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May 08

Hey Ozzie 50 Years Is Too Damn Long

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Hey Ozzie 50 Years Is Too Damn Long

By Obi Egbuna, Jr

For those Africans at home and abroad who feel obligated to safeguard and elevate the tradition of uncompromising front-line struggle, our worst nightmare is that genuine freedom fighters will one day become extinct like dinosaurs or volcanoes. The only other thought equally as horrific is if they are replaced by critics, bought and paid for by
our former colonial and slave masters, whose sole purpose is to spread confusion and voice baseless opinions that only expose how truly out of touch they are with the everyday African woman, child and man. It is truly liberating to know that even during our most vulnerable moments the most oppressive forces on earth are having even more difficulty convincing their children that they must carry the torch of genocide, exploitation and fascism to the finish line.

When the commissioner of Major League Baseball, Bud Selig, slapped the manager of the Miami Marlins, Ozzie Guillen with a five-game suspension for expressing during a Time Magazine interview his admiration for Fidel Castro, this reaction exposed that the racist and terrorist Cuban network in Miami is on the verge of complete collapse. At the peak of their political strength and influence in the early 1980s, this network had the muscle to turn a boxing match between Alexis Arguello and Aaron Pryor at the Orange Bowl in 1982 into a huge anti-Cuba, anti-Sandinista event, hoping to garner sentiment for their mission to dispose of Socialism in the Americas. They had a willing partner in Arguello, who not only betrayed the revolution in Nicaragua, but physically fought on the side with the Contras and US Imperialism. In comparison, Joe DiMaggio’s trip to South Vietnam to give the middle finger to Ho Chi Minh or Jackie Robinson’s denunciation of Paul Robeson before the House of Un-American Activities Committee and his condemnation of Muhammad Ali for not fighting in the Vietnam War, seem like small potatoes.

Guillen was born in Venezuela, whose current President, Hugo Chavez, deeply admires Commandante Fidel Castro. Guillen, like Arguello, who when the Sandinistas first overthrew the ruthless Somoza family in Nicaragua used to wear his flag to the boxing ring, was a target for the Gusanos. After leading the Chicago White Sox to a World Series in 2005, Guillen returned to Venezuela with the trophy and visited President Chavez, only to turn around and say he would never vote for Chavez in a million years. These remarks came shortly after Guillen received US citizenship, proving green cards come with a much bigger price—your heart, mind and soul. Since Guillen in 2010 condemned the treatment of so-called immigrants by the state of Arizona, the question must be raised why Africans in the US, who are also protesting the rights of so-called immigrants, are not demanding that they be able to express their own political point of view, as protected by Freedom of Speech, without fear of deportation or any other form of persecution.

We are nearly 60 years removed from the deportation of our Trinidad-born, sister, warrior, Claudia Jones, who was shown the door by US Imperialism for her membership in the Communist Party and her condemnation of US Foreign Policy. Who knows, Guillen may have been briefed by INS about her life story when they learned of his interview with Time Magazine.

Another political milestone in their heyday was when the slimy Gusanos (worms in Spanish) in Miami used the big screen in Hollywood to rewrite the script of the 1932 gangster movie Scarface, produced by Billionaire Howard Hughes. The film was originally centered around the rise of the Mafia in Chicago, but was re-written to highlight how Fidel Castro tricked the Carter administration into granting political asylum to 125,000 Cubans, many of whom had come from prison and mental health facilities. This film has become a cult classic, mainly because of its excessive violence and the film’s main character Tony Montana, portrayed by Al Pacino, who escaped poverty courtesy of the lucrative drug trade. However, what has been forgotten is the purpose of this film—to show depict President Reagan as a hero trying rescue a country 90 miles off the coast of Florida from an evil dictator. The Gusanos in Miami decided to use Guillen’s remarks to rebound from a decade of political embarrassment and to show their benefactors in Washington that they are far from being at the end of the road, even though all evidence at our disposal says otherwise.

Recently, before the Pope visited Cuba, he met with the Gusanos out of courtesy mainly because the Vatican was an ally of the Reagan administration at the height of the Cold War. After listening to the Gusanos’ demands, the Pope still called for the lifting of the US blockade on Cuba, echoing the sentiments of his late predecessor, Pope John Paul II, who in spite of his role in the dismantling of socialism in Poland and Hungary, while rubbing shoulders with billionaire George Soros, openly condemned the US blockade on Cuba. The irony of this is that the Gusanos, who are from the Marielsta generation, never thought
they would live to see the Peter Pan generation, the first group of Cubans to defect after the triumph of the revolution, sit in their backyard and not only call for the lifting of the blockade, but openly criticize the Bush administration for imposing inflexible measures
that limited the ability of the Cubans in Miami to travel to Cuba and see their own relatives. The condemnation of this policy led to the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF) having to publish an article in April 2009 lifting US restrictions on Cuba, it is amusing to watch terrorists pretend to show compassion, when everyone who understands US-CUBA relations understand the diplomatic and military posture can be best described with two words seek and destroy.

Since the Gusanos seem to be such fans of Hollywood they should remember Al Pacino’s character Michael Corleone in Godfather III portrayed by a real life Gusano terrorist sympathizer, Andy Garcia, tell his nephew, “Never hate your enemy. It affects your judgment.” This would help them understand and appreciate Ozzie Guillen’s
statement about Fidel. The governments of Cuba and Venezuela have a medical project called Operation Miracle, which has helped thousands of Venezuelans who were on the verge of going permanently blind regain their eyesight. Did Gusanos apologists, such as ESPN analyst Dan LeBetard, ever consider for a second that one of those Venezuelans could be a relative or life-long friend of Guillen? What if Guillen made those remarks about Fidel after learning he lifted the pro-US Batista regime that placed a ban on Nicholas Guillen, the African revolutionary poet born in Cuba that prevented him from re-entering the country? It is a well known fact that Nicolas Guillen was appointed President of the National Cuban Writers Union and was declared by Fidel the Poet of the Revolution.

During the kidnapping of Elian Gonzalez by the Gusanos in 2000, Commandante Fidel Castro stated while addressing the Organization of Caribbean and Latin American Youth, that “In the four months Elian was being held in the US against his will, the average
US citizen learned more about Cuba than they had in 41 years, which proves our neighbors to the North will lose the War of Ideas in the 21st century.” Because Guillen has a reputation as a loose cannon, the Gusanos feared he would challenge the very foundation of their existence and the world would see they no longer have the political clout to do anything meaningful about it. While Guillen’s five-game suspension helped the Gusanos gain 15 minutes of fame, the fast track approach to propaganda by the US Imperialist media apparatus will make this issue a distant memory by the beginning of June. With all the political muscle the Gusanos claim to have here in Washington, Guillen’s punishment is the equivalent of the Ku Klux Klan putting a cross on your yard without setting it on fire.

By claiming his admiration for Fidel stems from his ability to survive for nearly 60 years, Guillen accidentally brought attention to the Gusanos terrorist cells that still exist in Miami during an election year and the role they played in the 638 assassination attempts on Fidel’s life since 1959. At the present moment, CANF is still adjusting to their attempted political makeover, which has them trying to distance themselves from their associations with naked terrorists like Luis Posada Carrilles and Orlando Bosch, whose main purpose in life was to put Commandante Fidel Castro in a pine box and be hailed as heroes by US Imperialism for their efforts. The Gusanos in Miami, who repudiated Guillen for his remarks, would have preferred if he followed the example of Carrilles, a Venezuelan-born Cuban who was directly involved in the Bay of Pigs invasion then and received training at the School of Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia, between 1963 and 1964. The Cuban American National Foundation now claims in their mission statement that change should be non-violent and meaningful, reflecting the natural and inalienable rights of the Cuban
people. It also states that change must come from within the island, not forcibly imported from abroad. This had to anger the terrorists in Miami who view Posada Carrilles and Bosch almost in the identical manner that Christians and Muslims see their prophets in the Holy Bible and Holy Quran.

The posturing by CANF illustrates how eager they are to sweep under the rug that this year marks the 20th anniversary of their decision to develop a paramilitary wing to compliment the work of the Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations (CORU), which was run by Bosch when the leadership of CANF arrived at the conclusion that lobbying the US Congress in order to bring about a regime change in Cuba was not enough and more militant action had to be taken. The political highlights of Bosch’s career as a terrorist were pardoned by President Bush in 1990, including his role in the bombing of a Cuban airliner that claimed the lives of 73 people and in 1976 when Bush headed the CIA and refused a request by Costa Rica to have Bosch extradited for his role in masterminding that cowardly act of aggression.

We as Africans must understand how the efforts by US Imperialism to shield Bosch and Posada Carrilles from the appropriate form of punishment for their sadistic crimes are inextricably linked to Mumia Abu Jamal sitting on death row and the threats to have Assata Shakur extradited from safety in Cuba to return to her old prison cell in the US. The Congressional Black Caucus members who supported the Bush administration’s call to have sister Shakur extradited gave the lame excuse of not knowing Assata Shakur and Joanne Chesimard is the same person. What this reveals is that any statements they make concerning normalizing relations with Cuba are lip service at best or a chance to be in front of a camera.

For the pro-terrorist Gusanos in Miami the year 2011 will generate bitter sweet emotions for many years to come. While Carrilles was acquitted on all charges of terrorism and aggression in the beginning of April 2011, their beloved assassin Bosch was not only laid to rest, but from the looks of things, these events marks the end of an era for Miami as a haven for Cuban terrorists. The decision by the Gusanos to bash Guillen like a piñata at a birthday party was aimed at diverting attention from the case of the Cuban 5, whose international support is an extension of the world’s diplomatic corp. that have repeatedly and uncompromisingly called for the lifting of the US blockade on Cuba. The courage and patriotism of the Cuban 5 comes shining through as a beacon of light at a moment in history when US Imperialism is using the banner of Homeland Security to deny people their basic civil liberties and maintain their tradition of bombing countries that incur their wrath. Their courage also puts a rather intense microscope on a terrorist network in Miami that has direct ties to the White House, Congress and the Military Industrial Intelligence Police Complex. The Cuban 5 issue also spells disaster for the US government’s public
relations apparatus as it pertains to the immigration question. It is clear for everyone to finally see why citizens of Cuba have for all intents and purposes been exempt from the standard immigration procedures to which citizens are subject to from other nations of the world. There should be a slogan posted on the wall of INS headquarters that states “All Cubans ready to engage in countless acts of terrorism against Cuba are welcome,” with pictures of Carrilles and Bosch right next to these words. This would accurately reflect Cubans who live by the slogan coined by the founder of CANF Jose Mascanosa,“From
Proletarians to Profiterians.”

Guillen’s revelation about his admiration for Fidel frightened the Gusanos because the next words out of his mouth could be that maintaining the blockade against Cuba was absolutely racist and ridiculous. These words would create a platform to fight the blockade right in the Gusano’s backyard, making their worst political nightmare come true, protests and teach-ins about the blockade in the same place that the bulk of the assassination attempts of Fidel’s life were planned. This would have been even more humiliating than when Elian Gonzalez was snatched from the Gusano’s clutches as a result of President Clinton yielding to international pressure when he instructed Janet Reno to arrange the child’s departure from the landof the Gusanos.

The African community in the US must collectively acknowledge that our efforts to fight for the lifting of the US blockade on Cuba have been both casual and inconsistent. What makes this extremely troubling is the special and unique ties we have to Cuba that predate Fidel, Che Guevara and the July 26th movement overthrowing the Batista regime in 1959. As we are almost six months into the 50th anniversary of the US blockade on Cuba, a question that can be posed to our most visible organizations and spokes people is this: In 50 years have there been at least 50 protests, demonstrations, or press conferences to voice our displeasure with this policy? If the answer is no, then the main reason must be our reluctance to yank out the sweet tooth we have for JFK, who imposed the blockade in 1962 or to condemn those white liberals who convinced our people that political salvation lies in the bosom of the democratic party. Another crucial reason is our failure to realize that the blockade represents diplomatic terrorism of the highest order in that it has cost a country with a 60% African population, a country committed to free health and education, over $96 billion dollars that would have been invested in expanding on the already high-quality programs that are the staple of their revolution.

While many of us have defied the travel ban on Cuba, unfortunately having the monstrous blockade lifted is not a priority item on national agenda. This implies that for many of us a photo-op with Fidel was more of a motivation for taking the trip, as opposed to serious planning to return to the heart of Babylon with a new found commitment to defend Cuba’s integrity and sovereignty. Undoubtedly, because the US is in the middle of a presidential election, we can expect President Obama to put on an academy award-winning performance for the Gusanos that exceeds the showboating he did four years ago when he stated that in his lifetime “Cubans have not experienced Democracy or Human Rights.” This erroneous statement received a response from none other than Fidel himself.

The most valuable lesson Obama learned is that Fidel has maintained the tenacity that first gained international attention when he and his comrades were waging war on the Batista regime from the Sierra Maestra, and that making baseless comments when trying to score points with terrorists in Miami will not be tolerated. Whenever the bitter and vindictive reactionary Carlos Moore resurfaces and launches self serving attacks on the Cuban revolution, under the guise of representing Spanish speaking Africans born in Cuba, we only Africans in the US do their homework and refuse to allow themselves to be used as pawns in a game they obviously do not understand. There is no country in the Western
Hemisphere where Africans and Europeans co-exist that racism does not exist, the real issue is what genuine steps are being taken to eradicate racism, any Africans in the US who would are willing to get in the foxhole with Mr. Moore concerning this matter are not capable of identifying a nation more committed to this task than Cuba. The 60 individuals who were coerced and manipulated into signing their name to the ridiculous statement entitled “Acting On Our Conscience A Declaration Of African American Support For The Civil Rights In Cuba in 11/30/09,exposed one thing for the African community, they have lost the will to stand with the world majority and fight for the lifting of the blockade, therefore instead of appearing as outright agents of US Imperialism help create a masquerade and smoke screen that you are still fighting the good fight.

The African community should shower Ozzie Guillen with high praises for his apology to the Gusanos because if he didn’t mean what he said, he should have never made the comments in the first place. Those of us who consider Fidel the modern day John Brown or our favorite American President (when we use the true definition of America, which is the Western hemisphere, instead of what Democrats and Republicans believe) feel Guillen should have stuck to his guns. When he left Venezuela for what he was told is the land of milk and honey, he should have called INS and asked what the hell happen to his freedom of speech? If Guillen gets the urge to honestly express himself about the blockade but get cold feet when confronted by the Gusanos, we have a simple message for him HEY OZZIE 50 YEARS IS TOO DAMN LONG!

Obi Egbuna, Jr., is a US-based member of the Zimbabwe-Cuba Friendship
Association and the US Correspondent to the Herald (Zimbabwe’s National
Newspaper). Mr. Egbuna is also a frequent contributor to Your World News.
His email address is obiegbuna15@gmail.com.

Feb 01

America’s Origins of Terror: An Often Unspoken History

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America’s Origins of Terror: An Often Unspoken History

By Solomon Comissiong

The words “terror”, “terrorist” and “terrorism” seemed to take on new meaning after the tragedy that occurred on September 11, 2001—a day that will live on in infamy. However, if one did not know better, you might think that the aforementioned words failed to exist prior to 9/11. Unfortunately, due to a combination of factors, many Americans behave as if these words, and their trepid meaning, were unfamiliar inside America. Mass racially motivated propaganda has juxtaposed the word “terrorist” next to that of a Muslim person of color. Unfortunately for countless Indigenous people and Africans, who were mass murdered on “American” soil—they came to fully understand terror in some of the worst possible ways. The face of their terror was white and originated throughout Europe.

Terror on American soil has existed for hundreds of years, dating back to the arrival of ill intentioned invaders from Europe. These invaders/illegal aliens (commonly mislabeled as ‘settlers’) came to a land that was foreign to them in innumerable aspects. It was prosperous, abundant with resources, communal and egalitarian. It was only a “New World” to their limited way of seeing the world. Turtle Island (North America) had been inhabited by indigenous people for tens of thousands of years. These people lived in prosperous communal settings where private land ownership was quite literally a foreign concept. They respected the earth/nature (and the animals), which they used to feed, clothe, and shelter their communities. Despite living in lands abundant with resources they never over consumed. In 2012 over-consumption is synonymous with American society.  In essence, these people lived in a way that was in balance with nature itself. Unfortunately, with the arrival of scores of European invaders, the prosperity they enjoyed would soon come to a “terrifying” end.

Sharing land that was not theirs was an unacceptable option for these cretins from Europe—they rejected the indigenous people’s hospitality, opting for genocide instead. It was not long before the white man began a killing spree that would have made Hitler blush. Hitler would have felt compelled to take copious notes on the effectiveness, diversity, and sheer barbarity of their murderous ways. Within years to decades many native communities were on the verge of extinction. The white man spared no one, killing man, woman, the elderly and children. They sometimes would burn them alive in their homes, other times decapitating them—subsequently placing their severed heads on poles to send doomsday messages to other native peoples. Giving the native peoples blankets infected with small pox (a disease foreign to the natives and therefore no immunity) was one of the earliest forms of biological warfare. Biological warfare is something future generations of Euro-Americans would experiment with, on the likes of Africans/blacks (Tuskegee Experiment) and Central Americans (Guatemala)—to name couple of well known blatant examples. Now in 2012 the decedents of the indigenous of “America” are decimated in sheer numbers and relegated to impoverished reservations, on land that was their ancestors. If this historical snapshot detailing the multitude of atrocities unleashed on these once prosperous people is not terrorism, this author does not comprehend the meaning of this word.

European terrorism had no boundaries when it came to the non-white people of the world. They showered hundreds of years of brutality and murder upon the Africans they kidnapped and brought to the so-called “new world”. Millions upon millions were tortured and killed on the boat rides from hell, across the Atlantic Ocean. Those who survived the several months long trips, stacked upon one another like sardines and forced to defecate upon themselves, were forced to work  in hellish conditions by shiftless amoral “people”. As if working up to 16-18 hour days in the blazing hot southern sun (and muggy evenings) was not enough—these European monsters beat, raped, mutilated and mass murdered countless enslaved Africans. The brutality they carried out upon the Africans had an array of vile forms. Some Africans were hunted down like dogs and then lynched—-all the way in to the middle of the 20th century. This unfortunately was not half of this reprehensible experience. These barbarians would often slowly burn the African/black people to death as they mutilated their bodies, all the while showcasing these events in front of thousands of people, including their wives and children. The kind of person that could repeatedly carry out these kinds of atrocities, let alone in front of children, is soulless and riddled with pure evil. They were not only terrorists, they were devilish.

These European serial murderers were proud of the brutal campaigns of death and mutilation they carried out—so much so that they routinely took pictures of the charred lynched bodies and sold them, by the tens of thousands, as postcards. They not only terrorized and mass murdered, they had no remorse for their crimes against humanity. Euro-Americans carried out their genocide of Africans in America from the 1600s until well in to the 20th century. However, many would contest that this genocide continues today in the form of community-wide police orchestrated brutality and terror.  When looking at the cases of people like Sean Bell and Oscar Grant, it is hard to argue against that valid assertion. And the institution of slavery has taken upon another name, in the form of Mass Incarceration/Prison Industrial Complex. The massive prison warehousing of African/black people is big business within the white settler state now known as America.

I have not even begun to scratch the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Euro-American atrocities carried out upon people of color, within, and outside of the stolen US borders. I have not touched upon the mass rapes of African and indigenous women. I have not detailed how they stole babies and broke up families, all in the name of slavery. Most children were destined for a life of brutal servitude, beatings and possible murder. And I have not yet to discuss how Africans were renamed, prevented from being literate, and force fed Christianity (as a means of pacification). These are all facts that no honest historian can deny. This was also terror by any description.

Despite what masses of mentally programmed Americans may believe, the fact remains that Euro-American terror continues to inflict damage—throughout the globe. Mass indiscriminate bombings in places like Libya, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq has taken the lives of (at least) hundreds of thousands of civilians. This is terror, in the raw. This is terror similar to that which was carried out on 9/11, except on a much larger scale. There is little difference. Knowingly killing masses of civilians, in an effort to intimidate and accomplish an imperialist end game, is terrorism—plain and simple. Those civilians (men, women, and children) had nothing to do with the tragic events of 9/11; however that mattered little to the US government, and much of its populous. Many Americans wanted blood, they wanted revenge—-and it did not matter whose blood it was so long as it came from people thousands of miles away. In some sadistic way, it made them feel better knowing others had died. Little time was spent reflecting on the fact that the majority of people killed in places like Iraq, were in fact, too, civilians. These actions are terror just as the lynching of African/black people in the United States.

One can attempt to rename terror all they want, however it does not escape the fact that it is terror, murder, and brutality. If most Americans understood this or recognized these truths, they, too, would know that some of the planet’s worst atrocities have been committed by their own government. The US, particularly Euro-Americans, have inflicted vicious acts of terror, not only on people within this country, but throughout the world. Mass propaganda and indoctrination has conveniently blinded most Americans of these facts. This social myopia makes it all the more difficult for a better, more humane, world to be envisioned. And without a critical mass of social justice visionaries, the quest for social justice (and peace) become even more burdensome to social activists whose work remains critically vital.

Terror did not begin with the catastrophic events of 9/11. Terror began long before that infamous day in history. Americans, especially those of European decent need never to make blatantly false racist generalizations stating that all terrorists are Muslim, unless they willing to discuss the terrorist acts their ancestors, and government, have committed. Their crimes of terror are responsible for taking the lives of countless people—-well into the tens of millions (conservatively). Why doesn’t America mourn the lives of the masses of slain Iraqi, Pakistani, and Afghans, just as they do Americans who lost their lives on 9/11? Most Americans don’t mourn them because they have been programmed how to think and feel. They don’t see these people as fellow human beings, similar to themselves. This hollow thought process allows the globally deleterious actions of the US government from ever being challenged by a critical mass of its own citizens. Americans’ indifference is essential to the sustaining of destructive US foreign policy. America, as a nation, may never repent for its terrorist crimes against humanity, however if it ever does—it will be the very first crucial step towards building a much better global society. Until that happens the work of social justice surgeons remains critical—this is a socially sick society in desperate need of repair. A world of Peace, Justice, Equality and Prosperity depend upon it.

Solomon Comissiong is an educator, community activist, author, public speaker and the host of the Your World News media collective (www.yourworldnews.org). He can be reached at: solo@yourworldnews.org

Nov 23

Often Untold History of European Savagery in America

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“Thanksgiving” by Bama the Village Poet
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4mWASFXYvQ

Native American Heritage Month
http://nativeamericanheritagemonth.gov/

Redskins-A 500 Year Hate Crime (quick preview)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7GKtUDOPkM

The Pequot War
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gXvUPqLEug

The Pequot War Memorial / Southport
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-MOzx-dcvA

Black Indians: An American Story
The stories of the Native Americans and African-Americans are actually parallel tracks of tragedy. Indeed, from the colonial era through the 19th century, the intermingling of these peoples combined two diverse worlds into a new mixed race of people who have courageously withstood attempts erase their unique twin cultural heritage despite the efforts of both black and Indian movements as well as the dominant white society. …
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3RiA-6OS7Y

The Largest Mass Execution in U.S. History (Excerpt from interview below)
The President’s honored on Mt. Rushmore were very aggressive in their treatment of Native Americans. In this episode of The Massachusetts School of Law’s Educational Forum Assistant Professor of law Kurt Olson interviews host and producer of First Voices Indigenous Radio’s Tiokasin Ghosthorse.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ive7OW8P8A

Ghosthorse: Tiokasin Ghosthorse of First Voices Indigenous Radio (Full Interview)
host and producer of First Voices Indigenous Radio’s Tiokasin Ghosthorse.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxCqmXHm17o&feature=relmfu

Washitaw, Yamasee, Iroquois, Cherokee, Choctaw Blackfoot, Pequot & Mohegan (and/or All Indigenous People of America)

http://stewartsynopsis.com/washitaw.htm

The Six Nations:

Oldest Living Participatory Democracy on Earth
he people of the Six Nations, also known by the French term, Iroquois [1] Confederacy, call themselves the Hau de no sau nee (ho dee noe sho nee) meaning People Building a Long House. Located in the northeastern region of North America, originally the Six Nations was five and included the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas. The sixth nation, the Tuscaroras, migrated into Iroquois country in the early eighteenth century. Together these peoples comprise the oldest living participatory democracy on earth. Their story, and governance truly based on the consent of the governed, contains a great deal of life-promoting intelligence for those of us not familiar with this area of American history. The original United States representative democracy, fashioned by such central authors as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, drew much inspiration from this confederacy of nations. In our present day, we can benefit immensely, in our quest to establish anew a government truly dedicated to all life’s liberty and happiness much as has been practiced by the Six Nations for over 800 hundred years. [2] …

Figure 31 Figure 31. On June 11, 1776 while the question of independence was being debated, the visiting Iroquois chiefs were formally invited into the meeting hall of the Continental Congress. There a speech was delivered, in which they were addressed as “Brothers” and told of the delegates’ wish that the “friendship” between them would “continue as long as the sun shall shine” and the “waters run.” The speech also expressed the hope that the new Americans and the Iroquois act “as one people, and have but one heart.”[18] After this speech, an Onondaga chief requested permission to give Hancock an Indian name. The Congress graciously consented, and so the president was renamed “Karanduawn, or the Great Tree.” With the Iroquois chiefs inside the halls of Congress on the eve of American Independence, the impact of Iroquois ideas on the founders is unmistakable. History is indebted to Charles Thomson, an adopted Delaware, whose knowledge of and respect for American Indians is reflected in the attention that he gave to this ceremony in the records of the Continental Congress.[19] Artwork by John Kahionhes Fadden.

 

Figure 38

Drawn by JOSEPH KEPPLER

SAVAGERY TO “CIVILIZATION”
THE INDIAN WOMEN: We whom you pity as drudges
reached centuries ago the goal that you are now nearing The use of Indian women to provide an exemplar of feminist liberty continued into the nineteenth century. On May 16, 1914, only six years before the first national election in which women had the vote, Puck printed a line drawing of a group of Indian women observing Susan B. Anthony, Anne Howard Shaw and Elizabeth Cady Stanton leading a parade of women. A verse under the print read:

“Savagery to Civilization”
We, the women of the Iroquois
Own the Land, the Lodge, the Children
Ours is the right to adoption, life or death;
Ours is the right to raise up and depose chiefs;
Ours is the right to representation in all councils;
Ours is the right to make and abrogate treaties;
Ours is the supervision over domestic and foreign policies;
Ours is the trusteeship of tribal property;
Our lives are valued again as high as man’s. [67]
Black Indians
http://blackindians.com/



“Largest mass hanging in United States history”
38 Santee “Sioux” Indian men
 Mankato, Minnesota, Dec. 16, 1862
 303 Indian males were set to be hanged

http://www.unitednativeamerica.com/hanging.html

Massacre At Wounded Knee, 1890

http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/knee.htm
On the morning of December 29, 1890, the Sioux chief Big Foot and some 350 of his followers camped on the banks of Wounded Knee creek. Surrounding their camp was a force of U.S. troops charged with the responsibility of arresting Big Foot and disarming his warriors. The scene was tense. Trouble had been brewing for months.

 

The hope of
the Ghost Dance

The once proud Sioux found their free-roaming life destroyed, the buffalo gone, themselves confined to reservations dependent on Indian Agents for their existence. In a desperate attempt to return to the days of their glory, many sought salvation in a new mysticism preached by a Paiute shaman called Wovoka. Emissaries from Map of Battle Areathe Sioux in South Dakota traveled to Nevada to hear his words. Wovoka called himself the Messiah and prophesied that the dead would soon join the living in a world in which the Indians could live in the old way surrounded by plentiful game. A tidal wave of new soil would cover the earth, bury the whites, and restore the prairie. To hasten the event, the Indians were to dance the Ghost Dance. Many dancers wore brightly colored shirts emblazoned with images of eagles and buffaloes. These “Ghost Shirts” they believed would protect them from the bluecoats’ bullets. During the fall of 1890, the Ghost Dance spread through the Sioux villages of the Dakota reservations, revitalizing the Indians and bringing fear to the whites. A desperate Indian Agent at Pine Ridge wired his superiors in Washington, “Indians are dancing in the snow and are wild and crazy….We need protection and we need it now. The leaders should be arrested and confined at some military post until the matter is quieted, and this should be done now.” The order went out to arrest Chief Sitting Bull at the Standing Rock Reservation. Sitting Bull was killed in the attempt on December 15. Chief Big Foot was next on the list.When he heard of Sitting Bull’s death, Big Foot led his people south to seek protection at the Pine Ridge Reservation. The army intercepted the band on December 28 and brought them to the edge of the Wounded Knee to camp. The next morning the chief, racked with pneumonia and dying, sat among his warriors and powwowed with the army officers. Suddenly the sound of a shot pierced the early morning gloom. Within seconds the charged atmosphere erupted as Indian braves scurried to retrieve their discarded rifles and troopers fired volley after volley into the Sioux camp. From the heights above, the army’s Hotchkiss guns raked the Indian teepees with grapeshot. Clouds of gun smoke filled the air as men, women and children scrambled for their lives. Many ran for a ravine next to the camp only to be cut down in a withering cross fire.

When the smoke cleared and the shooting stopped, approximately 300 Sioux were dead, Big Foot among them. Twenty-five soldiers lost their lives. As the remaining troopers began the grim task of removing the dead, a blizzard swept in from the North. A few days later they returned to complete the job. Scattered fighting continued, but the massacre at Wounded Knee effectively squelched the Ghost Dance movement and ended the Indian Wars.

 

Wounded Knee, 1973

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27ale1TrD5c

Wounded Knee Siege: 1973: AIM

In the summer of 1968, two hundred members of the American Indian community came together for a meeting to discuss various issues that Indian people of the time were dealing with on an everyday basis. Among these issues were, police brutality, high unemployment rates, and the Federal Government’s policies concerning American Indians.

 

From this meeting came the birth of the American Indian Movement, commonly known as AIM. With this came the emergence of AIM leaders, such as Dennis Banks and Clyde Bellecourt to name a few.

 

Little did anyone know that AIM would become instrumental in shaping not only the path of American Indians across the country, but the eyes of the world would follow AIM protests through the occupation at Alcatraz through the Trail of Broken Treaties, to the final conflict of the 1868 Sioux treaty of the Black Hills. This conflict would begin on February 27, 1973 and last seventy-one days. The occupation became known in history, as the Siege at Wounded Knee….

http://siouxme.com/siege.html

 

Chata/Choctaw Chief Warhorse pt.3

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnXWRx_2zKM&feature=related

LEONARD PELTIER – AN AMERICAN POLITICAL PRISONER
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fuwe3yuXh7E

The Beat Goes On..Tribute to Leonard Peltier
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZsQzepS5MQ

John Trudell On Leonard Peltier
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0uMJkCGRUw

Thanksgiving: A Native American View

By Jacqueline Keeler, Pacific News Service
Posted on January 1, 2000, Printed on November 22, 2011

I celebrate the holiday of Thanksgiving. This may surprise those people who wonder what Native Americans think of this official U.S. celebration of the survival of early arrivals in a European invasion that culminated in the death of 10 to 30 million native people. Thanksgiving to me has never been about Pilgrims. When I was six, my mother, a woman of the Dineh nation, told my sister and me not to sing “Land of the Pilgrim’s pride” in “America the Beautiful.” Our people, she said, had been here much longer and taken much better care of the land. We were to sing “Land of the Indian’s pride” instead. I was proud to sing the new lyrics in school, but I sang softly. It was enough for me to know the difference. At six, I felt I had learned something very important. As a child of a Native American family, you are part of a very select group of survivors, and I learned that my family possessed some “inside” knowledge of what really happened when those poor, tired masses came to our homes. When the Pilgrims came to Plymouth Rock, they were poor and hungry — half of them died within a few months from disease and hunger. When Squanto, a Wampanoag man, found them, they were in a pitiful state. He spoke English, having traveled to Europe, and took pity on them. Their English crops had failed. The native people fed them through the winter and taught them how to grow their food. These were not merely “friendly Indians.” They had already experienced European slave traders raiding their villages for a hundred years or so, and they were wary — but it was their way to give freely to those who had nothing. Among many of our peoples, showing that you can give without holding back is the way to earn respect. Among the Dakota, my father’s people, they say, when asked to give, “Are we not Dakota and alive?” It was believed that by giving there would be enough for all — the exact opposite of the system we live in now, which is based on selling, not giving. To the Pilgrims, and most English and European peoples, the Wampanoags were heathens, and of the Devil. They saw Squanto not as an equal but as an instrument of their God to help his chosen people, themselves. Since that initial sharing, Native American food has spread around the world. Nearly 70 percent of all crops grown today were originally cultivated by Native American peoples. I sometimes wonder what they ate in Europe before they met us. Spaghetti without tomatoes? Meat and potatoes without potatoes? And at the “first Thanksgiving” the Wampanoags provided most of the food — and signed a treaty granting Pilgrims the right to the land at Plymouth, the real reason for the first Thanksgiving. What did the Europeans give in return? Within 20 years European disease and treachery had decimated the Wampanoags. Most diseases then came from animals that Europeans had domesticated. Cowpox from cows led to smallpox, one of the great killers of our people, spread through gifts of blankets used by infected Europeans. Some estimate that diseases accounted for a death toll reaching 90 percent in some Native American communities. By 1623, Mather the elder, a Pilgrim leader, was giving thanks to his God for destroying the heathen savages to make way “for a better growth,” meaning his people. In stories told by the Dakota people, an evil person always keeps his or her heart in a secret place separate from the body. The hero must find that secret place and destroy the heart in order to stop the evil. I see, in the “First Thanksgiving” story, a hidden Pilgrim heart. The story of that heart is the real tale than needs to be told. What did it hold? Bigotry, hatred, greed, self-righteousness? We have seen the evil that it caused in the 350 years since. Genocide, environmental devastation, poverty, world wars, racism. Where is the hero who will destroy that heart of evil? I believe it must be each of us. Indeed, when I give thanks this Thursday and I cook my native food, I will be thinking of this hidden heart and how my ancestors survived the evil it caused. Because if we can survive, with our ability to share and to give intact, then the evil and the good will that met that Thanksgiving day in the land of the Wampanoag will have come full circle. And the healing can begin. Jacqueline Keeler is a member of the Dineh Nation and the Yankton Dakota Sioux. Her work has appeared in Winds of Change, an American Indian journal.

http://www.alternet.org/story/4391/

Nov 02

Obama’s Legacy of Shame

By andreaNo Comments

by Stephen Lendman

 

Promising change after eight Bush/Republican years, Obama delivered betrayal.

 

With congressional Democrats, he exceeded Bush’s harshness, lawlessness, belligerency, and public trust betrayal.

 

He violating every major domestic and foreign issue promise made. As a result, he’s been complicit in:

  • looting the nation’s wealth, wrecking the economy, and consigning growing millions to impoverishment without jobs, homes, savings, social services, or futures;

 

  • giving Wall Street crooks greater money power, disguised as financial reform;

 

  • waging multiple imperial wars and occupations, spending more on militarism than the rest of the world combined at a time America has no enemies;

 

  • belligerently ousting Honduran President Manuel Zelaya and Libya’s Gaddafi;

 

  • promoting regime change in Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Lebanon, and elsewhere against independent leaders, while continuing support for the world’s most ruthless, corrupt tyrants;

 

  • presiding over a bogus democracy under a homeland police state apparatus;

 

  • continuing Bush’s worst lawless policies; adding more of his own, including indefinite detentions without charge, and deploying Special Forces death squads in over 120 countries to kill targeted suspects, including Americans;

 

  • targeting whistleblowers, dissenters, Muslims, Latino immigrants, and environmental and animal rights activists called terrorists;

 

  • illegally spying on Americans more aggressively than Bush;

 

  • destroying decades of hard won labor rights;

 

  • waging class war to destroy Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, public and private pensions, as well as other New Deal and Great Society gains;

 

  • wanting more aggressive media control than Nixon, according to veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas;

 

  • stiff-arming budget-strapped states and distressed households;

 

  • four years into a Main Street Depression, none of the millions of promised new jobs were created at a time real unemployment approaches 23%.

 

  • imposing austerity when vital stimulus is needed;

 

  • planning new cuts to sustain Wall Street, militarism, favoritism, waste, fraud, and other rewards for America’s top 1%;

 

  • wanting education commodified, government’s responsibility for it ended, and making it another business profit center;

 

  • enacting healthcare reform that taxes more, provides less, places profits above human need, and leaves a broken system in place; and

 

  • promoting “shared sacrifice,” forcing worker sacrifices to let America’s super-rich share.

 

As a result, Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protests fill hundreds of cities nationwide, raging against an unjust system too corrupted to fix.

 

OWS activists “protest for an American revolution,” because nothing less will work. Mayors deploy goon squads against them. Violent police crackdowns follow.

 

On October 26, Oakland, CA police attacked nonviolent protesters with tear gas, flash grenades, beanbag shotguns, and rubber bullets. Officers also threatened use of unspecified “chemical agents.”

 

Palestine came to Oakland’s 14th and Broadway. Veterans Against War member Scott Olsen sustained a serious skull fracture when struck on the head by a tear gas canister. He remains hospitalized awaiting surgery.

 

Ahead of the incident, Oakland Mayor Jean Quan defended city police, saying:

 

“I commend Chief Jordan for a generally peaceful resolution to a situation that deteriorated and concerned our community.”

 

Later she defended police violence, claiming they acted defensively. She lied. So did police officials saying protesters threw rocks, bottles and paint.

 

Across America, police violence and brutality are commonplace. Daily incidents occur. On January 1, 2009, Oakland police murdered Oscar Grant. Videotape evidence proved it. Five bystanders taped it.

 

Cops rarely are held accountable, even for cold-blooded murder. Endemic police violence brutalizes Americans. Eye-witness and videotape evidence shows nonviolent people tasered with 50,000 electrical volts. Deaths and injuries result.

 

Other incidents involve false arrests, painful cuffing, beatings, shootings, tear gas, stun grenades, rubber bullets, menacing attack dogs, and other forms of violence against society’s most vulnerable. They include people of color, students, workers, and others wanting social justice.

 

On February 4, 1999, New York cops shot African immigrant Amadou Diallo 41 times. Nineteen bullets struck and killed him while he stood unarmed peacefully in the vestibule of his apartment building.

 

On December 4, 1969, Chicago police murdered Black Panther activists Fred Hampton and Mark Clark while they slept.

 

Thousands of other nonviolent political victims fill America’s gulag prison system, the world’s largest by far.

 

In 1994, Congress passed the Police Accountability Act. It was incorporated into the 1994 Violent Crime and Law Enforcement Act, requiring compilation of national data on excessive police force. Nonetheless, Congress refused to fund it.

 

Moreover, local police aren’t required to keep records and submit them on Justice Department request. Nor is police violence and excessive force criminalized. Enforcement mechanisms are absent, and national security and border integrity related matters have carte blanche authority to commit murder.

 

Anything perhaps also goes to protect Wall Street and other corporate favorites from beneficial social change.

 

DOJ/FBI Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) data include thousands of police misconduct reports, many thousands of affected victims, hundreds of fatalities, and an average 15 or more known daily incidents, or one very 96 minutes.

 

This, in fact, represents the tip of the iceberg as data collection falls way short. Evidence also shows coverups, lax discipline, and failure to adhere to official policies and processes.

 

As a result, serious civil rights violations are commonplace, and why not. America became a police state, especially post-9/11 when repressive laws trashed constitutional freedoms.

 

The USA Patriot Act alone violates key Bill of Rights protections, including:

  • Fifth and Fourteen Amendment due process rights by permitting indefinite detentions of undocumented immigrants that now apply to anyone anywhere in the world, including US citizens for any reason or none at all.

 

  • First Amendment freedom of association rights the Supreme Court considers essential free expression. Now anyone may be charged and prosecuted for their alleged association with an “undesirable group.”

 

  • Fourth Amendment protections from unreasonable searches and seizures. As a result, personal privacy rights were lost.

 

  • Authorized unchecked government surveillance powers to access personal records, monitor financial transactions, as well as student, medical and other personal records.

 

“Sneak and peak” searches are now permissible through:

  • “delayed notice” warrants;

 

  • roving wiretaps;

 

  • email tracking; and

 

  • internet and cell phone surveillance.

 

In addition:

  • secret evidence may be obtained lawlessly and withheld from defense lawyers;

 

  • immigrants may be denied their right to counsel if unable to provide their own; and

 

  • built-in safeguards are ended to let domestic criminal and foreign intelligence operations share information so CIA can now spy domestically.

 

For the first time, in fact, the Act also created the federal crime of “domestic terrorism,” applicable to US citizens as well as aliens.

 

It states criminal law violations are considered domestic terrorist acts if they aim to “influence (government policy) by intimidation or coercion (or) intimidate or coerce a civilian population.”

 

As a result, anti-war, global justice, environmental and animal rights activism, civil disobedience, and dissent of any kind, including OWS protests, may be called “domestic terrorism.”

 

Notably under the Patriot Act’s Section 806, with no hearing or notice, authorities may confiscate or freeze all foreign and domestic assets of any individual, entity, or organization accused of engaging in, planning, supporting, concealing, or perpetrating any act called domestic or international terrorism against America – even by protesting nonviolently.

 

Other provisions are just as harsh, using vague language. It gives authorities wide latitude to twist the law perversely and advantageously against anyone for anything called terrorism, whether or not true.

 

Bipartisan complicity passed other police state laws. Any may be used against peaceful OWS protesters, especially if their numbers grow and stay the course for uncompromising social changes.

 

Earlier reports hinted at what’s coming. In December 2007, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination published one titled, “In the Shadows of the War on Terror: Persistent Police Brutality and Abuse of People of Color in the United States,” saying:

 

“Since this Committee’s 2001 review of the US, during which it expressed concern regarding incidents of police brutality and deaths in custody at the hands of US law enforcement officers, there have been dramatic increases in law enforcement powers in the name of waging the “war on terror (resulting in) the use of excessive force against people of color….(It’s not only continued post-9/11), but has worsened in both practice and severity” – a NAACP representative saying it’s “the worst I’ve seen in 50 years.”

 

On April 4, 2007, Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism’s Ryan Gallagher headlined, “Study: Police abuse goes unpunished,” saying:

 

From 2002 – 2004, over “10,000 complaints of police abuse were filed with Chicago police….but only 19 resulted in meaningful disciplinary action, a new study asserts.”

 

According to Gerald Frazier, president of Citizens Alert, it reflects “not only the appearance of influence and cover-up,” but clear evidence that city residents are being abused, not protected, despite the department’s official motto being “We Serve and Protect.”

 

Police notoriously attack nonviolent global justice protests against the IMF, World Bank, G-8, G-20, and WTO. Others demonstrating peacefully at national political conventions also harsh police crackdowns and mass arrests.

 

In 2005, the New York ACLU’s “Rights and Wrongs at the RNC,” reported on New York police attacking peaceful protesters at the Republican National Convention.

 

Free expression and assembly rights were denied. Over 1,800 arrests were made, including observers, members of the media and bystanders, the most ever at a national political convention.

 

Mistreatment resulted, including detentions in unsafe conditions, denial of medical care, painful handcuffing for long periods, and other lawless abuses.

 

At issue is protecting wealth and privilege from populist change. Social justice activism is suppressed. Those with power want to keep it. Nothing’s yielded unless forced.

 

Wall Street tops the pecking order. Money power in private hands to make more of it lets them occupy and control Washington.

 

What they want, they get. Ordinary people lose out. Rage against the system demands change. Getting it requires focusing on issue one – returning money power to public hands as the Constitution’s Article 1, Section 8 mandates.

 

Succeeding demands organized people putting their bodies on the line against police violence. Key is staying the course, knowing that social justice depends on returning money power to public hands where it belongs.

 

If that’s achieved, everything else is possible. Otherwise, it’s not!

 

A Final Comment

 

On October 25, a new Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report showed America’s richest 1% tripled their income from 1979 – 2007. They also doubled their national income share at the expense of the bottom 80% losing out.

 

Findings also concluded that the top 20% of US households increased their national income share. The other 80% declined. Inequality grew to unprecedented levels.

 

People of color and youths are hardest hit. Notably the study ended before Main Street’s Depression began in 2008. Updated findings will show greater than ever disparities.

 

Obama’s done nothing to address them. He’s beholden solely to America’s monied interests, notably those on Wall Street.

 

In the 1960s, economist Arthur Okum began calculating America’s Misery Index by adding unemployment and inflation rates for a sense of public pain or lack of it in good times.

 

In October, it hit a record high above 25%, exceeding its May 2011 25% and earlier June 1980 22% peaks. Given current conditions absent policy measures to improve them, analysts see it going higher.

 

Yet, on October 18, Obama outrageously told ABC News he supports OWS protesters, saying:

 

“The most important thing we can do right now (is) letting people know that we understand their struggles and we are on their side….”

 

For nearly three years, he systematically waged war on working Americans, targeted organized labor for destruction, and focused solely serving wealth and power.

 

That’s his legacy of shame. Polls show OWS protesters know it. Some people can be fooled some of the time, others all of it.

 

However, Fordham University Professor Costas Panagopoulos surveyed New York protesters and found three-fourths angry about Obama’s performance.

 

His research’s only surprise is that all of them don’t condemn his fealty to Wall Street and other corporate favorites at their expense.

 

Give it time. Perhaps later nationwide OWS surveys will show practically no one supports him. Why should they when he spurns them on all issues mattering most.

 

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

 

Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

 

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/.

Oct 26

A World without European Conquest, White Supremacy & Chattel Slavery

By No Comments

A World without European Conquest, White Supremacy & Chattel Slavery

By Solomon Comissiong

Hip Hop music has often served as a reliable vehicle for thought stimulation, especially Hip Hop music (rap) that the white dominated corporate media attempts to marginalize. This kind of rap serves as a direct threat to the concentration of economic power (and therefore political power), within the United States. It should be understood that within any capitalistic cesspool, money buys you political power. This is an assurance that routinely keeps the poor ultimately excluded from any significant shift in structure needed to alter their overall living standards. This economic and political power is almost entirely concentrated within the hands of white men—institutional racism is a pillar of “American Society”. In essence, these kinds of socially unequal conditions are what Hip Hop was born out of. Hip Hop is the manifestation of resistance and innovation throughout black and brown communities. And as Hip Hop evolved it became more and more of a tool for political expression, cultural edification, and, yes, radicalization via critical thought and analysis. That critical thought is what; once again, rap music led me to when recently listening to a song entitled “All Black Everything” by Hip Hop artist Lupe Fiasco.

The song (All Black Everything) takes listeners on an almost four minute journey exploring the possibilities of a world without there ever being chattel slavery imposed on Africans by the hands at Europeans, a world free of institutional racism and white supremacy. The song immediately invokes critical thought—which is exactly why it will most likely never find its way on rotation of any corporate radio station. It is commonplace within corporate media outlets that play Hip Hop music to continually dumb down their audiences with music that is not only overtly racist and misogynistic, but also psychologically debilitating. These media outlets are, in essence, psychological crack peddlers, routinely handing out doses of destructive music to youth throughout America. Lupe Fiasco’s “All Black Everything”, is antithetical to the aims and motives of the likes of Viacom (BET, MTV, VH-1), Clear Channel, and Radio One. It is the kind of song that would precipitate a lot of analytical thought from youth, especially Black/African youth. For instance the chorus (hook) of the song is:

You would never know
If you could ever be
If you never try
You would never see
Stayed in Africa
We ain’t never leave
So there were no slaves in our history
Were no slave ships, were no misery, call me crazy, or isn’t he
See I fell asleep and I had a dream, it was all black everything

The song goes on to imagine a world where Malcolm X was never assassinated, the US constitution was written by W.E.B. Du Bois (and not by a gang of slave owning amoral white men), and of course black/African people were never kidnapped, placed in bondage for hundreds of years, and forced to endure the deadliest Holocaust know to man, the African Holocaust. Now why in the hell would the white dominated corporate media ever want to play something like that? They are a part of America’s establishment, thus they willingly profit from black/African suffering (physical and psychological). These outlets could give a damn what affects the narrowly focused music they only play, has on the minds of black/African youth. Conversely US corporate media is not concerned, one iota, how the stereotypically racist images they peddle, contribute to the shaping of public policy. The corporate media almost exclusively promotes the one sided images of black/African people as pimps, sexually promiscuous, crime addicted and anti-intellectual. This supports Euro-America’s overall perception of black/African people. These kinds of images make white people feel much more at ease. Imagining black/African men pointing guns at one another is a much more comforting thought than those same black/African men politically organizing ways by which they can overthrow an institutionally racist and destructive system that continues to rob them of their freedom to truly determine their own destinies. Thoughts of the latter are terrible nightmares for most whites in America, because it represents a direct threat to their white privilege and thus their illegally manufactured power structure. Even most white so-called liberals are petrified of losing grip of a white dominated political and economic structure that was established by way of stolen land and stolen labor. It is a structure that continues to subsist on a gluttonous diet of racially based inequities and injustices.

The United States may foster a society where the system of institutional racism has been perfected, however similar structures can also be found throughout the globe, especially in lands where Europeans have plundered. European global conquest has had a most deadly impact on hundreds of millions of people of color. However, what if it never happened? What if the so-called white man never viciously ventured onto lands that were not his? How many lives could have been saved? How many people of color, presently, would have averted mass suffering? These are the kinds of thoughts that the lyrics from “All Black Everything” helped evoke in my mind. Songs mean different things to different people, however as a black/African man in America, I am always dreaming of liberation as well as an end to institutional racism. “All Black Everything” was an ideal playground for some of my pent up thoughts.

There are countless prosperity based situations that probably would have happened had it not been for exploitative based European encroachment, on land that was foreign to them. The following are but a few of those wishful thoughts… Well, for starters, the communal and agrarian based societies that existed in places like Turtle Island (North America) and Alkebulan (Africa) would have most likely continued to grow and thrive. The indigenous people in these places lived within their means. They worked together as a collective. They had great reverence for nature and the communities they lived within. Without the so-called official term of “socialism”, these societies were largely based on what most would now define as socialist or communal based. These societies needed no white man to validate their way of life with a term for it; they simply lived it. There was no notion of owning land as we now understand it within a capitalistic framework. European concepts of things like capitalism were as foreign to these societies as the European invaders that would eventually destroy their land and tens of millions of people. These European thugs, often euphemistically called “settlers” or “pilgrims”, raped, murdered, and maimed astronomical numbers of human beings. They often did this despite being welcomed with open arms by indigenous people of color who were clearly far more civilized than they were themselves.

Despite claiming to bring “civilization” to the black, red, and brown people of the world; they only brought death and destruction. They were the barbarians, and their actions more than proved that. These pathologically sadistic people often justified their campaigns of mass murder by quoting verses from their numerously rewritten “bible”. They were well adept at creating their own interpretations, especially if it meant stealing land that was not theirs or enslaving people with vastly different values than their own. Prior to the European plunder of places like the continent of Africa, magnificent civilizations and societies existed such as Great Zimbabwe, Kemet (ancient Egypt) and Timbuktu. These places were rooted in knowledge, culture and technology. Alkebulan (Africa) is the birthplace of things like science, mathematics, and philosophy—those who say otherwise are either fools or liars. Africa then, as it is now, was rich in natural resources. European conquest was largely based on theft of other people’s resources, no matter what the costs. Dreaming of a world without European conquest it should be easy to envision the further development of science and technology, as well as medicine. Without European interference, indigenous people of color, the globe over, most likely would have continued to thrive, develop, and innovate.

Contrary to the lies frequently taught in US classrooms, without European global conquest the world would be a far better place. Entire populations of people were completely destroyed due to these invaders’ devilish actions. Various species of animals would not have been forced to the brink of extinction due to the out of control greed of these people—maintaining balance with Mother Earth was well off their collective radar. And the world would most likely not be in the perpetual state of war that it is today. This narrative of European conquest is seldom told to children in America, which is why; unfortunately, the cycle of destruction has no end in sight.

If one follows the limited and often mythological Euro-American narrative you will believe that the “Dark Ages” impacted the entire globe. This is far from the truth. African, Asian, and societies throughout the “Americas” were prospering. The Black Plague killed between 40-60 percent of Europe’s population. This European catastrophe sent that region into an all out upheaval that harvested everything from cannibalism to mass murder. The author is not reveling in this series of events, I am only pointing out the double standards and narrative inconsistencies seldom confronted. People of color have routinely been described as unclean, uncivilized and barbaric. Interestingly, soap, like so many other inventions, was created outside of the European world. Those same unkempt Europeans described indigenous people of color as sub-human. However, when Europeans began their journeys to prosperous lands, only unfamiliar to them, they routinely brought turmoil, destruction and disease with them. Diseases, such as small pox, were unknown to these indigenous people, which meant they had little to no immunity to fight the viruses. Europeans, like Lord Jeffery Amherst, soon began to purposefully hand out small pox infected blankets to indigenous people of North America. Do these actions sound “civilized or cultured”? The ways and actions of these cretins were nothing short of barbaric. Entire native populations were killed because of this and for this reason I cannot help but imagine what could have been if European invaders never set foot on soil throughout the “Americas”. So much precious life and humanity was lost, all in the name of European conquest and greed. This horrifying, yet true, tale is not told within US history classrooms. The American history lessons taught in these classrooms are stories used to perpetuate white supremacy. They are fairy tales of the worst kind.

American children are mass indoctrinated with lies and fairy tales of European and Euro-American conquest. These fairy tales have even been shaped into holidays, such as Columbus Day, Thanksgiving, and the Fourth of July. They glorify everything from the genocide of indigenous people throughout the Americas to white people celebrating “independence” meanwhile millions of Africans were still enslaved within stolen US borders. For any Black person to refer to the likes of George Washington as their “Founding Father” is a prime example of the effectiveness of this mass indoctrination. George Washington was a proud slave owner and killer of indigenous people. Given the fact that America promotes the life and times of people like Washington and Columbus; should there be any shock when the US government orchestrates the mass murdering of black and brown people in Libya, Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan? And countless others have lost their lives in places like Zimbabwe and Iraq due to brutal economic sanctions such as the so-called Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act of 2001. America’s imposed economic sanctions and foreign economic policies continue to devastate “developing nations” and the people of color who mostly occupy them. Most Americans know nothing about this perspective in regards to their government’s actions— unfortunately they believe whatever the corporate media tells them. They are fantastically obedient. The US government routinely commits or financially backs the extrajudicial assassinations of heads of state just as they did with Muammar Gaddafi, Patrice Lumumba, Salvador Allende, and many others. The vast majority of Americans accept these injustices by way of their complicity and obsequiousness.

The destructive path we find ourselves on has much to do with the past and how the lessons of the past have yet to be learned. The past has become a current event. Glorification of mass genocide caused by European conquest is something that occurs on a frequent basis in places like the United States. US society continues to show no respect for the decedents of people trampled upon in order for that conquest to occur. Native Americans have been cast off onto reservations that are violently devoid of any adequate resources.

African-Americans make up the bulk of the US prison population. As a matter of fact, 1 in 8 of all of the world’s prisoners is an African-American. Euro-Americans have replaced chattel slavery with a prison industry complex that devours black and brown people. And people of color throughout the globe continue to feel the wrath of centuries of European conquest. When European criminals from Britain were cast off to Australia they summarily raped and murdered tens of thousands of black aboriginals and subsequently stole that continent for their own. Today the descendents of those black aboriginals are catching hell from white Australians. Australia remains a very unequal society with the whites on top and the black Aboriginals on the bottom. Europeans also virtually wiped out the entire indigenous population of Tasmania.

Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia (among many other places) have all been ravaged by European conquest, in one-way or another. They have had countless lives taken because of that ruthless conquest, which still goes on today. These regions have had European religious ideals imposed upon them, ideals that completely went against their existence as an independent people. European Christianity was vile and evil to its mythological core. It was the Catholic Church that still stands as one of the largest slave trading institutions ever. Without European Christianity imposed upon indigenous people of color, throughout the white man’s global conquest, we can safely imagine a world free of the hypocritical tentacles that came from missionaries and violent invaders. Christianity continues to retain a powerful grip upon the minds of people of color; most cannot even trace the point in which they became “Christians”. Christianity, for instance, was imposed on enslaved Africans for the purpose of indoctrination and pacification. They were trained to place the white man/woman much closer to God than they did themselves. God, in essence, became white. If we closely examine the things many Europeans did to people of color, in the name of religion, we can safely assume that the entity they worshiped was, in fact, the devil. This devil has shown its ugly face in the 21st century as war.

Little has ideologically changed today. Europeans and Euro-Americans are still waging wars of imperialism throughout the globe. In the days of chattel slavery the white slave master was able to find some black slaves willing to compromise the interests of his/her people. In 2011, the US has numerous black elected officials who are more than willing to serve the interests of their masters by waging wars in places like North Africa. Perhaps if European conquest never occurred many people of color might still have their minds—-far too many seem to have had them co-opted by a European value system that is directly working against their communities’ interests.

Unfortunately the mass carnage and loss of life that has occurred by way of European global conquest cannot be reversed. However, the destruction of lives and societies does not have to be in vain, if we all decide to abandon the ongoing legacy of European conquest. Reclaiming our collective identity, as human beings, will be an important first step, followed by the repudiation of any value system that glorifies slave owners, rapists, murders and plunderers. We must envision a better society, one free of injustice, war, white supremacy and institutional racism. The vision must be followed by political action aimed at reclaiming our destinies, especially those of us who identify as people of color. These are the thoughts much of the white American power structure frowns upon, which is why they methodically marginalized Hip Hop music riddled with political or cultural darts. The war on politically oriented Hip Hop is not simply a war on a popular music; it is a war for the minds of black and brown youth everywhere. These youth, if mentally freed, represent resistance and therefore substantive change. If various rap songs can stimulate some of us to deepen our thoughts and imagine the possibilities of a world that never had chattel slavery then we should all begin to envision a future without white supremacy, war, and institutional racism. Visionary thoughts lead to revolutionary actions—it’s time to start thinking, once again, as a community with a unified mission that leads directly toward real liberation, equality and justice for ALL. Our (Humanity) prosperous futures depend on it.

Solomon Comissiong is an educator, community activist, author, public speaker and the host of the Your World News media collective (www.yourworldnews.org). He can be reached at: solo@yourworldnews.org

Sep 21

The Revolution Felt Around the World

By andreaNo Comments

We are witnessing a time of radical political change all over the world. South America is leading the way in terms of regional progressive movements while Libya has its sovereignty violated by the West. The U.S. is already being exposed to campaign promises of more budget cuts and the elimination of working class rights. Egypt has deposed Mubarak only to see the military hold control and throw their old leader to the masses while continuing the same type of regime he represented. Bahrain is seeing repression and Syria seems destined to follow the path of Libya and Iraq.

One event that may be lost in the light of such a tumultuous time in global politics, despite its importance, are the 2011 Nicaraguan elections taking place November Sixth. Nicaragua’s importance fits the usual profile for most conflict zones around the world. The most unstable places on Earth are those richest in resources. Since the world capitalist epidemic eclipsed feudalisms hold on the world, lesser-developed nations all over the globe have been targeted for exploitation by the prototypical capitalist powers. Most nations that have suffered the worst degrees of aggression are rich in natural resources or are of geopolitical importance. Nicaragua has shared in the doomed fate of these countries because it is in a resource rich region, and more importantly, has been able to defy a world power for decades. Despite its overwhelming popularity, the U.S. has not ceased destabilization efforts against the FSLN revolutionary government of Nicaragua since its victory in the eighties.  The Sandinista revolution successfully overthrew the government, of Anastasio Somoza, in 1979 and had to deal with subsequent hostilities from the US government. The most famous manifestation of U.S. aggression was the US funded Contra insurgent force. The decades of war and oppression were brought upon the small country because it was a dangerous example to the rest of the oppressed continent. If tiny Nicaragua could defy the colossus of the north, what would a regional alliance be able to accomplish? Nicaragua has earned its place in history because it has done the impossible. It has withstood war and economic terrorism by the worlds leading super power and continues to fight for its liberty. To understand the uprising in Nicaragua it is important to understand its history and the forces that have led to a conflict for the nations future.

Nicaragua is a small country in Central America whose abject poverty has been caused by its strategic geopolitical location, abundance of natural resources, and the private interests that exploited them. During the Early days of Spanish conquest, the indigenous population was decimated by the military power and diseases of Europe under the guise of Christian prosperity. An example of the poverty caused by the territories natural wealth was the gold in Nicaragua’s Rio Bluefield’s, which led to the forceful displacement of the indigenous Carca tribe from the wetland and riverside territories. Since the landing of Columbus, the Indigenous have been displaced and forced into slavery in order to build up the capital used by the merchants of the Triangular Trade in order to depose Europe’s Monarchs. Europe, Christianity (namely Catholicism) and the globalized “free market” as administered by the World Trade Organization (WTO), International Monetary Fund (IMF), and World Bank (WB) have turned the region into a business asset and its people into a dependent work force. By 1823 Central America had separated itself from Mexico due to political differences and Mexico’s separation from the old colonial control of Spain and the Catholic Church.  In 1856, an agent for U.S. bankers Morgan and Garrison named William Walker appointment himself as president of Nicaragua with the support of the U.S. government. The United States president at the time, William Taft echoed the sense of dominion over the region by saying “The whole hemisphere will be ours in fact as, by virtue of superiority of race, it already is ours morally.” This culture of conquest planted the seeds of revolution that sprouted Augusto Sandino, and subsequently, grew into the movement whose branches extended to the most remote regions of the land. The Sandinista Liberation Front molded itself into a force capable of disrupting a legacy of domination and shares an exclusive place in history, alongside the Mexican and Cuban revolutions, as the only Latin American uprisings that have completely dismantled their oppressor’s armies.

This movement’s humble beginnings started with the rebellion of the guerilla fighter, Augusto Cesar Sandino. Sandino’s contempt for the U.S. invasion of Nicaragua gained momentum because of the appeal he had to the oppressed Nicaraguans whose livelihood’s have been stolen and exploited since the landing of the Spanish. Sandino combated 12,000 U.S. Marines and the Nicaraguan National Guard using machetes, stones and stolen firearms. The formidable Nicaraguan rebels were made up of farmers and artisans whose industries were dominated by a world power, foreign capital, and a national ruling class that benefited by selling its countries natural resources and labor. This crude army from Las Segovias gained international recognition for their defiance of a superior military power and grew audacious because of it. According to Eduardo Galeano in his book Open Veins of Latin America; Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, “The guerillas sang, to the tune of Adelita: In Nicaragua, gentlemen, the mouse kills the cat.” This rebellion would be defeated a few years later. Sandino’s death would give false hope to U.S. imperialism and become the seeds of a revolution that shook the world. This revolution would by no means end U.S. attempts to control Nicaragua’s fate and profit from its misery.

The U.S. military presence Sandino fought against ceased in 1933. As part of the United States’ “Good Neighbor Policy”, the Marines left Nicaragua but left a well-trained and armed National Guard of about 3,000 troops. Augusto Sandino was summoned to Managua by the president but was ambushed by, then head of the National Guard, Anastasio Somoza. Somoza later admitted that U.S. ambassador Arthur Bliss Lane had requested the assassination. As a result of Somoza’s compliance, he became the largest coffee producer in the region and president of Nicaragua. The Somoza dynasty would become the catalyst that resurrected Sandino in the form of the liberation front. In 1979, the second Anastasio Somoza had enjoyed dominion over Nicaragua with the support of the U.S. government during the Carter administration. Somoza became infamous because of the brutal tactics employed by his national guard in order to secure foreign corporate interests in the country. This abuse of power and blatant violation of human rights led to the rebirth of Sandino’s struggle for Nicaraguan self-determination. The new revolution adopted Sandino’s fight and name. The Sandinista Liberation Front was made up of farmers, artisans, students, teachers, doctors, and members of the nation that varied in socio-economic conditions but bound by a nationalist pride and struggle. The Sandinistas had their roots in Nicaragua’s first university, located in the capitol city of Managua. The Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Nicaragua fostered the seeds of Nicaraguan freedom. The National Guard was quick to respond to the social movement using sanguinary tactics to instill terror into the population. Somoza had become synonymous abuse of power and the White House began to rethink its support of the regime. Washington’s ideal outcome was to do away with Somoza while salvaging the structure of exploitation behind him. The Sandinista revolution devastated the status quo and did the impossible.

As the U.S. made a transition from the Carter to the Reagan era, U.S. hostility took on a new face. Reagan preached the dangers of revolution in tiny Nicaragua and the importance of quelling any dissent with all the might of the U.S. Empire. The Reagan administration referred to the Sandinista cause as a “revolution with no borders” and claimed that it was inspired and supported by the joint efforts of Cuba and the USSR. During diplomatic relations between Cuba and Nicaragua, Fidel Castro sent professionals ranging from engineers to doctors in order to help the small nation get on its feet after a hard fought war for independence. Fidel Castro also financed the biggest sugar mill in the country at favorable rates and at its inauguration announced that the technologically advanced mill would be free of charge. Diplomacy between Nicaragua and other rival nations infuriated Washington to the point that it exhausted the funds allotted by congress to wage war against Nicaragua. The White House funded the Contra insurgent force and used the CIA to maximize their efficiency in their war against the FSLN. With finances exhausted and the Contra force impotent against the might of the Sandinistas, Washington set a new precedent for immorality with the tactics it employed against Nicaragua. At the time, the U.S. government had placed a CIA operative and drug dealer as the president of Panama in order to guarantee its dominion of the Panama Canal Zone. The U.S. backed president, Manuel Noriega, was key to financing the war against Nicaragua. The CIA used Noriega’s drug trafficking connections to smuggle arms into Nicaragua for the Contra force to use. The CIA also used Nicaraguan exiles living in the US, with political asylum, that had connections with Colombian drug cartels to fund the war. They flew Colombian cocaine to major U.S. cities in order to be sold to street gangs and fuel the crack epidemic of the eighties. The revenue was used to fund the Contra force and Noriega’s smuggling operation. The U.S. also sold weapons to both sides of the Iraq/Iran war in order to raise funds for the campaign against Nicaragua. This would become known as the Iran-Contra Affair in which Oliver North took full responsibility. He was convicted to community service and probation before having the conviction overturned and being hired by Fox News. After billions of dollars and wasted efforts, the U.S. decided to employ diplomacy and called for elections to be held in order to legitimize Sandinista leadership. This would mark a new type of intervention that would become the model for future destabilization efforts like the modern example of Venezuela and the upcoming Nicaraguan elections.

After the elections had become Washington’s goal, they had no problem admitting their past current and future involvement in Nicaragua’s domestic policy. On October 4th 1989, California Democrat George Miller stated that “We are going to participate in these elections with billions of dollars, we financed the Contras, destroyed their (Nicaragua) economy, took Miss Chamorro and funded her newspaper, funded her whole operation, and now we are going to guarantee the best elections that the U.S. can provide”. U.S. capital reached Nicaragua through a number of channels but was aimed towards achieving one goal, the overthrow of the Sandinista government. US congress along with the National Security Council (NSC) approved the financing of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE), National Democratic Institute (NDI), International Republican Institute (IRI), and a plethora of NGO’s. These NGO’s led by the NED, concentrated their funds in order to pay the fourteen opposition parties in Nicaragua to come together and support the candidate Washington hand picked. This union led to the creation of the Union Nacional Opositora (UNO) with Violetta Chamorro at the helm. The CIA also funded Nicaragua’s private media outlets, including the leading newspaper La Prensa, in order to seal Nicaragua’s fate. The elections of 1990 bore the fruit of Washington’s labor and ousted the Sandinistas. The elation would not last for long, as today the FSLN has once again assumed its role as government of Nicaragua with Daniel Ortega as president. A new era of U.S. hostility was born with his victory and is evident by the $500,000 a month sent to Nicaraguan opposition forces in support of “democracy.”

The battle between Washington and the Sandinistas seems like a modern day version of David and Goliath. Ignoring the methods employed to combat the Sandinistas, many U.S. officials claim that the conflict is for the benefit of the Nicaraguan people; a theory that works on the premise that the end justifies the means. US intervention has brought war, monopolization of media outlets, deflation of Nicaraguan currency and has crippled the economy to the point that it paved the way for the Maquiladora (sweat shop) industry to come in and hire Nicaraguan women for a dollar a day in order to manufacture clothing sold in the U.S. at a 2,000% markup in some cases. The Sandinista government funded literacy campaigns that brought illiteracy down from 50+% to 12% in the eighties. The recent effects of Sandinista rule have marked the drop of families living in poverty (with under $2 a day) by an average of 50%. Families living in extreme poverty (under $1 a day) have dropped by an average of 30%. Nicaragua also joined the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas (ALBA). ALBA is a regional collaboration that includes, but not limited to, Ecuador, Bolivia, Cuba, Venezuela, St. Vincent, Antigua, and Honduras (prior to the military coup of 2009). ALBA is predominantly funded with Venezuelan petrodollars but counts on support from all member nations through finances, trade fortification, security and favorable business for national industry. ALBA has replaced the funding withdrawn by the U.S. in reaction to an FSLN win. The Sandinista government has fixed prices for energy utilities so that access is not exclusive, reduced malnutrition to an all time low, offered national industry subsidies reaching $70 million a year and all the while complied with all the free trade agreements and international laws and debts accrued by U.S. puppet regimes. The latest CID Gallup Poll has Sandinista candidate Daniel Ortega with 44% of the vote. Ortega has risen three points since the last poll and beats his closest opponent by twelve points.

In light of the overwhelming popular support for the FSLN, the U.S. refuses to give up and continues to utilize all resources for destabilization without having to wage another war. Nicaragua was designated by the U.S. to serve the international capitalist economy as a provider of cheap inputs in order to maximize the profits of the prototypical capitalist nations and multinational corporations. The Sandinistas have adopted Sandino’s resolution to defy the global ruling class in order to let Nicaragua chose her own destiny and break the shackles of exploitation that have bound her for over five hundred years.

 

Victor Martinez was raised in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles by his single mother. His family on his mother’s side comes from Guatemala and is Maya Quiche, indigenous to the Quetzaltenango highlands. His father is from El Salvador with mestizo roots. He is a transfer student at Los Angeles City College (LACC). As a political science major, he aspires to utilize his devotion to social justice and address the issues pertinent to his community on a national and international level. The problems he faced as a child were not specific to the “Latino” demographic that inhabits Silver Lake. They are inextricably linked to the social struggle of all underprivileged people of every color and in every corner of this planet. As a college student he has dedicated his free time to join popular movements. He is a charter member of the Students for Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP) chapter at Los Angeles City College; he volunteered in Guatemala with Asociacion Mujer Tejedora del Desarrollo (AMUTED) under Rosy Queme, he was a member of Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES) under Celina Benitez, and has organized with the Pasadena chapter of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) under Juan Jose Aguilar. Victor is serious about what he does and strives to develop himself in order to be in a position to offer something to the social justice movement.

 

Victor Martinez can be contacted via email/facebook at Kaibaman510@gmail.com.

 

Jul 04

Michelle Alexander: US Prisons and The New Jim Crow: Today in the era of colorblindness a new racial caste system has emerged

By DannyNo Comments

1901 picture of a ‘chain gang’ in Virginia.

On so-called ‘independence day’ it is important to keep in mind what litigator-turned-legal-scholar Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow (http://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/what.htm), argued at an event at Demos February 18, 2010: that is that we have not ended racial caste in America, we have simply redesigned it. She argues that the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary means of racial control, even as it formally adheres to the principle of color blindness.  

While we may laud the election of Barrack Obama as president of the US we still must acknowledge that the majority of young black men held captive  in disintegrating major American cities are now locked behind bars or have been labeled felons for life.

See Michelle’s speech at Demos on YouTube at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgM5NAq6cGI

Jul 04

Independence Day Hypocrisy

By No Comments

Independence Day Hypocrisy – by Stephen Lendman

 

All US federal holidays wreak of hypocrisy, representing  notions and events other than what they commemorate. Besides Christmas, none perhaps is more celebrated than when America became independent from Britain on July 4, 1776.

 

Coming in the summer, parades, outings, barbecues, other celebratory events, and baseball highlight the day for many – relaxing, not reflecting on the same independence we deny nations globally, waging imperial wars and other ways to prevent it.

 

July 4 also commemorates America’s history, liberation and traditions most people don’t know, never learned, or forgot. Instead – in school to the highest levels and through media managed news – they’ve been force fed distortions, half truths and illusions to believe what, in fact, isn’t true now and never was, a sanitized rewritten history, what historian Howard Zinn corrected in his “People’s History of the United States.”

 

First published in 1980, it became an extraordinary non-fiction best seller with over two million copies sold and counting, followed (in 2004) by “Voices of a People’s History of the United States,” presenting words and thoughts of labor and anti-war activists, anti-racists, feminists, socialists, and others rarely heard.

 

Zinn himself called his signature work “a biased account, one that leans in a certain direction. I am not troubled by that, because the mountain of history books under which we all stand leans so heavily in the other direction – so tremblingly respectful of state and statesmen and so disrespectful, by inattention, to people’s movements – that we need some counterforce to avoid being crushed into submission.”

 

His exhaustive, informative, and gloriously original work includes material on America’s Declaration of Independence and war waged for it not taught the way he did it.

 

In the July 2009 edition of The Progressive, he headlined an article, “Untold Truths About the American Revolution,” saying:

 

Was waging war then really worth it, taking perhaps 25,000 – 50,000 American lives, the “equivalent today to two and a half million (at the lower estimate) to get England off our backs.”

 

Canada ended British without war. So did Western Massachusetts farmers “driv(ing them out) without firing a single shot. They had assembled by the thousands and thousands around courthouses and colonial offices and they had just taken over (and) said goodbye to the British officials” nonviolently.

 

America’s revolution was much different, but who “gained what?” Most Americans were poor. “(T)he Founding Fathers were rather rich” with much different interests from ordinary people. “Do you think the Indians cared about independence” or Blacks held involuntarily as slaves?

 

“Slavery was there before (and) there after. Not only that, we wrote slavery into the Constitution. We legitimized it.”

 

“What about class divisions?” America was a racist class society then and remains one today to benefit elitist interests at the expense of working households, especially Black and Latino ones. “We try to pretend in this country that we’re all one happy family. We’re not.”

 

In fact, America’s revolution wasn’t “a simple affair of all of us against all of them,” any more than today, sending young men and women abroad to “liberate” countries for capital, slaughtering people to save them, ruining the lives, welfare and futures of thousands of US forces at the same whose minds and bodies are irreparably harmed by the experience.

 

As a result, Zinn said “(w)e’ve got to rethink this question of war and” decide it’s unacceptable, no matter what the reasons given, or the excuse.” In fact, they’re no more valid now than rallying Americans against Britain’s King George III, letting everything change but stay the same. The elite few always win against the ordinary many, but great pains are taken not to tell them.

 

As a result, young minds are programmed to believe in America’s exceptionalism, inherent goodness, and unique democratic values under governments of, by and for the people that never existed earlier or now.

 

In “Democracy for the Few,” Michael Parenti said “the Constitution was consciously designed as a conservative document” with provisions included or omitted to “resist the pressure of popular tides” and protect “a rising bourgeoisie(‘s)” freedom to “invest, speculate, trade, and accumulate wealth” the way things work for capital interests today.

 

In fact, it codified in law what politician, founding father, jurist and nation’s first Chief Supreme Court justice, John Jay, said the way things should be – that “The people who own the country ought to run it (for their benefit alone).”

 

It’s hardly reason to celebrate, especially today after decades of massive wealth transferred to America’s super-rich already with too much, and a nation without enemies at war simultaneously with six nonbelligerent states, spending trillions of dollars unavailable for vital homeland needs.

 

At America’s birth, only adult white male property owners could vote. Blacks were commodities, not people, and women were childbearing, homemaking appendages of their husbands.

 

Until 1810, religious prerequisites existed, and all adult white males couldn’t vote until property and tax requirements were dropped in 1850. Moreover, states elected senators until the 1913 17th amendment enfranchised citizens, and Native Americans had no rights until the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act, in part, returning what no one had the right to take away in the first place. In addition, women’s suffrage wasn’t achieved until the 1920 19th Amendment after nearly a century of struggle for it.

 

The 1865 13th Amendment freed Black slaves. The 1870 15th Amendment gave them what wasn’t gained until passage of the landmark mid-1960s Civil and Voting Rights Acts, abolishing Southern Jim Crow laws now reappeared in new forms. Today, virtually all hard won gains are lost, hardly a reason for Blacks to celebrate, struggling in a repressive, uncaring America, wanting them mainly to fight imperial wars to enrich corporate predators globally.

 

Native Americans perhaps have least to celebrate after centuries of extermination, persecution, denial, and isolation in poverty on reservations. Moreover, they’re been mocked and demonized in films and society as drunks, beasts, primitives, savages, and lesser beings to be Americanized or warehoused and forgotten.

 

As a result, their cultures are willfully denigrated. Their legacy includes betrayal, treaties made and broken, lands stolen, rights denied, and themselves criminally ignored to this day. For them, justice delayed was never gotten, giving them no reason to celebrate, nor America’s growing impoverished millions on their own and out luck in an increasingly uncaring society, focused solely on serving privilege, not popular needs.

 

So many others also are denied, persecuted, vilified, and gravely harmed in today’s America, notably Latino immigrants and Muslims for their faith and ethnicity to give Washington convenient enemies to incite fear to wage wars for power, profit, and plunder at a time America’s only enemies are manufactured, not real.

 

Celebrants this holiday enjoying outings, picnics, barbecues, ballgames, outdoor concerts, parades, fireworks displays, visits to the shore on vacation, and other pleasures might reflect about growing millions of victimized/deprived Americans in need, besides billions more worldwide, hoping to survive another day.

 

Imagine a future free from today’s despair, depravation and perpetual wars. That indeed would be reason to celebrate and give thanks. It’s also a goal everyone should support and dedicate themselves to achieve. It won’t happen any other way for sure.

 

Reflect about that on holiday Monday, as well as America’s intolerable legacy of shame.

 

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

 

Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

 

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/.

Jun 23

COLUMBUS DAY: IT’S TIME TO END THE CELEBRATION

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COLUMBUS DAY: IT’S TIME TO END THE CELEBRATION

By: JOHN MARCIANO

Each October 12th, millions of Italian Americans and other citizens celebrate the “discovery” of America by Christopher Columbus. Seventeen states do not recognize the federal holiday, however, including North and South Dakota, Hawaii, Alaska, and Wisconsin; and a number of California cities celebrate Indigenous People’s Day rather than Columbus Day.

Columbus is honored even though he did not “discover” America; he left a legacy of “greed, destruction, brutality, slave-trading, and murder”; and this celebration is shameful insult to Latin Americans, African Americans and American Indians.      The evidence documenting Columbus’s violence cannot be disputed. It is found in the writing of Bartolome de las Casas, the Dominican priest and eyewitness to some of the horrific atrocities during Columbus’s rule: “Endless testimonies … prove the mild and pacific temperament of the natives…. But our work was to … ravage, kill, mangle and destroy…. The admiral … committed irreparable crimes against the Indians.” It is also found in Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States”; James Loewen’s, Lies My Teacher Told Me; Kirkpatrick Sale’s, The Conquest of Paradise; Hans Koning’s, Columbus: His Enterprise; and David Stannard’s, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World.

No reputable historian denies what happened in the Caribbean 500 years ago; the truth is as crystal clear as the Holocaust in Europe under the Nazis. Those who ignore the facts of Columbus’s butchery deserve no more credence and sympathy than Holocaust deniers, whose views are rightly opposed and ridiculed. Why do Italian Americans and other citizens continue to defend and honor Columbus? Why are students in many U.S. cities given a school holiday to honor some that began the 500-plus years of European invasion and conquest of the Americas? When will school districts, city councils, state legislatures and the federal government cease celebrating this crime and tragedy?

We do not celebrate the genocidal murder of millions in Europe; why, therefore, should we celebrate one of the major architects of the American Holocaust? Even Rear Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison, Columbus’s admirer and biographer, stated that he initiated a period of “genocide” in the Western Hemisphere.

The Transform Columbus Day Alliance (TCDA) of Denver, Colorado is one of the many groups engaged in educational and political efforts on this issue (www.transformcolumbusday.org); its fine statement of principles and historical review should be read by all educators and citizens. TCDA points out that before Columbus came to the Americas, he transported West Africans to Portugal as slaves; he then commenced the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, joined by his brother and son. His subsequent rule and violence as viceroy and governor of the Caribbean Islands led to “the first mass genocide of indigenous peoples.”

TCDA calls Columbus Day a celebration of “racist … cultural domination” that reinforces “theft, lies, murder, slavery and the destruction of … the environment.” Columbus’s legacy is one of “violence and death”; the national holiday teaches children to “honor a cruel and brutal man” and it encourages people “to ignore … racist practices” in the Americas and throughout the world. We should support the call to transform Columbus Day from one that “celebrates conquest and domination” to one that “calls for a future in the Americas without racism [and] exploitation….”

I am personally moved by TCDA’s call for solidarity with Italian Americans who do not wish to celebrate the genocide represented by Columbus Day  –  instituted as a federal holiday in the 1930s under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. TCDA applauds “the beautiful, positive contributions of Italians around the globe” and condemns “the history of discrimination … experienced by Italians in the US.” However, it urges Italian Americans to stop celebrating “colonization and slavery … by repudiating Columbus.”

A history of Columbus and the Americas that is built upon lies and myths denies young people their inalienable right to learn the truth about the past. How are they to grow to become informed and democratic citizens when this right is denied and racist myths about Columbus shape their education? It is long past the time to end our shameful celebration of Columbus and all that he symbolizes.

Let us join together with TCDA and those who celebrate “Indigenous People’s Day” to reflect on the crimes of the past and affirm our solidarity with Americans throughout the hemisphere.

 

John Marciano, Professor Emeritus, SUNY Cortland, is a past chair of the Tompkins County (Ithaca, NY) Human Rights Commission (1991-96). He lives in Santa Monica, CA.

Jun 15

Native Blood: The Myth of Thanksgiving

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Native Blood: The Myth of Thanksgiving

by Mike Ely

[Available as podcast.]

It is a deep thing that people still celebrate the survival of the early colonists at Plymouth — by giving thanks to the Christian God who supposedly protected and championed the European invasion. The real meaning of all that, then and now, needs to be continually excavated. The myths and lies that surround the past are constantly draped over the horrors and tortures of our present.

Every schoolchild in the U.S. has been taught that the Pilgrims of the Plymouth Colony invited the local Indians to a major harvest feast after surviving their first bitter year in New England. But the real history of Thanksgiving is a story of the murder of indigenous people and the theft of their land by European colonialists–and of the ruthless ways of capitalism.

* * * * *

In mid-winter 1620 the English ship Mayflower landed on the North American coast, delivering 102 exiles. The original Native people of this stretch of shoreline had already been killed off. In 1614 a British expedition had landed there. When they left they took 24 Indians as slaves and left smallpox behind. Three years of plague wiped out between 90 and 96 percent of the inhabitants of the coast, destroying most villages completely.

The Europeans landed and built their colony called “the Plymouth Plantation” near the deserted ruins of the Indian village of Pawtuxet. They ate from abandoned cornfields grown wild. Only one Pawtuxet named Squanto had survived–he had spent the last years as a slave to the English and Spanish in Europe. Squanto spoke the colonists’ language and taught them how to plant corn and how to catch fish until the first harvest. Squanto also helped the colonists negotiate a peace treaty with the nearby Wampanoag tribe, led by the chief Massasoit.

These were very lucky breaks for the colonists. The first Virginia settlement had been wiped out before they could establish themselves. Thanks to the good will of the Wampanoag, the settlers not only survived their first year but had an alliance with the Wampanoags that would give them almost two decades of peace.

John Winthrop, a founder of the Massahusetts Bay colony considered this wave of illness and death to be a divine miracle. He wrote to a friend in England, “But for the natives in these parts, God hath so pursued them, as for 300 miles space the greatest part of them are swept away by smallpox which still continues among them. So as God hath thereby cleared our title to this place, those who remain in these parts, being in all not 50, have put themselves under our protection.”

The deadly impact of European diseases and the good will of the Wampanoag allowed the settlers to survive their first year.

In celebration of their good fortune, the colony’s governor, William Bradford, declared a three-day feast of thanksgiving after that first harvest of 1621.

How the Puritans Stole the Land

Early North America as Native peoples and Europe settlers collideBut the peace that produced the Thanksgiving Feast of 1621 meant that the Puritans would have 15 years to establish a firm foothold on the coast. Until 1629 there were no more than 300 settlers in New England, scattered in small and isolated settlements. But their survival inspired a wave of Puritan invasion that soon established growing Massachusetts towns north of Plymouth: Boston and Salem. For 10 years, boatloads of new settlers came.

And as the number of Europeans increased, they proved not nearly so generous as the Wampanoags.

On arrival, the Puritans and other religious sects discussed “who legally owns all this land.” They had to decide this, not just because of Anglo-Saxon traditions, but because their particular way of farming was based on individual–not communal or tribal–ownership. This debate over land ownership reveals that bourgeois “rule of law” does not mean “protect the rights of the masses of people.”

Some settlers argued that the land belonged to the Indians. These forces were excommunicated and expelled. Massachusetts Governor Winthrop declared the Indians had not “subdued” the land, and therefore all uncultivated lands should, according to English Common Law, be considered “public domain.” This meant they belonged to the king. In short, the colonists decided they did not need to consult the Indians when they seized new lands, they only had to consult the representative of the crown (meaning the local governor).

The colonists embraced a line from Psalms 2:8. “Ask of me, and I shall give thee, the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession.” Since then, European settler states have similarly declared god their real estate agent: from the Boers seizing South Africa to the Zionists seizing Palestine.

The European immigrants took land and enslaved Indians to help them farm it. By 1637 there were about 2,000 British settlers. They pushed out from the coast and decided to remove the inhabitants.

The Shining City on the Hill

Where did the Plymouth and Massachusetts colonies of Puritan and “separatist” pilgrims come from and what were they really all about?

Governor Winthrop, a founder of the Massachusetts colony, said, “We shall be as a City upon a Hill, the eyes of all people are upon us.” The Mayflower Puritans had been driven out of England as subversives. The Puritans saw this religious colony as a model of a social and political order that they believed all of Europe should adopt.

The Puritan movement was part of a sweeping revolt within English society against the ruling feudal order of wealthy lords. Only a few decades after the establishment of Plymouth, the Puritan Revolution came to power in England. They killed the king, won a civil war, set up a short-lived republic, and brutally conquered the neighboring people of Ireland to create a larger national market.

The famous Puritan intolerance was part of a determined attempt to challenge the decadence and wastefulness of the rich aristocratic landlords of England. The Puritans wanted to use the power of state punishment to uproot old and still dominant ways of thinking and behaving.

The new ideas of the Puritans served the needs of merchant capitalist accumulation. The extreme discipline, thrift and modesty the Puritans demanded of each other corresponded to a new and emerging form of ownership and production. Their so-called “Protestant Ethic” was an early form of the capitalist ethic. From the beginning, the Puritan colonies intended to grow through capitalist trade–trading fish and fur with England while they traded pots, knives, axes, alcohol and other English goods with the Indians.

The New England were ruled by a government in which only the male heads of families had a voice. Women, Indians, slaves, servants, youth were neither heard nor represented. In the Puritan schoolbooks, the old law “honor thy father and thy mother” was interpreted to mean honoring “All our Superiors, whether in Family, School, Church, and Commonwealth.” And, the real truth was that the colonies were fundamentally controlled by the most powerful merchants.

The Puritan fathers believed they were the Chosen People of an infinite god and that this justified anything they did. They were Calvinists who believed that the vast majority of humanity was predestined to damnation. This meant that while they were firm in fighting for their own capitalist right to accumulate and prosper, they were quick to oppress the masses of people in Ireland, Scotland and North America, once they seized the power to set up their new bourgeois order. Those who rejected the narrow religious rules of the colonies were often simply expelled “out into the wilderness.”

The Massachusetts colony (north of Plymouth) was founded when Puritan stockholders had gotten control of an English trading company. The king had given this company the right to govern its own internal affairs, and in 1629 the stockholders simply voted to transfer the company to North American shores–making this colony literally a self-governing company of stockholders!

In U.S. schools, students are taught that the Mayflower compact of Plymouth contained the seeds of “modern democracy” and “rule of law.” But by looking at the actual history of the Puritans, we can see that this so-called “modern democracy” was (and still is) a capitalist democracy based on all kinds of oppression and serving the class interests of the ruling capitalists.

In short, the Puritan movement developed as an early revolutionary challenge to the old feudal order in England. They were the soul of primitive capitalist accumulation. And transferred to the shores of North America, they immediately revealed how heartless and oppressive that capitalist soul is.


The Birth of “The American Way of War”

European colonists attack the Pequot villageIn the Connecticut Valley, the powerful Pequot tribe had not entered an alliance with the British (as had the Narragansett, the Wampanoag, and the Massachusetts peoples). At first they were far from the centers of colonization. Then, in 1633, the British stole the land where the city of Hartford now sits–land which the Pequot had recently conquered from another tribe. That same year two British slave raiders were killed. The colonists demanded that the Indians who killed the slavers be turned over. The Pequot refused.

The Puritan preachers said, from Romans 13:2, “Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation.” The colonial governments gathered an armed force of 240 under the command of John Mason. They were joined by a thousand Narragansett warriors. The historian Francis Jennings writes: “Mason proposed to avoid attacking Pequot warriors which would have overtaxed his unseasoned, unreliable troops. Battle, as such, was not his purpose. Battle is only one of the ways to destroy an enemy’s will to fight. Massacre can accomplish the same end with less risk, and Mason had determined that massacre would be his objective.”

The colonist army surrounded a fortified Pequot village on the Mystic River. At sunrise, as the inhabitants slept, the Puritan soldiers set the village on fire.

William Bradford, Governor of Plymouth, wrote: “Those that escaped the fire were slain with the sword; some hewed to pieces, others run through with their rapiers, so that they were quickly dispatched and very few escaped. It was conceived they thus destroyed about 400 at this time. It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire…horrible was the stink and scent thereof, but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave the prayers thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them.”

Mason himself wrote: “It may be demanded…Should not Christians have more mercy and compassion? But…sometimes the Scripture declareth women and children must perish with their parents…. We had sufficient light from the word of God for our proceedings.”

Three hundred and fifty years later the Puritan phrase “a shining city on the hill” became a favorite quote of conservative speechwriters.

Discovering the Profits of Slavery

This so-called “Pequot war” was a one-sided murder and slaving expedition. Over 180 captives were taken. After consulting the bible again, in Leviticus 24:44, the colonial authorities found justification to kill most of the Pequot men and enslave the captured women and their children. Only 500 Pequot remained alive and free. In 1975 the official number of Pequot living in Connecticut was 21.

Some of the war captives were given to the Narragansett and Massachusetts allies of the British. Even before the arrival of Europeans, Native peoples of North America had widely practiced taking war captives from other tribes as hostages and slaves.

The remaining captives were sold to British plantation colonies in the West Indies to be worked to death in a new form of slavery that served the emerging capitalist world market. And with that, the merchants of Boston made a historic discovery: the profits they made from the sale of human beings virtually paid for the cost of seizing them.

One account says that enslaving Indians quickly became a “mania with speculators.” These early merchant capitalists of Massachusetts started to make genocide pay for itself. The slave trade, first in captured Indians and soon in kidnapped Africans, quickly became a backbone of New England merchant capitalism.


Thanksgiving in the Manhattan Colony

In 1641 the Dutch governor Kieft of Manhattan offered the first “scalp bounty”–his government paid money for the scalp of each Indian brought to them. A couple years later, Kieft ordered the massacre of the Wappingers, a friendly tribe. Eighty were killed and their severed heads were kicked like soccer balls down the streets of Manhattan. One captive was castrated, skinned alive and forced to eat his own flesh while the Dutch governor watched and laughed. Then Kieft hired the notorious Underhill who had commanded in the Pequot war to carry out a similar massacre near Stamford, Connecticut. The village was set fire, and 500 Indian residents were put to the sword.

A day of thanksgiving was proclaimed in the churches of Manhattan. As we will see, the European colonists declared Thanksgiving Days to celebrate mass murder more often than they did for harvest and friendship.

The Conquest of New England

By the 1670s there were about 30,000 to 40,000 white inhabitants in the United New England Colonies–6,000 to 8,000 able to bear arms. With the Pequot destroyed, the Massachusetts and Plymouth colonists turned on the Wampanoag, the tribe that had saved them in 1620 and probably joined them for the original Thanksgiving Day.

In 1675 a Christian Wampanoag was killed while spying for the Puritans. The Plymouth authorities arrested and executed three Wampanoag without consulting the tribal chief, King Philip.

As Mao Tsetung says: “Where there is oppression there is resistance.” The Wampanoag went to war.

The Indians applied some military lessons they had learned: they waged a guerrilla war which overran isolated European settlements and were often able to inflict casualties on the Puritan soldiers. The colonists again attacked and massacred the main Indian populations.

When this war ended, 600 European men, one-eleventh of the adult men of the New England Colonies, had been killed in battle. Hundreds of homes and 13 settlements had been wiped out. But the colonists won.

In their victory, the settlers launched an all-out genocide against the remaining Native people. The Massachusetts government offered 20 shillings bounty for every Indian scalp, and 40 shillings for every prisoner who could be sold into slavery. Soldiers were allowed to enslave any Indian woman or child under 14 they could capture. The “Praying Indians” who had converted to Christianity and fought on the side of the European troops were accused of shooting into the treetops during battles with “hostiles.” They were enslaved or killed. Other “peaceful” Indians of Dartmouth and Dover were invited to negotiate or seek refuge at trading posts–and were sold onto slave ships.

It is not known how many Indians were sold into slavery, but in this campaign, 500 enslaved Indians were shipped from Plymouth alone. Of the 12,000 Indians in the surrounding tribes, probably about half died from battle, massacre and starvation.

After King Philip’s War, there were almost no Indians left free in the northern British colonies. A colonist wrote from Manhattan’s New York colony: “There is now but few Indians upon the island and those few no ways hurtful. It is to be admired how strangely they have decreased by the hand of God, since the English first settled in these parts.”

In Massachusetts, the colonists declared a “day of public thanksgiving” in 1676, saying, “there now scarce remains a name or family of them [the Indians] but are either slain, captivated or fled.”

Fifty-five years after the original Thanksgiving Day, the Puritans had destroyed the generous Wampanoag and all other neighboring tribes. The Wampanoag chief King Philip was beheaded. His head was stuck on a pole in Plymouth, where the skull still hung on display 24 years later.

The descendants of these Native peoples are found wherever the Puritan merchant capitalists found markets for slaves: the West Indies, the Azures, Algiers, Spain and England. The grandson of Massasoit, the Pilgrim’s original protector, was sold into slavery in Bermuda.
Runaways and Rebels

But even the destruction of Indian tribal life and the enslavement of survivors brought no peace. Indians continued to resist in every available way. Their oppressors lived in terror of a revolt. And they searched for ways to end the resistance. The historian MacLeod writes: “The first `reservations’ were designed for the `wild’ Irish of Ulster in 1609. And the first Indian reservation agent in America, Gookin of Massachusetts, like many other American immigrants had seen service in Ireland under Cromwell.”

The enslaved Indians refused to work and ran away. The Massachusetts government tried to control runaways by marking enslaved Indians: brands were burnt into their skin, and symbols were tattooed into their foreheads and cheeks.

A Massachusetts law of 1695 gave colonists permission to kill Indians at will, declaring it was “lawful for any person, whether English or Indian, that shall find any Indians traveling or skulking in any of the towns or roads (within specified limits), to command them under their guard and examination, or to kill them as they may or can.”

The northern colonists enacted more and more laws for controlling the people. A law in Albany forbade any African or Indian slave from driving a cart within the city. Curfews were set up; Africans and Indians were forbidden to have evening get-togethers. On Block Island, Indians were given 10 lashes for being out after nine o’clock. In 1692 Massachusetts made it a serious crime for any white person to marry an African, an Indian or a mulatto. In 1706 they tried to stop the importation of Indian slaves from other colonies, fearing a slave revolt.

Celebrate?

Looking at this history raises a question: Why should anyone celebrate the survival of the earliest Puritans with a Thanksgiving Day? Certainly the Native peoples of those times had no reason to celebrate.

The ruling powers of the United States organized people to celebrate Thanksgiving Day because it is in their interest. That’s why they created it. The first national celebration of Thanksgiving was called for by George Washington. And the celebration was made a regular legal holiday later by Abraham Lincoln during the civil war (right as he sent troops to suppress the Sioux of Minnesota).

Washington and Lincoln were two presidents deeply involved in trying to forge a unified bourgeois nation-state out of the European settlers in the United States. And the Thanksgiving story was a useful myth in their efforts at U.S. nation-building. It celebrates the “bounty of the American way of life,” while covering up the brutal nature of this society.

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Published: December 2007. Feel free to reprint, distribute or quote this with attribution. This website’s contents are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 U.S. License.

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