"The border is not the idealized metaphorical site of a new hybridity. Laredo, Nogales, Juarez, Mexicali, Calexico, Tijuana, National City are not figures of speech. They are first and last physical locations of great economic, social and cultural strife. Still, it is all for a purpose: this facile use of language. The “border” as a metaphor poses no threat to the cultural and economic dominance by Euro-America."

 - Cherie Moraga

Excerpt - Over, Under, Sideways, Down - Golbalization, spatial metaphors, and the question of state power

By Peter Bratsis

Al Qaeda and what it means to be modern - John Gray

MAS - A STORY THAT MUST BE TOLD!

I am super excited to tell share this news with you! This summer the creative team of Milta Ortiz (playwright) and Marc David Pinate (director) moved to Tucson, Arizona to interview, write, and produce a docudrama play about the now infamous banning of Mexican American Studies classes in the Tucson Unified School District.

Click below for the full story.
http://conta.cc/1c3Cc4t

Understanding Community Organizing through the Nahui Ollin - XITO Seminar

XITO Seminar

Los Muertos de Hambre The War on Chicana/o Studies Unmasking the Illusion of Inclusion

By Rodolfo F. Acuña

Muertos de hambre is a derogatory phrase often used by Mexicans to refer to people who are predators, i.e., human vultures, vendidos. They are so starved for attention or recognition that they pounce on scraps of garbage discarded by their colonial masters.

The history of Chicana/o Studies is replete with examples of myths such as that they are failing because of a lack of enrollment. The truth is that they fail because they are denied a place on the Monopoly Board (General Education, electives and the like) that runs the university and rewards departments.

The CSUN Chicana/o Studies Department has a unique problem, it has been too successful. It offers 175 plus sections per semester, and campus wide departments are salivating at the prospect of picking off pieces of the program. The sad thing is that without the Mexican student population the university would be half its size. 

The university is a plantation that is run by white overseers that are getting increasingly defensive about their illegitimacy. Take the College of Social and Behavioral Science. Like most colleges, it has avoided diversifying its faculty. Although there are approximately 12,000 Latinos on campus, out of 11 tenure track professors, Anthropology has 0 Mexican Americans; Geography (12-0); History (19-0); Pan African Studies (13-1); Political Science (17-2); Psychology (29-1); Social Work (16-0); Sociology 23-1); and Urban Studies & Planning (7-0).

Chicana/o Studies has challenged this inequity. It has confronted that there are few courses on the Mexican experience. In 1969, San Fernando State offered one course on Mexico that was taught by Dr. Julian Nava.

The professors, the overseers of the plantation, are nervous because the City of Los Angeles has changed, and over 50 percent are Latinos, 80 percent of whom are of Mexican extraction. 

The white colonists are getting increasingly defensive about their privilege. Recently one of the departments discussed its hiring priorities. A Mexican American professor raised the racial disparity between the number of Mexican American students and its faculty. This evoked angry responses.

Faculty members said they were uncomfortable talking about race; that the department should not hire “unqualified” applicants; that they do not see color; that race has no bearing. Studies show that the race and class backgrounds of the professors determine the questions that students ask and research outcome.

Mexicans north from Mexico have always been under the illusion that the Mexican government and the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) care about them and would protect their interests. They naively believed that they were part of the Mexican family.

This illusion was recently shattered by UNAM’s lack of respect for Mexican Americans at CSUN. It entered into an agreement to house a research center there. The project was clandestine. Over the past year, David Maciel who has abandoned more programs than any academician I know started to bring in speakers from UNAM. Recently dismissed from UCLA, it was his way to wangle a part time position.

Maciel and the CSUN administration slapped CHS in the face, and did not inform it about the center until it was a done deal. The slight was outrageous. Chicana/o Studies has 90 percent of the Mexicanists and Latin Americanists on campus. For over 40 years, it has had premier cultural groups, and championed Mexican immigrants with or without papers.

A meeting was held on November 12th involving UNAM’s criollo elite administrators and the CSUN faculty. Basically, they told us that we could join or not join –take it or leave it. They avoided the question as to why they showed disrespect for Mexicans on campus. Their attitude was one of porque nos da la chingada gana. Clearly it is a matter of class, they consider the Mexican population of 36 million as pochos, and prefer catering to gringos. They avoid contact with Mexicans who are not of their social class.

As for the white faculty present, it was pathetic. Not one has been involved with Mexican immigrants. One said that he was interested in Mexico because his wife had taken a class at UNAM. A Central American professor whose specialty is literature (a post-modernist) said she was a Mexicanist because Central Americans passed through Mexico en route to the U.S.

It is evident that these muertos de hambre saw only the color green. Frantz Fanon makes it clear that colonization is possible only with the complicity of members of the colonized.

In this case, it was two Central American Studies professors -- Douglas Carranza and Beatriz Cortez who are angry because I mentioned the role students and professors in the founding of CAS.

However, the colonizers and their collaborators have an obsession to rewrite history and mask their privilege. For the record, the CAS founders included Alberto García, a half dozen Central American women students, and Roberto Lovato who along with CAUSA and Dr. Carlos Cordova of San Francisco State developed the curriculum.

Additionally, Lovato and the students pressed the California legislature for funding to establish a Central American Studies Center. Cortez and Carranza came in well after the fact. Again part of being collaborators is the rewriting of history, and to create a counter narrative to establish legitimacy.

Los muertos de hambre are delusional, and somehow they have come to believe that CHS is taking courses from them. They also want to divert attention away from the fact that after a dozen years it still has only two professors, having bullied every Central American candidate out of the department.

These muertos de hambre have invented their own reality, wanting to erase the fact that CHS gave them four positions to start CAS.

We are also at odds with the Provost who says that we are obstructionists for not joining the process, which invitation came only after it was a done deal. His attitude is much that of the UNAM representatives.

If you allow someone to take your dignity from you, you are reduced to a serf. Thus, you cannot allow the colonizers to distort reality and erase you. As for the collaborators they must change history so as not to be seen as collaborators and opportunists. 

As our Latino student population mushrooms, the resistance to Mexican American hires will increase. Life for los muertos de hambre will become more profitable as white professors will enter into alliances with them to limit the number of minority faculty. The subversion of Chicana/o Studies will be possible only with the support of collaborators.

I have always respected and considered Central Americans to be family. However, I realize like Mexicans they also have muertos de hambre among them.

As political people we must respect the tensions within our countries of origin, i.e., teacher strikes, Zapatista-like movements, Mexico’s violation of Article 27 of the Constitution, and the giving away of Mexico’s land and resources.

What hurts is that my illusions of jointly building a unity of progressives of the two Middle Americas have been shattered, although hope remains. 

The fact is the Mexican government and UNAM have never had an interest in our community. They have not cared about Mexican immigrants whose rights Chicana/o organizations championed.

Los muertos de hambre only see us as a piggy bank. Even with the bad economy we send $22 billion annually to the homeland. 

Dr. Ernesto Galarza in Spiders in the House and Workers in the Field (1970) wrote that it was in error to assume Mexicans did not organize – they did but they were subverted by the spiders in the house and los muertos de hambre.

Fanon and Cabral - Xicano Resistance Literature

 

         

   Examining the theoretical foundation of literature written by Chicana/o community intellectuals could lead to an understanding of why Chicana/o resistance literature in the past and present situates itself within the overall struggle of third world liberation movements across the globe. Frantz Fanon, the Martinique born anti colonial writer, psychologist and liberation theorist outlines the stages of literary development within an emerging national culture after centuries of military and economic domination. Writing resistance to colonial oppression for Fanon is inextricably linked with physical resistance, which is inextricably linked with the material conditions of the oppressed. Fanon writes that when the native knows “he is not an animal”[i] (it is at this moment of understanding or epiphany resistance is born, that “he realizes his humanity [and] begins to sharpen the weapons with which he will secure its victory”[ii] Fanon continues later by giving intellectual body and substance to this process of struggle sharpening tools both physical and rhetorically when he writes concerning the national struggle,

In the first phase, the native intellectual gives proof that he has assimilated the culture of the occupying powers. His writings correspond point by point with those of his opposite number in the mother country…In the second phase we find the native is disturbed; he decides to remember what he is … sometimes this literature of just-before-the-battle is dominated by humor and by allegory; but often too it is symptomatic of a period of distress and difficulty … Finally, in the third phase, which is called the fighting phases, the native, after having tried to lose himself in the people and with the people, will on the contrary shake the people. Instead of according the people’s lethargy an honored place in his esteem, he turns himself into an awakener of the people; hence comes a fighting literature, a revolutionary literature, and a national literature.[iii]

Fanon describes the suspicion this allegiance to a long conqueror culture arouses within the “occupying power, which interprets attachment to traditions as faithfulness to the spirit of the nation and as a refusal to submit,”[iv] in other words the seed of national liberation. The same attitudes are prominent in Anglo and Chicana/o relations today as charges of slow assimilation are levied against third even fourth generation Mexican Americans.[v] Over 40 years after Fanon observations during the Algerian/Franco conflict, Samuel P. Huntington[vi], past chairman of the Havard Academy of International and Area Studies and author of the 2004 Foreign Policy article “The Hispanic Challenge”, documents U.S. Anglo recognition of this lingering memory of U.S. historical thievery when he compares the Southwest of the United States to other irredentist[vii] movements across the globe writing “History shows that serious potential for conflict exists when people in one country begin referring to territory in a neighboring country in proprietary terms and to assert special rights and claims to that territory.”[viii]

            The downward spiral toward the complete elimination of a people’s original culture is inevitable in a colonial setting. All around us we see the impact of 500 years of genocide and cultural devastation. Fanon is clear on the status of culture among oppressed colonized peoples. His words set the stage for long-term political action on the part of the native against the hegemony of colonial domination

The native intellectual who decides to give battle to colonial lies fights on the field of the whole continent. The past is given back its value. Culture, extracted from the past to be displayed in all its splendor, is not necessarily that of his own country… For colonialism, this vast continent was the haunt of savages, a country riddled with superstitions and fanaticism, destined for contempt, weighed down by the curse of God.[ix]

            Fanon, who trained as a psychologist in France[x], understood and documented the mental dilemmas facing colonized Third World people during their occupation. Many scholars and liberationist since the publishing of his work to the present regards his critique of the mental and physical circumstances endured by the colonized under an occupying colonial government to be as critical and pertinent today as then. Fanon removes the onus of maintaining personal legitimacy through culture off the colonized by demonstrating how the slowly and inevitably declining indigenous culture is inescapably replaced by a colonial culture, century after century, until it becomes obvious the original “national culture under colonial domination is a contested culture whose destruction is sought in a systematic fashion”[xi] so much so, Fanon writes, that in the end before the emergence of the national liberation movement all that is left for the natives is  “simply a concentration on a hard core of culture which is becoming more and more shriveled up, inert and empty.”[xii]

            Amilicar Cabral[xiii] the Papua New Guinea liberationist as the keynote speaker for the Eduardo Mondlane Speech at Syracuse University on October 14, 1970 in a speech titled “National Liberation and Culture” said in part, “the national liberation of a people is the regaining of the historical personality of that people, it is a return to history through the destruction of the imperialist domination to which they have been subjected” (Cabral, p. 7). Like all soldiers/scholars of third world national liberation struggles Cabral understood the actual return to history (cultural reawakening through a national liberation struggle) is subjective in that each national liberation struggle along with the strategies to victory are by necessity unique to the country where the struggle originates. This does not mean however, that lessons cannot be learned or shouldn’t be taken from other national liberation struggles.  

            By examining the histories of colonial struggles around the world we see that material conditions play a major role in both the decisions of the oppressed and the reaction of the oppressor in this return to history. The material, social and cultural conditions created by colonialism allow limited avenues of response to the oppressed. In terms of how this return to history is accomplished it is vital to understand that every revolutionary situation is different because according to Mao “war in any country is waged in the special environment of that country and it has special circumstances and characteristics.”[xiv] It stands to reason though any “return to history” is prefigured by a departure from history – for purposes of our discussion we will call this departure “colonialism” and focus on the process of return – known as the national liberation struggle.

            The history of the Chicana/o has been for the past 162 years the history of the United States, plenty of time to experience the inability of liberal democracy in the U.S. to fulfill its promise of citizenship guaranteed in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The failure to included Chicana/os in full citizenship rhetorically and in political practice along with increasingly stark power differentials in terms of socio-economic status within a colonial framework are vital in placing Chicana/o resistance literature as a first step toward Cabral’s “return to history.”

            It is vital to understand that for Cabral the national liberation struggle, which at is base is a cultureal/material production and is inextricably linked with a “return to history” are consequences of each other. In the case of Chicana/os the history being created is an Indigenist history. Indigenist history is defined as an evolving liberation history, the making of a set of events that is unfolding; history that is happening as an emerging vision written by an emerging people. Ward Churchill helps us to frame the Indigenist outlook when he writes about his definition of the word indigenist,

By this, I mean that I am one that not only takes the rights of indigenous peoples as the highest priority of my political life, but who draws upon the traditions – the bodies of knowledge and corresponding codes of values – evolved over many thousands of years by native peoples the world over.[xv]

            It is also important to understand that the process of national liberation, the physical and intellectual freeing of a people from colonial domination, is by necessity a long one shrouded many times in secrecy. For any cultural movement when this return to history begins is difficult to pinpoint and perhaps unnecessary since it evident through an examination of national liberation struggles there are usually multiple players working independent of each other for long periods of time. This is only one reason why the examination of resistance literature is so vital. Action spring from dialogue; without true dialogue, education and organization there can be no struggle. Without struggle there is no national culture, struggle for the oppressed being the material production of history or as Cabral writes “because it is history, culture has as its material base the level of the productive forces and the mode of production.”[xvi] The material foundation of struggle in terms of the production of culture and the will to resist is vital to understanding of how revolutionary culture is formed and revolutionary history is written.

            At what point does Chicana/o resistance literature abandon the imposed modernizing project of western civilization to return to its own process of collective history? Whose literature speaks to the future or to the past? Whose is obsessed with reexamining history or building toward a new history? It is important to understand that Cabals’ return to history is not a wish to return to the conditions that existed before the European arrived. Cabral’s and Fanon’s desire is that as a distinct people the colonized will emerge from a culturally obscure position to a position of authority on their land by reclaiming and rebuilding a national culture apart from the colonizer.

---

[i] Fanon, Frantz. (1961) “Wretched of the Earth” p. 43

[ii] Fanon, p. 43

[iii] Fanon, p. 222-223

[iv] Fanon,   p. 237

[v] Huntington, Samuel. “The Hispanic Challenge” p.  6-8

[vi] (deceased)

[vii] The Encarata World English Dictionary defines the word irredentist as “a member of a group of people who support the return to their country of territories that used to belong to it but are now under foreign rule.”

“Harry Beran has argued that the consent model leaves ample room for a right to secede from those states to which no consent was given. The idea here is that if each individual enjoys complete dominion regarding herself, then only her consent is sufficient to determine her membership in a political union. Beran writes, “Liberal democratic theory is committed to the permissibility of secession quite independently of its desirability in order to increase the possibility of consent-based political authority. The claim is this: if persons have a right to personal and political self-determination, then secession must be permitted if it is effectively desired by a territorially concentrated group and if it is morally and practically possible.” Thus Beran concludes that the consent theory of political legitimacy entails that individuals have a moral right to emigrate and change their nationality and that “any territorially concentrated group within a state should be permitted to secede if it wants to and it is morally and practically possible”

[viii] Huntington, Samuel. “The Hispanic Challenge” p. 5

[ix] Fanon, Frantz. (1961) “Wretched of the Earth” p. 211

[x] Gibson, Nigel. Ed. (1999) “Rethinking Fanon: The Continuing Dialogue” Humanity Books, Amherst, NY. P. 60-68

[xi] Fanon, Frantz. (1961) “Wretched of the Earth” p. 237

[xii] Ibid. p. 238

[xiii] Cabral was the Secretary General of the Partido Africana do Independencia de Guiné e Cabo Verde. He was assassinated January 20, 1973.

[xiv] Mao Tse Tung “Laws of war”

[xv] Churchill “Struggle for the Land” p. 403

[xvi] (Cabral, p. 5).  This point is particularly salient for Chicana/os in terms of production since Chicana/os do not have widespread ownership of the means of material production. They do have, however, and are engaged in the widespread production of culture. Meanwhile, it's becoming clear to me that that one of the most complex and compelling axes you want to grind is to defend cultural nationalism against that which has supplanted it: mestizaje (we're all mixed and therefore, finally, all the same), and multiculturalism (we agree that we're all different and that we all like each other's differences).

Fascism Anyone?

 http://www.secularhumanism.org/library/fi/britt_23_2.htm

Fascism Anyone?

Laurence W. Britt

Free Inquiry readers may pause to read the “Affirmations of Humanism: A Statement of Principles” on the inside cover of the magazine. To a secular humanist, these principles seem so logical, so right, so crucial. Yet, there is one archetypal political philosophy that is anathema to almost all of these principles. It is fascism. And fascism’s principles are wafting in the air today, surreptitiously masquerading as something else, challenging everything we stand for. The cliché that people and nations learn from history is not only overused, but also overestimated; often we fail to learn from history, or draw the wrong conclusions. Sadly, historical amnesia is the norm.

We are two-and-a-half generations removed from the horrors of Nazi Germany, although constant reminders jog the consciousness. German and Italian fascism form the historical models that define this twisted political worldview. Although they no longer exist, this worldview and the characteristics of these models have been imitated by protofascist¹ regimes at various times in the twentieth century. Both the original German and Italian models and the later proto-fascist regimes show remarkably similar characteristics. Although many scholars question any direct connection among these regimes, few can dispute their visual similarities.

Beyond the visual, even a cursory study of these fascist and proto-fascist regimes reveals the absolutely striking convergence of their modus operandi. This, of course, is not a revelation to the informed political observer, but it is sometimes useful in the interests of perspective to restate obvious facts and in so doing shed needed light on current circumstances.

For the purpose of this perspective, I will consider the following regimes: Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s Portugal, Papadopoulos’s Greece, Pinochet’s Chile, and Suharto’s Indonesia. To be sure, they constitute a mixed bag of national identities, cultures, developmental levels, and history. But they all followed the fascist or protofascist model in obtaining, expanding, and maintaining power. Further, all these regimes have been overthrown, so a more or less complete picture of their basic characteristics and abuses is possible.

Analysis of these seven regimes reveals fourteen common threads that link them in recognizable patterns of national behavior and abuse of power. These basic characteristics are more prevalent and intense in some regimes than in others, but they all share at least some level of similarity.

1. Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism. From the prominent displays of flags and bunting to the ubiquitous lapel pins, the fervor to show patriotic nationalism, both on the part of the regime itself and of citizens caught up in its frenzy, was always obvious. Catchy slogans, pride in the military, and demands for unity were common themes in expressing this nationalism. It was usually coupled with a suspicion of things foreign that often bordered on xenophobia.

2. Disdain for the importance of human rights. The regimes themselves viewed human rights as of little value and a hindrance to realizing the objectives of the ruling elite. Through clever use of propaganda, the population was brought to accept these human rights abuses by marginalizing, even demonizing, those being targeted. When abuse was egregious, the tactic was to use secrecy, denial, and disinformation.

3. Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause. The most significant common thread among these regimes was the use of scapegoating as a means to divert the people’s attention from other problems, to shift blame for failures, and to channel frustration in controlled directions. The methods of choice—relentless propaganda and disinformation—were usually effective. Often the regimes would incite “spontaneous” acts against the target scapegoats, usually communists, socialists, liberals, Jews, ethnic and racial minorities, traditional national enemies, members of other religions, secularists, homosexuals, and “terrorists.” Active opponents of these regimes were inevitably labeled as terrorists and dealt with accordingly.

4. The supremacy of the military/avid militarism. Ruling elites always identified closely with the military and the industrial infrastructure that supported it. A disproportionate share of national resources was allocated to the military, even when domestic needs were acute. The military was seen as an expression of nationalism, and was used whenever possible to assert national goals, intimidate other nations, and increase the power and prestige of the ruling elite.

5. Rampant sexism. Beyond the simple fact that the political elite and the national culture were male-dominated, these regimes inevitably viewed women as second-class citizens. They were adamantly anti-abortion and also homophobic. These attitudes were usually codified in Draconian laws that enjoyed strong support by the orthodox religion of the country, thus lending the regime cover for its abuses.

6. A controlled mass media. Under some of the regimes, the mass media were under strict direct control and could be relied upon never to stray from the party line. Other regimes exercised more subtle power to ensure media orthodoxy. Methods included the control of licensing and access to resources, economic pressure, appeals to patriotism, and implied threats. The leaders of the mass media were often politically compatible with the power elite. The result was usually success in keeping the general public unaware of the regimes’ excesses.

7. Obsession with national security. Inevitably, a national security apparatus was under direct control of the ruling elite. It was usually an instrument of oppression, operating in secret and beyond any constraints. Its actions were justified under the rubric of protecting “national security,” and questioning its activities was portrayed as unpatriotic or even treasonous.

8. Religion and ruling elite tied together. Unlike communist regimes, the fascist and protofascist regimes were never proclaimed as godless by their opponents. In fact, most of the regimes attached themselves to the predominant religion of the country and chose to portray themselves as militant defenders of that religion. The fact that the ruling elite’s behavior was incompatible with the precepts of the religion was generally swept under the rug. Propaganda kept up the illusion that the ruling elites were defenders of the faith and opponents of the “godless.” A perception was manufactured that opposing the power elite was tantamount to an attack on religion.

9. Power of corporations protected. Although the personal life of ordinary citizens was under strict control, the ability of large corporations to operate in relative freedom was not compromised. The ruling elite saw the corporate structure as a way to not only ensure military production (in developed states), but also as an additional means of social control. Members of the economic elite were often pampered by the political elite to ensure a continued mutuality of interests, especially in the repression of “have-not” citizens.

10. Power of labor suppressed or eliminated. Since organized labor was seen as the one power center that could challenge the political hegemony of the ruling elite and its corporate allies, it was inevitably crushed or made powerless. The poor formed an underclass, viewed with suspicion or outright contempt. Under some regimes, being poor was considered akin to a vice.

11. Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts. Intellectuals and the inherent freedom of ideas and expression associated with them were anathema to these regimes. Intellectual and academic freedom were considered subversive to national security and the patriotic ideal. Universities were tightly controlled; politically unreliable faculty harassed or eliminated. Unorthodox ideas or expressions of dissent were strongly attacked, silenced, or crushed. To these regimes, art and literature should serve the national interest or they had no right to exist.

12. Obsession with crime and punishment. Most of these regimes maintained Draconian systems of criminal justice with huge prison populations. The police were often glorified and had almost unchecked power, leading to rampant abuse. “Normal” and political crime were often merged into trumped-up criminal charges and sometimes used against political opponents of the regime. Fear, and hatred, of criminals or “traitors” was often promoted among the population as an excuse for more police power.

13. Rampant cronyism and corruption. Those in business circles and close to the power elite often used their position to enrich themselves. This corruption worked both ways; the power elite would receive financial gifts and property from the economic elite, who in turn would gain the benefit of government favoritism. Members of the power elite were in a position to obtain vast wealth from other sources as well: for example, by stealing national resources. With the national security apparatus under control and the media muzzled, this corruption was largely unconstrained and not well understood by the general population.

14. Fraudulent elections. Elections in the form of plebiscites or public opinion polls were usually bogus. When actual elections with candidates were held, they would usually be perverted by the power elite to get the desired result. Common methods included maintaining control of the election machinery, intimidating and disenfranchising opposition voters, destroying or disallowing legal votes, and, as a last resort, turning to a judiciary beholden to the power elite.

Does any of this ring alarm bells? Of course not. After all, this is America, officially a democracy with the rule of law, a constitution, a free press, honest elections, and a well-informed public constantly being put on guard against evils. Historical comparisons like these are just exercises in verbal gymnastics. 

Maybe, maybe not.

Note

1. Defined as a “political movement or regime tending toward or imitating Fascism”—Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary.

References

Andrews, Kevin. Greece in the Dark. Amsterdam: Hakkert, 1980.
Chabod, Frederico. A History of Italian Fascism. London: Weidenfeld, 1963.
Cooper, Marc. Pinochet and Me. New York: Verso, 2001.
Cornwell, John. Hitler as Pope. New York: Viking, 1999.
de Figuerio, Antonio. Portugal—Fifty Years of Dictatorship. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1976.
Eatwell, Roger. Fascism, A History. New York: Penguin, 1995.
Fest, Joachim C. The Face of the Third Reich. New York: Pantheon, 1970.
Gallo, Max. Mussolini’s Italy. New York: MacMillan, 1973.
Kershaw, Ian. Hitler (two volumes). New York: Norton, 1999.
Laqueur, Walter. Fascism, Past, Present, and Future. New York: Oxford, 1996.
Papandreau, Andreas. Democracy at Gunpoint. New York: Penguin Books, 1971.
Phillips, Peter. Censored 2001: 25 Years of Censored News. New York: Seven Stories. 2001.
Sharp, M.E. Indonesia Beyond Suharto. Armonk, 1999.
Verdugo, Patricia. Chile, Pinochet, and the Caravan of Death. Coral Gables, Florida: North-South Center Press, 2001.
Yglesias, Jose. The Franco Years. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1977.

Trayvon Martin and the reality of 'Race'

My oldest son called me the night the George Zimmerman not guilty verdict was read. He was upset, and with tears in voice he told me for the first time in his life he truly felt invisible. That his life as a Black and Xicano man living in this country – meant nothing he said. I told him I wished I could tell him I thought he was wrong. But truthfully, I said, I have no words of comfort to offer. 

I could only encouraged him to become a bigger part of the solution. I pushed him to continue learning, reading and studying. To recognize this murder and the verdict are about white privilege not white skin. That George Zimmerman may have pulled the trigger ending Trayvon Martin’s life is but he is simply a line of code in the program of oppression that has written the lives of Africans, Indigenous and poor peoples living in this country for the past 500 years.

We are, first and foremost, fighting a system privilege, of course that doesn't mean there are not individual enforcers of white privilege, it means that when we target just individuals and call for their heads only, and then feel justice has been served we are missing the important point of all.

Our struggle, the struggle to free humanity from a system of dehumanizing oppression like capitalism that reduces us all to distorted caricatures representing the fears and lies conjured to maintain social and economic control. These divisions have been and were created to bring into being the circumstances that allowed for the ongoing commoditization of humans beings. Capitalism has allowed us to create, maintain and accept these constructed differentiations in the value of life. This increases the wealth of those who perpetuate those divisions and establishes AN ARTIFICIAL ordering of the world that needs no explanation beyond the metaphysical acquisition of alleged attributes and qualities possessed by the superior and inferior “races.”

The suggestion that because Zimmerman’s mother is from Peru eliminates any implication of “racial” bias on his part is too obtuse to entertain. The very idea that there is a White Race, Black Race, Brown or Yellow is preposterous. It is pure science fiction – literally. Yet we repeat these ideas in every exchange we have – and let us be straight I'm not trying to preach any of that ‘I don't see color’ bullshit that really only the most conflicted of racists try to sling. No, what I am saying is that we are all human beings. That on some level we all share common goals of life, happiness or the right to exist. And we recognize as a species those very basic desires exist across the spectrum of humanity.

To my sons and daughters I have always said they must rise above the expectations of our society. That they must embrace and welcome into their hearts the truth they are no one’s flunky or stereotype. That they are in fact, change embodied in flesh and they have a responsibility, to humanity first, their chosen community second, to rise above the base, banal ideas others have about them – not to prove something to those who accuse others based on their own fears – but as an example of what we can be as a human beings when we freely pursue our own destinies, passions and path in life.

I am not ashamed to say I cried on the phone with my son that night. I am not ashamed to say when I heard how this man Zimmerman got his skull cracked by young Martin my heart raced at the young boy’s bravery. Trayvon Martin was fighting for his life against an unknown, armed assailant. Tragically, like the rest of us who struggle against this system of brutality – neither young Trayvon or most of you who will read this are the ones with the guns or the ‘authority’ to use them.

George Zimmerman murdered Trayvon Martin in cold blood but the law says he acted legally. Let that be a lesson to all you believers in law. Law does not equal justice. Law equals social control. Law serves to protect the power of the state: the power of privilege.

We are not the state. Nor do we wield the power of the state. This state exists to serve the whims of the elite and their flunkies, their murderous flunkies. The power of the state was not designed to protect the disenfranchised or those who openly oppose corrupt power. The reality is those on the receiving end of that brutality are mostly unorganized to resist it, unorganized to understand the system of oppression that controls and manipulates their existence. How we choose to respond to this tragedy and the countless others transpiring on a daily basis will mark our path to submission or resistance for generations to come.

As we hung up that night I told my son I love him, to stay close to his family and his children. To make sure they understood how much he loved them and how important they are to our future. I thought about all the PEOPLE flooding out into the streets that night hoodies up for Trayvon Martin. I kept hearing in my head the lyrics to the ‘Guns of Brixton’ by The Clash “You can cut us, you can bruise us, but you’ll have to answer too” and it made my heart race again.

A Lesson from Crazy Horse

(Marmilist moderator's note:  it's asserted that the war again Native Americans furnished the mode of warfare used in the war against the Filippinos in the early 1900s and later in the Vietnam war, and perhaps even in more recent  wars.  Regardless of the similarities and differences, this general mode of warfare exhibits imperialist warfare with "U.S. characteristics."  This is a  characterization not only by left military analysts, but also by conventional military historians.  Given Hedges' topic, the implication is that it would be used against an American people in revolt against the corporate ruling class.  Whether or not this is the case--and whatever the response to such an occurrence might be--it brings us back to the largely neglected task of the U.S. left to organize in the military against this eventuality.)   

TRUTHDIG

A Lesson from Crazy Horse

Monday, 02 July 2012

By Chris Hedges

 

(Image: Jared Rodriguez / Truthout)Native Americans' resistance to the westward expansion of Europeans took two forms. One was violence. The other was accommodation. Neither worked. Their land was stolen, their communities were decimated, their women and children were gunned down and the environment was ravaged. There was no legal recourse. There was no justice. There never is for the oppressed. And as we face similar forces of predatory, unchecked corporate power intent on ruthless exploitation and stripping us of legal and physical protection, we must confront how we will respond.

The ideologues of rapacious capitalism, like members of a primitive cult, chant the false mantra that natural resources and expansion are infinite. They dismiss calls for equitable distribution as unnecessary. They say that all will soon share in the "expanding" wealth, which in fact is swiftly diminishing. And as the whole demented project unravels, the elites flee like roaches to their sanctuaries. At the very end, it all will come down like a house of cards.

Civilizations in the final stages of decay are dominated by elites out of touch with reality. Societies strain harder and harder to sustain the decadent opulence of the ruling class, even as it destroys the foundations of productivity and wealth. Karl Marx was correct when he called unregulated capitalism "a machine for demolishing limits." This failure to impose limits cannibalizes natural resources and human communities. This time, the difference is that when we go the whole planet will go with us. Catastrophic climate change is inevitable. Arctic ice is in terminal decline. There will soon be so much heat trapped in the atmosphere that any attempt to scale back carbon emissions will make no difference. Droughts. Floods. Heat waves. Killer hurricanes and tornados. Power outages. Freak weather. Rising sea levels. Crop destruction. Food shortages. Plagues.

ExxonMobil, BP and the coal and natural gas companies—like the colonial buffalo hunters who left thousands of carcasses rotting in the sun after stripping away the hides, and in some cases carrying away only the tongues—will never impose rational limits on themselves. They will exploit, like the hustlers before them who eliminated the animals that sustained the native peoples of the Great Plains, until there is nothing left to exploit. Collective suicide is never factored into quarterly profit reports. Forget all those virtuous words they taught you in school about our system of government. The real words to describe American power are "plunder," "fraud," "criminality," "deceit," "murder" and "repression."

Those native communities that were most accommodating to the European colonists, such as the peaceful California tribes—the Chilulas, Chimarikos, Urebures, Nipewais and Alonas, along with a hundred other bands—were the first to be destroyed. And while I do not advocate violence, indeed will seek every way to avoid it, I have no intention of accommodating corporate power whether it hides behind the mask of Barack Obama or Mitt Romney. At the same time, I have to acknowledge that resistance may ultimately be in vain. Yet to resist is to say something about us as human beings. It keeps alive the possibility of hope, even as all empirical evidence points to inevitable destruction. It makes victory, however remote, possible. And it makes life a little more difficult for the ruling class, which satisfies the very human emotion of vengeance.

"Whenever the legislators endeavor to take away and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power," wrote the philosopher John Locke, "they put themselves into a state of war with the people who are thereupon absolved from any further obedience."

The European colonists signed, and ignored, some 400 treaties with native tribes. They enticed the native leaders into accords, always to seize land, and then repeated the betrayal again and again and again until there was nothing left to steal. Chiefs such as Black Kettle who believed the white men did not fare much better than those who did not. Black Kettle, who outside his lodge often flew a huge American flag given to him in Washington as a sign of friendship, was shot dead by soldiers of George Armstrong Custer in November 1868 along with his wife and more than 100 other Cheyenne in his encampment on the Washita River.

The white men "made us many promises, more than I can remember," Chief Red Cloud said in old age, "but they kept but one. They promised to take our land, and they took it."
Native societies, in which people redistributed wealth to gain respect, and in which those who hoarded were detested, upheld a communal ethic that had to be obliterated and replaced with the greed, ceaseless exploitation and cult of the self that fuel capitalist expansion. Lewis Henry Morgan in his book "League of the Iroquois," written in 1851 after he lived among them, noted that the Iroquois' "whole civil policy was averse to the concentration of power in the hands of any single individual, but inclined to the opposite principle of division among a number of equals. ..." This was a way of relating to each other, as well as to the natural world, that was an anathema to the European colonizers.

Those who exploit do so through layers of deceit. They hire charming and eloquent interlocutors. How many more times do you want to be lied to by Barack Obama? What is this penchant for self-delusion that makes us unable to see that we are being sold into bondage? Why do we trust those who do not deserve our trust? Why are we repeatedly seduced? The promised closure of Guantanamo. The public option in health care. Reforming the Patriot Act. Environmental protection. Restoring habeas corpus. Regulating Wall Street. Ending the wars. Jobs. Defending labor rights. I could go on.

There are few resistance figures in American history as noble as Crazy Horse. He led, long after he knew that ultimate defeat was inevitable, the most effective revolt on the plains, wiping out Custer and his men on the Little Big Horn. "Even the most basic outline of his life shows how great he was," Ian Frazier writes in his book "Great Plains," "because he remained himself from the moment of his birth to the moment he died; because he knew exactly where he wanted to live, and never left; because he may have surrendered, but he was never defeated in battle; because, although he was killed, even the Army admitted he was never captured; because he was so free that he didn't know what a jail looked like." His "dislike of the oncoming civilization was prophetic," Frazier writes. "He never met the President" and "never rode on a train, slept in a boarding house, ate at a table." And "unlike many people all over the world, when he met white men he was not diminished by the encounter."

Crazy Horse was bayoneted to death on Sept. 5, 1877, after being tricked into walking toward the jail at Fort Robinson in Nebraska. The moment he understood the trap he pulled out a knife and fought back. Gen. Phil Sheridan had intended to ship Crazy Horse to the Dry Tortugas, a group of small islands in the Gulf of Mexico, where a U.S. Army garrison ran a prison with cells dug out of the coral. Crazy Horse, even when dying, refused to lie on the white man's cot. He insisted on being placed on the floor. Armed soldiers stood by until he died. And when he breathed his last, Touch the Clouds, Crazy Horse's seven-foot-tall Miniconjou friend, pointed to the blanket that covered the chief's body and said, "This is the lodge of Crazy Horse." His grieving parents buried Crazy Horse in an undisclosed location. Legend says that his bones turned to rocks and his joints to flint. His ferocity of spirit remains a guiding light for all who seek lives of defiance.
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Chris Hedges spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he was a war correspondent for 15 years.

Since When Is Losing Winning? Playing-Follow-the-Leader by Rodolfo F. Acuna

The other day I gave a presentation to teachers in Moorpark. Like always you can predict the question and answer period. More often than not you get friends in the audience who don’t ask questions but give speeches instead of questions.

Everyone wants to be a presenter, and activists feel more entitled than most to promote their point of view.

Moorpark was no exception, and an old time friend from the San Fernando Valley was chomping at the bit to promote his cause and his perspective. My friend is a cheerleader, so I settled back realizing that this is a very important function of the Left. We get so few spaces to reach out to people outside our orbit.

You also learn a lot from the speeches, such as what tendencies or lines different groups are pushing. In this case my friend asked or better still stated that the Latino critics of the immigration bill were jeopardizing the passage of an immigration reform bill. I was taken aback because this is the kind of rhetoric usually used by the Right to silence the Left.

I shot back that I was a critic of what was coming out of Washington on immigration reform.  I have not played the game of follow-the-leader since childhood – quickly rattling off what was wrong with the proposals: no quick and just pathway to citizenship, a jingoist and racist border security policy, and a neo-bracero program.  

I emphasized that in this instance I did not trust President Obama, Senator Marco Rubio or for that matter the Latino leadership on the question of immigration reform. Further, I did not trust the knowledge of our so-called Latino leaders to bring about a fair and just immigration bill.

History shows that the wrongheaded logic of a half a loaf of bread is better than none results in none.

I realize that I am getting old (but not senile), but since when is losing winning?

Last Saturday we had a reunion of Chicana/o studies alumni at California State University Northridge where we screened “Unrest” – the story of the founding of the department. With only a little over a month to organize and zero funds, we were surprised when over 300 attended (not enough food).

In the documentary I was asked why it was so important that I had a PhD and a quick path to tenure. I replied because I had to be secure that I could tell administrators and white faculty to go to hell. The decision to play it fast and furious was very important to the success of the CSUN Chicana/o Studies department which offers five to ten times as many classes as the next most populated programs.

Of course, in order to do this it was essential to have united students that the administration feared. It was the only power that Chicanas/os had at the time that prevented the administration from eliminating us.

My feeling was that I did not take the leadership in a program to lose. A department had to have a full complement of courses and the teachers to teach them. Anyone who stood in our way had to be taken on.

I always felt that if we could not be the best then I should not take the job or sell out and go into a traditional department in a prestigious university where my pension would have been much higher than at a state college. Besides if money was the issue, I could have made much more money in sales than in education.

Looking back at the students that have gone through the department and the Education Opportunities Program, they have done so much more collectively than I could have done as an individual. I was never good looking enough to be a movie star.

This brings me back to the game of Follow-the-Leader.  The purpose of education is to produce leaders. To produce leaders who think and are not copycats. Issues such as the current immigration bill are too important for us to settle for a half loaf of bread; for us to compromise even before a vote is taken.

We should learn from history. Ask questions such as why other programs are not as large as the CSUN Chicana/o Studies department? We should ask if our leaders have led? Looking at my former students on April 27, 2013, I realized that it was because of them that we have had a measure of success. They were too raw, too idealistic to accept that losing was winning.