Violence, Racism, and Fundamentally Changing the United States

Seventy-seven years ago, civil rights activist and poet Langston Hughes wrote his chilling poem “Kids Who Die” to illuminate the horrors of lynchings during the Jim Crow era. Now at the one year mark of Michael Brown's death and the Ferguson uprising that sparked a movement, let us listen to Hughes' words with new ears. ColorOfChange.org.

Violence, Racism, and Fundamentally Changing the United States
By Richard Jehn / August 8, 2015

When will it be enough? Another horrible tragedy, self-confessed to be an act of terror and white supremacy has occurred. It isn’t a new phenomenon by any means, but we are seeing a more accurate record of these acts because of the available technology so many people now have in hand. And most observers are appalled to see them, police shooting unarmed black men in the back as they run away, a policeman abusing a young black girl at a junior high school pool party, and nine murders in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, followed by the burning of six more African American churches across the south, three of which have been unmistakably identified as arson.

But the fact is that nothing is new here. This has been happening since the founding of this nation, but events have simply had some different manifestations over time. This country was founded in some of the worst sorts of violence. In the very earliest days, European white settlers made it their business to eliminate, in one way or another, 90% of the resident population of the present-day United States. This took the form of outright slaughter most frequently, but also occurred through quite nefarious means such as burning Native American crops and deliberately passing smallpox infected blankets to Native Americans.¹ It should be no surprise that our founding fathers participated in this violence.²

While this “subduing” of the resident population was taking place, the settlers also thought it in their best interest to kidnap a few million Africans to come work for free in the new territory they were opening up. Thousands of those kidnapped never made it to the new world, dying during the voyage of disease, starvation, dehydration, and abject sadness. But those who did survive managed over the next couple of hundred years of mistreatment to create about 60% of present-day wealth in the US.³ Good arguments exist to demonstrate that the revolution that created the United States was a result of British reluctance to sanction continued slave-holding.⁴

Robert Jensen goes so far as to call these two periods “holocausts,” which they surely were: first, genocide of the Native Americans, followed closely by the genocide of Africans. He also describes the third holocaust as the continuing violence in other nations as the United States “protects” its overseas interests, sometimes in defending the oil industry, sometimes in removing a contrary government, occasionally to “bring democracy” to some needy nation, and for various other reasons in passing.⁵

Regardless, it is clear that from the earliest days of this nation, white European settlers unequivocally knew that they were superior to both the indigenous population and to the black immigrants who were building their nation. And this white supremacy has become a cultural fact of life for every person who has ever lived in the United States, manifested frequently in outright racist behavior, especially prior to passage of legislation specifically outlawing discrimination and segregation, but more frequently appearing in much more subtle ways, well documented in numerous in-depth studies.⁶

I have not seen it more appropriately expressed than in this short passage:

In my own lifetime, segregation and antimiscegenation laws were still on the books in many states. During the lifetimes of my parents and grandparents, and for several hundred years before them, laws were used to prevent blacks from learning to read, write, own property, or vote; blacks were, by constitutional mandate, outlawed from the hopeful, loving expectations that come from being treated as a whole, rather than three-fifths of a person. When every resource of a wealthy nation is put to such destructive ends, it will take more than a few generations to mop up the mess.

We are all inheritors of that legacy, whether new to this world or new to this country, for it survives as powerful and invisibly reinforcing structures of thought, language, and law. Thus generalized notions of innocence and guilt have little place in the struggle for transcendence; there is no blame among the living for the dimensions of this historic crime, this national tragedy. There is, however, responsibility for never forgetting another’s history, for making real the psychic obliteration that does live on as a factor in shaping relations not just between blacks and whites …., or between blacks and blacks …., but between whites and whites as well.⁷

And we continue to live this awful legacy every single day of every single year, in the form of those police murders (I will call them what they are) of black men and women; in the form of the overtly racist murders of nine African Americans in a Bible study at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina; in the form of continued economic disadvantage of Native and African Americans, and Hispanics⁸; in the form of significantly greater incarceration rates for Native and African Americans, and Hispanics⁹; and in the form of the continued existence of intentionally all-white towns and neighborhoods throughout the United States.

Sundown towns require special mention since they are not common knowledge. Between 1890 and 1930, many whites in the US took exception to the outcome of the Civil War, and especially the Reconstruction era, and took upon themselves the continued repression and exclusion of African Americans. These sundown towns were typically characterized by either signage or some other clear signal (such as a whistle that sounded at 6 pm) that blacks were to be out of the town by sundown or face dire (usually violent, including death) consequences. Moreover, these towns were more prevalent in the northern states and included every state in the US. The phenomenon is extensively documented both in James Loewen’s 2005 book on the subject and on his website which contains up-to-date information about these communities.¹⁰

To put it bluntly, this is a big-time white people problem and all of the people of color in this nation suffer because of it. And it is time for the white people to act like grown-ups, own this problem, and do something meaningful about it.

Since the event in Charleston, and the more recent incident where Sandra Bland was arrested on a fabricated charge and soon afterward died in jail,¹¹ I have seen some stunningly good suggestions for change. I especially appreciate Aaryn Belfer’s eleven suggestions in her article “How to Be an Interrupter: A White Person’s Guide to Activism,” where she says, “Whatever you do, don’t do nothing. Be an up-stander, not a bystander. Be an interrupter.”

I do not believe anyone has yet proposed a solution to the white supremacy problem in this country that will result in the changes we need to reach a meaningful state of non-racist equilibrium and true social justice. I view what I have read to date as band-aid fixes for what ails us, although absolutely everything helps. I also believe that legislation passed during and after the era of the civil rights movement has turned out in retrospect to be band-aid measures through which those desiring continuation of the racial imbalance always find loopholes. We have reached a moment where we need much more and we have a meaningful precedent to guide us.

John Toland has suggested that Adolf Hitler used the United States model for his treatment of gypsies, Jews, and other non-Aryan undesirables.¹²

Hitler's concept of concentration camps as well as the practicality of genocide owed much, so he claimed, to his studies of English and United States history. He admired the camps for Boer prisoners in South Africa and for the Indians in the wild west; and often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America's extermination—by starvation and uneven combat—of the red savages who could not be tamed by captivity.

He was very interested in the way the Indian population had rapidly declined due to epidemics and starvation when the United States government forced them to live on the reservations. He thought the American government's forced migrations of the Indians over great distances to barren reservation land was a deliberate policy of extermination. Just how much Hitler took from the American example of the destruction of the Indian nations is hard to say; however, frightening parallels can be drawn. For some time Hitler considered deporting the Jews to a large 'reservation' in the Lubin area where their numbers would be reduced through starvation and disease.

Assuming that Hitler used the violence and aggression visited by the United States on the Indigenous population as the model for the Nazis’ violence against non-Aryan populations in Europe and other conquered lands, would it be worth considering what the German people decided to do in post-World War II Germany to cleanse themselves of the Nazi atrocities?

Others have made such a suggestion, but not in as explicit terms as I do. Brian Stevenson, founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative, said in a recent interview:

So yes, the Confederate flag should come down but more than that, we need to engage with this in a very different way. You can’t go to Germany, to Berlin, and walk 100 meters without seeing a marker or a stone or a monument to mark the places where Jewish families were abducted from their homes and taken to the concentration camps. Germans want you to go to the concentration camps and reflect soberly on the legacy of the Holocaust. We do the opposite here. We don’t want anybody talking about slavery, we don’t want anybody talking about lynching, we don’t want anybody talking about segregation. You say the word “race” and people immediately get nervous. You say the words “racial justice” and they're looking for the exits. If we're going to change the attitudes of the judges who are making sentencing decisions, and police officers who are unfairly suspecting young men of color, and employers and educators who are suspending and expelling kids of color at disproportionately high rates, if we're going to make a difference in overcoming the implicit bias that we all have, we're going to have to deal honestly with this history and have to consciously work on freeing ourselves from this history.

Following World War II, German society implemented a curriculum in all German schools teaching the Holocaust, its results, and how it transpired in gory detail to all German children as they went through school. This curriculum frequently includes trips to concentration camps so students can see for themselves the ovens, the gas chambers, and the horrible living conditions. In the words of a staff member of the German Information Center:

For Germans, the Holocaust is not an event that happened in a faraway place in some distant past, but is part and parcel of their recent history. The memory of the Nazi dictatorship -- of which the Holocaust is an integral part -- and its traumatic legacies have been shaping German policies since the end of World War II. The rebuilding of political institutions in western Germany and postwar political education were largely determined by a serious effort to try to understand the horrors of the Nazi dictatorship and by searching for safeguards in order to prevent history from repeating itself. Consequently, teaching about Nazi dictatorship and the Holocaust at schools is not limited to a niche in the history syllabus like the "French and the Indian Wars." Instead, it is discussed again and again in different ways, in a number of subjects, and at different points in time.

The treatment of the Nazi period in all its aspects -- Hitler's rise to power; his establishment of a dictatorship in Germany; the abolition of the rule of law; the persecution of all kinds of political opponents; the racially motivated persecution of the Jews, culminating in the Holocaust; the reticence and opposition of German citizens; and, Germany's instigation of World War II -- is compulsory teaching matter at all types of schools in Germany and at all levels of education. The Holocaust is treated as the most important aspect of the period of Nazi rule.¹³

It is not far-fetched in the least to compare the treatment of Native Americans to the Nazi Holocaust, nor is it inappropriate to consider slavery and its seemingly endless aftermath of racism and discrimination comparable to the treatment of Jewish and other non-Aryan Germans in the 1930s and early 1940s.¹⁴ Thus, to seek a similar solution to this US problem seems obvious.

So the specific proposal for the United States is to include explicit curriculum in our schools to teach the truth of our past, to include all the gory details of the slaughter of Native Americans and the enslavement of Africans, including the aftermath of the Civil War that resulted in covert methods of discrimination and segregation that persist to the present day. Let’s bring this information out into the light of day for detailed examination and include with it the teaching of empathy in our classrooms. Let’s change what our children are learning to instill in them the horror of our past so our culture can learn not to repeat that repulsive past.

Clear precedents and active programs are in place to seed the effort to change the United States curriculum. In particular, Rethinking Schools has been making a significant impact on teaching and curriculum in the past 25 years. Moreover, it is well past time to take meaningful action when we hear Barack Obama say, “… this kind of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries. It doesn't happen in other places with this kind of frequency. It is in our power to do something about it.” If we mean what we are saying in all of the eulogies, tirades, rants, and other assorted missives I’ve read and heard since the tragedy in Charleston on June 17, 2015 and the Sandra Bland incident in Waller County, Texas in mid-July, then now is the time to begin the work to change our US society.

I recognize the challenge this poses where some states in control of school curriculum tend toward regression in the teaching of science and history. And even before this conservative regression, history curriculum in the US has been sorely deficient.¹⁵ But clear precedents do exist to proceed with development of meaningful curriculum to change our society. More than ten years ago, the Montana Supreme Court ruled that the state had ignored its constitutional responsibility to teach indigenous history and culture. That was the beginning of what has turned into a cascade of states implementing curriculum to teach Native American tribal history and culture, now including Idaho, Minnesota, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and most recently Washington.¹⁶

Although this is only anecdotal, the letter that appeared in the Bellingham Cascadia Weekly (on page 5) in June 2015 is indicative of the impact such curriculum can have:

I am in seventh grade at Fairhaven Middle School. In my social studies class, we have been learning about the past 200 years of Washington’s history. This includes the genocide of Native Americans, and also the cultural genocide through putting the natives in small reservations and sending the children far off to schools where their culture was belittled and they were transformed into the ways of the white culture. These things have now been found to be directly linked to problems many reservations face today.

Though there have been some apologies made, I feel that there has been little done in acknowledging our society’s actions in the past. The natives were living here first for thousands of years, yet they seem to get little respect. I noticed that in Fairhaven, there is a plaque that apologizes to the Chinese community for the Chinese deadline which was in place in 1898 to 1903. You probably know of this plaque. Former Mayor Dan Pike put it in, in 2011, as a formal apology to the Chinese community.

This made me think, why is there no such thing for the native community?

I believe what was done to them was worse than the Chinese deadline, the native people’s culture was absolutely destroyed! I think they deserve an apology from Whatcom County. It doesn’t have to be big or grand, but something like a plaque would remind our society of what has been done and it will show that we acknowledge previous actions and are sorry for them. It is just a thought, but I believe that it is the right thing to do. —Klara M. Schwarz, Bellingham

Any curriculum developed for meaningful portrayal of United States history must depend critically on the participation of the African American and the Native American communities, as well as all minority communities that suffer from the effects of white supremacy. I also believe that such a curriculum must be taught throughout the school years, starting at the earliest ages to ensure the lessons are deeply embedded.

Another component of US curriculum must be a program such as Roots of Empathy. This Canadian-born program has now been adopted for pilot study in four US states (California, Washington, New Mexico, New York, and Washington, D.C.), and is used in many nations around the globe. The original purpose of the program was to reduce the incidence of bullying and aggression in schools:

The focus of Roots of Empathy in the long term is to build capacity of the next generation for responsible citizenship and responsive parenting. In the short term, Roots of Empathy focuses on raising levels of empathy, resulting in more respectful and caring relationships and reduced levels of bullying and aggression. Part of our success is the universal nature of the program; all students are positively engaged instead of targeting bullies or aggressive children.¹⁷

But with little doubt, such a program would have more far-reaching effects. If it were combined with the teaching of US history, including the gross mistreatment of Native and African Americans, perhaps the impact would be even greater.

We can no longer continue living the lie of United States history as it is currently understood in this nation. We must take the next steps in our growth and evolution in order to eliminate the scourge of white supremacy and its racist manifestations from our culture. As Barack Obama says, “It is in our power to do something about it.” Let’s make sure what we do is meaningful.

Notes

1. "An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (ReVisioning American History)," Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. Sept. 2014. Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press.
2. See also Dunbar-Ortiz, pp. 77-82.
3. "The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism," Edward E. Baptist. 2014. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Basic Books.
4. "The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America," Gerald Horne. 2014. New York and London: New York University Press.
5. “The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism, and White Privilege,” Robert Jensen. 2005. San Francisco: City Light Books. And for a listing of US incursions at home and abroad since 1890, see Zoltan Grossman’s website.
6. See, for example, “Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class,” Ian Haney Lόpez. 2014. New York, New York: Oxford University Press, and “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” Michelle Alexander. 2012. New York, New York: The New Press.
7. “The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor,” Patricia J. Williams (1991). Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press. Pp. 60-61.
8. “People’s History of the United States,” Howard Zinn. 2001. New York: HarperCollins Publishers.
9. “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” Michelle Alexander. 2012. New York, New York: The New Press.
10. “Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism,” James Loewen. 2005. New York: Touchstone. See also his website.
11. And see full video of arrest here, which, I believe, corroborates my claim that it is a fabricated charge.
12. “Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography,” John Toland. 1991. New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. P. 202. Cited in “Hitler’s Inspiration and Guide: The Native American Holocaust” by Lia Mandelbaum. Jewish Journal, June 18, 2013.
13. “Holocaust Education in Germany,” German Information Center. 1998.
14. And Robert Jensen agrees with that analysis. See “The Heart of Whiteness,” pp. 27-44.
15. “Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong,” James M. Loewen. 2007. New York: Touchstone.
16. “Since Time Immemorial,” http://www.indian-ed.org/.
17. http://www.rootsofempathy.org/en/who-we-are/mission-goals-and-values.html.

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OWS Could Take Lessons from This, Part 2

A march in Ådalen, Sweden, in 1931.
How Swedes and Norwegians broke the power of the ‘1 percent’
By George Lakey | January 25, 2012

While many of us are working to ensure that the Occupy movement will have a lasting impact, it’s worthwhile to consider other countries where masses of people succeeded in nonviolently bringing about a high degree of democracy and economic justice. Sweden and Norway, for example, both experienced a major power shift in the 1930s after prolonged nonviolent struggle. They “fired” the top 1 percent of people who set the direction for society and created the basis for something different.

Both countries had a history of horrendous poverty. When the 1 percent was in charge, hundreds of thousands of people emigrated to avoid starvation. Under the leadership of the working class, however, both countries built robust and successful economies that nearly eliminated poverty, expanded free university education, abolished slums, provided excellent health care available to all as a matter of right and created a system of full employment. Unlike the Norwegians, the Swedes didn’t find oil, but that didn’t stop them from building what the latest CIA World Factbook calls “an enviable standard of living.”

Neither country is a utopia, as readers of the crime novels by Stieg Larsson, Kurt Wallender and Jo Nesbro will know. Critical left-wing authors such as these try to push Sweden and Norway to continue on the path toward more fully just societies. However, as an American activist who first encountered Norway as a student in 1959 and learned some of its language and culture, the achievements I found amazed me. I remember, for example, bicycling for hours through a small industrial city, looking in vain for substandard housing. Sometimes resisting the evidence of my eyes, I made up stories that “accounted for” the differences I saw: “small country,” “homogeneous,” “a value consensus.” I finally gave up imposing my frameworks on these countries and learned the real reason: their own histories.

Then I began to learn that the Swedes and Norwegians paid a price for their standards of living through nonviolent struggle. There was a time when Scandinavian workers didn’t expect that the electoral arena could deliver the change they believed in. They realized that, with the 1 percent in charge, electoral “democracy” was stacked against them, so nonviolent direct action was needed to exert the power for change.

In both countries, the troops were called out to defend the 1 percent; people died. Award-winning Swedish filmmaker Bo Widerberg told the Swedish story vividly in Ådalen 31, which depicts the strikers killed in 1931 and the sparking of a nationwide general strike. (You can read more about this case in an entry by Max Rennebohm in the Global Nonviolent Action Database.)

The Norwegians had a harder time organizing a cohesive people’s movement because Norway’s small population—about three million—was spread out over a territory the size of Britain. People were divided by mountains and fjords, and they spoke regional dialects in isolated valleys. In the nineteenth century, Norway was ruled by Denmark and then by Sweden; in the context of Europe Norwegians were the “country rubes,” of little consequence. Not until 1905 did Norway finally become independent.

When workers formed unions in the early 1900s, they generally turned to Marxism, organizing for revolution as well as immediate gains. They were overjoyed by the overthrow of the czar in Russia, and the Norwegian Labor Party joined the Communist International organized by Lenin. Labor didn’t stay long, however. One way in which most Norwegians parted ways with Leninist strategy was on the role of violence: Norwegians wanted to win their revolution through collective nonviolent struggle, along with establishing co-ops and using the electoral arena.

In the 1920s strikes increased in intensity. The town of Hammerfest formed a commune in 1921, led by workers councils; the army intervened to crush it. The workers’ response verged toward a national general strike. The employers, backed by the state, beat back that strike, but workers erupted again in the ironworkers’ strike of 1923–24.

The Norwegian 1 percent decided not to rely simply on the army; in 1926 they formed a social movement called the Patriotic League, recruiting mainly from the middle class. By the 1930s, the League included as many as 100,000 people for armed protection of strike breakers—this in a country of only 3 million!

The Labor Party, in the meantime, opened its membership to anyone, whether or not in a unionized workplace. Middle-class Marxists and some reformers joined the party. Many rural farm workers joined the Labor Party, as well as some small landholders. Labor leadership understood that in a protracted struggle, constant outreach and organizing was needed to a nonviolent campaign. In the midst of the growing polarization, Norway’s workers launched another wave of strikes and boycotts in 1928.

The Depression hit bottom in 1931. More people were jobless there than in any other Nordic country. Unlike in the U.S., the Norwegian union movement kept the people thrown out of work as members, even though they couldn’t pay dues. This decision paid off in mass mobilizations. When the employers’ federation locked employees out of the factories to try to force a reduction of wages, the workers fought back with massive demonstrations.

Many people then found that their mortgages were in jeopardy. (Sound familiar?) The Depression continued, and farmers were unable to keep up payment on their debts. As turbulence hit the rural sector, crowds gathered nonviolently to prevent the eviction of families from their farms. The Agrarian Party, which included larger farmers and had previously been allied with the Conservative Party, began to distance itself from the 1 percent; some could see that the ability of the few to rule the many was in doubt.

By 1935, Norway was on the brink. The Conservative-led government was losing legitimacy daily; the 1 percent became increasingly desperate as militancy grew among workers and farmers. A complete overthrow might be just a couple years away, radical workers thought. However, the misery of the poor became more urgent daily, and the Labor Party felt increasing pressure from its members to alleviate their suffering, which it could do only if it took charge of the government in a compromise agreement with the other side.

This it did. In a compromise that allowed owners to retain the right to own and manage their firms, Labor in 1935 took the reins of government in coalition with the Agrarian Party. They expanded the economy and started public works projects to head toward a policy of full employment that became the keystone of Norwegian economic policy. Labor’s success and the continued militancy of workers enabled steady inroads against the privileges of the 1 percent, to the point that majority ownership of all large firms was taken by the public interest. (There is an entry on this case as well at the Global Nonviolent Action Database.)

The 1 percent thereby lost its historic power to dominate the economy and society. Not until three decades later could the Conservatives return to a governing coalition, having by then accepted the new rules of the game, including a high degree of public ownership of the means of production, extremely progressive taxation, strong business regulation for the public good and the virtual abolition of poverty. When Conservatives eventually tried a fling with neoliberal policies, the economy generated a bubble and headed for disaster. (Sound familiar?)

Labor stepped in, seized the three largest banks, fired the top management, left the stockholders without a dime and refused to bail out any of the smaller banks. The well-purged Norwegian financial sector was not one of those countries that lurched into crisis in 2008; carefully regulated and much of it publicly owned, the sector was solid.

Although Norwegians may not tell you about this the first time you meet them, the fact remains that their society’s high level of freedom and broadly-shared prosperity began when workers and farmers, along with middle class allies, waged a nonviolent struggle that empowered the people to govern for the common good.

Source / Waging Nonviolence

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Signs of a Sick Society: Police State Amerikkka

Justice Department Prepares for Ominous Expansion of "Anti-Terrorism" Law Targeting Activists
By Michael Deutsch / 11 December 2010

In late September, the FBI carried out a series of raids of homes and antiwar offices of public activists in Minneapolis and Chicago. Following the raids, the Obama Justice Department subpoenaed 14 activists to a grand jury in Chicago and also subpoenaed the files of several antiwar and community organizations.

In carrying out these repressive actions, the Justice Department was taking its lead from the Supreme Court's 6-3 opinion last June in Holder v. the Humanitarian Law Project, which decided that nonviolent First Amendment speech and advocacy "coordinated with" or "under the direction of" a foreign group listed by the Secretary of State as "terrorist" was a crime.

The search warrants and grand jury subpoenas make it clear that the federal prosecutors are intent on accusing public nonviolent political organizers, many of whom are affiliated with Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO), of providing "material support" through their public advocacy for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). The Secretary of State has determined that both the PLFP and the FARC "threaten US national security, foreign policy or economic interests," a finding not reviewable by the courts, and listed both groups as foreign terrorist organizations (FTO).

In 1996, Congress made it a crime - then punishable by 10 years, which was later increased to 15 years - to anyone in the US who provides "material support or resources to a foreign terrorist organization or attempts or conspires to do so." The present statute defines "material support or resources" as:

... any property, tangible or intangible, or service, including currency or monetary instruments or financial services, lodging, training, expert advice or assistance, safe houses, false documentation or identification, communications equipment, facilities, weapons, lethal substances, explosives, personnel and transportation except medicine or religious materials.

In the Humanitarian Law Project case, human rights workers wanted to teach members of the Kurdistan PKK, which seeks an independent Kurdish state, and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which sought an independent state in Sri Lanka, how to use humanitarian and international law to peacefully resolve disputes and obtain relief from the United Nations and other international bodies for human rights abuses by the governments of Turkey and Sri Lanka. Both organizations were designated as FTOs by the Secretary of State in a closed hearing, in which the evidence is heard secretly.

Despite the nonviolent, peacemaking goal of the Humanitarian Law Project's speech and training, the majority of the Supreme Court nonetheless interpreted the law to make such conduct a crime. Finding a whole new exception to the First Amendment, the Court decided that any support, even if it involves nonviolent efforts towards peace, is illegal under the law since it "frees up other resources within the organization that may be put to violent ends," and also helps lend "legitimacy" to foreign terrorist groups. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Roberts, despite the lack of any evidence, further opined that the FTO could use the human rights law to "intimidate, harass or destruct" its adversaries, and that even peace talks themselves could be used as a cover to re-arm for further attacks. Thus, the Court's opinion criminalizes efforts by independent groups to work for peace if they in any way cooperate or coordinate with designated FTOs.

The Court distinguishes what it refers to as "independent advocacy," which it finds is not prohibited by the statute, from "advocacy performed in coordination with, or at the direction of, a foreign terrorist organization," which is, for the first time, found to be a crime under the statute. The exact line demarcating where independent advocacy becomes impermissible coordination is left open and vague.

Seizing on this overbroad definition of "material support," the US government is now moving in on political groups and activists who are clearly exercising fundamental First Amendment rights by vocally opposing the government's branding of foreign liberation movements as terrorist and supporting their struggles against US-backed repressive regimes and illegal occupations.

Under the new definition of "material support," the efforts of President Jimmy Carter to monitor the elections in Lebanon and coordinate with the political parties there, including the designated FTO Hezbollah, could well be prosecuted as a crime. Similarly, the publication of op-ed articles by FTO spokesmen from Hamas or other designated groups by The New York Times or The Washington Post, or the filing of amicus briefs by human rights attorneys arguing against a group's terrorist designation or the statute itself could also now be prosecuted. Of course, the first targets of this draconian expansion of the material support law will not be a former president or the establishment media, but members of a Marxist organization who are vocal opponents of the governments of Israel and Colombia and the US policies supporting these repressive governments.

In his foreword to Nelson Mandela's recent autobiography "Conversations with Myself," President Obama wrote that "Mandela's sacrifice was so great that it called upon people everywhere to do what they could on behalf of human progress. … The first time I became politically active was during my college years, when I joined a campaign on behalf of divestment, and the effort to end apartheid in South Africa." At the time of Mr. Obama's First Amendment advocacy, Mr. Mandela and his organization the African National Congress (ANC) were denounced as terrorist by the US government. If the "material support" law had been in effect back then, Mr. Obama would have been subject to potential criminal prosecution. It is ironic - and the height of hypocrisy - that this same man who speaks with such reverence for Mr. Mandela and recalls his own support for the struggle against apartheid now allows the Justice Department under his command to criminalize similar First Amendment advocacy against Israeli apartheid and repressive foreign governments.

Source / Truthout

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All Oppressed and Their Struggles Are One

All Earth is Alive and Akin
By Ed Kinane / May 9, 2010

"We have been socialized to treat [animals] as objects for our use rather than beings with intrinsic value and rights. It is easier to exploit when we depersonalize. Objectification and exploitation of animals parallels the objectification of women and cultural minorities...." -- Linda Destefano

To "objectify" is to turn creatures into things... objects without thought, without right, without need, without feeling. Objectification is a major obstacle to peace and justice on this bleeding planet.

Turning the living into things is precisely what the U.S. war machine did to the people and land of Southeast Asia. It is what that machine is doing to the people and land of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Such lethal objectifying can only occur insofar as military personnel are themselves objectified, i.e. desensitized and robotized. How and why does our culture foster such barbarity?

We need to resist objectification wherever and whenever we can. There are several fronts where the struggle must be waged. They connect and overlap. Struggle on one fortifies each of the others. When any one front is neglected, justice for all suffers.

Take sexism. Sexism entails objectifying women, often as sex objects, usually as work objects. To objectify half of the human species -- especially that half doing the least to destroy and the most to nourish -- is to deny and degrade all life. As long as there is sexism, violence will thrive. Eliminating sexism is crucial to eliminating war.

Take racism. Racism entails objectifying people of color. When people are reduced to things they can be exploited and war can be made on them. A "nigger" is a thing. So are "gooks" and "hajis."

Because, over the centuries, the people of pallor had a knack for weaponry we became world-striding conquerors. Since we conquer people of color, extract their resources and live off their labor, we have to depersonalize them. To live with our righteous selves we can't value those we exploit. Or those exploited on our behalf. Hence racism.

Workers are likewise objectified. Under industrialism and corporate capitalism jobs are structured so workers are depersonalized and function as mindless machines, as drones. Their stupor is then used to justify their further exploitation.

The training and enculturation of higher functionaries (officers, engineers, executives, professionals, etc.) tends to compartmentalize their minds. Oblivious to their own co-optation, for them the consequences of their actions often remain opaque.

Industrialism and corporate capitalism - think oil spill -- see not only people, but the whole of nature as dead matter. Air, earth, water, forests and rivers are treated as inert and not as the vital elements of the biosphere that they are.

The ecology movement, in exorcising our centuries-long amnesia, teaches us the intrinsic value of all nature. The recovery of this knowledge by the industrial world is essential to the struggle against violence on all fronts.

All oppressed and their struggles are one. Worldwide, most workers are women, most women are persons of color, most persons of color are workers. Even if they aren't thus doubly or triply victimized, they share the same fate: they are dehumanized, brutalized -- treated as animals.

As long as vast categories of humans are treated as non-human animals and as long as non-human animals are denied care and respect, workers, women and people of color will likewise be denied care and respect. Everyone loses.

This isn't platitude, it's common sense. It's the pragmatism behind, for example, organized labor demanding a living wage for non-unionized workers. The higher the wage floor, the higher the wage scale for all.

The more respect for the least empowered, the more respect for all. Long ago a Palestinian sage put it this way: "What you do to my least brethren...you do to me."

Insofar as the objectification of any kind of creature is routinized, the barbarism of a culture grows. Our layers on layers of callousness, like proliferating systems of military 'defense,' threaten us all. By objectifying anyone -- human or non-human -- we risk sharing her fate. The hardening of our hearts hardens our entirety.

What we do to animals in laboratories and on factory farms, the Nazis did in prison camps to defenseless minorities. Their medical experiments, presided over by doctors and scientists, grew out of standard laboratory procedure.

Whether it be in some research labs or in Nazi death camps - or in occupied Palestine or among the tortured of Abu Ghraeb, Bagram and Guantanamo -- the cold-bloodedness is similar. In each, caged, silenced, disenfranchised victims are met by clinical detachment and totalitarian power. By playing god the perpetrators deny their own humanity.

In all of these cages the victims and their tormentors are not so different from each other or from ourselves. How can we not consider them our kin? As ecologists and feminists keep reminding us: we are all connected. There is no heartbeat that is not somehow our own.

[Ed Kinane works to end state terrorism. He was with Voices in the Wilderness in Baghdad in 2003. Reach him at edkinane@verizon.net.]

Source / Common Dreams

Fluxed Up World

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The US Human Rights Record: Never Discussed in the US

On the sixth anniversary after charges were brought in the Abu Ghraib scandal, it is appropriate to raise the issue of human rights abuses by Americans and the American government. We are a callous and arrogant nation, in denial about who we are and what we've done in our short history. Wake up and smell the coffee shit.

Richard Jehn / Fluxed Up World

Chinese report documents human rights disaster in the United States
By Patrick Martin / 19 March 2010

On March 13, China’s Information Office of the State Council published a report titled, “The Human Rights Record of the United States in 2009.”

This document was clearly intended as a rebuttal to the annual US State Department Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2009, released two days earlier.

The Chinese report quite legitimately notes that the US government “releases Country Reports on Human Rights Practices year after year to accuse other countries, and takes human rights as a political instrument to interfere in other countries’ internal affairs, defame other nations’ image and seek its own strategic interests. This fully exposes its double standards on the human rights issue…”

Delivering the US government a well-deserved dose of its own medicine does not, of course, absolve the Chinese regime of its own gross violations of human rights. It rules autocratically over 1.3 billion people, most of them desperately poor peasants and super-exploited workers.

That being said, the Chinese report is an eye-opening document—factual, sober, even understated, drawn entirely from public government and media sources in the United States, with each item carefully documented. It presents a picture of 21st century America as much of the world sees it, one which is in sharp contrast to the official mythology and American media propaganda.

Not surprisingly, the report went unmentioned in the US mass media.



The 14-page report is divided into six major sections: Life, Property and Personal Security; Civil and Political Rights; Economic, Social and Cultural Rights; Racial Discrimination; Rights of Women and Children; US Violations of Human Rights Against Other Nations. The cumulative picture is one of a society in deep and worsening social crisis.

A few of the facts and figures cited on violence and police repression in the United States:

• Each year, 30,000 people die in gun-related incidents.
• There were 14,180 murders last year.
• In the first ten months of 2009, 45 people were killed by police use of tasers, bringing the total for the decade to 389.
• Last year, 315 police officers in New York City were subject to internal supervision due to “unrestrained use of violence.”
• 7.3 million Americans were under the authority of the correctional system, more than in any other country.
• An estimated 60,000 prisoners were raped while in custody last year.

On democratic rights, the report notes the pervasive government spying on citizens, authorized under the 2001 Patriot Act, extensive surveillance of the Internet by the National Security Agency, and police harassment of anti-globalization demonstrators in Pittsburgh during last year’s G-20 summit. Pointing to the hypocrisy of US government “human rights” rhetoric, the authors observe, “the same conduct in other countries would be called human rights violations, whereas in the United States it was called necessary crime control.”

The report only skims the surface on the socioeconomic crisis in the United States, noting record levels of unemployment, poverty, hunger and homelessness, as well as 46.3 million people without health insurance. It does offer a few facts rarely discussed in the US media:

• 712 bodies were cremated at public expense in the city of Los Angeles last year, because the families were too poor to pay for a burial.
• There were 5,657 workplace deaths recorded in 2007, the last year for which a tally is available, a rate of 17 deaths per day (not a single employer was criminally charged for any of these deaths).
• Some 2,266 veterans died as a consequence of lack of health insurance in 2008, 14 times the military death toll in Afghanistan that year.

The report presents evidence of pervasive racial discrimination against blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans, the most oppressed sections of the US working class, including a record number of racial discrimination claims over hiring practices, more than 32,000. It also notes the rising number of incidents of discrimination or violence against Muslims, and the detention of 300,000 “illegal” immigrants each year, with more than 30,000 immigrants in US detention facilities every day of the year.

It notes that the state of California imposed life sentences on 18 times more black defendants than white, and that in 2008, when New York City police fired their weapons, 75 percent of the targets were black, 22 percent Hispanic and only 3 percent white.

The report refers to the well-known reality of unequal pay for women, with median female income only 77 percent that of male income in 2008, down from 78 percent in 2007. According to the report, 70 percent of working-age women have no health insurance, or inadequate coverage, high medical bills or high health-related debt.

Children bear a disproportionate burden of economic hardship, with 16.7 million children not having enough food at some time during 2008, and 3.5 million children under five facing hunger or malnutrition, 17 percent of the total. Child hunger is combined with the malignant phenomenon of rampant child labor in agriculture: some 400,000 child farm workers pick America’s crops. The US also leads the world in imprisoning children and juveniles, and is the only country that does not offer parole to juvenile offenders.

US foreign policy comes in for justifiable criticism as well. A country with so many poor and hungry people accounts for 42 percent of the world’s total military spending, a colossal $607 billion, as well as the world’s largest foreign arms sales, $37.8 billion in 2008, up nearly 50 percent from the previous year.

The Chinese report notes the documented torture of prisoners in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, the worldwide US network of military bases, the US blockade of Cuba (opposed by the UN General Assembly by a vote of 187 to 3), and the systematic US spying around the world, utilizing the NSA’s “ECHELON” interception system, as well as the US monopoly control over Internet route servers.

The report also points out the deliberate US flouting of international human rights covenants. Washington has either signed but not ratified or refused to sign four major UN covenants: on economic, social and cultural rights; on the rights of women; on the rights of people with disabilities; and on the rights of indigenous peoples.

The report does not discuss the source of the malignant social conditions in the United States—nor should that be expected, since that would require an explanation of the causal connection between poverty, repression and discrimination and the operations of the capitalist profit system, something that Beijing is hardly likely to undertake.

Source / World Socialist Web Site

Thanks to Jeffrey Segal / Fluxed Up World

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