Haiti afterwards
the interview commences about 15 minutes into the show after commentary from the hosts
--Richard
FRI 05:00 PM -06:00 PM
Speaking in Tongues
Public Affairs
Emphasizes peace, environmental, civil rights and social justice issues in these turbulent times, with a focus upon grassroots perspectives, through interviews and the occasional whimsical musical interlude.]
previous shows are also archived for one week after broadcast, if you go to the Schedule/Archives link on the top left side of the KDVS homepage, http://www.kdvs.org , click on Basic Schedule link and go to our show listed at 5pm to 6pm on Fridays, you should be able to listen to the archived program with either RealPlayer or MP3
last week, we interviewed Leisa Faulkner Barnes, who recently completed a 3 month sentence for protesting at the School of the Americas, and visited Haiti afterwards
the interview commences about 15 minutes into the show after commentary from the hosts
--Richard
"SPAIN -- A COUNTRY OF ONLY 40 MILLION PEOPLE -- CAN TURN OUT OVER A MILLION ANTI-WAR PROTESTERS IN ONE CITY ALONE. "
Don't believe it. Some newspapers bothered to count the demonstrators by computer and there were not even half of that, even though some "progressive" teachers took small children to the streets.
Another observation: there are 43 million Spaniards.
Don't believe it. Some newspapers bothered to count the demonstrators by computer and there were not even half of that, even though some "progressive" teachers took small children to the streets.
Another observation: there are 43 million Spaniards.
And you said in one city alone. Not even in the entire country.
circumstances have undoubtedly changed, and Rahul Mahajan himself believes that the activities of the al-Zarqawi network have fractured the prospects for unity amongst the different groups, but his analysis from last April provides a useful framework for evaluating events in Iraq:
[April 8, 2:00 pm EST. Baghdad, Iraq -- Some thoughts on the question of Sunni-Shi'a unity. This is a very difficult question to address.
Let me start with some general comments just to frame things, then I'll get to my perceptions of what's going on now.
On the one hand, it's a standard, and usually necessary, part of colonialist discourse to play up the many divisions in the occupied country, stressing their deep-rooted and ineluctable nature. With the British, "divide et impera" was a pretty clearly-articulated strategy. Others used it, of course -- the English settlers in North America, the Belgians in Rwanda, you name it. But, with the development of liberal imperialist ideology (the white man's burden and all that), it became a crucial way to justify imperialism.
So, the British said, especially late in the game, "We have to stay in India, because otherwise there'll be a bloodbath between Hindus and Muslims" -- and, sure enough, in the Partition riots, somewhere from 250-500,000 people were killed. Oddly, the Americans said that in Vietnam too -- although there, instead of racial, ethnic, or sectarian divisions, they used their own division between slavery-loving Communists and freedom-loving human beings (in the latter case, they were proved wrong; the violence by Communists against those who supported the South Vietnamese government was on a far lesser scale than violence against British loyalists after the American Revolution or violence against Nazi collaborators in France).
The relevant point here is that the colonial powers didn't just invoke the risk of bloodbath. They created, usually deliberately, the conditions in which the risk of bloodbath would be greatest.
There are some postcolonial revisionists who say that they did this by just fabricating divisions out of whole cloth. You can point, for example, to the fact that, before the European colonization, notions of Hutu or Tutsi identity were fluid, but that later they were fixed as a matter of law. Or you can point to the fact that, in India, Hindu and Muslim armies regularly fought side by side against other Hindu and Muslim armies. Or that, aside from the barbaric acts of conquerors, there really weren't incidents of large-scale personalized violence between the two communities.
Personally, I don't quite agree. I think it's difficult or impossible to exacerbate a division if no division exists. I think that colonialists in general seized on small differences, froze them, reified them, magnified them, and exploited them, but I don't believe that those differences were simply fabrications.
So now, what about Iraq. People write with justifiable annoyance about the Americans' constant harping on Shi'a, Sunnis, Kurds, instead of just talking about Iraqis. It is, in fact, one of the major complaints of Iraqis as well.
An incredibly common refrain one hears is, "There has never been violence between Sunna and Shi'a." "Sunna and Shi'a are the same religion."
I don't really buy it. I certainly see no reason to believe that there would be mass violence on an individual level if the Americans left (mass violence between political groups is harder to predict), but there are profound differences and it's not an accident that resistance has been almost exclusively confined to Sunni Arabs.
What's of interest right now is what are the possibilities for a more meaningful level of unity to emerge, especially in resisting the occupation.
There is lots of spontaneous rhetorical support for unity. When we went to Shuala, Thawra, Kadhimiya, all Shi'a areas, people took pains to say that Sunna and Shi'a are now united in opposing the Americans. It was the first thing they said. They said it in the offices of Moqtada al-Sadr's movement.
When we went to Aadhamiyah, where people were collecting supplies for the relief of Fallujah and Ramadi, people were equally quick to say, "These are for Fallujah, Ramadi, Kufa, Najaf [Kufa and Najaf are Shi'a towns." I asked, "Would you give to Thawra as well" and they said, "absolutely" -- Thawra is a slum and one often hears derogatory comments about the people in it. They're nothing but thieves (we heard this from several middle class Shi'a as well), ... -- the kind of thing you don't hear very much in the United States because people have learned to be very hypocritical about the issue.
But probe a little deeper, and you find differences. Every Sadr supporter says there is no difference between him and Sistani -- except, they admit, that Sistani doesn't believe in clerical rule and Sadr does. These are irreconcilable positions.
Go further, and ask how can a Sadr supporter agree with a Sunni on the form of government when the Sunni don't even believe that independent interpretation of the canons of Islamic law is possible any more and that interpretation is exactly what the Just Jurist of the Khomeinist philosophy does.
Imam Syed Hazem al-Arajy of the Kadhimiyah mosque told me that people who talked about Shi'a-Sunni disunity were mistaken, that there were no problems between them. I asked him about Saddam and he said, "Saddam was not a Muslim."
The people in Aadhamiyah, on the other hand, were praising Saddam to the skies. And when I asked them what percentage of the supplies would be going to Kufa, they said, "Well, it's Fallujah and Ramadi that are under siege now."
I'm just saying that there are nontrivial differences. The dynamic of this resistance, when the United States has vowed to crush Fallujah and to crush the Mahdi Army, evolves every minute. According to AFP, thousands of Sunni and Shi'a are marching toward Fallujah, accompanied by cars bearing supplies. In Fallujah, people are putting up posters of Moqtada al-Sadr.
And I'm told that in Thawra they're also collecting supplies for Fallujah. I was thinking of going tomorrow, but I'm told that the word has also been put out to kidnap foreigners. And al-Arajy did admit, even though he had been forced to flee Iraq because Saddam would kill him, that he felt "a little bit" of unity even with Saddam supporters.
It's funny to me that so firmly entrenched is this colonialist mindset that people are actually talking even now about "civil war." Bob Kerrey the child-killer said to Condoleezza Rice today in 9/11 commission hearings that tactics in Iraq run the risk of civil war. And Hans Blix, who spoke out forcefully against the Bush administration on WMD only after the war, when it didn't matter, said Iraq is on the verge of civil war.
In an interesting inversion of the colonialist logic, perhaps we can say now that the United States presence is needed to prevent civil war, not by ensuring stability and protecting the supposedly opposed groups from each other, but by giving them an enemy to unite against.]
http://www.empirenotes.org/april04.html
--Richard
[April 8, 2:00 pm EST. Baghdad, Iraq -- Some thoughts on the question of Sunni-Shi'a unity. This is a very difficult question to address.
Let me start with some general comments just to frame things, then I'll get to my perceptions of what's going on now.
On the one hand, it's a standard, and usually necessary, part of colonialist discourse to play up the many divisions in the occupied country, stressing their deep-rooted and ineluctable nature. With the British, "divide et impera" was a pretty clearly-articulated strategy. Others used it, of course -- the English settlers in North America, the Belgians in Rwanda, you name it. But, with the development of liberal imperialist ideology (the white man's burden and all that), it became a crucial way to justify imperialism.
So, the British said, especially late in the game, "We have to stay in India, because otherwise there'll be a bloodbath between Hindus and Muslims" -- and, sure enough, in the Partition riots, somewhere from 250-500,000 people were killed. Oddly, the Americans said that in Vietnam too -- although there, instead of racial, ethnic, or sectarian divisions, they used their own division between slavery-loving Communists and freedom-loving human beings (in the latter case, they were proved wrong; the violence by Communists against those who supported the South Vietnamese government was on a far lesser scale than violence against British loyalists after the American Revolution or violence against Nazi collaborators in France).
The relevant point here is that the colonial powers didn't just invoke the risk of bloodbath. They created, usually deliberately, the conditions in which the risk of bloodbath would be greatest.
There are some postcolonial revisionists who say that they did this by just fabricating divisions out of whole cloth. You can point, for example, to the fact that, before the European colonization, notions of Hutu or Tutsi identity were fluid, but that later they were fixed as a matter of law. Or you can point to the fact that, in India, Hindu and Muslim armies regularly fought side by side against other Hindu and Muslim armies. Or that, aside from the barbaric acts of conquerors, there really weren't incidents of large-scale personalized violence between the two communities.
Personally, I don't quite agree. I think it's difficult or impossible to exacerbate a division if no division exists. I think that colonialists in general seized on small differences, froze them, reified them, magnified them, and exploited them, but I don't believe that those differences were simply fabrications.
So now, what about Iraq. People write with justifiable annoyance about the Americans' constant harping on Shi'a, Sunnis, Kurds, instead of just talking about Iraqis. It is, in fact, one of the major complaints of Iraqis as well.
An incredibly common refrain one hears is, "There has never been violence between Sunna and Shi'a." "Sunna and Shi'a are the same religion."
I don't really buy it. I certainly see no reason to believe that there would be mass violence on an individual level if the Americans left (mass violence between political groups is harder to predict), but there are profound differences and it's not an accident that resistance has been almost exclusively confined to Sunni Arabs.
What's of interest right now is what are the possibilities for a more meaningful level of unity to emerge, especially in resisting the occupation.
There is lots of spontaneous rhetorical support for unity. When we went to Shuala, Thawra, Kadhimiya, all Shi'a areas, people took pains to say that Sunna and Shi'a are now united in opposing the Americans. It was the first thing they said. They said it in the offices of Moqtada al-Sadr's movement.
When we went to Aadhamiyah, where people were collecting supplies for the relief of Fallujah and Ramadi, people were equally quick to say, "These are for Fallujah, Ramadi, Kufa, Najaf [Kufa and Najaf are Shi'a towns." I asked, "Would you give to Thawra as well" and they said, "absolutely" -- Thawra is a slum and one often hears derogatory comments about the people in it. They're nothing but thieves (we heard this from several middle class Shi'a as well), ... -- the kind of thing you don't hear very much in the United States because people have learned to be very hypocritical about the issue.
But probe a little deeper, and you find differences. Every Sadr supporter says there is no difference between him and Sistani -- except, they admit, that Sistani doesn't believe in clerical rule and Sadr does. These are irreconcilable positions.
Go further, and ask how can a Sadr supporter agree with a Sunni on the form of government when the Sunni don't even believe that independent interpretation of the canons of Islamic law is possible any more and that interpretation is exactly what the Just Jurist of the Khomeinist philosophy does.
Imam Syed Hazem al-Arajy of the Kadhimiyah mosque told me that people who talked about Shi'a-Sunni disunity were mistaken, that there were no problems between them. I asked him about Saddam and he said, "Saddam was not a Muslim."
The people in Aadhamiyah, on the other hand, were praising Saddam to the skies. And when I asked them what percentage of the supplies would be going to Kufa, they said, "Well, it's Fallujah and Ramadi that are under siege now."
I'm just saying that there are nontrivial differences. The dynamic of this resistance, when the United States has vowed to crush Fallujah and to crush the Mahdi Army, evolves every minute. According to AFP, thousands of Sunni and Shi'a are marching toward Fallujah, accompanied by cars bearing supplies. In Fallujah, people are putting up posters of Moqtada al-Sadr.
And I'm told that in Thawra they're also collecting supplies for Fallujah. I was thinking of going tomorrow, but I'm told that the word has also been put out to kidnap foreigners. And al-Arajy did admit, even though he had been forced to flee Iraq because Saddam would kill him, that he felt "a little bit" of unity even with Saddam supporters.
It's funny to me that so firmly entrenched is this colonialist mindset that people are actually talking even now about "civil war." Bob Kerrey the child-killer said to Condoleezza Rice today in 9/11 commission hearings that tactics in Iraq run the risk of civil war. And Hans Blix, who spoke out forcefully against the Bush administration on WMD only after the war, when it didn't matter, said Iraq is on the verge of civil war.
In an interesting inversion of the colonialist logic, perhaps we can say now that the United States presence is needed to prevent civil war, not by ensuring stability and protecting the supposedly opposed groups from each other, but by giving them an enemy to unite against.]
http://www.empirenotes.org/april04.html
--Richard
As usual, that was an interesting post, Richard.
I guess the only thing I would say is that no reasonable person would dispute that the internal logic of religious extremism contains the seeds of conflict and civil war. The question is what "environmental conditions" allow these seeds to spread and germinate....
This Zarqawi character strikes me as something straight out of the CIA's central casting. Assuming he in fact does exist, he might as well be an agent of the Americans for all the help he provides US planners. Like Hussein before him, he is the perfect embodiment of evil, a pretextual punching bag, and a religious/ethnic divider of the first order. It's interesting how, although the recent onslaught against Fallujah was justified on grounds that Zarqawi and his followers needed to be smoked out, little has been made of the fact that Zarqawi--again, assuming he does exist--got away scot free.
I guess the only thing I would say is that no reasonable person would dispute that the internal logic of religious extremism contains the seeds of conflict and civil war. The question is what "environmental conditions" allow these seeds to spread and germinate....
This Zarqawi character strikes me as something straight out of the CIA's central casting. Assuming he in fact does exist, he might as well be an agent of the Americans for all the help he provides US planners. Like Hussein before him, he is the perfect embodiment of evil, a pretextual punching bag, and a religious/ethnic divider of the first order. It's interesting how, although the recent onslaught against Fallujah was justified on grounds that Zarqawi and his followers needed to be smoked out, little has been made of the fact that Zarqawi--again, assuming he does exist--got away scot free.
--Jesse Jackson's quip about the U.S. Federal Park Service's *OBVIOUS* undercount of the African American "Million Man March" on the Washington, D.C., Mall. (I think that the "official" Park Service count was as low as around 300,000 and no more than anything over 500,000 -- I forgot exactly, but the Federal Park Service pretty much low-balled it. Jackson & Co. took the Park Service to court and embarrassed it with its obviously low count.)
>"SPAIN -- A COUNTRY OF ONLY 40 MILLION PEOPLE --
>CAN TURN OUT OVER A MILLION ANTI-WAR
>PROTESTERS IN ONE CITY ALONE. "
"Don't believe it. Some newspapers bothered to count the demonstrators by computer and there were not even half of that, even though some "progressive" teachers took small children to the streets."
Doesn't surprise me that Sefarad believes everything she reads in establishment/corporate *newspapers*!
Cops, establishment newspapers, and corporate TV *ALWAYS* undercount by at least half -- and often *more*!
I'm not impressed by the "computer" count claim. (As they say, 'garbage in, garbage out'. I could input criteria/methods/assumptions/formulae that could make -- ahhhem -- "the computer" come up with almost anythng I wanted it to.)
I remeber when the major corporate American TV news (the major commercial networks), day 1, said that there were, first, only "a few dozen protesters", and then, in retrospect, day 2, "a few hundred protesters" protesting Bush, recently, in Ottawa, Canada. (The S.F. corporate TV media always uses the "few hundred" number for thousands and the "few thousand" number for tens of thousands.) Even the Ottawa IMC digital photos alone put a lie to that assertion. Later (I guess when the lie became too obvious), day 3, the largest corporate TV media retrospective report number I heard was "several thousand protestors". The largest corporate media report I heard put the count at 5,000. I think that Ottawa IMC put the count on the order of 10,000 (maybe even 15,000).
===============================================================
IThanks for the radio info, Richard. I'll be looking forward to listening.)
Pepe Escober of Asia Times Online sees it like you do, in a number of articles on the subject that can be readily accessed at the site, such as the following:
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/FJ15Ak02.html
He has also written several great articles about the attack upon Falluja, accessible through "The Best of Pepe Escobar" link on the atimes.com homepage
Conversely, Mahajan has little patience with such conspiracy theories, treating them as a digression, instead emphasizing the lunatic, violent Wahabbist beliefs of al-Zarqawi and his network of followers, as he did during an interview I conducted with him a few months ago.
He has several posts about al-Zarqawi on his weblog, http://www.empirenotes.org , including the one that I have periodically mentioned here on indybay about al-Zarqawi hiding behind the insurgency as a means of fomenting violence toward Shiite Iraqis, as Wahabbism considers the Shia form of Islam to be heretical. He has a link to Google on his blog that enables you to search it for past notes and articles.
Both atimes.com and empirenotes.org are great websites, and indybay links to empirenotes.org on its antiwar page dedicated specifically to Iraq.
--Richard
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/FJ15Ak02.html
He has also written several great articles about the attack upon Falluja, accessible through "The Best of Pepe Escobar" link on the atimes.com homepage
Conversely, Mahajan has little patience with such conspiracy theories, treating them as a digression, instead emphasizing the lunatic, violent Wahabbist beliefs of al-Zarqawi and his network of followers, as he did during an interview I conducted with him a few months ago.
He has several posts about al-Zarqawi on his weblog, http://www.empirenotes.org , including the one that I have periodically mentioned here on indybay about al-Zarqawi hiding behind the insurgency as a means of fomenting violence toward Shiite Iraqis, as Wahabbism considers the Shia form of Islam to be heretical. He has a link to Google on his blog that enables you to search it for past notes and articles.
Both atimes.com and empirenotes.org are great websites, and indybay links to empirenotes.org on its antiwar page dedicated specifically to Iraq.
--Richard
Simply Ward Churchill more or less (and I think its more) supported the 9-11 slaughter at the WTC. If this is false I'd like to hear him to denounce the 9-11 mass murder. I'm not interested in discussing his sickening apologies.
For the those whose logical reasoning is challenged like some of the above posters because I criticize Churchill doesn't mean that I support Todd Gitlin (or pacificism). Give me a break, please!
Third to Paul Burton-- Fuck yourself. You don't know shit. Just because some idiot "does something" we should therefore logically support it regardless of its effectiveness or content is absurd.
Fourth-- Churchill's stuff on coinetlpro is valuable.
Fifth- Critizing pacifism is an easy target in my book so no props for the "Pacifism as Pathology" -- which is also basically an attempt to guilt bait naive young middle class people into weathermen type idiocy.
For the those whose logical reasoning is challenged like some of the above posters because I criticize Churchill doesn't mean that I support Todd Gitlin (or pacificism). Give me a break, please!
Third to Paul Burton-- Fuck yourself. You don't know shit. Just because some idiot "does something" we should therefore logically support it regardless of its effectiveness or content is absurd.
Fourth-- Churchill's stuff on coinetlpro is valuable.
Fifth- Critizing pacifism is an easy target in my book so no props for the "Pacifism as Pathology" -- which is also basically an attempt to guilt bait naive young middle class people into weathermen type idiocy.
"Simply Ward Churchill more or less (and I think its more) supported the 9-11 slaughter at the WTC. If this is false I'd like to hear him to denounce the 9-11 mass murder. I'm not interested in discussing his sickening apologies."
Go tell him yourself. He'll be in town at City Lights Bookstore, Feb 23, 5:00pm. We'll be there to hear you support your arguments.
Go tell him yourself. He'll be in town at City Lights Bookstore, Feb 23, 5:00pm. We'll be there to hear you support your arguments.
To JA: "We'll be there to hear you support your arguements" Thanks for the welcoming committee. I'll think about it-- though I would guess probably 99% of Americans (of all races and classes) agree with me that 9-11 was mass murder. So I'm not sure what arguement I need to "support".
It was an act of war.
What, did you think the US could continue bombing people all over the world forever and never once get bombed back? Gimme a break. That would fly in the face of everything we know about human nature.
What, did you think the US could continue bombing people all over the world forever and never once get bombed back? Gimme a break. That would fly in the face of everything we know about human nature.
I'm not sure it really matters what 99% of Americans agree on because the world is a whole lot bigger than that. Of course 911 was an act of mass murder. Who is disputing that? War is an act of murder and targetting civilians is grizzly no matter who does it in whose name.
The problem with Churchill is that he gets off on being a gadfly with a deathwish and blames the people with no power to effect policy for the crimes of our ruling class.
People who want to stop imperialism better get hip to the fact that it is the soldier and working people of this country who are going to make that change. Calling secretaries "little eichmans" might give fringe wingnuts a trangressive thrill, but it's strategcially wrong and counter-productive. Those who defend it brag about their own misanthropy.
The problem with Churchill is that he gets off on being a gadfly with a deathwish and blames the people with no power to effect policy for the crimes of our ruling class.
People who want to stop imperialism better get hip to the fact that it is the soldier and working people of this country who are going to make that change. Calling secretaries "little eichmans" might give fringe wingnuts a trangressive thrill, but it's strategcially wrong and counter-productive. Those who defend it brag about their own misanthropy.
For more information:
http://burning.typepad.com
Then I guess it should be pretty easy for you to make your case and show Ward up, huh? I won't pass up seeing *that*!
Well, here is one thing I've always wondered. Given that many leftists have a disagreement with his work, how come he isn't under attack by the many right-wingers who actively search out professors and deliberately misinterpret their work and make them the subject of death threats and so forth.
There are several professors who aren't nearly as well published, who didn't set out to do anything provokatory like with the Roosting Chickens book, such as Hatem Bazian at UC Berkeley or that guy at Columbia who just made some remark in class, who have been subject to big Frontpagemag articles and talk radio and death threats. So why aren't the right wingers all familiar with his book and busy bashing it, when it seems like he would even relish confronting them and seeks it out?
There are several professors who aren't nearly as well published, who didn't set out to do anything provokatory like with the Roosting Chickens book, such as Hatem Bazian at UC Berkeley or that guy at Columbia who just made some remark in class, who have been subject to big Frontpagemag articles and talk radio and death threats. So why aren't the right wingers all familiar with his book and busy bashing it, when it seems like he would even relish confronting them and seeks it out?
I'm not really interested in "showing" Ward Churchill up. I did write the review, sign my name to it and post it to Indymedias around the country, as well as publishing it in the new issue of the Indypendent in NYC.
Ward is always welcome to respond any time. But I suspect he prefers the company of his acolytes to the "little Eichmanns" of New York.
Ward is always welcome to respond any time. But I suspect he prefers the company of his acolytes to the "little Eichmanns" of New York.
For more information:
http://nyc.indymedia.org
I think the right-wing finds him a little too out there to take seriously. Plus, if they focused on him then their other complaints would seem more petty so they attack the center-left and ignore the radical left to make the center appear to be farther to the right than it really is. They will go after radicals who are from certainminority groups (like Arabs) that its PC to demonize since it doesnt break the stereotype about people from the ethnic groups they are attacking, but they cant do that with Ward since Native AMericans are not part of the current right-wing message.
He's a chariacture of what the right thinks the left is. He's a lot more useful running around cheering 911 than he would be getting fired. Then people besides po'd primies might start paying attention to him.
yeah.. (I shouldn't be wasting time on this. procrastination).
at this site, run by Daniel Pipes I think, there is nothing at U of Colorado. But there is all this stuff about Hatem Bazian... who I heard once. He's smart. He was really able to summarize history to a general audience well, and I didn't hear anything untoward. He seems very in touch with young people, and also moderate in personal mannerisms. http://www.campus-watch.org/survey.php/id/14
They also have links to articles about the students for justice in palestine group, where they are even main describing off campus protesters like JA. JA was at Berkeley, but he wasn't in the classroom unnerving sensitive minded freshmen from the OC.
At http://www.noindoctrination.org run by a woman who has a few filtering standards, there is no mention of him. Some of these described people are a bit unhinged and stuff. 1 U Colorado mention, 6 at cal including one about their marxist computer science structures class.
I don't think many students are rushing to complain at this site.
At this UC Boulder based site, started by young republicans with few standards, they were able to generate all these major media articles about themselves, but then when you click on their link... they don't have any stories or reports of bias listed. You'd think that by now they could summarize their results, but they dropped the project I guess, like most school clubs do.
http://www.colorado.edu/StudentGroups/CURepublicans/classroom-bias.html
at this site, run by Daniel Pipes I think, there is nothing at U of Colorado. But there is all this stuff about Hatem Bazian... who I heard once. He's smart. He was really able to summarize history to a general audience well, and I didn't hear anything untoward. He seems very in touch with young people, and also moderate in personal mannerisms. http://www.campus-watch.org/survey.php/id/14
They also have links to articles about the students for justice in palestine group, where they are even main describing off campus protesters like JA. JA was at Berkeley, but he wasn't in the classroom unnerving sensitive minded freshmen from the OC.
At http://www.noindoctrination.org run by a woman who has a few filtering standards, there is no mention of him. Some of these described people are a bit unhinged and stuff. 1 U Colorado mention, 6 at cal including one about their marxist computer science structures class.
I don't think many students are rushing to complain at this site.
At this UC Boulder based site, started by young republicans with few standards, they were able to generate all these major media articles about themselves, but then when you click on their link... they don't have any stories or reports of bias listed. You'd think that by now they could summarize their results, but they dropped the project I guess, like most school clubs do.
http://www.colorado.edu/StudentGroups/CURepublicans/classroom-bias.html
http://www.denverpost.com/framework/0,1413,36~53~1061453~,00.html
Also, look at this... The Denver police developed a plan to kill Ward Churchill and Glen Morris, wrote a memo about it, and filed it. Maybe he's afraid or suspicious of some people due to this.
Also, look at this... The Denver police developed a plan to kill Ward Churchill and Glen Morris, wrote a memo about it, and filed it. Maybe he's afraid or suspicious of some people due to this.
The SF Anarchist Book Fair is free. See him there if you don't want to pay.
oops, I meant 'was aware of plan' above.
This was in the news a couple days ago. Denver is actually supposed to be the liberal big down in Colorado, while Colorado springs is super right, and the eastern and far western side are rural, and the western range is filled with yuppies.
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/local/article/0,1299,DRMN_15_3452166,00.html
This was in the news a couple days ago. Denver is actually supposed to be the liberal big down in Colorado, while Colorado springs is super right, and the eastern and far western side are rural, and the western range is filled with yuppies.
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/local/article/0,1299,DRMN_15_3452166,00.html
oh, that website says that the January 23 thing is cancelled and he's coming in March to talk about the residential schools, where they wouldn't let kids attend neighborhood schools with local white people.
(see Jed Brandt, Wednesday, Jan. 12, 2005 at 5:26 PM.)
I'm starting to smell a *chicken* of another type.
(I have never known City Lights Bookstore to charge for any event. The event, however has been POSTPONED, so you have a more convenient excuse -- for now.)
I'm starting to smell a *chicken* of another type.
(I have never known City Lights Bookstore to charge for any event. The event, however has been POSTPONED, so you have a more convenient excuse -- for now.)
Okay, you called me a chicken so I'll come to City Lights to argue with Ward Churchill. Please contact me via email so we can arrange for the plane tickets from JFK "Roosting Chickens" International Airport in New York. Since you are so eager, I'm sure you will pay the fare. (JetBlue has some killer deals, so it's possible. You buy it, I'm there.)
I was going to get back to work, but I had to say this:
(see cp, Wednesday, Jan. 12, 2005 at 9:21 PM)
Hatem Bazian and I have been very good friends for many years.
I *HIGHLY* respect him: he's sharp, witty, lively, mentally quick, highly intelligent, extremely knowledgeabe, very incisive, very articulate, very approachable, and has an easy sophistication.
IF YOU EVER SEE A NOTICE WHERE HATEM BAZIAN IS LECTURING, *DON'T* -- I REPEAT *DON'T* -- MISS IT!!
(And bring an audio recorder: you'll want to listen to his lecture again for the sheer wealth of information he provides.)
That's why the Zionists have been attacking him with much fury and mightily always try to get him kicked off the faculty at Berkeley. The Zionists are always barraging the Chancellor's office with emails to get him fired. You could say that the Zionists pay him their highest honor with such always strenuous efforts of theirs.
(And, I am rather good in the classroom. I have even guest lectured there.)
(see cp, Wednesday, Jan. 12, 2005 at 9:21 PM)
Hatem Bazian and I have been very good friends for many years.
I *HIGHLY* respect him: he's sharp, witty, lively, mentally quick, highly intelligent, extremely knowledgeabe, very incisive, very articulate, very approachable, and has an easy sophistication.
IF YOU EVER SEE A NOTICE WHERE HATEM BAZIAN IS LECTURING, *DON'T* -- I REPEAT *DON'T* -- MISS IT!!
(And bring an audio recorder: you'll want to listen to his lecture again for the sheer wealth of information he provides.)
That's why the Zionists have been attacking him with much fury and mightily always try to get him kicked off the faculty at Berkeley. The Zionists are always barraging the Chancellor's office with emails to get him fired. You could say that the Zionists pay him their highest honor with such always strenuous efforts of theirs.
(And, I am rather good in the classroom. I have even guest lectured there.)
I don't understand how the US's oppression of Indians has anything to do with innocent people who were murdered on 9/11. These events are completely unrelated. Ward Churchill is a fraud and a hypocrite. He profits off his "controversial" viewpoints but he's not better than those he speaks disparingly off. He's a profiteer, plain and simple. Any one with half a brain will see him for what he is...a waste of life who does not deserve an audience.
I'm reading these posts and I'm struck by a sense that you people really have nothing better to do than debate these issues all day and night. I sense you have no real jobs and you smoke way too much weed. Nothing wrong with reefer (great recreational drug but in moderation and when watching Chappelle Show) except when it interferes with rational judgement. The fact that some of you people don't believe that Al-Zarqawi exists (that the CIA invented him) speaks to your delusions and paranoia. Ignorance is bliss especially when you live in the moutains of Colorado or the Bay Area.
Shhh Hey Quit Yelling At The Left We are learning the
True colors Red (no ref to Bush States) let them keep
spewing the Leftist trash So we will learn The Truth of
the real American (liberty) hating dits
True colors Red (no ref to Bush States) let them keep
spewing the Leftist trash So we will learn The Truth of
the real American (liberty) hating dits
Who the fuck is Paul Burton? Yeah, tell us how many gonads you have by including your fake name while calling out all the pussies...look in the mirror if you can stand it. Might is right...Period!
I followed the link here to the Denver Post article that "cp" posted on 12 January: "The Denver police developed a plan to kill Ward Churchill and Glen Morris, wrote a memo about it, and filed it. Maybe he's afraid or suspicious of some people due to this."
As far as I can tell from the article, there was some evidence that a rival political group -- not the cops -- wanted to kill those guys. Apparently the police willfully or clumsily failed to disclose that info to Churchill & Morris. This inaction by the PD is certainly troubling, but it's quite a bit different from the police developing a plan to kill these guys. ...or am I missing something here?
As far as I can tell from the article, there was some evidence that a rival political group -- not the cops -- wanted to kill those guys. Apparently the police willfully or clumsily failed to disclose that info to Churchill & Morris. This inaction by the PD is certainly troubling, but it's quite a bit different from the police developing a plan to kill these guys. ...or am I missing something here?
You should all read his article, then comment. That way your ass won't be hanging out.
http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/WC091201.html
http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/WC091201.html
That article was posted online, he made no money for that.
As for the Denver Police files on Churchill, if the police know there is a murder plot and do nothing about it what does that say about their position? To me it says they approve of the murder. Forget about telling him or not, isn't it the police's resposibility to stop murder when they know about it? They haven't even identified the people conspiring to hurt Churchill, this leaves me with the impression that they are protecting those people.
We hear all of this arguing over whether or not the government knew about 9-11 before it happened, whether it let US citizens die without doing anything to stop it. This inaction by the Denver police dept proves that our officials are capable of turning their heads when they know a US citizen's life is in danger.
As for the Denver Police files on Churchill, if the police know there is a murder plot and do nothing about it what does that say about their position? To me it says they approve of the murder. Forget about telling him or not, isn't it the police's resposibility to stop murder when they know about it? They haven't even identified the people conspiring to hurt Churchill, this leaves me with the impression that they are protecting those people.
We hear all of this arguing over whether or not the government knew about 9-11 before it happened, whether it let US citizens die without doing anything to stop it. This inaction by the Denver police dept proves that our officials are capable of turning their heads when they know a US citizen's life is in danger.
yes, I decided to correct my miswording in the next comment after that.
Hopefully no one who can't bother to read Churchill's whole essay there shows up to stab him at the talk at Hamilton College that suddenly is a big issue in the press. It is actually good that someone who is so damn prepared and well-spoken and smart finally is getting to argue the position that deaths of people who aren't european or U.S. citizens count too. Various other figures have families or jobs to defend and can't stick their neck out as much, or they just aren't in the right spot- for instance, google 'toni smith' and 'anthem', regarding a student who decided not to stand for the anthem during school basketball games during the Iraq escalation, and it became a top talk radio topic and people came to attack her at games- and that is just picking on someone who doesn't have the resources to fight back.
First, I wish the press would go and look at the documents he got from the Freedom of Information Act from the FBI which were letters sent to Martin Luther King ordering him to commit suicide, or they'd hurt his family. That Cointelpro book was really the number one thing for me, why I respect his work. Everyone needs to see that.
Hopefully no one who can't bother to read Churchill's whole essay there shows up to stab him at the talk at Hamilton College that suddenly is a big issue in the press. It is actually good that someone who is so damn prepared and well-spoken and smart finally is getting to argue the position that deaths of people who aren't european or U.S. citizens count too. Various other figures have families or jobs to defend and can't stick their neck out as much, or they just aren't in the right spot- for instance, google 'toni smith' and 'anthem', regarding a student who decided not to stand for the anthem during school basketball games during the Iraq escalation, and it became a top talk radio topic and people came to attack her at games- and that is just picking on someone who doesn't have the resources to fight back.
First, I wish the press would go and look at the documents he got from the Freedom of Information Act from the FBI which were letters sent to Martin Luther King ordering him to commit suicide, or they'd hurt his family. That Cointelpro book was really the number one thing for me, why I respect his work. Everyone needs to see that.
We need to be a little careful here as certain questions would need to be answered: What was the specificity of the threat? What was the credibility of the threat?
Obviously in the case of Morris and Churchill the threat was specific and if it was at all credible, those men should have been notified. (Does anyone know how credible that threat was?)
As for 9/11, obviously the threat was credible (the perpetrators had acted before and said they would again) -- but how specific was it? Frankly, I'm willing to believe just about any perfidy (idiocy?) on the part of the present administration, but to date I haven't seen substantial evidence that the administration knew of the 9/11 plot. Can anyone direct me to such evidence?
Obviously in the case of Morris and Churchill the threat was specific and if it was at all credible, those men should have been notified. (Does anyone know how credible that threat was?)
As for 9/11, obviously the threat was credible (the perpetrators had acted before and said they would again) -- but how specific was it? Frankly, I'm willing to believe just about any perfidy (idiocy?) on the part of the present administration, but to date I haven't seen substantial evidence that the administration knew of the 9/11 plot. Can anyone direct me to such evidence?
Has anyone ever check on Warde Chuchill's facts?
The First Nations people in Canada have denounced a book he wrote about his wife (who had died in a car accident) and her family whom are First Nations. So why does Ward oppose history and Columbus, yet writes a false account of a First Nations family and their history himself. How much of his writings are actually true accounts? Has the univeristy checked?
Here's the link - http://www.afn.ca/resolutions/2004/res56.htm
The First Nations people in Canada have denounced a book he wrote about his wife (who had died in a car accident) and her family whom are First Nations. So why does Ward oppose history and Columbus, yet writes a false account of a First Nations family and their history himself. How much of his writings are actually true accounts? Has the univeristy checked?
Here's the link - http://www.afn.ca/resolutions/2004/res56.htm
For more information:
http://www.afn.ca/resolutions/2004/res56.htm
from the biographical preface to In My Own Voice: Explorations in the Sociopolitical Context of Art & Cinema by Leah Renae Kelly, Copyright 2001 Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 2-91 Albert St., Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada R3B 1G5
phone: 204.942.7058
website: http://www.tao.ca/~arbeiter/
email: arbeiter [at] tao.ca
Let it be said, first of all, that I don’t write on personal themes. It is not a form to which I’m accustomed, to which I’ve aspired, with which I’ve ever been the least comfortable. This is all the more true in the present instance, devolving as it does on the destruction and death of my wife, my chosen one, the person who in her very presence afforded me a sense of direction, fulfillment and completeness I’d neither known nor believed possible. In her absence, I will never know it again.
Whatever the scale of my anguish, its real measure can never be found within me. What was lost was, after all, vastly more decisive for her than me, no matter how tightly I was and will always remain bound to her. In ways both tangible and not, moreover, hers is a loss shared by everyone, without exception, irrespective of whether they know or are willing to admit it. Anything I might have to offer will come only in an effort to explain, however clumsily and imperfectly, why this is so.
Leah Renae Kelly was not simply an “inebriated pedestrian killed by [a] car,” as the local newspaper so casually remarked on the date she died. There were reasons why that young, beautiful, incredibly promising and catastrophically drunk Ojibwe woman was running barefoot down the middle of the road that night. Whether she thought she was running away from something, towards something else, or whether she was capable of thinking anything at all in that moment are things beyond my power of knowing. In a larger sense, however, I do know why she was drunk, why she was a drunk and therefore why things ended for her as they did. From there, I cannot avoid the meaning of it all. Leah’s is the quintessential story of contemporary North America. It is thus ours, each of us, to the extent that we live on this continent. From this, squirm as one might, there is, can be no escape.
The essential elements of Leah’s story emerge from the realities of her identity as an American Indian and, consequently, the nature of her life and sense of self. Inevitably, these take shape only within the framework of such considerations for Native North Americans more generally. And with equal certainty, this cannot be understood apart from the structural relationship presently existing between the continent’s immigrant (settler) society and the peoples indigenous to what many of us call Turtle Island. It follows that an honest accounting must be made of the flows of impact and benefit involved, as well as an unequivocal repudiation of the elaborate veils of evasion and denial behind which such unpleasantness is habitually concealed.
What Leah desired most - aside, perhaps, from the fleeting moments of happiness we spent together - was to “be somebody,” to “count for something” beyond the immediacy of herself. This she told me often, and with a yearning that quite literally broke my heart. No matter that she was in fact somebody, somebody very special, and that to me she counted for absolutely everything. I knew what she meant and why she meant it that way. To the extent that her suffering can now serve to illustrate and reveal the grinding horror that destroyed her, she will have in some way succeeded in her desire, claiming the dignity she was due all along from the very indignity forced upon her at the instant of her birth.
Nobody Loves a Drunken Indian
It should surprise no one that Leah might have ended her days an alcoholic. Liquor and other intoxicants, after all, replaced Gatling guns and smallpox as the greatest killers of native people during the twentieth century.1 Long before the dawn of the new millennium, upwards of half the continent’s indigenous people were known to be suffering or recovering from the effects of acute alcoholism, while on some Canadian reserves - Alkali Lake, Grassy Narrows, Cross Lake, Norway House and others - the tally included every adult.2 Children, too, are afflicted, although their chosen substances run more towards gasoline, spray paint and nail polish remover. Seventy percent of the youngsters in northern Manitoba were found to be addicted to such toxics by the mid-1980s. In some villages, it had become necessary to post guards outside implement buildings to prevent nine-year-olds from breaking in and sniffing gas or solvents, deliberately and permanently blotting out their consciousness through the resulting brain damage or death.3
The toll is everywhere apparent, evidenced not only along the skid rows of most North American cities, but in the disintegration of indigenous family structures and communities, sometimes whole societies.4 Alcohol-related patterns of domestic violence, spousal abandonment and child neglect or abuse, unheard of in traditional settings, have become endemic facts of contemporary native life.5 Deaths from accidents and exposure, the great majority involving inebriation, reached catastrophic levels decades since.6 So, too, deaths resulting from cirrhosis and other degenerative illnesses associated with chronic alcoholism.7 Fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS), a condition permanently impairing the offspring of alcoholic mothers, embodies yet another crisis for native people.8
Physical debilitation accruing from chronic alcoholism also figures prominently in the abysmal picture painted by American Indian health data overall.9 American Indians die from readily-survivable maladies like flu and pneumonia at a rate three times the norm in both Canada and the US.10 Nutrition related illnesses, often associated with binge drinking, abound. Diabetes is “almost a plague,” afflicting upwards of half of native adults.11 Death from tuberculosis occurs among Indians at a rate four times that of the general population.12 Hepatitis, eight times. Strep infections, ten times. Infant mortality, up to fourteen times. Meningitis, twenty times. Dysentery, a hundred times.13 Rounding out the picture, “the suicide rate for Indian youths ranges from 1,000 to 10,000 [percent] higher than for non-Indian youths.”14
The bottom line is that reservation-based aboriginal men experienced a life-expectancy of less than 45 years, our female counterparts only three years longer in 1990. This, in the world’s most advanced industrial countries, where “mainstream” women outstrip the 71.8 year average lifespans of males by nearly a decade.15 Viewed from this standpoint, it can be asserted with an undeniable degree of accuracy that every time an Indian dies on a reservation, one-third of a lifetime has been lost. And, since the pattern is intergenerational, having lasted now for more than a century, the observation can be inverted with equal precision: each baby born on a reserve represents a third of a lifetime that will remain unlived. Nor for their part, do urbanized natives fare appreciably better.16
So ubiquitous are the effects of alcohol among native people that a whole mythology of “drunken Indians” has been contrived by the interloping Euroderivative settler society.17 The centerpiece of this complex of fables, promoted by everyone from the “scientific community” to pseudoreligious “self-help groups” like Alcoholics Anonymous, and internalized as an article of faith by many native people, is the claim that aboriginals are “congenitally predisposed” to suffer the “disease” of alcoholism. 18 No one bothers to explain why, if this were so, we suffer it at rates virtually identical to those evident among the Irish, say, or the Scotch Irish “hillbillies” of Appalachia, inner city blacks and the poorer sectors of the Angloamerican mainstream itself.19 All told, there are some twenty million alcoholics in the US, only a half-million of them native; a similar proportionality prevails in Canada.20
In truth, there’s never been a shred of credible evidence to support claims that alcoholism is either “hereditary” or in any physiological sense a “disease.”21 On the contrary, there is every indication that such addictions are “normal” concomitants of poverty and feelings of powerlessness, irrespective of the racial/cultural pedigree of those afflicted.22 Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi and others have further demonstrated that self-destructive pathologies like alcoholism correlate to conditions of colonial domination.23 Such conclusions are validated by the fact that while “drunken Indians” and “drunken Irish” share virtually nothing in terms of peculiarities in our DNA, we have everything in common when it comes to experiencing the ravages of centuries-long colonization.
For Indians, this translates into dispossession of some 98 percent of our lands, the balance and the astonishing abundance of resources with which it is endowed - administered in a unilaterally imposed and permanent “trust status” by Canada and the US.24 Exercise of this self-assigned “plenary power" has enabled the settler governments to siphon the residual assets of native peoples into their own economies - paying less than a dime on the dollar of market royalty rates for minerals extracted, to offer but one example - while leaving native peoples increasingly destitute.25 The upshot is that Indians, still in nominal possession of the largest per capita landholdings of any sector of the North American population and thus potentially the wealthiest of all groups on an individual basis, experience the practical reality of being far and away the poorest.26
As the remnants of traditional subsistence economies have been ever more thoroughly undermined, the very survival of native people has been rendered increasingly dependent upon our ability to participate in the settlers’ wage/cash system. Yet so complete has our marginalization been in this respect that our overall unemployment rate has hovered in the mid-sixtieth percentile for the past half century. On some reservations, more than ninety percent of the workforce has remained jobless during the same period.27 Per capita annual income in many communities barely exceeds $2,000 US, while it has been officially estimated that in places, over 85 percent of the housing units are unfit for human habitation.28 On balance,it is fair to say that the situation shows no sign of improvement. Indeed, there are indicators that it may actually be worsening.29
In and of themselves, such conditions contribute substantially to the grim health and longevity statistics recited above. More to the point, they combine to create among those perpetually burdened with them a sense of such utter disempowerment, despair and hopelessness as to make the oblivion of chronic intoxication seem an attractive alternative to conscious awareness of one’s circumstances. That the compulsion to opt for such figurative self-nullification, and/or the literal variety attainable through outright suicide, has by now become pronounced among aboriginal gradeschoolers bespeaks as little else can the depth of the misery the settler society has imposed upon native people.30
Others have evidenced strikingly similar patterns of response. German Jews, for example, when subjected to a harsh régime of discrimination, dispossession and disemployment by the nazis during the 1930s, shortly came to evidence a suicide rate some three times that of the German public as a whole. During the early 1940s, as they were being relocated to Poland and concentrated there in reservations and urban ghettos - they were not yet aware of being slated for outright extermination - the Jewish suicide rate rose to a level approximately fifty times higher than that of non-Jews.31 The response of the Sinti and Romani or Gypsies to nazi persecution was much the same, if somewhat less pronounced.32 For that matter, the suicide rate among Germans rose steeply during the first years of occupation following their defeat in World War II.33
It follows that, were the North American settler population subjected to circumstances comparable to those imposed upon native people, it would soon come to exhibit many of the same “negative group characteristics” as do Indians (or Jews, Gypsies, Irish and inner city blacks). Just as clearly, holding Indians in a state of perpetual subordination/destitution is a prerequisite to maintaining the relatively lavish level of comfort enjoyed by the settlers, collectively announced as their own entitlement. The implications of this cause/effect relationship are ready-made to instill a sense of guilt among beneficiaries, the settlers - those so prideful of their self-proclaimed “humanitarian enlightenment.” Since guilty feelings are at best an uncomfortable sensation, the implications - or the nature of the relationship itself must be denied.
Better still that the victims themselves should be “held accountable” - that is, blamed - for the very fact of their victimization.34 Vacuous assertions that American Indians are “innately endowed” with a “congenital predisposition” to alcoholism or suicide serve this purpose quite nicely, as do oft expressed “concerns” that there may be some mysterious set of “factors” at work in native cultures producing much the same effect.35 Thus handily self-absolved of responsibility for what the system underpinning their privilege has wrought, the settler beneficiaries free themselves to enjoy its fruits absent the least discomfiting pangs of conscience.36 Indeed, they position themselves thereby to adopt a lofty air of “moral superiority” vis-a-vis those whose relentless agony pays the tab.37 The mentality at issue is not dissimilar from that of the twisted little boys known to delight in torturing cats, its effect in exacerbating the pain of the victims self-evident.
“To Educate the Indian Out of Them”
If all this were not enough, still worse will be found in the legacy of a comprehensive system of residential “Indian Schools” established during the early 1880s and maintained for a century thereafter. A linchpin of “assimilationist” policies through which the US and Canada alike sought to eradicate the last traces of indigenous culture in North America, the schools were meant to serve, in the words of US Indian Commissioner Francis E. Leupp, as “a great pulverizing engine for breaking down the tribal mass.”38 Leupp’s northerly counterpart, Duncan Campbell Scott, was clearer and more blunt, observing that the “objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada” culturally identifiable as such.39
Such sentiments permeated the settler society. The goal of residential schooling, as articulated by the editors of the Calgary Herald in 1892, was nothing less than to “wipe out the whole Indian establishment.”40 At about the same time, US Superintendent of Indian Schools Richard Henry Pratt - an army captain whose main qualification for the job seems to have been that he’d earlier presided over a military prison in Florida to which Geronimo and other “recalcitrant” native adults were sent to be broken - explained to wide applause that his object was to “kill the Indian, spare the man” in every pupil.41 In Canada, the formulation was to “educate the Indian out of each student.”42 Statements of this sort were legion, and made right into the 1980s."43
The techniques employed in such endeavors were as brutal as they were straightforward. Aboriginal children as young as five were “caught” by government agents and forcibly removed to facilities “located away from reserves so that parental influence would be reduced to a minimum.”44 Thus isolated from all that was familiar, the youngsters were shorn of their hair, outfitted in “proper” Euroamerican/ Eurocanadian attire, their personal effects impounded or destroyed. Thereafter, they were subject to military/penal style regimentation."45 Crowded into barracks-like living quarters where disease often ran rampant, they were fed on about one-third the officially estimated minimum cost of providing adequate nutrition to children their age.46
Severe corporal punishment - whippings, solitary confinement, restriction to bread and water rations - was routinely employed to prevent students speaking their own languages, practicing or in many cases even knowing about their spiritual traditions or anything else associated with the autochthonous functioning of their cultures.47 Not infrequently, this harsh “discipline” was transmuted into outright torture, as when children were chained to walls or posts for days, sometimes weeks on end, burned or scalded, had needles run through their tongues, were forced to eat their own vomit, subjected to electrical shocks and/or denied medical attention.48 Sadism was often conjoined by the sexual predations of staff members, a pattern of abuse now proven to have been pervasive in many institutions (and covered up by responsible officials).49 Under such conditions, death rates among students were extraordinarily high.50
Those who survived were held for an average of ten years, living in a state of perpetual anxiety - or abject terror - as they were systematically “deculturated” through a process elsewhere described as “education for extinction.”51 In actuality, the entire procedure in many ways resembled the hideous “depatterning” techniques developed for the CIA by McGill University psychiatrist Ewen Cameron during the agency’s notorious MK-ULTRA Project of the early 1960s.52 More appropriate still, given Captain Pratt’s seminal role, it might be seen as prefiguring the methods currently employed in supermax penal units to force ideological conversion upon politicized inmates, or failing that, to reduce them to “psychological jelly.”53
The form of conversion demanded of residential school students is not especially mysterious. Operating under government authority, the schools were administered mainly by the Anglican, Catholic and other Christian churches.54 It follows that, as their own spiritual beliefs were expunged, students were subjected to intensive indoctrination in “the true faith,” spending about twice the time each day undergoing religious training as they did receiving academic instruction.55 As recently as 1993, the Anglicans were still prepared to defend this “civilizing mission” in terms of the unabashed white supremacism it entailed.
Canada ... must increasingly become ... a country of white men rooted and grounded in those fundamental scriptural conceptions of the individual, of society [and] of the state ... as the same have been conceived and found expression through the struggles and conquests of the several peoples of British blood and tradition. The church felt it had a Christian responsibility to assist the Aboriginal people in this transition. Assimilation, like medicine, might be intrusive and unpleasant, might even hurt a great deal, but in the long run it was for the people’s own good...56
In other words, the idea was to infect students at the most primal level with a perception of Indians corresponding to the emphatically negative views embraced by their colonizers.57 Thus conditioned to see themselves and their heritage as consigned by god to a state of “natural inferiority” - if not as things “evil” or “satanic” - students suffered profound and permanent psychological/emotional damage. 58 Probably without exception, they left the residential schools with a deformed self-concept, their senses of self-esteem and confidence severely undermined. In the majority of cases, active self-loathing appears to be at issue.59
Meanwhile, in a rather close parallel to what the nazis planned for a residue of Slavs after conquering eastern Europe, initiatives were undertaken to “fit [students] into the lower echelons of the new economic order” in North America.60 To this end, many residential facilities were configured as “industrial schools” providing “vocational training to prepare their pupils to fill certain limited occupations.”61 In practice, this meant the children typically worked more hours per day than they spent in the classroom, the bulk of their wages impounded to offset the “expense of their education.”62 Thereby reduced to de facto slave status, it was drummed into them, year after year, that their “place” would be forever to toil as manual laborers and domestics serving the needs of their racial “betters” at discount rates.63
In the end, of course, the racial biases of the settlers were such that there were precious few jobs for graduates, even of these demeaning varieties. Thus “disemployed,” they were mostly forced into a posture of seemingly immutable material dependency upon those who most despised them. What the residential schools in effect produced were successive generations of increasingly desperate and dysfunctional human beings, incapable of valuing themselves as Indians and neither assimilated nor assimilable into the dominant society which had rendered them thus. Given the sheer impossibility of their situation, the self-negating pathologies evidenced by residential school graduates are, or should have been, perfectly predictable.64
Although it was originally intended that every aboriginal child between the ages of five and fifteen would be processed through the schools, attendance ultimately peaked at somewhere around half the youngsters in successive generations.65 The correlation between this proportion of the indigenous population and the percentage now suffering alcoholism is obvious. One suspects that were a list of native alcoholics compared to a list of those who endured the residential schools - along with their sons and daughters - a well-nigh perfect match would result.
Worlds of Pain
While the diagnosis has been rather scrupulously avoided by psychoanalysts and therapeutic practitioners over the years, the core of the devastation inflicted upon those incarcerated in the residential schools was a magnitude of psychological trauma most commonly associated with men suffering the aftereffects of heavy combat.66 “Emotional numbing,” “incomplete mourning” and a range of other symptoms of acute trauma afflicting survivors of the nazi genocide, the Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombings and comparable phenomena are equally apparent.67 So too, a confluence with the pathologies typically exhibited by hostages, rape victims, and the victims of political repression/state terrorism.68
The early age at which residential school victims typically incurred their traumas has also tended to amplify the impacts to a greater extent than those evident among the mostly adult counterpart groups noted above. In this sense, the pattern of ensuing pathologies more nearly resembles that displayed by victims of severe child abuse.69 This is especially true with respect to children suffering not a single traumatic incident (or cluster of incidents), but upon whom abuse has been visited in a chronic and protracted fashion.70 Thus layered and reinforced over a period of years, the result is not so much the classic “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder” (PTSD), with which so many combat veterans and rape victims are afflicted, as it is a sort of “Complex PTSD” recently described by Harvard Psychiatry Professor Judith Herman.71
Even Herman’s is an inadequate characterization of the “Residential School Syndrome” (RSS), however.72 For a condition to be accurately depicted as “post-traumatic,” it is of course necessary that the circumstance(s) generating the trauma first be eliminated. A rape victim, for example, is not experiencing “post-traumatic stress,” no matter how “complex,” while the rape is occurring. S/he is instead undergoing the trauma itself. By the same token, there can be no reasonable expectation that a child might be “cured” of the psychological ravages of abuse before s/he is removed from the abusive setting, or a Gypsy victim of the nazi genocide during his/her confinement in Neuengamme or Auschwitz.
Effective therapeutic strategies for those suffering trauma-induced pathologies, moreover, invariably devolve upon some form of generalized and tangible withdrawal of social sanction from those who perpetrated the trauma-inducing acts or processes.73 “Regular” rapists, child abusers and mass murderers are all viewed as criminals in a socially normative sense. They are not celebrated by the great majority of people in North America, nor are apologetics usually offered in their behalf asserting that however “misguided” they may have been in what they did, they acted on the basis of “the best of intentions.”74 Still less are their victims subjected to a broad and continuous bombardment of public scorn, ridicule and trivialization.
Where a supportive environment exists, “healing” the effects of severe trauma is extraordinarily difficult.75 Where it does not, as is to a noticeable extent the case with Vietnam combat veterans and much more so with the victims of political repression, it is largely impossible. Vietnam vets continued to suffer disproportionately high rates of alcoholism, drug usage, incarceration and suicide until those who’d borne the brunt of ground combat were largely and quite prematurely dead.76 Although far less research has been done with respect to those suffering the aftershocks of state terrorism, there are indications that they manifest the same pattern in a still more pronounced form.77
For survivors of the residential schools, none of the criteria requisite to psychological “recovery” apply. Although the facilities themselves have by-and-large been phased out, the material incentives prompting the settler society to establish them in the first place - that is, the comprehensive dispossession/disempowerment of native people - were fulfilled long since. The results remain very much in effect and are treated as a “natural entitlement” by the perpetrator population. Other than those judicially proven to have engaged in specific acts of sexual predation, even the persons most directly involved - those who worked in and presided over the schools - are not normatively viewed as criminals.78 Indeed, while the Canadian government has lately offered a tepid “expression of regret” for a carefully-limited range of “negative impacts,” it has formally declined to so much as apologize for the criminality inherent to the residential school system as a whole."79 The US has yet to rise even to this token level of acknowledgement.80
Meanwhile, the iconography of settler triumphalism is everywhere and always apparent, from annual celebrations of “Thanksgiving” and “Columbus Day” to the enshrinement of patently genocidal personages like Andrew Jackson and Theodore Roosevelt on national currencies, from the exalted statuary littering public spaces to the names bestowed upon the places themselves. And then, to be sure, there is the haughty supremacist aura with which the settlers have imbued their culture - and by extension themselves - in the canons of their literature, their cinema and the academic (mis)representations that continue to be imposed upon native youth with more force and sophistication today than ever before.81
The flip side of the triumphalist coin concerns a proliferate iconography of degradation and outright dehumanization where aboriginal people are concerned. This will be found in the same literary and academic texts through which the settler society lends a false burnish to the contrivances of its own image in the 2,000-odd westerns released by Hollywood over the past century, in some 10,000 television segments produced between 1950 and 1990, in “Tumbleweeds” cartoons and product names like Jeep “Cherokee” and “Winnebago” recreational vehicles, in sports team names and mascots like those of the Washington “Redskins,” Cleveland “Indians,” Atlanta “Braves,” University of Illinois “Fighting Illini” and Florida State University “Seminoles,” in the wooden Indian caricatures adorning tobacco shops across the continent, and in the more than 1,000 North American place names presently featuring the word “squaw.”82
In effect, the consciousness of residential school survivors continues to be inundated with the “lessons” imparted in those institutions, every waking moment of their lives (and perhaps in their dreams as well). The primal source of their psychic wounding thus remains hyperactive at all times, ripping away emotional scabs before they’ve had the least opportunity to form. Exacerbating the victims’ situation still further is a grotesque and increasingly aggressive posture of denial on the part of the settlers that anything is being done to them at all.83 While some survivors have obviously found means of coping with these circumstances, theirs remains - how could it be otherwise? - an unremitting world of pain.84
By Any Other Name
My use of terms like “criminal” to describe the actions and attitudes of the settler society is neither rhetorical nor a mere “matter of personal conjecture or opinion.” A rather vast range of black letter law has been systematically violated, and in most cases continues to be violated, in the course of creating the situation sketched out in preceding sections.85 Not least is the 1948 Convention on Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, an element of international customary law making it a crime against humanity to undertake any policy intended “to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such” Indians, of course, fit all four classifications.86
Among the categories of policy/action specifically delineated as genocidal in the convention’s second article are those “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group... deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”87 Unmistakably, the conditions imposed upon native people in both Canada and the US fall well within the parameters of these criteria, so much so that they tend to validate Jean-Paul Sartre’s “controversial” observation, made on entirely functionalist grounds, that “colonialism equals genocide.”88
Under the convention’s third article, it is made clear that, aside from direct involvement in the perpetration of the crime, one is guilty of genocide if one participates in planning or conspiring to commit it, inciting it or is otherwise complicit in the process.89 This last has been construed to mean simply ignoring or acquiescing in others’ commission of the crime. In effect, where genocide is concerned, virtually every member of a perpetrator society not actively engaged in opposing it is, by definition, legally guilty of it. Obfuscation and denial are thus to be seen as part and parcel of the crime itself.90
The complaint is usually heard at this juncture, always from those benefiting quite tangibly from the ongoing genocide of American Indians, and in the aggrieved tone invariably adopted by all such offenders, that such framing of legal obligation is “unreasonable.” That the opposite holds true is also a matter of black letter law. As the matter was put by US Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson during the trial of the nazi leadership at Nuremberg in 1945, responsibility for ensuring that its government adheres to the rule of law resides first, foremost, and by all available means in the citizenry of each country.91 Default upon this responsibility by any citizen is a matter of legal culpability. There can be nothing “apolitical,” no “bystanders” or “innocents” among beneficiaries of the “incomparable crime.”92 It follows that North America’s “Good Settlers” are no less guilty than were the “Good Germans” of the Third Reich.93
This is The Law to which all parties endorsing or participating in the Nuremberg proceedings bound themselves and their constituents. As Justice Jackson put it, “We are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we are not willing to have invoked against us.”94 His assertion was then enshrined in the 1946 “Affirmation of the Principles of International Law Recognized by the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal,” a covenant to which both Canada and the US are signatories.95 Further, neither the Nuremberg Doctrine nor customary law more generally affords either country a legitimate recourse but to comply with the principles, whether or not they’ve formally subscribed to or even agree with them."96
Officially - and this speaks volumes to the extent of their mutual awareness that they are in violation of it - both governments have done their utmost to mask the implications of The Law. For its part, having taken the lead in formulating the noble principles espoused at Nuremberg, the US has adopted the naziesque posture of refusing the jurisdiction of any international judicial body.97 Similarly, having been instrumental in shaping the content of the Genocide Convention, it declined to ratify it for forty years, purporting to do so in 1988 only after attaching a “sovereignty package” through which it claims a unique “right” to exempt itself from compliance whenever it finds an interest in doing so.98 A list of international human rights laws the US has treated in similar fashion over the past half-century would be exceedingly long.99
Canada’s path to the same end has been more slippery. Although it claims to have ratified the Genocide Convention in 1952, it did so in a tellingly circumscribed fashion. After much discussion, the parliament simply deleted from the statute defining the crime in Canadian jurisprudence those criteria - causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of a target group, and the forced transfer of their children - describing the policies in which Canada was most clearly engaged with respect to native peoples.100 In 1985, the statute was further “revised” to remove yet another criterion (imposing measures intended to prevent births within a target group).101 Where the 1948 Convention lists five discrete categories of genocidal policy, the Canadian legal code now acknowledges but two.
In 1998, an Ontario judge, James McPherson, went still further, disregarding black letter law and expert witnesses alike to rule that abridged dictionary definitions would henceforth be considered binding in Canadian courts." This juridical absurdity, which has prompted no correction from the country’s higher tribunals, had the effect of constraining Canada’s “legal understanding” of genocide to a single criterion: engagement in nazi-style mass extermination programs. Absent incontrovertible evidence that such actions are being undertaken as a matter of state policy, the judge opined that allegations of genocide constitute “an enormous injustice ... bordering on the grotesque ... cavalier and grossly unfair” to perpetrators."102 He concluded with a gag order seeking to constrain anyone, especially the victims of Canada’s most genocidal policies, from saying otherwise.103
This, in a country where public denial of “the” Holocaust - by which is meant the fate of the Jews at the hands of the nazis, and exclusively so - has long been a criminal offense."104 The significance of the disparity is by no means lost upon native people, residential school survivors perhaps most of all. McPherson’s performance, emblematic as it is of the overall settler sensibility, was precisely what one might have expected of a nazi jurist/intellectual a couple of generations after a German victory in World War II. Therein lies the distinction separating the nazis from North America’s settler élite: the former, unlike “the Nordics of North America” they consciously emulated, were losers in their drive to assert dominion on a continental scale. The mentality involved is neither more nor less genocidal, win or lose.105 And genocide denied or by any other name remains genocide. 106
Down Through Generations
Even had the full range of genocidal policies reflected in the residential schools been terminated when the schools themselves were phased out, and the mentality of the perpetrating society magically transformed into a complete opposite of itself, it would be unreasonable to expect that everything might suddenly have become “okay” for the victims or those in close proximity to them. While trauma is no more hereditary or a disease than its “symptoms,” alcoholism and suicide included, its effects are often extremely longlasting.107 It is also not especially uncommon for traumatic wounding to work along the lines of a time-delayed bomb, its effects reappearing, often quite suddenly, after extended periods of apparent dormancy."108 Such characteristics mark the malady even in cases where trauma has been induced by natural disaster rather than the malevolence of human agency."109
Given the nature of its effects, as well as their duration and sometime recurrence, they can be transmitted in an almost epidemiological fashion. This is to say that, unaddressed “trauma begets trauma.” People suffering complex traumatic stress are apt - and in some circumstances all but guaranteed - to traumatize others, especially those closest to and most dependent on them. In this sense, the spouses, and more particularly the children, of trauma victims are those most vulnerable to being traumatized by them. There is no reason to expect this to be less true among residential school survivors than among other victim groups: survivors of the nazi genocide, for instance, or former POWs and combat veterans.110 Quite the contrary, given the sources of ongoing wounding described above, it might be reasonably anticipated that it would be more so.
Such suspicions have been amply confirmed in a number of recent studies, the findings of which were partially - and rather politely - summarized in a 1992 report by the Health Commission of Canada’s Assembly of First Nations.111
The survivors of the Indian residential school system have ... continued to have their lives shaped by their experiences in those schools. Persons who attended the schools continue to struggle with their identity after years of being taught to hate themselves and their culture. The residential school led to a disruption in the transference of parenting skills from one generation to the next. Without these skills, many survivors have difficulty in raising their own children. In residential schools, they learned that adults often exert power and control through abuse. The lessons learned in childhood are often repeated in adulthood with the result that many survivors of the residential school system often inflict abuse on their own children. These [victims] in turn use the same tools on their children.112
Much more is involved than nontransference of appropriate parenting skills, or the transference of inappropriate ones, of course. Even where residential school survivors both understand the requirements of good parenting and genuinely desire to be good parents - and this in all probability encompasses most cases - the dysfunctions with which they’ve been saddled by their trauma are likely to render them incapable of following through. The question is exactly how people burdened with a symptomology including somatism, dissociation, depression, fragmented personality structure, intense anxiety, hypersensitivity to slights (“paranoia”), inability to form stable or sustainable emotional bonds, panic attacks, nightmares and chronic insomnia, as well as a high degree of irritability may be expected to comport themselves as good parents irrespective of what they know or don’t know about the techniques of proper parenting.113
Add to their incapacity to meet the emotional needs of their children - or spouses - a systemically imposed inability to meet their material responsibilities faced by the preponderance of residential school survivors, and you’ve a perfect recipe for disaster. Ever deepening feelings of personal inadequacy, guilt, frustration and ultimately uncontrollable rage blend with the already volatile stew simmering in the survivor psyche.114 Unsurprisingly, especially but by no means exclusively among men, sometimes quickly, sometimes over a longer period, the process culminates in an explosion, a blind lashing out at whoever is unfortunate enough to be at hand.115 Assuming the victims are family members, which is most frequently the case, an even greater sense of guilt and unworthiness ensues. At this point, if not before, attempts at self-nullification via alcohol, other substances, or suicide typically set in, most often in conjunction with an escalating rate of externalized violence.116
For children caught up in this hideous cycle, the impact is in many ways far greater than that of the residential schools upon their parents. In the schools, those by whom youngsters were victimized could at least be seen as alien “others.” Such buffers are obviously removed when the victimizer is one’s own father, mother or both. Also, within the family setting, the pattern of abuse may well commence at an even earlier age than in the schools, sometimes at birth.117 Even in the relatively rare instances where domestic violence is not present, but where one or both parents are serious alcoholics, the depth of the traumatic effects upon children are very well-documented.118
The abused child’s existential task is ... formidable. Though she perceives herself as abandoned to a power without mercy, she must find a way to preserve hope and meaning. The alternative is utter despair, something no child can bear. To preserve her faith in her parents, she must reject the first and most obvious conclusion that something is terribly wrong with them. She will go to all lengths to construct an explanation for her fate that absolves her parents of all blame and responsibility.119
In simplest terms, such “adaptations serve the fundamental purpose of preserving her primary attachment to her parents in the face of daily evidence of their malice, helplessness or indifference... Unable to alter the unbearable reality in fact, the child alters it in her mind.”120
When it is impossible to avoid the reality of the abuse, the child must construct some system of meaning that justifies it. Inevitably the child concludes that her innate badness is the cause. The child seizes upon this explanation early and clings to it tenaciously, for it enables her to preserve a sense of meaning, hope, and power. If she is bad, then her parents are good. If somehow she has brought this fate upon herself, then somehow she has the power to change it. If she has driven her parents to mistreat her, then if only she tries hard enough, she may someday earn their forgiveness and finally win the protection and care she so desperately needs.121
When this strategy also fails, as it all but inevitably must, the self-negation of gasoline sniffing and/or outright suicide often results. The disintegration of family/community structures in some quarters of Native North America has by now reached such a pass that parents traumatized in the residential schools have become desperate enough to request intervention by the very authorities who victimized them. Their premise, which holds a disquieting measure of undeniability, is that the youngsters probably stand a better prospect of physical survival in residential institutions than they do at home.122 Even in better case settings, the emotional damage already displayed by preschoolers is often staggering. Thus maimed before they begin, and trapped within an overall social construction in which they will be consistently denigrated, often openly reviled, and forever dispossessed of their birthright, they are forced with increasing frequency to hear sermons from their oppressors about how they should “stop whining and get over it,” that they’re now “as free as anyone else to become whoever or whatever they want.”123
Kizhiibaabinesik
It was in this nightmarish environment that Leah spent her formative years. A Lynx Clan Ojibwe, her name in her own language was Kizhiibaabinesik (roughly translated, “Being Who Circles with the Birds”). She entered the world on February 19, 1970, in Thunder Bay, Ontario, the youngest of six siblings born in rapid succession.124 Her father, John Peter Kelly, is from Sabaskong Bay, a reserve of the Onegaming Ojibwe First Nation located near the Ontario town of Kenora. Her mother, Barbara, is from the nearby Couchiching Reserve, outside Fort Francis, where she, John, their parents and most of their relatives in their own generation attended Roman Catholic residential schools.125
At the point Leah arrived, the family was living crammed eight-deep in a small trailer house, struggling to make ends meet while John pursued an MA in Educational Administration. The first in his Band to complete an undergraduate degree, much less to take up graduate studies, his internalization of mainstream ideals led him to an angry repudiation of Ojibwe tradition and a period of self-imposed isolation from his people. A dark-complected fullblood, however, he was shortly forced to face the harsh reality that his skin-tone was in itself sufficient to prevent either his acceptance among the Eurocanadians he’d been conditioned to model himself after or employment in the sorts of positions to which he correspondingly aspired.126
The situation was complicated considerably by the devout Catholicism, a faith noted for its preclusion of birth control, into which Barbara had been indoctrinated at Fort Francis. The demands, both material and emotional, attending the resulting - and, for a time, seemingly endless - avalanche of children became overwhelming, magnifying John’s already substantial sense of powerlessness and personal inadequacy. By the time Barbara became pregnant with Leah, he’d had already commenced what would become a seventeen-year descent into what he now calls “the bottomless pit of alcoholism and despair.” It did not end until his children were scattered to the winds.127
One of Leah’s earliest recollections was of being told that she’d been “unplanned for,” a “mistake,” observations the little girl easily translated as “unwanted.”128 It was a feeling she would never escape," along with an abiding sense of guilt that things might have worked out differently for her father if only she’d never been born.129 Other memories centered mainly on John’s stumbling in, blind drunk, night after night, and of the violence that often ensued. For the most part, Leah was a witness, although, somewhere along the line, she was herself on the receiving end.130 Barbara - battered, emotionally and otherwise, depressed and in a state of perpetual exhaustion - could offer little comfort or protection.
Verbal abuse was also endemic, often manifested in vituperative denunciations of the children’s “stupidity,” their “laziness” and supposed lack of hygiene.131 More insidious still were John’s expressions of resentment towards the lighter-complected among his offspring. Barbara is half white, her coloration reflected in three of the children, including Leah. Glass was regularly ground into this wound when she was greeted with much the same disparagement by potential playmates during summers spent visiting her grandparents at Couchiching.132 By the time she was four, she’d been thoroughly infected with the idea that there was something dreadfully wrong with the way she looked, a debilitating misperception that would stay with her the rest of her life.133
As John’s alcoholism progressed, the family underwent periods of outright disintegration. The children were sent to live for varying intervals with relatives, themselves active or recovering alcoholics.134 At other times, they would sleep whenever possible at the homes of friends. It was on one of these overnights, when she was perhaps twelve, that Leah was first sexually molested. The man was apparently the father of her best and perhaps only real chum, a figure of trust whom she’d embraced as an “uncle.” Again, there is no clear indication whether the abuse was repeated or if so, whether more than a single predator was involved.135
Meanwhile, the Kellys had relocated to the Southdale area of Winnipeg, a predominantly white suburban sprawl largely devoid of anything resembling redeeming value. For Leah, however, it initially represented something of a new start. Twenty-odd years later, she’d recount how, having been consistently rebuffed as “too white” by her hoped-for friends on the reserves, she’d trotted off to school her first day fully expecting to be accepted, eager for someone - anyone - to like her. Instead, she was chased all the way home by a rabid pack of little settler kids taunting her as a “squaw and a ”wagon burner." As she put it, “I tried and tried, but I never really fit in with anybody, anywhere, ever.” 136
At fifteen, desperate to escape the effects of her home life and Southdale’s “mindlessly racist climate,” Leah struck out on her own. Supporting herself as a waiter in Winnipeg, she enrolled at The Collegiate, a highly-touted local prep school. She did quite well academically, but finding the students’ and faculty’s attitudes “pretty much the same as [she’d] already experienced, only more so,” she left before graduating. Her raw test scores gained her an early admission to Laval University in Québec. A year later, having mastered conversational French,137 she was back in Winnipeg, waiting tables at an upscale restaurant in the city’s fashionable Cordon district.
For a while, it seemed enough. For the first time, she had a small circle of friends, her first live-in lover and was earning enough money to indulge in clothes, a car and other accoutrements of what she then saw as “class.” She appears to have reveled in the sheer novelty of it all.138 Making the rounds of Winnipeg’s surprisingly vibrant music and café scenes, she quickly built a reputation as something of a hipster and the ingredients of an affirmative identity began at last to congeal. Soon, however, her relationship with her boyfriend soured and she found herself pregnant and alone. Before informing her partner that she was with child, Leah confided in friends that she would keep the baby and get married, revealing the depth of her longing to create the kind of idealized family environment she’d craved all her life. Her lover’s response to what she thought glad tidings - that he wanted no part of either marriage or fatherhood - played directly into the already profound sense of unworthiness and rejection she harbored. It also destroyed at a single stroke the most important of the redemptive fantasies she’d been nurturing. His dropping her at a clinic, leaving her to walk home was merely a cruel redundancy. After the abortion, the world she’d been constructing for herself crumbled very rapidly.139
Her diary reveals that she berated herself endlessly for this abandonment and having dared to dream aloud, bringing on what she felt as humiliating public exposure, worrying that she’d “once again become a laughing stock,” feeling the image she’d so carefully crafted slipping away. For weeks she actively contemplated suicide."140 Instead, she bolted, leaving all her worldly possessions behind and setting out on what is still sometimes fondly remembered by those who knew her as “Leah’s grand adventure.”141 In retrospect, it might more accurately be described as a hurt and terribly frightened young woman, trapped in a blind alley, running for her life.
Little Girl Lost (and Found?)
All I saw when I first met Leah in November 1993 was a remarkably beautiful young woman, palpably shy but with bright eyes and a radiant smile. I knew nothing of her background and cared less. I was completely unaware that Leah’s lifelong sense of lonely futility had resettled over her recently like the chill of a North Beach fog, leading her to late night searchings along the Golden Gate bridge for an excuse for a final plunge into the murky depths below. Her diary at that time brims with passages declaiming “how nice it would be to just lie down in the snow, go to sleep, and never wake up.” Had I known, I can honestly say it would not have deterred me in the least from loving her, but I might have been able to help her more.
We saw each other only intermittently for the next half year, but in May 1994 we agreed that, upon her return from a trip to Ireland, I’d stop in and visit for a “couple of weeks,” maybe driving her up along the coast for a few days camping in the redwoods. Once I arrived in early July, I never left. We spent time in the redwoods and in the vineyards of Simi Valley, in the forests below Mount Shasta, along beaches watching sunsets as far north as Coos Bay. Most of our time, however, was spent in the city, she working, me prowling bookstores or coffee houses, chain smoking as I read the postmodernists from Baudrillard to Lyotard, waiting every night in the Dalva, a bar across the street from Ti Cous, to share glasses of cider at the end of her shift. Her off hours we spent constantly together, probing, exploring, laughing, holding hands or she my arm, as we strolled the streets. Common tastes were discovered in food and films, literature and music, art and much else. She displayed her knowledge of wines, refined through years of serving others. I showed off my talents as a gourmet cook, making her a batch of cioppino. In restaurants, she’d order for us both to my delight. We went willy-nilly from infatuation through mutual astonishment to genuine love for one another. In late August, as I was preparing to go home for the start of another school year - I’d pushed my departure back to the last possible hour of the last possible day, driving straight through and pulling into town as new students were undergoing orientation - we conducted something of a summit conference to decide what should come next. She, fearing that I, I now realize, might be just one more strand in her lengthening skein of intense but ultimately transient unions, flashed visible signs of distress.
Surprised at her level of anxiety, unsure of its source, I sought to reassure her, I offered to take a year’s leave from my job and simply stay on in San Francisco, if necessary finding permanent employment there. She considered this offer for only a moment before dismissing it as ridiculous with an irritated wave of the hand, but posed no alternative plan herself. As the sense of stalemate grew, she grew steadily more agitated. There seemed little I might say or do to calm her. Things were sliding downhill in a hurry.
At some point, though, I hit on asking her what she really wanted to do not just with me or for the next few months but with her life. An indecipherable wistfulness passed across her face, her voice filling with a kind of yearning I’d not heard from her before. She’d been spinning her wheels for years, she said, going nowhere, but always meaning to finish college, to “get to know things,” become an artist, a painter, a photographer, and above all, a filmmaker. Her words rushed forth as if of their own volition, at once pensive and excited, seemingly propelled by some force disconnected from her will.
Then, quite abruptly, she caught herself. Like a slamming door, a resigned guarded look closed over her eager hopefulness. Bitterly canceling her previous torrent, she offered a curt endgame observation that “none of it will ever happen, of course.” “Why not?” I replied, “It sounds do-able enough to me.” She appeared confused, unsure whether she should be startled, happy, or simply baffled. But I’d definitely captured her attention. “Really?” she asked, a bit incredulously. “Sure,” I said. ‘What’s the problem?"
An hour later, we had a plan. I’d base myself in San Francisco for the fall, commuting to-and-from Denver to teach my three days per week’s worth of classes at the University of Colorado. In December, Leah would move to Boulder and I’d arrange her admission at the University of Colorado. We’d live together in my house there and I’d support her living while she completed her undergraduate degree. After that, she’d take a job in some aspect of cinema and/or go to grad school. As she established her career, I’d begin phasing out of mine, turning an increasing share of our financial burden over to her. Perhaps I’d take early retirement and devote myself to writing, maybe even start painting again. Perhaps I’d secure an end-of-career position at a university in or near Winnipeg. In either event, we’d eventually move there. She’d be our primary breadwinner making movies or something similar, we’d buy a big house in an older neighborhood, possibly raise a kid or two. We were in for the long haul.
The Unraveling
There had always been signs that all was not well with her. In San Francisco, she’d whimper in her sleep or wake trembling and terrified, unwilling or unable to name her terror.142 And there were the sudden and equally inexplicable rages, like the one on my birthday that first fall when after treating me to dinner at a favorite seafood restaurant, she me for no apparent reason with a looping right that split my lip so badly I was spitting blood two days later.143 The next morning, she tearfully apologized, saying she’d had too much wine and had confusedly lashed out at someone or something from another time, another place, she didn’t say who or what or why. I hugged her, said forget it, asked no questions, only too glad to believe her hostility had been directed at anyone, anything other than me….
Looking back, I see the undercurrents of what would happen surfacing mainly in the tension of her relationship with her father, the force of both their needs to bond with each other, the huge, futile efforts both made to achieve closeness and their mutual inability to get wherever it was they needed so badly to go. She would defend him fiercely to me about things I’d never said, thought or had any idea of, loving him in ways fathomable only in herself, struggling with all her might to absolve this small, remorse-ridden man of sins he’d long forgotten or perhaps never even knew he’d committed against her. Sometimes, she seemed to be displacing on me her anger at and hurt from her father, while reserving the tenderness that formed the other dimension of their compact for him.
From our first day in Boulder, she would spike a rage almost daily out of what I at first thought was a youthful unfettered jealousy of the fact that I’d had a wife and a life before her. I set myself to reassure her of the depth of my love and commitment to her, my respect and esteem for her. I spent virtually all my time with her, lavishing her with clothes, with shoes and boots and other such “finery” - her term - of the sorts she’d never had. We redecorated and furnished the house as hers. I constantly gave her presents, from new vehicles to drive to flowers, so thoroughly out of character it filled my friends with wonder.
Still, month after month, without warning, most often in the midst of something nice, she’d turn on me like a fury, disparaging me, my family, clawing, kicking, biting, jerking out clumps of hair.144 I reached my own snapping point in early 1996, when under this kind of assault, I broke and slammed her back against our bedroom wall, telling her that if she kept it up, she’d be apt to land in a hospital.145 The look on her face told me I’d confirmed some secret dread far surpassing anything I’d meant to say or do, but she never raised a hand to me again.146
Although our life seemed to level out for a while thereafter, even recapturing some of the richness of our first summer, later that spring, a miscarriage and Leah’s erroneous belief that I was unfaithful to her ended the fragile equilibrium.147 In the fall, she started drinking, abruptly, in full force, as if undertaking a conscious design.
Jumbled between the signs and signifiers of her life, Leah’s plunge into alcohol triggered not clarity but implosion, quickly eroding the feeble network of defenses she’d erected, stripping away the coping skills she’d fought so hard to gain. By the new year of 1997, there were nights when her frightened doe’s eyes, her mouth contorted into a Munch-like O, a ring of horror, her soundless screams - for help? mercy? - pierced me like rusty spikes. She’d found her own much worse version of that awful place where John had been. I was confronting a semblance of what that hideously maimed little girl had suffered, the one still hiding within the woman I valued above all others.
During the first months of her unraveling, I ran an emotional gamut from irritation to anger through frustration to confusion, arriving at bewilderment only to move on to a perpetual fearfulness, nibbling the edges of my soul constantly like a rat. My own feelings shifted with such swiftness and kaleidoscopic complexity, I never quite felt I had caught up with myself, reached a balance or perspective that might have let me grasp the magnitude of our trouble. I was nearly fifty when she began to crumble. I was used to thinking of myself as something of a tough guy I was completely unequipped with tools or toughness sufficient to retrieve Leah or even to hold myself together.
After I’d put her to bed when she passed out, I would later sit alone in the dark, swaying back and forth, hugging myself, weeping uncontrollably, mourning the comfort I’d last encountered as a three-year-old in the warmth of my mother’s protecting embrace. I myself had been some of the impossible places Leah had been, but I had been there as a full-grown man, battle-weary and seasoned. Unhappy, I could remember a good childhood place. Leah had gone to the impossible places as a child; unhappy, she had no such good place to go. How Leah or any child without that good place can possibly survive beggars my powers of comprehension. She held on for far longer than I could have.
Dis-Integration
What is usually called “consciousness” does not come preassembled. It is delivered along with each newborn in pieces, or more properly stated, in a cluster of flows or streams, each related to but operating more or less independently of the others. A foundational phase of both cognitive and emotional development in younger children concerns the integration of these discrete streams, bringing about a unified and internally coherent perception of both the child’s self and of the external world that self interacts with. Things like viable self-concept and personality formation depend entirely on this process occurring in an orderly fashion. Should it be significantly disrupted, psycho-emotional chaos can result, with one or more nonintegrated stream of consciousness competing and often conflicting with the others. The effect, which can be permanent, is that the child incurs multiple personalities or personality fragments, and thus, multiple perceptions of reality."148
Early childhood trauma is a major - probably the major - cause of such disruption.149 Predictably, the pattern holds true particularly in cases where traumatic experience(s) is/are, chronic or prolonged.150 This, to an all but absolute certainty, is what happened to Leah. Almost from the start, she made mention of hearing “voices,” telling me of “others” who sometimes spoke to her and asking whether the same was so for me. At first, thinking she meant it in a traditional way, that this was her manner of informing me that she paid heed to messages conveyed by the spirits, I responded affirmatively, sometimes jokingly answering “yes, but only when I take the time to listen.” She’d laugh, but also look relieved, seeming glad to hear she was not the only one.
Later, neither of us was laughing. I’d find her in the kitchen, standing at the sink, muttering, apparently to herself. If I asked who she was talking to, she’d start as if jolted from a trance. “Them,” she’d say and that would be that. As time passed and her condition deteriorated, “they” became far more threatening. Eyes wild, trembling with terror, she’d argue frantically with unseen others, gesticulating, pointing to corners where she imagined them to be.151 My attempts to calm her, to wrap her in my arms, met with a horrified recoil. She cowered, assuming a near-fetal position, arms up as if to ward off blows, pleading in a di
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Let it be said, first of all, that I don’t write on personal themes. It is not a form to which I’m accustomed, to which I’ve aspired, with which I’ve ever been the least comfortable. This is all the more true in the present instance, devolving as it does on the destruction and death of my wife, my chosen one, the person who in her very presence afforded me a sense of direction, fulfillment and completeness I’d neither known nor believed possible. In her absence, I will never know it again.
Whatever the scale of my anguish, its real measure can never be found within me. What was lost was, after all, vastly more decisive for her than me, no matter how tightly I was and will always remain bound to her. In ways both tangible and not, moreover, hers is a loss shared by everyone, without exception, irrespective of whether they know or are willing to admit it. Anything I might have to offer will come only in an effort to explain, however clumsily and imperfectly, why this is so.
Leah Renae Kelly was not simply an “inebriated pedestrian killed by [a] car,” as the local newspaper so casually remarked on the date she died. There were reasons why that young, beautiful, incredibly promising and catastrophically drunk Ojibwe woman was running barefoot down the middle of the road that night. Whether she thought she was running away from something, towards something else, or whether she was capable of thinking anything at all in that moment are things beyond my power of knowing. In a larger sense, however, I do know why she was drunk, why she was a drunk and therefore why things ended for her as they did. From there, I cannot avoid the meaning of it all. Leah’s is the quintessential story of contemporary North America. It is thus ours, each of us, to the extent that we live on this continent. From this, squirm as one might, there is, can be no escape.
The essential elements of Leah’s story emerge from the realities of her identity as an American Indian and, consequently, the nature of her life and sense of self. Inevitably, these take shape only within the framework of such considerations for Native North Americans more generally. And with equal certainty, this cannot be understood apart from the structural relationship presently existing between the continent’s immigrant (settler) society and the peoples indigenous to what many of us call Turtle Island. It follows that an honest accounting must be made of the flows of impact and benefit involved, as well as an unequivocal repudiation of the elaborate veils of evasion and denial behind which such unpleasantness is habitually concealed.
What Leah desired most - aside, perhaps, from the fleeting moments of happiness we spent together - was to “be somebody,” to “count for something” beyond the immediacy of herself. This she told me often, and with a yearning that quite literally broke my heart. No matter that she was in fact somebody, somebody very special, and that to me she counted for absolutely everything. I knew what she meant and why she meant it that way. To the extent that her suffering can now serve to illustrate and reveal the grinding horror that destroyed her, she will have in some way succeeded in her desire, claiming the dignity she was due all along from the very indignity forced upon her at the instant of her birth.
Nobody Loves a Drunken Indian
It should surprise no one that Leah might have ended her days an alcoholic. Liquor and other intoxicants, after all, replaced Gatling guns and smallpox as the greatest killers of native people during the twentieth century.1 Long before the dawn of the new millennium, upwards of half the continent’s indigenous people were known to be suffering or recovering from the effects of acute alcoholism, while on some Canadian reserves - Alkali Lake, Grassy Narrows, Cross Lake, Norway House and others - the tally included every adult.2 Children, too, are afflicted, although their chosen substances run more towards gasoline, spray paint and nail polish remover. Seventy percent of the youngsters in northern Manitoba were found to be addicted to such toxics by the mid-1980s. In some villages, it had become necessary to post guards outside implement buildings to prevent nine-year-olds from breaking in and sniffing gas or solvents, deliberately and permanently blotting out their consciousness through the resulting brain damage or death.3
The toll is everywhere apparent, evidenced not only along the skid rows of most North American cities, but in the disintegration of indigenous family structures and communities, sometimes whole societies.4 Alcohol-related patterns of domestic violence, spousal abandonment and child neglect or abuse, unheard of in traditional settings, have become endemic facts of contemporary native life.5 Deaths from accidents and exposure, the great majority involving inebriation, reached catastrophic levels decades since.6 So, too, deaths resulting from cirrhosis and other degenerative illnesses associated with chronic alcoholism.7 Fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS), a condition permanently impairing the offspring of alcoholic mothers, embodies yet another crisis for native people.8
Physical debilitation accruing from chronic alcoholism also figures prominently in the abysmal picture painted by American Indian health data overall.9 American Indians die from readily-survivable maladies like flu and pneumonia at a rate three times the norm in both Canada and the US.10 Nutrition related illnesses, often associated with binge drinking, abound. Diabetes is “almost a plague,” afflicting upwards of half of native adults.11 Death from tuberculosis occurs among Indians at a rate four times that of the general population.12 Hepatitis, eight times. Strep infections, ten times. Infant mortality, up to fourteen times. Meningitis, twenty times. Dysentery, a hundred times.13 Rounding out the picture, “the suicide rate for Indian youths ranges from 1,000 to 10,000 [percent] higher than for non-Indian youths.”14
The bottom line is that reservation-based aboriginal men experienced a life-expectancy of less than 45 years, our female counterparts only three years longer in 1990. This, in the world’s most advanced industrial countries, where “mainstream” women outstrip the 71.8 year average lifespans of males by nearly a decade.15 Viewed from this standpoint, it can be asserted with an undeniable degree of accuracy that every time an Indian dies on a reservation, one-third of a lifetime has been lost. And, since the pattern is intergenerational, having lasted now for more than a century, the observation can be inverted with equal precision: each baby born on a reserve represents a third of a lifetime that will remain unlived. Nor for their part, do urbanized natives fare appreciably better.16
So ubiquitous are the effects of alcohol among native people that a whole mythology of “drunken Indians” has been contrived by the interloping Euroderivative settler society.17 The centerpiece of this complex of fables, promoted by everyone from the “scientific community” to pseudoreligious “self-help groups” like Alcoholics Anonymous, and internalized as an article of faith by many native people, is the claim that aboriginals are “congenitally predisposed” to suffer the “disease” of alcoholism. 18 No one bothers to explain why, if this were so, we suffer it at rates virtually identical to those evident among the Irish, say, or the Scotch Irish “hillbillies” of Appalachia, inner city blacks and the poorer sectors of the Angloamerican mainstream itself.19 All told, there are some twenty million alcoholics in the US, only a half-million of them native; a similar proportionality prevails in Canada.20
In truth, there’s never been a shred of credible evidence to support claims that alcoholism is either “hereditary” or in any physiological sense a “disease.”21 On the contrary, there is every indication that such addictions are “normal” concomitants of poverty and feelings of powerlessness, irrespective of the racial/cultural pedigree of those afflicted.22 Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi and others have further demonstrated that self-destructive pathologies like alcoholism correlate to conditions of colonial domination.23 Such conclusions are validated by the fact that while “drunken Indians” and “drunken Irish” share virtually nothing in terms of peculiarities in our DNA, we have everything in common when it comes to experiencing the ravages of centuries-long colonization.
For Indians, this translates into dispossession of some 98 percent of our lands, the balance and the astonishing abundance of resources with which it is endowed - administered in a unilaterally imposed and permanent “trust status” by Canada and the US.24 Exercise of this self-assigned “plenary power" has enabled the settler governments to siphon the residual assets of native peoples into their own economies - paying less than a dime on the dollar of market royalty rates for minerals extracted, to offer but one example - while leaving native peoples increasingly destitute.25 The upshot is that Indians, still in nominal possession of the largest per capita landholdings of any sector of the North American population and thus potentially the wealthiest of all groups on an individual basis, experience the practical reality of being far and away the poorest.26
As the remnants of traditional subsistence economies have been ever more thoroughly undermined, the very survival of native people has been rendered increasingly dependent upon our ability to participate in the settlers’ wage/cash system. Yet so complete has our marginalization been in this respect that our overall unemployment rate has hovered in the mid-sixtieth percentile for the past half century. On some reservations, more than ninety percent of the workforce has remained jobless during the same period.27 Per capita annual income in many communities barely exceeds $2,000 US, while it has been officially estimated that in places, over 85 percent of the housing units are unfit for human habitation.28 On balance,it is fair to say that the situation shows no sign of improvement. Indeed, there are indicators that it may actually be worsening.29
In and of themselves, such conditions contribute substantially to the grim health and longevity statistics recited above. More to the point, they combine to create among those perpetually burdened with them a sense of such utter disempowerment, despair and hopelessness as to make the oblivion of chronic intoxication seem an attractive alternative to conscious awareness of one’s circumstances. That the compulsion to opt for such figurative self-nullification, and/or the literal variety attainable through outright suicide, has by now become pronounced among aboriginal gradeschoolers bespeaks as little else can the depth of the misery the settler society has imposed upon native people.30
Others have evidenced strikingly similar patterns of response. German Jews, for example, when subjected to a harsh régime of discrimination, dispossession and disemployment by the nazis during the 1930s, shortly came to evidence a suicide rate some three times that of the German public as a whole. During the early 1940s, as they were being relocated to Poland and concentrated there in reservations and urban ghettos - they were not yet aware of being slated for outright extermination - the Jewish suicide rate rose to a level approximately fifty times higher than that of non-Jews.31 The response of the Sinti and Romani or Gypsies to nazi persecution was much the same, if somewhat less pronounced.32 For that matter, the suicide rate among Germans rose steeply during the first years of occupation following their defeat in World War II.33
It follows that, were the North American settler population subjected to circumstances comparable to those imposed upon native people, it would soon come to exhibit many of the same “negative group characteristics” as do Indians (or Jews, Gypsies, Irish and inner city blacks). Just as clearly, holding Indians in a state of perpetual subordination/destitution is a prerequisite to maintaining the relatively lavish level of comfort enjoyed by the settlers, collectively announced as their own entitlement. The implications of this cause/effect relationship are ready-made to instill a sense of guilt among beneficiaries, the settlers - those so prideful of their self-proclaimed “humanitarian enlightenment.” Since guilty feelings are at best an uncomfortable sensation, the implications - or the nature of the relationship itself must be denied.
Better still that the victims themselves should be “held accountable” - that is, blamed - for the very fact of their victimization.34 Vacuous assertions that American Indians are “innately endowed” with a “congenital predisposition” to alcoholism or suicide serve this purpose quite nicely, as do oft expressed “concerns” that there may be some mysterious set of “factors” at work in native cultures producing much the same effect.35 Thus handily self-absolved of responsibility for what the system underpinning their privilege has wrought, the settler beneficiaries free themselves to enjoy its fruits absent the least discomfiting pangs of conscience.36 Indeed, they position themselves thereby to adopt a lofty air of “moral superiority” vis-a-vis those whose relentless agony pays the tab.37 The mentality at issue is not dissimilar from that of the twisted little boys known to delight in torturing cats, its effect in exacerbating the pain of the victims self-evident.
“To Educate the Indian Out of Them”
If all this were not enough, still worse will be found in the legacy of a comprehensive system of residential “Indian Schools” established during the early 1880s and maintained for a century thereafter. A linchpin of “assimilationist” policies through which the US and Canada alike sought to eradicate the last traces of indigenous culture in North America, the schools were meant to serve, in the words of US Indian Commissioner Francis E. Leupp, as “a great pulverizing engine for breaking down the tribal mass.”38 Leupp’s northerly counterpart, Duncan Campbell Scott, was clearer and more blunt, observing that the “objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada” culturally identifiable as such.39
Such sentiments permeated the settler society. The goal of residential schooling, as articulated by the editors of the Calgary Herald in 1892, was nothing less than to “wipe out the whole Indian establishment.”40 At about the same time, US Superintendent of Indian Schools Richard Henry Pratt - an army captain whose main qualification for the job seems to have been that he’d earlier presided over a military prison in Florida to which Geronimo and other “recalcitrant” native adults were sent to be broken - explained to wide applause that his object was to “kill the Indian, spare the man” in every pupil.41 In Canada, the formulation was to “educate the Indian out of each student.”42 Statements of this sort were legion, and made right into the 1980s."43
The techniques employed in such endeavors were as brutal as they were straightforward. Aboriginal children as young as five were “caught” by government agents and forcibly removed to facilities “located away from reserves so that parental influence would be reduced to a minimum.”44 Thus isolated from all that was familiar, the youngsters were shorn of their hair, outfitted in “proper” Euroamerican/ Eurocanadian attire, their personal effects impounded or destroyed. Thereafter, they were subject to military/penal style regimentation."45 Crowded into barracks-like living quarters where disease often ran rampant, they were fed on about one-third the officially estimated minimum cost of providing adequate nutrition to children their age.46
Severe corporal punishment - whippings, solitary confinement, restriction to bread and water rations - was routinely employed to prevent students speaking their own languages, practicing or in many cases even knowing about their spiritual traditions or anything else associated with the autochthonous functioning of their cultures.47 Not infrequently, this harsh “discipline” was transmuted into outright torture, as when children were chained to walls or posts for days, sometimes weeks on end, burned or scalded, had needles run through their tongues, were forced to eat their own vomit, subjected to electrical shocks and/or denied medical attention.48 Sadism was often conjoined by the sexual predations of staff members, a pattern of abuse now proven to have been pervasive in many institutions (and covered up by responsible officials).49 Under such conditions, death rates among students were extraordinarily high.50
Those who survived were held for an average of ten years, living in a state of perpetual anxiety - or abject terror - as they were systematically “deculturated” through a process elsewhere described as “education for extinction.”51 In actuality, the entire procedure in many ways resembled the hideous “depatterning” techniques developed for the CIA by McGill University psychiatrist Ewen Cameron during the agency’s notorious MK-ULTRA Project of the early 1960s.52 More appropriate still, given Captain Pratt’s seminal role, it might be seen as prefiguring the methods currently employed in supermax penal units to force ideological conversion upon politicized inmates, or failing that, to reduce them to “psychological jelly.”53
The form of conversion demanded of residential school students is not especially mysterious. Operating under government authority, the schools were administered mainly by the Anglican, Catholic and other Christian churches.54 It follows that, as their own spiritual beliefs were expunged, students were subjected to intensive indoctrination in “the true faith,” spending about twice the time each day undergoing religious training as they did receiving academic instruction.55 As recently as 1993, the Anglicans were still prepared to defend this “civilizing mission” in terms of the unabashed white supremacism it entailed.
Canada ... must increasingly become ... a country of white men rooted and grounded in those fundamental scriptural conceptions of the individual, of society [and] of the state ... as the same have been conceived and found expression through the struggles and conquests of the several peoples of British blood and tradition. The church felt it had a Christian responsibility to assist the Aboriginal people in this transition. Assimilation, like medicine, might be intrusive and unpleasant, might even hurt a great deal, but in the long run it was for the people’s own good...56
In other words, the idea was to infect students at the most primal level with a perception of Indians corresponding to the emphatically negative views embraced by their colonizers.57 Thus conditioned to see themselves and their heritage as consigned by god to a state of “natural inferiority” - if not as things “evil” or “satanic” - students suffered profound and permanent psychological/emotional damage. 58 Probably without exception, they left the residential schools with a deformed self-concept, their senses of self-esteem and confidence severely undermined. In the majority of cases, active self-loathing appears to be at issue.59
Meanwhile, in a rather close parallel to what the nazis planned for a residue of Slavs after conquering eastern Europe, initiatives were undertaken to “fit [students] into the lower echelons of the new economic order” in North America.60 To this end, many residential facilities were configured as “industrial schools” providing “vocational training to prepare their pupils to fill certain limited occupations.”61 In practice, this meant the children typically worked more hours per day than they spent in the classroom, the bulk of their wages impounded to offset the “expense of their education.”62 Thereby reduced to de facto slave status, it was drummed into them, year after year, that their “place” would be forever to toil as manual laborers and domestics serving the needs of their racial “betters” at discount rates.63
In the end, of course, the racial biases of the settlers were such that there were precious few jobs for graduates, even of these demeaning varieties. Thus “disemployed,” they were mostly forced into a posture of seemingly immutable material dependency upon those who most despised them. What the residential schools in effect produced were successive generations of increasingly desperate and dysfunctional human beings, incapable of valuing themselves as Indians and neither assimilated nor assimilable into the dominant society which had rendered them thus. Given the sheer impossibility of their situation, the self-negating pathologies evidenced by residential school graduates are, or should have been, perfectly predictable.64
Although it was originally intended that every aboriginal child between the ages of five and fifteen would be processed through the schools, attendance ultimately peaked at somewhere around half the youngsters in successive generations.65 The correlation between this proportion of the indigenous population and the percentage now suffering alcoholism is obvious. One suspects that were a list of native alcoholics compared to a list of those who endured the residential schools - along with their sons and daughters - a well-nigh perfect match would result.
Worlds of Pain
While the diagnosis has been rather scrupulously avoided by psychoanalysts and therapeutic practitioners over the years, the core of the devastation inflicted upon those incarcerated in the residential schools was a magnitude of psychological trauma most commonly associated with men suffering the aftereffects of heavy combat.66 “Emotional numbing,” “incomplete mourning” and a range of other symptoms of acute trauma afflicting survivors of the nazi genocide, the Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombings and comparable phenomena are equally apparent.67 So too, a confluence with the pathologies typically exhibited by hostages, rape victims, and the victims of political repression/state terrorism.68
The early age at which residential school victims typically incurred their traumas has also tended to amplify the impacts to a greater extent than those evident among the mostly adult counterpart groups noted above. In this sense, the pattern of ensuing pathologies more nearly resembles that displayed by victims of severe child abuse.69 This is especially true with respect to children suffering not a single traumatic incident (or cluster of incidents), but upon whom abuse has been visited in a chronic and protracted fashion.70 Thus layered and reinforced over a period of years, the result is not so much the classic “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder” (PTSD), with which so many combat veterans and rape victims are afflicted, as it is a sort of “Complex PTSD” recently described by Harvard Psychiatry Professor Judith Herman.71
Even Herman’s is an inadequate characterization of the “Residential School Syndrome” (RSS), however.72 For a condition to be accurately depicted as “post-traumatic,” it is of course necessary that the circumstance(s) generating the trauma first be eliminated. A rape victim, for example, is not experiencing “post-traumatic stress,” no matter how “complex,” while the rape is occurring. S/he is instead undergoing the trauma itself. By the same token, there can be no reasonable expectation that a child might be “cured” of the psychological ravages of abuse before s/he is removed from the abusive setting, or a Gypsy victim of the nazi genocide during his/her confinement in Neuengamme or Auschwitz.
Effective therapeutic strategies for those suffering trauma-induced pathologies, moreover, invariably devolve upon some form of generalized and tangible withdrawal of social sanction from those who perpetrated the trauma-inducing acts or processes.73 “Regular” rapists, child abusers and mass murderers are all viewed as criminals in a socially normative sense. They are not celebrated by the great majority of people in North America, nor are apologetics usually offered in their behalf asserting that however “misguided” they may have been in what they did, they acted on the basis of “the best of intentions.”74 Still less are their victims subjected to a broad and continuous bombardment of public scorn, ridicule and trivialization.
Where a supportive environment exists, “healing” the effects of severe trauma is extraordinarily difficult.75 Where it does not, as is to a noticeable extent the case with Vietnam combat veterans and much more so with the victims of political repression, it is largely impossible. Vietnam vets continued to suffer disproportionately high rates of alcoholism, drug usage, incarceration and suicide until those who’d borne the brunt of ground combat were largely and quite prematurely dead.76 Although far less research has been done with respect to those suffering the aftershocks of state terrorism, there are indications that they manifest the same pattern in a still more pronounced form.77
For survivors of the residential schools, none of the criteria requisite to psychological “recovery” apply. Although the facilities themselves have by-and-large been phased out, the material incentives prompting the settler society to establish them in the first place - that is, the comprehensive dispossession/disempowerment of native people - were fulfilled long since. The results remain very much in effect and are treated as a “natural entitlement” by the perpetrator population. Other than those judicially proven to have engaged in specific acts of sexual predation, even the persons most directly involved - those who worked in and presided over the schools - are not normatively viewed as criminals.78 Indeed, while the Canadian government has lately offered a tepid “expression of regret” for a carefully-limited range of “negative impacts,” it has formally declined to so much as apologize for the criminality inherent to the residential school system as a whole."79 The US has yet to rise even to this token level of acknowledgement.80
Meanwhile, the iconography of settler triumphalism is everywhere and always apparent, from annual celebrations of “Thanksgiving” and “Columbus Day” to the enshrinement of patently genocidal personages like Andrew Jackson and Theodore Roosevelt on national currencies, from the exalted statuary littering public spaces to the names bestowed upon the places themselves. And then, to be sure, there is the haughty supremacist aura with which the settlers have imbued their culture - and by extension themselves - in the canons of their literature, their cinema and the academic (mis)representations that continue to be imposed upon native youth with more force and sophistication today than ever before.81
The flip side of the triumphalist coin concerns a proliferate iconography of degradation and outright dehumanization where aboriginal people are concerned. This will be found in the same literary and academic texts through which the settler society lends a false burnish to the contrivances of its own image in the 2,000-odd westerns released by Hollywood over the past century, in some 10,000 television segments produced between 1950 and 1990, in “Tumbleweeds” cartoons and product names like Jeep “Cherokee” and “Winnebago” recreational vehicles, in sports team names and mascots like those of the Washington “Redskins,” Cleveland “Indians,” Atlanta “Braves,” University of Illinois “Fighting Illini” and Florida State University “Seminoles,” in the wooden Indian caricatures adorning tobacco shops across the continent, and in the more than 1,000 North American place names presently featuring the word “squaw.”82
In effect, the consciousness of residential school survivors continues to be inundated with the “lessons” imparted in those institutions, every waking moment of their lives (and perhaps in their dreams as well). The primal source of their psychic wounding thus remains hyperactive at all times, ripping away emotional scabs before they’ve had the least opportunity to form. Exacerbating the victims’ situation still further is a grotesque and increasingly aggressive posture of denial on the part of the settlers that anything is being done to them at all.83 While some survivors have obviously found means of coping with these circumstances, theirs remains - how could it be otherwise? - an unremitting world of pain.84
By Any Other Name
My use of terms like “criminal” to describe the actions and attitudes of the settler society is neither rhetorical nor a mere “matter of personal conjecture or opinion.” A rather vast range of black letter law has been systematically violated, and in most cases continues to be violated, in the course of creating the situation sketched out in preceding sections.85 Not least is the 1948 Convention on Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, an element of international customary law making it a crime against humanity to undertake any policy intended “to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such” Indians, of course, fit all four classifications.86
Among the categories of policy/action specifically delineated as genocidal in the convention’s second article are those “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group... deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”87 Unmistakably, the conditions imposed upon native people in both Canada and the US fall well within the parameters of these criteria, so much so that they tend to validate Jean-Paul Sartre’s “controversial” observation, made on entirely functionalist grounds, that “colonialism equals genocide.”88
Under the convention’s third article, it is made clear that, aside from direct involvement in the perpetration of the crime, one is guilty of genocide if one participates in planning or conspiring to commit it, inciting it or is otherwise complicit in the process.89 This last has been construed to mean simply ignoring or acquiescing in others’ commission of the crime. In effect, where genocide is concerned, virtually every member of a perpetrator society not actively engaged in opposing it is, by definition, legally guilty of it. Obfuscation and denial are thus to be seen as part and parcel of the crime itself.90
The complaint is usually heard at this juncture, always from those benefiting quite tangibly from the ongoing genocide of American Indians, and in the aggrieved tone invariably adopted by all such offenders, that such framing of legal obligation is “unreasonable.” That the opposite holds true is also a matter of black letter law. As the matter was put by US Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson during the trial of the nazi leadership at Nuremberg in 1945, responsibility for ensuring that its government adheres to the rule of law resides first, foremost, and by all available means in the citizenry of each country.91 Default upon this responsibility by any citizen is a matter of legal culpability. There can be nothing “apolitical,” no “bystanders” or “innocents” among beneficiaries of the “incomparable crime.”92 It follows that North America’s “Good Settlers” are no less guilty than were the “Good Germans” of the Third Reich.93
This is The Law to which all parties endorsing or participating in the Nuremberg proceedings bound themselves and their constituents. As Justice Jackson put it, “We are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we are not willing to have invoked against us.”94 His assertion was then enshrined in the 1946 “Affirmation of the Principles of International Law Recognized by the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal,” a covenant to which both Canada and the US are signatories.95 Further, neither the Nuremberg Doctrine nor customary law more generally affords either country a legitimate recourse but to comply with the principles, whether or not they’ve formally subscribed to or even agree with them."96
Officially - and this speaks volumes to the extent of their mutual awareness that they are in violation of it - both governments have done their utmost to mask the implications of The Law. For its part, having taken the lead in formulating the noble principles espoused at Nuremberg, the US has adopted the naziesque posture of refusing the jurisdiction of any international judicial body.97 Similarly, having been instrumental in shaping the content of the Genocide Convention, it declined to ratify it for forty years, purporting to do so in 1988 only after attaching a “sovereignty package” through which it claims a unique “right” to exempt itself from compliance whenever it finds an interest in doing so.98 A list of international human rights laws the US has treated in similar fashion over the past half-century would be exceedingly long.99
Canada’s path to the same end has been more slippery. Although it claims to have ratified the Genocide Convention in 1952, it did so in a tellingly circumscribed fashion. After much discussion, the parliament simply deleted from the statute defining the crime in Canadian jurisprudence those criteria - causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of a target group, and the forced transfer of their children - describing the policies in which Canada was most clearly engaged with respect to native peoples.100 In 1985, the statute was further “revised” to remove yet another criterion (imposing measures intended to prevent births within a target group).101 Where the 1948 Convention lists five discrete categories of genocidal policy, the Canadian legal code now acknowledges but two.
In 1998, an Ontario judge, James McPherson, went still further, disregarding black letter law and expert witnesses alike to rule that abridged dictionary definitions would henceforth be considered binding in Canadian courts." This juridical absurdity, which has prompted no correction from the country’s higher tribunals, had the effect of constraining Canada’s “legal understanding” of genocide to a single criterion: engagement in nazi-style mass extermination programs. Absent incontrovertible evidence that such actions are being undertaken as a matter of state policy, the judge opined that allegations of genocide constitute “an enormous injustice ... bordering on the grotesque ... cavalier and grossly unfair” to perpetrators."102 He concluded with a gag order seeking to constrain anyone, especially the victims of Canada’s most genocidal policies, from saying otherwise.103
This, in a country where public denial of “the” Holocaust - by which is meant the fate of the Jews at the hands of the nazis, and exclusively so - has long been a criminal offense."104 The significance of the disparity is by no means lost upon native people, residential school survivors perhaps most of all. McPherson’s performance, emblematic as it is of the overall settler sensibility, was precisely what one might have expected of a nazi jurist/intellectual a couple of generations after a German victory in World War II. Therein lies the distinction separating the nazis from North America’s settler élite: the former, unlike “the Nordics of North America” they consciously emulated, were losers in their drive to assert dominion on a continental scale. The mentality involved is neither more nor less genocidal, win or lose.105 And genocide denied or by any other name remains genocide. 106
Down Through Generations
Even had the full range of genocidal policies reflected in the residential schools been terminated when the schools themselves were phased out, and the mentality of the perpetrating society magically transformed into a complete opposite of itself, it would be unreasonable to expect that everything might suddenly have become “okay” for the victims or those in close proximity to them. While trauma is no more hereditary or a disease than its “symptoms,” alcoholism and suicide included, its effects are often extremely longlasting.107 It is also not especially uncommon for traumatic wounding to work along the lines of a time-delayed bomb, its effects reappearing, often quite suddenly, after extended periods of apparent dormancy."108 Such characteristics mark the malady even in cases where trauma has been induced by natural disaster rather than the malevolence of human agency."109
Given the nature of its effects, as well as their duration and sometime recurrence, they can be transmitted in an almost epidemiological fashion. This is to say that, unaddressed “trauma begets trauma.” People suffering complex traumatic stress are apt - and in some circumstances all but guaranteed - to traumatize others, especially those closest to and most dependent on them. In this sense, the spouses, and more particularly the children, of trauma victims are those most vulnerable to being traumatized by them. There is no reason to expect this to be less true among residential school survivors than among other victim groups: survivors of the nazi genocide, for instance, or former POWs and combat veterans.110 Quite the contrary, given the sources of ongoing wounding described above, it might be reasonably anticipated that it would be more so.
Such suspicions have been amply confirmed in a number of recent studies, the findings of which were partially - and rather politely - summarized in a 1992 report by the Health Commission of Canada’s Assembly of First Nations.111
The survivors of the Indian residential school system have ... continued to have their lives shaped by their experiences in those schools. Persons who attended the schools continue to struggle with their identity after years of being taught to hate themselves and their culture. The residential school led to a disruption in the transference of parenting skills from one generation to the next. Without these skills, many survivors have difficulty in raising their own children. In residential schools, they learned that adults often exert power and control through abuse. The lessons learned in childhood are often repeated in adulthood with the result that many survivors of the residential school system often inflict abuse on their own children. These [victims] in turn use the same tools on their children.112
Much more is involved than nontransference of appropriate parenting skills, or the transference of inappropriate ones, of course. Even where residential school survivors both understand the requirements of good parenting and genuinely desire to be good parents - and this in all probability encompasses most cases - the dysfunctions with which they’ve been saddled by their trauma are likely to render them incapable of following through. The question is exactly how people burdened with a symptomology including somatism, dissociation, depression, fragmented personality structure, intense anxiety, hypersensitivity to slights (“paranoia”), inability to form stable or sustainable emotional bonds, panic attacks, nightmares and chronic insomnia, as well as a high degree of irritability may be expected to comport themselves as good parents irrespective of what they know or don’t know about the techniques of proper parenting.113
Add to their incapacity to meet the emotional needs of their children - or spouses - a systemically imposed inability to meet their material responsibilities faced by the preponderance of residential school survivors, and you’ve a perfect recipe for disaster. Ever deepening feelings of personal inadequacy, guilt, frustration and ultimately uncontrollable rage blend with the already volatile stew simmering in the survivor psyche.114 Unsurprisingly, especially but by no means exclusively among men, sometimes quickly, sometimes over a longer period, the process culminates in an explosion, a blind lashing out at whoever is unfortunate enough to be at hand.115 Assuming the victims are family members, which is most frequently the case, an even greater sense of guilt and unworthiness ensues. At this point, if not before, attempts at self-nullification via alcohol, other substances, or suicide typically set in, most often in conjunction with an escalating rate of externalized violence.116
For children caught up in this hideous cycle, the impact is in many ways far greater than that of the residential schools upon their parents. In the schools, those by whom youngsters were victimized could at least be seen as alien “others.” Such buffers are obviously removed when the victimizer is one’s own father, mother or both. Also, within the family setting, the pattern of abuse may well commence at an even earlier age than in the schools, sometimes at birth.117 Even in the relatively rare instances where domestic violence is not present, but where one or both parents are serious alcoholics, the depth of the traumatic effects upon children are very well-documented.118
The abused child’s existential task is ... formidable. Though she perceives herself as abandoned to a power without mercy, she must find a way to preserve hope and meaning. The alternative is utter despair, something no child can bear. To preserve her faith in her parents, she must reject the first and most obvious conclusion that something is terribly wrong with them. She will go to all lengths to construct an explanation for her fate that absolves her parents of all blame and responsibility.119
In simplest terms, such “adaptations serve the fundamental purpose of preserving her primary attachment to her parents in the face of daily evidence of their malice, helplessness or indifference... Unable to alter the unbearable reality in fact, the child alters it in her mind.”120
When it is impossible to avoid the reality of the abuse, the child must construct some system of meaning that justifies it. Inevitably the child concludes that her innate badness is the cause. The child seizes upon this explanation early and clings to it tenaciously, for it enables her to preserve a sense of meaning, hope, and power. If she is bad, then her parents are good. If somehow she has brought this fate upon herself, then somehow she has the power to change it. If she has driven her parents to mistreat her, then if only she tries hard enough, she may someday earn their forgiveness and finally win the protection and care she so desperately needs.121
When this strategy also fails, as it all but inevitably must, the self-negation of gasoline sniffing and/or outright suicide often results. The disintegration of family/community structures in some quarters of Native North America has by now reached such a pass that parents traumatized in the residential schools have become desperate enough to request intervention by the very authorities who victimized them. Their premise, which holds a disquieting measure of undeniability, is that the youngsters probably stand a better prospect of physical survival in residential institutions than they do at home.122 Even in better case settings, the emotional damage already displayed by preschoolers is often staggering. Thus maimed before they begin, and trapped within an overall social construction in which they will be consistently denigrated, often openly reviled, and forever dispossessed of their birthright, they are forced with increasing frequency to hear sermons from their oppressors about how they should “stop whining and get over it,” that they’re now “as free as anyone else to become whoever or whatever they want.”123
Kizhiibaabinesik
It was in this nightmarish environment that Leah spent her formative years. A Lynx Clan Ojibwe, her name in her own language was Kizhiibaabinesik (roughly translated, “Being Who Circles with the Birds”). She entered the world on February 19, 1970, in Thunder Bay, Ontario, the youngest of six siblings born in rapid succession.124 Her father, John Peter Kelly, is from Sabaskong Bay, a reserve of the Onegaming Ojibwe First Nation located near the Ontario town of Kenora. Her mother, Barbara, is from the nearby Couchiching Reserve, outside Fort Francis, where she, John, their parents and most of their relatives in their own generation attended Roman Catholic residential schools.125
At the point Leah arrived, the family was living crammed eight-deep in a small trailer house, struggling to make ends meet while John pursued an MA in Educational Administration. The first in his Band to complete an undergraduate degree, much less to take up graduate studies, his internalization of mainstream ideals led him to an angry repudiation of Ojibwe tradition and a period of self-imposed isolation from his people. A dark-complected fullblood, however, he was shortly forced to face the harsh reality that his skin-tone was in itself sufficient to prevent either his acceptance among the Eurocanadians he’d been conditioned to model himself after or employment in the sorts of positions to which he correspondingly aspired.126
The situation was complicated considerably by the devout Catholicism, a faith noted for its preclusion of birth control, into which Barbara had been indoctrinated at Fort Francis. The demands, both material and emotional, attending the resulting - and, for a time, seemingly endless - avalanche of children became overwhelming, magnifying John’s already substantial sense of powerlessness and personal inadequacy. By the time Barbara became pregnant with Leah, he’d had already commenced what would become a seventeen-year descent into what he now calls “the bottomless pit of alcoholism and despair.” It did not end until his children were scattered to the winds.127
One of Leah’s earliest recollections was of being told that she’d been “unplanned for,” a “mistake,” observations the little girl easily translated as “unwanted.”128 It was a feeling she would never escape," along with an abiding sense of guilt that things might have worked out differently for her father if only she’d never been born.129 Other memories centered mainly on John’s stumbling in, blind drunk, night after night, and of the violence that often ensued. For the most part, Leah was a witness, although, somewhere along the line, she was herself on the receiving end.130 Barbara - battered, emotionally and otherwise, depressed and in a state of perpetual exhaustion - could offer little comfort or protection.
Verbal abuse was also endemic, often manifested in vituperative denunciations of the children’s “stupidity,” their “laziness” and supposed lack of hygiene.131 More insidious still were John’s expressions of resentment towards the lighter-complected among his offspring. Barbara is half white, her coloration reflected in three of the children, including Leah. Glass was regularly ground into this wound when she was greeted with much the same disparagement by potential playmates during summers spent visiting her grandparents at Couchiching.132 By the time she was four, she’d been thoroughly infected with the idea that there was something dreadfully wrong with the way she looked, a debilitating misperception that would stay with her the rest of her life.133
As John’s alcoholism progressed, the family underwent periods of outright disintegration. The children were sent to live for varying intervals with relatives, themselves active or recovering alcoholics.134 At other times, they would sleep whenever possible at the homes of friends. It was on one of these overnights, when she was perhaps twelve, that Leah was first sexually molested. The man was apparently the father of her best and perhaps only real chum, a figure of trust whom she’d embraced as an “uncle.” Again, there is no clear indication whether the abuse was repeated or if so, whether more than a single predator was involved.135
Meanwhile, the Kellys had relocated to the Southdale area of Winnipeg, a predominantly white suburban sprawl largely devoid of anything resembling redeeming value. For Leah, however, it initially represented something of a new start. Twenty-odd years later, she’d recount how, having been consistently rebuffed as “too white” by her hoped-for friends on the reserves, she’d trotted off to school her first day fully expecting to be accepted, eager for someone - anyone - to like her. Instead, she was chased all the way home by a rabid pack of little settler kids taunting her as a “squaw and a ”wagon burner." As she put it, “I tried and tried, but I never really fit in with anybody, anywhere, ever.” 136
At fifteen, desperate to escape the effects of her home life and Southdale’s “mindlessly racist climate,” Leah struck out on her own. Supporting herself as a waiter in Winnipeg, she enrolled at The Collegiate, a highly-touted local prep school. She did quite well academically, but finding the students’ and faculty’s attitudes “pretty much the same as [she’d] already experienced, only more so,” she left before graduating. Her raw test scores gained her an early admission to Laval University in Québec. A year later, having mastered conversational French,137 she was back in Winnipeg, waiting tables at an upscale restaurant in the city’s fashionable Cordon district.
For a while, it seemed enough. For the first time, she had a small circle of friends, her first live-in lover and was earning enough money to indulge in clothes, a car and other accoutrements of what she then saw as “class.” She appears to have reveled in the sheer novelty of it all.138 Making the rounds of Winnipeg’s surprisingly vibrant music and café scenes, she quickly built a reputation as something of a hipster and the ingredients of an affirmative identity began at last to congeal. Soon, however, her relationship with her boyfriend soured and she found herself pregnant and alone. Before informing her partner that she was with child, Leah confided in friends that she would keep the baby and get married, revealing the depth of her longing to create the kind of idealized family environment she’d craved all her life. Her lover’s response to what she thought glad tidings - that he wanted no part of either marriage or fatherhood - played directly into the already profound sense of unworthiness and rejection she harbored. It also destroyed at a single stroke the most important of the redemptive fantasies she’d been nurturing. His dropping her at a clinic, leaving her to walk home was merely a cruel redundancy. After the abortion, the world she’d been constructing for herself crumbled very rapidly.139
Her diary reveals that she berated herself endlessly for this abandonment and having dared to dream aloud, bringing on what she felt as humiliating public exposure, worrying that she’d “once again become a laughing stock,” feeling the image she’d so carefully crafted slipping away. For weeks she actively contemplated suicide."140 Instead, she bolted, leaving all her worldly possessions behind and setting out on what is still sometimes fondly remembered by those who knew her as “Leah’s grand adventure.”141 In retrospect, it might more accurately be described as a hurt and terribly frightened young woman, trapped in a blind alley, running for her life.
Little Girl Lost (and Found?)
All I saw when I first met Leah in November 1993 was a remarkably beautiful young woman, palpably shy but with bright eyes and a radiant smile. I knew nothing of her background and cared less. I was completely unaware that Leah’s lifelong sense of lonely futility had resettled over her recently like the chill of a North Beach fog, leading her to late night searchings along the Golden Gate bridge for an excuse for a final plunge into the murky depths below. Her diary at that time brims with passages declaiming “how nice it would be to just lie down in the snow, go to sleep, and never wake up.” Had I known, I can honestly say it would not have deterred me in the least from loving her, but I might have been able to help her more.
We saw each other only intermittently for the next half year, but in May 1994 we agreed that, upon her return from a trip to Ireland, I’d stop in and visit for a “couple of weeks,” maybe driving her up along the coast for a few days camping in the redwoods. Once I arrived in early July, I never left. We spent time in the redwoods and in the vineyards of Simi Valley, in the forests below Mount Shasta, along beaches watching sunsets as far north as Coos Bay. Most of our time, however, was spent in the city, she working, me prowling bookstores or coffee houses, chain smoking as I read the postmodernists from Baudrillard to Lyotard, waiting every night in the Dalva, a bar across the street from Ti Cous, to share glasses of cider at the end of her shift. Her off hours we spent constantly together, probing, exploring, laughing, holding hands or she my arm, as we strolled the streets. Common tastes were discovered in food and films, literature and music, art and much else. She displayed her knowledge of wines, refined through years of serving others. I showed off my talents as a gourmet cook, making her a batch of cioppino. In restaurants, she’d order for us both to my delight. We went willy-nilly from infatuation through mutual astonishment to genuine love for one another. In late August, as I was preparing to go home for the start of another school year - I’d pushed my departure back to the last possible hour of the last possible day, driving straight through and pulling into town as new students were undergoing orientation - we conducted something of a summit conference to decide what should come next. She, fearing that I, I now realize, might be just one more strand in her lengthening skein of intense but ultimately transient unions, flashed visible signs of distress.
Surprised at her level of anxiety, unsure of its source, I sought to reassure her, I offered to take a year’s leave from my job and simply stay on in San Francisco, if necessary finding permanent employment there. She considered this offer for only a moment before dismissing it as ridiculous with an irritated wave of the hand, but posed no alternative plan herself. As the sense of stalemate grew, she grew steadily more agitated. There seemed little I might say or do to calm her. Things were sliding downhill in a hurry.
At some point, though, I hit on asking her what she really wanted to do not just with me or for the next few months but with her life. An indecipherable wistfulness passed across her face, her voice filling with a kind of yearning I’d not heard from her before. She’d been spinning her wheels for years, she said, going nowhere, but always meaning to finish college, to “get to know things,” become an artist, a painter, a photographer, and above all, a filmmaker. Her words rushed forth as if of their own volition, at once pensive and excited, seemingly propelled by some force disconnected from her will.
Then, quite abruptly, she caught herself. Like a slamming door, a resigned guarded look closed over her eager hopefulness. Bitterly canceling her previous torrent, she offered a curt endgame observation that “none of it will ever happen, of course.” “Why not?” I replied, “It sounds do-able enough to me.” She appeared confused, unsure whether she should be startled, happy, or simply baffled. But I’d definitely captured her attention. “Really?” she asked, a bit incredulously. “Sure,” I said. ‘What’s the problem?"
An hour later, we had a plan. I’d base myself in San Francisco for the fall, commuting to-and-from Denver to teach my three days per week’s worth of classes at the University of Colorado. In December, Leah would move to Boulder and I’d arrange her admission at the University of Colorado. We’d live together in my house there and I’d support her living while she completed her undergraduate degree. After that, she’d take a job in some aspect of cinema and/or go to grad school. As she established her career, I’d begin phasing out of mine, turning an increasing share of our financial burden over to her. Perhaps I’d take early retirement and devote myself to writing, maybe even start painting again. Perhaps I’d secure an end-of-career position at a university in or near Winnipeg. In either event, we’d eventually move there. She’d be our primary breadwinner making movies or something similar, we’d buy a big house in an older neighborhood, possibly raise a kid or two. We were in for the long haul.
The Unraveling
There had always been signs that all was not well with her. In San Francisco, she’d whimper in her sleep or wake trembling and terrified, unwilling or unable to name her terror.142 And there were the sudden and equally inexplicable rages, like the one on my birthday that first fall when after treating me to dinner at a favorite seafood restaurant, she me for no apparent reason with a looping right that split my lip so badly I was spitting blood two days later.143 The next morning, she tearfully apologized, saying she’d had too much wine and had confusedly lashed out at someone or something from another time, another place, she didn’t say who or what or why. I hugged her, said forget it, asked no questions, only too glad to believe her hostility had been directed at anyone, anything other than me….
Looking back, I see the undercurrents of what would happen surfacing mainly in the tension of her relationship with her father, the force of both their needs to bond with each other, the huge, futile efforts both made to achieve closeness and their mutual inability to get wherever it was they needed so badly to go. She would defend him fiercely to me about things I’d never said, thought or had any idea of, loving him in ways fathomable only in herself, struggling with all her might to absolve this small, remorse-ridden man of sins he’d long forgotten or perhaps never even knew he’d committed against her. Sometimes, she seemed to be displacing on me her anger at and hurt from her father, while reserving the tenderness that formed the other dimension of their compact for him.
From our first day in Boulder, she would spike a rage almost daily out of what I at first thought was a youthful unfettered jealousy of the fact that I’d had a wife and a life before her. I set myself to reassure her of the depth of my love and commitment to her, my respect and esteem for her. I spent virtually all my time with her, lavishing her with clothes, with shoes and boots and other such “finery” - her term - of the sorts she’d never had. We redecorated and furnished the house as hers. I constantly gave her presents, from new vehicles to drive to flowers, so thoroughly out of character it filled my friends with wonder.
Still, month after month, without warning, most often in the midst of something nice, she’d turn on me like a fury, disparaging me, my family, clawing, kicking, biting, jerking out clumps of hair.144 I reached my own snapping point in early 1996, when under this kind of assault, I broke and slammed her back against our bedroom wall, telling her that if she kept it up, she’d be apt to land in a hospital.145 The look on her face told me I’d confirmed some secret dread far surpassing anything I’d meant to say or do, but she never raised a hand to me again.146
Although our life seemed to level out for a while thereafter, even recapturing some of the richness of our first summer, later that spring, a miscarriage and Leah’s erroneous belief that I was unfaithful to her ended the fragile equilibrium.147 In the fall, she started drinking, abruptly, in full force, as if undertaking a conscious design.
Jumbled between the signs and signifiers of her life, Leah’s plunge into alcohol triggered not clarity but implosion, quickly eroding the feeble network of defenses she’d erected, stripping away the coping skills she’d fought so hard to gain. By the new year of 1997, there were nights when her frightened doe’s eyes, her mouth contorted into a Munch-like O, a ring of horror, her soundless screams - for help? mercy? - pierced me like rusty spikes. She’d found her own much worse version of that awful place where John had been. I was confronting a semblance of what that hideously maimed little girl had suffered, the one still hiding within the woman I valued above all others.
During the first months of her unraveling, I ran an emotional gamut from irritation to anger through frustration to confusion, arriving at bewilderment only to move on to a perpetual fearfulness, nibbling the edges of my soul constantly like a rat. My own feelings shifted with such swiftness and kaleidoscopic complexity, I never quite felt I had caught up with myself, reached a balance or perspective that might have let me grasp the magnitude of our trouble. I was nearly fifty when she began to crumble. I was used to thinking of myself as something of a tough guy I was completely unequipped with tools or toughness sufficient to retrieve Leah or even to hold myself together.
After I’d put her to bed when she passed out, I would later sit alone in the dark, swaying back and forth, hugging myself, weeping uncontrollably, mourning the comfort I’d last encountered as a three-year-old in the warmth of my mother’s protecting embrace. I myself had been some of the impossible places Leah had been, but I had been there as a full-grown man, battle-weary and seasoned. Unhappy, I could remember a good childhood place. Leah had gone to the impossible places as a child; unhappy, she had no such good place to go. How Leah or any child without that good place can possibly survive beggars my powers of comprehension. She held on for far longer than I could have.
Dis-Integration
What is usually called “consciousness” does not come preassembled. It is delivered along with each newborn in pieces, or more properly stated, in a cluster of flows or streams, each related to but operating more or less independently of the others. A foundational phase of both cognitive and emotional development in younger children concerns the integration of these discrete streams, bringing about a unified and internally coherent perception of both the child’s self and of the external world that self interacts with. Things like viable self-concept and personality formation depend entirely on this process occurring in an orderly fashion. Should it be significantly disrupted, psycho-emotional chaos can result, with one or more nonintegrated stream of consciousness competing and often conflicting with the others. The effect, which can be permanent, is that the child incurs multiple personalities or personality fragments, and thus, multiple perceptions of reality."148
Early childhood trauma is a major - probably the major - cause of such disruption.149 Predictably, the pattern holds true particularly in cases where traumatic experience(s) is/are, chronic or prolonged.150 This, to an all but absolute certainty, is what happened to Leah. Almost from the start, she made mention of hearing “voices,” telling me of “others” who sometimes spoke to her and asking whether the same was so for me. At first, thinking she meant it in a traditional way, that this was her manner of informing me that she paid heed to messages conveyed by the spirits, I responded affirmatively, sometimes jokingly answering “yes, but only when I take the time to listen.” She’d laugh, but also look relieved, seeming glad to hear she was not the only one.
Later, neither of us was laughing. I’d find her in the kitchen, standing at the sink, muttering, apparently to herself. If I asked who she was talking to, she’d start as if jolted from a trance. “Them,” she’d say and that would be that. As time passed and her condition deteriorated, “they” became far more threatening. Eyes wild, trembling with terror, she’d argue frantically with unseen others, gesticulating, pointing to corners where she imagined them to be.151 My attempts to calm her, to wrap her in my arms, met with a horrified recoil. She cowered, assuming a near-fetal position, arms up as if to ward off blows, pleading in a di
Ward is just a phony. Wonder why nobody listens? There's your answer. Wonder why the left/liberal/progressive view is constantly losing ground? It's full of phonies spouting phony crap and the average shmuck out there (quite correctly) sees right through it. That doesn't mean the average shmuck necessarily agrees with the current administration. It just means they reject an opposing view that doesn't hold water, or even hot air for that matter. It doesn't mean they all drool approvingly while glued to FOX news either. It just means that the left/liberal/progressive camp has been subverted by raving lunatics and the whole fucking world knows it. Time to find a new revolution, this one's being run by posers.
Manufacturing a weak integrity argument to justify free speech violations...
It started in a federal Court in Pittsburgh and has moved quickly to Colorado Universtity and Iraq. It's a stretch, but political hacks have besieged first amendment free speech protections.
They attempt to combine a provacative essay comparing victims of 911 with Nazi criminals and an emotionally charged General's comments on war, questioning whether such is permissible when the comments may cause damaged to an institution's integrity.
Why?
Because in a Pittsburgh federal court a well connected corporate crony has suggested the novice argument, and the legal question is waddling without any legal precedent in need of an activist court.
Thus the current unexplained campaign against “free speech” appears to be little more than a Madison Avenue scheme to control any discussion of the President’s desire to privatize higher education.
That is, a number of for-profit colleges have faced inquiries, lawsuits and other actions calling into question the way they inflate enrollment to mislead/increase the value of their parent company’s stock.
In the last year, the Career Education Corporation of Hoffman Estates, Ill., has faced lawsuits, from shareholders and students, contending that, among other things, its colleges have inflated enrollment numbers. In addition, F.B.I. agents raided 10 campuses run by ITT Educational Services of Carmel, Ind., looking for similar problems.
But in a Pittsburgh federal court there is a bigger can of worms.
Kaplan, Inc., is wholly own by the Washington Post Company. For-profit postsecondary education has turned the company around and individuals far more powerful than Martha Steward have made millions. However, there is a nominal “Watergate” styled federal court proceeding (scandal) involving campus “free speech,” that could expose the administration’s violation of public trust
In short, I provided the S.E.C., Department of Education, and federal courts information that appears to prove Kaplan inflated the Concord School of Law enrollment, telling investors that the “flagship” of its higher education division has as many as 600 to 1000 or more students.
I also provided evidence to prove apparent violations of sections 10(b) and 20(a) of the Exchange Act and Rule 10b-5 promulgated thereunder.
However, in an attempt to protect important icons of the Washington and New York financial/political circle, hacks have been hired to stir a free speech controversy.
But even Stan Chess (En Passant http://lawtv.typepad.com/en_passant/2004/a_question_of_l.html) innocently questioned the obvious - a clear violation of the federal securities laws.
“Kaplan’s Concord School of Law says it’s one of the largest law schools in the country, yet for each administration only about 25 of its graduates sit for the bar exam. What happens to the hundreds of other students in each class?”
What are you willing to do?
It started in a federal Court in Pittsburgh and has moved quickly to Colorado Universtity and Iraq. It's a stretch, but political hacks have besieged first amendment free speech protections.
They attempt to combine a provacative essay comparing victims of 911 with Nazi criminals and an emotionally charged General's comments on war, questioning whether such is permissible when the comments may cause damaged to an institution's integrity.
Why?
Because in a Pittsburgh federal court a well connected corporate crony has suggested the novice argument, and the legal question is waddling without any legal precedent in need of an activist court.
Thus the current unexplained campaign against “free speech” appears to be little more than a Madison Avenue scheme to control any discussion of the President’s desire to privatize higher education.
That is, a number of for-profit colleges have faced inquiries, lawsuits and other actions calling into question the way they inflate enrollment to mislead/increase the value of their parent company’s stock.
In the last year, the Career Education Corporation of Hoffman Estates, Ill., has faced lawsuits, from shareholders and students, contending that, among other things, its colleges have inflated enrollment numbers. In addition, F.B.I. agents raided 10 campuses run by ITT Educational Services of Carmel, Ind., looking for similar problems.
But in a Pittsburgh federal court there is a bigger can of worms.
Kaplan, Inc., is wholly own by the Washington Post Company. For-profit postsecondary education has turned the company around and individuals far more powerful than Martha Steward have made millions. However, there is a nominal “Watergate” styled federal court proceeding (scandal) involving campus “free speech,” that could expose the administration’s violation of public trust
In short, I provided the S.E.C., Department of Education, and federal courts information that appears to prove Kaplan inflated the Concord School of Law enrollment, telling investors that the “flagship” of its higher education division has as many as 600 to 1000 or more students.
I also provided evidence to prove apparent violations of sections 10(b) and 20(a) of the Exchange Act and Rule 10b-5 promulgated thereunder.
However, in an attempt to protect important icons of the Washington and New York financial/political circle, hacks have been hired to stir a free speech controversy.
But even Stan Chess (En Passant http://lawtv.typepad.com/en_passant/2004/a_question_of_l.html) innocently questioned the obvious - a clear violation of the federal securities laws.
“Kaplan’s Concord School of Law says it’s one of the largest law schools in the country, yet for each administration only about 25 of its graduates sit for the bar exam. What happens to the hundreds of other students in each class?”
What are you willing to do?
Anyone know anything more about this? http://www.aimovement.org/moipr/churchill05.html
Is this true? If so it pretty severely vitiates his credibility, doesn't it?
Is this true? If so it pretty severely vitiates his credibility, doesn't it?
yes, his mother was 3/8 cherokee, and definitely was from the culture rather than raised in a white family, and his father was Creek, but he never met his father even in early childhood so he didn't register with that tribe. By the way- look at his picture. No one in my white family with brown hair could just say they're indian. The idea of demanding a certain purity is kind of dumb too. When tribes get down to 250 people, each young person might have 5 people of the opposite sex of their age available, and no one else has that pressure to be racially pure.
Read this. The Bellecourt AIM group is separate from all the local AIM chapters.
http://www.americanindianmovement.org/papers/struggle.html
""He's not Indian!"
The substantial effort to discredit Churchill' Native American identity buys into several of the dominant culture's racist assumptions and policies, ironically on the part of those who least stand to be served well by them. As in the attempts to link him to mainstream, right-wing or governmental agencies or organizations, the effort to destroy his credibility by playing the red race card is not only in itself racist but based on lies. The leader of the pack in this connection has always been Tim Giago, a notoriously anti-AIM South Dakota publisher who made his mark as chief propagandist and apologist for the lethally repressive COINTELPRO-supported Dickie Wilson régime on the Pine Ridge Reservation in the 70s.39 As early as 1988, trying to counter Churchill's exposés of what transpired on Pine Ridge during the 70s, Giago used his Republican-backed newspaper Lakota Times (now Indian Country Today), to announce that Churchill was an "ethnic fraud" and "impostor" who "changes his tribal identity like some people change socks."40
In point of fact, there are five criteria by which native people are normally identified in the US-self-identification, genealogy, tribal enrollment, blood quantum and community recognition.41 Churchill qualifies by all five standards. Let's start with self-identification and genealogy. Contrary to Tim Giago's claim that Churchill has identified himself as being of different peoples at different times, the record is absolutely clear that he has always identified as Cherokee (his mother's lineage). The first conclusive evidence of this dates from a 1970 article on the Alcatraz occupation.42 By 1975, having met his father for the first and only time in the interim, he added Creek, as in the identification he gave for an art show he mounted at the Sioux Indian Museum that year.43 Thereafter, he added Métis -meaning one of mixed ancestry and culture - to accomplish what he called "truth in advertising."44 From 1979 onward, his self-descriptor was always "Creek/Cherokee Métis," nothing else. Churchill has publicly challenged Giago to produce evidence of any other self-identification.45 Giago has not responded.
Meanwhile, Paul DeMain has repeatedly printed that his "investigations" (what these are is never made clear) into Churchill's genealogy reveal that because Churchill is not of American Indian descent, he "hides" his family history. Churchill responds that his family is as entitled to privacy as anyone else's: "I don't accept that these guys have any prerogative to hassle my 90-year-old grandmother, or my mother for that matter, and I don't recognize their right to inspect these personal records any more than I would if they demanded my credit history or medical file." Moreover, he has already published the relevant general information.46 According to AIM leader Russell Means, a long-term friend with whom Churchill once shared his family documents, "Not only does Ward have Indian ancestry, he has more proof of it than I do."47
As to community recognition, Churchill has been active in several. In Boulder, where he has lived the last twenty years, Churchill's record speaks for itself. He was hired as an Indian by the 'committee of the Boulder Valley School District's Title-IV Indian Education Project in 1977. He was hired as an Indian by the all-native staff of the American Indian Educational Opportunity Program at the University of Colorado Boulder campus in 1978.48 "He has always been accepted as an Indian by the Indians in this town," says Norbert S. Hill, Jr., an Oneida and former director of the Educational Opportunity Program, now head of the Boulder-based American Indian Science and Engineering Society. Hill cites that Churchill has been repeatedly honored by the Oyate Indian Student Organization at University of Colorado over the years. "I don't agree with him on a lot of things," Hill concludes, "but I've never known anybody who worked harder for Indian rights."49
In the Denver area, the story is the same. Bellecourtian accusations in the local press in 1993 provoked an outpouring of letters to the editor from Indians and others supporting Churchill, including one signed by the entirety of the Elders and leadership Councils of Colorado AIM.50 Both Churchill and Glenn Morris, another Bellecourt target, offered to resign their positions as codirectors of the chapter if the membership felt the publicity blitz was detrimental to Indian interests or were in any way uncomfortable about either of their identities. They unanimously reaffirmed both men's leadership.51
Enrollment in a federally-recognized tribe is the point the Bellecourts, Standing Elk and others most fuss about. Their animus against Churchill outweighs any consideration of whether they should support a criterion consisting of certification from a non-Indian government -the United States -involving bureaucratic extinction of indigenous peoples, like the Abenaki of Vermont. Instead, NAIMI insists that maintaining "tribal rolls" based upon criteria set by a non-Indian government is an important aspect of native self-determination. To be a "real" Indian, you must be enrolled. The procedure essentially deeds to the US government the privilege of determining who is or is not an Indian. There is a certain perverse logic to this argument in the baleful light of the assimilationist nature of US Indian policy since as early as 1880.52 But the Bellecourts' application of the rule is anything but consistent. For instance, they never suggest that imprisoned Chippewa/Sioux activist Leonard Peltier is not an Indian because he remains unenrolled, or denounce former AIM national spokesperson John Trudell, an unenrolled Santee, as an "impostor." Their behavior exempts IITC's Antonio Gonzales, a self-identified Seri, and Andrea Carmen, who claims to be a Yaqui.53 Hogwash washes both sides of the hog.
Yet in Churchill's case, federal certification isn't enough. Instead, the Bellecourts first trotted out David Cornsilk, a supposed "genealogist for the Cherokee Nation" to question Churchill's ancestry before the council of the Tahlequah, Oklahoma-based United Keetoowah Band of Cherokees (in which his roll number is R7627). The Keetoowah Band's refusal to impugn Churchill's stat"
cont'd
Read this. The Bellecourt AIM group is separate from all the local AIM chapters.
http://www.americanindianmovement.org/papers/struggle.html
""He's not Indian!"
The substantial effort to discredit Churchill' Native American identity buys into several of the dominant culture's racist assumptions and policies, ironically on the part of those who least stand to be served well by them. As in the attempts to link him to mainstream, right-wing or governmental agencies or organizations, the effort to destroy his credibility by playing the red race card is not only in itself racist but based on lies. The leader of the pack in this connection has always been Tim Giago, a notoriously anti-AIM South Dakota publisher who made his mark as chief propagandist and apologist for the lethally repressive COINTELPRO-supported Dickie Wilson régime on the Pine Ridge Reservation in the 70s.39 As early as 1988, trying to counter Churchill's exposés of what transpired on Pine Ridge during the 70s, Giago used his Republican-backed newspaper Lakota Times (now Indian Country Today), to announce that Churchill was an "ethnic fraud" and "impostor" who "changes his tribal identity like some people change socks."40
In point of fact, there are five criteria by which native people are normally identified in the US-self-identification, genealogy, tribal enrollment, blood quantum and community recognition.41 Churchill qualifies by all five standards. Let's start with self-identification and genealogy. Contrary to Tim Giago's claim that Churchill has identified himself as being of different peoples at different times, the record is absolutely clear that he has always identified as Cherokee (his mother's lineage). The first conclusive evidence of this dates from a 1970 article on the Alcatraz occupation.42 By 1975, having met his father for the first and only time in the interim, he added Creek, as in the identification he gave for an art show he mounted at the Sioux Indian Museum that year.43 Thereafter, he added Métis -meaning one of mixed ancestry and culture - to accomplish what he called "truth in advertising."44 From 1979 onward, his self-descriptor was always "Creek/Cherokee Métis," nothing else. Churchill has publicly challenged Giago to produce evidence of any other self-identification.45 Giago has not responded.
Meanwhile, Paul DeMain has repeatedly printed that his "investigations" (what these are is never made clear) into Churchill's genealogy reveal that because Churchill is not of American Indian descent, he "hides" his family history. Churchill responds that his family is as entitled to privacy as anyone else's: "I don't accept that these guys have any prerogative to hassle my 90-year-old grandmother, or my mother for that matter, and I don't recognize their right to inspect these personal records any more than I would if they demanded my credit history or medical file." Moreover, he has already published the relevant general information.46 According to AIM leader Russell Means, a long-term friend with whom Churchill once shared his family documents, "Not only does Ward have Indian ancestry, he has more proof of it than I do."47
As to community recognition, Churchill has been active in several. In Boulder, where he has lived the last twenty years, Churchill's record speaks for itself. He was hired as an Indian by the 'committee of the Boulder Valley School District's Title-IV Indian Education Project in 1977. He was hired as an Indian by the all-native staff of the American Indian Educational Opportunity Program at the University of Colorado Boulder campus in 1978.48 "He has always been accepted as an Indian by the Indians in this town," says Norbert S. Hill, Jr., an Oneida and former director of the Educational Opportunity Program, now head of the Boulder-based American Indian Science and Engineering Society. Hill cites that Churchill has been repeatedly honored by the Oyate Indian Student Organization at University of Colorado over the years. "I don't agree with him on a lot of things," Hill concludes, "but I've never known anybody who worked harder for Indian rights."49
In the Denver area, the story is the same. Bellecourtian accusations in the local press in 1993 provoked an outpouring of letters to the editor from Indians and others supporting Churchill, including one signed by the entirety of the Elders and leadership Councils of Colorado AIM.50 Both Churchill and Glenn Morris, another Bellecourt target, offered to resign their positions as codirectors of the chapter if the membership felt the publicity blitz was detrimental to Indian interests or were in any way uncomfortable about either of their identities. They unanimously reaffirmed both men's leadership.51
Enrollment in a federally-recognized tribe is the point the Bellecourts, Standing Elk and others most fuss about. Their animus against Churchill outweighs any consideration of whether they should support a criterion consisting of certification from a non-Indian government -the United States -involving bureaucratic extinction of indigenous peoples, like the Abenaki of Vermont. Instead, NAIMI insists that maintaining "tribal rolls" based upon criteria set by a non-Indian government is an important aspect of native self-determination. To be a "real" Indian, you must be enrolled. The procedure essentially deeds to the US government the privilege of determining who is or is not an Indian. There is a certain perverse logic to this argument in the baleful light of the assimilationist nature of US Indian policy since as early as 1880.52 But the Bellecourts' application of the rule is anything but consistent. For instance, they never suggest that imprisoned Chippewa/Sioux activist Leonard Peltier is not an Indian because he remains unenrolled, or denounce former AIM national spokesperson John Trudell, an unenrolled Santee, as an "impostor." Their behavior exempts IITC's Antonio Gonzales, a self-identified Seri, and Andrea Carmen, who claims to be a Yaqui.53 Hogwash washes both sides of the hog.
Yet in Churchill's case, federal certification isn't enough. Instead, the Bellecourts first trotted out David Cornsilk, a supposed "genealogist for the Cherokee Nation" to question Churchill's ancestry before the council of the Tahlequah, Oklahoma-based United Keetoowah Band of Cherokees (in which his roll number is R7627). The Keetoowah Band's refusal to impugn Churchill's stat"
cont'd
I have been reading the news about Ward Churchill not with surprise or even too much outrage, rather with a sense of foreboding.
Today I also watched the wonderful Martin Ritt's movie "The Front", about the McCarthy era blacklisting of writers, artists, intellectuals, entertainers, etc. This witch hunt is more than set to come back today - in fact, it is already here.
In my university, where I am a teaching assistant in Art History, I was recently the victim of a micro episode of censorship: having stuck some political cartoons and artwork on my office door as a miniscule protest after the dismal election results, I was immediately confronted, not by the faculty, but by my two new colleagues: young, "all American" girls, one claiming to be a "Democrat", the other a Bush supporter, who basically cajoled me into taking the images down on the ground that they were "offensive" (they were not). To cut a long story short, I reacted with rage to a protracted provocation from the two and was subsequently reprimanded by the head of department in two sanctimonious emails containing veiled threats to my position. As I have only a precarious job, "protected" by a nearly useless union, and no money for lawyers, I had to cave in. Result; one more bare, mute door, one more point in favor of the reactionary right that runs the country.
I am a European who came to live here, to study, only 2 months prior 9/11, and ever since have been watching in horror as the country goes down the drain of populist, reactionary demagogy speaking to the emotions and avoiding both the use of rationality and the truths contained in the remembering and understanding of history.
Because I have no emotional or personal stake in the country, I am both more appalled and at the same time more detached in my observations of what is going on. This is why I have always agreed with Ward Churchill when he reminds us that genocide, bloodshed, war and repression are nothing new to America, certainly not created by the current administration, but have always existed; they form indeed the very foundations on which America was built. This is why I find liberals such as Michael Moore both naive and even dangerous in his simultaneous act of waving the flag ("we are a great nation!") and cricitizing the present, while conveniently forgetting the past (anything before Clinton seems to be too remote for him to touch on).
Indeed, the entire American psyche seems to be built on denial and forgetting, first and foremost of the atrocities both physical and political committed against the original, rightful inhabitants of the land.
One interesting case in point is in fact in the very alma mater of Churchill, the university of Colorado.
The name in Spanish means "colored", and the color is that of the blood of innocent (much more than the 9/11 victims) Indians.
The university was supported, financed and nurtured into existence by a certain David Nichols, a successful businessman, in the late 1870s; he also became their first regent. So far so good, no? The usual wonderful story of American individual enterprise and philanthropic support for great causes such as education, the arts, etc. Well, not quite.
David Nichols was one of the army men led by Colonel Chivington who participated in the horrific Sand Creek massacre of November 29 1864.
More than 700 men slaughtered a group of 105 women and children and only 28 men of the Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes, who were peacefully camping there. This in spite of the fact that their peoples had just negotiated an official peace with the Governor of Colorado.
After the massacre, the official records report the military (self-appointed: it was an army of volunteers) men parading into town wearing as trophies the bleeding, cut-off genitalia of the slaughtered Indian men and women...
So, who's the "savage" here?
Colorado University American Indian students had to wait until 1986 to have Nichols' name officially removed from a hall. As if that would be reparation enough.
So, what I really have to say here is: first, as Americans, liberals and non-, you ought first of all learn your history, and consider all your past sins, before you can even open your mouth and rant and rave about the "unspeakable" acts committed by terrorists against your country. After all, the death toll in Iraq, of Iraqi and American soldiers combined, has by now more than exceeded the number of victims of 9/11, and nothing has been achieved except for providing lucrative contracts for US, and US-backed, corporations, as well as pouring more and more money into the military machine that supports a well-oiled industry.
Secondly, before howling with outrage at comments such as Churchill's, you should consider the silent suffering of all the descendents of Native Americans who had their ancestors killed, raped, relocated, repressed by laws and abused in boarding schools, their cultural artifacts stolen and even their human remains indecently shown in museum as "scientific evidence", and who have never been entitled to either apologies nor reparations. Not even, indeed, to any general acknowledgment on the part of the US government, media and general public. How do you think these people feel? Who do you think has been suffering more, and for longer?
Thirdly, you should also consider whether you want the whole of America to become some kind of Utah, a place where religious fundamentalism and intolerance (which equals ignorance) dominates. When this climate of repression starts to touch institutions of learning such as the universities, where critical debate and open speech should be encouraged not stifled, you can be sure that we are on the way to a new McCarthy era.
I think the decision by the Board of CU to scrutinize Churchill's writings is APPALLING and should not have been allowed. Even more appalling is that the state of Colorado (and notice that all the representatives who caused the furor about Churchill were Republicans) would be allowed to interfere with the running of the university, to the point of threatening to cut their funding if they do not remove Churchill. Who ever said these things only happened in communist China and Russia?
Furthermore, a lot of Churchill's writings have nothing to do with his teachings, but were published in books which circulate freely (so far, maybe soon the FBI will be ordered by Congress to remove and ban them) in bookstores and internet sites. So it is even more difficult to see what they may have to do with his position as professor and the status of his job. Instead of going through his writings, the regents (any descendents of Nichols there?) should read his class sillabi and reading lists, interview his students and generally look at his work as a teacher.
I also find it appalling that some people seem to think that he is some kind of "attention seeker" thriving on this: he is standing to lose his job! His livelihood! Surely that ought to mean something to money-driven Americans!
How many of you would ever have the guts to speak out if the monthly payements on your SUVs, DVDs, home theater set-ups and suburban houses were a stake? Few, very few. So, shame on you for your pseudo-fashionable, MTV-poisoned comments! You watch too much crap TV, and are led to believe that anybody who causes a public fuss is an "attention seeker". Well, there is a little difference between semi-naked, coke-fuelled, brainless bimbettes shaking their asses like the overpaid whores they are, and an elderly Native American professor who dares speak his mind about something POLITICAL, as unfashionable as that may seem to you lot.
I have spent nearly 4 years now in America. I came here full of good intentions, and, despite my advanced knowledge and distaste of its political history, full of admiration for the many wonderful facets of American culture. Ever since 9/11, all I've seen come to the surface are the negative, childish, appalling sides of this country, those things which make it indeed so hated and reviled around the world, and make it the target of terrorist attacks (if you think only "the Arabs" hate you, think again: most Europeans think you are unsophisticated, uncultured morons, and that's when they are being kind).
Most of all, and from this stem all the other evils, people all over the world hate the US schizophrenic attitude to life, combining as it does a cowboy mentality of "let's shoot the bastards" with the ostrich mentality of pretending that everything will be "apple pie". A lethal combination of gun bullets and Prozac pills seems to be the staple diet of most Americans.
I am now ready to move to Canada or back to Europe, overall more sane environments. Witness the Spanish response to a terrorist attack, as opposed to the US reaction to 9/11: which was more mature, and which will yield more attacks? History will tell - but if you keep watching Fox and CNN, you may miss the true answer.
Today I also watched the wonderful Martin Ritt's movie "The Front", about the McCarthy era blacklisting of writers, artists, intellectuals, entertainers, etc. This witch hunt is more than set to come back today - in fact, it is already here.
In my university, where I am a teaching assistant in Art History, I was recently the victim of a micro episode of censorship: having stuck some political cartoons and artwork on my office door as a miniscule protest after the dismal election results, I was immediately confronted, not by the faculty, but by my two new colleagues: young, "all American" girls, one claiming to be a "Democrat", the other a Bush supporter, who basically cajoled me into taking the images down on the ground that they were "offensive" (they were not). To cut a long story short, I reacted with rage to a protracted provocation from the two and was subsequently reprimanded by the head of department in two sanctimonious emails containing veiled threats to my position. As I have only a precarious job, "protected" by a nearly useless union, and no money for lawyers, I had to cave in. Result; one more bare, mute door, one more point in favor of the reactionary right that runs the country.
I am a European who came to live here, to study, only 2 months prior 9/11, and ever since have been watching in horror as the country goes down the drain of populist, reactionary demagogy speaking to the emotions and avoiding both the use of rationality and the truths contained in the remembering and understanding of history.
Because I have no emotional or personal stake in the country, I am both more appalled and at the same time more detached in my observations of what is going on. This is why I have always agreed with Ward Churchill when he reminds us that genocide, bloodshed, war and repression are nothing new to America, certainly not created by the current administration, but have always existed; they form indeed the very foundations on which America was built. This is why I find liberals such as Michael Moore both naive and even dangerous in his simultaneous act of waving the flag ("we are a great nation!") and cricitizing the present, while conveniently forgetting the past (anything before Clinton seems to be too remote for him to touch on).
Indeed, the entire American psyche seems to be built on denial and forgetting, first and foremost of the atrocities both physical and political committed against the original, rightful inhabitants of the land.
One interesting case in point is in fact in the very alma mater of Churchill, the university of Colorado.
The name in Spanish means "colored", and the color is that of the blood of innocent (much more than the 9/11 victims) Indians.
The university was supported, financed and nurtured into existence by a certain David Nichols, a successful businessman, in the late 1870s; he also became their first regent. So far so good, no? The usual wonderful story of American individual enterprise and philanthropic support for great causes such as education, the arts, etc. Well, not quite.
David Nichols was one of the army men led by Colonel Chivington who participated in the horrific Sand Creek massacre of November 29 1864.
More than 700 men slaughtered a group of 105 women and children and only 28 men of the Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes, who were peacefully camping there. This in spite of the fact that their peoples had just negotiated an official peace with the Governor of Colorado.
After the massacre, the official records report the military (self-appointed: it was an army of volunteers) men parading into town wearing as trophies the bleeding, cut-off genitalia of the slaughtered Indian men and women...
So, who's the "savage" here?
Colorado University American Indian students had to wait until 1986 to have Nichols' name officially removed from a hall. As if that would be reparation enough.
So, what I really have to say here is: first, as Americans, liberals and non-, you ought first of all learn your history, and consider all your past sins, before you can even open your mouth and rant and rave about the "unspeakable" acts committed by terrorists against your country. After all, the death toll in Iraq, of Iraqi and American soldiers combined, has by now more than exceeded the number of victims of 9/11, and nothing has been achieved except for providing lucrative contracts for US, and US-backed, corporations, as well as pouring more and more money into the military machine that supports a well-oiled industry.
Secondly, before howling with outrage at comments such as Churchill's, you should consider the silent suffering of all the descendents of Native Americans who had their ancestors killed, raped, relocated, repressed by laws and abused in boarding schools, their cultural artifacts stolen and even their human remains indecently shown in museum as "scientific evidence", and who have never been entitled to either apologies nor reparations. Not even, indeed, to any general acknowledgment on the part of the US government, media and general public. How do you think these people feel? Who do you think has been suffering more, and for longer?
Thirdly, you should also consider whether you want the whole of America to become some kind of Utah, a place where religious fundamentalism and intolerance (which equals ignorance) dominates. When this climate of repression starts to touch institutions of learning such as the universities, where critical debate and open speech should be encouraged not stifled, you can be sure that we are on the way to a new McCarthy era.
I think the decision by the Board of CU to scrutinize Churchill's writings is APPALLING and should not have been allowed. Even more appalling is that the state of Colorado (and notice that all the representatives who caused the furor about Churchill were Republicans) would be allowed to interfere with the running of the university, to the point of threatening to cut their funding if they do not remove Churchill. Who ever said these things only happened in communist China and Russia?
Furthermore, a lot of Churchill's writings have nothing to do with his teachings, but were published in books which circulate freely (so far, maybe soon the FBI will be ordered by Congress to remove and ban them) in bookstores and internet sites. So it is even more difficult to see what they may have to do with his position as professor and the status of his job. Instead of going through his writings, the regents (any descendents of Nichols there?) should read his class sillabi and reading lists, interview his students and generally look at his work as a teacher.
I also find it appalling that some people seem to think that he is some kind of "attention seeker" thriving on this: he is standing to lose his job! His livelihood! Surely that ought to mean something to money-driven Americans!
How many of you would ever have the guts to speak out if the monthly payements on your SUVs, DVDs, home theater set-ups and suburban houses were a stake? Few, very few. So, shame on you for your pseudo-fashionable, MTV-poisoned comments! You watch too much crap TV, and are led to believe that anybody who causes a public fuss is an "attention seeker". Well, there is a little difference between semi-naked, coke-fuelled, brainless bimbettes shaking their asses like the overpaid whores they are, and an elderly Native American professor who dares speak his mind about something POLITICAL, as unfashionable as that may seem to you lot.
I have spent nearly 4 years now in America. I came here full of good intentions, and, despite my advanced knowledge and distaste of its political history, full of admiration for the many wonderful facets of American culture. Ever since 9/11, all I've seen come to the surface are the negative, childish, appalling sides of this country, those things which make it indeed so hated and reviled around the world, and make it the target of terrorist attacks (if you think only "the Arabs" hate you, think again: most Europeans think you are unsophisticated, uncultured morons, and that's when they are being kind).
Most of all, and from this stem all the other evils, people all over the world hate the US schizophrenic attitude to life, combining as it does a cowboy mentality of "let's shoot the bastards" with the ostrich mentality of pretending that everything will be "apple pie". A lethal combination of gun bullets and Prozac pills seems to be the staple diet of most Americans.
I am now ready to move to Canada or back to Europe, overall more sane environments. Witness the Spanish response to a terrorist attack, as opposed to the US reaction to 9/11: which was more mature, and which will yield more attacks? History will tell - but if you keep watching Fox and CNN, you may miss the true answer.
hmm.
In the lab where I work, there is a very left wing grad student in math who is totally quiet, but then I ran into him at a big protest. There are others in the lab who are very moderate, so I won't even turn on NPR when others are in the room. Across the hall, the biomechanics people have stickers against imperialism and oil wars and something for Emma Goldman, although all of them physically dress very moderately and I don't know who it is, or all of them. In some other labs, there are antienvironmental sentiments expressed, or people who do feel free to openly express cynical conservative views, but the general trend is towards being able to do a Bush joke and counting on it currying favor for you.
Hopefully everyone will read that book, but in sum, everyone will be spending all this time in reaction mode again.
In the lab where I work, there is a very left wing grad student in math who is totally quiet, but then I ran into him at a big protest. There are others in the lab who are very moderate, so I won't even turn on NPR when others are in the room. Across the hall, the biomechanics people have stickers against imperialism and oil wars and something for Emma Goldman, although all of them physically dress very moderately and I don't know who it is, or all of them. In some other labs, there are antienvironmental sentiments expressed, or people who do feel free to openly express cynical conservative views, but the general trend is towards being able to do a Bush joke and counting on it currying favor for you.
Hopefully everyone will read that book, but in sum, everyone will be spending all this time in reaction mode again.
Where are Ward Churchill's books located??? Fact or Fiction?? Ward Churchill is not an Indian. He is white, his parents are white. Yes his mother is old and people should not bother her, but she is still white. Yes, his dad died but he was not Creek. Maybe he lived near a creek, but he was white. Please stop trying to fool the world (and yourself)!!
Hopefully all this Ward Churchill brouhaha will settle down soon and the waters will clear so we can see the real issue at stake. Of course on a small scale this is a free speech issue, but let's look at the political realities: As a tenured professor, there's a very high bar for WC's foes to meet in order to boot him out. If he's risking his livelihood, it isn't much of a risk. As a lawyer, I'd love to have this guy as a client. Before we work ourselves into a lather about the spleen-venting of the CO Governor & Legislature calling for WC's head, let's consider their political reality: It costs them nothing to decry WC's "Eichmann" comments -- in fact, it strengthens their hold on their Red-State constituency. But it's a lot of hot air. WC ain't going anywhere unless he wants to.
The real problem here is the "Blowback": WC's comments blow back on the entire Left of the political spectrum, filling the ammo magazines of the Right, who tar all of us with the Churchill brush: "All Liberals think this way -- they must be stopped!!" If Lefties want to sit around the coffeehouse, smoke weed and give each other hand jobs about what a courageous guy WC is and how righteous we are for supporting him, I guess that's great: We can comfort ourselves in smug superiority while we lose yet another election.
Because that's where the rubber meets the road: At the ballot box. In 6 months' time, WC will be forgotten and all the privileged college kids who thump the 1st Amendment drum for him will be summering . . . wherever they summer . . . and Bush/Cheney will still be running things. I agree that US foreign policy -- particularly of this administration -- is a substantial cause of anti-Americanism throughout the world and that some people who hate eventually act with violence. We DO need to change our foreign policy, but it won't happen with this Administration, regardless of how shrill the protests. We need regime change, and we need to be realistic about it. Consider the historical reality that political change comes about through one of two means: Bullets or Ballots. Personally, I prefer the latter, and a guy like WC hurts the Cause at the ballot box far more than he helps it.
As for our European guest and her diatribe above, PLEASE remember that 49% of us voted for the other guy.
So, are we going to debate the 1st Amendment and whether or not WC is a swell guy, or are we going to take practical steps to reclaim the political center in this country so we can actually change things?
The real problem here is the "Blowback": WC's comments blow back on the entire Left of the political spectrum, filling the ammo magazines of the Right, who tar all of us with the Churchill brush: "All Liberals think this way -- they must be stopped!!" If Lefties want to sit around the coffeehouse, smoke weed and give each other hand jobs about what a courageous guy WC is and how righteous we are for supporting him, I guess that's great: We can comfort ourselves in smug superiority while we lose yet another election.
Because that's where the rubber meets the road: At the ballot box. In 6 months' time, WC will be forgotten and all the privileged college kids who thump the 1st Amendment drum for him will be summering . . . wherever they summer . . . and Bush/Cheney will still be running things. I agree that US foreign policy -- particularly of this administration -- is a substantial cause of anti-Americanism throughout the world and that some people who hate eventually act with violence. We DO need to change our foreign policy, but it won't happen with this Administration, regardless of how shrill the protests. We need regime change, and we need to be realistic about it. Consider the historical reality that political change comes about through one of two means: Bullets or Ballots. Personally, I prefer the latter, and a guy like WC hurts the Cause at the ballot box far more than he helps it.
As for our European guest and her diatribe above, PLEASE remember that 49% of us voted for the other guy.
So, are we going to debate the 1st Amendment and whether or not WC is a swell guy, or are we going to take practical steps to reclaim the political center in this country so we can actually change things?
[Hopefully all this Ward Churchill brouhaha will settle down soon and the waters will clear so we can see the real issue at stake. Of course on a small scale this is a free speech issue, but let's look at the political realities: As a tenured professor, there's a very high bar for WC's foes to meet in order to boot him out. If he's risking his livelihood, it isn't much of a risk. As a lawyer, I'd love to have this guy as a client. Before we work ourselves into a lather about the spleen-venting of the CO Governor & Legislature calling for WC's head, let's consider their political reality: It costs them nothing to decry WC's "Eichmann" comments -- in fact, it strengthens their hold on their Red-State constituency. But it's a lot of hot air. WC ain't going anywhere unless he wants to.
The real problem here is the "Blowback": WC's comments blow back on the entire Left of the political spectrum, filling the ammo magazines of the Right, who tar all of us with the Churchill brush: "All Liberals think this way -- they must be stopped!!" If Lefties want to sit around the coffeehouse, smoke weed and give each other hand jobs about what a courageous guy WC is and how righteous we are for supporting him, I guess that's great: We can comfort ourselves in smug superiority while we lose yet another election.
Because that's where the rubber meets the road: At the ballot box. In 6 months' time, WC will be forgotten and all the privileged college kids who thump the 1st Amendment drum for him will be summering . . . wherever they summer . . . and Bush/Cheney will still be running things. I agree that US foreign policy -- particularly of this administration -- is a substantial cause of anti-Americanism throughout the world and that some people who hate eventually act with violence. We DO need to change our foreign policy, but it won't happen with this Administration, regardless of how shrill the protests. We need regime change, and we need to be realistic about it. Consider the historical reality that political change comes about through one of two means: Bullets or Ballots. Personally, I prefer the latter, and a guy like WC hurts the Cause at the ballot box far more than he helps it.
As for our European guest and her diatribe above, PLEASE remember that 49% of us voted for the other guy.
So, are we going to debate the 1st Amendment and whether or not WC is a swell guy, or are we going to take practical steps to reclaim the political center in this country so we can actually change things?]
Perhaps, you've been out of the country since election day.
Kerry, the congressional Democrats and the Democratic Leadership Council abandoned their own voters in Ohio after spending months exhorting them to vote because this was purportedly one of the most crucial elections in American history.
Kinda of like the way you want to throw Ward Churchill over the side.
And, pray tell, what is this "political center" you are talking about? Support for the occupation in Iraq? Support for possible upcoming wars in Iran and Venezuela? Support for Social Security reform? Please elaborate, with specifics.
--Richard
The real problem here is the "Blowback": WC's comments blow back on the entire Left of the political spectrum, filling the ammo magazines of the Right, who tar all of us with the Churchill brush: "All Liberals think this way -- they must be stopped!!" If Lefties want to sit around the coffeehouse, smoke weed and give each other hand jobs about what a courageous guy WC is and how righteous we are for supporting him, I guess that's great: We can comfort ourselves in smug superiority while we lose yet another election.
Because that's where the rubber meets the road: At the ballot box. In 6 months' time, WC will be forgotten and all the privileged college kids who thump the 1st Amendment drum for him will be summering . . . wherever they summer . . . and Bush/Cheney will still be running things. I agree that US foreign policy -- particularly of this administration -- is a substantial cause of anti-Americanism throughout the world and that some people who hate eventually act with violence. We DO need to change our foreign policy, but it won't happen with this Administration, regardless of how shrill the protests. We need regime change, and we need to be realistic about it. Consider the historical reality that political change comes about through one of two means: Bullets or Ballots. Personally, I prefer the latter, and a guy like WC hurts the Cause at the ballot box far more than he helps it.
As for our European guest and her diatribe above, PLEASE remember that 49% of us voted for the other guy.
So, are we going to debate the 1st Amendment and whether or not WC is a swell guy, or are we going to take practical steps to reclaim the political center in this country so we can actually change things?]
Perhaps, you've been out of the country since election day.
Kerry, the congressional Democrats and the Democratic Leadership Council abandoned their own voters in Ohio after spending months exhorting them to vote because this was purportedly one of the most crucial elections in American history.
Kinda of like the way you want to throw Ward Churchill over the side.
And, pray tell, what is this "political center" you are talking about? Support for the occupation in Iraq? Support for possible upcoming wars in Iran and Venezuela? Support for Social Security reform? Please elaborate, with specifics.
--Richard
Interesting that by saying that the 9/11 people were retaliating for wrongs done to their country, Ward Churchill implicitly links them to Iraq, since all the things he cites as having retaliated for involve Iraq. Is he a secret Bushie? :)
BTW, on O'Reilly last night there was a reference to a 1987 Denver Post article which alleges that Churchill trained the Weathermen in bomb-making and how to fire weapons. Does anyone know anything about this? Can anyone find a link to anything of this kind?
BTW, on O'Reilly last night there was a reference to a 1987 Denver Post article which alleges that Churchill trained the Weathermen in bomb-making and how to fire weapons. Does anyone know anything about this? Can anyone find a link to anything of this kind?
I'm not trying to throw Ward over the side, just trying to contextualize him. Whether you or I throw him over the side is irrelevant in the long run. What IS relevant is what happens in the political center of the electorate: the great mass of people who decide elections in this country. These people currrently support the Iraq adventure because they perceive it is in their interest to do so. Why? Because the Right has convinced them of this. These are for the most part working-class people, half of whom barely know where Iraq is, but who have been convinced by the Right that this is the thing to do. They have neither the education nor the time to understand the intricacies of foreign policy (these are the people who voted Bush in 2000 b/c they could not or would not understand that Bush's tax cuts actually hurt them in the long run). These are not bad people, they are misinformed and misled. They don't want to send their boys to die in Venezuela or anywhere else, but they will if they believe it's the right thing to do. Which is where Ward comes in: When this mass of the electorate hears a remark like the "little Eichmanns" comment, they are offended and repulsed and cuddle up more tightly in the welcoming arms of the GOP. Like it or not, political power comes from elections, and elections are won & lost at the center. There will always be extremists at either pole -- victory belongs to the side that wins the center. These days the GOP is doing a much better job selling their program to the center, and one reason for that is Ward & his ilk. He is an ideal bogeyman for the Right: long-haired, big-mouth, sucking on the government teat, untouchable b/c of his tenure, filling the heads of students with extremist rhetoric: You get the drift. It isn't about whether he's right or wrong, it's about the effect he has on the electorate. At present he serves the interests of the Right by playing into their politics of Fear: they offer the voters a choice of good 'ol boy W vs. Ward the whacko. Whom do you think the average voter is going to choose?
The political Center I'm talking about is made up of people who aren't well-educated and who think in simple terms; they are not idealogues and they are not Little Eichmanns -- they are simply people who are trying to earn a living and make sense of a world that is confusing and overwhelming to them. We on the Left need to reach out to these people, not offend and insult them. To that extent, WC is part of the problem.
The Ohio thing is also substantially irrelevant and must be looked at in terms of realpolitik: It's my understanding that the Ohio vote was close but was probably going to go Bush anyway. Kerry and the DNC have limited political capital and must spend it where it will do the most good. Example: The governor's race in Washington where the DNC took it to the mattresses & won in the end.
The real problem is not that Kerry & Co. abandoned the voters, it's that the voters abandoned Kerry (and more to the point, Gore). I attended an anti-war rally in DC in 2002 and conducted an informal poll: Whom did you vote for in 2000? The results: Gore 28%, Nader 8%, Bush 4%, Didn't vote 60%. That's just terrible. I had more respect for the Bush voters who changed their minds than for the idiot non-voters with their after-the-fact sloganeering.
The turnout in 2004 was better, but still awfully thin. We need to do better.
In a few months, this tempest about WC will be knocked off the front page by the next hoo-ha, the Regents will tsk-tsk at Ward but he'll keep his job and after that we'll only hear from him when the Republicans trot him out as a bogeyman at election time.
So what's it going to be? Ward Churchill t-shirts or trying to win an election?
The political Center I'm talking about is made up of people who aren't well-educated and who think in simple terms; they are not idealogues and they are not Little Eichmanns -- they are simply people who are trying to earn a living and make sense of a world that is confusing and overwhelming to them. We on the Left need to reach out to these people, not offend and insult them. To that extent, WC is part of the problem.
The Ohio thing is also substantially irrelevant and must be looked at in terms of realpolitik: It's my understanding that the Ohio vote was close but was probably going to go Bush anyway. Kerry and the DNC have limited political capital and must spend it where it will do the most good. Example: The governor's race in Washington where the DNC took it to the mattresses & won in the end.
The real problem is not that Kerry & Co. abandoned the voters, it's that the voters abandoned Kerry (and more to the point, Gore). I attended an anti-war rally in DC in 2002 and conducted an informal poll: Whom did you vote for in 2000? The results: Gore 28%, Nader 8%, Bush 4%, Didn't vote 60%. That's just terrible. I had more respect for the Bush voters who changed their minds than for the idiot non-voters with their after-the-fact sloganeering.
The turnout in 2004 was better, but still awfully thin. We need to do better.
In a few months, this tempest about WC will be knocked off the front page by the next hoo-ha, the Regents will tsk-tsk at Ward but he'll keep his job and after that we'll only hear from him when the Republicans trot him out as a bogeyman at election time.
So what's it going to be? Ward Churchill t-shirts or trying to win an election?
[I'm not trying to throw Ward over the side, just trying to contextualize him. Whether you or I throw him over the side is irrelevant in the long run. What IS relevant is what happens in the political center of the electorate: the great mass of people who decide elections in this country.]
If you are not willing to stand up for academic freedom in a time of crisis, just say so, and spare us the handwringing rationalizations. No one is going to remember Churchill one way or another 4 years from now during an election, but there are people out there in academia that are facing similar risks if the CU Board of Regents succeeds in firing him.
Quite a number of Churchill's critics have been very open about the fact that they see Churchill as emblematic of an approach to American history that includes consideration of ethnic studies, the labor movement and women's studies, and they want to get rid of all of it. Note also, that CU refused to renew a contract of an environmental studies instructor a few days ago during the height of the Churchill hysteria. I'm at a loss to understand how liberalism, or your "political center", or anything other than a right wing populism, has any hope if people like you decide, because of some bizarre notion of political expediency to stay silent, and allow this emerging intimidation of academia to grow.
[These people currrently support the Iraq adventure because they perceive it is in their interest to do so. Why? Because the Right has convinced them of this. These are for the most part working-class people, half of whom barely know where Iraq is, but who have been convinced by the Right that this is the thing to do. They have neither the education nor the time to understand the intricacies of foreign policy (these are the people who voted Bush in 2000 b/c they could not or would not understand that Bush's tax cuts actually hurt them in the long run). These are not bad people, they are misinformed and misled. They don't want to send their boys to die in Venezuela or anywhere else, but they will if they believe it's the right thing to do. Which is where Ward comes in: When this mass of the electorate hears a remark like the "little Eichmanns" comment, they are offended and repulsed and cuddle up more tightly in the welcoming arms of the GOP. Like it or not, political power comes from elections, and elections are won & lost at the center. There will always be extremists at either pole -- victory belongs to the side that wins the center. These days the GOP is doing a much better job selling their program to the center, and one reason for that is Ward & his ilk. He is an ideal bogeyman for the Right: long-haired, big-mouth, sucking on the government teat, untouchable b/c of his tenure, filling the heads of students with extremist rhetoric: You get the drift. It isn't about whether he's right or wrong, it's about the effect he has on the electorate. At present he serves the interests of the Right by playing into their politics of Fear: they offer the voters a choice of good 'ol boy W vs. Ward the whacko. Whom do you think the average voter is going to choose?}
This analysis is so entangled that it is almost impossible to penetrate. But, a few salient points. First, one reason that a lot of Americans support "the Iraq adventure" is because BOTH PARTIES do.
For all of your bluster about Churchill (and no doubt, he would enjoy the exaggeration of his political influence, because he appears to be quite the egotist), John Kerry had a much greater impact when he said, before the Grand Canyon in August of last year, that he would support the Iraq war again even in the absence of any evidence of WMDs and a link to al-Qaeda.
By the way, let me ask my questions again: what is the position of this political center that you want to create on the war in Iraq? Does it want to continue the occupation indefinitely or not? Does it want to support possible Bush wars in Venezuela and Iran? If so, who cares whether Bush or your political center runs the country?
Second, as someone who has been active in politics, I have never been very successful in trying to gain support by characterizing people in a way as condescending as you characterize "working class people". I try to talk to everyone the same way, I assume they are intelligent, well informed and capable of making their own independent decisions. It has suited me and the others that I know well. When I haven't acted this way, I've invariably failed.
I politely suggest that you engage in some introspection about this, as opposed to flailing about for anticipatory scapegoats like Churchill to justify possible future political defeats.
[The political Center I'm talking about is made up of people who aren't well-educated and who think in simple terms; they are not idealogues and they are not Little Eichmanns -- they are simply people who are trying to earn a living and make sense of a world that is confusing and overwhelming to them. We on the Left need to reach out to these people, not offend and insult them. To that extent, WC is part of the problem.]
Yes, we do need to reach out to them. But, see my comment above. Condescension is a much bigger problem in reaching them than Churchill's comments, and, it has been my experience that people generally, including "working class people", often respect people who stand up for their beliefs. They don't respect, and will invariably refuse to vote for, people who are spineless, and this is one big reason why Kerry lost, and why liberalism is in such disarray today.
[The Ohio thing is also substantially irrelevant and must be looked at in terms of realpolitik: It's my understanding that the Ohio vote was close but was probably going to go Bush anyway. Kerry and the DNC have limited political capital and must spend it where it will do the most good. Example: The governor's race in Washington where the DNC took it to the mattresses & won in the end.
The real problem is not that Kerry & Co. abandoned the voters, it's that the voters abandoned Kerry (and more to the point, Gore). I attended an anti-war rally in DC in 2002 and conducted an informal poll: Whom did you vote for in 2000? The results: Gore 28%, Nader 8%, Bush 4%, Didn't vote 60%. That's just terrible. I had more respect for the Bush voters who changed their minds than for the idiot non-voters with their after-the-fact sloganeering.]
WOW! See my comments above, this is not just condesension, but contempt. "Idiot voters"?? Continue with this approach, and your "limited political capital" will be non-existent.
In Ohio, Kerry sold out his people, pure and simple, and exposed the whole organizing principle of his campaign as a lie, the Anybody But Bush effort. And, it shouldn't be a surprise (although, it was to me, after swallowing the ABB line, and hearing Kerry and Edwards hype their "10,000 attorneys on the ground), as Kerry voted for most Bush policies betweeen 2001 and 2004. Expect to have to work very hard to recover from the damage that has been done to the confidence of a lot of marginal, cynical low turnout voters, as a result of this cowardice.
[So what's it going to be? Ward Churchill t-shirts or trying to win an election?]
Typical inside out Bush type thinking by liberals: it's either us or them. And, it will about as effective in the future as the Anybody But Bush effort was in 2004.
--Richard
If you are not willing to stand up for academic freedom in a time of crisis, just say so, and spare us the handwringing rationalizations. No one is going to remember Churchill one way or another 4 years from now during an election, but there are people out there in academia that are facing similar risks if the CU Board of Regents succeeds in firing him.
Quite a number of Churchill's critics have been very open about the fact that they see Churchill as emblematic of an approach to American history that includes consideration of ethnic studies, the labor movement and women's studies, and they want to get rid of all of it. Note also, that CU refused to renew a contract of an environmental studies instructor a few days ago during the height of the Churchill hysteria. I'm at a loss to understand how liberalism, or your "political center", or anything other than a right wing populism, has any hope if people like you decide, because of some bizarre notion of political expediency to stay silent, and allow this emerging intimidation of academia to grow.
[These people currrently support the Iraq adventure because they perceive it is in their interest to do so. Why? Because the Right has convinced them of this. These are for the most part working-class people, half of whom barely know where Iraq is, but who have been convinced by the Right that this is the thing to do. They have neither the education nor the time to understand the intricacies of foreign policy (these are the people who voted Bush in 2000 b/c they could not or would not understand that Bush's tax cuts actually hurt them in the long run). These are not bad people, they are misinformed and misled. They don't want to send their boys to die in Venezuela or anywhere else, but they will if they believe it's the right thing to do. Which is where Ward comes in: When this mass of the electorate hears a remark like the "little Eichmanns" comment, they are offended and repulsed and cuddle up more tightly in the welcoming arms of the GOP. Like it or not, political power comes from elections, and elections are won & lost at the center. There will always be extremists at either pole -- victory belongs to the side that wins the center. These days the GOP is doing a much better job selling their program to the center, and one reason for that is Ward & his ilk. He is an ideal bogeyman for the Right: long-haired, big-mouth, sucking on the government teat, untouchable b/c of his tenure, filling the heads of students with extremist rhetoric: You get the drift. It isn't about whether he's right or wrong, it's about the effect he has on the electorate. At present he serves the interests of the Right by playing into their politics of Fear: they offer the voters a choice of good 'ol boy W vs. Ward the whacko. Whom do you think the average voter is going to choose?}
This analysis is so entangled that it is almost impossible to penetrate. But, a few salient points. First, one reason that a lot of Americans support "the Iraq adventure" is because BOTH PARTIES do.
For all of your bluster about Churchill (and no doubt, he would enjoy the exaggeration of his political influence, because he appears to be quite the egotist), John Kerry had a much greater impact when he said, before the Grand Canyon in August of last year, that he would support the Iraq war again even in the absence of any evidence of WMDs and a link to al-Qaeda.
By the way, let me ask my questions again: what is the position of this political center that you want to create on the war in Iraq? Does it want to continue the occupation indefinitely or not? Does it want to support possible Bush wars in Venezuela and Iran? If so, who cares whether Bush or your political center runs the country?
Second, as someone who has been active in politics, I have never been very successful in trying to gain support by characterizing people in a way as condescending as you characterize "working class people". I try to talk to everyone the same way, I assume they are intelligent, well informed and capable of making their own independent decisions. It has suited me and the others that I know well. When I haven't acted this way, I've invariably failed.
I politely suggest that you engage in some introspection about this, as opposed to flailing about for anticipatory scapegoats like Churchill to justify possible future political defeats.
[The political Center I'm talking about is made up of people who aren't well-educated and who think in simple terms; they are not idealogues and they are not Little Eichmanns -- they are simply people who are trying to earn a living and make sense of a world that is confusing and overwhelming to them. We on the Left need to reach out to these people, not offend and insult them. To that extent, WC is part of the problem.]
Yes, we do need to reach out to them. But, see my comment above. Condescension is a much bigger problem in reaching them than Churchill's comments, and, it has been my experience that people generally, including "working class people", often respect people who stand up for their beliefs. They don't respect, and will invariably refuse to vote for, people who are spineless, and this is one big reason why Kerry lost, and why liberalism is in such disarray today.
[The Ohio thing is also substantially irrelevant and must be looked at in terms of realpolitik: It's my understanding that the Ohio vote was close but was probably going to go Bush anyway. Kerry and the DNC have limited political capital and must spend it where it will do the most good. Example: The governor's race in Washington where the DNC took it to the mattresses & won in the end.
The real problem is not that Kerry & Co. abandoned the voters, it's that the voters abandoned Kerry (and more to the point, Gore). I attended an anti-war rally in DC in 2002 and conducted an informal poll: Whom did you vote for in 2000? The results: Gore 28%, Nader 8%, Bush 4%, Didn't vote 60%. That's just terrible. I had more respect for the Bush voters who changed their minds than for the idiot non-voters with their after-the-fact sloganeering.]
WOW! See my comments above, this is not just condesension, but contempt. "Idiot voters"?? Continue with this approach, and your "limited political capital" will be non-existent.
In Ohio, Kerry sold out his people, pure and simple, and exposed the whole organizing principle of his campaign as a lie, the Anybody But Bush effort. And, it shouldn't be a surprise (although, it was to me, after swallowing the ABB line, and hearing Kerry and Edwards hype their "10,000 attorneys on the ground), as Kerry voted for most Bush policies betweeen 2001 and 2004. Expect to have to work very hard to recover from the damage that has been done to the confidence of a lot of marginal, cynical low turnout voters, as a result of this cowardice.
[So what's it going to be? Ward Churchill t-shirts or trying to win an election?]
Typical inside out Bush type thinking by liberals: it's either us or them. And, it will about as effective in the future as the Anybody But Bush effort was in 2004.
--Richard
At the risk of turning this into a one-on-one battle instead of an open forum, permit me to respond directly to my opponent a bit if I may. First, please stop the nasty language: you've made a number of direct or indirect insults to me and I find that extremely inappropriate. My point submitted for discussion is that WC's 9/11 remarks are going to have a net negative effect on the progression of the political climate in this country. Please stick to the topic or let it drop; in any event, please desist from the attacks.
Regarding academic freedom, I do support WC's right to speak his mind -- I just think that just because one has the right to say something, it doesn't always mean it's a good idea to do so. You think I'm "handwringing"? How's this for real cred: I've PERSONALLY represented college faculty on exactly this kind of issue before, I've done it pro bono, AND I've won -- now, perhaps you'll be kind enough to share with the class precisely what YOU have done to "stand up for academic freedom"?
I agree that condescension is a big problem (dare I mention your apparent condescension for me?), but I contend that "Little Eichmanns" is of the same magnitude as a blow to the Cause. Read your history: Reactionaries have always used straw men like WC to scare the masses into staying in line. Consider Jane Fonda, Huey Newton, Henry Wallace, John L. Lewis, Huey Long....
On this point, I find your comment about me being condescending to working-class people to be personally insulting and perhaps downright bizarre. It seems that while I perceive their acting-against-interest voting patterns as the result of ignorance (that can be addressed with effective politicking), Ward (and you?) chalk it up to wickedness. The people who got snuffed at WTC were Nazis? Now who's being condescending? Chalmers Johnson has far more effectively and eloquently expressed the same basic idea as WC, only he did it first, and without calling people names. Johnson is part of the solution b//c he raises consciousness; WC is POTP b/c he is a demagogue and an easy target for the Right.
Progressive political development historically has occurred via either revolution or evolution; can we agree to leave bloody revolution off the list of options? That leaves evolution, which means the gradual conquest of the political Center by the Left. It's been going on in the West for 800 years. The only time in modern US history when a 3rd party successfully emerged to seize substantial political power was in 1860. Every other progressive movement that has achieved success has done so by gradually popularizing an ideal, molding it into a politically workable program and integrating it into an existing party machinery; only then did the ideal achieve legislative or judicial implementation. Consider the 13th Amendment et seq., women's suffrage, the labor movement, anti-trust action, minimum wage law, the New Deal, Civil Rights....
Is the Democratic party corrupt? Absolutely: It's packed with politicians. Would I like to see it more progressive? Definitely. My question to you is: Where else you gonna go? I'm not trying to be glib here, I'm asking for some real thoughts on the subject.
Regarding academic freedom, I do support WC's right to speak his mind -- I just think that just because one has the right to say something, it doesn't always mean it's a good idea to do so. You think I'm "handwringing"? How's this for real cred: I've PERSONALLY represented college faculty on exactly this kind of issue before, I've done it pro bono, AND I've won -- now, perhaps you'll be kind enough to share with the class precisely what YOU have done to "stand up for academic freedom"?
I agree that condescension is a big problem (dare I mention your apparent condescension for me?), but I contend that "Little Eichmanns" is of the same magnitude as a blow to the Cause. Read your history: Reactionaries have always used straw men like WC to scare the masses into staying in line. Consider Jane Fonda, Huey Newton, Henry Wallace, John L. Lewis, Huey Long....
On this point, I find your comment about me being condescending to working-class people to be personally insulting and perhaps downright bizarre. It seems that while I perceive their acting-against-interest voting patterns as the result of ignorance (that can be addressed with effective politicking), Ward (and you?) chalk it up to wickedness. The people who got snuffed at WTC were Nazis? Now who's being condescending? Chalmers Johnson has far more effectively and eloquently expressed the same basic idea as WC, only he did it first, and without calling people names. Johnson is part of the solution b//c he raises consciousness; WC is POTP b/c he is a demagogue and an easy target for the Right.
Progressive political development historically has occurred via either revolution or evolution; can we agree to leave bloody revolution off the list of options? That leaves evolution, which means the gradual conquest of the political Center by the Left. It's been going on in the West for 800 years. The only time in modern US history when a 3rd party successfully emerged to seize substantial political power was in 1860. Every other progressive movement that has achieved success has done so by gradually popularizing an ideal, molding it into a politically workable program and integrating it into an existing party machinery; only then did the ideal achieve legislative or judicial implementation. Consider the 13th Amendment et seq., women's suffrage, the labor movement, anti-trust action, minimum wage law, the New Deal, Civil Rights....
Is the Democratic party corrupt? Absolutely: It's packed with politicians. Would I like to see it more progressive? Definitely. My question to you is: Where else you gonna go? I'm not trying to be glib here, I'm asking for some real thoughts on the subject.
[On this point, I find your comment about me being condescending to working-class people to be personally insulting and perhaps downright bizarre. It seems that while I perceive their acting-against-interest voting patterns as the result of ignorance (that can be addressed with effective politicking), Ward (and you?) chalk it up to wickedness. The people who got snuffed at WTC were Nazis? Now who's being condescending?]
You said that "working class people" are "not well educated" and "think simply", I didn't.
You called people who didn't vote in the election "idiotic voters", I didn't.
Please explain what is insulting about me pointing out what is set forth in the text of your earlier posts on this topic. Personally, I believe that "working class people" take more enduring offense at such, dare I say?, simplistic characterizations of them than they do at Churchill's remarks.
Neither my mother nor my father were educated beyond high school, and both of them consistently spoke about political issues in a more thoughtful and passionate manner than many better educated people of my own generation. My mother follows (and my father followed, before he died a year or so ago) the news avidly. My political conversations with both were dynamic and unpredictable.
So again, my suggestion, made in all sincerity, is that people like you need to examine how you think and relate to "working class people" as something for improvement before attacking people like Churchill for alienating them.
As for Churchill, I've never heard that he sees himself as trying to get people to vote for a progressive cause, you do. As far as I know, he's never even purported to be a Democrat. Hence, why should he be compelled to conform to your standard? I've never understood the connection between anything Churchill says and the political fortunes of the Democrats, because there's no association between them. So the whole thing strikes me as contrived.
By contrast, there's good reason to believe that Michael Moore actually did alienate possible Democratic voters, and motivated Republicans to turn out, during the election. I'd focus my attention on this possibility before I gave any thought to Churchill. But, then again, maybe he's exempt, after all, he's a card carrying member of the Democratic Party.
It is good to see that you support Churchill, and don't believe that he should be fired, having instead constructed an alternative rationale that would have encouraged him to avoid having said anything controversial at all. I guess that this constitutes the state of contemporary liberalism as it applies to freedom of speech: they support it but you should have the good judgment not to exercise it.
[Chalmers Johnson has far more effectively and eloquently expressed the same basic idea as WC, only he did it first, and without calling people names. Johnson is part of the solution b//c he raises consciousness; WC is POTP b/c he is a demagogue and an easy target for the Right.]
I agree with some of this, I like Chalmers Johnson a lot, and actually interviewed him at length on the radio. His books, "Blowback" and "The Sorrows of Empire" are excellent. Daniel Ellsberg, Tariq Ali and Rashid Khalidi are all very good as well on these topics in their own way.
I don't agree that Churchill is "part of the problem" because he didn't conform to your standard. Along these lines, note that there is a history of considering people of color, like Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Cesar Chavez and Paul Robeson, for example, as part of the problem because they, compared to whites, insisted upon expressing themselves too bluntly.
In this case, I know that there is controversy as to whether Churchill is Native American, but many on the right, as discussed in a recent COUNTERPUNCH article by Tim Wise, clearly relate to him as if he is, so the issue is a legitimate one to raise. And, Wise considers it very possible that the anger against Churchill is driven by contempt for Native Americans. Back in the day, liberals used to confront this type of bigotry, now they apparently caution the speakers that they should stay silent unless they can exercise better discretion.
[Progressive political development historically has occurred via either revolution or evolution; can we agree to leave bloody revolution off the list of options? That leaves evolution, which means the gradual conquest of the political Center by the Left . . . . . . Is the Democratic party corrupt? Absolutely: It's packed with politicians. Would I like to see it more progressive? Definitely. My question to you is: Where else you gonna go? I'm not trying to be glib here, I'm asking for some real thoughts on the subject.]
I've tried to open the door to such a discussion two times already, but, for some reason, you haven't engaged. So, let me, for the third time, pose the questions that you have yet to answer.
Does your political center support the ongoing occupation of Iraq? Will it support possible future Bush military actions in Venezuela and Iran? In other words, is your evolutionary form of progressive politics based upon tolerating the continued bloodletting conducted on behalf of the American empire around the world?
If so, I'm not interested. I will, instead, dedicate myself to taking an issues oriented approach to politics, and trying to get involved in the effort to discourage people from enlisting in the military. Starving the military of the people it needs to fight wars around the world has an immediate, tangible benefit: it saves the lives of people both here and abroad.
Such an approach, people organizing around issues outside the two party system, has often lead to radical political change in the US. Abolitionism, women's rights, civil rights, the creation of labor unions and gay rights were all driven by the efforts of people outside the two party electoral system. Success in none of these instances occurred because of an emphasis upon electoral politics. Electoral politics became important at a later stage after the activists consciously refused to be bound by the constraints of it, sometimes for many years.
--Richard
You said that "working class people" are "not well educated" and "think simply", I didn't.
You called people who didn't vote in the election "idiotic voters", I didn't.
Please explain what is insulting about me pointing out what is set forth in the text of your earlier posts on this topic. Personally, I believe that "working class people" take more enduring offense at such, dare I say?, simplistic characterizations of them than they do at Churchill's remarks.
Neither my mother nor my father were educated beyond high school, and both of them consistently spoke about political issues in a more thoughtful and passionate manner than many better educated people of my own generation. My mother follows (and my father followed, before he died a year or so ago) the news avidly. My political conversations with both were dynamic and unpredictable.
So again, my suggestion, made in all sincerity, is that people like you need to examine how you think and relate to "working class people" as something for improvement before attacking people like Churchill for alienating them.
As for Churchill, I've never heard that he sees himself as trying to get people to vote for a progressive cause, you do. As far as I know, he's never even purported to be a Democrat. Hence, why should he be compelled to conform to your standard? I've never understood the connection between anything Churchill says and the political fortunes of the Democrats, because there's no association between them. So the whole thing strikes me as contrived.
By contrast, there's good reason to believe that Michael Moore actually did alienate possible Democratic voters, and motivated Republicans to turn out, during the election. I'd focus my attention on this possibility before I gave any thought to Churchill. But, then again, maybe he's exempt, after all, he's a card carrying member of the Democratic Party.
It is good to see that you support Churchill, and don't believe that he should be fired, having instead constructed an alternative rationale that would have encouraged him to avoid having said anything controversial at all. I guess that this constitutes the state of contemporary liberalism as it applies to freedom of speech: they support it but you should have the good judgment not to exercise it.
[Chalmers Johnson has far more effectively and eloquently expressed the same basic idea as WC, only he did it first, and without calling people names. Johnson is part of the solution b//c he raises consciousness; WC is POTP b/c he is a demagogue and an easy target for the Right.]
I agree with some of this, I like Chalmers Johnson a lot, and actually interviewed him at length on the radio. His books, "Blowback" and "The Sorrows of Empire" are excellent. Daniel Ellsberg, Tariq Ali and Rashid Khalidi are all very good as well on these topics in their own way.
I don't agree that Churchill is "part of the problem" because he didn't conform to your standard. Along these lines, note that there is a history of considering people of color, like Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Cesar Chavez and Paul Robeson, for example, as part of the problem because they, compared to whites, insisted upon expressing themselves too bluntly.
In this case, I know that there is controversy as to whether Churchill is Native American, but many on the right, as discussed in a recent COUNTERPUNCH article by Tim Wise, clearly relate to him as if he is, so the issue is a legitimate one to raise. And, Wise considers it very possible that the anger against Churchill is driven by contempt for Native Americans. Back in the day, liberals used to confront this type of bigotry, now they apparently caution the speakers that they should stay silent unless they can exercise better discretion.
[Progressive political development historically has occurred via either revolution or evolution; can we agree to leave bloody revolution off the list of options? That leaves evolution, which means the gradual conquest of the political Center by the Left . . . . . . Is the Democratic party corrupt? Absolutely: It's packed with politicians. Would I like to see it more progressive? Definitely. My question to you is: Where else you gonna go? I'm not trying to be glib here, I'm asking for some real thoughts on the subject.]
I've tried to open the door to such a discussion two times already, but, for some reason, you haven't engaged. So, let me, for the third time, pose the questions that you have yet to answer.
Does your political center support the ongoing occupation of Iraq? Will it support possible future Bush military actions in Venezuela and Iran? In other words, is your evolutionary form of progressive politics based upon tolerating the continued bloodletting conducted on behalf of the American empire around the world?
If so, I'm not interested. I will, instead, dedicate myself to taking an issues oriented approach to politics, and trying to get involved in the effort to discourage people from enlisting in the military. Starving the military of the people it needs to fight wars around the world has an immediate, tangible benefit: it saves the lives of people both here and abroad.
Such an approach, people organizing around issues outside the two party system, has often lead to radical political change in the US. Abolitionism, women's rights, civil rights, the creation of labor unions and gay rights were all driven by the efforts of people outside the two party electoral system. Success in none of these instances occurred because of an emphasis upon electoral politics. Electoral politics became important at a later stage after the activists consciously refused to be bound by the constraints of it, sometimes for many years.
--Richard
As a supplement, please note the following.
Introduction: In a Pittsburgh federal court a well connected corporate crony has suggested a novice "free speech" argument and the legal question is waddling without any legal precedent in need of an activist court.
Creating the free speech crisis is a "red herring" to draw attention away from the plain and clear evidence of the Pittsburgh Federal Court proceeding (best example of the corruption).
Ward Churchill was a relatively unknown professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, until Bill O'Reilly reported a piece about him and requested his audience to make a fuss. His provacative essay was written more than three years ago.
The connection:
Ms. ElizaBETH Hoffman is the President of Colorado University. Go to http://www.hss.caltech.edu/Photos/Alumni/HoffmanElizabeth.jpg and/or http://www.colorado.edu/Carillon/volume47/images/1.jpg to view her picture.
Ms. BETH (Rue) Kotcella Buchanan is the U.S. Attorney for Western Pennsylvania. Go to http://www.pittsburghlive.com/photos/2002-02-26/PH_2002-02-26_iattorney-b.jpg to view her picture.
Background: I attended undergraduate school with Ms. Buchanan. At the Pennsylvania University I succesfully re-established (and served as president) the pre-law society and graduated in 1983. Here Ms. Buchanan would become interested in the law. She graduated after me in 1984.
In addition, I was listed in Whose Who Among American Colleges and Universities, and given the 1983 Progressive Leadership Award, and 1983 Distinguished Honor Award.
Before joining the U.S. Attorney's Office in 1988 Ms. Buchanan secured a clerkship with U.S. District Judge Maurice B. Cohill, Jr.
Judge Cohill is the Western District Judge responsible for enforcing a consent decree governing United States of America v. Port Authority of Allegheny County, Docket No. 91-CV-1694. However, he turned a blind eye to my case Docket No. 95-CV-00339. I had organized (secure a union) a political sub-division.
During that same year members of the state judiciary were charged and convicted for violating my civil right (fixing cases against me in retaliation of Docket No. 95-CV-00339).
In a case related to Docket No. 95-CV-00339, an alleged EEOC investigative file was prematurely purged and the U.S. Department of Labor refused deliver its copy despite a subpoena, FOIA Request and Motion to Compel. See Docket No. 98-CV-230. That is, the Department of Labor closed its investigation based on the alleged EEOC decision. But, I had proffered to the court EEOC's writings that demonstrated no investigation was conducted.
Discussion: At issue is the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act. The Bush administration is attempting to change the 50 percent rule. That is, financial aid is available for postsecondary education provided at a college or university that has at least 50 percent of its students campus-based.
Corporations have paid Senators and Congress men and women well, attempting to change the 50 percent rule. The rule is necessary to prevent fraud (absentee students and/or diploma mills).
It appears at least three corporations have abused the administration's Distance Education Demonstration that wavied the 50 percent rule.
The Career Education Corporation of Hoffman Estates, Ill., has faced lawsuits, from shareholders and students, contending that, among other things, its colleges have inflated enrollment numbers. In addition, F.B.I. agents raided 10 campuses run by ITT Educational Services of Carmel, Ind., looking for similar problems.
Nonetheless, the S.E.C. and FBI investigation is just spin to make it appear the administration is doing its job.
The Pittsburgh case involves Kaplan, Inc., who is wholly own by the Washington Post Company. For-profit postsecondary education has turned the company around. Individuals far more powerful than Martha Steward have made millions.
Thus the current unexplained campaign against “free speech” appears to be little more than another Madison Avenue scheme to control any discussion.
Introduction: In a Pittsburgh federal court a well connected corporate crony has suggested a novice "free speech" argument and the legal question is waddling without any legal precedent in need of an activist court.
Creating the free speech crisis is a "red herring" to draw attention away from the plain and clear evidence of the Pittsburgh Federal Court proceeding (best example of the corruption).
Ward Churchill was a relatively unknown professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, until Bill O'Reilly reported a piece about him and requested his audience to make a fuss. His provacative essay was written more than three years ago.
The connection:
Ms. ElizaBETH Hoffman is the President of Colorado University. Go to http://www.hss.caltech.edu/Photos/Alumni/HoffmanElizabeth.jpg and/or http://www.colorado.edu/Carillon/volume47/images/1.jpg to view her picture.
Ms. BETH (Rue) Kotcella Buchanan is the U.S. Attorney for Western Pennsylvania. Go to http://www.pittsburghlive.com/photos/2002-02-26/PH_2002-02-26_iattorney-b.jpg to view her picture.
Background: I attended undergraduate school with Ms. Buchanan. At the Pennsylvania University I succesfully re-established (and served as president) the pre-law society and graduated in 1983. Here Ms. Buchanan would become interested in the law. She graduated after me in 1984.
In addition, I was listed in Whose Who Among American Colleges and Universities, and given the 1983 Progressive Leadership Award, and 1983 Distinguished Honor Award.
Before joining the U.S. Attorney's Office in 1988 Ms. Buchanan secured a clerkship with U.S. District Judge Maurice B. Cohill, Jr.
Judge Cohill is the Western District Judge responsible for enforcing a consent decree governing United States of America v. Port Authority of Allegheny County, Docket No. 91-CV-1694. However, he turned a blind eye to my case Docket No. 95-CV-00339. I had organized (secure a union) a political sub-division.
During that same year members of the state judiciary were charged and convicted for violating my civil right (fixing cases against me in retaliation of Docket No. 95-CV-00339).
In a case related to Docket No. 95-CV-00339, an alleged EEOC investigative file was prematurely purged and the U.S. Department of Labor refused deliver its copy despite a subpoena, FOIA Request and Motion to Compel. See Docket No. 98-CV-230. That is, the Department of Labor closed its investigation based on the alleged EEOC decision. But, I had proffered to the court EEOC's writings that demonstrated no investigation was conducted.
Discussion: At issue is the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act. The Bush administration is attempting to change the 50 percent rule. That is, financial aid is available for postsecondary education provided at a college or university that has at least 50 percent of its students campus-based.
Corporations have paid Senators and Congress men and women well, attempting to change the 50 percent rule. The rule is necessary to prevent fraud (absentee students and/or diploma mills).
It appears at least three corporations have abused the administration's Distance Education Demonstration that wavied the 50 percent rule.
The Career Education Corporation of Hoffman Estates, Ill., has faced lawsuits, from shareholders and students, contending that, among other things, its colleges have inflated enrollment numbers. In addition, F.B.I. agents raided 10 campuses run by ITT Educational Services of Carmel, Ind., looking for similar problems.
Nonetheless, the S.E.C. and FBI investigation is just spin to make it appear the administration is doing its job.
The Pittsburgh case involves Kaplan, Inc., who is wholly own by the Washington Post Company. For-profit postsecondary education has turned the company around. Individuals far more powerful than Martha Steward have made millions.
Thus the current unexplained campaign against “free speech” appears to be little more than another Madison Avenue scheme to control any discussion.
I said the people who protested the war but didn't vote were idiotic. I stand by that: What did the protests accomplish? Nothing. Zero. What might have been different if Bush hadn't been elected? Plenty. Millions of protesters didn't change anything; a few thousand voters in 2000 would have changed a lot.
I'm happy that your uneducated parents were politically astute, but in my experience they are the exception rather than the rule among the working class. In any event, I'm not talking about book-learning: a college or even grad. degree isn't a free pass to being smart or wise; I'm talking about ignorance of politics, history & issues of the day. It's those people who vote against their self-interest and need to be reached. It appears we share congruent goals but differ on how best to reach them; I can live with that. I support your efforts against enlistment and I hope they are are fruitful.
Finally, I'm amazed that despite my record of direct personal activism on academic free speech -- with real results -- you continue to impute to me a cowardly sort of liberalism. I have spent my time and money and those of my staff and risked my professional standing. If you can't see the wisdom in choosing strategically when to holler & when to hold one's tongue, then I politely suggest you have a few things to learn. Good luck.
I'm happy that your uneducated parents were politically astute, but in my experience they are the exception rather than the rule among the working class. In any event, I'm not talking about book-learning: a college or even grad. degree isn't a free pass to being smart or wise; I'm talking about ignorance of politics, history & issues of the day. It's those people who vote against their self-interest and need to be reached. It appears we share congruent goals but differ on how best to reach them; I can live with that. I support your efforts against enlistment and I hope they are are fruitful.
Finally, I'm amazed that despite my record of direct personal activism on academic free speech -- with real results -- you continue to impute to me a cowardly sort of liberalism. I have spent my time and money and those of my staff and risked my professional standing. If you can't see the wisdom in choosing strategically when to holler & when to hold one's tongue, then I politely suggest you have a few things to learn. Good luck.
"What did the protests accomplish? Nothing. Zero. What might have been different if Bush hadn't been elected? Plenty"
Plenty would have changed in that we wouldnt have to worry about Social Security being destroyed or Medicare being cut. But, as for the war its hard to see a real difference between what Kerry would have done and what Bush is doing. Many liberals will try to distinguish Bush's ineptness from Kerrys intelligence and claim that even though their policies on Iraq were the same this made a difference but the President doesnt run such policies (most decissions are made several levels down) so trying to hide behind Bush's lack of intelligence to justify a lack of difference in policy towards Iraq seems mainly a slight of hand.
The protests did accomplish a few things. They were not large enough to change US policy completely but the US may have not tried to go through the UN the way it did (revealing most of the more open US lies about WMD) if it hasnt been for the protests (the UK protests were a major casue in forcing Blair to force Bush...). But more significantly they helped to solidify opposition to he war in Europe, Turkey and most of the rest of the world. It made the price of the war (for the US) much higher and by doing so has gotten the US bogged down in a way where the US probably cant invade Iran or Syria.
Voting acomplishes small changes but voting Democrat is almost like voting for the good cop in a good cop bad cop routine. I dont know how they got stuck in the position but they compain about things we care about and then give in every time. Under Bush II Democrats wont block Supreme Court appointments that coiuld end Row v Wade (Sicne they dont want to appear divisive) and they probably will even let Bush destory Social Security. The Iraa vote where Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Diane Fienstein and the rest all voted to allow Bush to invade Iraq pretty much sums up the problem. All Bush has to do is engage in a PR blitz right before the vote and the Democrats will cave in.
Plenty would have changed in that we wouldnt have to worry about Social Security being destroyed or Medicare being cut. But, as for the war its hard to see a real difference between what Kerry would have done and what Bush is doing. Many liberals will try to distinguish Bush's ineptness from Kerrys intelligence and claim that even though their policies on Iraq were the same this made a difference but the President doesnt run such policies (most decissions are made several levels down) so trying to hide behind Bush's lack of intelligence to justify a lack of difference in policy towards Iraq seems mainly a slight of hand.
The protests did accomplish a few things. They were not large enough to change US policy completely but the US may have not tried to go through the UN the way it did (revealing most of the more open US lies about WMD) if it hasnt been for the protests (the UK protests were a major casue in forcing Blair to force Bush...). But more significantly they helped to solidify opposition to he war in Europe, Turkey and most of the rest of the world. It made the price of the war (for the US) much higher and by doing so has gotten the US bogged down in a way where the US probably cant invade Iran or Syria.
Voting acomplishes small changes but voting Democrat is almost like voting for the good cop in a good cop bad cop routine. I dont know how they got stuck in the position but they compain about things we care about and then give in every time. Under Bush II Democrats wont block Supreme Court appointments that coiuld end Row v Wade (Sicne they dont want to appear divisive) and they probably will even let Bush destory Social Security. The Iraa vote where Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Diane Fienstein and the rest all voted to allow Bush to invade Iraq pretty much sums up the problem. All Bush has to do is engage in a PR blitz right before the vote and the Democrats will cave in.
[Finally, I'm amazed that despite my record of direct personal activism on academic free speech -- with real results -- you continue to impute to me a cowardly sort of liberalism. I have spent my time and money and those of my staff and risked my professional standing. If you can't see the wisdom in choosing strategically when to holler & when to hold one's tongue, then I politely suggest you have a few things to learn. Good luck.]
You were willing to "contextualize" Churchill right out of a job, so apparently the commitment has waned. I understand, based upon your experience, why you think Churchill is going to keep it, and I hope that he does. In normal circumstances, he would, for the reasons that you have mentioned. But Bill Owens, the governor of Colorado, is threatening to withhold funds to CU and organize donors to to stop contributing if he isn't fired, so CU may decide that the cost-benefit of firing him justifies firing him, even if if they lose a large financial judgment.
As for your political goals that justify keeping silent here, despite the possibility that the outcome could damage the instruction of social, labor and ethnic history all around the country, I am still very unclear about them.
I've already asked 3 times whether your evolutionary, "political center" requires support for the occupation in Iraq, and its economic colonization by the US, as well as support for possible future conflicts in Venezuela and Iran.
I still haven't gotten an answer. Why is that? Could it be that they are also issues that you think we need to learn "when to holler & when to hold one's tongue"? You seem to have been very disciplined about doing it so far, despite several opportunities to respond.
--Richard
You were willing to "contextualize" Churchill right out of a job, so apparently the commitment has waned. I understand, based upon your experience, why you think Churchill is going to keep it, and I hope that he does. In normal circumstances, he would, for the reasons that you have mentioned. But Bill Owens, the governor of Colorado, is threatening to withhold funds to CU and organize donors to to stop contributing if he isn't fired, so CU may decide that the cost-benefit of firing him justifies firing him, even if if they lose a large financial judgment.
As for your political goals that justify keeping silent here, despite the possibility that the outcome could damage the instruction of social, labor and ethnic history all around the country, I am still very unclear about them.
I've already asked 3 times whether your evolutionary, "political center" requires support for the occupation in Iraq, and its economic colonization by the US, as well as support for possible future conflicts in Venezuela and Iran.
I still haven't gotten an answer. Why is that? Could it be that they are also issues that you think we need to learn "when to holler & when to hold one's tongue"? You seem to have been very disciplined about doing it so far, despite several opportunities to respond.
--Richard
Mercy sakes.
I did NOT say Churchill should keep silent, I just said that the Eichmann comment was a foolish thing to say b/c I believe it to be counterproductive. I encourage him to speak out freely and openly on the issues, but I would discourage him (and anyone else) from identifying the WTC vics as Nazis and using other such counterproductive, self-indulgent verbosity and name-calling. I am NOT "willing to contextualize him out of a job" and I'm starting to resent your accusations along this line in view of my ACTUAL PRODUCTIVE WORK in this area. More than one college professor is teaching right now because of ME. How dare you question my committment?
[I've already asked 3 times whether your evolutionary, "political center" requires support for the occupation in Iraq, and its economic colonization by the US, as well as support for possible future conflicts in Venezuela and Iran.]
Gee, you haven't answered several of my questions and you persist in attacking me personally, but you don't see me inpugning your courage or commitment...or intelligence.... Let's see, you asked:
[Does your political center support the ongoing occupation of Iraq? Will it support possible future Bush military actions in Venezuela and Iran? In other words, is your evolutionary form of progressive politics based upon tolerating the continued bloodletting conducted on behalf of the American empire around the world?]
Answers: Yes. Probably. No.
Forgive me if I have to dumb this down a bit. It's not "[my] political Center" -- it exists in spite of little ol' me. The political Center is simply the gravitational center of the electorate; in other words, where the average person is voting on a given issue. I am neither defending nor condemning these people, merely describing what shold already be obvious to you: These are the people who elected a GOP-controlled Congress and Executive as well as your pal Bill Owens.
To the extent that this vast polyglot can be characterized in a few words, it is made up of the working class and the poor, most of whom are not politically savvy and are therefore are subject to manipulation by the crafty marketing experts employed by the GOP. These are the same people who drink gallons of Pepsi & smoke cartons of cigs even though these products are proven to be deleterious to the health (and pocketbook). Why do they engage in this self-destructive behavior? Because they've been conned by the manufacturers of these products. Why do they vote Bush? Because they've been conned by the GOP and its accomplices. The people support the Iraq business b/c they have been convinced to do so. Answer to your question: Yes, the political Center does support the war in Iraq; I believe our challenge is to convince them otherwise: to move the Center on this issue toward our side.
Will they support further military adventurism? They will as long as the Right operates a better-organized, better-funded, more effective marketing machine than does the Left, which is where your boy Wardo comes in. I've worked opposite GOP party flacks and had a few drinks with them and unless they find better ammo before then, they will make Wardo one of their poster boys come election time.
I would like to see the locus of the Center get moved to the Left (as it gradually has over time on many issues), but for now it is where it is and this is where the battle must be fought. The election results & polls demonstrate that these people currently support Bush. This is what needs to change. Sure, we on the Left can get angrier and louder, but unless we change the voting habits of the Center, we will be little more than a noisy annoyance to those in Power.
Is my political theory "based upon tolerating the continued bloodletting..."? No, certainly not. Think it through: Your question as phrased is either idiotic or intentionally accusatory: Am I supposed to somehow slip up and say YES and fall into your trap? Please. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt & assume that what you mean is: Does my theory accept continued imperialism? [As an aside, it might be decent of you to give me the benefit of the doubt occasionally.]
I completely oppose the bloodletting policies you refer to; my political theory is not "based on tolerating" such policies. My theory is that Power in this country is decided at the polls and that's where we must be effective. The question isn't one of ideology or commmitment, it's one of effectiveness. I maintain that we must do a better job of reaching the people in the Center so that they are not duped by right-wing propaganda. (Incidentally, I think we must also do a better job of getting the Lefties to actually vote -- do you?).
I've submitted that I think the best we can do now is to elect enough Democrats to bring the balance of power far enough to the Left to change our foreign policy. Do you have a better idea for real, effective change? Wasn't it you who demanded specifics of me? C'mon, I'm all ears! [BTW: I've asked you this before, so far w/o reply...]
If you choose to continue this discussion, please identify your age, education, work experience and/or some other applicable metric so that I have some idea of who I'm talking to -- I have done this courtesy for you.
I did NOT say Churchill should keep silent, I just said that the Eichmann comment was a foolish thing to say b/c I believe it to be counterproductive. I encourage him to speak out freely and openly on the issues, but I would discourage him (and anyone else) from identifying the WTC vics as Nazis and using other such counterproductive, self-indulgent verbosity and name-calling. I am NOT "willing to contextualize him out of a job" and I'm starting to resent your accusations along this line in view of my ACTUAL PRODUCTIVE WORK in this area. More than one college professor is teaching right now because of ME. How dare you question my committment?
[I've already asked 3 times whether your evolutionary, "political center" requires support for the occupation in Iraq, and its economic colonization by the US, as well as support for possible future conflicts in Venezuela and Iran.]
Gee, you haven't answered several of my questions and you persist in attacking me personally, but you don't see me inpugning your courage or commitment...or intelligence.... Let's see, you asked:
[Does your political center support the ongoing occupation of Iraq? Will it support possible future Bush military actions in Venezuela and Iran? In other words, is your evolutionary form of progressive politics based upon tolerating the continued bloodletting conducted on behalf of the American empire around the world?]
Answers: Yes. Probably. No.
Forgive me if I have to dumb this down a bit. It's not "[my] political Center" -- it exists in spite of little ol' me. The political Center is simply the gravitational center of the electorate; in other words, where the average person is voting on a given issue. I am neither defending nor condemning these people, merely describing what shold already be obvious to you: These are the people who elected a GOP-controlled Congress and Executive as well as your pal Bill Owens.
To the extent that this vast polyglot can be characterized in a few words, it is made up of the working class and the poor, most of whom are not politically savvy and are therefore are subject to manipulation by the crafty marketing experts employed by the GOP. These are the same people who drink gallons of Pepsi & smoke cartons of cigs even though these products are proven to be deleterious to the health (and pocketbook). Why do they engage in this self-destructive behavior? Because they've been conned by the manufacturers of these products. Why do they vote Bush? Because they've been conned by the GOP and its accomplices. The people support the Iraq business b/c they have been convinced to do so. Answer to your question: Yes, the political Center does support the war in Iraq; I believe our challenge is to convince them otherwise: to move the Center on this issue toward our side.
Will they support further military adventurism? They will as long as the Right operates a better-organized, better-funded, more effective marketing machine than does the Left, which is where your boy Wardo comes in. I've worked opposite GOP party flacks and had a few drinks with them and unless they find better ammo before then, they will make Wardo one of their poster boys come election time.
I would like to see the locus of the Center get moved to the Left (as it gradually has over time on many issues), but for now it is where it is and this is where the battle must be fought. The election results & polls demonstrate that these people currently support Bush. This is what needs to change. Sure, we on the Left can get angrier and louder, but unless we change the voting habits of the Center, we will be little more than a noisy annoyance to those in Power.
Is my political theory "based upon tolerating the continued bloodletting..."? No, certainly not. Think it through: Your question as phrased is either idiotic or intentionally accusatory: Am I supposed to somehow slip up and say YES and fall into your trap? Please. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt & assume that what you mean is: Does my theory accept continued imperialism? [As an aside, it might be decent of you to give me the benefit of the doubt occasionally.]
I completely oppose the bloodletting policies you refer to; my political theory is not "based on tolerating" such policies. My theory is that Power in this country is decided at the polls and that's where we must be effective. The question isn't one of ideology or commmitment, it's one of effectiveness. I maintain that we must do a better job of reaching the people in the Center so that they are not duped by right-wing propaganda. (Incidentally, I think we must also do a better job of getting the Lefties to actually vote -- do you?).
I've submitted that I think the best we can do now is to elect enough Democrats to bring the balance of power far enough to the Left to change our foreign policy. Do you have a better idea for real, effective change? Wasn't it you who demanded specifics of me? C'mon, I'm all ears! [BTW: I've asked you this before, so far w/o reply...]
If you choose to continue this discussion, please identify your age, education, work experience and/or some other applicable metric so that I have some idea of who I'm talking to -- I have done this courtesy for you.
[Mercy sakes.
I did NOT say Churchill should keep silent, I just said that the Eichmann comment was a foolish thing to say b/c I believe it to be counterproductive. I encourage him to speak out freely and openly on the issues, but I would discourage him (and anyone else) from identifying the WTC vics as Nazis and using other such counterproductive, self-indulgent verbosity and name-calling.]
Yes, his comments were foolish, as I said in a conversation with a faculty member of UC Davis today in the farmer's market. But, the problem isn't that he somehow hurts progressivism in America, because Churchill has nothing to do with electoral politics.
The problem is that his "little Eichmanns" comment in his "Roosting Chickens" piece crudely compresses the social issues associated with the people who administer American finance capital (many of whom work in Manhattan on H-1-B visas). More generally, he also tends to project motivations upon the hijackers which I do not believe to be plausible. The rest of his analysis in "Roosting Chickens" about the brutality of American policy since the Mayflower is, by and large, accurate, and it is important for people like him to address them, regardless of the electoral environment.
[I am NOT "willing to contextualize him out of a job" and I'm starting to resent your accusations along this line in view of my ACTUAL PRODUCTIVE WORK in this area. More than one college professor is teaching right now because of ME. How dare you question my committment?]
Excuse me, Great Oz. But, I thought that we were talking about Churchill, not all of those other college professors that are teaching because of you. As I said, I appreciate it, as I'm sure that they do. But how does any of that work help Churchill?
You pretty much said, or, more accurately, implied, that people should ignore Churchill because it was a sideshow that would inevitably result in Churchill keeping his job. I don't agree, for the reasons I've mentioned, as the prospect seems to be growing that CU will accept the financial cost of firing him, with potentially troubling consequences for any non-mainstream form of academic instruction. As I've already posted, I hope that you are right about this, but I wouldn't encourage people to be passive on the assumption that it is true.
My belief is that people should publicly defend Churchill even as they evaluate the extent to which they agree or disagree with various aspects of his commentary, as I have done in a number of forums. By contrast, you seem to think that it is more important to "contextualize" him to prevent other people from being infected with the contagion of Churchill's beliefs and his willingness to publicly express them.
.
[I've already asked 3 times whether your evolutionary, "political center" requires support for the occupation in Iraq, and its economic colonization by the US, as well as support for possible future conflicts in Venezuela and Iran.]
[Gee, you haven't answered several of my questions and you persist in attacking me personally, but you don't see me inpugning your courage or commitment...or intelligence.... Let's see, you asked:
[Does your political center support the ongoing occupation of Iraq? Will it support possible future Bush military actions in Venezuela and Iran? In other words, is your evolutionary form of progressive politics based upon tolerating the continued bloodletting conducted on behalf of the American empire around the world?]
Answers: Yes. Probably. No.
Forgive me if I have to dumb this down a bit. It's not "[my] political Center" -- it exists in spite of little ol' me. The political Center is simply the gravitational center of the electorate; in other words, where the average person is voting on a given issue. I am neither defending nor condemning these people, merely describing what shold already be obvious to you: These are the people who elected a GOP-controlled Congress and Executive as well as your pal Bill Owens.]
Well, your answers are a start, although remarkably brief, given your willingness to expound at length on the other aspects of our dialogue. My perspective about them is no doubt obvious given my other posts on this thread.
[To the extent that this vast polyglot can be characterized in a few words, it is made up of the working class and the poor, most of whom are not politically savvy and are therefore are subject to manipulation by the crafty marketing experts employed by the GOP. These are the same people who drink gallons of Pepsi & smoke cartons of cigs even though these products are proven to be deleterious to the health (and pocketbook). Why do they engage in this self-destructive behavior? Because they've been conned by the manufacturers of these products. Why do they vote Bush? Because they've been conned by the GOP and its accomplices.]
Remarkable. If this is why the Democratic Party believes they lost the election, they are not going to see the White House again unless and until I have grandchildren. For a better analysis, read the article in the Nov/Dec New Left Review by Thomas Mertes, about the Thomas Frank book, "What's the Matter with Kansas?", entitled, "Republican Proletariat"
Just do a Google for "New Left Review" and you should find the website homepage and the link to the article pretty readily. I also posted a link to it a few days ago in the "Support the Iraqi insurgency" thread. Here's a hint as to one of the major factors for the Democrats' predicament: NAFTA
I suspect that there are other articles with similar kinds of analysis as well.
By the way, a lot of middle class, upper middle class and wealthy people also drink Pepsi, although I have to concede that, based upon superficial appearances, they do smoke fewer cigarettes. But then, I like in Northern California, so my visual sampling is no doubt skewed.
[The people support the Iraq business b/c they have been convinced to do so. Answer to your question: Yes, the political Center does support the war in Iraq; I believe our challenge is to convince them otherwise: to move the Center on this issue toward our side.
Will they support further military adventurism? They will as long as the Right operates a better-organized, better-funded, more effective marketing machine than does the Left, which is where your boy Wardo comes in. I've worked opposite GOP party flacks and had a few drinks with them and unless they find better ammo before then, they will make Wardo one of their poster boys come election time.
I would like to see the locus of the Center get moved to the Left (as it gradually has over time on many issues), but for now it is where it is and this is where the battle must be fought. The election results & polls demonstrate that these people currently support Bush. This is what needs to change. Sure, we on the Left can get angrier and louder, but unless we change the voting habits of the Center, we will be little more than a noisy annoyance to those in Power.
Is my political theory "based upon tolerating the continued bloodletting..."? No, certainly not. Think it through: Your question as phrased is either idiotic or intentionally accusatory: Am I supposed to somehow slip up and say YES and fall into your trap? Please. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt & assume that what you mean is: Does my theory accept continued imperialism? [As an aside, it might be decent of you to give me the benefit of the doubt occasionally.]
I completely oppose the bloodletting policies you refer to; my political theory is not "based on tolerating" such policies. My theory is that Power in this country is decided at the polls and that's where we must be effective. The question isn't one of ideology or commmitment, it's one of effectiveness. I maintain that we must do a better job of reaching the people in the Center so that they are not duped by right-wing propaganda. (Incidentally, I think we must also do a better job of getting the Lefties to actually vote -- do you?).
I've submitted that I think the best we can do now is to elect enough Democrats to bring the balance of power far enough to the Left to change our foreign policy. Do you have a better idea for real, effective change? Wasn't it you who demanded specifics of me? C'mon, I'm all ears! [BTW: I've asked you this before, so far w/o reply...]
If you choose to continue this discussion, please identify your age, education, work experience and/or some other applicable metric so that I have some idea of who I'm talking to -- I have done this courtesy for you.]
My belief, as I've already said, is that people who are actively working to deter enlistment in the military are having the greatest impact on American foreign policy, because without enlistees, the wars can't be fought, including the occupation, regardless of the politicians in power. I also believe that the efforts of some people around the world to boycott American corporations could significantly influence American foreign policy if it gains traction. Contrary to your comment, I also provided additional elaboration to these questions in one of my last two posts. I suggest that you go back and read it.
On a personal note, I have lived in the Central Valley for many years, with a public affairs radio program on KDVS 90.3 FM in Davis every Friday. I have also been involved in numerous political protest and campaign activities. No doubt you can guess the kinds.
Here in the Valley, the sun is out and the weather is fabulous. Maybe, we should both get out and enjoy it.
--Richard
I did NOT say Churchill should keep silent, I just said that the Eichmann comment was a foolish thing to say b/c I believe it to be counterproductive. I encourage him to speak out freely and openly on the issues, but I would discourage him (and anyone else) from identifying the WTC vics as Nazis and using other such counterproductive, self-indulgent verbosity and name-calling.]
Yes, his comments were foolish, as I said in a conversation with a faculty member of UC Davis today in the farmer's market. But, the problem isn't that he somehow hurts progressivism in America, because Churchill has nothing to do with electoral politics.
The problem is that his "little Eichmanns" comment in his "Roosting Chickens" piece crudely compresses the social issues associated with the people who administer American finance capital (many of whom work in Manhattan on H-1-B visas). More generally, he also tends to project motivations upon the hijackers which I do not believe to be plausible. The rest of his analysis in "Roosting Chickens" about the brutality of American policy since the Mayflower is, by and large, accurate, and it is important for people like him to address them, regardless of the electoral environment.
[I am NOT "willing to contextualize him out of a job" and I'm starting to resent your accusations along this line in view of my ACTUAL PRODUCTIVE WORK in this area. More than one college professor is teaching right now because of ME. How dare you question my committment?]
Excuse me, Great Oz. But, I thought that we were talking about Churchill, not all of those other college professors that are teaching because of you. As I said, I appreciate it, as I'm sure that they do. But how does any of that work help Churchill?
You pretty much said, or, more accurately, implied, that people should ignore Churchill because it was a sideshow that would inevitably result in Churchill keeping his job. I don't agree, for the reasons I've mentioned, as the prospect seems to be growing that CU will accept the financial cost of firing him, with potentially troubling consequences for any non-mainstream form of academic instruction. As I've already posted, I hope that you are right about this, but I wouldn't encourage people to be passive on the assumption that it is true.
My belief is that people should publicly defend Churchill even as they evaluate the extent to which they agree or disagree with various aspects of his commentary, as I have done in a number of forums. By contrast, you seem to think that it is more important to "contextualize" him to prevent other people from being infected with the contagion of Churchill's beliefs and his willingness to publicly express them.
.
[I've already asked 3 times whether your evolutionary, "political center" requires support for the occupation in Iraq, and its economic colonization by the US, as well as support for possible future conflicts in Venezuela and Iran.]
[Gee, you haven't answered several of my questions and you persist in attacking me personally, but you don't see me inpugning your courage or commitment...or intelligence.... Let's see, you asked:
[Does your political center support the ongoing occupation of Iraq? Will it support possible future Bush military actions in Venezuela and Iran? In other words, is your evolutionary form of progressive politics based upon tolerating the continued bloodletting conducted on behalf of the American empire around the world?]
Answers: Yes. Probably. No.
Forgive me if I have to dumb this down a bit. It's not "[my] political Center" -- it exists in spite of little ol' me. The political Center is simply the gravitational center of the electorate; in other words, where the average person is voting on a given issue. I am neither defending nor condemning these people, merely describing what shold already be obvious to you: These are the people who elected a GOP-controlled Congress and Executive as well as your pal Bill Owens.]
Well, your answers are a start, although remarkably brief, given your willingness to expound at length on the other aspects of our dialogue. My perspective about them is no doubt obvious given my other posts on this thread.
[To the extent that this vast polyglot can be characterized in a few words, it is made up of the working class and the poor, most of whom are not politically savvy and are therefore are subject to manipulation by the crafty marketing experts employed by the GOP. These are the same people who drink gallons of Pepsi & smoke cartons of cigs even though these products are proven to be deleterious to the health (and pocketbook). Why do they engage in this self-destructive behavior? Because they've been conned by the manufacturers of these products. Why do they vote Bush? Because they've been conned by the GOP and its accomplices.]
Remarkable. If this is why the Democratic Party believes they lost the election, they are not going to see the White House again unless and until I have grandchildren. For a better analysis, read the article in the Nov/Dec New Left Review by Thomas Mertes, about the Thomas Frank book, "What's the Matter with Kansas?", entitled, "Republican Proletariat"
Just do a Google for "New Left Review" and you should find the website homepage and the link to the article pretty readily. I also posted a link to it a few days ago in the "Support the Iraqi insurgency" thread. Here's a hint as to one of the major factors for the Democrats' predicament: NAFTA
I suspect that there are other articles with similar kinds of analysis as well.
By the way, a lot of middle class, upper middle class and wealthy people also drink Pepsi, although I have to concede that, based upon superficial appearances, they do smoke fewer cigarettes. But then, I like in Northern California, so my visual sampling is no doubt skewed.
[The people support the Iraq business b/c they have been convinced to do so. Answer to your question: Yes, the political Center does support the war in Iraq; I believe our challenge is to convince them otherwise: to move the Center on this issue toward our side.
Will they support further military adventurism? They will as long as the Right operates a better-organized, better-funded, more effective marketing machine than does the Left, which is where your boy Wardo comes in. I've worked opposite GOP party flacks and had a few drinks with them and unless they find better ammo before then, they will make Wardo one of their poster boys come election time.
I would like to see the locus of the Center get moved to the Left (as it gradually has over time on many issues), but for now it is where it is and this is where the battle must be fought. The election results & polls demonstrate that these people currently support Bush. This is what needs to change. Sure, we on the Left can get angrier and louder, but unless we change the voting habits of the Center, we will be little more than a noisy annoyance to those in Power.
Is my political theory "based upon tolerating the continued bloodletting..."? No, certainly not. Think it through: Your question as phrased is either idiotic or intentionally accusatory: Am I supposed to somehow slip up and say YES and fall into your trap? Please. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt & assume that what you mean is: Does my theory accept continued imperialism? [As an aside, it might be decent of you to give me the benefit of the doubt occasionally.]
I completely oppose the bloodletting policies you refer to; my political theory is not "based on tolerating" such policies. My theory is that Power in this country is decided at the polls and that's where we must be effective. The question isn't one of ideology or commmitment, it's one of effectiveness. I maintain that we must do a better job of reaching the people in the Center so that they are not duped by right-wing propaganda. (Incidentally, I think we must also do a better job of getting the Lefties to actually vote -- do you?).
I've submitted that I think the best we can do now is to elect enough Democrats to bring the balance of power far enough to the Left to change our foreign policy. Do you have a better idea for real, effective change? Wasn't it you who demanded specifics of me? C'mon, I'm all ears! [BTW: I've asked you this before, so far w/o reply...]
If you choose to continue this discussion, please identify your age, education, work experience and/or some other applicable metric so that I have some idea of who I'm talking to -- I have done this courtesy for you.]
My belief, as I've already said, is that people who are actively working to deter enlistment in the military are having the greatest impact on American foreign policy, because without enlistees, the wars can't be fought, including the occupation, regardless of the politicians in power. I also believe that the efforts of some people around the world to boycott American corporations could significantly influence American foreign policy if it gains traction. Contrary to your comment, I also provided additional elaboration to these questions in one of my last two posts. I suggest that you go back and read it.
On a personal note, I have lived in the Central Valley for many years, with a public affairs radio program on KDVS 90.3 FM in Davis every Friday. I have also been involved in numerous political protest and campaign activities. No doubt you can guess the kinds.
Here in the Valley, the sun is out and the weather is fabulous. Maybe, we should both get out and enjoy it.
--Richard
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