Land cessions. Relevant history.

Colonial period. Between 1565 (when Spain established, in Florida, the first permanent European colony in what was to become the 48 contiguous United States) and 1783 (when the United States gained its independence from Britain), Euro-American colonial settler-states forcibly displaced the indigenous nations from most of the land east of the Appalachian divide. Said displacements were often effectuated through violent military action, often in wars provoked by abusive colonial-settler impositions upon their indigenous neighbors. Most of the displaced Indigenes, who survived, were thusly forced to relocate to territory further west.

US claims. During the War for United States Independence, some of the indigenous nations (and/or their internal factions) remained neutral, while others eventually took one side or the other. Of the latter, many more sided with the British than with the United States, because Britain (wanting to avoid costly armed conflicts) had attempted to protect indigenous territory from incursions by Euro-American land speculators and frontier settlers. With the end of the War in 1783, the United States laid claim to sovereignty over all of the territory between the Appalachian divide and the Mississippi River. At first, the US claimed the right to take ownership of all of the land in this new territory based upon a purported “right of conquest”. Naturally, the indigenous nations refused to accept either the claim of US sovereignty or the purported right of Euro-Americans to take their land.

Treaty cessions. As the United States seized indigenous land in response to pressure from wealthy land speculators and racist demagogues, war was the inevitable result. The US government soon recognized that negotiations for land cessions was an easier and far less costly means for enforcing the claimed sovereignty and obtaining the coveted land. In such negotiations, all of the advantages were with the US side, which used those advantages to gradually obtain nearly all of the coveted territory thru a series of unequal treaties. The treaties were, of course, always written: by the US side, in the language of the Euro-Americans, and using interpreters chosen by the US. US government agents (who often were territorial military governors) used intimidation, coercion, deceit, bribery, and exploitation of conflicts within and between the indigenous nations. Although the indigenous nations were paid for the land, that pay was a small fraction of its actual value and commonly included promised annuities. Said annuities were often subsequently withheld in order to extort cessions of additional territory. Moreover, the US side routinely recognized an indigenous go-between, who was willing to comply with US demands, as agent (or purported “Chief”) of an indigenous nation even though said go-between often had no authority to act for that nation. Naturally, the resulting treaties were generally fraudulent.

Principal source: Robert M Owens: “Indian Land Cessions” (encyclopedia.com, © 2019).

Land speculators. Until the middle of the 19th century, for Euro-Americans with money, the most popular and usual place to invest was in land, especially land on the frontier yet to be settled by Euro-Americans. Wealthy Europeans also often invested in such American land. Naturally, wealthy land speculators cast covetous eyes upon land owned and occupied by the indigenous peoples. Said land speculators were leading instigators of Euro-American aggressions and wars against the indigenous nations, aggressions thru which such lands were acquired by the governmental authority. Of course, “valid” title to land in frontier areas could only be obtained from the colonial governments or later the federal government. Politically connected land speculators used their influence with provincial and federal office-holders to purchase, on especially favorable terms, grants of large tracts of land newly extorted from the indigenous nations. Then, after the Indigenes had been expelled, said grant holders would contract surveys and sell the land in small lots at a great markup over their privileged purchase price. A notable example is the case of western New York.

Preemption. In the 1784 Treaty of Fort Stanwix, the US acknowledged that ownership of western New York belonged to the Six Nations Confederacy. A 1786 agreement to resolve conflicting claims over this territory gave its governance to New York, but gave to Massachusetts a preemptive right to buy the land from the Haudenosaunee. In 1788, Oliver Phelps and Nathaniel Gorham purchased (from Massachusetts) that preemptive right over nearly all of New York west of Seneca Lake (6 million acres occupying 14 present-day counties). The price was $1 million, but it was to be paid in Massachusetts scrip then worth about 20 cents on the dollar. The scrip rose in value to par, and Phelps and Gorham were then unable to complete payment. When they defaulted after having made their first of three payments, purchase rights over the western 2/3 (that is the part west of the Genesee River) reverted to Massachusetts. In 1791, Robert Morris (then the richest man in the US, also a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and [like half of his fellow signers] a slave owner) purchased the rights over most of that 2/3 (for $333,333.33).

Dispossession. In 1792 and 1793, Morris contracted the sale of most (3,250,000 acres) of his subject land to the Holland Land Company (a syndicate of wealthy investors in Amsterdam, Netherlands). In order to deliver clear title, Morris had to buy the land from the Haudenosaunee, its actual owners. In 1797, their agreement to sell (for $100,000) was fraudulently extorted in the Treaty of Big Tree thru a combination of: (1) threat that the US would likely not recognize their ownership rights, and (2) bribery of their leaders and negotiators. As a concession, the Haudenosaunee were left with 200,000 acres (about 6%) for reservations. The Holland Land Company hired a survey (cost $71,000) and divided the land into lots which it then sold between 1801 and 1840.

End result. Massachusetts, which had never paid anything to the Haudenosaunee, received from 9 to 15 cents per acre (respectively from Morris and Phelps-Gorham). The surveyors were paid about 2.2 cents per acre. The actual owners, the Haudenosaunee, received about 3 cents per acre. The land in post-survey lots was then sold, initially at $2.75/acre. Thus, the land speculators (Morris and the Holland Land Company) apparently received, between them, gross profits in excess of $2.50/acre.

Principal source: Wikipedia: “Treaty of Fort Stanwix” (1784) (2025 April 06); “Treaty of Hartford” (1786) (2025 July 11); “Phelps and Gorham Purchase” (2025 July 13); “Holland Land Company” (2025 July 10); “Treaty of Big Tree” (2024 February 26).

Purchasers. Land, in the fully settled eastern part of the newly independent United States, was mostly all privately owned, and it was relatively expensive. Consequently, working tenant farmers and farm laborers generally could not afford to purchase farms there. Meanwhile, land in the western frontier areas possessed certain relative disadvantages; specifically: less of it had been cleared of woods, its roads and other transportation infrastructure were few and crude, and access to markets and established Euro-American communities was more distant and difficult. So, whenever land became available on the western frontier, it was relatively cheap. With every tract of territory ceded by the Indigenes to the US, the federal government asserted ownership of the ceded land. In the old Northwest Territory (Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin), the Indigenes received pennies per acre for their land, which the US government then surveyed and offered at auction to individual family farmers at prices of no less than $1.00 or $2.00/acre, often after having previously sold large tracts to wealthy politically-connected speculators at lower prices. The speculators, who never settled on the land, purchased it only to re-sell at a sizable mark-up to later settlers. Moreover, such speculators were a major influence on US policy to take the land from its indigenous peoples, as they (along with racist demagogues and war-profiteering military contractors) lobbied their friends in government to induce said government to seize and/or extort ever more cessions of territory from the indigenous nations. ^[3]

Principal source: Paul W Gates: “Land Speculation” (encyclopedia.com, © 2019).

Interracial relations. In order to justify the dispossession of the original owners and to obscure the fraud and theft utilized in the process, the proponents (land speculators, other advocates of US expansionism, and their apologists) routinely resorted to rationalization, misrepresentation, and bigotry.

Firstly, although there was brutality on both sides in the “Indian” wars (invariably provoked by the Euro-American side), the expansionists dehumanized the Indigenes by one-sidedly vilifying them as murdering heathen savages.

Secondly, they portrayed white settlement as bringing civilization to an untamed wilderness and falsely portrayed the indigenous peoples as incapable of making productive use of the land. In fact, the indigenous peoples throughout almost the whole of the territory between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mississippi River were farmers, who cleared tracts of the woodland in order to raise the crops which included their staple foods (maize [corn], beans, and squash) plus various other vegetables. Meat obtained in the hunt was a supplement to the staples. If the Indigenes did not clear as much of the woodland as the Euro-Americans, this was: because their lower population density and their land rotation practice made it unnecessary; and (until after European contact) because they lacked the steel saws and axes and the draft animals of the Euro-Americans, which made forest removal much easier.

Despite the disparaging propaganda against the indigenous peoples, most settlers sought to avoid conflict with the remaining local natives. Some, as attested in contemporary reports, went further and established neighborly and mutually beneficial trade relations with neighboring Indigenes. It was the avaricious profiteering men of wealth and power who created the conditions for ethnic cleansing and genocidal policies.

Principal sources:

Jack Lynch: “A Principal Source of Dishonor: Indian Policies in Early America” (C W Journal, 2009 Spring).

R Douglas Hurt: “Agriculture, American Indian” (encyclopedia.com, © 2019).

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Charles Pierce.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

In a statement, the Maasai International Solidarity Alliance (MISA) denounced the “loss of control or use” of vital Maasai grazing grounds, and accused VW of making “false and misleading claims” about Maasai participation in decision making about the project.

Many Maasai pastoralists have already been evicted from large parts of their grazing lands for national parks and game reserves, with highly lucrative tourist businesses operating in them. Now a major new carbon-credit generating project by Volkswagen ClimatePartner (VWCP) and US-based carbon offset company Soils for the Future Tanzania is taking control of large parts of their remaining lands, and threatening livelihoods by upending long-standing Maasai grazing practices.

The Maasai have not given their free, prior and informed consent for the project. They fear it will restrict their access to crucial refuge areas in times of drought, and threaten their food security.

Another Maasai man, who wished to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals, said: “They use their money to control us.” A third said: “Maasailand never had a price tag. In Maasailand, there is no privatization. Our land is communal.”

Survival International’s Director of Research and Advocacy, Fiona Watson, said today: “The carbon project that Volkswagen supports violates the Maasai’s rights and will be disastrous for their lives, all so the company can carry on polluting and greenwash its image. It takes away the Maasai’s control over their own lands and relies on the false and colonial assumption that they are destroying their lands — which is not supported by evidence.

“The Maasai have been grazing cattle on the plains of East Africa since time immemorial. They know the land and how to manage it better than carbon project developers seeking to make millions from their lands.”

VW’s investment in the project, whose official name is the “Longido and Monduli Rangelands Carbon Project”, is believed to run to several million dollars, and has contributed to corruption and tensions in northern Tanzania, according to MISA’s report on the project.

An adjacent project in southern Kenya, also run by Soils for the Future, is beset with similar problems, and has already sparked resistance from local communities.

Survival International’s Blood Carbon report revealed that the whole basis for these “soil carbon” projects is flawed, and unsupported by evidence. Survival documented similar problems with the highly controversial Northern Kenya Grasslands Carbon Project. That project suffered a blow in a Kenyan court and was suspended and put under review by Verra, the carbon credit verification agency, for an unprecedented second time.

Notes:

1. Further undermining VW’s “green” credentials, there are serious concerns that the company might source nickel for their electric vehicle batteries from the territory of uncontacted Indigenous Hongana Manyawa people in Halmahera, Indonesia.
2. VW sources batteries from CATL, a joint venture partner in a new battery factory inaugurated last month just a few miles from the territory of the uncontacted Hongana Manyawa.
3. VW has also signed MOUs with Eramet and Tsingshan, which, together with the Indonesian state mining company, own the biggest nickel mine in the world. That mining operation is currently destroying the uncontacted Hongana Manyawa’s territory.
4. Volkswagen ClimatePartner (VWCP) is a joint venture between the auto maker and ClimatePartner, a controversial German company which provides carbon offsetting services to polluting businesses.
5. The 1 million hectare (2.5 million acre) project depends on undermining the Maasai’s traditional and long-standing grazing practices, requiring them to change to ‘Rapid Rotational Grazing’, which removes flexibility and causes hardship – particularly in dry seasons.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Survival International.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Faramarz Farbod.

This morning more than 250 police, forest guards and tiger force members raided a village which Indigenous people had reclaimed in a tiger reserve six weeks ago. The security forces tore down seven forest shelters where women, children and older people were living, at Karadikallu Atturu Kolli village, in Nagarhole Tiger Reserve.

“They are forcing people to destroy their own homes on their own lands. This is a grave violation of human rights as well as the rights guaranteed under the Forest Rights Act,” said a source from inside the village.

Jenu Kuruba people were violently evicted from Nagarhole 40 years ago to make way for a tiger reserve. More than 50 families returned on May 5 to live in their former village and to assert their claims in accordance with India’s Forest Rights Act. It’s believed to be the first time Indigenous people in India asserted their rights to return to their homes after eviction from a Protected Area.

“It is outrageous that the Jenu Kuruba are being thrown out of their home once again. The authorities must stop this persecution of the Jenu Kuruba, who are just trying to live in peace on their own land,” said Caroline Pearce, director of Survival International. “As we’ve seen time and again, conservation – in this case a Tiger Reserve – is being used as a pretext to violate Indigenous rights. It is time to stop this abusive and colonial model of fortress conservation.”

The Jenu Kuruba had lived alongside and worshipped tigers for generations. They decided to return because their sacred spirits, who still dwell in the old village location, became angry at being abandoned when the community was forced from the forest in the 1980s.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Survival International.

Then what about a sustainable city? Unfortunately, when planners and politicians talk about making cities more sustainable, they are thinking of large urban centers like Portland or Seattle. Oh, the buzz phrases: walkable neighborhoods, traditional architecture, and diverse land uses. It’s neighborhoods that sort of look like small towns. The fix is in for those large cities as planners and developers are B.S.-ing introducing a “small-town feel” into large cities and suburbs. This will never ever create a sense of community, nor will it reduce the use of automobiles.

From the promo stuff on the book, The New American Small Town: “So, what of small towns themselves? We don’t talk about these places as much. They are often assumed to be utopias of the past or crumbling ghost towns of the present day rather than places with potential for sustainable living. This book critically examines narratives of American small towns, contrasting them with lived experiences in these places, and considers both the myth and reality in the context of current urban challenges. Interweaving stories from and about U.S. small towns, the book offers lessons in sustainable urbanism that can be applied both in the towns themselves and to the larger cities and suburbs where most Americans now live.”

Like I stated above, there are dozens of books for planning students and developers and chambers of commerce and policy wonks on how to jigger things for smalltowns.

“The book offers hope-filled portraits of small towns as livable, sustainable, and diverse places and serves as an important corrective to the media narrative of alienated, left-behind rural voters.”

—Mark Bjelland, author of Good Places for All

Thinking of community from that large urban space, Jane Jacobs approached cities as living beings and ecosystems. She suggested that over time, buildings, streets and neighborhoods function as dynamic organisms, changing in response to how people interact with them. She explained how each element of a city – sidewalks, parks, neighborhoods, government, economy – functions together synergistically, in the same manner as the natural ecosystem. This understanding helps us discern how cities work, how they break down, and how they could be better structured.

She was looking at big urban places, like her home, New York:

“Whenever and wherever societies have flourished and prospered rather than stagnated and decayed, creative and workable cities have been at the core of the phenomenon. Decaying cities, declining economies, and mounting social troubles travel together. The combination is not coincidental.” (source)

In my small town, population 2,300, we look toward the sea and the forest as reminders of how vital ecosystems are. The county becomes a network of towns along the coast and inland — Lincoln City, Depoe Bay, Newport, Seal Rock, Waldport, Yahcats.

We drive a lot, and the traffic during tourist summer season balloons. The town of Lincoln City is around 10,000, but on some weekends, it swells to 50,000. All that infrastructure, all that water, all those restaurants and beaches, well, think of five times the impact, or more, since locals do not all swarm to the beaches or the restaurants all in one fell swoop.

We are living on unceded land, and in many cases, sacred burial land: Indigenous Communities in Oregon.

The links below are the websites of Oregon’s nine federally recognized tribal communities:

• Burns Paiute Tribe
• Confederated Tribes of the Coos, Lower Umpqua and Siuslaw Indians
• Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community of Oregon
• Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians
• Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation
• Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs
• Coquille Indian Tribe
• Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Tribe of Indians
• Klamath Tribes

The story of a community is all wrapped up in its context, history, and in this age of a memory hole crazy presidency —  with white supremacists like Jewish Stephen Miller running the Trump team’s Gestapo and Big Brother training camp —  we will see history literally erased.

Communities that are small are more vulnerable than those large urban areas Jacobs wrote about, and studied.

From my urban and regional-planning graduate-student days (looking at concepts of small is better and scaling down) there are so many quotable axioms tied to communities that are considered small. Here are some notes from one of my planning classes looking at regional smalltown planning:

01/21/2015: Institutions of higher education exist for the common good, and the unfettered search for truth and its free exploration is critical to the common good. The college seeks to educate its students in the democratic tradition, to foster recognition of individual freedoms and social responsibility, and to inspire meaningful awareness of and respect for a collaborative learning environment. Freedom of expression will be guaranteed to instructors to create a classroom atmosphere that allows students to raise questions and consider all sides of issues. OCCC instructors are responsible for exercising judgment in selecting topics of educational value for discussion and learning consistent with course requirements, goals, and desired outcomes.   (Emphasis added, DP)

Not sure how my email exploring higher education’s fear of losing all of the humanities, losing all the Diversity Equity Inclusion courses, and gutting liberal arts in general, how all of that is “not allowing” students to raise questions and consider all sides of issues.

Small towns or big towns, pick your institution and Kafkaesque poison.

But part of my role in community consciousness raising is primarily community journalism, also known as solutions journalism, so in this most recent iteration of Haeder, I have a fairly new show, one hour a week, dealing with public affairs, but truly an interview show, a deep dive with a guest or guests, and alas, all shows, all topics, all of it derives from my own deep well of experience, exploration, education and emancipation — the Four E’s, man, of life!

Some upcoming shows, Wednesday, on the air, 6 to 7 PM, Finding Fringe: Voice from the Edge, KYAQ.org (streaming live) and 91.7 FM, Lincoln County.

I’m shifting some of the program dates around since we have current news around the mayor of a small town, Waldport, being arrested and removed from her position as elected mayor. That’s May 14.

You have to listen to her. May 14. 6 pm. again, stream the show, kyaq.org

• Then, have you ever heard of the Amanda Trail in Yachats?
• Do you know what it is like to be incarcerated and then put on 6 years house arrest? Part I & II.
• Rick Bartow, the famous artist, will be a living reflection at the Yakona Nature Preserve.
• The Rights of Nature and the Community Bill of Rights? Kai of CELDF will tell us all about that.
• Siletz is the Home of the Elakha Alliance, a non-profit to work with stakeholders of every sort to reintroduce sea otters to Oregon’s coast.
• So you leave prison and you have a farm to work on to heal, to reorient oneself, to let the soil salve the PTSD. Freedom Farms.

May 14 — Heide Lambert, Waldport Mayor controversy

May 21 — Amanda Trail,  Joanne Kittel

May 28 — Prisons, Incarceration, Probation — Kelly Kloss

June 4 — Prisons, Incarceration, Alcoholism — Kelly Kloss

June 11 — Three women from Yakona Nature Preserve & Learning Center — Anna, Rena, JoAnn

June 18 — CELDF, Rights of Nature & Community Rights — Kai  Huschke

June 25 — Chanel Hason, Elakha Alliance, sea otters

July 2–  Freedom Farms — Sean O Ceallaigh

Past shows are on the website, but only in limited form. Go to archives, and then put in Finding Fringe.

Try listening to a smalltown radio station, tuning into a smalltown resident’s take on what it TAKES to be a citizen of the world in a small town, this one called Waldport.

Here, yet another global thing attached to Waldport — a former Georgia slave paid for his freedom and ended up out here!  You Can’t Have Your Mule and Forty Acres, Too!

How about the legacy of genocide out here? Not Just One of those Tales of Another Dead Indian

You’ll get the picture that Waldport or Vancouver, BC, or El Paso or Mexico City, we all face the same problems that the rich and the militarists and the oligarchs force us to fight.

Tune in, KYAQ.org, streaming worldwide, Wednesdays, 6 PM, PST.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

A group of Indigenous people who were evicted from their ancestral village in Nagarhole Tiger Reserve in south India 40 years ago have returned to their former homes.

It’s believed to be the first time Indigenous people in India have asserted their rights in this way, and returned en masse to their homes after being evicted from a Protected Area.

Forest department officials warn the Jenu Kuruba against re-occupying their homes inside Nagarhole National Park. The Indigenous people castigated them for delaying recognition of their forest rights, and went ahead anyway. ©Survival International

More than 50 Jenu Kuruba families took part in the long-planned operation, and have started building houses using their traditional materials and techniques. The Jenu Kuruba say they decided to return because their sacred spirits, who still dwell in the old village location, became angry at being abandoned when the community was forced from the forest in the 1980s.

Forest department officials, backed up by police, warned the Jenu Kuruba against re-occupying their homes, but the Indigenous people castigated them for delaying the recognition of their forest rights for years, and went ahead anyway. Today around 130 police officers and forest guards were on the scene, and prevented journalists from accessing the area.

Shivu, a young Jenu Kuruba leader, said today: “Historical injustice continues to happen over us by denying our rights on our lands, forests and access to sacred spaces. Tiger conservation is a scheme of the forest department and various wildlife NGO’s to grab indigenous lands by forcefully moving us out, but opening the very same lands in the pretext of tourism to make money

We have to today returned to our home lands and forests. we will remain here. Our sacred sprits are with us.”

Jenu Kuruba families begin to construct a house for their ancestors, as they rebuild their old village inside Nagarhole National Park. ©Sartaz Ali Barkat/ Survival

In a statement the Jenu Kuruba of Nagarhole said: “Enough is Enough. We can’t part from our lands anymore. We want our children and youth to live a life that our ancestors once lived. Tigers, elephants, peacocks, wild boar, wild dogs are our deities. We have been worshipping them as our ancestral spirits since generations. This deliberate attempt to separate us from our lands, forests and sacred spaces will not be tolerated. We resist the current conservation model based on the false idea that forests, wildlife and humans cannot coexist.”

For decades it has been official policy in India, as in many other countries around the world, to evict Indigenous people whose lands are turned into Protected Areas, a practice known as Fortress Conservation.

An estimated 20,000 Jenu Kuruba people have been illegally evicted from Nagarhole. Another 6,000 resisted, and have managed to stay in the park.

The Jenu Kuruba’s belief system centers around their connection to the forest, its wildlife, and their gods – including the tigers who live there – but forest guards harass, threaten, and even shoot members of the tribe.

Jenu Kuruba people are experts in their environment. They gather medicine, honey, fruits, vegetables, tubers, and the thatch and bamboo needed to build their houses.

Famed for their honey collecting skills – Jenu Kuruba means “honey collectors” – they are guided from birth to death by the philosophy “Nanga Kadu Ajjayya… Nanga Kadina Jenu Ajjayya – Our forests are sacred… The honey from our forest is sacred.”

Those beliefs underpin the tribe’s careful management of their environment and have ensured tiger survival. Indeed, the healthy tiger population found in their forest is what drove the Indian government to turn the area into a Tiger Reserve. It has one of the highest concentrations of tigers in all of India.

Caroline Pearce, Director of Survival International, said today: “The Jenu Kuruba people’s re-occupation of their ancestral land is an inspirational act of repossession. They’re reclaiming what was theirs, in defiance of a hugely powerful conservation and tourism industry that has enriched itself at their expense.

“If the Indian government really cares about tiger conservation, it will not only allow the Jenu Kuruba people to return, but encourage them to do so – because the science is clear that tigers thrive alongside the Indigenous people whose forests they live in.”

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Survival International.

During the 2024 presidential election, I, like thousands of committed voters, decided to take a stand. When I was much younger, I believed that the American government was not for the people. I was confused by politics, but I knew what I saw in my community — poverty, police brutality, public schools with inadequate supplies, and markets offering unhealthy products that contributed to the chronic diseases plaguing neighborhood children and elders. I was convinced that the people in charge did not care about us, so I opted out of participating in the voting process.

Eventually, my associates convinced me that no politician would ever truly put our needs first, but that I was obligated to vote regardless. After all, many people had fought and died for the privilege so that I would have the opportunity to do what our ancestors had been denied. The trick, I was told, was to vote for the lesser evil and to then pray to God that the smaller demon would do something, even if just a little. Where I am from, the more trusted option was always a Democrat, so for twenty-five years I dutifully darkened the bubbles next to every Democrat running, without ever having heard of them or the principles upon which they were running. I wanted to know, but quite frankly, it all seemed too overwhelming to comprehend.

Then, on October 7, 2023, Palestinians decided to fight back. I watched in real time with millions of others worldwide as the impending slaughter fell upon them. Video after video forced us to witness infants with detached limbs, shell-shocked children surviving collapsed buildings, and parents on the brink of insanity carrying salvaged body parts of their children in bags. We also witnessed how our politicians — Democrats included — dug in their heels in support of the perpetrators.

I was appalled and distressed. There was absolutely no way that I was going to vote in an election where there was no “lesser evil.” As the campaigns surged on, I became more and more convinced that I needed to sit this one out. It did not matter whether a Republican or a Democrat won. As far as I could tell, both candidates were boastful, condescending, and committed to their billionaire base above all else.

I told my young daughters, who I noticed were becoming increasingly politically involved, what I was planning. They were supportive yet suggested, “You should check out third party candidates though. There are some who you may like.” It turned out that they both were leaning towards the Green Party.

I had heard of the Green Party in passing and even briefly considered voting Green during the 2016 presidential election, but it was too little, too late. This go-around, I had time and a little more confidence to learn so I could make a much more informed decision. I read the Jill Stein/Butch Ware Campaign platform and was immediately on board.

What hooked me were a few things: their stance on the genocide in Gaza and all proxy wars that America is involved in; cash reparations for descendants of enslaved Africans who were imprisoned here for centuries; and most of all, allyship with Indigenous people who continue to be regarded as subhuman by this government.

My family is Afro-Indigenous. My son, Muriyd “Two Clouds” Williams, was an extremely successful water protector and land defender, instrumental in halting a 150-plus-mile oil pipeline which threatened water sources and the environment, and in winning back dozens of acres of stolen land for his people through litigation. Due to his superb leadership, he was targeted, kidnapped, and murdered, and I immediately started two organizations to continue and expand his work.

The Green Party’s platform on honoring Native American lives, rights, and treaties pulled me in. Frankly, Jill and Butch had me at “sovereignty.” I was fighting tooth and nail to convince as many people as possible that this was the party to roll with, because they were promising to act for all citizens and immigrants, too.

Unfortunately, the 2024 election went to a usual suspect, and as we all know, it has all been downhill from there. One would hope that we would learn from this as a nation and finally try another route which would benefit all the people, not just some. Yet sadly we have not. It is politics as usual, with millionaire Democrats ramping up fear tactics through anti-Trump verbiage and a bogus “hands off” campaign.

In the interim, we all are suffering, and none as much as Indigenous people. Therefore, we proclaim: Hands ON regarding all Indigenous people and Nations as sovereign entities! Hands ON honoring all treaty rights and the return of stolen Indigenous lands! Hands ON establishing a Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the United States! Hands ON working toward an absolute end to the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons crisis! Hands ON expanding funding for health/mental health clinics and Tribal Compact Schools! Hands ON ensuring assistance, safety, and justice to all Indigenous people regardless of government recognition status!

If the United States has a chance of turning itself on its heels to become the “Great” society most of us claim we want it to be, it must fully honor First Nations people, from the inside out. I believe the Green Party is the only political party ready and willing to do so.

The Green Party of Pennsylvania (GPPA), is an independent political party which stands in opposition to the two corporate parties. GPPA candidates promote public policy based on the Green Party’s Four Pillars: grassroots democracy, nonviolence, ecological wisdom, and social justice/equal opportunity.

For More Information Please See:

Stein/Ware 2024 Platform, Social Justice, Tribal/Indigenous Sovereignty.

Green Party of the United States Platform, II. Social Justice, 4. Indigenous Peoples.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Mumtahanah Williams-Ansari.

One of the world’s most isolated tribes will be wiped out if the Indian government presses ahead with a mega-development project on their island, according to a new report published today.

The report “Crushed: How India plans to sacrifice one of the world’s most isolated tribes to create ‘the new Hong Kong’” is published by Survival International.

It warns that the uncontacted Shompen people, who live only on Great Nicobar Island in the Indian Ocean, will not survive if the Great Nicobar Development Project goes ahead.

The project includes plans to build a mega-port, defense base, power station and new city of 650,000 people, and bring in around a million tourists and other visitors to the small island each year.

Indian government visualisation of the Great Nicobar mega-port, just one part of the huge project planned for the island.

Survival International said today that it is sending the report to the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, UN Special Rapporteurs, and other UN officials, and urging them to call for the project to be scrapped.

Thirty-nine genocide scholars wrote to the Indian government in February 2024 warning that the project would wipe out the Shompen if it went ahead.

Around 300 Shompen people live in the lush rainforests of the island’s interior, the majority of whom are uncontacted. Great Nicobar is part of the same island chain that is home to the uncontacted Sentinelese people, where an American influencer was arrested this month for trying to contact the tribe.

Survival International Director Caroline Pearce said today: “It’s appalling that the authorities in India are pressing ahead with this project that will wipe out the Shompen, one of the world’s most isolated tribes. While they’re prosecuting someone for going to the island of the Sentinelese, they cannot justify building a city of 650,000 people on the island of their uncontacted neighbors the Shompen.

“This project would seem absurd if it weren’t so deadly. The Shompen have the right to survive, and just want to be left in peace. The government must allow them to do so by scrapping this project, rather than pressing ahead and condemning the Shompen to annihilation.”

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Survival International.

Many of those notables that assembled in the city of Philadelphia in that historic year of 1787 were intent on framing a resilient centralized government that stood in accordance with Adam Smith’s essential maxims which affirmed that “Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all;” contending that civil government, “grows up with the acquisition of valuable property.”^[3] Consequently, this analysis will challenge that long-held notion which has described early American thought and society as “egalitarian, free from [the] extreme want and wealth that characterized Europe.”^[4] In fact, as will be demonstrated throughout the work that follows, by an array of noted scholars and academics, this exploration will prove that property, class, and status played a significant, although perhaps not an exclusive, role in the development of that early colony and its nascent nation.

The intricacies of these contradictions will be examined in further detail throughout this study, arguing that, it is impossible to elude the fact that status, class, and race performed a major part in the views and doctrines woven within the principles and legal mechanisms formulated by those luminaries in that early republic. In fact, the following quote extracted from a letter written in 1786 by a French diplomat (positioned as the chargé d’affaires), in communiqué with his government, leading up to the Constitutional Convention of 1787, helps to delineate the top-down attitudes and devices engineered by the men historically known as the “Framers:”

Although there are no nobles in America, there is a class of men denominated “gentlemen.” … Almost all of them dread the efforts of the people to despoil them of their possessions, and, moreover, they are creditors, and therefore interested in strengthening the government and watching over the execution of the law…. The majority of them being merchants, it is for their interest to establish the credit of the United States in Europe on a solid foundation by the exact payment of debts, and to grant to Congress powers extensive enough to compel the people to contribute for this purpose.^[5]

As supported, evidenced, and argued by famed bottom-up historians like Michael Parenti, Charles A. Beard, Michael J. Klarman and others, the concepts of class and ownership and their European legacy greatly contributed to the initial composition of that early American dominion and its proprietorship stratum. In fact, as Professor Parenti demonstrates, “from colonial times onward, ‘men of influence’ received vast land grants from the [English] crown and presided over estates that bespoke an impressive munificence.” Parenti also reveals the stark differentials woven within the colonial class structure through exposing the fact that, “By 1700, three-fourths of the acreage in New York belonged to fewer than a dozen persons.” And, beyond that, “In the interior of Virginia, seven individuals owned 1.7 million acres,” exhibiting a structuralized formulation of wealth concentration from early on. In the run-up to the American Revolution, some twenty-seven years prior to the Continental Congress taking place in that celebrated year of 1787, Professor Parenti additionally notes that, “By 1760, [some] fewer than five hundred men in five colonial cities controlled most of the commerce, shipping, banking, mining, and manufacturing on the eastern seaboard.” Again, Parenti brings to the fore, a clear demarcation between the few and the many, property ownership and capital accumulation in that newly formed land of “equality,” which will be explored and surveyed in further detail within this work.^[6]

Chapter One of this dissertation will do a deep dive, in part, by focusing on documentary evidence penned by the “Framers” themselves. In addition to that, this work will seek to challenge existing historiographical debates, as noted, by displaying both the negative and positive legacy left by the men that articulated the U.S. Constitution in the city of Philadelphia in that momentous year of 1787. Furthermore, a major theoretical element of this retrospective will be working with, and challenging, the classifications and clashes within the so-called American ideals of Independence, Liberty, and Equality through studying an array of viewpoints from historical masterworks by Gordon S. Wood, Woody Holton, and others as mentioned below. Some of the topics brought forth within this research will include Chapter One, “An American Paradox: The Marriage of Liberty, Slavery and Freedom.” Chapter Two, “Cui Bono – Who Benefitted Most from the Categorical Constructs of Race and Class in Early America?” And, finally, in Chapter Three, this work will take a cogent look at “The Atomization of the Powerless and the Sins of Democracy,” historically from antiquity and beyond, by reflecting upon the judgments, attitudes and viewpoints, from a class perspective, of the privileged faction of men that forged that early nation’s crucial founding doctrines and documents. Again, these chapters above mentioned will take a thorough look at the varying constructs of race and class throughout the American experience from the Eighteenth, Nineteenth, and early part of the Twentieth centuries, focusing on cui bono, that is, who benefitted most from those racialized constructs of division and how those benefits negatively affected those societies at large socially, politically, and culturally.

Specifically, the chapters summarized above will bring together the importance of understanding just how class, ownership, and status, per race, position, and wealth demarcated the early American experience within governmental and societal structures, rules, and regulations from 1787 forward – surveying the uniqueness of the U.S. Constitution (both pro and con) along with its Amendments (known as the Bill of Rights)  will help provide a nuanced understanding of both said document and the men that formulated it. Which later impacted social movements and social discord from abolitionism to civil rights. This study will deliver not just a structuralized economic and political viewpoint, but a humanistic perspective. Moreover, this research will incorporate historical and scientific classics by such noted scholars as Edmund S. Morgan, Edward E. Baptist, Barbara J. Fields; and Nancy Isenberg – just to name a few. The foundations of racial divisions mentioned above were clearly measured by 16th-century English theorist and statesman Francis Bacon when he penned, “The Idols of the Tribe have their foundation in human nature itself, and in the tribe or race of men.”^[7] As determined, Bacon defined racism as an innate element of human nature. Hence, this study will challenge that hypothesis, in part, by arguing that divisions of race within the human condition are social constructs that ultimately benefit those that exercise those dictates.

1
The Paradox of Early American Freedom

What were the underlying moral and ideological contradictions woven within that newly birthed land of freedom’s class-stratified slave society?

We believe we understand what class is, that being, an economic social division shaped by affluence and privilege versus want and neglect. “The problem is that popular American history is most commonly told, [or] dramatized, without much reference to the existence of social classes.” The story, in the main, is taught and/or conveyed as a tale of American exceptionalism – as if the early American colonies, and their break with Great Britain, somehow miraculously transformed the constraints of class structuralism – resulting in a greater realization of “enriched possibility.” This conception of America was galvanized by the men that formulated its constitution in the city of Philadelphia in that momentous year of 1787 with great elegance – an image of how a modern nation “might prove itself revolutionary in terms of social mobility in a world traditionally dominated by monarchy and fixed aristocracy.” America’s most beloved myths are at once encouraging and devastating: “All men are created equal,”^[8] for example, which excluded Indigenous Peoples and African Americans, penned by renowned American statesman and philosopher Thomas Jefferson in his landmark Declaration of Independence written in 1776 – was effectively employed as a maxim to delineate, as historian Nancy Isenberg presents, “the promise of America’s open spaces and united people’s moral self-regard in distinguishing themselves from a host of hopeless societies abroad,” but the tale is much darker, more troublesome and abundantly more nuanced than that.^[9]

An elite colonial land-grabbing class, from early on, in that fledgling America, contrived its own attitudes and perspectives – those which served it best. After settlement, starting as early as the seventeenth century, colonial outposts exploited their unfree labor: European indentured servants, African slaves, Native Americans, and their offspring – describing such expendable classes as “human waste.”^[10] When it comes to an early settler-colonial mentality of not only conquest but profitability as an exemplar, “Coined land,” is the term that Benjamin Franklin (noted Eighteenth Century political philosopher, scientist, and diplomat) used to refer to, or celebrate, the intrinsic monetary value woven within the then brutal land acquisition and/or theft from the Indigenous Native American population at the time – appropriated land which was later “privatized and commodified” in the hands of venture capitalists, described as “European colonists.”^[11] These attitudes of hierarchy over “the people out of doors,” as those eminent luminaries that gathered in Philadelphia later referred to them were long held. A phrase, according to noted Professor of History Benjamin Irvin, that was largely defined to incorporate not only “the working poor” that clamored in the streets of Philadelphia during the Convention of 1787, but all peoples who were disenfranchised by that newly formed Continental Congress, “including women, Native Americans, African Americans, and the working poor.”^[12] In fact, as Isenberg demonstrates, notions of superiority from the upper crust of that early society toward, “The poor, [or waste people], did not disappear, [on the contrary], by the early eighteenth century they [the lower classes] were seen as a permanent breed.”^[13] That is, a taxonomical classification viewed through how one physically appeared, grounded in their class and conduct, came to the fore; and, this prejudicial manner of classifying and/or categorizing bottom-up human struggle or failure took hold in the United States for centuries to come – which will be further explored within subsequent chapters.

These unfavorable top-down class attitudes toward the poor or “waste people” emanated from what was known at the time as the mother country, that is, England itself – where as early as the 1500s and 1600s, America was not viewed as an “Eden of opportunity,” but rather a “giant rubbish heap,” that could be converted and cultivated into productive estates, on behalf of wealthy landowners through the unloading of England’s poor and destitute – who would be used to develop that far-off wasteland. Again, as Isenberg contends, “the idle poor [or] dregs of society, were to be sent thither simply to throw down manure and die in a vacuous muck.” That is, before it became celebrated as the fabled “City on a Hill,”^[14] auspiciously described by John Winthrop (English Puritan lawyer and then governor), in his well-known sermon of 1630, to what was then the early settlement of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, “America was [seen] in the eyes of sixteenth-century adventurers [and English elites alike] as a foul, weedy wilderness – a ‘sink-hole’ [perfectly] suited to [work, profit and lord over] ‘ill-bred commoners,’”^[15] clearly defining top-down class distinctions from early on.

Returning to those eminent American men that later devised the doctrines and documents which conceived of a “new nation” built on individual liberty and freedom, under further examination, begs the question: “Freedom for whom and for what?” This study will delve deeper into who those men were and how their overall attitudes toward the general populous as far as class, education, rank, and proprietorship, eventually led to a decisive result known as the U.S. Constitution. To appreciate the U.S. political and economic structure, it is essential to understand its original formulation, starting with said constitution. Those dignitaries that gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 were intent on framing a strong centralized government in adherence with (what they believed to be Scottish economist and theorist) Adam Smith’s fundamental dicta and/or revelations, which stated that government was “instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor” and “grows up with the acquisition of valuable property.”^[16] As Political Scientist and author, Robert Ovetz argues below, the mechanisms and/or devices designed and implemented within the U.S. Constitution were contrived from the outset to thwart any and all democratic control. Equally noted, the Framers’ brilliance was in formulating a virtually unalterable system which offered through clever slogans like “We the People” an assurance of participation within the constructs of a Republic, all the while permitting “a few to hand-pick some representatives,” whilst the majority thus surrendered “the power of self-governance.” The U.S., still to this day, lauds itself as a “Democracy,” yet, from the outset, as argued, that illustrious landmark charter mentioned was nefariously intended to “impede democratic control of government” all the while foiling “democratic control of the economy.”^[17]

Under careful observation, no section of the U.S. Constitution is more misconstrued and misinterpreted than its Preamble. Moreover, the term, “We the People,”  for example was, and still is to this day, deliberately employed as a rhetorical device in the form of a “philosophical aspiration,” separating it from the dry legalese that compose most of the rest of the charter. This, perhaps, is why the Preamble . has grasped the attention of the common everyday citizen. It embodies the hopes and values of ordinary people, cunningly expressing what they would ideally like the Constitution to achieve in practice – even though in truth it does something distinctively different. In fact, if we survey the meaning of the doctrines found within the Preamble, we find a set of material relations dating back to the 1700s which were brilliantly devised to deliberately constrain economic and political democracy:^[18]

Figure 1: The original handwritten Preamble to the U.S. Constitution on permanent display at the National Archives.

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.^[19]

The “Blessings of Liberty” run amiss. Again, those “Framers,” or group of elite men that gathered in Philadelphia for that historic event in 1787 ideally utilized the inclusive language of “We the People,” .  while at the same time, implementing a complex structural formulation which would stave off the will of the common people at every turn. The fifty-five of the seventy-four delegates that showed up on the scene, were, in fact, a cohort indistinguishable from themselves as “wealthy white men” of whom only a small number were not rich (but nevertheless affluent). They viewed themselves as “the People,” who would not only be provided liberties under that newly devised constitution, but also offered themselves the power to control the authority within that newly formed centralized government.^[20]

Figure 2: The Framers working out the concept of “We the People” by Tom Meyer.

By bringing the term “insure domestic Tranquility” to the fore, an early American top-down class paradigm is made evident by those men of property historically known as the “Framers.” The U.S. Constitution was the result of the repercussions of the American Revolution and decades of class conflict from within. Cogent warnings provided by not only Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence,^[21] which cautioned against “convulsions within” and “exciting domestic insurrections amongst us,” but also forewarnings offered by the man considered “the father of that newly formed nation,” George Washington. In the following statements to the run-up of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, written in correspondence to his then erstwhile comrade-in-arms and chief of artillery, General Henry Knox, George Washington (supreme commander of the American revolutionary colonial forces and hero par excellence) projected clear class distinctions, fears and/or biases which lie at the heart of this study, “There are combustibles in every state, to which a spark might set fire.”^[22] Hence, as Professor of Law, Jennifer Nedelsky asserts, what General Washington believed was necessary was a statutory formulation of control, instituted and devised by the upper crust of society, in the shape of a constitution, “to contain the threat of the people rather than to embrace their participation and their competence,”^[23] or else, as stated in a second letter to Knox, the eminent General warned, “If government shrinks, or is unable to enforce its laws … anarchy & confusion must prevail – and every thing will be turned topsy turvey,”^[24] demonstrating an elite fear most pronounced.

Figure 3: George Washington (1732-1799), Supreme Commander of the American Revolution and First President of the United States.

A good exemplar of a “spark that set fire,” which struck fear in the hearts of that elite class of men assembled in Philadelphia, is famously known as Shays’ Rebellion (August 29, 1786 to February 1787), led by former American army officer and son of Irish Immigrants, Daniel Shays, which culminated in a bottom-up armed revolt that took place in Western Massachusetts and Worcester, in response to a debt crisis imposed upon, in large part, the common citizenry; and, in opposition to the state government’s increased efforts to collect taxes on both individuals and their trades – as a remediation for outstanding war debt. The rebellion was eventually put down by Colonial Army forces sent there by George Washington himself – staving off the voice of the people, in that newly formed land of liberty. What “Tranquility” actually meant, as established by the Framers, was a centralized government formulated within the constitution, with the ability to halt and/or suppress conflict or unrest that threatened “the established order and governance of the elite.”^[25] Shays’ Rebellion in combination with the possibility of slave uprisings and native resistance offered the justification for creating, and later expanding, a domestic military force as penned into the Charter by Gouverneur Morris (1752 – 1816), American political leader and contributor to the Preamble outlined above. Morris cleverly emphasized the necessity for a general fiscal “contribution to the common defense” on behalf of his class interests, warning of the possible dangers of both “internal insurrections and external invasions” as outlined in detail in Article I Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution.^[26] In summary, by centralizing a military power within a national charter, “the elites got their own protection force against the possibility of the majority’s ‘popular despotism’” as described by Washington himself – thwarting any and all popular resistance to elite rule. In fact, by 1791, just four years after the Constitutional Congress met in the city of Philadelphia, that newly formed nation’s military force tripled its cost and increased its number of troops by fivefold.^[27]

In challenging that ideal of promoting “the general Welfare,” within a class paradigm, William Manning, (1747 – 1814) American Revolutionary soldier, farmer, and novelist, was one of the few voices at the Constitutional Convention that stood up and pushed back against the elite coup that was evidently taking place. After having fought in the Revolutionary War, as a common foot soldier, he began to believe that his military service and sacrifice carried little weight with the elites that surrounded him. He also delineated the fact that those measures which reflected Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, and (the first President of the Continental Congress) John Jay’s views, and policies, created a poisonous atmosphere, ideology, and division between the “Few and the Many.” William Manning feared that by locking “the people out of doors,” out of government, the Founders were implementing measures such as Hamilton’s economic vision for that newly formed nation “at the expense of the common farmer and laborer.”^[28] When it came to Shays’ Rebellion, for example, his views were commensurate with those of the uprising, but not with their methods of armed resistance. Based on his staunch democratic values, he called upon the common man to forcefully use new organizational tactics by directly petitioning the government to redress grievances. Manning understood the economic divisions as implemented.^[29] In 1798, he authored his most celebrated work,  The Key of Liberty, in which he displayed what he believed to be the objectives of the “Few” – which were to “distress and force the Many” into being financially dependent on them, “generating a sustained cycle of dependence.” Manning argued that the only chance for the “Many” was to choose those leaders that would battle for those with lesser economic and political authority.^[30] What Manning understood so well was that those early colonial financial interests defined their own class “influence and benefits” as “the general Welfare” which was, in his view, in diametrical opposition to much of the population. 

Figure 5: Alexander Hamilton (1757-1804), the First Secretary of the Treasury from 1789 to 1795 during George Washington’s presidency.

Alexander Hamilton’s celebrated financial plan alluded to above, put that early nation on a trajectory of economic growth, through a concentration of wealth in the form of property and holdings which would serve his class best, “…so capital [as] a resource remains untouched.”^[31] Hamilton delivered an innovative and audacious scheme in both his First and Second Reports on the Further Provision Necessary for Establishing Public Credit issued on 13 December 1790. Again, on behalf of his class interests, that newly devised federal government would purchase all state arrears at full cost – using its general tax base. Hamilton understood that such an act would considerably augment the legitimacy of that newly formed centralized government. To raise money to pay off its debts, the government would issue security bonds to rich landowners and wealthy stakeholders who could afford them, providing huge profits for those invested when the time arrived for that recently formed Federal government to pay off its debts.^[32] Charles Beard, Columbia University historian and author, in his famed book, An Economic Interpretation of The Constitution of The United States, succinctly outlines Hamilton’s class bias woven within his strategy per taxation, “[d]irect taxes may be laid, but resort to this form of taxation is rendered practically impossible, save on extraordinary occasions, by the provision that ‘they [taxes] must be apportioned according to population’ – so that numbers cannot transfer the burden to accumulated wealth”^[33] – revealing a significant economic top-down class preference and formulation of control from the outset. Beard summarizes as such, “The Constitution was essentially an economic document based upon the concept that the fundamental private rights of property are anterior to government and morally beyond the reach of popular majorities.”^[34] Given the United States’ long history of top-down class biases and bottom-up class struggle, to be further explored within this research, Beard provides a cogent groundwork.

Figure 6: James Madison (1751-1836), Father of the U.S. Constitution and Fourth President of the United States.

James Madison, elite intellectual and Statesman, was and is traditionally proclaimed as the “Father of the Constitution” for his crucial role in planning and fostering the Constitution of the United States and later its Bill of Rights. For many of the Framers, with Madison in the lead, the Articles of Confederation (previously formulated on November 15, 1777, and effectuated on March 1, 1781) were a nefarious compact among the 13 states of the United States, previously the Thirteen Colonies of Great Britain, which operated as the nation’s first framework of government establishing each individual State as “Free and Independent” – eloquently encouraged and outlined in Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence.^[35] From a class vantage point, the phrase “establish Justice” as devised by Madison within the Preamble above, meant in an idealistic sense, that the government would apply the rule of law impartially and consistently to all, irrespective of one’s station in society. But, in fact, the expression, “establish Justice,” explicitly points to the Framers’ “intent to tip the balance of power back in favor of the elites.”^[36] Notably, by early 1783, in his famed “Notes on Debates in Congress Memo” dated January 28^th, 1783, some four years prior to the ratification of the U.S. Constitution on December 12^th, 1787, Madison had well-defined what “justice” had meant to him and his cohorts by asserting that, “the establishment of permanent & adequate funds [in the form of a general taxation] to operate … throughout the U. States is indispensably necessary for doing complete justice to the Creditors of the U.S., for restoring public credit, & for providing for the future exigencies of … war.”^[37] For Madison,  as argued by eminent Professor of History Woody Holton, “establishing Justice” envisioned doing what some of the States were reluctant and/or incapable of achieving – that being, the payment of debts for the elites by “safeguarding their property” whether it be slave, land, or financial.^[38]

How class and race maintained supremacy. In essence, the cleverly devised Three-fifths Compromise outlined in Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3 of the U.S. Constitution, conceived by Madison, not only preserved, and reinforced the atrocity of slavery, but it also made stronger “the power of property” produced by the capitalization of all human labor. The minority checks embedded in the constitutional power of taxation ultimately prevented all types of what the Framers referred to as “leveling,” that being a fair and equal redistribution of wealth and resources amongst the general population.^[39] In doing so, the constitution serves in perpetuity to protect wealth from what the Framers feared most: “economic democracy.”^[40] Unambiguously, the Three-fifths clause established that three out of every five enslaved persons were counted, on behalf of their owners, when deciding a state’s total populace per representation and legislation. Hence, before the Civil War, the Three-fifths clause gave disproportionate weight to slave states, specifically slave ownership, in the House of Representatives.

A final element written within the Preamble of the U.S. Constitution worth further mention is the famed idiom “secure the Blessings of Liberty to Ourselves and Our Posterity,” a phrase that concisely encompasses the opinions of that band of elites, that amassed in Philadelphia, known as “the Framers” and their historical and material view of the possession of “Private Property” – greatly influenced and inspired by English Enlightenment philosopher and physician John Locke (1632-1704). Locke, in his famed The Two Treatises of Civil Government, argued that the law of nature obliged all human beings not to harm “the life, the liberty, health, limb, or goods of another,” defined as “Natural Rights.”^[41] As a result, the Framers (most of whom were large landowners) were intent on designing a centralized government that would singularly protect and defend “private property.”  The U.S. Constitution fosters this by placing a collection of roadblocks and/or obstacles in the way of majority demands for “economic democracy”  – what, on numerous occasions, James Madison himself described as an oppression, enslavement and/or tyranny of the majority.^[42] In a land without Nobles, Madison declared that “the Senate ought to come from, and represent, the wealth of the nation.”^[43] With Madison’s compatriot John Dickinson of Delaware in full accord, proclaiming that the Senate should be comprised of those that are, “distinguished for their rank in life and their weight of property, and bearing as strong a likeness to the British House of Lords as possible.”^[44] Additionally, Pierce Butler, wealthy land-owning South Carolinian, stood in complete agreement confirming that the Senate was, “the aristocratic part of our government.”^[45] Those elite men, as members of that continental congress, largely on their own behalf, cleverly formulated “a plethora of opportunities to issue a minority veto of any changes by law, regulation, or court rulings,” that might menace their property ownership.^[46] In essence, that charter known as the U.S. Constitution was brilliantly constructed to ensure an elite control and privilege that would last for “Posterity” – forever unchanged and unchangeable.

There is a wealth of evidence, as demonstrated, that the U.S. Constitution was originally designed and implemented not to facilitate meaningful bottom-up systemic change, but to ultimately avert anything that does not serve the benefits of the propertied class. Let us keep in mind that meaningful change from below has always been hard-fought, but not impossible. It took roughly seventy-eight years from 1787; and, a Civil War which lasted from 1861 to 1865, culminating in the loss of nearly 620,000 lives to officially abolish slavery under Amendment XIII (ratified on December 6^th, 1865).^[47] Until then, human bondage was a long held and integral form of property ownership within the United States – to be further examined within this work. Reflecting succinctly on the underlying class interests during and prior to the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, two indispensable statements, concerning “human nature,” from two essential minds, per class, which undergird the views here summarized, are as follows: Benjamin Franklin keenly observed that any assemblage of men, no matter how gifted, bring with them “all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interest and their selfish views.”^[48] Which stood ironically in accordance with Adam Smith’s, “All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind,”^[49] which demonstrates Smith’s historical view per an innate class perspective of wealth concentration.

2
Cui Bono – Who Benefitted Most from the Categorical Constructs of Race and Class?

The year 1776 is a deceptive starting point when it comes to the ideologies of American freedom and liberty. Independence from Great Britain did not expunge the British class arrangement long embraced by colonial elites that undergirded a social system of division which promulgated “entrenched beliefs about poverty and the willful exploitation of human labor.” An unfavored view of African slaves and poor whites widely thought of as “waste and/or rubbish,” remained a long-held social construct which served American elites well into the modern era.^[50] From the outset, when it came to class dynamics, no one understood the manipulative power of faction and discord sown amongst the masses better than James Madison himself as boldly outlined in Federalist #10. The danger, Madison argued on behalf of his class interests, was not faction itself, but the escalation of “a majority faction” grounded in that “most common and durable source” of conflict: the “unequal distribution of property.”^[51] In that widely celebrated land of “democracy,” Madison revealed not only his class biases anathema to the concept, but his fear of the very idea: “When a majority is included in a faction,” it could use democracy, “to sacrifice to its ruling passion or interest the public good and the rights of other citizens” – that is, the privileges of the propertied class.^[52] To his credit, from early on, James Madison laid out clear class distinctions, partialities, and fears woven within that newly formulated American social stratum – which are essential to this study. Within Federalist #10, Madison brilliantly devised a strategy of division which would protect elite interests by suppressing the economic menace of a majoritarian class faction through the encouragement of as many divisions within the populous as possible. Hence, as he outlined, the “greater variety of parties and interests [within class, race, gender, or religion] … make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have common motive.”^[53] Ironically, faction was problematic as stated, yet, at the same time, paradoxically, according to James Madison, more of it was the answer.

From the outset of the American experience, as outlined in his masterwork, American Slavery, American Freedom, Edmond S. Morgan, Yale Professor of History, makes evident the elite class interests and/or dynamics that fortified the use of clever rhetorical devices, such as “freedom and liberty” upon the general populous – all the while devilishly using the cruelty of slavery as a unifying force. During his visit to that early America, an astute English diplomat by the name of Sir Augustus John Foster, serving in Washington during Jefferson’s presidency (1801-1809), keenly observed, “[Elite] Virginians above all, seem committed to reducing all [white] men to an equal footing.” Foster observed, “owners of slaves, among themselves, are all for keeping down every kind of superiority”; and he recognized this pretension of equality used upon the masses as a powerful manipulative tactic. Virginians, he argued, “can profess an unbounded love of liberty and of democracy in consequence of the mass of the people, who in other countries might become mobs, being there nearly altogether composed of their own Negro slaves….”^[54] In that ruthless slave society, as Morgan reveals, “Slaves did not become leveling mobs, because their owners would see to it that they had no chance to. The apostrophes to equality were not addressed to them.”^[55] In clarification, he adds:

…because Virginia’s labor force was composed mainly of slaves, who had been isolated by race and removed from the political equation, the remaining free [white] laborers and tenant farmers were too few in number to constitute a serious threat to the superiority of the [elite white] men who assured them of their equality.^[56]

The ancient Roman concept of Divide and Conquer, which dates to Julius Caesar himself, was effectively implemented by Virginia’s elite propertied class through the skillful use of cooptation. Virginia’s yeoman class comprised of small land-owning farmers were made to believe that they shared “a common identity” with those “men of better sorts,” simply due to the fact that neither was a slave – hence, both were alike in not being slaves.^[57] Ironically, in the mindset of those early American elites that viewed themselves as the founders of a republic, largely inspired by Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth and the pushing off of monarchy, slavery occupied a critical, if not indeterminate position: it was thought of as a principal evil which free men sought to avoid for society in general through the usurpation of monarchies and the establishment of republics. But, at the same time, it was also viewed as the solution to one of society’s most pressing problems, “the problem of the poor.” Elite Virginians could move beyond English republicanism, “partly because they had solved the problem: they achieved a society in which most of the poor were enslaved.”^[58] In truth, contempt for the poor permeated the age. John Locke, English philosopher and physician (1632-1704), considered one of the most essential of Enlightenment thinkers, commonly read, discussed, and admired by early American elites, famously wrote a classic defense of the right of revolution in his Two Treatises of Civil Government published in 1689 – yet he did not extend that right to the poor. ^[59] In fact, in his proposals for workhouses and/or “working schools,” outlined in his Essay on the Poor Law, published in 1687, the children of the [English] poor would “learn labor,” and nothing but labor, from a very young age, stopping short of enslavement – though it would require a certain alteration of mind to recognize the distinction.^[60] That said, those astute men that assembled in the city of Philadelphia in 1787 took their inspiration from Locke very seriously.

Hamilton and Madison were in absolute accord with Locke’s views per property and ownership, that being, “Government has no other end but the preservation of property.”^[61] Consequently, the U.S. Constitution was designed to both govern the population through limiting its capacity to self-govern; and by protecting all forms of property ownership including the enslavement of human beings. Hence, as historian David Waldstreicher (expert in early American political and cultural history) presents, the Constitution was devised not only to safeguard slavery as a separate economic system, but as integral to the basic right of what he describes as the “power over other people and property (including people who were property).”^[62] As a result, the tensions and/or rivalries that resided in that newly formed nation, which would eventually lead to a bloody Civil War, were not over quantities of land possession between the North and the South, but more focused on how many slaves resided in each. To his credit, Madison presciently admitted as such:

[T]he States were divided into different interests not by their difference of size … but principally from the effects of their having or not having slaves. These two causes concurred in forming the great division of interests in the U. States. It did not lie between the large & small States: It lay between the Northern & Southern.^[63]

Slavery was considered insidious by some, and yet fundamental to those that profited from it, both North and South. In fact, John Rutledge, esteemed Governor of South Carolina during the Revolution; and delegate to the Constitutional Convention, spoke on behalf of the Southern planters’ class by supporting slavery, of which, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney also of South Carolina, stood in full agreement. Both men implored their fellow delegates to recognize their common interests in preserving slavery from which they “stood to profit,” not only from selling slave-produced goods, but from carrying the slaves on their ships^[64] – hence, they argued, stood a long-held alliance between Northern “personality” (that is, financial holdings) and “that particular form of property” (slavery) which dominated the South.^[65] Slaves were long held the most valuable asset in the country. By 1860, the total value of all the slaves in America was estimated at the equivalent of $4 billion, more than double the value of the South’s entire farmland valued at $1.92 billion, four times the total currency in circulation at $435.4 million, and twenty times the value of all the precious metals (gold and silver) then in circulation at $228.3 million.^[66] Thus, at the time and thereafter, North American slavery was not just a national or sectional asset, but a global one. As a result of the promise of monetary benefits and values produced by enslaved peoples, “the Framers,” in defense of their own interests, collectively devised a system of fail-safe mechanisms to protect their most cherished resource: human vassalage.^[67] Moreover, in addition to the Three-Fifths Clause described above, the Constitution contained several safeguards with a clear objective of maintaining the vile system as it was. The Foreign Slave Trade Clause as outlined in Article 1; Section 9 of that charter known as the U.S. Constitution stated that Congress could not prohibit the “importation of persons” prior to 1808 – which cleverly excluded the term “slave.”^[68] The intention of said clause, was not to stave off slavery, but was implemented to maintain, if not inflate, the monetary value of those persons already in captivity – when it came to their sale and transport to other slave states outside of Virginia. The Fugitive Slave Clause as written in Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3, was clearly devised to protect elite proprietorship over individuals forcefully ensconced in a system of chattel slavery:

No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.^[69]

This Clause, not nullified until the Thirteenth Amendment’s abolition of slavery, considered it “a right” on the part of a slaveholder, to retrieve an enslaved individual who had fled to another state. Finally, as esteemed University of Chicago Professor, Paul Finkelman, contends, the ban on congressional export taxes adamantly argued for by those elite men that gather in Philadelphia, was, for the most part, a concession to southern planters whose slaves primarily produced agricultural goods for export.^[70] Clearly demonstrating and demarcating an upper-class bias based on ownership, race, and wealth from the outset.

How elite capture worked in early America – diversity was implemented and utilized as a ruling class ideology. Privileged landowners, specifically Virginians, being “men of letters,” as they would have thought of themselves, understood very well that all white men were not created equal, especially when it came to property and what they referred to as “virtue,” a much admired “elite attribute” which can be traced back to Aristotle himself, in his classic work, Nicomachean Ethics, who defined the only life worth living as “a life of leisure” – that is a life of study and freedom for the few which rested on the labor of slaves and proprietorship.^[71] As thus revealed, the material forces and benefits which dictated southern elites to see Negroes, mulattoes, and Indians as one, also “dictated that they see large and small planters as one.” Consequently, racism became an essential, if unacknowledged, ingredient woven within that “republican ideology” that enabled Virginians to not only design, but to “lead the nation,” for generations to come. An important question thus addressed: Was the ideological vision of “a nation of equals” flawed from the very beginning by the evident contempt, exhibited, toward both poor whites and enslaved blacks? And beyond that, to be further explored within the final chapter of this research project: Are there still elements of colonial Virginia, ideologically, ethnically, and socially, woven within America today? More than a century after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox (on April 9^th, 1865) – those questions per race and class still linger….^[72]

As Edward E. Baptist, Professor of History at Cornell University, makes clear in his epic work, The Half Has Never Been Told, Slavery and The Making of American Capitalism, attitudes toward race and race superiority in America long remained. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, America’s first generation of professional historians, he argues, “were justifying the exclusion of Jim Crow and disfranchisement” by telling a story about the nation’s past of slavery and civil war that seemed to confirm, for many white Americans, that “white supremacy was just and necessary.” In fact, Baptist proclaims that racism had not only become culturally accepted, but historically and socially grounded within a form of “race science” to be further explored in the final chapter of this study. He states that by the latter part of the nineteenth century, “for many white Americans, science had proven that people of African descent [if not the poor in general] were intellectually inferior and congenitally prone to criminality.” As a result, he argues, that that cohort of racist whites in [Jim Crow] America, “looked wistfully to [the] past when African Americans had been governed with whips and chains.” Confirming the fact that class, race, and racism have long been integral parts of America’s long and difficult history^.[73]

American capitalism, land, cotton, slaves, and profit: by the early nineteenth century, the U.S. Banking system was fundamental when it came to entrepreneurial revenue development in the form of land acquisition, cotton production, and slave labor. Bank lending became the key ingredient that propelled slave owners to greater heights of wealth accumulation, “Enslavers benefited from bank-induced stability and steady credit expansion.” The more slave purchases that U.S. Banks would finance, the more cotton enslavers could produce, “and cotton [at the time] was the world’s most widely traded product.” As mentioned, in this newly devised system of capital, lending, and borrowing, cotton was an essential resource in an unending global market. So, the more cotton slaves produced, the more cotton enslavers would sell, and thus the more profit they would make. In fact, “owning more slaves enabled planters to repay debts, take profits, and gain property that could be [used as] collateral for even more borrowing.”^[74] Early U.S. Capitalism not just undergirded, but bolstered and expanded the harsh and inhumane system of slavery as such, “Lending to the South’s cotton economy was an investment not just in the world’s most widely traded commodity, but also in a set of producers who had shown a consistent ability to increase their productivity and revenue.”^[75] Said differently, American slave owners, throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, had the “cash flow to pay back their debts.” And, the debts of slave owners were secure, given the fact that they had “a lot of valuable collateral.” In fact, as argued by a number of economic historians, enslavers, by mid-century had in their possession the largest pool of collateral in the United States at the time, 4 million slaves worth over $3 billion, as “the aggregate value of all slave property.”^[76] These values embedded themselves in a global system of investment through slave commodification which benefitted mostly the upper crust of society in both the U.S. and the U.K., “this meant that investors around the world would share in revenues made by ‘hands in the field.’” Even though at the time, and to its credit, “Britain was liberating the slaves of its empire,” British banks could still sell, to a wealthy investor, a completely commodified human being in the form of a slave – not as a specific individual, but as a holding or part of a collective investment venture “made from the income of thousands of slaves.”^[77]

Furthermore, as mentioned, the fact that popularly elected governments repeatedly sustained such bond schemes, on both sides of the Atlantic, was therefore not only insidious by its very nature, but at the same time remarkable. Popular abolitionist movements were springing up from one side to the other, and demanding abolition across the board. Beyond that, in the United States, there were many elements of class recognition in the form of an “intensely democratic frontier electorate” of both slaves and poor whites that saw banks as “machines designed to channel financial benefits and economic governing power to the unelected elite.”^[78] By mid-century, the rift and divisions between the North and the South became catastrophic in the form of a bloody Civil War. It took a poor boy from a dirt-floor cabin in Kentucky named Abraham Lincoln, who rose to the prominence of lawyer and statesman becoming the 16^th President of the United States, to write and implement the Emancipation Proclamation brought forth on January 1^st, 1863. As President, Abraham Lincoln issued that historic decree, which served not only as a direct challenge to “property ownership,” in the form of human bondage, but a direct assault on the lucrative southern slaveocracy as the nation approached its third year of bloody civil war. The proclamation declared “that all persons held as slaves within the rebellious states are, and henceforward shall be free.”^[79] Although Lincoln’s, contribution has been much contested to this day, by historians both Black and white alike, the fact remains that, his efforts as already presented, were undoubtedly a more active and direct support for the freedom of African slaves than those of all the fifteen previous presidents before him combined – The Emancipation Proclamation would prove to be the most important executive order ever issued by an American president, offering the possibility of freedom to an enslaved people held in a giant dungeon that was the confederacy.^[80] Even though there are those historians that argue that the Proclamation was incomplete due to the fact that it “excluded the enslaved not only in Union-held territories such as western Virginia, but also southern Louisiana” where there were pro-Union factions that were trying not to be antagonistic toward local whites who were hell-bent on maintaining the status quo.^[81]

But facts speak for themselves, Abraham Lincoln had been working diligently to persuade the political class in the border states that were loyal to the Union to agree to a “gradual or compensated” emancipation plan – pushing back against the benefactors of the race and class divide. Even though some within the border states refused to give in and held out for permanent slavery, by April 1862, because of Lincoln’s tenacious efforts, Congress passed legislation “freeing – in return for payments to enslavers totaling $1 million – all 3,000 people enslaved in the District of Columbia, Maryland, Delaware and Kentucky.” After the Union army’s victory at the battle of Antietam, Lincoln felt “he could move more decisively” against the institution of slavery and hence released that historic executive order which he had written months earlier as outlined above.^[82] Undoubtedly, again, the Emancipation Proclamation offered for the first time in American history the unquestioned possibility of freedom to a long-held and enslaved people that were seized in a giant open-air prison which was the American South. The Emancipation did unbar the door. Next, enslaved Africans, due to their own agency, forced it wide open.^[83]

As an exemplar of that heartfelt commitment, stood Frederick Douglass (1818 – 1895), former slave in his home state of Maryland, who rose to become a historic social reformer, abolitionist, writer, orator, and statesman. Lincoln was the first U.S. President in a long line, to invite an eminent African American intellectual, such as, Frederick Douglass to the White House to discuss the wonton discrimination within the military ranks cast upon African American men. That well-known meeting between Lincoln and Douglass took place in August 1863, two years after the start of the war on April 12, 1861. Douglass tenaciously argued for the enlistment of Black soldiers in the Union Army based largely on his legendary speech delivered at the National Hall in Philadelphia (on July 6, 1863), a month prior, entitled “the Promotion of Colored Enlistments,” outlined in the well-known publication The Liberator, that same month. Where Douglass stated:

Let the black man get upon his person the brass letters US … a musket on his shoulder, and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on earth or under the earth which can deny that he has earned the right of citizenship in the United States.^[84]

Douglass presented the same argument to Lincoln, that “Black men in Blue” would not only swell the ranks of the Union Army but would elevate those former slaves to the status of free men of honor – shifting the course of American history.^[85] Lincoln took decisive action, per Douglass’ request, enlisting nearly 200,000 battle-ready African Americans, understanding that without those Black soldiers, there would be no Union. As a result, Douglass wholeheartedly endorsed the President for his coming reelection on November 8, 1864. “The enlistment of blacks into the Union Army was part of Lincoln’s evolving policy on slavery and race.”^[86] Ultimately, he paid the price. On April 14, 1865, the 16^th President of the United States was brutally slain by an assassin’s bullet for his valiant efforts against the racist slavocracy known as the Confederacy – Lincoln died at 7:22 a.m. on April 15, 1865.^[87] The Civil War ultimately nullified the barbarity of slavery, which was later codified in the 13^th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, true, yet prejudicial elements of both race and class remained a fixture in American society for decades to come….

In the latter part of the nineteenth century, the coalescing or coming together from a class perspective of the lower ranks in the American South, later revealed itself in the formulation of the “Colored Farmers’ Alliance,” which stood as a direct threat to the established southern regime leading to a brutal and repressive racialized crackdown in the form of the Ku Klux Klan and the implementation of an oppressive social order known as Jim Crow – to be further explored within this study.

3
The Atomization of the Powerless
and the Sins of Democracy

Finally, as alluded to, the appellation and/or utilization of the term “race” was seldom employed by Europeans prior to the fifteen-hundreds. If the word was used at all, it was used to identify factions of people with a group connection or kinship. Over the proceeding centuries, the evolution of the term “race,” that came to comprise skin color, levels of intelligence and/or phenotypes, was in large part a European construct – which served to undergird a strategy of division amongst the masses that helped to maintain a stratified class structure with “elite white land-owning men” placed firmly at the top of the social-ladder in that newly birthed land of “freedom” called America.

As succinctly stated by David Roediger, esteemed Professor of American history at the University of Kansas, who has taught and written numerous books focused on race and class in the United States, “The world got along without race for the overwhelming majority of its history. The U.S. has never been without it.”^[88] Nothing could be further from the truth. As outlined in previous chapters, American society uniquely and legalistically formulated the notion of “race” early on to not only justify, but support its new economic system of capitalism, which rested in large part, if not exclusively, upon the exploitation of forced labor – that is, the brutal enslavement and demoralization of African peoples. To understand how the development of race and its bastardized twin “racism” were fundamentally and structurally bound to early American culture and society we must first survey the extant history of how the notions of race, ethnocentrism, white supremacy, and anti-blackness came to exist.

The ideas that undergirded the notions of “race, a class-stratified stratified slave society, as we recognize them today, were birthed and developed together within the earliest formation of the United States; and were intertwined and enmeshed in the phraseologies of “slave” and “white.” The terms “slave,” “white,” and “race” began to be utilized by elite Europeans in the sixteenth century and they imported these hypotheses of hierarchy with them to the colonized lands of North America. That said, originally, the terms did not hold the same weight they have today. However, due to the economic needs and development of that early American society, the terms mentioned would transform to encompass new racialized ideas and meanings which served the upper class best. The European Enlightenment, defined as, “an intellectual movement of the 17^th and 18^th centuries in which ideas concerning god, reason, nature, and humanity were synthesized into a worldview that gained wide assent in the West and that instigated revolutionary developments in art, philosophy, and politics,”^[89] would come to underpin and contribute to racialized perceptions which argued that, “white people were inherently smarter, more capable, and more human than nonwhite people – became accepted worldwide.” In fact, from an early American perspective, “This [mode] of categorization of people became the justification for European colonization and subsequent enslavement of people from Africa.”^[90] To be further surveyed.

As Paul Kivel, noted American author, social-justice educator and activist, brings to the fore, the terms “white” or “whiteness,” historically, from a British/Anglo-American perspective, served to underpin class distinctions and justify exploitation through human bondage by providing profit-accumulation to a distinct ownership class, “Whiteness is [historically] a constantly shifting boundary separating those who are entitled to have privileges from those whose exploitation and vulnerability to violence is justified by their not being white.”^[91] Where and how did it begin? The conception of “whiteness”  did not exist until roughly 1613 or so, when Anglo-Saxon forces, later known as the English, first “encountered and contrasted themselves” with the Indigenous populations of the East Indies – through their cruel and rapacious colonial pursuits – later justifying, and bolstering, a collective cultural sense of racial superiority. Up and until that point, roughly the 1550s to the 1600s, within Anglo-Saxon society, “whiteness”  was used to set forth clear class signifiers.

In fact, the word “white”  was utilized exclusively to “describe elite English women,” because the whiteness of their skin indicated that they were individuals of “high social standing” who did not labor “out of doors.” That said, conversely, throughout that same period, the appellation of “white”  did not apply to elite English men, due to the stigmatizing notion that a man who would not leave his home to work was “unproductive, sick and/or lazy.” As the concept of who was white and who was not began to grow, “whiteness” gained in popularity within the Anglo-American sphere, for example, “the number of people that considered themselves white would grow” as a collective pushback against people of color due to immigration and eventual emancipation.^[92] These social constructs centered around race accomplished their nefarious goals – thus, unifying early colonists of European descent under the rubric of “white,” and hence, marginalizing, stigmatizing and dispossessing native populations – all the while permanently enslaving most African-descended people for generations. As acclaimed African American Professor, Ruth Wilson Gilmore (director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at CUNY) contends concerning America’s base history, “Capitalism requires inequality and racism enshrines it….”^[93] A revelatory statement by John Jay (1745-1829, the first Chief Justice of the United States and signer of the U.S. Constitution) helps make evident, from a class perspective, the entrenched values of those early American elites toward their newly proclaimed democracy, “The people who own the country ought to govern it!”^[94] The preceding two quotes help to summarize and clarify the top-down legal and societal mechanisms embedded within that early American social stratum which linger to this day.

The social status and hence the nomenclature of “slave” have been with mankind for millennia. Historically, a slave was one who was classified as quasi-sub-human, derived from a lower lineage; and forced to toil for the benefit of another of higher standing. We can find the phraseology of slave throughout the ancient world and within early writings from Egypt, the Hebrew Bible, Greece, and Rome, as well as later periods. In fact, Aristotle (384 to 322 BC, famed polymath, and philosopher) succinctly clarified, from his privileged vantage-point, the social standing and value of personages classified as slaves – which would endure for epochs to come. From the legendary logician’s point of view, a slave was defined as, “one who is a human being belonging by nature not to himself [or herself] but to another is by nature a slave.” Aristotle further described a slave as, “a human being belongs to another if, in spite of being human, he [or she] is a possession; and as a possession, is [simply a tool for labor] having a separate existence.”^[95] Clarifying the fact that in the known world prior to Columbus’ famed voyage, in the late 15^th century, opening the floodgates of European colonial theft, pillage, and domination, historical notions of Western hierarchy and supremacy were commonplace. As European Enlightenment ideals such as, “the natural rights of man,” aforementioned, became ubiquitous amongst early American colonial elites throughout the 18^th century, “equality” became the new modus operandi which galvanized whites over and above all others. Hence, by classifying human beings by “race,” a new method of hierarchy was established based on what many at the time considered “science” to be further explored. As the principles of the Enlightenment penetrated the colonies of North America forming the basis for their early “democracy,” those same values paradoxically undergirded the most vicious kind of subjugation – chattel slavery.^[96]

A significant codified shift took place in colonial America within one of its most prosperous slave domains known as Virginia. Under the tutelage and guidance of the then Governor Sir William Berkeley (1605-1677), wealthy planter and slave owner, the House of Burgesses (the first self-proclaimed “representative government” in that early British colony) included a coterie of councilors hand-chosen by the governor to enact a law of hereditary slavery – which would economically serve their elite planter class interests. The English common law, known as, Partus Sequitur Patrem, traditionally held that, “the offspring would follow the condition … of the father.”^[97] But after a historic legal challenge brought by Elizabeth Key, an enslaved, bi-racial woman who sued for her freedom and won, in 1656, on the basis that her father was white – elite white Virginians understood that a shift in the law was not only necessary, but essential, if they were to maintain and/or increase their wealth through human bondage in the form of “property ownership.” Consequently, the new 1662 law, Partus Sequitur Ventrem, diverged from English common law,  in that it proclaimed that the status of the mother, free or slave, determined the status of her offspring in perpetuity.^[98] Thus, African women were subjugated to the ranking of “breeders,” that would serve to produce more offspring categorized as slaves, whether bi-racial or not, and hence more profit for the ruling class. Enlightenment values ensconced in a rudimentary “race science,” by famed early Americans, would also help to solidify a systematized racialized hierarchy for decades to come.^[99]

Figure 7: Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), Diplomat, Son of the Enlightenment, Planter, Lawyer, Philosopher, Primary Author of the Declaration of Independence and Third President of the United States.

Thomas Jefferson is famed to be one of the most quintessential characters in the formulation of America’s early Republic, along with James Madison and others, severing foreign rule and developing a new independent nation, substantiated on the Enlightenment principles of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,”^[100] based largely on John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, which argued that true “freedom” is defined by one’s singular control over their holdings and/or estates, i.e., property.^[101] But the most basest question which still lingers, within America’s long and twisted historical tragedy of early conquest and domination, which must be probed, is, “freedom for whom and for what?” Jefferson, that complex and enigmatic son of Enlightenment thought, both in science and sociological principles, clearly demarcated and endorsed a racialized societal structure that undergirded a system of hierarchy in which white colonists and their European legacy were considered far superior to all others – simplified notions woven within an early race science which would endure through time and memorial. Throughout his lifetime, race was defined by phenotype (or the look of human beings), physical characteristics which “appended physical traits [or idiosyncrasies] defined as ‘slave-like’ [were attributed] to those enslaved.”^[102] As Karen and Barbara Fields, two noted African American scholars, point out, Jefferson became convinced that a forced separation of people delineated by skin color was the only solution; that “the very people white Americans had lived with for over 160 years as slaves would be, after emancipation, too different for white people to live with any longer.”^[103] In fact, he suggested that if slaves were to be freed they should be promptly deported, their lost labor to be best supplied “through the importation of white laborers.”^[104]

Jefferson unabashedly qualified his racialized views when writing, “I advance it therefore as a suspicion only that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.”^[105] John Locke and Thomas Jefferson stood in agreement, philosophically, when it came to the superiority versus inferiority of selected “races,” underpinning a racialized stratification within early colonial thought that helped to culturalize a race-based hierarchy in that newly formed “land of freedom,” known as the United States. These arguments of hierarchy which spread throughout the European mindset within that early colonial era, aided and abetted, “the dispossession of Native Americans” and “the enslavements of Africans” during that golden era of revolution.^[106] In his historic manuscript known as, Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson outlined in detail his Enlightenment-inspired racialized interpretations of European superiority, demarcating what he believed to be a “scientific view” of the varying gradations of human beings based on race:

Comparing them [both blacks and whites] by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me, that in memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior … and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous. But never yet could I find that a black has uttered a thought above the level of plain narration; never see even an elementary trait, of painting or sculpture.^[107]

Ironically, given the complexity of the man, in response to a critic who opposed his views as presented above, Jefferson confessed that even if blacks were inferior to whites, “it would not justify their enslavement.”^[108] Hence, to his credit, he admitted and/or recognized the strangeness and/or irony of his own position when it came to Enlightenment constructs of race and their structural consequences.^[109] Again, from early on, racialized notions of superiority versus inferiority served the American planter class best, by cleverly embedding perceptions of hierarchy or white preeminence, they were able to suppress that which they feared most – which was the unification or coming together of a mass of lower classes comprising both enslaved Africans and poor whites. The historic incident which, served as an exemplar, sending shockwaves through that propertied class of early colonial America was notably Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676.

Nathaniel Bacon (1647-1676) elite Virginian, born and educated in England, member of the governor’s Council and close friend of Sir William Berkeley then colonial Governor – led a bottom-up rebellion which sent tremors through the upper classes of that newly birthed slave society, known as, Virginia – still considered one of the most foundational events of early American history. The colonial elite were threatened on all sides, as made evident by Governor Berkeley’s revelation, “The Poore Endebted Discontented and Armed” would, he feared, use this opportunity to “plunder the Country” and seize the property of the elite planters.^[110] Bacon, “who was no leveler,” was cleverly able to formulate a coalition (or unification), on behalf of his class interests, which included poor white indentured servants, free and enslaved Africans, to push back against any and all encroachments by native inhabitants which included the Appomattox and Susquehannock indigenous tribes of the region, in order to cease their lands and enrich himself and his class even further, insisting that, “the country must defend itself ‘against all Indians in general for that they were all Enemies.’”^[111] Some one hundred years later, in his acclaimed paradox of liberty known as the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, obviously influenced by Bacon’s racialized frame of thought, referred to the indigenous Native American peoples as nothing more than, “merciless Indian savages.”^[112] Hence, the native populations of that early America were collectively used as “scapegoats,” to enlarge the land holdings and wealth of the propertied class. From early on, the United States’ nascent form of Capitalism became dependent upon exploitative low-cost labor, “especially that of those considered nonwhite,” but also that of “the poor in general, including women and children – black and white alike.”^[113] Ironically, by the 1850s, antislavery sentiment grew even more intense amongst the masses, largely spurred on by white Southerner’s aggressive attempts to maintain the societal structure as such through political dominance and the spread of that “peculiar institution,” known as slavery to newly pilfered lands.^[114] In turn, the very idea of the possibility of any and all “lower class unity,” or a coming together of poor white indentured servants and African slaves as a militant force rising up against an entrenched planter class, brought forth a racialized culturalization grounded upon racial difference, racial hierarchy, and racial enmity, “a pattern that those statesmen and politicians of a later age would have found [politically useful and] familiar.”^[115] In fact, right through to the end of the 19^th century, post-Civil War and Reconstruction era (1865-1877), any form of lower-class unity in America stood as a direct threat to the established order of things throughout the nation as a whole; and especially throughout the South – most notably in the form of the Colored Farmers’ Alliance and the South’s reactionary implementation of a brutal social-order of domination and control known as Jim Crow.

Figure 8: Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865), American Lawyer, Statesman and Politician. Sixteenth President of the United States and Author of the Emancipation Proclamation.

Although historically contentious, Abraham Lincoln’s primary goal within his Reconstruction scheme was to reunite a fractured nation after a bloody and costly Civil War. Through which, Lincoln’s objective was to reestablish the union and transfigure that implacable Southern society. His plan was also stridently committed to enforcing progressive legislation driven by the abolition of slavery. In fact, Lincoln directed Senator Edwin Morgan, chair of the National Union Executive Committee, to put in place a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery. And Morgan did just that, in his famed speech before the National Convention on May 30, 1864, demanding the “utter and complete extirpation of slavery” via such an amendment.^[116] Beyond the Emancipation Proclamation, Abraham Lincoln was the first President in American history to call forth an amendment to the U.S. Constitution abolishing the long-held institution of chattel slavery. For the first time, President Lincoln demanded the eventual passage of the Thirteenth Amendment Section 1 (ratified on December 6, 1865), which mandated that, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”^[117] Defining it as “a fitting, and necessary conclusion” to the war effort that would make permanent the joining of the causes of “Liberty and Union.”^[118] Lincoln’s sweeping Reconstruction agenda  was a fight for freedom, requiring the South to adhere to a new constitution that would implicitly include black suffrage through the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment Section 1, ratified after his death on July 9, 1868, which for the first time in American history, declared:

All persons [meaning black and white alike] born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.^[119]

Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, saw his Reconstruction struggles above all as, “an adjunct of the war effort – a way of undermining the Confederacy, rallying southern white Unionists, and securing emancipation,”^[120] for which he paid the ultimate price. From early on, internecine rivalry, or infighting, within the Republican Party from those labeled as “the Radicals,” led to a push-back against certain elements of Lincoln’s strategy mentioned above – arguing that Reconstruction should be postponed until after the war, “as outlined in the Wade-Davis Bill of 1864, which clearly envisioned, as a requirement, that a majority of southern whites take an oath of loyalty,” to the United States; and that the federal government should by necessity, “attempt to ensure basic justice to emancipated slaves.” A point at which, “equality before the law,” not “black suffrage,” as Lincoln had suggested, was an essential factor for many of the Republicans in Congress at the time.^[121] As a result of Lincoln’s efforts in taking away the productive forces of labor within the South, and in turn, the diminishment of property, wealth, and political power of the elite southern planter class, a nefarious conspiracy to murder the President was hatched and executed by southern loyalist and assassin John Wilks Booth, on April 14, 1865, while the President sat accompanied by his wife, Mary, watching a play titled, Our American Cousin, at Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C. – oddly, the assassin was able to gain access to the theater, enter the Presidential Booth, and shoot and kill the President of the United States. Lincoln’s body was carried to the nearby Petersen House, where he passed away at 7:22 a.m., the following morning. At his bedside, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton famously remarked, “Now he belongs to the ages.”^[122] Reflecting upon not only the uniqueness of the man, but his tremendous contributions to those American ideals of “Liberty and Freedom.” Emphasizing the fact that the Emancipation of Africans from forced labor; and the abolishment of chattel slavery, through a stroke of his pen, uniquely placed Abraham Lincoln in the pantheon of historical renown.

That said, throughout the end of the 19^th Century, the road ahead per class relations for African Americans and poor whites alike, especially in the South, would be a hard and arduous one of top-down control and division. Reactionary as they were, as argued, Southern elites would forcefully implement doctrines of superiority, separation, and control that would crush and/or punish any form of lower-class unity which threatened their power and influence over the majority. This reaction would become most evident in the racialized militant form of the Ku Klux Klan; and later the structural control and dominance of an imposed social order known as Jim Crow, which would orchestrate the groundwork for a deepening racial divide.

The Colored Farmers’ Alliance, formulated in the 1870s, still stands as a historical model of class unity amongst the poor, both Black and white alike, which galvanized southern elites in a top-down belligerent class war to protect their interests. The Alliance was created, “when an agricultural depression hit the South around 1870 and poor farmers began to organize themselves into radical multiracial political groups”^[123] – which stood as a direct threat to upper-class Southern dominance and their wealth accumulation. Years earlier by 1865, that elite militancy revealed itself in the form of the Ku Klux Klan (a violent and racist, hate-filled supremacist terror organization) that, “extended into almost every southern state by 1870 and became a vehicle for white southern resistance to the Republican Party’s Reconstruction-era policies aimed at establishing political and economic equality for Black Americans.”^[124] Klan members devised a subversive crusade of coercion and brutal violence directed at Black and white Republican leadership. Even though the U.S. Congress had successfully pushed through regulations intended to mitigate Klan extremism, the KKK  viewed its main goal as the “reinstatement of white governance and supremacy throughout the Southlands in the 1870s and beyond,” made most evident through Democratic victories within state legislatures across the South.^[125] Jim Crow was the name given to a racialized social order or caste system which operated primarily, but not exclusively, in the southern and border states between 1877 to the mid-1960s. “Jim Crow was more than a series of rigid anti-black laws. It was a way of life.”^[126] Under the system of Jim Crow, African Americans were consigned to the rank of second-class citizens, as emphasized by African American Professor Emeritus, Adolph L. Reed Jr., “We were all unequal, but [when it came to race and class], some were more unequal than others.”^[127] Divisions amongst the lower classes, throughout the South, served as a powerful and effective hegemonic tool of supremacy. Hence, it was not long, thereafter, within that stratified class society, before that black-white alliance had ended – as Democrats slowly united in a series of successful white supremacy campaigns to banish the Fusionists and discontinue what most white southern racists denoted to as, “Negro rule.”^[128] Hence, as noted throughout this study, class, race, and racism have long been fundamental elements of control woven within this class-conscious slave culture, paradoxically, self-described, “birthplace of freedom.”

Conclusion

From the outset, as early as the Constitutional Convention of 1787, it has been inherently difficult to reconcile a faith in the U.S. Constitution as a “living, flexible and changeable,” document – with the fundamental unfeasibility of making systemwide class transformation in the United States of America. There is copious and convincing evidence that the U.S. Constitution was intended and/or mechanized, by design, to stifle and/or inhibit any “meaningful systemic change,” in order to counteract anything that does not assist the benefits of the moneyed elite. Brilliantly designed and implemented by those acclaimed early American “Framers,” such as James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and others – the means and complex configurations woven within the U.S. Constitution were deliberately intended to be unchangeable when it came to any and all challenges from below. The Constitutional aphorism over “the rights of private property possession” and its accompanied protections for example – made possible by the “expropriation of Native Americans lands, slavery; and the exploitation of lower-class labor” as discussed – has served, from the very beginning of that early American experiment, as a primary preset to protect wealth.^[129] Political Science Professor Robert Ovetz argues, in fact, that the U.S. Constitution has never really lived up to its well-known first three words, of “We the People,”  insisting that that renowned Charter is, by its very nature and design, “self-breaching,” because “we the people have never directly given consent to be governed by it – nor do the laws put in place give [the people] the liberty to do so.”^[130] That said, given the complexity of mind of those men recognized as “the Framers,” and in their defense, they did interweave a certain language of liberty, in the form of protections, as exemplified in Amendment IX, which states, “The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”^[131]

Amendment IX to the Constitution was authorized on December 15^th, 1791. And, it clearly proclaims that the text is not a wide-ranging list of every right of the citizen, but that the unnamed rights to come will be allowed protections under the law.^[132] The IX Amendment explicitly acknowledged that the people have a reserve of rights that go beyond the Constitution. Hence, the enumeration of specific rights “shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”^[133] As a counterweight to popular belief, American political scientist, author, and activist, Michael Parenti contends that, “those privileged delegates gave nothing to popular interests, rather – as with the Bill of Rights – they reluctantly made democratic concessions under the menacing threat of popular rebellion.”^[134] Race and class, in early America, not only substantiated that, “the wealthy are a better class of men,” as James Madison proclaimed during the Convention^[135] – but that wealth and privilege were correlated to intelligence and deserved protections. In fact, not dissimilar to present-day America, “According to the dogma [of that early elite colonial class] efforts to lessen inequality, through progressive taxation, or redistributive public spending, infringe the liberty of the rich,” meaning the rich deserve their benefits and reward as such. Consequently, intelligence determines merit, and merit apportions rewards are those early American values which permeate the culture to this day. The working class, both Black and white alike, “that have been consigned to the lower reaches of society were there,” as noted African American scholars Barbara and Karen Fields have demonstrated, “due to attributions of low intelligence” – demarcating clear class distinctions and divisions based on a model of superiority from early on which privileged an elite few.^[136] The seeds of race supremacy and the hypocrisy of liberty, throughout America’s long and difficult history, were planted by the Framers themselves, “most of whom accepted that human beings could be held as property and that Africans and Native Americans were inferior to Caucasians” in a multitude of ways^[137] – as demonstrated throughout this study.

Endnotes:

[1] James Madison, “Federalist Papers: Primary Documents in American History: Federalist No. 10,” research guide, accessed August 27, 2023, https://guides.loc.gov/federalist-papers/text-1-10.

[2] Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia: An Annotated Edition, Notes on the State of Virginia (Yale University Press, 2022).

[3] Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (London: G. Routledge, 1893), 556–60.

[4] Michael Parenti, Democracy for the Few, 8th ed (Boston: Thomson-Wadsworth, 2008), 40.

[5] Louis Otto quoted in Herbert Aptheker, Early Years of the Republic: From the End of the Revolution to the First Administration of Washington (1783-1793) (New York: International Publishers, 1976), 41.

[6] Michael Parenti, Democracy for the Few, 40. Sourcing the works of Sidney H. Aronson, Status and Kinship in the Higher Civil Service: Standards of Selection in the Administrations of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1964); Daniel M. Friedenberg, Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Land: The Plunder of Early America (Buffalo, N.Y: Prometheus Books, 1992).

[7] Francis Bacon, The Philosophical Works of Francis Bacon, with Prefaces and Notes by the Late Robert Leslie Ellis, Together with English Translations of the Principal Latin Pieces, ed. James Spedding, vol. 4 (London: Longman & co., 1861), 64.

^[8] “Declaration of Independence: A Transcription,” America’s Founding Documents, National Archives, accessed March 22, 2024, https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript.

^[9] Nancy G. Isenberg, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (New York, New York: Penguin Books, 2017), 1.

^[10] Isenberg, 1.

^[11] David McNally, Blood and Money: War, Slavery, Finance, and Empire (Chicago, Illinois: Haymarket Books, 2020), 178.

[12] Benjamin Irvin, Clothed in Robes of Sovereignty: The Continental Congress and the People Out of Doors (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 1–18.

[13] Isenberg, White Trash, 1.

[14] John Winthrop, “A Modell of Christian Charity, 1630,” in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 3rd Series (Boston, 1838), 7:31-48, https://history.hanover.edu/texts/winthmod.html.

[15] Isenberg, White Trash, 3.

[16] Smith, Wealth of Nations, 556–60.

[17] Robert Ovetz, We the Elites: Why the US Constitution Serves the Few (London: Pluto Press, 2022), 2–3.

[18] Ovetz, 41.

[19] “The Constitution of the United States,” National Archives, accessed September 3, 2023, https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution.

[20] Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, Ruling America: A History of Wealth and Power in a Democracy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 40.

[21] “Declaration of Independence: A Transcription.”

[22] “From George Washington to Henry Knox,” December 26, 1786, Founders Online, National Archives, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/04-04-02-0409.

[23] Jennifer Nedelsky, Private Property, and the Limits of American Constitutionalism: The Madisonian Framework and Its Legacy, Paperback ed., (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1994), 159.

[24] “From George Washington to Henry Knox,” February 3, 1787, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/04-05-02-0006.

[25] Gregory H Nobles, “Historians Extend the Reach of the American Revolution,” in Whose American Revolution Was It? Historians Interpret the Founding, ed. Alfred Fabian Young and Gregory H. Nobles (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 213.

[26] “The Constitution of the United States.”

[27] Richard H. Kohn, Eagle and Sword: The Federalists and the Creation of the Military Establishment in America, 1783-1802 (New York: Free Press, 1975), 80, 95, 120.

[28] William Manning, The Key of Liberty: The Life and Democratic Writings of William Manning, “a Laborer,” 1747-1814, ed. Michael Merrill and Sean Wilentz, The John Harvard Library (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1993), 113.

[29] Manning, 164–66.

[30] Manning, 162.

[31] Alexander Hamilton, “Final Version: First Report on the Further Provision Necessary for Establishing Public Credit,” December 13, 1790, Founders Online, National Archives, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Hamilton/01-07-02-0227-0003.

^[32] Alexander Hamilton, “Final Version of the Second Report on the Further Provision Necessary for Establishing Public Credit (Report on a National Bank),” December 13, 1790, Founders Online, National Archives, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Hamilton/01-07-02-0229-0003.

^[33] Charles Austin Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (Anodos Books, 2018), 88.

^[34] Beard, 164.

^[35] “Declaration of Independence: A Transcription.”

^[36] Ovetz, We the Elites, 44.

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^[38] Woody Holton, Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution, First Edition (New York: Hill and Wang, 2008), 87–88.

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^[40] Ovetz, We the Elites, 96.

^[41] John Locke, Two Treatises on Civil Government (London: G. Routledge and Sons, 1884), 160.

^[42] “From James Madison to James Monroe,” October 5, 1786, Founders Online, National Archives, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-09-02-0054; “To Thomas Jefferson from James Madison,” October 24, 1787, Founders Online, National Archives, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-12-02-0274; Madison, “Research Guides.”

^[43] James Madison quoted in Michael J. Klarman, The Framers’ Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2016), 210.

^[44] John Dickinson quoted in Klarman, 210.

^[45] Pierce Butler quoted in Klarman, 210.

^[46] Ovetz, We the Elites, 53.

^[47] “The Constitution of the United States.”

^[48] Max Farrand, ed., The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1911), 642.

^[49] Smith, Wealth of Nations, 342.

^[50] Isenberg, White Trash, 14.

^[51] Madison, “Research Guides.”

^[52] Madison.

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^[54] Augustus John Foster, Jeffersonian America: Notes on the United States of America, Collected in the Years 1805-6-7 and 1-12 (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1954), 163, 307.

^[55] Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1995), 380.

^[56] Morgan, 380.

^[57] Morgan, 381.

^[58] Morgan, 381.

^[59] Locke, Two Treatises on Civil Government, 169–75.

^[60] John Locke, “An Essay on the Poor Law,” in Political Essays, ed. Mark Goldie, Transferred to digital print, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 190–91.

^[61] Locke, Two Treatises on Civil Government, 239–40.

^[62] David Waldstreicher, Slavery’s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009), 14.

^[63] James Madison, “Rule of Representation in the Senate,” June 30, 1787, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-10-02-0050.

^[64] James Madison, “Madison Debates,” August 22, 1787, Yale Law School, The Avalon Project, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/debates_822.asp.

^[65] Staughton Lynd, Class Conflict, Slavery and the United States Constitution: Ten Essays (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Pr, 1980), 14.

^[66] Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2017), 65.

^[67] Michael J. Klarman, The Framers’ Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2016), 294.

^[68] “The Constitution of the United States.”

^[69] “The Constitution of the United States.”

^[70] Paul Finkelman, “Slavery in the United States: Person or Property,” in The Legal Understanding of Slavery: From the Historical to the Contemporary, ed. Jean Allain (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2012), 118.

^[71] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. W. D. Ross, 2009, https://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.html.

^[72] Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, 386–87.

^[73] Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, Paperback edition (New York: Basic Books, 2016), xviii–xix.

^[74] Baptist, 244–45.

^[75] Baptist, 245.

^[76] Steven Deyle, “The Domestic Slave Trade in America: The Lifeblood of the Southern Slave System,” in The Chattel Principle: Internal Slave Trades in the Americas, ed. Walter Johnson and Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 95.

^[77] Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told, 248.

^[78] Baptist, 248.

^[79] Abraham Lincoln, “The Emancipation Proclamation, 1863,” January 1, 1863, https://www.archives.gov/exhibits/american_originals_iv/sections/nonjavatext_emancipation.html.

^[80] James M. McPherson, “Who Freed the Slaves?,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 139, no. 1 (1995): 1–10.

^[81] Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told, 400–401.

^[82] Baptist, 400.

^[83] Baptist, 401.

^[84] “SPEECH OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS: Delivered at a Mass Meeting Held at National Hall, Philadelphia, July 6, 1863, for the Promotion of Colored Enlistments,” Liberator (1831-1865), American Periodicals, 33, no. 30 (July 24, 1863): 118.

^[85] David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020), 409–10.

^[86] John T. Hubbell, “Abraham Lincoln and the Recruitment of Black Soldiers,” Papers of the Abraham Lincoln Association 2, no. 1 (1980).

^[87] “Lincoln’s Death,” Ford’s Theatre, accessed July 16, 2024, https://fords.org/lincolns-assassination/lincolns-death/.

^[88] David R. Roediger, How Race Survived US History: From Settlement and Slavery to the Eclipse of Post-Racialism, Paperback edition (London New York: Verso, 2019), XII.

^[89] Brian Duignan, “Enlightenment,” in Encyclopedia Britannica, July 29, 2024, https://www.britannica.com/event/Enlightenment-European-history.

^[90] “Historical Foundations of Race,” National Museum of African American History and Culture, accessed July 30, 2024, https://nmaahc.si.edu/learn/talking-about-race/topics/historical-foundations-race.

^[91] Paul Kivel, Uprooting Racism: How White People Can Work for Racial Justice (Gabriola Islands, BC: New Society Publ, 1996), 127.

^[92] “Historical Foundations of Race.”

^[93] Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “The Worrying State of the Anti-Prison Movement,” in Abolition Geography: Essays towards Liberation, ed. Brenna Bhandar and Albero Toscano (Brooklyn: Verso, 2022), 451.

^[94] Quoted in Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition: And the Men Who Made It, Vol Vintage Books, 1989, 15–16.

^[95] Aristotle, Politics, trans. Harris Rackham, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1944), 1.5 1254a13-18, https://catalog.perseus.org/catalog/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0086.tlg035.perseus-eng1.

^[96] “Historical Foundations of Race.”

^[97] James H. Kettner, The Development of American Citizenship, 1608 – 1870 (Chapel Hill, N.C: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1984), 14–15.

^[98] Tarter Brent, “Elizabeth Key (Fl. 1655-1660) Biography,” in Dictionary of Virginia Biography (Library of Virginia, 2019), Available at: https://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Key_Elizabeth_fl_1655-1660.

^[99] Richard H. Popkin, “The Philosophical Basis of Eighteenth-Century Racism,” in Racism in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Harold E. Pagliaro (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1973), 246.

^[100] “Declaration of Independence: A Transcription.”

^[101] Locke, Two Treatises on Civil Government.

^[102] Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1981), 132–35, 149–51.

^[103] Karen E. Fields and Barbara Jeanne Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (London: Verso, 2014), 18.

^[104] Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. William Harwood Peden (Chapel Hill, NC: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1995), 137–38.

^[105] Jefferson, 143.

^[106] “Historical Foundations of Race.”

^[107] Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 1995, 139.

^[108] “Thomas Jefferson to Henri Gregoire, February 25, 1809” (Correspondence, February 25, 1809), Available at: https://www.loc.gov/resource/mtj1.043_0836_0836/?st=text.

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^[112] “Declaration of Independence: A Transcription.”

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^[114] “Historical Foundations of Race.”

^[115] Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, 250–70.

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^[117] “The Constitution of the United States.”

^[118] Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, vol. VII (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, c1953-55), 380.

^[119] “The Constitution of the United States.”

^[120] Foner, The Fiery Trial, 302.

^[121] Foner, 302.

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^[124] History.com Editors, “Ku Klux Klan: Origin, Members & Facts,” History, April 20, 2023, https://www.history.com/topics/19th-century/ku-klux-klan.

^[125] History.com Editors.

^[126] “What Was Jim Crow – Jim Crow Museum,” accessed August 29, 2024, https://jimcrowmuseum.ferris.edu/what.htm.

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^[128] “What Was Jim Crow – Jim Crow Museum.”

^[129] Ovetz, We the Elites, 159.

^[130] Ovetz, 161.

^[131] “The Constitution of the United States.”

^[132] “The Constitution of the United States.”

^[133] “The Constitution of the United States.”

^[134] Parenti, Democracy for the Few, 50–51.

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^[137] Klarman, The Framers’ Coup, 2016, 630–31.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Stephen Joseph Scott.

An uncontacted man from the Mamoriá Grande area of Brazil who appeared at a settlement in an extractivist reserve in February 2025. © Anon

Experts working in the area where an uncontacted Indigenous man appeared last week say it reveals the acute pressures from landgrabbers and the extraction of forest produce in that part of Brazil’s Amazon.

The young man, from a group known as “Uncontacted people of Mamoriá Grande,” emerged last week at a settlement occupied by locals harvesting Brazil nuts and other forest produce in the southern part of Amazonas state. He returned to the forest the following day.

Brazil’s Indigenous Affairs Agency FUNAI finally issued a Land Protection Order (a temporary protection) over the area last December, decades after local Indigenous people reported the group’s presence. The area is, however, still not officially demarcated (mapped out and protected), and some local politicians are challenging the Order.

There is mounting pressure on the forest from illegal hunting, fishing and land grabbers in the region.

Video of an uncontacted man in the Mamoriá Grande area of Brazil has circulated widely online.

Zé Bajaga Apurinã, the Coordinator of local Indigenous organization FOCIMP (Federação das Organizações das Comunidades do Médio Rio Purus) says: “We’ve been asking for that territory to be protected for a long time. They did the temporary protection, but that doesn’t solve it. What really solves it is demarcation. Those people have nowhere else to go. People are invading, taking the wealth that’s inside the land, cutting down wood, fishing, hunting, everything in there. And they’re suffocating, they’re under threat. We need to set up a health cordon immediately and demarcate the land urgently.”

Public prosecutor Daniel Luis Dalberto works on uncontacted peoples’ issues. He was in the area last week and told Brazilian news site A Publica: “I have seen with my own eyes the risks [to] which these peoples are subjected. The risk of genocide or extermination is very high.”

Carlos Travassos is the former head of FUNAI’s uncontacted and recently-contacted peoples unit, and was also previously chief of the FUNAI base in the area. He told A Publica: “[Some parts of this region] are not legally protected and have been the target of land speculation, such as land grabbing. Funai’s Land Protection Order was very important. This is the end of the ‘arc of deforestation’, the most deforested region of the Amazon. It’s a region with a lot of land pressure.”

Survival previously publicized the vulnerable nature of the territory and the people in it, which until recently lacked even the most basic protection.

Survival International Director Caroline Pearce said today: “This alarming development shows how vital it is that this territory, like all uncontacted Indigenous peoples’ territories, is properly demarcated and protected as a matter of urgency. The government has taken years just to issue a temporary Land Protection Order, but the Indigenous people’s presence in this area has been known for decades, and land grabbing is now rampant.”

Note: Survival Brasil’s researcher Priscilla Oliveira was in the area with FUNAI shortly before the young man appeared, and is available to interview.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Survival International.

An uncontacted man from the Mamoriá Grande area of Brazil who appeared at a settlement in an extractivist reserve in February 2025. © Anon

Experts working in the area where an uncontacted Indigenous man appeared last week say it reveals the acute pressures from landgrabbers and the extraction of forest produce in that part of Brazil’s Amazon.

The young man, from a group known as “Uncontacted people of Mamoriá Grande,” emerged last week at a settlement occupied by locals harvesting Brazil nuts and other forest produce in the southern part of Amazonas state. He returned to the forest the following day.

Brazil’s Indigenous Affairs Agency FUNAI finally issued a Land Protection Order (a temporary protection) over the area last December, decades after local Indigenous people reported the group’s presence. The area is, however, still not officially demarcated (mapped out and protected), and some local politicians are challenging the Order.

There is mounting pressure on the forest from illegal hunting, fishing and land grabbers in the region.

Video of an uncontacted man in the Mamoriá Grande area of Brazil has circulated widely online.

Zé Bajaga Apurinã, the Coordinator of local Indigenous organization FOCIMP (Federação das Organizações das Comunidades do Médio Rio Purus) says: “We’ve been asking for that territory to be protected for a long time. They did the temporary protection, but that doesn’t solve it. What really solves it is demarcation. Those people have nowhere else to go. People are invading, taking the wealth that’s inside the land, cutting down wood, fishing, hunting, everything in there. And they’re suffocating, they’re under threat. We need to set up a health cordon immediately and demarcate the land urgently.”

Public prosecutor Daniel Luis Dalberto works on uncontacted peoples’ issues. He was in the area last week and told Brazilian news site A Publica: “I have seen with my own eyes the risks [to] which these peoples are subjected. The risk of genocide or extermination is very high.”

Carlos Travassos is the former head of FUNAI’s uncontacted and recently-contacted peoples unit, and was also previously chief of the FUNAI base in the area. He told A Publica: “[Some parts of this region] are not legally protected and have been the target of land speculation, such as land grabbing. Funai’s Land Protection Order was very important. This is the end of the ‘arc of deforestation’, the most deforested region of the Amazon. It’s a region with a lot of land pressure.”

Survival previously publicized the vulnerable nature of the territory and the people in it, which until recently lacked even the most basic protection.

Survival International Director Caroline Pearce said today: “This alarming development shows how vital it is that this territory, like all uncontacted Indigenous peoples’ territories, is properly demarcated and protected as a matter of urgency. The government has taken years just to issue a temporary Land Protection Order, but the Indigenous people’s presence in this area has been known for decades, and land grabbing is now rampant.”

Note: Survival Brasil’s researcher Priscilla Oliveira was in the area with FUNAI shortly before the young man appeared, and is available to interview.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Survival International.

State and market solutions to the ecological crisis have only increased the wealth and power of those on top, while greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise. Nearly all the experts and professionals are invested, literally, in a framework that is only making things worse. With so much power concentrated in the very institutions that suppress any realistic assessment of the situation, things seem incredibly bleak. But what if we told you that there’s another way? That there are already people all around the world implementing immediate, effective responses that can be integrated into long-term strategies to survive these overlapping, cascading crises?

We spoke with three revolutionaries on the front lines resisting capitalist, colonial projects. Sleydo’ from the Gidimt’en clan of the Wet’suwet’en nation, in so-called British Columbia, Isa from the ZAD in the west of France, and Neto, a militant with the Landless Workers’ Movement based in the northeast of so-called Brazil. They share their experiences gained from years of building collective power, defeating repression, and defending the Earth for all its inhabitants and for the generations still to come.

They share stories of solidarity spreading across a continent, of people abandoned to poverty and marginalization reclaiming land, restoring devastated forests, and feeding themselves communally, stories of strangers coming together for their shared survival and a better future, going head to head with militarized police forces and winning. And in these stories we can hear things that are lacking almost everywhere else we look: optimism alongside realism, intelligent strategies for how we can survive, love and empathy for the world around us and for the future generations, together with the belief that we can do something meaningful, something that makes a difference. The joy of revolutionary transformation.

We learn about solutions. Real world solutions. Solutions outside of the control of capitalism and the state.

The Revolution is Already Here.

Next up: how do we make it our own?

Revolution or Death is a three-part collaboration between Peter Gelderloos and subMedia. Part 1, ‘Short Term Investments,’ examined the official response to the climate crisis and how it’s failing. In Part 2, ‘Heads Up, the Revolution is Already Here’ we talk with movements around the globe that provide inspiring examples of what realistic, effective responses look like. Part 3 ‘Reclaiming the World Wherever We Stand’ will focus on how we can all apply these lessons at home.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by subMedia.

Abuse and impunity.

Especially concerning, in the Hunter Biden case, is that said pardon preemptively covers all possible federal crimes with which Hunter could possibly be charged, if committed at any time during the past 11 years.  And there are unresolved questions concerning his shady business dealings during Joe Biden’s Vice-Presidency.  Moreover, unlike Biden, previous Presidents (including Trump) had (with the exception of the political crimes of one ex-President) always followed precedent by limiting their pardons to crimes for which the accused had been actually prosecuted.  Biden now sets a corrupt example which Trump will almost certainly copy as he (Trump) pardons those whose yet-to-be-charged crimes (including violent ones) were perpetrated by his supporters.

Meanwhile, crimes perpetrated by Joe Biden and other US government decision-makers against people of color in other countries get, not lenient treatment, but absolute impunity.  Among their never-to-be-prosecuted crimes, Biden (and Harris) are full participants with the fascist settler-colonialist state in its genocidal mass murder, rooted in their de facto embrace of the proposition that Zionists are entitled to treat the resistant indigenous population of Palestine as white American expansionists had treated the indigenous nations of this continent.

As for the liberal left, they (being more concerned over possibly somewhat increased repression of liberal dissent in the US than over actual US-backed fascist repression and mass murder elsewhere) shelved their anti-racism and anti-imperialism as they campaigned for the center right Harris-Walz-Cheney-Bolton ticket.  Left liberal fervor to elect the Democrat ticket was despite: Biden-Harris and other centrist Democrat politicians’ complicity in the existing domestic repression of pro-Palestine and other anti-imperialist dissent, as well as their decision to obstruct access to due process for most migrant and asylum-seeking people of color.  Thusly the liberal left has given its allegiance to centrist Democrat politicians, whose opposition to racism and repression is, like that of Trump, entirely expedient and selective.

Will Biden provide clemency for US prisoners who are not of the privileged class?  Consider the US political prisoners, unjustly convicted in rigged political trials, victims who have languished for decades in US prisons!  As these were prosecuted on account of their having acted in opposition to the regime to which Biden et al are committed, it is very unlikely that Biden will pardon them.  Three current examples follow.

[1] Extraordinary prosecution: Ricardo Palmera

Context.  Colombia has been almost continuously torn apart by civil war since 1948 when Jorge Eliécer Gaitán (the populist Liberal Party candidate for President) was assassinated by a lone gunman.  As a proponent of land reform and with a history of advocacy for workers’ rights, Gaitán had incurred the enmity of the ruling elites and of US-based transnational capital.  At the time of his assassination, he was opposing the US project for the formation of the Organization of American States which would be a tool for facilitating US domination and for suppressing “Communist” influence in Latin America.  The assassination provoked armed civil conflict among political factions.  Eventually, rightwing forces gained control of the Liberal Party which then entered into a ruling coalition with the Conservative Party.  The conflict then evolved into one between:

• the central government (controlled by the oligarch-dominated ruling coalition and relying upon police, armed forces, and right-wing paramilitaries); and
• leftist guerrilla armies.

The latter eventually consisted mainly of:

• the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia [FARC] which had begun as an offshoot of the Colombian Communist Party, and
• the National Liberation Army [ELN].

Both sides in this civil war had engaged in practices which were widely condemned as human rights violations: the FARC for ransom kidnappings and extortions; the government (and its rightwing paramilitary death squads) for brutal repression, torture, and assassinations of peasant and labor leaders and other noncombatant left-leaning activists.  The two sides had sometimes engaged in peace talks.  While a negotiated truce was in effect from 1984 until 1987, leftist groups (including the FARC) formed the Patriotic Union [UP] to seek social and political reforms thru peaceful political processes.  In the 1986 elections UP candidates achieved victories in many of the local contests.  The ruling oligarchs became alarmed, and over the following years some 4,000 to 6,000 UP members (including its 1986 and 1990 Presidential candidates) were murdered (with near-universal impunity) by rightwing paramilitaries backed by oligarchs.  The US has actively intervened (since 1964) with material assistance to the armed forces of the central government.  In 2004 the US targeted FARC negotiator Ricardo Palmera.

Ricardo Palmera (a.k.a. Simón Trinidad) had worked as a professor of economic history and had participated in the 1986 UP election campaign.  As the death squads assassinated leftist leaders and activists with impunity, Palmera decided (in 1987) to join the FARC.  He rose to a position of leadership and served as a negotiator for the FARC during the 1998 to 2002 peace process.  He went to Quito, Ecuador (in 2004 January) to meet with James Lemoyne, a United Nations special advisor on peace processes to facilitate a prisoner exchange.  At the behest of the CIA, the Ecuadoran government arrested Palmera and turned him over to the Colombian government, which then conspired with the US (which had no charges against him at the time) to invent a case for his extradition for trial in the US.

The case.  The US DoJ [Dept of Justice] then subjected Palmera to four illegitimate trials on inappropriate charges.  Specifics follow.

(1) The US misclassified FARC revolutionaries as “terrorists”; but, under international law captured participants in a revolutionary civil war are entitled to prisoner-of-war [POW] status.  By prosecuting Palmera for participation in the armed conflict, the US has violated his right to POW status.

(2) The prosecution charged complicity in hostage-taking based on the FARC’s shoot-down and capture of three US contractors on a reconnaissance mission over FARC-held territory in 2003.  Thus, the prosecution misrepresented a legitimate act of war as being a crime.

(3) Even if the capture and detention of the contractors were a crime, the US had no jurisdiction over the area where the event occurred.  Moreover, Palmera had no command authority over the relevant FARC forces or advance knowledge of their operations.

(4) The prosecution charged complicity in “narco-trafficking”, but US government sources had determined: that, although it taxed operators profiting from cocaine production, the FARC did not engage in or control Colombian drug trafficking; and that, meanwhile, many of the rightwing paramilitaries opposed to the FARC were employed by the drug traffickers.  In four trials the DoJ was unable to get a conviction on this accusation.

(5) In the first trial (2006) the jury deadlocked on all charges.  At its conclusion the judge illicitly questioned the jurors in order to obtain information to help the prosecution obtain convictions in the next trial.  Consequently, a new judge had to be found for the subsequent trials.

(6) In the second trial the jury told the judge that they were at an impasse and unable to agree upon a verdict.  The judge required them to continue deliberations until, after another four days, they consented to a guilty verdict on one of five counts – conspiracy to hold three US citizens hostage.  However, there was no evidence of any act by Palmera that involved the capture or detention of the three US citizens.  Consequently, this conviction could only be a verdict of guilt-by-association.

(7) The third and fourth trials on narco-trafficking charges ended with deadlocked juries, and the prosecution then dismissed those charges.

(8) In 2008 Palmera was sentenced to 60 years in prison.  He has been held in solitary confinement with very limited access to his lawyer for nearly all of his 20 years in US detention.

[2] Repressing resistance in the First Nations: Leonard Peltier

 Historical context.  The US government has a long history of atrocious abuse of the indigenous nations and their peoples throughout its territory.  These abuses include: genocidal wars, ethnic cleansings, coerced assimilation with suppression of the native languages and cultures, forcing their peoples into conditions of degrading poverty, imposition of fraudulent and inequitable treaties, subjugation as subordinate nations, routine violations of treaty rights, corrupt governance, theft of their land and resources thru outright seizures and thru imposition of inequitable leases to US capitalists, and so forth.

In mid-20th century, Amerindian resistance grew and produced a number of activist organizations.  The American Indian Movement [AIM] (founded in 1968) adopted a militant posture and gained nationwide prominence.  The poverty and lack of opportunity on reservations had induced many Amerindians to move to urban areas where they concentrated in urban slums and suffered the afflictions common to other disadvantaged racial minorities.  AIM responded by starting remedial projects: health programs, education and job training programs, legal rights centers, and so forth.  In 1969 AIM joined Fred Hampton’s original revolutionary Rainbow Coalition.  During the next few years AIM brought public attention to Amerindian grievances thru participation in a series of militant protest actions including: the occupation of Alcatraz (1969—71), the Thanksgiving Day occupation of the replica Mayflower (1970), the occupation of Mount Rushmore (1971), a brief occupation of US Bureau of Indian Affairs [BIA] headquarters (1971), the “Trail of Broken Treaties” cross-country caravan and protest which included the occupation of the BIA offices (1972).  The US Federal Bureau of Investigation [FBI] and DoJ decided that AIM was a “threat to national security” and set out to destroy it.

Repression on the Pine Ridge Reservation.  Tribal members on the (Oglala Lakota) Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota had formed the Oglala Sioux Civil Rights Organization [OSCRO]:

• to seek justice for Oglala victims of racist attacks in neighboring off-reservation communities where the white perpetrators were routinely given impunity or biased leniency, even in murder cases; and
• to seek reform of tribal government then ruled by a corrupt and autocratic tribal Chairman, Dick Wilson, who engaged in blatant favoritism, with respect to jobs and other benefits, for his relatives and cronies.

In 1973 some tribal councilors brought misconduct charges against Wilson (who held the chairmanship from 1972 until 1976), and the tribal council then voted 11 to 7 to suspend him, but he managed to have his impeachment trial stopped.  Wilson had already organized his own private militia, Guardians of the Oglala Nation [GOONs], which he illegally paid with tribal funds and used to suppress his political opponents.  When several hundred Oglala gathered to protest the quashing of the impeachment trial, the BIA sent in a force of the US Marshals Service [USMS] to sustain Wilson’s position.

A few days after the foiled impeachment trial, some 200 local protestors and AIM activists occupied the remote Reservation village of Wounded Knee (site of the 1890 massacre of over 200 Lakota men, women, and children by a trigger-happy US Cavalry Regiment).  Using the action to publicize Amerindian grievances, the occupiers demanded: the removal of Wilson, and negotiations to address US violation of its treaty obligations.  USMS, FBI, and other police cordoned the area thereby creating a standoff with frequent shooting from both sides.  After 71 days the occupiers ended the occupation and withdrew.  One FBI agent, two occupiers, and one visitor had been killed; and 13 individuals wounded.

During and after the Wounded Knee siege, the Wilson regime and his GOONs intensified repression of his political opponents of whom more than 60 were killed during the following 3 years, while the Reservation’s homicide rate grew to 17 times the US average.  Meanwhile, the DoJ indicted 185 individuals for alleged crimes involving their actions in occupying Wounded Knee; these included: arson, theft, assault, and interfering with federal officers.  Numerous trials followed, the most prominent being the government’s 1974 show trial of AIM leaders, Dennis Banks and Russell Means.  This (8 ½ month) trial ended when the judge ruled that the prosecution had committed such egregious misconduct, including withholding of evidence and use of perjured witness testimony, that dismissal was the only appropriate outcome.  Nevertheless, the DoJ persisted in its persecution of AIM leaders.

From the start of the conflict between Dick Wilson with his supporters and his opponents (including OSCRO and AIM), the federal agencies (BIA, FBI, USMS, and DoJ) naturally sided with the Wilson regime which leased tribal lands to nearby white ranchers and politically influential American capitalists under inequitable contracts deemed unfair to reservation residents.  The FBI provided Wilson’s GOONs with intelligence on AIM activists and other opponents of the Wilson regime and looked away while the GOONs assaulted, terrorized, and murdered Wilson’s critics.  The FBI also perpetrated warrantless no-knock assaults on homes as it used the Pine Ridge Reservation to train its first militarized commando (i.e. SWAT) teams.  Meanwhile, the FBI and DoJ targeted AIM members and supporters for prosecution on any and every possible charge.  This hostile environment created the tension which eventually erupted into the shootout at the Jumping Bull Ranch.  The DoJ ultimately obtained a fraudulent murder conviction against Leonard Peltier.

Subject events.  In 1975 June 26, two FBI agents, Jack Coler and Ronald Williams, in unmarked cars were following a red pickup truck which they believed belonged to an Oglala alleged to have stolen a pair of cowboy boots.  As they entered the Jumping Bull Ranch (where several AIM members were camped) shots were fired, and a shootout then ensued between the feds and the AIM activists.  There were more than 30 people at the ranch including women, children, and other non-belligerents.  By the end of the confrontation, the ranch was surrounded by some 150 armed agents (FBI, BIA, local police, and GOONs).  Which side fired first is in dispute.  Casualties: the two FBI men were wounded by fire from the AIM side and then killed execution-style by person unknown; AIM member, Joe Stuntz, was killed by a government sniper.

FBI investigators and DoJ prosecutors, embarrassed by their failures to obtain convictions of AIM leaders involved in the Wounded Knee occupation, responded by pursuing only prominent AIM members, the objective being to convict some AIM leaders on charges of having murdered the two FBI men.  For this purpose, they indicted three prominent AIM members who had participated in the shootout, namely: Leonard Peltier, Robert Robideau, and Darrelle Butler.

Trials.  In September Butler and Robideau were arrested.  Peltier fled to Canada, where he was arrested and extradited to the US (1976 December).  While Peltier was not yet in custody, Robideau and Butler were tried and acquitted (1976 July, with Judge McManus presiding) when their jury concluded that, with the level of violence and government intimidation on the Reservation, they could plausibly claim to have acted in self-defense during the exchange of gunfire.

Peltier was extradited and subjected to a rigged trial (in Fargo, ND in 1977) before an all-white jury which convicted him on two counts of first-degree murder.  The judge then sentenced him to two consecutive terms of life imprisonment.  The improprieties in the legal proceedings were as follows.

(1) The FBI coerced one, Myrtle Poor Bear, to allege in a signed affidavit that she had been Peltier’s girlfriend and had seen him kill the two FBI men.  In fact, she had never met Peltier and was not present at the shootout.  The FBI then used this false affidavit to obtain Peltier’s extradition from Canada.

(2) Ms Poor Bear recanted her allegations against Peltier, but the judge refused to permit the defense to present her as a witness (claiming: that she was too mentally unstable to provide competent testimony, and that exposure of the FBI’s extradition fraud would prejudice the jury against the prosecution).  The judge also refused to allow the defense to present evidence of other cases where the FBI had been rebuked for tampering with evidence and witnesses.

(3) An FBI agent changed his story by testifying at trial that the vehicle, which the two agents had pursued and whose occupant had fired at them, was Peltier’s red and white van.  In fact, the two FBI agents had identified the pursued vehicle as a red pickup truck, and it was red pickup trucks which the FBI first sought and searched after the shootout.

(4) The prosecution alleged at trial that the two FBI agents had been killed by Peltier’s AR-15 rifle.  The prosecution also asserted that Peltier’s AR-15 was the only one present, but it was later compelled to admit to the appellate judge that several other AR-15 rifles were present in the area and possibly present at the shootout.  An FBI ballistics expert testified that extractor marks on a shell casing found at the scene matched Peltier’s rifle; he also testified that a more accurate firing pin test had not been performed because of damage to Peltier’s gun.  Some years after Peltier’s conviction, a FOIA request produced documentation of a pre-trial FBI ballistics test on the firing pin which proved that the shell casing had not been fired by Peltier’s AR-15.  The DoJ had withheld this crucial exculpatory evidence from the defense during trial.

(5) No trial witness identified Peltier as the person who killed the FBI men.  And during Peltier’s appeal (in 1986), the prosecution admitted that it had no real evidence to establish who fired the fatal shots.  Nevertheless, the appellate court refused to overturn the conviction based on the prosecutor’s new assertion that the jury had found Peltier guilty of “aiding and abetting” the murders, notwithstanding that the prosecution had never actually pursued that issue at trial.  Moreover, this allegation would have applied equally to Robideau and Butler, whose jury (having heard all of the defense case) had acquitted them.

(6) Other apparent violations of Peltier’s rights to a fair trial include: the arbitrary and never-explained replacement of the originally assigned judge (McManus) by another judge (Benson) more disposed to exclude evidence favorable to the defendant, an undisclosed FBI pre-trial meeting with trial judge Benson, infiltration of FBI informants into the defense team, the presentation of coerced testimony by juvenile witnesses who had been intimidated by the FBI, and the DoJ use of tactics to frighten and bias the jury by always transporting them to and from court under escort by a SWAT team.

Evaluation.  Many organizations and individuals have examined the case and concluded: that the DoJ and federal courts violated Peltier’s right to a fair trial, that he was targeted and convicted for his political associations, that the government has no evidence that he committed the murders for which he was convicted, and that he should be immediately released from prison.  These include: Amnesty International, the UN Commissioner for Human Rights, Robert F Kennedy Memorial Center for Human Rights, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, National Lawyers Guild, Center for Constitutional Rights, European parliament, Belgian parliament, Italian parliament, several Nobel Prize winners, and many other well-known advocates for human rights.

Frame-up in Milwaukee.  2 ½ years prior to the 1975 shoot-out, AIM activist Leonard Peltier, was sitting in a Milwaukee restaurant where 2 off duty cops (in 1972 November) picked a quarrel with him.  Then, as he was leaving, the same 2 cops jumped and beat Peltier.  They then arrested Peltier on a charge of attempted murder (of themselves) with what was later shown to be a nonfunctional gun.  Fearing that he would be killed or railroaded to prison on perjured police testimony, Peltier obtained release on bond and then fled.  In 1978, while in prison following his frame-up conviction for the premeditated murders of the two FBI agents, he was finally brought to trial on this “attempted murder” charge.  At trial the girlfriend of one of the two cops testified that her cop friend had shown her a photo of Peltier prior to the incident and had told her that “he was going to help the FBI get a big one”.  Thus, it became clear that the entire incident had been a set-up and fraud.  The prosecution’s case then collapsed, and the jury acquitted this “notorious AIM felon”.

Sources

[1] Wagner & Lynch PLLC: Wounded Knee – the Massacre, the Incident, & the Radical Lawyer (© 2023).

[2] International Leonard Peltier Defense Committee: Facts (accessed 2024 Dec).

[3] FOIA Documents – U.S. v Leonard Peltier (CR NO. C77-3003): Post-Trial Actions – Criminal (© 2015 Dec).

 [3] Criminalizing Muslim charities

The Holy Land Foundation [HLF] was the largest Islamic charity in the US in 2000.  It distributed charity (food, clothing, healthcare services, et cetera) thru established local zakat [charity] committees in the Israeli-occupied territories of Palestine.  Because it provided charitable relief to victims of Israeli persecution, HLF was targeted first by American Zionists and then, at their behest, by the US government.

Islam in Palestine.  90% of Palestinian Arabs are Muslim.  Naturally, they vary widely in their devotion to religious prescriptions.  Until the PLO’s capitulation and corruption cost it most of its popular sympathy, Hamas had the allegiance of only a small minority of Palestinian Muslims.  Hamas, which is a political and social force within Palestinian Muslim communities, was founded in 1987 as an offshoot of the (Islamist Egyptian) Muslim Brotherhood [MB].  Until 1987, MB in Palestine maintained peaceful relations with the Zionist state, and its leaders had met regularly with Israeli officials.  Because said MB was hostile to the secular and leftist Palestine Liberation Organization [PLO], the Israeli state: had happily encouraged the former as a potential alternative Palestinian leadership to that of the PLO, and had refrained from interfering when MB Islamists perpetrated violent attacks against secular groups aligned with the PLO.  However, violent Israeli repression impacted all Palestinians (including MB adherents) in the occupied territories; and overwhelming Palestinian support for the First Intifada (1987—93 civil disobedience campaign) finally induced Palestinian MB, reconstituted as Hamas, to embrace the resistance to Israeli occupation.  When Hamas responded to Israeli violence by forming a military arm to retaliate with its own violent counterattacks upon Israelis, the Zionist state branded it as a “terrorist” organization.  In 1995 the US accommodated its Israeli ally by also branding Hamas as a “terrorist” organization.

Target.  Although a Hamas fundraiser, Musa Abu-Marzuk, had provided financial support at its founding (in 1989), HLF was not an affiliate of Hamas, and its actual activities had nothing to do with violent resistance to Zionist oppressions.  Nevertheless, Zionist groups targeted HLF with smears and demands for revocation of its tax-exemption.  HLF continued its charitable work until 2001, when the US government used the 9-11 Al-Qaeda attacks as pretext for a so-called “war on terror” which became largely an attack upon civil liberties with widespread targeting of (mostly innocent) Arab-American activists and US-based Islamic institutions.  One such target was HLF.  The federal government (in 2001 December): seized its assets, shut down its operations, and branded it as a “terrorist” organization.

Prosecution.  In 2007 the DoJ brought the HLF and five of its principal officers (now known as the Holy Land Five) to trial on allegations of providing material support to a designated terrorist organization (meaning Hamas).  In this trial (which included violations of the defendants’ due process rights), the jury acquitted on some counts and deadlocked on the others.  A more egregiously rigged retrial in 2008 resulted in convictions on all remaining counts.  Specific violations of due process follow.

(1) The prosecution contended that, by providing charity to needy Palestinians thru the local charity committees which the prosecution alleged were controlled by Hamas, HLF was bolstering Hamas’ popularity and thereby providing material support for “terrorism”.  Thus, the prosecution sought conviction of the accused based upon guilt-by-association.

(2) The prosecution’s classification of the local charities as agents of “terrorism” was baseless.  The relevant facts: (1^st) the local committees were independent entities devoted to charitable purposes, and their leaders included individuals with no ties to Hamas as well as those who were members or sympathizers with Hamas; (2^nd) immediately after the US had listed Hamas as “terrorist”, HLF had sought advice from the federal government as to which, if any, of the charities were deemed unacceptable; (3^rd) none of the charity committees was listed by the US as a terrorist organization; (4^th) the US (thru its USAID program) had provided funding for many of the same local charity committees until 2006 (for five years after the HLF had been shut down); and (5^th) the prosecution acknowledged that none of the funding of the charities was used for acts which the US deemed to be “terrorist”.

(3) The prosecution was permitted, over defense objections, to present two unidentified Israeli state security agents as “expert” witnesses for the purpose of tying the charity committees to Hamas.  The anonymity of these “experts” prevented effective defense cross-examination to challenge their credentials and the validity of their assertions thereby violating the defendants’ 6^th Amendment rights to confront and rebut their accusers.

(4) In the retrial the only significant change in the prosecution’s presentation was its move to bolster its case by introducing additional “evidence” which consisted of untestable assertions, hearsay, and irrelevant material, all of which served only to prejudice the jury against the defendants.  The appeals court (in 2011): ruled this additional “evidence” inadmissible, then astonishingly asserted that its use did not affect the outcome, and finally refused to overturn the convictions.

(Ω) The Holy Land Five are: Ghassan Elashi, Shukri Abu-Baker, Mufid Abdulqader, Abdulrahman Odeh, and Mohammad El-Mezain.  Their prison sentences were: 65 years for each of the first two, 20 years for the third, and 15 years for the remaining two.

Source

For more on Hamas, see Pierce, Charles: Gaza War: Palestine, Zionism, imperialism, Hamas, previous wars, atrocities. What are the relevant actual facts?.

 Conclusion

For 3 reasons (their liberal capitalist indoctrination, their attachment to their own privileges and entitlements, and their dependency upon their capitalist campaign funders), governing centrist Democrat politicians are incapable of providing: equal justice in law enforcement, or consistent enforcement of the civil rights of opponents of their imperial and capital-serving policies.  Moreover, any concessions (reforms) which they offer, in support of greater social justice, will always be limited to what does not seriously impinge against the interests of powerful factions of the ruling class.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Charles Pierce.

A new report by Survival International has revealed that demand for electric vehicles is destroying uncontacted people’s lives and lands in Indonesia.

The report, published today, reveals:

• The uncontacted Indigenous Hongana Manyawa people of Halmahera island in Indonesia, are facing a severe and immediate threat of genocide because mining nickel for use in electric vehicle batteries is destroying their rainforest home and puts them at risk of contracting deadly diseases.
• French mining company Eramet, which operates the largest mine on uncontacted Hongana Manyawa territory has known of the severe risks to the 500 uncontacted Indigenous people for more than 10 years. Eramet oversees the mining operations of Weda Bay Nickel (WBN), the largest nickel mine on Earth.
• According to its own reports, the company has been aware of uncontacted Hongana Manyawa in and around the WBN concession since at least 2013. In spite of this, the company continues to deny their presence, and has been mining on territory belonging to the uncontacted Hongana Manyawa since 2019.
• There are at least 19 mining companies operating on the territory of the uncontacted Hongana Manyawa, most mining for nickel.
• Mining in Halmahera is part of a major Indonesian government project to massively expand nickel mining to feed the global demand for electric vehicle batteries.
• The mining is not simply deadly, it is also a violation of international law. The uncontacted Hongana Manyawa have not given their Free, Prior and Informed Consent to the destruction of their forest and land, and are unable to give it.

Following intense lobbying from Survival International, German chemical giant BASF pulled out in June from a $2.6 billion dollar project with Eramet to process nickel from Halmahera.

In recent months, as the miners pushed ever-deeper into Hongana Manyawa territory, a series of videos went viral, showing uncontacted Hongana Manyawa people resisting bulldozers operating on their territory, or being forced out of the forest into mining camps.

Uncontacted Hongana Manyawa appear at a Weda Bay Nickel mining camp. The uncontacted Hongana Manyawa are becoming effectively forced to beg for food from the same companies destroying their rainforest home. ©Survival

Survival International’s Director Caroline Pearce said today: “It’s obscene that a nickel rush to fuel supposedly sustainable consumption is in fact on the verge of wiping out the uncontacted Indigenous Hongana Manyawa, who truly live sustainably.

“Survival International is calling for the urgent, immediate recognition and demarcation of their territory, an end to mining on their land and the establishment of a ‘no-go zone’ – the only way to ensure the survival of the uncontacted Hongana Manyawa people.

“It’s also vital that electric vehicle manufacturers publicly commit to ensuring that their supply chains are entirely free of materials stolen from the territories of uncontacted Indigenous peoples, or from companies operating on (or sourcing from) the territories of uncontacted peoples, including the Hongana Manyawa.”

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Survival International.

New Zealand’s parliament was suspended on Thursday after lawmakers from the Maori Party tore up a copy of a controversial bill on tribal rights and performed a traditional war chant in the legislature.

For nearly two centuries, the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi has guided relations between New Zealand’s native Maori people and its white settlers. The treaty promised the natives that they would keep their lands and customs in exchange for accepting British rule, and has since been interpreted by parliament and courts to guarantee the Maori a broad range of rights – including hiring quotas and financial reparations.

The libertarian ACT party, part of the country’s governing coalition, has argued that that the treaty discriminates against non-Maori people, and has put forward a bill that would dramatically narrow its interpretation.

During a vote on the bill on Thursday, Maori Party MP Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke tore up a copy of the legislation before breaking into a Haka, a traditional Maori war chant. Maipi-Clarke’s colleagues rose from their seats and joined in the chant, as did opposition lawmakers and spectators in the gallery.

Unable to quiet the shouting MPs, Speaker Gerry Brownlee cut the hearing short and suspended Maipi-Clarke from parliament for a day.

Despite the Maori Party’s opposition, the vote passed and the bill will now proceed to a public consultation process. Prime Minister Christopher Luxon opposed the bill, but his National Party voted to support it under the terms of an agreement signed with ACT last year. The National Party is the largest faction in New Zealand’s coalition government, with ACT and New Zealand First serving as junior partners.

Thursday was not the first time that Maori Party MPs have broken into Hakas in parliament. Back in 2021, party co-leader Rawiri Waititi was ejected from the legislature for performing the ceremonial chant after a National Party MP argued that implementing a separate healthcare system for the Maori community was discriminatory.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by RT.

On this day in Anarchist History, November 14 1909, we remember young Simón Radowitzky and his assassination of Colonol Falcón, the head of the federal police in Argentina.

Colonel Falcón rose through the ranks of the military by conducting genocide and enslaving Mapuche and other Indigenous People in Patagonia and brought those same skills to Buenos Aires where he brutally repressed anarchists.

After assassinating Falcón, Radowitzky was tortured and jailed for 22 years but that didn’t stop him from continuing to lead a revolutionary life.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by subMedia.

Deep learning deploys a set of lenses that takes the complexities of contradictions and not-so-self-evident truths and focus into some sense of why “they” are where “they” are economically, culturally and spiritually.

The US election is over (as of Nov. 5 midnight?), but the dangerous clown show of misanthropy and hegemony marches on. I am writing this for National American Indian Heritage Month (Nov.), because Native Peoples in this part of the world are actually way beyond the rhetoric and knee-jerk responses of the bad history books of the children of the colonizers.

My Native brothers and sisters everywhere, but specifically in New Mexico, West Texas and Northern Arizona, have a deeper understanding of their own history and that of the current indigenous people undergoing eradication, ethnic cleansing, and genocide.

“Dehumanization is the first step in genocidal incitement. However, counter-annihilation is also a key feature of settler colonialism. It is the belief and practice that colonial society must annihilate Native people; otherwise, the colonizers, in turn, will be annihilated in a zero-sum calculus. It is a pre-emptive ‘self-defense’ against any real or imagined anti-colonial attack. It makes invasion look like ‘self-defense.’ It is why the chorus of Western media outlets repeat the mantra: ‘Israel has the right to defend itself.’ But the colonized are never granted the authority of self-defense or the right not to be annihilated.” — Nick Estes

Again, ‘open those eyes,’ is what I insist with students and others I intersect with in Lincoln County. Those words above are from someone most Lincoln County Leader readers have never heard of: Nick Estes, an enrolled member of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe. He is an Assistant Professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota and the co-host of The Red Nation Podcast.

We can jump through superficial hoops with this 34th year of National American Indian Heritage Month, a 1990 congressional resolution signed into law by President George H.W. Bush.

The irony isn’t lost on many of us who have parsed our history, or the Bush Family’s dark legacy.

George H.W. Bush’s father, the late US senator Prescott Bush, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from their involvement with the financial backers of Nazi Germany.

Journalists 20 years ago discovered files in the US National Archives that a firm of which Prescott Bush was a director was involved with the financial architects of Nazism.

His business dealings, which continued until his company’s assets were seized in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act, has led more than 60 years later to a civil action for damages being brought in Germany against the Bush family by two former slave laborers at Auschwitz.

Moreover, the cry by Estes and others in the Native American rights community announce their own declaration of liberation: “Until Decolonization, Liberation, and Landback.”

This November’s not limited to those here on Turtle Island to find a space for deep reflection and education. Others around the world who are indigenous are collectively traumatized by the current genocide in Gaza and Lebanon.

“Many of the lessons people are learning are not new to me;  for many this moment has been a realization that their governments are not just corrupt, but also complicit in the evils of the world, that their media is biased and that the people around them will turn their backs on a genocide being live-streamed on their social media. As an Aboriginal person living in so-called Australia, these truths have been a reality for me and my people for decades and nor am I shocked to learn of the ignorance of so many others,” states Dominic Guerrera, a Ngarrindjeri and Kaurna poet, community organizer, artist and curator.

Closer to my Central Oregon Coast home, we have groups fighting for cultural preservation and land acknowledgement. View the Future is a Yachats nonprofit collaborating with our two confederated tribes from the central Oregon Coast who are the descendants of the first people: The Confederated Tribe of Siletz Indians and the Confederated Tribe of Coos, Lower Umpqua and Siuslaw Indians.

Land Acknowledgment for tribes is more than a ceremonial point in cultural fluency. Words and declarations are the soul and spirit of Native people. You can read the two land acknowledgments at  (https://viewthefuture.org/)

Find something to “hook into” this month (and every month), to acknowledge our own temporary “holding” of land here in Lincoln County or wherever you live. Forget about the elections.

Be deep in understanding why this month can be important for individual and societal change. Don’t parrot the bad history taught or just live life in an echo chamber of your choosing with “monkey do as monkey sees” superficial engagement with the issues.

Find Native writers on alternative sources like Red Nation.

Listen to Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer, academic and musician and member of Alderville First Nation.

“Although our ancestors lived through the genocide of Indigenous peoples in North America, this past year we have witnessed genocide in real-time, with technologically advanced warfare, destruction and obliteration on a spectacular scale. We’ve watched daily video footage and photos of unimaginable violence targeting families and children. We’ve read social media posts, news reports and poetry coming from Palestinians inside Gaza. And we’ve watched the very states that have dispossessed us of our homelands, supply the weapons and unwavering political support to Israel to do the same to the Palestinian people.”

Be Native Aware.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

Five years after the killing of Paulo Paulino Guajajara, an Indigenous Amazon Guardian who was gunned down by illegal loggers, his family still waits for justice.

Paulo’s death was widely covered by the world’s press, but despite the global outcry, the killers have never been brought to trial. Two men, Antônio Wesly Nascimento Coelho and Raimundo Nonato Ferreira de Sousa, have been charged, but not tried.

Paulo Paulino, known also as Kwahu Tenetehar, was shot in the neck and died in the forest after an ambush by loggers. His colleague, Tainaky Tenetehar, was shot in the back and arm but escaped.

The Amazon Guardians have patrolled their territory in the eastern Amazon, which has been heavily invaded by loggers, for more than 15 years. Uncontacted members of the Awá people also live in the territory.

Amazon Guardians Tainaky Tenetehar (left), Paulo Paulino Guajajara (center) and Olimpio Guajajara (right) during an operation to destroy an illegal logging camp. Paulo was shot dead in November 2019, Tainaky was wounded. © Sarah Shenker/Survival International

At least six Guardians have been killed, and many of their relatives shot dead, as loggers and land grabbers target their territory, known as Arariboia – one of the last areas of forest left in that region, in the eastern state of Maranhão.

Survival has supported the Guardians for many years. Survival’s Brazil researcher Sarah Shenker, who accompanied the Guardians on one of their operations, said five years ago: “Kwahu was completely dedicated to defending his forest and his uncontacted relatives, despite the risks. He was also one of the most humble people I’ve ever met.

“He knew that he might pay with his life, but he saw no alternative, as the authorities did nothing to protect the forest and uphold the rule of law.”

His friends and colleagues paid tribute to him in an emotional video.

After years of pressure from the Guardians, and from contacted Awá people, Brazilian authorities have finally begun construction of a guard post in the Arariboia territory, to help them monitor, and prevent incursions by, illegal loggers.

In a statement to mark the anniversary of Paulo’s murder, the Guardians said: “We feel the distress of the Guajajara people over the continued impunity of our people’s murderers, and especially of the warrior Paulo Paulino, who we will always remember, above all for his struggle to protect our ancestral territory.

“The Guardians are preparing an act of remembrance to mark five years of impunity, and we join Survival for this moment of denunciation, and to demand that those responsible for the murder of Paulo Paulino are duly tried and sentenced.”

Fiona Watson, Survival International’s Director of Research and Advocacy, said today: “Five years ago Paulo Paulino paid with his life to protect his beloved rainforest home, and the Indigenous people who live in it.

“He was one of countless Indigenous people in Brazil killed every year for defending their land – and the killers persist because they know it’s unlikely they will ever face justice. Brazil’s government pays lip service to the need to protect what is left of the Amazon – but the people defending it on the ground are sacrificing their lives as the rainforest is destroyed around them. How much longer will this appalling injustice continue?”

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Survival International.

A new California law, which takes effect on January 1, 2025, requires that public schools begin teaching about the state’s treatment of Indigenous peoples. The State Department of Education must consult with tribes when updating the social studies curriculum and several tribes are advocating the inclusion of material contained in UCLA professor Benjamin Madley’s  book, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873. This is the first comprehensive account of the state-sanctioned murder of California’s Native People. Madley documents how state and federal governments employed their legitimizing authority for the genocide and Congress financially underwrote California’s extinction campaign.

The new legislation was set in motion five years ago when California Gov. Gavin Newsome publicly apologized for the “war of extermination” pronounced by Peter Burnett, the state’s first governor in 1851.  Newsome said that at time, state law required that Indigenous peoples be removed from their land, children separated from their families, native people stripped of their language and culture and a system of indentured servitude was begun. Under Gov. Burnett, California’s Indigenous population was reduced by 80 percent.

In 1846, U.S. troops took control of California from Mexico and in 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the war with Mexico. Mexico ceded California and its other northern territories for 15 million dollars. On January 6, 1851, the new governor of California said the following about the “Indians” in his inaugural address: “That war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races until the Indian is extinct. While we cannot anticipate this result with painful regret, the inevitable destruction of a race is beyond the power of wisdom of man to avert.” California Senator John B. Weller declared of the Indigene, “Humanity may forbid, but the interests of the white man demands their extinction.” This “myth of inevitable extinction”  fueled the ideology that Indigenes were destined to vanish, that it was simply their fate and unstoppable.

And in case there remains any doubt that this was not official policy, we know that the men who “killed thousands of Indians from the 1840s to the 1870s were paid by the state of California and the federal government…they filed expenses and were reimbursed.” (Tom Fuller, “Hastings Law Grapples with the Founder’s Involvement with Native Massacres,” NYT, (pay wall, updated November 4, 2021). It should be noted that with the outbreak of the Civil War,  California sent 15,725 volunteers to serve in the Union Army. However there so many volunteers that enough remained at home to serve as the primary agent of the killing machine. Furtherduring the Civil War the Union government’s treasury was running perilously low but Congress still allotted major funding to the California Volunteers for their  Indigene-hunting operation. Madley calculates that at the end of the Civil War, only 34,000 Indians remained from from 150,000 in 1845. Limited attacks continued until 1871 when it was beginning to find any more Inidigenes left to kill. The decline was caused by killings, disease, starvation and massacres. Madley estimates that the “state spent 1.7 million — a staggering sum in its day — to murder some 16,000 people.”

My hope (perhaps a fantasy) is that Indigenous and non-Indigenous public school kids in California will be deprogrammed and learn that genocide, like slavery, was part of the inherent capitalist logic of dispossesion.   Will they be exposed to the truth that there exists a glaring contemporay parallel to this history in Israel’s “plausible genocide” (ICJ) in Gaza and the future ethnic cleansing of the West Bank? Young Indigenous peoples understand that they are the descendants of genocide as the banner  flown by the Oglala Lakota’s Youth Council in South Dakota reads, “From Pine Ridge to Palestine.” Will school chidren learn, as Middle East Eye‘s Jonathan Cook points out, that Israel is now finishing the job it began in 1948? At least as important, will they be encouraged to understand that, as in the 1840-1871 period in California, the U.S. government is not only backing this modern day war of extermination but its actions are wholly consonant with the objective of U.S. imperialism in its efforts to maintain America’s global empire? Will they learn that both Israel and the United States were settler-colonial state projects and not as the official narratives proclaim, “nations of immigrants.”

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Gary Olson.

I was very surprised a few days ago to see the local bank where I have an account displaying a sign outside the front door which referred to what they called, “Columbus Day/Indigenous Peoples Day.” Although I wish the first two words had not been there, it is still a positive thing that they went public in this compromise kind of way.

There’s something personal to me about this day. I’m not Indigenous, am very much of European ancestry, but in 1992 at the time of the 500th anniversary, official celebrations in the US of Columbus’ arrival in the western hemisphere, I took part in a 42 day, water-only Fast for Justice and Peace in the Americas. It was initiated by Brian Willson, Scott Rutherford and Diane Fogliatti, and it went from September 1 to October 12.

The overall message of this action and the much broader movement out of which it emerged was that it was long past time to turn away from all that Christopher Columbus represents—racism, slavery, militarism, imperialism and ecological destruction—and commit ourselves to working for a next 500 years very different than the one experienced between 1492 and 1992. One specific demand was for Columbus Day to be replaced by Indigenous Peoples Day.

There was an Indigenous-led movement that had been taking action over many months in 1991-92 in support of this essential new direction for the USA and other countries in the Americas. The fast was inspired by that movement.

20 years before I had taken part in two long fasts/hunger strikes, one in 1971 for 33 days while in prison for draft resistance and another in 1972, a 40 day, water-only fast to end the war in Indochina.

When I heard about this initiative by Brian, Scott and Diane about a month before it was to begin, it struck a chord in me, and my life circumstances were such that I could join it. Then, toward the end of the fast, Diane Fogliatti came up with an idea for how to continue to build this movement: do an organized fast for 12 days, from October 1 to October, each year going forward. I ended up taking part in this, helping to lead a People’s Fast for Justice loose network which did so from 1993 to 2001. Our two demands were for Columbus Day to be renamed Indigenous Peoples Day and for political prisoner Leonard Peltier to be freed.

Doing some research for this column, I have learned that since 1992 there have been a growing number of localities and states which have officially recognized in some way the second Monday of October as Indigenous Peoples Day, including the states of Alaska, California, Iowa, Louisiana, Maine, Minnesota, Michigan, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, South Dakota, Texas, Virginia and Wisconsin. What a surprise!

And responding to this upsurge, in 2021 President Joe Biden signed a proclamation in support of Indigenous Peoples Day.

There’s an awful lot of reasons to be anxious or depressed right now, but it is a very positive thing, something for which to be thankful, that Indigenous peoples throughout the Americas and elsewhere in the world continue to survive. Even more, they continue to give leadership in the existential battle to prevent cascading ecological and societal devastation and for a very different future in the years to come. La lucha continua!

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Ted Glick.

circa 1830: A slave auction in America. (Photo by Rischgitz/Getty Images)

Through the centuries, the Republic that eventuated in North America has maintained a maximum of chutzpah and minimum of awareness in forging a creation myth that sees slavery and dispossession not as foundational but as inimical to the nation now known as the United States. But, of course, to confront the ugly reality would induce sleeplessness interrupted by haunted dreams, so far this unsteadiness has prevailed.
— Dr. Gerald Horne¹

When an origin story is considered sacrosanct, any challenge to it is sacrilege.
— Prof. Abby Reisman²

In most areas of the United States, school will be starting up in a few weeks. This reminds me of the song “What Did You Learn in School Today?” which was written by Tom Paxton and then recorded and released by Pete Seeger in 1963. Paxton’s lyrics mock the misinformation and lies provided by the public school system. This prompted me to wonder what would happen if today’s school children returned home from school and responded to Paxton’s question.

You’ll need to imagine that their teacher, (let’s call her, Ms Brown) is able to recast what follows in age appropriate language, a skill that lies far beyond my limited capacity and that he adopted a creative, critical thinking approach and not rote learning. Finally, how the precocious student conveys this information to parents might take the form of a jumbled response but we can hope the essential information is intact.

Okay. How about something along the following lines: “What did you learn in school today?” We discussed the America Revolution in 1776 and Ms Brown said that when she was in school, she was taught that the American Revolution was about besieged colonists courageously standing up against British tyranny and it was all about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. She said the textbook authors characterized it as a glorious confirmation of American exceptionalism.

One of countless celebratory examples that she was taught was from Joseph J. Ellis, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his book, The Cause: The American Revolution and Its Discontents, 1773-1783 (New York: Liveright 2021). According to Ellis and other myth-making historians, the greatest activity of this “Revolutionary generation” was their devotion to popular sovereignty and their “common sense of purpose.”³

Ms Brown said that she later learned that this devotion excluded the majority of people in the new nation and that slavery existed in all 13 British colonies and had begun at least in 1619. And Africans weren’t the only ones aware of specious reasoning in the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Hutchinson, the last colonial governor of Massachusetts, queried that if the rights were “absolutely inalienable” how could the delegates deprive so many Africans of “their right to liberty?”⁴ And this apparently included George Washington’s order for the genocidal attack on the Haudenosaunee nation in upstate New York where more than 40 villages were burned to the ground and all crops and winter provisions destroyed. Those not killed or captured fled to Canada. This event was, in truth, an example of the Founder’s “common purpose.”

We learned that in 1700, roughly 75 percent of land in colonial New York state was owned by only 12 individuals. In Virginia, 1.7 million acres was held by seven individuals.⁵ In 1760, less than five hundred men in just five colonies controlled most of the shipping, banking, mining and manufacturing on the eastern seaboard and in1767 the richest 10 percent of Boston’s taxpayers had 66 percent of Boston’s taxable income while some 30 percent had no property at all.⁶ Ms Brown said that fifty-six of these propertied men later signed the Declaration of Independence.⁷

Many of the Founders were not only slave holders but obsessive land speculators This included George Washington who began acquiring land in 1752, while still a teenager. He eventually owned more than 70,000 acres in what became seven states and the District of Colombia. Ms Brown smiled and said, “I cannot tell a lie. George Washington became the richest person in America.” We also learned that even before King George III issued his Proclamation forbidding settlements from the Appalachian Mountains to the Mississippi, individuals and colonial land speculators were staking claims to millions of acres of and were eager to push forward into Indigenous land. Ms. Brown said that we must consider the possibility that Native dispossession and exclusion played a key role in creating the country through speculative capitalism.⁸ The patriotic fantasy or fig leaf for all of this was that America was destined by God to expand democracy and the Protestant ethos to the native inhabitants.

Ms Brown said we should always look for other sources of information and rely on evidence. She learned from her own reading — outside of school — that there’s an entirely different view of the so-called Revolutionary War of 1776 and that it was actually part of a “counter-revolution,” a conservative movement that the “Founding Fathers” — Britain’s “revolting spawn” — fought to oust London. When the colonial elites broke with the Mother Country, the world’s first-ever apartheid state came into being.⁹ We learned that in the 1770s, the British Parliament was moving toward abolition and in 1773 there was the famous Somerset case in Britain in which Lord Mansfield banned slavery — calling it “odious” —within the country but not yet in the colonies. There was a real fear that Britain would soon cease to support slavery in the thirteen colonies. Simultaneously, Alexander Hamilton, another Founding Father, bought and sold slaves for his wife’s family, owned slaves himself and called Indigenous people “savages.”

More specifically, Ms Brown told us that “…In November 1775, Lord Dunsmore in Virginia issued his famous — or infamous, in the view of the settlers — edict offering to free and arm Africans to squash an anti-colonial revolt, he entered a pre-existing maelstrom of insecurity about the fate of slavery and London’s intentions. And by speaking so bluntly, Dunsmore converted the moderates into radicals.” Indeed, another expert on the Colonial period says that Dunsmore’s edict “did more than any another measure to spur uncommitted white Americans into the camp of rebellion.”¹⁰ Our teacher said that many more Africans — some estimates run as high as 100,000 — allied with the Red Coats rather than with their masters. Of course there were risks for the Africans because if the Revolution succeeded they would be considered traitors and punished as such. It was a terrifying choice and their fears were justified because after the 1776-1783 Revolutionary War, tens of thousands of formerly enslaved people were returned to enslavement.

We learned that in 1787, after the war, James Madison made sure that the Constitution guaranteed that the government would, in his words, “protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.” He was firmly against agrarian reform of any sort and opposed to anything akin to actual functioning democracy. Why? Because the majority — the poor and landless — might use the political power they were granted to force a redistribution of wealth.

We learned that the British were jeopardizing numerous fortunes, not only based on slavery, but the slave trade. So, the war was necessary to protect the freedom of a small white elite to maintain slavery and further, not have any interference as they went ahead with dispossessing and exterminating indigenous people. In short, British colonialism was replaced with U.S. capitalist state colonialism.¹¹

Ms Brown said there was evidence strongly suggesting that the American Revolution was, in the words of historian William Hoagland, “The first chapter in an inter-imperial war between Great Britain and its dissident elite in North America.” We learned that the Euro-American elite ‘patriots” had only contempt and fear of actual democracy which they termed “The tyranny of the majority.” One historian pointed out that “The American state, even in its earliest incarnation was more concerned with limiting popular democracy than securing and expanding it.”¹² He told us that the Declaration’s phrase “Life, liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” was changed in the Constitution to “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Property.”

In support of this revisionist history, Ms Brown shared a few excerpts from Howard Zinn’s magisterial book, A People’s History of the United States, in which he cogently explains that over a relatively short period, the colonial elite were able to:

… take over land, profits and power from the British empire. In the process they could hold back a number of potential rebellions and create a consensus of popular support for the rule of a new privileged leadership. When we look at the American Revolution in that way it was a work of genius.

The Declaration of Independence was a wonderfully useful device because the language of liberty and equality could unite just enough whites to fight for the Revolution, without ending either slavery or inequality.

…the rebellion against British rule allowed a certain group of the colonial elite to replace those loyal to England, give some benefits to small holders and leave poor white working people and tenant farmers in very much the same situation.¹³

Finally, we considered that in 1776, nascent capitalists pulled off the ultimate coup and succeeded in “convincing the deluded and otherwise naive (to this very day) that this naked grab for land, slaves and power was somehow a great leap forward for humanity.”¹⁴

Just before the bell rang, one kid in my class asked the teacher, “If what we’ve previously been taught about the American Revolution may not be true what else may not be true?” Ms Brown said that was a good question and we’d talk about it next week and also do some role playing.

ENDNOTES:

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Gary Olson.

Campaigners say they’re a graphic illustration of the urgent need to revoke all the logging licenses in the area, and recognize that the territory belongs to the Mashco Piro people, which Survival believes is the largest uncontacted tribe in the world.

More than 50 Mashco Piro people have appeared near the Yine village of Monte Salvado, in SE Peru, in recent days. In a separate incident, another group, of 17, appeared near the neighboring village of Puerto Nuevo. The Yine, who are not uncontacted, speak a language related to Mashco Piro, and have previously reported that the Mashco Piro angrily denounced the presence of loggers on their land.

Several logging companies hold timber concessions inside the territory that belongs to the Mashco Piro people. The nearest is just a few miles from where the Mashco Piro were filmed.

Mashco Piro men on the banks of a river near near the Yine village of Monte Salvado, in Southeast Peru. ©Survival

One company, Canales Tahuamanu, that operates inside the Mashco Piro territory has built more than 200km of roads for its logging trucks to extract timber. It is certified by the FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) for its supposedly sustainable and ethical operations there, despite the Peruvian government acknowledging eight years ago that it is cutting down trees within Mashco Piro territory.

Survival International is calling on the FSC to withdraw its certification of the company’s operations. More than 8,000 people have already lobbied the FSC.

Alfredo Vargas Pio, President of local Indigenous organization FENAMAD said today: “This is irrefutable evidence that many Mashco Piro live in this area, which the government has not only failed to protect, but actually sold off to logging companies. The logging workers could bring in new diseases which would wipe out the Mashco Piro, and there’s also a risk of violence on either side, so it’s very important that the territorial rights of the Mashco Piro are recognized and protected in law.”

Survival International Director Caroline Pearce said today: “These incredible images show that very large numbers of uncontacted Mashco Piro people are living just a few miles from where loggers are poised to start operations. Indeed one logging company, Canales Tahuamanu, is already at work inside Mashco Piro territory, which the Mashco Piro have made clear they oppose.

“This is a humanitarian disaster in the making – it’s absolutely vital that the loggers are thrown out, and the Mashco Piro’s territory is properly protected at last. The FSC must cancel its certification of Canales Tahuamanu immediately – failure to do so will make a mockery of the entire certification system.”

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Survival International.

One of the most senior politicians in Indonesia has said the government should protect an uncontacted tribe whose territory is being destroyed for the world’s largest nickel mine.

Senate Leader AA LaNyalla Mahmud Mattalitti, a close ally of President-elect Prabowo, said Hongana Manyawa people should be protected from nickel mining on their land. He urged the government to “immediately intervene to provide protection to the indigenous tribe.”

Up to 500 uncontacted Hongana Manyawa people live on Halmahera island, about 1,500 miles NW of Jakarta. They refuse interactions with outsiders and rely entirely on their rainforest for survival. Contact with outsiders can kill them through exposure to diseases to which they have no immunity. Their rainforest home sits on huge deposits of nickel and is being torn apart for mining. One of those mines – the largest nickel mine in the world – is run by Weda Bay Nickel, attracted by the global boom in nickel for electric car batteries.

Eramet’s Weda Bay Nickel mine on the territory of the uncontacted Hongana Manyawa people in Halmahera, Indonesia. © Survival

Indonesia’s 1945 Constitution specifically recognizes the protection of Indigenous tribes, LaNyalla said. He added that it’s vital to ensure the Hongana Manyawa can be “independent over all matters relating to their livelihoods.” He called on Halmahera’s North Maluku provincial government to revisit their land planning regulations to ensure the Hongana Manyawa would no longer be displaced by mining.

LaNyalla’s comments were prompted by the viral spread of a video showing uncontacted Hongana Manyawa people forced by the destruction of their rainforest home to beg for food from Weda Bay Nickel miners – the very people responsible for that destruction.

Uncontacted Hongana Manyawa appear at a Weda Bay Nickel mining camp.

The uncontacted Hongana Manyawa are becoming effectively forced to beg for food from the same companies destroying their rainforest home.

The mining operations are run by French company Eramet, which has known about the presence of uncontacted Hongana Manyawa in their concession since 2013, yet continues to mine on their territories regardless.

This is believed to be the first time the plight of the uncontacted Hongana Manyawa has received the direct attention of the Indonesian central government. LaNyalla’s comments also follow Tesla’s recent announcement that the company is exploring the need for a mining no-go zone to protect the rights and territories of uncontacted Indigenous people in Indonesia. Tesla included the statement in its 2023 Impact Report, issued in May, after Survival International supporters sent more than 20,000 emails to electric vehicle companies, mining companies and the Indonesian government calling for a mining no-go-zone.

LaNyalla said: “Whatever form it takes, I ask that development does not displace the surrounding communities, especially the indigenous tribe who lives in the interior, where they depend on the forest.” There’s not much time. The recent video reveals the rapid destruction of the Hongana Manyawa’s rainforest home.

Survival’s Director Caroline Pearce said: “This is an unprecedented announcement and offers a lifeline to the uncontacted Hongana Manyawa. The solution is clear: Their territory must be protected and must be free from mining and other developments. Eramet and other companies must abide by international law and stop mining on these territories, where they clearly have no consent.”

Survival calls upon local and national governments in Indonesia to urgently demarcate and protect the territory of the uncontacted Hongana Manyawa and establish a no-go zone to protect them against the catastrophic effects of mining and forced contact.

Pearce said: “Time is ticking for the uncontacted Hongana Manyawa. Their territory must be urgently protected, with a no-go-zone established before it’s too late.”

Notess:

1. Out of a total population of approximately 3,000 Hongana Manyawa people, between 300 and 500 are uncontacted, and could be wiped out. Mining destroys their rainforest home, and the mine workers bring diseases for which the uncontacted people have no immunity.

2. Survival is calling on all electric vehicle companies, including BMW, Volkswagen, and BYD, to commit to not source any materials from uncontacted tribes’ territories and for Tesla to make this their formal policy.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Survival International.

One of the most senior politicians in Indonesia has said the government should protect an uncontacted tribe whose territory is being destroyed for the world’s largest nickel mine.

Senate Leader AA LaNyalla Mahmud Mattalitti, a close ally of President-elect Prabowo, said Hongana Manyawa people should be protected from nickel mining on their land. He urged the government to “immediately intervene to provide protection to the indigenous tribe.”

Up to 500 uncontacted Hongana Manyawa people live on Halmahera island, about 1,500 miles NW of Jakarta. They refuse interactions with outsiders and rely entirely on their rainforest for survival. Contact with outsiders can kill them through exposure to diseases to which they have no immunity. Their rainforest home sits on huge deposits of nickel and is being torn apart for mining. One of those mines – the largest nickel mine in the world – is run by Weda Bay Nickel, attracted by the global boom in nickel for electric car batteries.

Eramet’s Weda Bay Nickel mine on the territory of the uncontacted Hongana Manyawa people in Halmahera, Indonesia. © Survival

Indonesia’s 1945 Constitution specifically recognizes the protection of Indigenous tribes, LaNyalla said. He added that it’s vital to ensure the Hongana Manyawa can be “independent over all matters relating to their livelihoods.” He called on Halmahera’s North Maluku provincial government to revisit their land planning regulations to ensure the Hongana Manyawa would no longer be displaced by mining.

LaNyalla’s comments were prompted by the viral spread of a video showing uncontacted Hongana Manyawa people forced by the destruction of their rainforest home to beg for food from Weda Bay Nickel miners – the very people responsible for that destruction.

Uncontacted Hongana Manyawa appear at a Weda Bay Nickel mining camp.

The uncontacted Hongana Manyawa are becoming effectively forced to beg for food from the same companies destroying their rainforest home.

The mining operations are run by French company Eramet, which has known about the presence of uncontacted Hongana Manyawa in their concession since 2013, yet continues to mine on their territories regardless.

This is believed to be the first time the plight of the uncontacted Hongana Manyawa has received the direct attention of the Indonesian central government. LaNyalla’s comments also follow Tesla’s recent announcement that the company is exploring the need for a mining no-go zone to protect the rights and territories of uncontacted Indigenous people in Indonesia. Tesla included the statement in its 2023 Impact Report, issued in May, after Survival International supporters sent more than 20,000 emails to electric vehicle companies, mining companies and the Indonesian government calling for a mining no-go-zone.

LaNyalla said: “Whatever form it takes, I ask that development does not displace the surrounding communities, especially the indigenous tribe who lives in the interior, where they depend on the forest.” There’s not much time. The recent video reveals the rapid destruction of the Hongana Manyawa’s rainforest home.

Survival’s Director Caroline Pearce said: “This is an unprecedented announcement and offers a lifeline to the uncontacted Hongana Manyawa. The solution is clear: Their territory must be protected and must be free from mining and other developments. Eramet and other companies must abide by international law and stop mining on these territories, where they clearly have no consent.”

Survival calls upon local and national governments in Indonesia to urgently demarcate and protect the territory of the uncontacted Hongana Manyawa and establish a no-go zone to protect them against the catastrophic effects of mining and forced contact.

Pearce said: “Time is ticking for the uncontacted Hongana Manyawa. Their territory must be urgently protected, with a no-go-zone established before it’s too late.”

Notess:

1. Out of a total population of approximately 3,000 Hongana Manyawa people, between 300 and 500 are uncontacted, and could be wiped out. Mining destroys their rainforest home, and the mine workers bring diseases for which the uncontacted people have no immunity.

2. Survival is calling on all electric vehicle companies, including BMW, Volkswagen, and BYD, to commit to not source any materials from uncontacted tribes’ territories and for Tesla to make this their formal policy.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Survival International.

Nothing is more evident of this than his treatment of New Caledonia, a Pacific French territory annexed in 1853 and assuming the title of a non-self-governing territory in 1946.  Through its tense relationship with France and the French settlers, the island territory has been beset by periodic bursts of violence and indigenous indignation.  Pro-independence parties such as L’Union Calédonienne have seen their leaders assassinated over time – Pierre Declerq and Eloi Machoro, for instance, were considered sufficiently threatening to the French status quo and duly done away with.  Kanak pro-independence activists have been butchered in such confrontations as the Hienghène massacre in December 1984, where ten were killed by French loyalists of the Lapetite and Mitride families.

As for Macron, New Caledonia was always going to feature in efforts to assert French influence in the Indo-Pacific.  In 2018, he visited the territory promising that it would be a vital part of “a broader strategy” in the region, not least to keep pace with China.  Other traditional considerations also feature.  The island is the world’s fourth ranked producer of nickel, critical for electric vehicle batteries.

In July 2023, Macron declared on a visit to the territory that the process outlined in the Nouméa Accord of 1998 had reached its terminus.  The accords, designed as a way of reaching some common ground between indigenous Kanaks and the descendants of French settlers through rééquilibrage (rebalancing), yielded three referenda on the issue of independence, all coming down in favour of the status quo. In 2018, the independence movement received 43% of the vote.  In 2020, the number had rumbled to 47%.

The last of the three, the December 2021 referendum, was a contentious one, given its boycott by the Kanak people.  The situation was aided, in large part, by the effects of Covid-19 and its general incapacitation of Kanak voters.  Any mobilisation campaign was thwarted.  A magical majority for independence was thereby avoided.  The return of 97% in favour of continued French rule, despite clearly being a distortion, became the bullying premise for concluding matters.

The process emboldened the French president, effectively abandoning a consensus in French policy stretching back to the Matignon Accords of 1988.  With the independence movement seemingly put on ice, Macron could press home his advantage through political reforms that would, for instance, unfreeze electoral rolls for May 2024 elections at the provincial and congressional level.  Doing so would enable French nationals to vote in those elections, something they were barred from doing under the Nouméa Accord.  New Caledonian parliamentarians such as Nicolas Metzdorf heartily approve the measure.

On May 13 riots broke out, claiming up to seven lives.  It has the flavour of an insurrection, one unplanned and uncoordinated by the traditional pro-independence group.  Roadblocks have been erected by the Field Action Coordination Cell (CCAT).  It had been preceded by peaceful protests in response to the deliberations of the French National Assembly regarding a constitutional arrangement that would inflate the territory’s electoral register by roughly 24,500 voters.

Much of the violence, stimulated by pressing inequalities and propelled by more youthful protestors, have caught the political establishment flatfooted. Even Kanak pro-independence leaders have urged such protestors to resist resorting to violence in favour of political discussions.  The young, it would seem, are stealing the show.

Macron, for his part, promptly dispatched over 3,000 security officers and made a rushed visit lasting a mere 18 hours, insisting that, “The return of republican order is the priority.”  Various Kanak protestors were far from impressed.  Spokesperson for the pro-independence FLNKS (Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front), Jimmy Naouna, made the sensible point that, “You can’t just keep sending in troops just to quell the protests, because that is just going to lead to more protests.”  To salve the wounds, the president promised to lift the state of emergency imposed on the island to encourage dialogue between the fractious parties.

Western press outlets have often preferred to ignore the minutiae about the latest revolt, focusing instead on the fate of foreign nationals besieged by the antics of desperate savages.  Some old themes never dissipate.  “We are sheltered in place because it’s largely too dangerous to leave,” Australian Maxwell Winchester told CNN.  “We’ve had barricades, riots … shops looted, burnt to the ground.  Our suburb near us basically has nothing left.”

Winchester describes a scene of desperation, with evacuations of foreign nationals stalling because of Macron’s arrival for talks.  Food is in short supply, as are medicines.  “Other Australians stranded have had to scrounge coconuts to eat.”

René Dosière, an important figure behind the Nouméa Accord, defined the position taken by Macron with tart accuracy.  Nostalgia, in some ways even more tenacious and clinging than that of Britain, remains.  The French president had little interest in the territory beyond its standing as “a former colony”.  His was a “desire to have a territory that allows you to say, ‘The sun never sets on the French empire’.”

For the indigenous Kanak population, the matter of New Caledonia’s fate will have less to do with coconut scrounging and the sun of a stuttering empire than electoral reforms that risk extinguishing the voices of independence.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Invariably since foundation, foreign policy doctrines were conceived as instruments of imperialist expansions and ideological sources pointing to the worldview and political direction of the United States. Not only did they become the official banners externalizing its aims, but also blueprints for establishing operational plans for territorial conquests, interventions, and wars. The threat of using military force (or other corecitive measures) to implement those plans has consistently been the chosen method. Did the U.S. achieve anything as consequence? Yes.  Its colonialistic and imperialistic accomplishments during the past two centuries are vast and impressive.¹

From measuring their collective place in the practice of imperialism, foreign policy doctrines can be described as the engine that moves the global objectives of the United States. Once an administration comes up with a specific policy course, the engine is revved up for action, guidelines drafted, and the course is announced. At the same point in time, an army of doctrinaires and agents of the state go into overdrive to procure all military, budgetary, and legislative means needed for the planned enterprise.

For instance, after the breakup of the USSR, the United States relentlessly reprised its previous attempts to be the sole decision maker of world affairs. Or, said differently, to exercise total control over the world system of nations using aggressive tactics—always backed by doctrines. On occasion, adages mix with doctrines. One such adage that U.S. ruling circles have been repeating ad nauseam is the “sole remaining superpower” (1, 2, 3, 4). Interpreted correctly, it means that the United States feels it has “earned the right” to rove around the world unopposed.

Nevertheless, with or without doctrines, the U.S. project to subjugate nations still out of its control has come to a full stop consequent to three convergent events. The first is the Russian intervention in Ukraine. The second is the unstoppable rising of China as a world power. The third is the overdue defiance that the South (formerly called developing countries) has launched against the pan-imperialist American-European order.²

Since their appearance on the scene in the early 19th century, foreign policy doctrines helped build the U.S. imperialist system. For the record, from the very beginning, this system was born neither pacifist nor peaceful or open to re-thinking. George Washington and the Continental Congress’s policy ordering Original Peoples to choose either relocation or war is an irrefutable case in point.

Special Note

In 2012, Mitt Romney recycled Washington’s concept of the U.S. power using a different figure of speech. “If you don’t want America to be the strongest nation on earth, I am not your president“. In 2024, Romney replayed his arrogant refrain. He stated, “What America is as a nation, what has allowed us to be the most powerful nation on Earth, and the leader of the Earth is the character of the people who have been our leaders”. [Italics added].

Comment: Romney stated his vision for America in terms and images that leave no doubt on his hegemonic agenda. Is that surprising? No. he is a product of a system and ideology that sees the world as something to grab, own, manage, and even go to war to keep it. In other words, his vision is about imposing U.S. domination over all other nations. Pertinently though, with phrases such as “strongest nation on earth”, “most powerful nation on Earth”, and “leader of the Earth”, Romney allow his militaristic hyperimperialism to float to the surface but disguised it under the “leadership” heading.

Question: how could Romney install America as a “leader of the earth” without first unleashing global violence to accomplish that installation? More importantly, has China, Russia, Hungary, Serbia, Algeria, Cuba, Brazil, Iran, Palestine, Sri Lanka, India, Colombia, Malaysia, or Turkey, for example, ever asked for such leadership in the first place?

General Discussion

As it developed into a military and economic superpower, the United States emerged first with distinct character: (a) colonialist, racist, and supremacist to the bone, (b) imperialist-focused conduct sold as a product of “democratic” statecraft, and (c) official culture primed for violence domestically and wired for war internationally.

To summarize, as conceived, adopted, and thereafter transformed into programs of the United States, foreign policy doctrines have been occupying a central place in the thinking, policymaking, and actions of presidents, their administrations, and orbiting institutions and think tanks. Remark: doctrines are not announced as such—a president does not go the podium and say: hey, here is my doctrine. Generally, doctrines start as specific acts to serve the system, to stress its assumed prowess and power, and to uphold its declared objectives.

This is how the process works. Initially, the habitual protocol leading to the informal promulgation of doctrines is scripted and introduced to make it sound as a “reasoned” conclusion to debated matters. But debates such as these and conclusions thereof are of no value whatsoever to those affected by their outcome. First, they are not rooted in the natural laws and needs of world societies. Second, they only reflect the hegemonic thus exploitive aims of U.S. ruling circles. For instance, aside from carpet-bombing, burning Viet Nam with Napalm bombs, poisoning it with Agent Orange, and killing three million of its people to prove Robert McNamara’s Domino Theory was never a good reason for the Vietnamese people to accept the U.S. motive for destroying their country.

Successively, when an administration reaches a decision on an issue, makes an announcement  against a specific country, and when that issue finds its way to the public, the system’s “pundits” proceed to extract passages from presidents’ speeches and writings, assign to them concept and purpose, and, before you know it, a doctrine is born. In the case of Ukraine, new doctrines are taking the center stage in the defense of U.S. post-USSR unipolarism and hegemonic agendas. One such ad hoc doctrine is that the United States is fighting Russian imperialism in Ukraine.

Doctrines, in the American practice of imperialism, offer a two-layer function. First, they intellectualize the bullying language of imperialism to solemnize the power of the ruling regime at enacting its “rules of engagement” with foreign nations. Second, they set the pattern, methodology, and ideological structure for the next enterprise. (Caveat: despite heavy setbacks in many parts of the world, the U.S. doctrine industry is highly adaptable, and it is not going to close its gates any time soon.)

Given that foreign policy doctrines have become a showcase for displaying the objectives of the ruling circles, as well as a repetitive ideological ritual confirming the unity and continuity of the imperialist state, is there a pattern to their mechanisms?

As it happens, when a president vacates the office for the next occupant, he leaves behind a trail of ideas and political positions highlighting the collective thinking of the system. Comparing the U.S. doctrines to those of religions may be of value. For instance, unlike the field of religions where doctrines are static and permanent (created to defend original, ancient, or old beliefs and dogmas), the U.S. doctrines are dynamic, always open to re-interpretations, and reflect three-stage process with a precise scope of work and finality—all situated in the future.

The first stage begins with deliberation on the objectives of the ruling circles in a given period. The second continues by enshrining them into a general declaration(s) of intent. The third, which is extremely important, turns that declaration into a three-tier sequential process. The first presents the system’s rationales for the decisions taken. The second deals with their implementation. The third is more complex: it turns all interrelated processes and sustaining ideologies into a legacy of some sort. That is, what has been decided by a president (and his administration) at a specific period is going to be invoked, expanded on, and continued by his successors.

For example, with its post-WWII focus on hypothetical threats from international Communism to the Middle East, Eisenhower’s doctrine is a replica of Truman’s doctrine that declared the Soviet Union a universal threat. As for John Kennedy, his doctrine, often referred to as his foreign policy, is a mixture between those of Truman and Eisenhower. To see the U.S. doctrines in a broad perspective, I’m going to briefly discuss the Monroe Doctrine (corner stone of all successive doctrines), and three other doctrines relating to Theodore Roosevelt, Jimmy Carter, and Joe Biden.

The Monroe Doctrine (1823) 

When the thirteen colonies became a political state in 1776, the objective was to claim neutrality to avoid further conflict with Britain or potential ones with France and Spain. But when the thirteen states increased to eighteen under the presidency of James Monroe (1817-25), that objective became two-pronged: (1) a call for increased expansion of colonies, and (2) a declaration that United States is the sole power in charge of the entire Western hemisphere. The U.S. Naval Institute describes the Monroe Doctrine as follows:

“As a principle in which the rights and interests of the United States are involved, that the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers. . . We owe it, therefore, to candor and to the amicable relations existing between the United States and those powers to declare that we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety. [Italics added]

Comment

• Monroe was a skillful imperialist tactician. He presented his theory (attributed to his secretary of state and future president John Quincy Adams) of colonialism and domination in clear wording. First, he prohibits European powers from colonizing the rest of the Americas; yet, he allows the heir to colonialist Britain (the United States) the exclusive privilege of further colonization. With that, Monroe instituted the infamous American dual-standard paradigm in world relations.
• The inherent fascism of the new American state under Monroe is self-explanatory. He treated Turtle Island as lands without people and civilizations. The question is how could one colonize lands without removing or killing first their original inhabitants and destroying their stewarded environment?
• As I stated, Monroe is the prototype of typical U.S. hyper-imperialist. He arrogantly considers any challenge to the new system of things as “dangerous” to peace and prosperity of the United States.
• Two centuries later, anything happens in the world that U.S. fascist rulers do not like, they deem it a threat to U.S. national security, or, “dangerous” to peace and prosperity of the United States.
• The peremptory, imperialist injunction of Monroe reaches the apex when he declares that every portion of the hemisphere is, by exclusive U.S. unilateral decisions, under the U.S. indirect control thus jurisdiction. This declaration has led countless administrations not only to claim extraterritorial jurisdiction, but also to pretend that domestic affairs and development of a country could imperil U.S. national security. (Read: US to probe if Chinese cars pose national data security risks)

Doctrines: The Reincarnation of Monroe  

• The case of Theodore Roosevelt: in 1904, the Monroe Doctrine gave birth to the Roosevelt Doctrine—then named the Roosevelt Corollary. I already stated that what has been decided by a president at a specific period is going to be invoked, expanded, and continued by his successors. Theodore Roosevelt corroborates my statement. A National Archives’ article states the following:

“In his annual messages to Congress in 1904 and 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt expanded the Monroe Doctrine. The corollary stated that not only were the nations of the Western Hemisphere not open to colonization by European powers, but that the United States had the responsibility to preserve order and protect life and property in those countries.” [Italics added]. The text in Italics proves my point.

• The case of Jimmy Carter: As Henry Kissinger had Richard Nixon in the palm of his hand; Zbigniew Brzezinski had Carter in his—coincidence or lack of intellectual security? Carter who, much later, had a rude awakening to the racist nature of Zionism (re: Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid), was another example representing the hyper-imperialist model. In his Union Address in 1980, Carter declared, among many other important things, the following:

“Let our position be absolutely clear: An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force. [Italics added]. Who was talking—Monroe or Carter?

It is beside the point to state that while the Soviet power or its main successor Russia never intervened in the Middle East during the past 107 years (exception in Syria to stop the U.S. and Israel from dismembering it. (Read, The Debate on the Imperialist Violence in Syria series by Kim Petersen and B.J. Sabri). At present, the American power is everywhere in the Middle East. It has full political and military control—direct and indirect—of Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Sudan, and Morocco. Conclusion: an attentive study of Carter’s address will prove that the mind of Monroe has transmigrated to that of Carter.

• The case of Joe Biden: in 1986, Biden (then senator) stated, “If there were not an Israel, we’d have to invent one.” The issue I am raising here is not about this Zionist wanting to create at any cost a state for Zionist settlers on Arab Palestinian soil. It is about Joe Biden repeating Monroe. That is, the United States consistently gives itself the unearned right to shape the world according to its convenient imperialist view.
• As for Biden’s doctrine, The Hoover Institution (an imperialist academic think tank claiming liberalism) addresses the topic. One of its doctrinaires, Colin Dueck (a university professor and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a known nest of American Zionists) thusly defines Biden’s philosophy of imperialism, “If the Biden administration’s grand strategy could be summed up in a single phrase, it would be – progressive transformation at home and abroad”.

Could specialists in semantics and esoteric writings help us to decode what does “progressive transformation at home and abroad” mean? In the first place, what is progressive? Second, domestically, can Biden, as per Dueck, progressively transform the Zionist mobs inside his party, as well as those of Trump and his crowds? Internationally, could Sweden, Switzerland, Russia, Ukraine, Cameroon, Bolivia, Nepal, or Bolivia, etc. partake in or learn from Biden’s “progressive” doctrine? Incidentally, how would Dueck qualify America before the advent of Biden: progressive, regressive, or what?)

To settle the issue on Dueck’s bogus idea of “progressive transformation”, we need to pose a few questions.  Suppose an independent country X is touched by the American wand of “progressive transformation”. Would that touch entail, among other things, invading it, installing military bases on its soil, dissolving its army, partitioning it in “federated” regions, abolishing its national currency, co-opting pro-American elements to lead it, writing constitutions for it, and building “without permit” the largest embassy in the world? It happened in Iraq.

Aside from this thematic mishap, Dueck redeemed himself by presenting articulate arguments—all anchored to the basic elements of U.S. hegemonic imperialism. Not to be overlooked, he permeated—perhaps without realizing it—his elaborations with undeclared references to the Monroe Doctrine and its successors. The following are selected passages:

• “Biden went further than either Obama or Trump in declaring that a global struggle against authoritarianism would be a strategic centerpiece of his new administration”. Remark: “authoritarianism” is a catchword to say that this or that country is antithetical to U.S. objectives, thus it is, de facto, a hostile nation.
• Dueck declares that Jack Sullivan (current National Security Advisor) and other Democrats, “Developed the concept of a “foreign policy for the middle class”. Remark: Dueck’s statement begs the question: is there a foreign policy for the upper and lower classes. It is notable though that the United States never cast its foreign policy in terms of class or class conflict. For the record, who decides on this policy is the deep American State and its Zionist elites.
• Dueck then goes to the traditional themes of U.S. foreign policy: “China, Russia, and so on” are the real threat to the United States. He then adds, “Populism, nationalism, liberalism, and authoritarianism are each assumed by the Biden administration to be pressing threats.” REMARK: This is overly trite. With regard to China, the United States has been inimical since the Long March of Mao Zedong.
• With typical American imperialist zeal, Dueck concludes, “We now face a kind of anti-American axis of hostile dictatorships, however loosely coordinated, covering most of the Eurasian continent. This is the most deadly threat in generations. By that standard, have we developed the policy tools, and specifically the military capabilities, to meet that challenge?  The answer is obvious: not even close.” REMARK: with these words, Dueck has effectively announced that all ante-Biden doctrines have come together in the person of Biden and his cohorts.

Propaganda and foreign policy     

• The National Museum of American Diplomacy asks an “interesting” question, “What are the key pillars of American diplomacy?” The Museum answers with stock American slogan: “Security, Prosperity, Democracy, and Development”. Then it goes on to give frivolous examples such as the one about “development in Cambodia”—the country that United States obliterated in order to fight the Vietcong and North Viet Nam. It is a fact that the United States never brought security, prosperity, democracy, and development to any country it attacked.
• The official voice of American diplomacy: the Zionist-ruled State Department is a pompous factory specialized in rhetorical garbage. It declares, “The State Department has four main foreign policy goals: Protect the United States and Americans; Advance democracy, human rights, and other global interests; Promote international understanding of American values and policies; and; Support U.S. diplomats, government officials, and all other personnel at home and abroad who make these goals a reality.”

As I am forfeiting my right to comment, I am curious to know where Monroe is hiding in the statement. Look no farther than (a) “Protect the United States and Americans”, and (b) “Other global interests”.

Preliminary Conclusion

From the end of WWII forward, the phenomenon of U.S. doctrines is what it is—a bizarre menagerie of global power themes. Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush Sr., Clinton, Bush Jr., Obama, Trump, and Biden each have their own doctrine—or, to be exact, doctrines the system prepared for them. Conceptually, all such doctrines are declarations of allegiance to the continuity of imperialism and to the path that many generations of American colonialists, expansionists, supremacists, imperialists, and hegemonists set for the United States.

Observation: none among the above presidents had any doctrine with a specific formulation before taking seats in the halls of power. But once there, the seated presidents reprise the preceding doctrines and amplify content and reach. When you closely examine them, however, you will find out that they mimic each other in essence and means—and all have for a common goal the application of U.S. imperialist power abroad.

Evaluating how doctrines prepare the ground for the solidification of anti-Russian policies can be done by looking at how candidates conduct their campaigns for political positions. During such events, they speak of this and that idea so sketchily but only to sell their electability to a complacent and uninformed audience—normally, details of foreign policy and motivations never appear on the stage. Still, despite the paucity of substantive talk, their endeavor is mainly directed to the establishment, not to the public. Ultimately, this establishment has the overwhelming ability to promote or demote candidates with ease—kneeling to it, therefore, is an electoral necessity.

In the end, when it boils down to voting, the public will have only a Hobson’s choice: candidates, with different names and faces, have identical views on the world—and a plan to rule it. They all have to sell the same merchandise: we control, we want, we oppose, we think, we decide, and so on.

Is selling the imperialist merchandise an important factor in U.S. foreign policy decision-making and actions?

In his book: A Nation of Salesmen, Earl Shorris, an attentive sociological researcher, touched on the crafty art of selling “things”. He delves into the essence of controlled persuasion by taking on advertising as a tool that subverted the American culture. Shorris, of course, did not include foreign policy as “merchandise” that has been subverting the entire American polity for decades while inflicting incalculable heavy damages on all humanity. Briefly, selling its Foreign Policy Brand—by persuasion, coercion, or aggression—has been America’s never-ending endeavor.

At this point, how is the United States merchandizing and selling its Brand and policy schemes on Ukraine and Russia?

• Read Part 1,  2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7.

ENDNOTES:

1. To fight U.S. imperialism, we have to acknowledge its danger by looking at its accomplishment. In 1783, the newly established American Republic was 800,000 square miles. In 2024 factsheet, its area is 3,796,742 square miles. Currently and to varying degrees, the U.S. controls the entire European continent with the exception of Serbia. It controls Japan. It castrated the entire Arab states with the exception of Syria and Algeria. It controls most of South Asia. It controls many Latin American and African countries. It controls Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. And, it largely controls the UN and the UNSC—the UN’s General Assembly is of no consequence. About the territorial colonialist expansions of the United States: the professional misinformants writing at Wikipedia calls the U.S. violent, bloody colonialist conquests as “territorial evolution” as if these were in line Darwin’s theory of natural selection.
2. The expression: American-European order is an umbrella term specifically denoting American, British, French, Italian, Spanish, and German imperialisms. By extension, it also includes the dangerous trio: Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. These three countries work under U.S. wings and take direct orders from Washington. Among all U.S. vassals, Japan is insidious. Although it does not appear often on the news, Japan is an advanced country, still very much militaristic, and acts according to U.S. rules and political views.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by B.J. Sabri.

If we take this “view from the shore” seriously, it calls into question all of the crumbling dominant narratives of our world today—especially narratives based in “nationalism” or in “democracy and human rights” as paths to a more just and peaceful world—and offers a possible way out of what Iain McGilchrist has called “The Unmaking of the World.” We may, perhaps, reimagine global history to see the world as voluntarily entering or reentering into millennia of Indigenous history and culture rather than continually absorbing the peoples of the Native Nations with horrific force and violence into a “Western,” or a “modern,” or even a “democratic” culture that is steadily attacking the spiritual foundations for a shared life on this planet.

The steady attack that is conveyed in these still widely cherished narratives—the steady attack on Indigenous wisdom and spiritual truth that the false universalism of these narratives entails—draws its strength from a covert religious bigotry and a doubling down on moral depravity that has become traditional over the past six centuries; an ongoing whirlpool of lowering moral standards.

Originating in fifteenth century papal bulls attempting to justify what would become chattel slavery, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and the invasion and conquest of the “New World,” the first doubling down came—as we will see—in response to the criticisms of grotesque Spanish misconduct articulated by Bartolomé de Las Casas and his allies beginning early in the sixteenth century. In this dynamic, first Spain, and then the other eurochristian powers (including, as of the 1830s, the United States), ultimately embraced the arguments—not of Las Casas—but of Juan Ginés Sepúlveda and his allies and their successors as to the alleged virtue of their “Christian” nations and the alleged inferiority of the peoples of the Native Nations—the “heathens.” This contrast between “Christians” and “heathens” is at the origins of both eurochristian nationalism and modern racism and has been ever since 1452 when Pope Nicholas V authorized Portugal’s Alfonso V to enslave in perpetuity “Saracens,” “Pagans,” and “other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed.”

The difference between “Christian” dominators and the “heathen” dominated remains the foundation of what the American Bar Association calls “federal Indian law” to this day. This is a body of “law” that is not made by the Native Nations but rather imposed upon them. As a unanimous Supreme Court put it, in 1823, in Johnson v. McIntosh, the mere presence of representatives of a “Christian people” on this side of the Atlantic “necessarily diminished” the sovereignty of the “heathens”—the Native peoples—and gave an “ultimate dominion” to the discoverers whereby they claimed a “title” to the land and a “right” to dominate the Native inhabitants—a “degree of sovereignty” over them—to be in their government.

This pernicious doctrine of Christian discovery has been inscribed in more secular language into what now passes for international law where “Indigenous peoples” (read: “heathens”) are defined as peoples under the domination of nation-states (read: “eurochristian dominators”). The covert religious bigotry this involves—and the ongoing and deliberate doubling down on immorality—is part of what Denise Ferreira da Silva has called our “global political architecture.”

The secular religion of nationalism—in many ways the infrastructure of this global architecture—has greatly reinforced the claims made by those who exercise, or seek to exercise, domination in our world. Having experienced domination at the hands of eurochristian nationalists, much of the world has adopted and adapted a version of nationalism in an attempt at self-defense. Nationalist doctrine holds (mistakenly), as Elie Kedourie argued more than sixty years ago, that humanity is divided by nature into nations, that nations are known by certain characteristics that can be ascertained, and that the only legitimate form of government is national self-determination (in the sense of a nation having a state of its “own”). In short, this doctrine holds that “nations” are “rightful sovereigns” under no superior moral or legal authority whose states can pretty much dominate “things” at will (such as—according to the United States Supreme Court to this day—“Indigenous peoples”). This assertion that the Supreme Court claims that the United States has a “right” to treat the Native Nations as things—as subjects completely under its “plenary power”—is evident in such horrific American misconduct as that involved in forcing the Native Nations onto the Trail of Tears and is powerfully demonstrated in my most recent book, Arguments Over Genocide, in Peter d’Errico’s Federal Anti Indian Law, in Steve Newcomb’s classic, Pagans in the Promised Land, and in the more philosophical exploration of the historical record, Political Principles and Indian Sovereignty, by Lee Hester (Choctaw).

All nations, from a perspective informed by Indigenous ideas, are constituted by the collective self-consciousness of peoples with a capacity to recognize all living beings as our kith and kin; peoples who are obliged to act in accordance with that recognition in trustworthy, reciprocal, and consensual ways towards all life. All peoples sense the presencing of the whole and the relationships it contains in contrast with the re-presentations of reality that are perceived and generated by states—the maps rather than the terrain—that are part of the efforts of all systems of domination to control and manipulate.

As George Manuel (Secwepemc), chief of the National Indian Brotherhood (known today as the Assembly of First Nations), has written:

Perhaps when men no longer try to have ‘dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that liveth upon the earth,’ they will no longer try to have dominion over us. It will be much easier to be our brother’s keeper then.” As the Basic Call to Consciousness—emerging from the Haudenosaunee in 1977—puts it: “The way of life known as ‘Western Civilization’ is on a death path…. The air is foul, the waters poisoned, the trees dying, the animals are disappearing. We think even the systems of weather are changing…. The people who are living on this planet need to break with the narrow concept of human liberation and begin to see liberation as something that needs to be extended to the whole of the Natural World. What is needed is the liberation of all the things that support life—the air, the waters, the trees—all the things that support the sacred Web of Life.

The greatest political divide in our world today is the divide between those who believe that benevolent authority (however variously defined) is necessary to the establishment, maintenance, and improvement of any worthwhile community, and its conduct of relations with any and all other communities, and those who think that at the most inclusive level the beloved community already exists (that it is constituted by the spiritual fact that all living beings are our kith and kin) and that our responsibility is to maintain balance and harmony with and within this beloved community without domination. Those on the pro-“benevolent authority” side of this divide tend to seek security through control and manipulation. Those on the other side understand that the whole cannot be dominated and that harmony and balance with and within it must be sought instead. Such balance and harmony is not a human creation, still less an expression of some “political will.” On the contrary, it is a gift of creation, and especially of our grandmother Earth, and we are all obliged to respect this gift.

There is a grain of truth in the narrative that presents “democracy and human rights” as emerging in the United States and then spreading—as the “best” form of government—towards global hegemony in subsequent centuries against the resistance of monarchical and dictatorial powers including, in the twentieth century, both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. That grain of truth is rooted in the soil of the “New World” and the cultures and polities that this land has sustained for millennia. Embracing the original free and independent existence of the peoples of the Native Nations, these cultures and polities do in fact include forms of government from which the “modern” world has learned much of what little it knows of genuine democracy. It is as an attempt at genuine democracy—a failed attempt at voluntarily entering Indigenous culture and history—that the narrative of “democracy and human rights” should be seen and understood.

Brother Gabriel Sagard’s early seventeenth century account of the Wendat, a work that became a bestseller in Europe cited by both Locke and Voltaire, is one of many that David Graeber and David Wengrow review in The Dawn of Everything. According to Sagard: “They reciprocate hospitality and give such assistance to one another that the necessities of all are provided for without there being any indigent beggar in their towns and villages; and they considered it a very bad thing when they heard it said that there were in France a great many of these needy beggars, and thought this was for lack of charity in us, and blamed us for it severely.” The Jesuit missionary Le Jeune wrote of the Montagnais-Naskapi in 1642: “They imagine that they ought by right of birth, to enjoy the liberty of wild ass colts, rendering no homage to anyone whomsoever, except when they like. They have reproached me a hundred times because we fear our Captains, while they laugh at and make sport of theirs. All the authority of their chief is in his tongue’s end; for he is powerful so far as he is eloquent; and, even if he kills himself talking and haranguing, he will not be obeyed unless he pleases the Savages.” Writing of the Wendat in 1648, Father Lallemant noted that “They are free people, each of whom considers himself of as much consequence as the others; and they submit to their chiefs only in so far as it pleases them.”

As Graeber and Wengrow note, when it comes “to questions of personal freedom, the equality of men and women, sexual mores or popular sovereignty—or even, for that matter, theories of depth psychology—indigenous American attitudes are likely to be far closer to the reader’s own than seventeenth-century European ones.” Sixteenth and seventeenth century glimpses of this more genuine democracy became a major tributary flowing into the Enlightenment. Their significance is only beginning to be recovered by contemporary scholarship. And the depth of the failure of the Enlightenment and its successors to become rooted in Indigenous spiritual truth rather than in intellectual abstractions is still to be fully recognized.

It is only as Native scholars have addressed the spiritual foundations of their own societies—as, for example, in God is Red by Vine Deloria, Jr. (Standing Rock Sioux) and Aazheyaadizi: Worldview, Language, and the Logics of Decolonization by Mark Freeland (Sault Ste. Marie Tribe Chippewa)—that they have begun to become more accessible to academic audiences. The works of some rare outsiders, such as Marshall Sahlin’s recent The New Science of the Enchanted Universe, are also helpful. In Radical Wholeness, Philip Shepherd shows something of how “modern” culture enforces divisions within each of us, and among all of us, depriving our world of the qualities we most want to experience—connection, peace, grace, simplicity, clarity, and the like—all of which arise from a sense of wholeness.

It is past time to put an end to the false universalism, perhaps most persuasively expressed by G. K. Chesterton, that links democracy to Christian thought and that claims that “There is no basis for democracy except in a dogma about the divine origin of man.” While that claim is obviously mistaken as it completely ignores the Indigenous foundations of a deeper and more genuine democracy and its influence, Chesterton was correct to warn that without an adequate spiritual foundation there was a great danger to democracy—including to the American democratic experiment—that it would “become wildly and wickedly undemocratic.” Chesterton was not looking back—as he easily could have been—to slavery, the Trail of Tears, and the invasion of the West, but rather looking ahead toward the future and, in particular, the danger to American society that “Its rich will riot with a brutal indifference far beyond the feeble feudalism which retains some shadow of responsibility or at least of patronage.”

The sharp and difficult point that must be grasped here—wounding to the egos of prideful people and prideful nations as it will be—is that, under adherence to even a tacit and allegedly democratic system of domination, the terms “human” and “Christian”—and even “democratic”—can acquire horrific meanings and their advocates become filled with enslaving and even genocidal intent toward those deemed “outside” these categories and seen as “justly” subordinated to those within them. The truth is that the Native peoples have proved better able to realize a human flourishing—in terms of the moral standards that are allegedly held by the societies of Christendom and its secular successors—than have these same societies. The Native peoples have proven that they are capable of being more virtuous—more charitable, more equalitarian, more free, and more attuned to the needs of the land and of all living beings. Much as some contemporary eurochristian attitudes may be closer to those of the Indigenous world than to those of Christendom, the spiritual foundations of our societies seem as far away as ever.

There was, to be sure, a spiritual foundation to the work of the philosophers of the American Revolution and the framers of the Constitution. Perhaps the single most important architect of this work was the Pennsylvanian jurist James Wilson. In a famous political pamphlet in 1774, Wilson declared that “All men are, by nature, equal and free” that “no one has a right to any authority over another without his consent” and that “all lawful government is founded upon the consent of those who are subject to it.” Wilson recognized that the Native Nations had never consented to be governed by the United States and that the United States therefore had, as he put it in 1776, “no right over the Indians, whether within or without the real or pretended limits of any Colony.”

Wilson’s respect and love was not confined to white male property owners. His hope was for an American society in which: “All will receive from each, and each will receive from all, mutual support and assistance: mutually supported and assisted, all may be carried to a degree of perfection hitherto unknown; perhaps, hitherto not believed.” And he carried this hope into the international sphere:

It may, perhaps, be uncommon, but it is certainly just, to say that nations ought to love one another. The offices of humanity ought to flow from this pure source. When this happily is the case, then the principles of affection and friendship prevail among states as among individuals: then nations will mutually support and assist each other with zeal and ardour; lasting peace will be the result of unshaken confidence; and kind and generous principles, of a nature far opposite to mean jealousy, crooked policy, or cold prudence, will govern and prosper the affairs of men.

Wilson believed that the American people had claimed such powers as they asserted a right to exercise under the law of nations—an expression of natural law—while recognizing the equal right of all other nations, including the Native Nations, to do likewise. This is what the sovereignty of “we the people” meant to Wilson: that we were answerable to the international moral and legal order under which we claimed our rights—and ultimately answerable to God—for our conduct. He made this perfectly clear in his law lectures in 1790-1791 at the College of Philadelphia. The first of these lectures was attended by the entire House of Representatives and the entire Senate of the United States—and by the entire Pennsylvania House of Representatives and Senate—as well as by the President and Martha Washington, and by the Vice President and Abigail Adams, and they are a marvel to read. These lectures provide an authoritative context in which to understand the intentions of the framers of the Constitution in terms of the revolutionary American jurisprudence that helps inform it and which has in the past enabled reform movements to appeal to the Constitution as if it were a “promissory note.”

[When] I say that, in free states, the law of nations is the law of the people; I mean that, as the law of nature, in other words, as the will of nature’s God, it is indispensably binding upon the people, in whom the sovereign power resides; and who are, consequently, under the most sacred obligations to exercise that power, or to delegate it to such as will exercise it, in a manner agreeable to those rules and maxims, which the law of nature prescribes to every state, for the happiness of each, and for the happiness of all. How vast—how important—how interesting are these truths! They announce to a free people how exalted their rights; but at the same time, they announce to a free people how solemn their duties are.

The spiritual truths Wilson articulated and relied upon were inadequate to establish, maintain, and improve a genuine democracy. In the first place, adherence to these truths was not universal even among the more radical American revolutionaries. Such adherence as there was, moreover, was vitiated by the common practices of tolerating and even maintaining active legal support for slavery and was profoundly eroded by the genocidal conduct towards the Native Nations that the Supreme Court sanctioned beginning in the 1830s with the Trail of Tears. From such beginnings as the elimination of religious tests for office, the rise of abolitionism, the movement for women’s suffrage, and the emergence of the trade union movement, there have been powerful reformist endeavors that sought to strengthen adherence to spiritual truth, but they have rarely had the ascendancy for any great length of time. From the practices associated with extractive industries and industrial modernity to the development of those associated with financial capitalism and neoliberalism the corrosion of adherence to spiritual truth has been more of the norm.

At a deeper level, the spiritual truths Wilson sought to advance were inadequate because his strategy involved combining a potentially impressive approach—one that involved cultivating what he called “the power of moral abstraction”—with a deliberate effort to build a democracy with the power of the state.

The power of moral abstraction was as necessary to the progress of exalted virtue, Wilson maintained, as the power of intellectual abstraction was to the progress of extensive knowledge. By this power, the commonwealth of a state, the empire of the United States, the civilized and commercial part of the world, and the inhabitants of the whole earth become the objects of the warmest spirit of benevolence. By this power, even a minute, unknown and distant group of individuals may become a complex object that will warm and dilate the soul. By this power, people otherwise invisible are rendered conspicuous and become known to the heart as well as to the understanding.

This enlarged and elevated virtue ought to be cultivated by nations with peculiar assiduity and ardour. The sphere of exertion, to which an individual is confined, is frequently narrow, however enlarged his disposition may be. But the sphere, to the extent of which a state may exert herself, is often comparatively boundless. By exhibiting a glorious example in her constitution, in her laws, in the administration of her constitution and laws, she may diffuse reformation, she may diffuse instruction, she may diffuse happiness over this whole terrestrial globe.

That this whole terrestrial globe was in need of the “happiness” the Constitution of the United States could provide is a position that can be challenged, particularly by the Native Nations of Turtle Island (this continent) and by the enslaved people coercively held inside the new American states and outside of the equal rights and equal belonging of the supposedly truly human. For them, and for their heirs, the expansionism underlying Wilson’s vision of diffusing happiness—the politics of domination with which this effort was (and is) inextricably bound up—meant that not joy but a challenge to their very existence and relationship to reality was part of even the best intentioned version of the aspirations informing the invader state’s constitution in the aftermath of the American Revolution. Wilson sought to strengthen a political will to “progress” that would suffuse both American society and “its” state. The peoples of the Native Nations sought to maintain balance and harmony with ancestors and descendants.

Wilson could speak of maintaining a warm spirit of benevolence toward all the inhabitants of the earth, but this was still a far cry from respect and love for all living beings, including the Earth herself. That the heart should inform the understanding was a possible place of common ground. With that truth as a shared foundation, what might have been built by working together—or what might be done along such lines even today—remains an open question, particularly if there would be a willingness on the eurochristian side to act with trustworthy, reciprocal, and consensual conduct and to leave aside any attempt at continued domination.

The relevant question is whether the “modern” world can, first, overcome its prejudices about the peoples of the Native Nations and their ways and accomplishments—whether it can overcome its absurd “evolutionary” social theories and its simplistic and wrongheaded conceptions of “human nature” (theories and concepts designed to blunt what Graeber and Wengrow call an “Indigenous Critique” of Western culture)—second, whether we can relinquish our efforts at domination, and, third, whether we can voluntarily enter or reenter into millennia of Indigenous history and culture.

Here it may be helpful to make explicit an alternative global political architecture that I think is implicit in “the view from the shore,” a perspective that encourages respect and love for “all our relations” (if not necessarily a liking for each and every one of them) without a pursuit of domination.

It is easy, in the “Western” or “modern” or even “democratic” world, to think of national collective self-consciousness as tending towards an identification with the state, with what might be termed the nation’s ego. This may be considered, from a global perspective, as a form of insanity; a cause of fearful, selfish, and violent behavior on a massive scale. Such nations, from this perspective, are schizophrenic: caught between identifying with their egos in ways that in the extreme are solipsistic and profoundly antisocial and identifying with the peoples they embrace in ways that can open to respect and love for all living beings without a search for domination over any of them.

At the level of national collective self-consciousness, those nations that claim to be devoted to “democracy and human rights”—to say nothing of the outright dictatorships—are more or less dimly aware of the systems of domination that “their” states maintain. They tend to accept, with greater or lesser degrees of enthusiasm, the claims to legitimacy that “their” politicians proffer (both for their own rule and for their efforts to rule over other peoples). The challenge is how to help these nations to develop a form of social self-understanding that separates their collective selves from their states and brings clarity to their minds—that deepens their connections with their genuine peoplehood—and thus helps them bring their nations into what JoDe Goudy (Yakama Nation), the founder of www.redthought.org, has called “right and respectful relations.”

A people, in contrast with a state, is a matrix of affinity for all of the members of that people who recognize themselves as fellow nationals, their nationality being understood in relation to such things as territoriality, language, consanguinity, shared history, shared stories, and the like. A people is a form of social self-awareness—a body. A nation, in contrast, is a collective self-consciousness capable of validating the referents of a people’s identity—a mind. A state is a system of domination that involves a claim to a monopoly on the legitimate exercise of violence within a particular territorial jurisdiction—an ego.

One can distinguish among peoples, nations, and states in such a way that everyone should be able to see all peoples as potential allies, to perceive nations whose collective self-consciousness is more attuned to their full peoplehood as likely friends, to perceive nations whose collective self-consciousness confuses their selves with “their” states as misguided and as likely dangerous, and to see states as unhelpful—as systems of domination that the world would be better off without or, at the very least, would be better off having regulated by the concern for the whole of every people. Such concern for the whole is part of the spiritual foundation of the international laws and usages that were so much a part of life on Turtle Island before the eurochristians invaded, so much a part of the relatively full peoplehood of these nations. And these international laws contributed to the maintenance of a relative harmony and balance that it is illuminating to contrast with the “order” to which the best of the international laws rooted in Christianity contributed.

Underneath modern conceptions of both “nationalism” and “democracy and human rights” are ideas of the global common good in which the rights of every nation and every national are to be secured under the law of nations understood as an expression of natural law. And secured under that law—as if such were possible—by benevolent political authority. When Bartolomé de las Casas condemned Spanish colonialism and imperialism in the so-called “New World” in the sixteenth century this was the language in which he did so:

The king of France does not pronounce sentence in Spain nor does the king of Spain dictate laws for France, nor does the Emperor himself, in his travels, use his imperial authority outside the borders of his empire. [In all of these cases] there is a lack of that power and jurisdiction which in his indescribable wisdom the author of nature has prescribed within certain limits for each nation and prince so as to safeguard and preserve the common good of each. For this reason jurisdiction is said to be implanted in a locality or territory, or in the bones of the persons of each community or state, so that it cannot be separated from them any more than food can be separated from the preservation of life.

At the heart of Charles V’s empire—and at the risk of charges of lèse majesté and heresy (and he was reported to the Inquisition)—Las Casas publicly and persuasively appealed to this global common good arguing that “war against the Indians, which we call in Spanish, conquistas, is evil and essentially anti-Christian…. war against the Indians is unlawful.”

“The Natives (of America),” Las Casas insisted, “having their own lawful kings and princes, and a right to make laws for the good government of their respective dominions, could not be expelled out of them, or deprived of what they possess, without doing violence to the laws of God, as well as the laws of nations.”

When God divided kingdom from kingdom and people from people—when he gave the nations their inheritance—it was, Las Casas maintained, for the common good of each. The office of ruler had been established especially that its holder might be diligently concerned with the public good: “For whatever right a king has, he has by the consent of his people. If a king should die without heirs, the right of choosing a new king belongs to the people…. injustice is committed by depriving a community or people of its right of choice without any lawful cause.”

Those apologists for Spain’s grotesque misconduct who claimed to find a sanction for violence in the gospels (specifically in Luke 14:16-23) were articulating an opinion that Las Casas maintained was “completely foreign to all reason and Christian teaching.” According to this passage, Jesus spoke of a man who gave a great supper and invited many, but found that those originally invited made excuses and did not come. He then ordered his servant to invite the poor and the lame, the blind and the maimed, from the streets and lanes of the city. When this had been done, and there was still space for more, the master ordered his servant to go out to the highways and hedges and “compel them to come in.” That passage had traditionally been interpreted as involving spiritual persuasion, not violence, Las Casas insisted: the use of violence was tyrannical and in direct opposition to the instructions of Christ to his disciples and to the example they established.

Consider, in contrast, the words of Juan Ginés Sepúlveda, the court historian in mid-sixteenth century Spain and Las Casas’ great rival in the debate within Spain over Spanish colonialism. Sepúlveda described the Indians of the New World harshly. There are early expressions of both eurochristian nationalism and modern racism in his opposition to Las Casas’ critique. Speaking of the Native peoples, Sepúlveda declared: “In prudence, talent, virtue, and humanity they are as inferior to the Spaniards as children to adults, women to men, as the wild and cruel to the most meek, as the prodigiously intemperate to the continent and temperate, that I have almost said, as monkeys to men.”

The idea that Las Casas knew better was beyond Sepúlveda’s imagination and would have seemed to him an affront to the dignity of the crown and of Spain: “Shall we doubt that those peoples, so uncivilized, so barbarous, so wicked, contaminated with so many evils and wicked religious practices, have been justly subjugated by an excellent, pious, and most just King, such as was Ferdinand and the Emperor Charles is now, and by a most civilized nation that is outstanding in every kind of virtue?” To the claim that wars of conquest were impeding the progress of Christianity because the Indians came to hate those who did them harm, Sepúlveda replied, “the madman also hates the doctor who cures him, and the unruly boy hates the teacher who punishes him, but this fact does not negate the usefulness of one nor the other, nor should it be abandoned.”

The ongoing process of seeking to “teach” or “cure” the Native peoples with the force and violence that Sepúlveda and the papal bulls championed was, as Steve Newcomb has noted—and, to a considerable extent, still is—a process of seeking to strip them of their original free and independent existence, to deny them their national rights, to steal their lands, to force them to work, and to force baptism and “cultural conversion” upon them under conditions of torment and misery beneath the incessant and cruel demands of states claiming to be sovereign over them.

While the law of nations that Las Casas was appealing to had less tangibility for the eurochristians and much less political efficacy than the international laws and usages of Turtle Island had for the peoples of the Native Nations, and while the international laws Las Casas championed expressed a false universalism grounded in the inadequate conceptions of a Christianity as yet unfamiliar with Indigenous wisdom and spiritual truth, it was still far preferable to the arrogant, ignorant, hate-filled, and dominationist prejudices that animated Sepúlveda and that continue to animate his heirs and successors including the members of the United States Supreme Court.

The American Constitution sanctioned slavery. It did not sanction genocide. That was the handiwork of Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall and his allies. That handiwork was accomplished, in the first place, by their claim that the treaty-guaranteed dominion of the Cherokee Nation, Choctaw Nation, Muscogee Nation, Chickasaw Nation (and many others) was a mere right of “occupancy,” as a unanimous Supreme Court put it in 1823, in Johnson v. McIntosh. When this pernicious nonsense was criticized, the Supreme Court doubled down on that wrongly decided opinion in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, in 1831, by deciding—again wrongly—that no Native Nation has a right to bring an action in the courts of the United States in defense of their treaty rights because they are (allegedly) “domestic” and “dependent.”

In fact, the Cherokee Nation had a perfect right to bring an action in the Supreme Court to enforce the treaty obligations of the United States because their case arose under a treaty and a state of the union was a party to the case, regardless of whether the Cherokee Nation was considered as an independent “foreign state” or not.

While the advocates of “self-restraint”—the advocates of respecting the equal rights of others under the same international moral and legal order in which one claimed one’s own rights—have rarely had the ascendancy over the past six centuries, they exercised a decisive influence on the Constitution’s Treaty Supremacy Clause. It was that clause that James Wilson, clarifying the intentions of the framers, would proudly champion in the Pennsylvania ratifying convention: “This clause, sir, will show the world that we make the faith of treaties a constitutional part of the character of the United States; that we secure its performance no longer nominally, for the judges of the United States will be enabled to carry it into effect, let the legislatures of the different states do what they may.”

Without even attempting to address the reality of the Constitution’s text and of the framers’ intentions, John Marshall and his allies betrayed the Constitution and sanctioned the genocide of the 1830s and those that followed: “If it be true that the Cherokee Nation have rights, this is not the tribunal in which those rights are to be asserted. If it be true that wrongs have been inflicted, and that still greater are to be apprehended, this is not the tribunal which can redress the past or prevent the future.”

These two Supreme Court decisions—Johnson and Cherokee Nation—are the equivalent, for the Native Nations, of a combination of Dred Scott v. Sanford and Plessy v. Ferguson. There can be no fundamental movement toward justice for the Native Nations until these anti-constitutional precedents are overturned. Nor can there be much movement towards getting in touch with the true peoplehood of the American people—and away from the insanity of identifying with a state that has committed genocide and that continues to defend the “federal Indian law” that allowed it—without recognizing the anti-constitutional character of what should properly be called federal anti-Indian law.

Here it should be stressed that while there was a spiritual foundation to the self-restraint that both Bartolomé de Las Casas and James Wilson advocated with regard to the Native Nations, and while both men articulated a genuine respect for some of these nations’ national rights, there was still a spiritual failure to recognize that the only lawful basis for any eurochristian presence in the “New World” was in accord with the wishes of these nations and in accord with the wishes of the land and the international laws and usages the land sustains. The eurochristian imperialists had no right to bring any domination system with them to the free soil of Turtle Island, still less to impose one by horrific force and violence on the peoples of the Native Nations.

If we—the heirs and successors of these imperialists—are to free ourselves from the ongoing legacies of their grotesque misconduct (rather than simply continuing to double down upon such misconduct with sanitized and “secular” justifications for our ultimately religious bigotry and domination) we will have to reimagine both “nationalism” and “democracy” in ways that strip these doctrines of their dominationist elements. We will have to fashion, instead, doctrines that genuinely rely upon peoples who recognize all living beings as our kith and kin and act, accordingly, with trustworthy, reciprocal, and consensual conduct toward all life. More than this, we will have to recognize the inadequacy of even the best doctrines and seek to learn, instead, from the peoples of the Native Nations as they continue a deep process of healing and of the recovery of their original free and independent existence. If we are all to enter or reenter into millennia of Indigenous history and culture—if we are to enjoy genuine democracy—it will have to be not only by mutual consent among our true selves, who are always already connected (all being “of creation”), but by mutual respect and love in our conduct.

John Collier, who served as the US Commissioner of Indian Affairs from 1933 to 1945, in a popular book titled Indians of the Americas, sought to share something of what he felt the world can learn from the spirituality of the Native Nations:

They had what the world has lost. They have it now. What the world has lost, the world must have again, lest it die. Not many years are left to have or have not, to recapture the lost ingredient…. It is the ancient, lost reverence and passion for human personality, joined with the ancient, lost reverence and passion for the earth and its web of life. This indivisible reverence and passion is what the American Indians almost universally had; and representative groups of them have it still. They had and have this power for living which our modern world has lost—as world-view and self-view, as tradition and institution, as practical philosophy … and as an art supreme among all the arts…. If our modern world should be able to recapture this power, the earth’s natural resources and web of life would not be irrevocably wasted … which is the prospect now. True democracy, founded in neighborhoods and reaching over the world, would become the realized heaven on earth. And living peace—not just an interlude between wars—would be born and would last through ages.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Steven Schwartzberg.

just for a few hours: out of the insanity of the insane and dementia patients and psychopaths ruling the world, inside and outside of government

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

Pasubio, one of Europe’s leading leather manufacturers, has today announced that it will refuse to buy leather from suppliers whose activities directly or indirectly threaten the forests inhabited by the uncontacted Ayoreo people in Paraguay.

Pasubio’s decision follows intensive dialogue with the Italian office of Indigenous rights organization Survival International, which filed a formal complaint against the company under the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises, assisted by the lawyers Veronica Dini and Luca Saltalamacchia.

These Ayoreo are the last uncontacted Indigenous people in South America outside the Amazon, and the ranches occupying and illegally deforesting their ancestral land threaten their very existence.

In its announcement, Pasubio said: “[Our company] is today announcing its commitment to defend the ancestral territory of the Ayoreo-Totobiegosode Indigenous people…

“Thanks to the awareness-raising role played over the years by Survival International, the global movement for Indigenous peoples’ rights, and the NGO Earthsight, the Pasubio Group has learnt about the threat to the Ayoreo Totobiegosode people of Paraguay’s Gran Chaco region, especially the uncontacted Ayoreo groups living in the forest.

“The Pasubio Group is therefore announcing its decision to exclude from its suppliers any leather linked to the deforestation of the [Ayoreo territory]; starting today, the Pasubio Group will halt all commercial relationship with any Paraguayan supplier unable to provide appropriate guarantees regarding the absence of any relationship, direct or indirect, with the cattle ranches located within the [Ayoreo territory].”

The Ayoreo territory is today an island of forest surrounded by a sea of deforestation, as the land around it (and some inside it) has been cleared for cattle ranching. Since the start of this year countless fires set by ranchers have consumed a significant part of the Ayoreo’s forest.

An unknown number of Ayoreo live uncontacted in the forest. Many more have been forced out of the forest, and now live in settled communities.

Caroline Pearce, Director of Survival International, said today: “We’re delighted that Pasubio has committed to boycott leather from suppliers that threaten the lives and lands of the Ayoreo in Paraguay, and we look forward to other companies doing the same. We will, of course, be watching closely to ensure that the commitment is implemented in full.

“The powerful figures behind Paraguay’s leather industry need to know that the world won’t stand for the illegal destruction of the forest and its people in the name of profit. Their industry’s name is being brought into disrepute: we hope this news will serve to speed up the appallingly slow process of recognizing the Ayoreo’s land rights, which has already gone on for  thirty years. The authorities in Paraguay should finally respect national and international law; expel all the cattle ranchers from inside the Ayoreo’s territory, and return the land to them.”

Note: 

Italy is the world’s biggest buyer of Paraguayan leather, and Pasubio is the main Italian importer (2022 data). Pasubio leather is primarily used in the automotive industry. BMW, Jaguar Land Rover, Porsche and many others buy it to make interiors, seats and steering wheels.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Survival International.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Survival International.

My documentary Long Knife – produced by George DiCaprio, with his son Leonardo’s encouragement – recounts, in the words of the Osage people, what happened in the century since the killings portrayed in the film, from the Terror to oil thievery to today’s fight for sovereignty

‘The Osage Nation has continued to suffer massive oil thievery, impoverishment and oil-sludge poisoning’. Lily Gladstone and Leonardo DiCaprio in Killers of the Flower Moon.

Over the past century, the Osage Nation has continued to suffer massive oil thievery, impoverishment and oil sludge poisoning on their Oklahoma reservation. “It’s not over,” Osage principal chief, Geoffrey Standing Bear, tells me. “It’s still happening.” At the heart of it is legal control of Osage native land by the US Bureau of Indian Affairs, an entity the Osage call the Ma-he-tah, or the Long Knife. Standing Bear, a lawyer himself, likens the arrangement to a military occupation.

The Osage’s current misfortunes began in 1894 with, ironically, the discovery of a gigantic oil reservoir under their Oklahoma land. Suddenly, desperately poor Osage became the richest people on Earth.

But for the US government, that was too much oil and too much money under the control of a people who were not at that time recognised as US citizens. In 1906, the US Congress passed the Burke Act, named after congressman Charles Burke, who called American Indigenous people “half animal”. Burke would head the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which determined that Osage were not sufficiently competent to handle their new wealth. It assigned each full-blood Osage a white “guardian”.

These guardians wrote themselves into Osage wills and insurance policies, then systematically murdered their wards and took their oil rights. That’s where Killers of the Flower Moon ends, in the 1920s.

But the predation continued. The US government barred the tribe from developing their own oil and instead auctioned off the Osage’s drilling rights. The giant reserves were then exploited by the behemoths we now know as Getty Oil, ConocoPhillips, Sinclair and Exxon.

The Osage were left with small “stripper” wells producing too little oil to send out through pipelines. Beginning in the 1960s, a small operator out of Wichita, Kansas, Koch Industries, agreed to send out small tanker trucks to take the Osage crude. Except that Koch truckers would take 30 barrels and write down 20. In 1996, I was brought in as a forensic expert on energy frauds. I calculated they had skimmed off $2.4bn (£2bn) – about $6bn in today’s money.

It’s said that behind every great fortune is a great crime. It was this Osage oil that created one of America’s greatest fortunes: the Koch family, whose wealth is calculated at over $120bn. The Kochs have used this wealth to build a fearsome ultra-rightwing force that can create and destroy political careers. Lisa Graves of True North, an authority on corporate lobbying, calculates that Koch interests have spent no less than $200m on campaigns to attack climate change science.

Everett Waller, Chairman of the Osage Minerals Council from Greg Palast and George DiCaprio’s documentary, Long Knife: Osage Oil and the New Trail of Tears, to be released in 2024. Photo, © Palast Investigative Fund, 2023.

To the Osage, it’s still raw. Only months ago, Everett Waller, Osage’s resource chair, confronted the Bureau of Indian Affairs at a tense hearing. “When you get a quote from Koch Oil that said they deserve a barrel for every two they had to pay for, you should have hung the bastards.” (Appropriately, in Killers, Waller plays the fierce Osage leader, Paul Red Eagle.)

Today, the Koch oil trucks are gone, but their poisons are left behind – and I’m not just talking about the economic legacy. Former Koch trucker Jack Crossen told me that Koch ordered its workers to cover up toxic sludge spilt into creeks and water supplies.

Right now, Chief Standing Bear is at war with the system that engendered the Koch heist, the 1920s Reign of Terror and continuing cruelties. The US government still claims ultimate power over Osage money and lands, simply changing the murderous “guardianship” scheme to the “trusteeship” of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The chief explains: “This is our land, and we bought this land with our own money. But the federal government says: ‘The ownership title may belong to you, but the day-to-day control and operation belongs to the federal government.’ And who do they get to help manage? Koch oil!”

For the chief, it’s also personal. The US government to this day lists Chief Standing Bear as “incompetent”, despite his national recognition as one of America’s top trial attorneys. During those few years of oil wealth 100 years ago, the Osage invested in education and skills, with some becoming noted scholars at Stanford and Oxford, and they gave America its first prima ballerina, Maria Tallchief (née Elizabeth Marie Tall Chief). The chief took me to the Bureau of Indian Affairs office, where, in a huge leatherbound book, he and other college graduates in his family are listed as incompetent. It’s more than an insult. It is part of the legal structure that allows the federal government to remain as sovereign over reservation affairs.

The father of Principal Chief Geoffrey Standing Bear as a baby, surrounded by his family and in the lap of oilman Frank Phillips, in 1929. Photograph: Courtesy of Principal Chief Geoffrey Standing Bear.

Today, Koch’s trucks are gone, but Koch’s campaign to deny climate science and stop the government taking action on greenhouse gas emissions has undermined Osage demands for funds to seal up the thousands of methane-spewing, poisonous wells abandoned by corporate drillers. And Waller needs the sovereign rights granted to other Americans so the Osage can launch his long-term plan to “put it all underground” – that is, instead of drilling oil, drilling huge, clean geothermal reserves. That puts the Osage on the frontline in the war over climate and Koch-ocracy.

While the Osage are appreciative of Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio bringing the 1920s Terror to the screen, they want the world to know that their story doesn’t end when the movie credits roll. Former chief Jim Roan Gray, whose great-grandfather’s murder is at the centre of Killers, says the Osage want to be seen as more than victims: they are warriors confronting their US rulers for control of their own land and lives.

• First published in The Guardian

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Greg Palast.

The last of the Kawahiva are forced to live on the run from armed loggers and powerful ranchers. Still from unique footage taken by government agents during a chance encounter. © FUNAI

Ten years after Brazilian authorities released extraordinary footage showing the existence of an uncontacted Amazonian tribe, their lands have still not been fully protected – and loggers and land-grabbers surround them.

In 2013 Brazil’s Indigenous Affairs Department FUNAI released video that they had filmed during a chance encounter with the Kawahiva people of Mato Grosso state, deep in the Amazon.

Award-winning actor Mark Rylance recording the narration for The Last of the Kawahiva. © Survival 2015

Oscar-winning actor Mark Rylance later narrated a film about their plight, “The Last of the Kawahiva,” for Survival International.

A global campaign by Survival International, alongside Indigenous people, pressured the authorities to act, and in 2018 cattle ranchers and loggers who had occupied the Kawahiva territory were evicted.

But since then the land protection process has stalled – loggers and landgrabbers are surrounding their territory, and an illegal road has been built just 2km away.

A FUNAI team at a protection post nearby have been working to keep the loggers and ranchers out, despite the dangers – their post has been attacked several times.

Massacres and disease have already killed many Kawahiva – the only chance of survival for those who remain is if their territory is finally demarcated (legally recognized and marked out).

The government has already been given two deadlines to finish demarcating the Kawahiva territory: in 2013 – the year the video was first released – a Brazilian court ordered the demarcation to be carried out. Ten years on, this still has not happened, and in August of this year, Brazil’s Supreme Court gave FUNAI 60 days to finalize a plan for the definitive demarcation of the territory.

Eliane Xunakalo of Indigenous organization FEPOIMT (Federation of Indigenous peoples and organizations of Mato Grosso) said today: “It’s vital to finish the demarcation for our uncontacted relatives. The “Kawahiva do Rio Pardo” territory is coveted by outsiders, and it’s also extremely dangerous for the FUNAI employees who work on the protection post there. We will only be able to guarantee the survival of our uncontacted relatives if the territory is demarcated.

“It’s up to us to protect our relatives, to protect their way of life, because they are the resistance and resilience in the midst of all these threats and challenges that exist here in Mato Grosso,” she added.

This is one of the most crucial cases concerning uncontacted tribes anywhere in Brazil. The Kawahiva are survivors of countless genocidal attacks which have wiped out many of them; the land demarcation process has ground to a halt; and loggers and landgrabbers see the territory as open for business. We know that they have been active inside the Kawahiva’s forest, and any encounter between the Kawahiva and these outsiders, who are usually armed, could be deadly. The authorities must act now to finish the job, and legally protect the Kawahiva territory once and for all.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Survival International.

NEW on Smithsonian Voices: Everyone's history matters. The #Thanksgiving story deeply rooted in America’s curriculum reduces the Wampanoag Indians to supporting roles. The true history of Thanksgiving begins with the Indians. @SmithsonianMag https://t.co/nQkI2CnLk4 pic.twitter.com/UhuksA9RGf

— National Museum of the American Indian (@SmithsonianNMAI) November 23, 2017

No one will dispute that the Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island from Umingmak Nuna (Ellesmere Island) to Tierra del Fuego were here long, long before the White Man arrived. So, if land is to be “owned,” it seems only right that the people who first settled it would become the owners. However, the Europeans who chanced upon Turtle Island claimed it in the name of their God and their rulers. Now, if Martians were to land here and claim the land, would any of the inhabitants of the western hemisphere accept that? No, because the Martians were latecomers, and they have their own planet. So by what morality do European Johnny-come-latelies lay claim to Turtle Island? And by Johnny-come-latelies, that is many millennia after the First Peoples arrived.

The First People were originally believed to have crossed the Bering Ice Bridge some 12,000 YA. That time frame has now been superseded, as even in Canada, the evidence is that Indigenous peoples were in the Bluefish Caves in Yukon 24,000 YA. And now some researchers are positing that the first humans might have been here as long as 130,000 YA. At any rate, that is many millennia longer than the first White Men, the Norsemen, who stayed for a while in Ktaqmkuk (Mi’kmaw designation for Newfoundland) back in 1000 CE.

Nonetheless, the Europeans arrived, claimed and took (stole would be an accurate verb) the continents north and south.

Today is Thanksgiving Day in Canada. Thanksgiving traces back to 1621 in the United States. In Canada, it originates with the English explorer Martin Frobisher’s third voyage in 1578. Frobisher arrived in Ktaqmkuk/Newfoundland while seeking the Northwest Passage. It was in Ktaqmkuk/Newfoundland that Frobisher had a meal of salt beef, biscuits and mushy peas to celebrate and give thanks for their safe landing.

But the arrival of the White Man was not about giving; it was about taking that has continued to this day.

What has been taken (Canadian context, but applicable in the US)?

1. First of all, colonialists took the land. It has been divvied up into provinces and territories, black-topped, and renamed (quite often to the names of colonialist).
2. Their children. The state had the RCMP remove children from their families and be placed in Indian Residential Schools.
3. Their spirituality. Indigenous peoples were forcibly proselytized in the church-run schools.
4. The rich culture. Canada outlawed the Potlatch, an important ceremony of the Pacific Northwest First Nations.¹
5. The vibrant languages. Children were forbidden to speak their language in the residential schools. Linguicide was the result.
6. Law and governance. Indigenous peoples were now subject to White Man’s laws. Even their ways of governing themselves were rejected by the White Man.
7. The resources. White Man practiced capitalism, an economic system antithetical to Indigenous peoples. “Those Indians who go over to the white man can be nothing but beggars, for he respects only riches, and how can an Indian be a rich man? He cannot without ceasing to be an Indian,” said the revered leader of the Oglala Lakota, Red Cloud (Maȟpíya Lúta)² Professor John Lutz wrote of the historical “dialogue” and the subordination of Indigenous economies in the Pacific Northwest. Prior to the establishment of white settlement, the Indigenous peoples of present day British Columbia were among the richest and best-fed societies in the world.³ Thus, the trees were felled, the land was mined, the oil and gas were drilled, the earth and water was polluted.
8. The fish and game were exploited and became scarce or extinct. The bison no longer roamed the prairies in huge herds. The salmon no longer return to the rivers in previous abundance. The great auk and the passenger pigeon are extinct, as is the Atlantic walrus and blue walleye of the Great Lakes.
9. Sovereignty. The Indigenous peoples find themselves deprived of nationhood and hindered in their freedom of movement by colonially created borders. Even within the unceded territory of their ancestors, the colonial government acts as the owner and ruler. Thus, the Wet’suwet’en find themselves in a battle against the forces of the Canadian state. The hereditary chiefs are ignored and subject to arrest. And Canada is held to account by Amnesty International.

ENDNOTES

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kim Petersen.

Maybe it’s the town you grew up in. Maybe it’s a city you’ve lived in for decades. Perhaps it’s a state or even a country.

Your primary and secondary schools gave you comic book versions of the place’s history and heroes, and then you were on your merry way. You did the normal things, pursued the typical ends, and enjoyed standard success. You assumed a life.

But somewhere along the way, you remembered something off-putting at a red light or recalled a disturbing image you saw on TV. A face in a crowd or a voice in the back of your head. It unsettled you. Something rattled the acquiescence you had eased into and the cozy assimilation you eventually wore like a leather jacket for adulthood.

Something undermined it and, with it, you.

Most people’s attention to this kind of existential glitch drifts when the TV channel changes or the red light turns green, and they may never revisit it again. Why should they? It was an exception, not the rule. They have their children’s college funds to save for and retirement. They shush the stray notions away or shove them out of the foreground.

Few of them have read Herman Hesse, but a short passage from Steppenwolf perfectly illustrates their stance on the matter. People won’t swim, Hesse suggests.

They are born for the solid earth, not for the water. And naturally they won’t think. They are made for life, not for thought. Yes, and he who thinks, what’s more, he who makes thought his business, he may go far in it, but he has bartered the solid earth for the water all the same, and one day he will drown.

It’s a fair point. Who wants to drown?

Can you name a single person from wherever you grew up who was really interested in swimming? Didn’t almost all of them prefer the safety of solid ground?

Dylan Thomas was a fine swimmer, but he knew there was no future in his “craft or sullen art” and that he’d be treading water ’til the end. Anne Sexton approached the issue more practically.

“Live or die,” she wrote, “but don’t poison everything.”

Hesse and Thomas were the types of friends you let drift away. Sexton killed herself.

Yes.

To think is to undermine. And sinking is the danger of thinking, so we cling to false buoyancies like capitalism, religion, or technology. We know they’re nothing more than garbage patches spinning in the ocean, but a temporary respite from our anxieties is better than nothing.

So here we are. We find ourselves in a time and a place where the complacence that was once guaranteed by standard, obligatory distractions and gaieties is failing us. And we seem to have forgotten how to swim.

Existential urgency encroaches from every direction, including rising, poisoned seas, but only a teenage girl from Sweden has taken to the water.

Does this make us pathetic or simply apathetic?

Our leaders use one to reinforce the other. They certainly work real hard to keep us from abandoning solid ground.

Serious thought processes are what the times require, and I thought my home state and my country were full of serious people. We certainly need to be. We’re seven generations behind.

The average period constituting one generation to the next is 20 to 30 years, and seven generations back, the first Industrial Revolution was about to be supplanted by the second. Meanwhile, our efforts to extinguish or convert our indigenous neighbors—many of whom believed that every major decision in their tribe should be made keeping the well-being of the seventh generation forward in mind were really picking up steam. It was happening to indigenous and aboriginal peoples all over the world, and the white refrain was always the same. The indigenous or aboriginal peoples were considered godless, primitive savages, uneducated, uncivilized, and, in many cases, subhuman.

Boy, do we have egg on our face now.

The Great White Lie that our ways were better than theirs is finally and indisputably being exposed. We don’t even think one generation ahead, much less seven—and our stewardship of the planet and the human population that inhabits it has been cataclysmic and may be unsalvageable.

The white guys were never the smartest folks in the room. Just the greediest and the ones who paid the least heed to living in harmony with their environment and the world around them. Their air. Their water sources. And their animal kin.

Ultimately—and probably until the end—we are the worst lice in creation, and every conscious, sentient creature that isn’t us knows it.

But we’re on solid ground.

And they’ll all drown.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by E.R. Bills.

In a historic referendum, people in Ecuador have voted to block oil drilling on uncontacted tribes’ land in the Yasuní National Park.

Leonidas Iza, President of Ecuador’s national Indigenous organization CONAIE, said today:

The Ecuadorian people, mindful of life, in solidarity with our uncontacted Tagaeri, Taromenane and Dugakaeri brothers and sisters, said “Yes to Yasuní” in this referendum on August 20th. We have saved their territory, their lives, their food sovereignty, and their medicines in the sacred Yasuní forest”. He added: “In this little piece of territory in the heart of the Amazon, we can find solutions to problems that most affect humanity. Science has shown that the best protected territories in the fight against climate change are Indigenous territories. That’s why we invite the international community to lend a hand, in solidarity and sensitively, to protect the territories that balance the life of Mother Nature, which save species and also humanity.

Julio Cusurichi Palacios from Peru’s Amazon Indigenous organization AIDESEP said:

It is extremely important to protect the territory of uncontacted tribes who share land in Ecuador, in the Yasuní National Park, and in Peru, in the Napo Tigre Indigenous Reserve (awaiting creation), to guarantee their rights to life, health, survival and territory, in compliance with international frameworks that governments must implement. In Peru, the government has officially recognized five uncontacted tribes in the Napo Tigre area. These peoples are cross-border peoples, who live on both sides of the border between Peru and Ecuador in the basins of the Napo, Curaray, and Tigre rivers, and their tributaries. They have lived on their ancestral lands for hundreds of years, even before the countries of Ecuador and Peru were established, and they do not recognize artificial borders.

Survival International is fighting globally for the survival of all the world’s uncontacted tribes. Sarah Shenker, head of Survival’s Uncontacted Tribes campaign, said today:

This is a major victory for Ecuador’s Indigenous movement, and for the global campaign to recognize the rights of uncontacted tribes.

The uncontacted Tagaeri, Dugakaeri and Taromenane have for years seen their lands invaded, firstly by evangelical missionaries, then by oil companies. Now, at last, they have some hope of living in peace once more. We hope this prompts greater recognition that all uncontacted peoples must have their territories protected if they’re to survive, and thrive.

Apart from anything else, we know that their territories are the best barrier to deforestation, particularly in the Amazon rainforest. Uncontacted tribes are our contemporaries, a vital part of humankind’s diversity, and the guardians of the most biodiverse places on Earth.

In Peru, Indigenous organizations have been fighting for more than 20 years to create and protect the Napo-Tigre Indigenous reserve for uncontacted tribes, adjacent to Yasuní. Currently, the oil and gas company Perenco is exploiting Napo-Tigre oil.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Survival International.

Dispossession of a people is a thoroughly nasty business, and it blatantly violates one of the biblical ten commandments, one that is encoded in law around the world, namely, “Thou shalt not steal.” Those who have gained property and wealth, and their progeny who continue to profit from the dispossession of Others, would like to paint a prettier picture of colonialism.

Sam Sullivan, a former mayor of Vancouver and former cabinet minister in the BC legislature, is the easy-to-listen-to narrator of Kumtuks, a series of historical videos which are usually interesting and informative. However, Kumtuks often presents a gussied-up narrative around the history of colonialism. Usually omitted from the discussion is that the land that settler-colonialists came into possession of was stolen from Original Peoples who had their own laws, beliefs, economies, and culture.

The Kumtuks video “1862 Smallpox Epidemic: British Columbia’s First Major Contagious Outbreak” claims to be based in the oral history of the Haida. The source given is the book Raven’s Cry (1966, 1992) by American author Christie Harris. Both versions of the book are interesting and informative for the historical perspective they shine on the Haida and the interactions they had with the Iron Men (as the Haida called the White men). The versions differ little, but the 1992 version is preferable because of the respect shown for the names and designations used by the Haida. Bill Reid, whose mother was Haida, is a renowned artist who illustrated Raven’s Cry and was a mentor to Harris. Harris also spent time with the family of Haida artist Charles Edenshaw. Harris, Reid, and Edenshaw are all deceased. So I will refer to Harris’s book to ascertain the verisimilitude of what Sullivan says in his narration.

What does Raven’s Cry indicate about Haida feelings toward the presence and behavior of the Iron Men?

Haida hostility, as well as the stormy moat around the Haida islands, discouraged American miners. Nevertheless, James Douglas, Chief Factor for the Hudson’s Bay Company’s western district and Governor of the little colony of Vancouver Island, advised Her Majesty Queen Victoria that it would be well to maintain a gunboat on the northwest coast to protect British rights. (p 102) [Italics added.]

Harris indicates the priority of Douglas. Douglas is not said to be protecting Haida rights. This was about colonialism: protecting rights claimed by the British, rights that presumably included sailing a gunboat in Haida waters.

The Haida did not acknowledge British rights. When the Company sent its schooner Recovery in with a group of Company miners in 1852, it was thwarted. The Haida simply waited for the white men to blast. Then they rushed in and grabbed the treasure. It was their gold. Let anyone else try to take it! (p 102)

Clearly, Douglas’s  priority was objectionable to the Haida.

The “native chiefs” objected to colonialism:

“What we don’t like about the [White man’s] government is their saying this, ‘We will give you this much land,’ ” they protested. “How can they give it when it is our own? We cannot understand it. They have never bought it from us or our forefathers. They have never fought and conquered our people and taken the land that way, and yet they say now they will give us so much land — our own land!” (p 134)

Sdast’a·aas Saang gaahl Eagle chief chief 7indansuu felt likewise:

“By what right do the King George men claim this land?” 7indansuu demanded of Governor Douglas. “There are no treaties with the tribes. There was no conquest by warriors.” (p 115)

The Raven and the First Men by Bill Reid

In a lighter vein, Harris wrote,

Unfortunately, Governor Douglas retired that year, though not before making a strong case for generous treatment of Indians, or before setting aside many reservations. The Queen had honored him with a knighthood. (p 132)

Harris generally comes across as respectful and sympathetic to the Haida, but she still seems mired in a colonialist mindset. Why is taking the land of a people and setting aside some reservations for them considered “generous”? If a thief steals my library and returns a few of the books, is the thief generous?

Because the narrative in “1862 Smallpox Epidemic: British Columbia’s First Major Contagious Outbreak” is starkly at odds with the narrative in The Smallpox War against the Haida, I turned to Swanky to discuss the different narratives. I also reached out to Sam Sullivan through the Global Civic Policy Society which produces the Kumtuks videos, but have yet to hear back.

Tom Swanky: The Police Commissioner advised a journalist that Helmcken personally had administered a procedure to 500 natives on April 26, 1862, in a context where multiple observers reported that the disease – as of that date – remained confined to just one of the People represented at Victoria and these observers believed the disease still could be contained among that one People.

However, within a few days after the disclosure of Helmcken’s program, witnesses then began reporting that some noticeable number of the natives who he supposedly had “vaccinated” were seen to have the disease. Also, within ten days of Helmcken’s vaccination program being disclosed, that is, within the time usually required for an infection to become visible, the disease suddenly exploded so that it was now no longer visible among only one People, it was everywhere. This evidence is consistent with Helmcken’s program having been all or in part, not “vaccinations” but inoculation with actual smallpox. And thereby creating the opportunity for the disease to become rooted among new Peoples and spread widely as a result of inoculation epidemics. It was because of the risk of inoculation creating epidemics that Parliament had outlawed inoculation in 1840. To administer inoculations in 1862 was a violation of British law, and so any use of the procedure would have to be concealed.

There is substantial other evidence of inoculation being used to spread the disease in the North Pacific during 1862. The Oweekeno said in 1862 that the medicine the colonists sold them started the disease. Numerous other cases can be documented where doctors administered what was advertised as a “vaccination” program, but after which the disease exploded among the targeted population. In fact, there is little to no evidence that “Douglas had Helmcken send vaccines” around the colonies. At Kamloops, the HBC post manger reported administering a procedure to the surrounding natives all summer – however, by late fall, independent observers were reporting that the indigenous residents in the Kamloops area had been virtually exterminated.

Once can draw two lessons from Helmcken’s advertised “500 vaccinations.” The first lesson is that each stage of the disease undergoing an advance – beginning with its original importation in 1862 – was accompanied by some sort of public relations campaign that subsequent events would show was misdirection by those advancing the disease. The second lesson is that historians who come to this material unaware of their own colonial predispositions, or of the phenomenon of confirmation bias, seize on the first thing they read without doing the painstaking work of then seeing how events actually unfolded.

KP: The Kumtuks video mentions numerous conflicts among the Northern First Nations and the Southern First Nations, but he omits mention of any conflicts between First Nations and settler-colonialists. Instead the colonial administration of Vancouver Island is portrayed as a peacemaker in having the Northerners towed up island past Nanaimo. In Raven’s Cry, Harris wrote:

More than ever before, futile rage against the overpowering white man turned on fellow Indians. Understandably, it turned most fiercely on the Haida, the lords of the coast. Centuries of resentment burst out, especially among the northern neighbors.

The native people raged with resentment at these white men; but the rage turned on their ancient rivals. On June 12th, a thousand Haida reinforcements arrived at Victoria. (p 117-118)

The Kumtuks video seems not in concordance with Raven’s Cry or what you have written of the oral history presented to you by knowledge keepers of The People?

TS: If a researcher is unaware of the issues concerning the means through which the Crown asserted control among many of the indigenous Peoples – which diverse knowledge keepers allege was through a smallpox assisted genocide – then the researcher is unlikely to be attuned to the challenges presented by the sources.

On the one hand, among the colonial sources are the multiple efforts at misdirection – which were an integral part of the smallpox program executed by the colonial authorities – and, after 1862, there followed the usual post-genocide or post-criminal activity of denying the shameful or wrongful thing done.

On the other hand, among the indigenous sources there is the necessity of coping with having been purposefully targeted for destruction by the colonial authorities and the incoming colonial community. For the indigenous Peoples, the post-1862 task became walking a fine line so as not to offend a community that has shown a propensity to destroy you and yet wanting to work on the political task of undoing the loss of control brought about by what is understood to have been a smallpox genocide. So, for example, one will see praise offered for Douglas – politely overlooking his smallpox policies to focus on the time before April/June of 1860 when he had set a precedent of colonial respect for indigenous customs in inter-community relations and before he had begun the process of displacing indigenous authority. In addition, in things published primarily for the benefit of a colonial audience, one will see a desire not to be offensive but to cater to the colonial mythology concerning indigenous relations.

Very early in my work, I was advised by more than one elder that if I truly wanted to learn about the teaching in indigenous communities, I would learn by listening to what elders and knowledge keepers told each other or their communities and not by asking questions for someone to tell me something – for members of the colonial community often are told what they want to hear or a version satisfying some political need.

KP: The video depicts Douglas lamenting that some Indigenous peoples did not accept the preventative measures against smallpox. However, in your book, you noted how Douglas had tried to scare Haida by warning of a fake outbreak of measles. (Swanky, p 84-86) Harris in Raven’s Cry wrote:

Alarmed at the thought of what might happen next, Governor Douglas tried to banish all the natives with a measles scare, which had often worked before. But the native people weren’t frightened by it now. (p 118)

TS: This is all just fiction by someone who is not very familiar with the actual record. Nowhere does Douglas do any such lamenting. In fact, Bishop George Hills reported that the indigenous Peoples where the smallpox first broke out at Victoria were ready to do anything asked of them. Nowhere were natives reported to resist vaccinations – at least until the problems associated with inoculation began to emerge – but there are several accounts of natives going out of their way to become vaccinated.

Douglas used the false threat of an imminent outbreak of measles in June of 1860, in conjunction with his first attempt to assert control over the autonomous indigenous Peoples operating around Victoria. Dr. Helmcken proposed this plan and the hope was that all the autonomous communities would flee and then, when they returned, they would be assigned to spaces and come under the Police Commissioner’s control. Helmcken made this proposal in the Assembly and it was reported in the newspapers. Since Capt. John, the Haida leader who led the resistance to Douglas’s policies – and some other natives – were fluent in English, they would have learned from the newspapers that the threat was part of a dishonest plan to assert control over them. There was every reason not to be frightened and to be resentful of this dishonest trick.

KP: Douglas is portrayed as a defender of First Nations. The video gives Douglas a pass for having been away on the mainland when police towed Northerners into the ocean to return home. But the Kumtuks video states that the oral history of elders tells of Douglas trying to save lives by having the Haida towed home.

TS: This is not true. In another case of what turned out to be misdirection, the Police Commissioner advised the newspapers that he and a colonial gunboat would accompany north the Haida expelled on June 11 so that they would have safe passage past their enemies in Georgia Strait. British law in 1862 was that those with the custody of smallpox carriers had a legal duty to keep a safe distance between the infected people and any nearby healthy people. On this trip north, the Cowichan fired on this convoy to keep it from leaving infected people among them, the convoy did leave infected Haida at Nanaimo, and, rather than safe passage, the Police Commission delivered the Haida to the doorstep of some enemies at Cape Mudge who could be expected to kill them. This plan failed only because the enemies of the Haida at Cape Mudge already had attacked a previous Haida convoy, became infected and were dying.

The actual oral tradition is of Douglas executing a smallpox genocide “holding hands with the HBC.” This tradition is conveyed in “The Story of Bones Bay” and the next generation of knowledge keepers was instructed in the oral tradition during a formal ceremony and pole raising in 2008. The “Story” can be found in the March 2009 edition of Haida Laas, an official publication of the Council of the Haida Nation.

KP: This brings up many questions. Why did the video mention that the police removed the Haida when Douglas was away in the lower mainland? How could he attempt to save lives from the other side of the Salish Sea? Was it an eviction or a life-saving attempt? Also, I could find no mention of the oral history of Haida elders (in either the 1966 or 1992 edition of Raven’s Cry) that testifies that Douglas was trying to save Haida lives by having them removed. After all, this is illogical at best, or at worst genocidally racist, given that 1) the video relates a Victoria newspaper editorial that settler lives were at risk from the camps, in which case gathering all Haida together without discerning who was ill or not would put some Haida potentially at risk from each other, and 2) the question of why the Northerners should be removed all the way up the long water highway, especially since the video stated that it takes 12 days for signs of smallpox to manifest and become infectious. Why send them 800 km to Haida Gwaii and not to a nearby uninhabited island of which there are many around Vancouver Island?

TS: Most serious people recognize that Douglas’ 1862 smallpox policies in the ordinary course would have been considered as criminal offences under British law. That is, everyone recognizes that it was easily foreseeable that his policies would increase dramatically the native death toll. Douglas’ apologists are left to contend that his policies – and these additional deaths – were justified because the presence of smallpox among even one of the autonomous Peoples operating in the Victoria area constituted an emergency threatening the colonial population. On examination, this turns out to be another case of misdirection. The Police Commissioner planted the theory of an emergency in the newspapers at Victoria and Douglas planted the theory at New Westminster. Douglas already had used the concept of an emergency in 1860 to justify his first attempt to assert control over the autonomous Peoples operating in the Victoria area, rather than to deal through the existing native leadership as British policy usually required. The theory of an emergency would be advanced again in a bizarre way when colonists advanced the disease to the Nuxalk and Tsilhqot’in territories.

However, there was never any emergency that constituted an existential threat to the colonial community – vaccine was readily available from San Francisco or the Catholic missions in Oregon, and most of the colonial population already had been vaccinated before the theory of an emergency had been raised. The threat to the colonial community was economic. The fear in the colonial community was that prospective miners or settlers would stay away because ordinary human beings prefer not to witness suffering on a grand scale.

If the Douglas administration had wanted to decrease the death toll from smallpox in 1862, it would have carried out the three control measures that it advertised in the newspapers: vaccinations, a pest house for isolating carriers and sanctuaries to quarantine the disease among infected communities. Instead, the administration perverted each control so that it became another means by which the disease would spread.

KP: The character of James Douglas is wrapped up very much in the colonial history of Vancouver Island and British Columbia and the attempts to extinguish Indigenous title. There are plenty of quotations that attest to Douglas being a morally centered person, but they are several quotations that point to a racist streak. Few humans are white or black. In To Share, Not Surrender: Indigenous and Settler Visions of Treaty Making in the Colonies of Vancouver Island and British Columbia (UBC Press, 2022), the contributors have varying viewpoints on Douglas. Keith Thor Carlson, Canadian research chair in Indigenous and Community-Engaged History at the University of Fraser Valley captures the lack of consensus in his piece, “‘The Last Potlatch’ and James Douglas’s Vision of an Alternative Settler Colonialism,” pointing out that Douglas is less racist than others. This is neither laudatory or condemnatory. Nonetheless, relying on quotations seems to contravene the admonition that actions speak louder than words. Overall, Douglas appears lauded by contemporary academia, cultural depictions, and wider society. With the emerging acceptance of First Nations oral history, will a purported genocidaire such as Douglas continue to elude an honest rendering of history?

TS: In his correspondence with the colonial office in London, Douglas freely refers to the Haida as barbarians and savages. He seems an average representative of the British colonial culture in the North Pacific, which culture imagines anglo-saxons as a superior race – to use Dr. Helmcken’s words. However, it is a distraction to use “race” as a point of departure when seeking to understand the transition of sovereign authority that accompanied colonialism in the North Pacific. The problem facing Douglas and the colonists was to dispossess the indigenous Peoples of their communal or “national” resources through the most cost-effective means. Douglas and others make frequent references to the “great number” of natives occupying strategic locations, pointing to the projection of overwhelming political power that is inherent in great numbers. The implicit motive for this genocide, then, is not reducing another race per se, but reducing the native voice and the capacity of native authority to defend the integrity of its sovereign control.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kim Petersen.

Romero started life and ministry as a conservative. But, after his friend Rev. Rutilio Grande was assassinated to discourage other faith leaders from supporting Salvadorian peasants, Romero underwent a political and theological conversion. Picking up where Grande left off, Romero embraced a “theology of liberation,” a perspective that espouses G-d’s preference for the poor and oppressed. His visibility as archbishop elevated his voice and the credibility of his critique of the conditions faced by peasants in El Salvador.

A month before his assassination, Romero wrote President Jimmy Carter requesting a halt to U.S. military assistance to the Salvadoran government.

Over 250,000 people attended Romero’s funeral demonstrating the love of the Salvadoran people and echoing his demands for justice. Tragically, however, they were swimming against a historical current of meddling and manipulation which included murder, often orchestrated or at the very least condoned from the U.S.

Intentionally ignoring two U.S. embassy cables naming the general who ordered his personal bodyguard to carry out the assassination of Romero, in 1982, Elliot Abrams, the newly appointed Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs, said, “anybody who thinks you’re going to find a cable that says that Roberto d’Aubuisson murdered the archbishop is a fool.” Thanks to Abrams and his ilk’s support, U.S. military assistance to the Salvadoran regime was dramatically increased that year. The following year, the U.S. gifted the Salvadoran military and government with U.S. advisors.

Last week, President Biden nominated Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell’s pick to join the State Department Bipartisan Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy, Elliot Abrams. If you’re not already outraged and infuriated, keep reading.

Under Abrams’ watch, over the 12 years of the Reagan/Bush Sr. administrations, 75,000 Salvadorians were killed. In the village of El Mozote, the army’s Atlácatl Battalion herded women and children into a church convent and opened fire with U.S.-supplied M-16 automatic rifles before burning the building down. One hundred and forty children, average age six, were killed. In 1994, with blood still dripping from his hands, Abrams referred to the U.S.’s record on El Salvador as a “fabulous achievement.”

In addition to supporting the Salvadorian junta, Abrams was a defender of the Guatemalan Montt regime which oversaw the mass murder, rape, and torture of scores of Indigenous Ixil Mayan people in the 1980s. The Montt regime was so brutal that it was later classified by the United Nations as genocidal. From his conviction for lying to Congress during the Iran-Contra affair, to his roles supporting the Iraq war, scuttling the Iran nuclear deal, and attempting to orchestrate a coup in Venezuela as recently as 2019, one thing is clear: Abrams doesn’t have a diplomatic bone in his body.

Abrams epitomizes an extreme form of American biblical nationalism, dressed in the distortions of Christianity and Judaism that ironically echo the papal bulls of 1452. These papal decrees, known as the “Doctrine of Discovery,” codify the rights of white nations to acquire and dominate any lands they “discovered.” Similarly, Abrams speaks the language of the Global North proclaiming that their hegemony is the natural order of the world, as G-d wills it to be.

The Doctrine of Discovery inspired the Monroe Doctrine, which declared the “right” to exploit and plunder Latin America to be exclusive to the U.S. “We should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety,” President James Monroe said. This served as a philosophical justification for the ideological boots Abram’s wore to stomp all over Latin America, the Middle East and other places. Abrams has left bloody footprints across the globe.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Ariel Gold and Rev. Graylan Scott Hagler.

[S]ettlers in thrall to colonial ideology saw every unfenced meadow as waste land free for the taking, especially the most fertile land supporting native self-sufficiency.

— Tom Swanky, The Smallpox War against the Haida (p 67).

July 1, was recently celebrated in “Canada” as Canada Day by “Canadians.” The Dominion of Canada was formed by the joining of three British North American colonies in 1867. It would serve as an Anglo bulwark against the French presence, and a bulwark against the American presence to the south. Over subsequent years, settler-colonialists spread from the Atlantic to the Pacific and Arctic coasts in what was deemed Canada. When the first European natives, the Norsemen, appeared in 1000 CE, Indigenous peoples had already inhabited the land for millennia, or as they often phrase it, since time immemorial.¹

The Original Peoples in Canada were dispossessed, largely decultured, proselytized, assimilated, disappeared. The founding peoples of Canada, as depicted on Canada’s colonialist coat-of-arms, are the English and French. Not the Indigenous peoples. The official languages of Canada are English and French. Indigenous languages are not recognized federally as official; moreover, linguicide of Indigenous languages was an outcome of the Residential School programs. This all amounts, unquestioningly, to cultural genocide.

But the genocide is more than just the annihilation of a group’s culture and language.

In The Smallpox War Against the Haida, author Tom Swanky (with contributions from Shawn Swanky) amplifies the oral history of the knowledge keepers among The Peoples that hold the administration of James Douglas, first governor of “British Columbia” (1858–1864) and second governor of “Vancouver Island” (1851–1864) culpable for a genocide via the spreading of the smallpox virus in 1862-63. The Original Peoples would suffer a horrific number of fatalities and would be rendered unable to withstand seizure of their land nor the implementation of colonial government and the meting out of colonial law.

Swanky humbly presents himself as conduit for the history of the knowledge keepers. He writes, “My only contribution is a search of the documentary record for evidence that may reflect on the native narrative, one way or another. I am not writing history. I am reporting how knowledge keepers tell of the history of BC’s founding and considering to what extent that teaching is justified.”

Why mention this? Because while discussing the smallpox genocide with a learned gentleman, he asked who the source of the information was. I replied, Tom Swanky. I was informed that some academics consider Swanky’s thesis as disputed. This was nothing new, and it is to be expected that there would be a pushback.² However, while the book’s authorship is by Tom Swanky, the narrative is the oral history of the Original Peoples. The oral history of First Nations was recognized in 1997 as admissible in court by Delgamuukw v British Columbia. However, Alexandra Potamianos, while a third-year JD student at Osgoode Hall Law School concluded that the Supreme Court of Canada’s Mitchell v Minister of National Revenue (2001) “has made it more difficult for Indigenous claimants to use oral history to counter dominant understandings of Indigenous presence and relationships to land.”³

Granting further credence to Swanky was his reporting of the Tsilhqot’in’s oral history about a grievous wrong in which chiefs were abducted by provincial officials in violation of the sacred peace pipe ceremony. Six chiefs were subsequently hanged in Quesnel, BC. This is detailed in his book The Great Darkening: The True Story of Canada’s “War” of Extermination on the Pacific plus The Tsilhqot’in and other First Nations Resistance (2012).⁴ In 2014, then BC premier Christy Clark stated, “[We] confirm without reservation that these six Tsilhqot’in chiefs are fully exonerated for any crime or wrongdoing.”

Nonetheless, while the source of information is somewhat pertinent, what is unequivocally primary is the factuality of the information and the evidence and logic brought to bear on that information. Swanky listened to the oral history, assessed it and the historical record for verisimilitude, and applied logic to make sense of a narrative. Swanky, who holds a Doctor of Jurisprudence degree (among other academic credentials) connects the dots and builds a compelling case.

The Opening Scene of the Crime

It was common during that time period for First Nation peoples, the Tlingit, Haida, Ts’msyen (Tsimshian), Nuxalk, Tahltan, Heiltsuk, and others, to canoe down the water highway from the north to Fort Victoria and set up camps.

Fort Victoria was established by the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1843 as a trading post at the location the Lekwungen People called Camosack meaning “rush of water.” It is not always easy to nail down the proper Indigenous designation as another moniker has it that the Lekwungen people called it Kuo-Sing-el-as, which means “place of strong fibre,” specifically the Pacific Willow. The WSÁNEĆ, Coast Salish neighbors of the Lekwungen, called Victoria METULIYE. The Haida called it Micdolly. (p ix)

The colonialist designation eponymous for an imperialist queen still persists, but probably one day moral sentiment and a semblance of honest intent toward reconciliation will result in a re-designation of the city that would honor First Nations.

The Genocidaires

Swanky has named the perpetrators of the genocide, many of who have their names applied to various geographic or manmade structures. James Douglas, who allegedly used his position of governor to plan the smallpox epidemic, had his name applied to a mountain (actually a tall hill, since renamed by the WSÁNEĆ as PKOLS while the park around the “mountain” still honors an alleged genocidaire), schools, main street, etc. Francis Poole, a bizarre prevaricator, played a major role in his peregrinations throughout the province, often connected to where smallpox outbreaks had occurred. In Haida Gwaii, his name was elided and replaced by Haida designations. Racist MLA Robert Burnaby is a capitalist whose name was bestowed on a city in the centre of Metro Vancouver, a mountain, a lake, etc. The same applies to other questionable characters in the smallpox war such as Alfred Waddington who was behind the ill-fated Waddington’s Road at Bute Inlet, MLA dr John Helmcken, AG George Cary, HBC insider Ranald McDonald, colonel Richard Moody, and others.

Indigenous characters are portrayed as well: Haida hyas tyee (roughly translates as “chief”) captain John, hyas tyee Gitkun, hyas tyee Albert Edenshaw, great Haida hyas tyee Geesh, Ts’msyen diarist Arthur Wellington Clah, etc.

Solving the “Indian Question”

Pre-1862-63, the settler-colonialists were vastly outnumbered by the Indigenous peoples and presented Douglas with the quandary of how to solve the “Indian Question.” Douglas was fervently against launching costly Indian wars. As a last resort, Douglas decided upon inflicting “cruelty and injustice” on the Indigenous peoples in the case that their suffering “could be given less regard than the ‘evils’ colonists associated with autonomous communities operating freely in colonizing zones…” (p 123-124) About this Douglas had no compunction since “natives who would not compromise their sovereign dignity should expect collective punishments. Otherwise in Douglas’ words, “the country will become intolerable as a residence for white-settlers.” (p 128)

“Cruelty and injustice” included starvation, ethnic cleansing (clearing The Peoples out of Victoria), and genocide via smallpox.

Smallpox-afflicted persons traveled by ship from San Francisco. Dubious inoculations were given to some of The Peoples. Dubious because, as Swanky relates, multiple eye-witness reported, and the timing of numerous outbreaks tends to corroborate, that Indigenes who were told that they were being vaccinated with harmless cowpox where instead inoculated with smallpox and, in that way, instead of contributing to controlling the disease, they were made into conduits for spreading the disease. Understanding inoculation as a tool of spreading the disease under the guise of vaccination is critical to understanding the “intent” required to prove genocide. The British Parliament’s Vaccination Act of 1840 had outlawed inoculation precisely because of the ease with which the procedure produced epidemics. (p 139)

Quarantining is also a tool for controlling the spread of contagions. The Songhees (a Lekwungen people) would ride out smallpox on a nearby island. Tellingly, the Douglas administration would violate British law by forcibly expelling the Northerners, forcing sick and healthy Indigenes into close contact and then putting them on the move to carry the disease up the coast and into their home territories. The administration implied that decreasing the risk of infection for Victoria’s resident colonists — most of whom had been vaccinated — justified actions that were certain to increase the First Nation death toll.

Swanky, furthermore, furnishes evidence showing that the pliable Poole, who was employed and coached throughout by MLA Robert Burnaby, set out and created his own “trail of blood” (chapters 10-13), thereby magnifying the smallpox epidemic.

Why Resort to Biological Warfare?

The settler-colonialists wanted the land. Land is regarded with deep reverence by most First Nations.⁵ For colonialists, land is money, and private property is a key cornerstone of capitalism. If a people are disappeared, then the empty land is for the taking. Smallpox was a means to weakening the ability of the First Nations to resist dispossession.

Swanky had as his starting point the oral history of The Peoples. Swanky found that the oral history is supported by the written record. That history, according to knowledge keepers as reported by Swanky, reveals that, starting in 1862, the colonialist administration of James Douglas engaged in biological warfare by spreading smallpox throughout First Nation territories. That measures such as inoculations/vaccinations and quarantines were obviated or ineffective suggests the criminality of the colonial administrations.

Thus today, the once numerous Indigenous peoples constitute 5.9% (2016 census) of the BC population. Where smallpox has not ended the existence of First Nations sovereignty in their unceded territories, colonial governments still resort to militarized RCMP and colonial courts to maintain colonial law. And when it suits the authorities, colonial court decisions anathema to politicians and corporations will be ignored. Thus today, the Wet’suwet’en are resisting an assault on their unsurrendered territory which is being scarred for a pipeline.

When the Indigenous peoples and the land they exist on is disregarded and hence disrespected, then reconciliation is diminished to a mere buzzword. It feels good to talk about it, but where is the action to back up the rhetoric?

That is why Swanky’s The Smallpox War Against the Haida is important. It is an extraordinary historically based opus resulting from detective work that combs the historical record, names the criminals, and points out legal redress to the grave crimes committed against the Haida by settler-colonialists.

If the admonition against forgetting history is a precautionary wisdom, then The Smallpox War Against the Haida ought to be promulgated in media; be taught in educational institutions, including in public schools; and should set in motion appropriate steps at atonement, beginning with a sincere apology. Indirectly, the book also provides a template for some steps for settler-colonialist society to achieve genuine reconciliation with The Peoples who were appallingly wronged, such as:

1. listening to the Original Peoples,
2. taking into account the evidence supporting the oral history,
3. listening to one’s conscience and what one’s sense of morality dictates,
4. publicly exposing history’s dissemblers and their disinformation and recasting the information and the dissemblers in an honest light,
5. educating people about the racism/supremacism that underlies the crimes of colonization,
6. recognizing the sovereignty of Original Peoples on their unceded territory,
7. recognizing the inherent humanity of all human beings, and
8. living according to the golden rule.⁶

ENDNOTES

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kim Petersen.

A Nanti woman and child. The Nanti were just one of many uncontacted and recently-contacted peoples whose survival was threatened by the bill. © Survival

In a dramatic reversal of fortune, a key Congressional committee in Peru has effectively blocked a draft law, labeled the “Genocide Bill” by Peru’s Indigenous people for the calamitous effects it would have had if approved.

The bill had been progressing through Congress, but the vote by the Decentralization Committee will now prevent it progressing any further.

Teresa Mayo of Survival International described this as “a huge victory for Peru’s Indigenous peoples, their organizations, and for thousands of ordinary people around the world who joined the campaign”.

Indigenous organizations in Peru such as AIDESEP and ORPIO had lobbied intensively to stop the bill, and more than 13,000 Survival supporters had written to the committee, urging them to block the bill.

The bill had been drafted by Congresspeople with ties to the powerful oil and gas industry. It represented a particular threat to the many uncontacted tribes in the country, whose lands would have been opened up for industrial exploitation.

Tabea Casique of AIDESEP said: “I’m very happy because we’ve worked hard to stop this draft bill, which violates the rights of uncontacted tribes and those in initial contact…. This scrapping of the draft bill protects our uncontacted relatives, their rights and their lives, and avoids the genocide and ecocide that it would have unleashed.”

Roberto Tafur of ORPIO said the decision “highlights the participation of those people with a conscience, in order to look out for our [uncontacted] brothers and sisters. Because life comes before money. It’s been a hard-fought vote to get here. And to continue fighting for our brothers and sisters in the jungle, who don’t know that we’re fighting for them.”

Teresa Mayo of Survival International said today: “It’s hard to believe that this bill was just one small step away from becoming law. It would have been catastrophic for uncontacted tribes in Peru – they’d have been left utterly exposed to the oil and gas corporations who’ve targeted their lands and resources for generations.

“All their rights would have been stripped away, and many would very probably have been wiped out. So we’re delighted this bill has been blocked – but will remain on alert in case the oil and gas giants and their political allies try again.”

The crucial vote has come in the middle of Uncontacted Tribes Week, which Survival’s supporters mark annually as a week of action in support of the rights of uncontacted Indigenous peoples worldwide. Celebrities such as Gillian Anderson and Julian Lennon have been posting videos highlighting the campaigns for their rights.

Notes:

• Had the Decentralization Committee passed the bill, it would then have passed to a vote in the Chamber of Deputies, where it was likely to have passed.
• Survival has been campaigning for the rights of uncontacted tribes in Peru for more than forty years.
• The oil and gas industry has had a catastrophic impact already on such tribes in Peru. In the 1980s, for example, following oil exploration work by Shell, introduced diseases killed more than half the population of the previously-uncontacted Nahua people.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Survival International.

Touted as the green transportation of the future, demand has exploded for electric cars. This has, in turn, increased the demand for lithium and other rare earth metals, with corporations rushing to open as many new mines as possible. Indigenous elders have been at the forefront of resistance to this latest wave of extractive capitalism, particularly in Peehee Mu’huh also known as Thacker Pass, Nevada, where the Ox Sam Indigenous Women’s camp has been resisting the construction of what would be North America’s largest lithium mine.

Later, subMedia’s nihilist weather droid, UV-400 brings us the latest updates in the climate crisis with a global weather report. Included are record-breaking wildfires in Canada, a heatwave and devastating floods across China and an earthquake in Haiti.

Finally, in so-called Peru, Indigenous warriors seized oil tankers in yet another flare up of the ongoing tensions with Canadian oil company PetrolTal.

For more information on the Ox Sam Indigenous Women’s Camp visit OxSam.org.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by subMedia.

Thirty years ago, in my economics textbook in India, the section on international trade referred to Argentina. It would be better, according to the textbook, for Argentina to concentrate on the production and export of beef, while Germany should direct its resources towards the production of electronics. This example was used to illustrate Adam Smith’s ‘absolute advantage’ principle – countries should focus on what they do ‘best’, rather than diversify their economies. It seemed churlish to me, that developing countries such as Argentina should only produce raw materials, while wealthy countries such as Germany went ahead with technological development.

Argentina, at that time, was still a major producer and exporter of beef. My peers and I had no access to José Hernández’s epic poem ‘Martín Fierro’, about the gauchos of the pampas, the cowboys of the plains of Argentina, but we knew of the ferocious compadritos (‘streetcorner thugs’) and cuchilleros (‘knife fighters’) from the short stories of Jorge Luis Borges. There were cowboys mixed in here, loners who sat on their horses on Argentina’s flatlands and gathered their cattle for the market. No longer do these horsemen define Argentina’s rural society. Today, the countryside is defined by the small farmer and the agricultural proletariat who work for the large agribusinesses and are the protagonists of the country’s fortunes.

According to Argentina’s National Agricultural Census, the number of agricultural holdings (EAPs) in the country decreased by roughly 41 percent between 1988 and 2018, due to the increasing concentration of land into the hands of a small elite.

In 2021, the World Trade Organisation (WTO) noted that Argentina remains ‘a major exporter of agricultural products’, which, at that time, accounted for nearly two-thirds of the country’s exports (as of April 2023, agricultural goods accounted for 56.4% of the country’s exports). The main products are grains (wheat, maize), soya, and beef. Argentina’s agribusinesses enthusiastically entered into the global soybean market, even producing a ‘soy dollar’ scheme to encourage greater exports so that the country could earn dollars to offset its major foreign exchange crises.

Argentina has been wracked by three consecutive years of drought (exacerbated by the climate catastrophe) and faced pressure from the increasing acreage for soybeans in the other four leading producers (Brazil, the United States, China, and India). The production of soybeans has transformed Argentina’s countryside, drawing in over half of the country’s arable lands and concentrating production into the hands of what the economist Claudio Scaletta called the ‘invisible giants’ (corporations such as Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland Argentina, Bunge Argentina, Dreyfus, and Noble Argentina). It is no longer cattle that run through the pampas; it is now the soybean flowers that tilt in the breeze.

In this graph, we can see the proportion of agricultural holdings, or EAPs, categorised according to size (hectares), in orange, as well as the share of total surface area that each category accounts for, in yellow. The majority of the productive EAPs are small; as they increase in size, the number of farms is reduced, but the amount of land they account for increases.

Our latest dossier, Whose Land Is It and What Is It For? An Unfinished Debate about Land Access in Argentina (June 2023), explores some of the most startling contradictions that afflict Argentina’s rural landscape. The most obvious incongruity is that Argentina has more than enough arable land to feed its 46 million people, and yet hunger is growing in the country. Most of the food consumed by the people is produced not by the large agribusiness conglomerates but by family farms, and yet these family farms are disappearing as families find it impossible to economically sustain themselves and make the trek from rural areas to the cities in large numbers. Rising landlessness and hunger have produced the social reality out of which new forms of political protest have appeared: verdurazos (‘vegetable protests’) and panazos (‘bread protests’), often led by rural social organisations, confront the ridiculous situation in which those who farm the soil cannot eat its crops.

A few years ago, I spent some time with small-scale farmers outside La Plata. Wildo Eizaguirre of the Federación Rural told me that the greatest burden for farmers such as himself is rent. Antonio García as well as Else and Mable Yanaje agreed that rent is a dead weight for them. The cost of land is prohibitive and their tenure on the land is uncertain. It prevents the farmers from making capital improvements to the farm or even from buying equipment (such as tractors) to make their labour more productive. These farmers neither own the fields nor do they control the pathways to the market. Brokers buy their produce at the lowest prices and then take them to be processed or sold directly to supermarkets. The money is made elsewhere than on the fields.

The land access bills proposed in Argentina in recent years are based on two key laws, the Historical Reparation of Family Agriculture Law (no. 27118, 2014) and the Indigenous Territories Emergency Law (no. 26160, 2006).

It is out of the struggles of people such as Wildo and Mable that Argentina’s government passed key laws such as the Historical Reparation of Family Agriculture Law of 2014 and the Indigenous Territories Emergency Law of 2006 (repeatedly extended in 2009, 2013, 2017, and 2021). The Historical Reparation of Family Agriculture Law seeks to ‘construct a new rural life in Argentina’ and guarantee ‘access to land for family, peasant, and indigenous agriculture, given that land is a social good’. These are powerful words but, in the face of the power of the agribusiness, they are not often translated into deeds. The law itself does not close off the class struggle. In Brazil, for instance, the Movement of Rural Landless Workers (MST) uses the 1988 Brazilian Constitution to the letter as a legal justification for its land occupations. And yet, punctually, Brazil’s agribusinesses and their political allies try to criminalise the MST occupations with a Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry, which MST leader João Paulo Rodrigues correctly considers an opportunity to hold a public dialogue about agrarian reform, food sovereignty, and social equality.

In 2020, the International Land Coalition and Oxfam released an important report called Uneven Ground. Land Inequality at the Heart of Unequal Societies. There are 608 million farms in the world, the report notes, most of them being family farms (with 2.5 billion people involved in smallholder farming). The largest 1% of the farms, however, control more than 70% of global farmland, while 80% of the farmers are smallholders who operate less than two hectares. Land concentration, the report shows, has increased dramatically since 1980. Meanwhile, according to a study by Luis Bauluz, Yajna Govind, and Filip Novokmet, in Latin America the top 10% of landowners capture up to 75% of the agricultural land value, while the bottom 50% own less than 2%. As the dossier highlights, in Argentina the disparity is extremely sharp: 80% of family farmers (who are characterised as smallholders) occupy around 11% of demarcated agricultural land, while the big landowners who make up 0.3% of farmers occupy almost double that land. The tendency towards land concentration is hastened by the power of multinational agribusinesses and by the increasing use of farmland as a financial asset by private equity firms and asset managers (as Madeleine Fairbairn argues in her book Fields of Gold: Financing the Global Land Rush, 2020). On the African continent, farmers are being pushed off the land due to ‘nature conservation’ and the growth of the mining sector (such as we documented in Xolobeni in South Africa).

Over the past century, peasant movements have put forward a demand for ‘agrarian reform’ as the antidote to capitalism’s devastation of the countryside. In the foreword to our dossier, Manuel Bertoldi of the Federación Rural writes, ‘We must start talking without fear about agrarian reform, food sovereignty, agroecology, and about socialism as an alternative system, since it is through socialism that these ideas become viable’.

In recent years, a number of proposals, such as the ‘March to the Countryside’ programme, have been put forward to address Argentina’s agrarian crisis.

The Brazilian poet João Cabral de Melo Neto wrote with great feeling about the only piece of land to which the peasants are entitled, their graves. In 1955, he composed the verse ‘Morte e Vida Severina’ (‘Death and Life of Severino’), where he wrote,

– The grave you’re in
Is measured by hand,
The best bargain you got
In all the land.

– You fit it well,
Not too long or deep,
The part of the latifundio
Which you will keep.

– The grave’s not too big,
Nor is it too wide,
It’s the land you wanted
To see them divide.

– It’s a big grave
For a body so spare,
But you’ll be more at ease
Than you ever were.

– You’re a skinny corpse
For such a big tomb,
But at least down there
You’ll have plenty of room.

Farmers and peasants around the world know that their struggles are existential, a feeling that gripped the Indian farmers and peasants during their ongoing struggle against the privatisation of the marketplace for agricultural commodities. They want land to live, not just for their graves.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Vijay Prashad.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/09/for-argentinas-small-farmers-the-land-is-predictable-but-the-markets-are-not/feed/ 0 402108 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/06/sharpen-your-machetes/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/06/sharpen-your-machetes/#respond Tue, 06 Jun 2023 15:07:02 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=140883 This episode of System Fail highlights the tensions between Indigenous communities and the settler colonial state in Brazil. The lower house of Brazil’s congress passed a bill, PL 490, which aims to open up Indigenous territories for mining and capitalist development, subjecting established Indigenous land claims to legal challenges. The Indigenous communities have resisted the bill through blockades and protests.

Next we cover the Bwa Kale movement in Haiti, where residents take up arms against gangs terrorizing their communities, liberating their neighbourhoods and building up organization of community self-defense.

Lastly, riots erupted in Cardiff, Wales, following the deaths of two teenage boys who crashed their e-bike while being chased by police.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by subMedia.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/06/sharpen-your-machetes/feed/ 0 401267 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/28/urgent-cgl-causes-heartbreaking-damage-to-our-rivers/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/28/urgent-cgl-causes-heartbreaking-damage-to-our-rivers/#respond Sun, 28 May 2023 21:53:22 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=140654 TC Energy, in the construction of the Coastal Gaslink Pipeline (CGL) has been reported by the Narwhal and a Citizen Monitoring Group as “having committed numerous environmental infractions, including slope failures, flooded worksites, and sediment entering wetlands and waterways.”

Helicopter flyovers of the area revealed heartbreaking footage of the destruction of our territory, currently otherwise inaccessible to us due to the ceaseless harassment of our people by the CIRG and CGL security and by gates put up to limit our access.

CGL received permits to construct a “trenchless crossing” of the Gosnell Creek and surrounding wetlands, a vital tributary to our Wedzin Kwa (Morice River) and in January, they laid down rubber and timber mats over frozen wetlands, in order to bring in heavy equipment. If they were going to do the crossing in this manner, it was imperative that they complete it in winter.

While machines sat idle, predictably, May brought spring melt. As the snow and ice pack dissolved into the river, the equipment, mats, pipes, and other infrastructure sank into the wetlands and Gosnell Creek itself.

On May 9th, the EAO inspected the area and dropped a stop work order for a 5km radius surrounding the crossing. The order does not include “activities necessary for the watercourse crossing of Gosnell Creek”. Further attempts to cross the river at this time will cause enormous additional harm.

CGL has left their equipment to sink into the river and the wetlands, and it has been sinking for weeks. This was the 6th stop work order issued to CGL in two weeks, covering 6 sections of the pipeline. Many areas of the damage appear to be outside of the stop work order area, and traffic through the area does not seem to have decreased at all.

The Gosnell is thick and sludgy. Where it enters the Wedzin Kwa, the Wedzin Kwa changes from clear blue green to an opaque brown.

The violent history of colonization, the Indian Act, the reservation system, and residential schools have sought to disconnect us from the healing and nourishing power of our lands. These wetlands are part of a federally protected wetland complex. They are the nurseries for moose in calving season, home to beaver and marten, and a much needed respite from the heat for other animals in summer. They provide us with cranberries, rice root, and a resting place for birds. They filter and oxygenate the water that feeds the rivers like Wedzin Kwa, absorb spring runoff and flood waters to prevent erosion and filter silt that can ruin salmon spawning beds. Salmon that many of us in the northwest coast rely on spawn in these waterways.

The future of the Healing Centre and its vital work in connecting our people with our culture and roots, with our way of life and medicine, with who we are as people, depends on the survival of our territories, and our territories are rooted in the survival of our waterways and wetlands.

CGL promised that this would be a trenchless crossing and instead they have made a landfill of our bread basket. The Gosnell is as opaque as pavement. Salmon cannot survive without light and air.

This cannot continue. CGL must be held accountable for their actions, and consistent unbiased inspections must be done over the length of the pipeline to prevent these kinds of tragedies from happening again.

We call on you to ask your MLAs, MPs, the National Resource Violations office, the Environmental Enforcement office, and especially Minister of Environment George Heyman (250-387-1197) and Minister of Energy Josie Osborne (250-953-0900) to call for an immediate cease work order on the Coastal Gaslink Pipeline until a full inspection has been conducted and all remedial and repair work has been completed.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by UnistotenCamp.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/28/urgent-cgl-causes-heartbreaking-damage-to-our-rivers/feed/ 0 399062 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/26/censorship-of-indigenous-australians-and-palestinians-stan-grant-julian-assange-and-truth-tellers/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/26/censorship-of-indigenous-australians-and-palestinians-stan-grant-julian-assange-and-truth-tellers/#respond Fri, 26 May 2023 13:55:21 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=140551 Eminent Australian and Indigenous journalist, Stan Grant, was recently driven  to resign from the ABC (the tax-payer-funded Australian equivalent of the UK BBC) as compere of the high-rating Q+A TV program by a flood of devastating racist abuse  after he participated in a  frank and truthful ABC discussion of the British  Crown and genocidal colonialism on 5 continents that prefaced the ABC coverage of the Coronation of King Charles III. Stan Grant, please come back, decent Australia loves you and needs you.

The 235 year and ongoing settler-colonial Australian Aboriginal Genocide has been associated with about 0.1 million violent deaths and 2 million deaths from dispossession, deprivation and disease. Before the British invasion in 1788 there were 350-750 different Indigenous Australian (Aboriginal) tribes and a similar number of languages and dialects, of which only 150 survive today and of these all but about 20 are endangered in a process of continuing Australian Aboriginal Ethnocide.

From a qualitative perspective the Australian Aboriginal Genocide and Ethnocide  was the worst in human history. The term “Aboriginal Genocide”  is not used by the ABC nor by numerous Australian commentators. A Search of the ABC for the term “Aboriginal Ethnocide” yields zero (0) results. Also ignored by the ABC, as UK and US lackeys Australians have invaded 85 countries with 30 of these invasions being genocidal.

The WW1 onwards settler-colonial Palestinian Genocide has been associated with 0.1 million violent deaths and about 2 million deaths from imposed deprivation. The first step that the world should insist on immediately is return of full human rights to all 15.5 million Palestinians, noting that half of them are children and three quarters are women and children. The per capita GDP is a deadly $3,500 for Occupied Palestine versus $55,500 for Occupier Apartheid Israel in gross violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Today all of Palestine and  parts of Jordan, Lebanon and Syria remain occupied. The 7 million Exiled Palestinians are cruelly excluded from returning to their multi-millennial homeland  and  from full human rights. The 5.5 million Occupied Palestinians are denied all human rights as set out in the 30 Articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). 2 million Israeli Palestinians are subject to 60 Nazi-style, race-based discriminatory laws. A Search of the ABC for the term “Palestinian Genocide” yields zero (0 results).

There are detailed accounts comparing the Australian Aboriginal  Genocide and the Palestinian Genocide. There is massive censorship of the Palestinian Genocide and ongoing atrocities of Apartheid Israel in a Zionist-subverted, Zionist-perverted, and US lackey Australia. Indeed the ABC bans use of the term “Apartheid” to describe genocidally racist Apartheid Israel.

This massive and genocide-ignoring lying by omission is promoted by the pathologically mendacious and traitorous US Lobby and Apartheid Israel Lobby in Australia. Freedom of speech is crucial for democracy and societal advance – we must expose and oppose maltreatment and censorship of truth tellers.

I have published literally millions of words (overwhelmingly overseas) in 9 huge books, over 100 scientific papers, and hundreds of carefully researched and referenced humanitarian articles. Nevertheless for defending the human rights of Indigenous Palestinians, Indigenous Australians and other horribly violated peoples I have been rendered invisible in Australia in the last dozen years by traitorous Mainstream gate-keepers and false Zionist defamation in the interests of nasty foreign states (the US, UK and Apartheid Israel). I have been banned from Twitter and a Wikipedia entry about me has been removed.

However I have used my voice overseas to vigorously defend variously eminent Australian writers variously subject to abuse and censorship e.g. Julian Assange, Mike Carlton, Scott McIntyre, Dr Sandra Nasr, Yassmin Abdel Magied, Alan Seymour, Michelle Guthrie, Emma Alberici, Essam Al Ghalid, and Stan Grant. There are so many more censored voices.

Decent people must stand up and be counted. The core moral messages from the WW2 Jewish Holocaust – and from all WW2 holocausts, and indeed all genocides and holocausts – are “zero tolerance for racism”, “zero tolerance for lying”, “bear witness”, and “never again to anybody” with the latter including Indigenous Australians and Indigenous Palestinians.

However under either Labor or Coalition Australian Governments a Zionist-perverted and US lackey Australia is second only to the US as a fervent supporter of neo-Nazi and genocidally racist  Apartheid Israel and hence of the evil crime of neo-Nazi Apartheid. Only the decent Australian Greens and a small number of other decent MPs support Palestinian human rights.

Journalists in particular  should “bear witness”  when fellow journalists  and writers are being targeted, vilified and  falsely defamed. Indeed on a per capita basis neo-Nazi Apartheid Israel is the world leader for the killing  of journalists. The core principles of Humanity are Kindness and Truth, but this is ever being perverted into Racism and Lying. Truth tellers are the guardians of the core ethos of Kindness and Truth.

Decent people must (a) bear witness, (b) support  truth tellers, and (c) call out and resolutely apply Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) to all those people, politicians, parties, collectives, corporations and countries grossly violating the core ethos of Kindness and Truth. For details and  documentation see  Countercurrents, 25 May 2023.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Gideon Polya.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/26/censorship-of-indigenous-australians-and-palestinians-stan-grant-julian-assange-and-truth-tellers/feed/ 0 398650 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/24/how-far-do-we-go-to-save-a-species/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/24/how-far-do-we-go-to-save-a-species/#respond Fri, 24 Mar 2023 01:34:02 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=138991 Robin Waples: University of Washington (NOAA Fisheries, retired) Topic: On the shoulders of giants: Under-appreciated studies in salmon biology with lasting influence. In 1675 Isaac Newton wrote, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” This idea epitomizes the way that science progresses by incremental steps, punctuated occasionally by […]

The post How Far Do We Go to Save a Species? first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>

Robin Waples: University of Washington (NOAA Fisheries, retired)

Topic: On the shoulders of giants: Under-appreciated studies in salmon biology with lasting influence.

In 1675 Isaac Newton wrote, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

This idea epitomizes the way that science progresses by incremental steps, punctuated occasionally by major breakthroughs. But often it is the case that neither these ‘giants’ nor their research are well-known or even routinely recognized.

I discuss four such studies conducted in Oregon that have had a profound influence on scientific developments in salmon biology in subsequent decades:

1) a 1960s study of southern Oregon Chinook salmon that was the first documentation of what has come to be known as the Portfolio Effect;

2) a 1970s study of Deschutes River steelhead that was the first attempt to empirically evaluate genetic differences between hatchery and wild fish;

3) a 1980s study of family size variation in Oregon coho salmon that helped pave the way for entirely new lines of research; and

4) a 1980s report on age structure and relative fecundity for Oregon Coast Chinook salmon that provided crucial empirical data to help parameterize models of the rates of genetic drift and loss of genetic variability in Pacific salmon.

I attended the talk just to be in situ at this Hatfield Marine Sciences Center and see what this 76-year-old fellow had to say = Robert Snowden Waples, Jr., born  in Berkeley, California. He attended Palo Alto High School, where he excelled in swimming; he went on to Yale to major in American Studies and to swim, competing with the likes of future Olympians Don Schollander, John Nelson, and Mark Spitz.

He has been at the forefront of wild salmon (and now hatchery salmon) research. He has been cited more than 25,000 times, has a plethora of articles, and he is credited with helping put some teeth in the endangered species act for salmon wild species. That is, he and others worked on the various genetic lines within species so they might get special categorization.

The ESA was set forth to bring a species to a status where it doesn’t need that endangered status. There are more than 50 percent of salmon species listed under the ESA.

The Bristol Bay sockeye salmon fisheries has been and up and down situation. There are 20 to 30 different stocks of Coho salmon, and with sockeye, resiliency, representation, and redundancy are key to keeping this ecological area sustainable, Robin states.

While the talk was dry, and there were no photos or videos, graphics from Madison Avenue, he did his talk hoping the audience there was keyed into learning about the top four articles influencing him and the science of salmon research. The first article he cited was “Biocomplexity and Fisheries Sustainability” concerning fall Chinook salmon on the Sixes River, OR.

Crazy science, including the slow work looking at adult returns using interesting criteria — fast to the ocean once hatched in home stream; a little time in the estuary after hatching; a lot of time in the estuary; a lot of time in home tributaries; yearlings staying in fresh water for a year.

What helps with survivability. While the 2, 3 , 4 and 5 year returns included mostly those in the third group = a lot of time in the estuary before maturing and heading to sea. This was done in 1965, without Google, the internet and so many other tools.

The next article on Robin’s top four list includes looking Deschutes summer steelhead and the genetic differences in growth and survival of Juvenile Hatchery and Wild Steehead Trout, Salmo gairdneri.

The question posed in the 1970s research includes: What if there were no hatchery fish? That is, what would that effect be on wild fish? They call that hatchery supplementation since so many wild stocks (more than 50 percent) are endangered, in peril.

The research Robin goes over gets even more deep in terms of genetics and determining the status of coho salmon from WA, OR, and CA. That one was published in 1995.

Lots of work on wild populations and reproductive isolation and life history traits — they can be adapted to local areas.

He cited Valley Creek, near the Sawtooth mountains, where the salmon move from the ocean 900 miles away up to around 6,500 feet in elevation.

Of course, the questions from the audience include: what about the effects of climate change on the salmon community. Robin says there are tons of studies on how salmon sustainability will be changed by warming land and ocean areas. The southern range will have a more difficult time. The northern area will see salmon expansion as the ice recedes and the water gets warmer.

The big questions are around what sort of evolutionary changes can help them keep up. These are called evolutionary rescues, but he says warming seas might be too quick for that rescuing to occur.

Reduction in forests and such stream imperilment really affects salmon. Non-point source pollution is huge. More people are changing the land, through urbanization and agriculture. Rainfall and impervious surfaces add pollution loads. Robin states that there is great support for salmon, and most recent polls show 70 to 80 percent of people want to work with salmon mitigation and are willing to pay more for salmon survival and be taxed, as opposed to the spotted owl, with only gets 10 percent backing for massive tax increases to save them.

While Robin is not a fan of techno fixes, he is for more streamside tree planting for shading the homes of salmon to lower water temperatures. And making sure water from rainfall gets back into the system clean.

He notes that trout have been put everywhere around the world (trout being a cousin of salmon), and he notes that steelhead and chinook have been put into Patagonia rivers starting a hundred years ago. New Zealand has also introduced Pacific salmon there.

Here’s the talk,

I got to talk with Robin for a few minutes. We talked about his American Studies degree, and how he taught English at the University of Hawaii. And what got him into the sciences. We also mulled over why there is such a disconnect from his and his fellow scientists’ research and the average person including the fisher people who live here in our rural community fishing for rock fish, shrimp, crab, halibut, and other species.

Also discussed was the issue tied to K-12 students NEVER being at these events. And, alas, the problem of higher education pushing MBA programs and programs around coding and software application creation.

I introduced him to some of my work, with David James Duncan, with David Suzuki, and Tim Flannery and dozens of other groups, including Save Our Wild Salmon. And there is my “Interview with David James Duncan.”

 

See also “Flat-Earther Bush’s Style for Wild Salmon (Part III of III)
Saving Salmon, Saving Grace — Busting Dams,” August 31, 2005. And Part I & Part II.

Finally:

A Tribe Once Called “Power from the Brain”

---

How’d you end up in the Inbred Northwest… What act of fate dragged your Texas butt up here… You exchanged West Texas, Cormac McCarthy, real Tex-Mex food and sun for this? Or some variation on that theme greeted me when I first bivouacked in Spokane after heading to El Norte from “I fought the law but the law won” Bobby Fuller El Paso, Texas.

It was a hell of a Salmonidae journey, hitching my adult body and soul to the Pacific Northwest in the form of the Inland Empire, Spokane — “largest city between Seattle and Minneapolis,” they kept telling me. My olfactory memory burst with narrative skills by traveling the region as reporter, educator and environmental activist. Man, the work I did on writing about removing those four lower Snake River dams. Pieces on sustainable agriculture in Washington. Stories on the power of storytelling in this region of Earth.

This place is full of river-teeth; the place of Ice Age Floods’ erratic boulders dropped 12,000 years ago from ice rafts in the middle of the Willamette Valley; the ramming tectonics and ring of fire. Luckily for me, writers like Rick Bass, Lizzie Grossman, David James Duncan and so many others kept me busy as a desert salmon looking for some home stream back to the Pacific.

I left Sonora and then Chihuahua for Inland Salish land, where 24 distinct languages once ruled.

Npoqíniscn, or Spokane. For thousands of years the Inland Salish people here built permanent villages along these powerful rivers in order to connect to their lifeblood and make benedictions to brother-sister salmon. Over three million acres made up their distinct territory, and later other Indians introduced them to horses and plank houses.

It’s a place that encompasses a kind of hope trapped in the way the sun hits water through a stand of cedars and towering Douglas firs. “Sun People” Spokane is translated as, though I’ve talked to a few Spokane scholars who say it’s more closely, “the color of the sun reflecting through the water on a salmon’s back.”

That story dredging is what makes a place, place. The legend about my new home is even more poetic: “There was once a hollow tree. When an Indian beat upon it, a serpent living inside made a noise which sounded like spukcane, a phonetic sound without meaning in the tribe’s language. So, one day, as the tribe’s chief thought about those sounds, these vibrations reverberated from his head. Spukcane then blossomed to mean, ‘Power from the brain.’”

Even a thousand years ago marketing rued the day — Spukanee is what they ended up calling themselves. Children of the Sun.

One of my trips deeper into the spiritual and intellectual fabric of this place (new to me starting May, 2001) was with a contemporary Caucasian writer — David James Duncan. We were talking about dam breeching, slack water rivers, President Bush, war, salmon recovery, and writing. That was April 2008:

I’ve been surprised from time to time by the American people’s eagerness to vote for ways to increase their own suffering and their children’s destitution and Mother Earth’s degradation. But I refuse to despair. Salmon are my totem creature and salmon don’t despair. They keep trying to return home to their mountain birth houses and create a beautiful new generation no matter what kind of hellhole industrial man has made of their rivers. Mother Teresa spoke with the heart of a wild salmon when she said, ‘God doesn’t ask us to win. He only asks us to try.’ I’m in the business of trying. I leave the scorecard to the Scorekeeper.

That journey for me, those tallies by the proverbial Scorekeeper as Duncan frames it, is tied to salmon, as the corpuscles of that species have been in my bloodline for centuries. The blood of Celts and of Scots. Why not? The word “salmon” is from Old French: salmonem, salmo, maybe even from salire.

Salire — to leap.

My mother was born and raised in British Columbia, Powell River. The stench of the largest pulp mill in the world at that time was rotting the alveoli of her lungs and hundreds of others’ respiratory tracks, eventually resulting in emphysema, or what is referred to as COPD.

I remember from one stay there how I noticed a line of cars at the town’s free car washes when the day shift switched to night shift. Acid releases, ash snows, rotten egg winds, and automobile paint flaking.

Both her parents were from Ireland and Scotland ending up on the Sunshine Coast. Some call it Sechelt (shishalh) First Nation land, again, Salish (coastal).

I remember pulling in Coho and King salmon, huge ones in the 1960s. In fact, one that I hooked was close to my eight-year-old’s size, at seventy-five pounds. My Uncle Ted (not by blood, but my grandparents’ friend and boarder) had to take over for me, pulling on the rod with his tobacco-stained hands. His own tired lungs wheezed and rattled while he wrestled the magnificent muscular Chinook close to the gunnels while directing me to gaff it.

Here I was, on this boat along this dark-dark forested coast, with Uncle Ted, friend of my Irish-Scottish grandparents. Son of a chief, from the Sliammon Reserve, 20 miles north of Powell River.

That deep red heart and liver were still connected after Ted gutted it quickly — after some word in his native language he exhorted while proceeding to smash the salmon’s head. He put the heart and liver into an old bucket, the one we used to piss in. As I watched the rhythm of that seven-year-old fish’s power train still pulsating with life in salt water, after being eviscerated, dog fish sharks surfaced near us and gulls dive-bombed our foredeck. Just along the beach a mother and her two cubs paraded around that brown bear way, scenting our kill.

That was almost five decades ago.

Strawberries, spuds and these Douglas firs that stayed with me as shapes long after any J. R.R. Tolkien dreams.

Olfactory memory. I recall those smells on a dive boat off Honduras. I remember the taste of Sockeye blood when I was snorkeling off the Baja peninsula into the thrashing sailfish that was in the grips of a 12-foot hammerhead’s jaw.

Once in Vietnam, along the Laos border, in a bat cave with British and Vietnamese scientists, I tasted that Sechelt cedar fire when Uncle Ted took me and my sister to the “reservation” for a potlatch. Dried smoked salmon was on my deja vu mind in 2006 when I was with Nez Perce friends digging camas in a field near Lolo Pass, Idaho.

It’s cliche but apropos to think some of us are shaped by anadromous destinies, like the salmon, biologically programmed millions of years ago by small but mostly large geologic transformations, and the ice barriers, leaking rivers and creeks caused by melting ice. What got salmon going was the changing nature of the oceans cooling some 30 million years ago.

Theories abound, but the prevailing science says they started out as freshwater fish. Moved to the cold Pacific where nutrient rich waters attracted their ancestors.

That destiny to move, to follow some ancient walkabout song or subsonic calling, it’s been an arousing part of my life. I was born on the ocean — San Pedro, California — and then moved as an infant to the Sunshine Coast in British Columbia.

We moved like migrating salmon, hitching our lives to the tether of my old man’s military profession. I ended up teething on the island of Terceira, part of the Azores, Portugal, about 1,600 km west from Lisbon and 3,680 km east from New York City.

Fish, bread, saints and milagros. Miracles. And stories of fishermen hitting the open waters with poveiro boats launched from the Port of Póvoa de Varzim. Thirty oarsmen making it all the way to Newfoundland. Cod, sardine, ray, mackerel, whiskered sole, snook, whiting, alfonsino and salmon.

Also, tuna, migratory and strong. They’ve been recorded by modern biology traveling some 5,000 miles in 50 days. Albacora these fishermen call them.

Piano wires, hooks and barracuda brought up from the depths. I ate their flesh around beach fires, using colorful upturned boats as barriers from the whipping winds. These fishers talked of sperm whale hunts and monsters from the depths west in the Puerto Rico trench.

A uma profundidade de cinco milha, oito quilometros. More than 26,400 feet down.

Later in college, while working as a dive master in the Sea of Cortez, I was boning up for the History of Hispania course I was taking at the University of Arizona. I read about a 1755 earthquake in an undersea “fracture zone-subduction zone” off Portugal — near the Azores. It generated a giant tsunami that went both directions, as far as Caribbean islands. It killed more than 100,000 people and destroyed the city of Lisbon. It sapped Portugal as a going concern — European power — impacting in grand scale not only the religious thinking of the time but philosophical constructs.

Salmyo, Portuguese for salmon. Some of those old salty dogs talked about fishing a river along the Spanish border — Rio Mino — for salmon.

Atlantic salmon.

For me, Pacific salmon, a calling in Salish. Words whispered by the prince and his salmon people, lured me away from that walkabout. We ended up as a family moving to Paris, France, and then Munich and Edinburgh. We harbored in Arizona, where I became, of all things, a dive master. Then, Mexico, Central America, Belize. West Texas, New Mexico.

That home stream, that electromagnetic pull, got me to Spokane. I ended up working on a study guide for six through eight graders for Claire Rudolph Murphy’s Tsimshian tale, The Prince and the Salmon People.

I am here, in Vancouver, having traveled from Seattle via Spokane. I just finished work on two magazine pieces around the 70th Anniversary of Hanford, the Manhattan Project, also couched as the A-bomb. That was 2013. My pieces were on downwinders — those people throughout Washington, Idaho, Montana, California and Oregon hit with bursts or radioactive iodine 131. Secret government experiments during the cold war. Millions of gallons of radioactive waste in tanks buried along the Columbia.

The iodine 131 came with the winds and settled into feed, hay. The milk runs to Spokane from Pasco carried the radionuclide with them.

Stories of three-eyed salmon. Sheep born with two heads. My Nez Perce and Yakima Indian friends speak about young girls with cancers. Diseased thyroids for people in their twenties. Aches, pains, stomach ailments, early deaths. Stories of the Pacific Northwest, really, as those waters around Hanford leech into the mighty Columbia as it makes it way to the Pacific.

Salmon made me a storyteller. I have a sockeye tattooed on my right calf muscle. I listen to those sidebar stories. I listen to writers born in the Pacific Northwest. Born to tell the story of their own returned journey.

It’s a story etched in fossils a hundred million years old. Over and over, the stories, yet what is literacy unless we embrace the knowledge that rivers and streams have to be clean, unimpeded, free-flowing, and cold in order to harbor life, to make the salmon. To make warm-blooded storytellers.

David James Duncan:

To learn to live with the earth on the earth’s own terms is more important to me than literacy. I lived on the Oregon Coast at a time when the most ancient Sitka spruce groves in the world were being converted daily into the LA Sunday Times. There was, in my view, nothing in the Times’ stories of that era that compared in beauty or import to the trees that were slaughtered to create the newspapers. The news those trees were emitting was something invisible, called oxygen. The news those trees published constantly was keeping the planet alive. We killed them in the name of literacy.

The end

The Prince and the Salmon People Study Guide, Developed by Paul Haeder and Claire Rudolf Murphy

The post How Far Do We Go to Save a Species? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/24/how-far-do-we-go-to-save-a-species/feed/ 0 381697 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/24/how-far-do-we-go-to-save-a-species-2/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/24/how-far-do-we-go-to-save-a-species-2/#respond Fri, 24 Mar 2023 01:34:02 +0000 https://new.dissidentvoice.org/?p=138991

Robin Waples: University of Washington (NOAA Fisheries, retired)

Topic: On the shoulders of giants: Under-appreciated studies in salmon biology with lasting influence.

In 1675 Isaac Newton wrote, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

This idea epitomizes the way that science progresses by incremental steps, punctuated occasionally by major breakthroughs. But often it is the case that neither these ‘giants’ nor their research are well-known or even routinely recognized.

I discuss four such studies conducted in Oregon that have had a profound influence on scientific developments in salmon biology in subsequent decades:

1) a 1960s study of southern Oregon Chinook salmon that was the first documentation of what has come to be known as the Portfolio Effect;

2) a 1970s study of Deschutes River steelhead that was the first attempt to empirically evaluate genetic differences between hatchery and wild fish;

3) a 1980s study of family size variation in Oregon coho salmon that helped pave the way for entirely new lines of research; and

4) a 1980s report on age structure and relative fecundity for Oregon Coast Chinook salmon that provided crucial empirical data to help parameterize models of the rates of genetic drift and loss of genetic variability in Pacific salmon.

I attended the talk just to be in situ at this Hatfield Marine Sciences Center and see what this 76-year-old fellow had to say = Robert Snowden Waples, Jr., born  in Berkeley, California. He attended Palo Alto High School, where he excelled in swimming; he went on to Yale to major in American Studies and to swim, competing with the likes of future Olympians Don Schollander, John Nelson, and Mark Spitz.

He has been at the forefront of wild salmon (and now hatchery salmon) research. He has been cited more than 25,000 times, has a plethora of articles, and he is credited with helping put some teeth in the endangered species act for salmon wild species. That is, he and others worked on the various genetic lines within species so they might get special categorization.

The ESA was set forth to bring a species to a status where it doesn’t need that endangered status. There are more than 50 percent of salmon species listed under the ESA.

The Bristol Bay sockeye salmon fisheries has been and up and down situation. There are 20 to 30 different stocks of Coho salmon, and with sockeye, resiliency, representation, and redundancy are key to keeping this ecological area sustainable, Robin states.

While the talk was dry, and there were no photos or videos, graphics from Madison Avenue, he did his talk hoping the audience there was keyed into learning about the top four articles influencing him and the science of salmon research. The first article he cited was “Biocomplexity and Fisheries Sustainability” concerning fall Chinook salmon on the Sixes River, OR.

Crazy science, including the slow work looking at adult returns using interesting criteria — fast to the ocean once hatched in home stream; a little time in the estuary after hatching; a lot of time in the estuary; a lot of time in home tributaries; yearlings staying in fresh water for a year.

What helps with survivability. While the 2, 3 , 4 and 5 year returns included mostly those in the third group = a lot of time in the estuary before maturing and heading to sea. This was done in 1965, without Google, the internet and so many other tools.

The next article on Robin’s top four list includes looking Deschutes summer steelhead and the genetic differences in growth and survival of Juvenile Hatchery and Wild Steehead Trout, Salmo gairdneri.

The question posed in the 1970s research includes: What if there were no hatchery fish? That is, what would that effect be on wild fish? They call that hatchery supplementation since so many wild stocks (more than 50 percent) are endangered, in peril.

The research Robin goes over gets even more deep in terms of genetics and determining the status of coho salmon from WA, OR, and CA. That one was published in 1995.

Lots of work on wild populations and reproductive isolation and life history traits — they can be adapted to local areas.

He cited Valley Creek, near the Sawtooth mountains, where the salmon move from the ocean 900 miles away up to around 6,500 feet in elevation.

Of course, the questions from the audience include: what about the effects of climate change on the salmon community. Robin says there are tons of studies on how salmon sustainability will be changed by warming land and ocean areas. The southern range will have a more difficult time. The northern area will see salmon expansion as the ice recedes and the water gets warmer.

The big questions are around what sort of evolutionary changes can help them keep up. These are called evolutionary rescues, but he says warming seas might be too quick for that rescuing to occur.

Reduction in forests and such stream imperilment really affects salmon. Non-point source pollution is huge. More people are changing the land, through urbanization and agriculture. Rainfall and impervious surfaces add pollution loads. Robin states that there is great support for salmon, and most recent polls show 70 to 80 percent of people want to work with salmon mitigation and are willing to pay more for salmon survival and be taxed, as opposed to the spotted owl, with only gets 10 percent backing for massive tax increases to save them.

While Robin is not a fan of techno fixes, he is for more streamside tree planting for shading the homes of salmon to lower water temperatures. And making sure water from rainfall gets back into the system clean.

He notes that trout have been put everywhere around the world (trout being a cousin of salmon), and he notes that steelhead and chinook have been put into Patagonia rivers starting a hundred years ago. New Zealand has also introduced Pacific salmon there.

Here’s the talk,

I got to talk with Robin for a few minutes. We talked about his American Studies degree, and how he taught English at the University of Hawaii. And what got him into the sciences. We also mulled over why there is such a disconnect from his and his fellow scientists’ research and the average person including the fisher people who live here in our rural community fishing for rock fish, shrimp, crab, halibut, and other species.

Also discussed was the issue tied to K-12 students NEVER being at these events. And, alas, the problem of higher education pushing MBA programs and programs around coding and software application creation.

I introduced him to some of my work, with David James Duncan, with David Suzuki, and Tim Flannery and dozens of other groups, including Save Our Wild Salmon. And there is my “Interview with David James Duncan.”

 

See also “Flat-Earther Bush’s Style for Wild Salmon (Part III of III)
Saving Salmon, Saving Grace — Busting Dams,” August 31, 2005. And Part I & Part II.

Finally:

A Tribe Once Called “Power from the Brain”

---

How’d you end up in the Inbred Northwest… What act of fate dragged your Texas butt up here… You exchanged West Texas, Cormac McCarthy, real Tex-Mex food and sun for this? Or some variation on that theme greeted me when I first bivouacked in Spokane after heading to El Norte from “I fought the law but the law won” Bobby Fuller El Paso, Texas.

It was a hell of a Salmonidae journey, hitching my adult body and soul to the Pacific Northwest in the form of the Inland Empire, Spokane — “largest city between Seattle and Minneapolis,” they kept telling me. My olfactory memory burst with narrative skills by traveling the region as reporter, educator and environmental activist. Man, the work I did on writing about removing those four lower Snake River dams. Pieces on sustainable agriculture in Washington. Stories on the power of storytelling in this region of Earth.

This place is full of river-teeth; the place of Ice Age Floods’ erratic boulders dropped 12,000 years ago from ice rafts in the middle of the Willamette Valley; the ramming tectonics and ring of fire. Luckily for me, writers like Rick Bass, Lizzie Grossman, David James Duncan and so many others kept me busy as a desert salmon looking for some home stream back to the Pacific.

I left Sonora and then Chihuahua for Inland Salish land, where 24 distinct languages once ruled.

Npoqíniscn, or Spokane. For thousands of years the Inland Salish people here built permanent villages along these powerful rivers in order to connect to their lifeblood and make benedictions to brother-sister salmon. Over three million acres made up their distinct territory, and later other Indians introduced them to horses and plank houses.

It’s a place that encompasses a kind of hope trapped in the way the sun hits water through a stand of cedars and towering Douglas firs. “Sun People” Spokane is translated as, though I’ve talked to a few Spokane scholars who say it’s more closely, “the color of the sun reflecting through the water on a salmon’s back.”

That story dredging is what makes a place, place. The legend about my new home is even more poetic: “There was once a hollow tree. When an Indian beat upon it, a serpent living inside made a noise which sounded like spukcane, a phonetic sound without meaning in the tribe’s language. So, one day, as the tribe’s chief thought about those sounds, these vibrations reverberated from his head. Spukcane then blossomed to mean, ‘Power from the brain.’”

Even a thousand years ago marketing rued the day — Spukanee is what they ended up calling themselves. Children of the Sun.

One of my trips deeper into the spiritual and intellectual fabric of this place (new to me starting May, 2001) was with a contemporary Caucasian writer — David James Duncan. We were talking about dam breeching, slack water rivers, President Bush, war, salmon recovery, and writing. That was April 2008:

I’ve been surprised from time to time by the American people’s eagerness to vote for ways to increase their own suffering and their children’s destitution and Mother Earth’s degradation. But I refuse to despair. Salmon are my totem creature and salmon don’t despair. They keep trying to return home to their mountain birth houses and create a beautiful new generation no matter what kind of hellhole industrial man has made of their rivers. Mother Teresa spoke with the heart of a wild salmon when she said, ‘God doesn’t ask us to win. He only asks us to try.’ I’m in the business of trying. I leave the scorecard to the Scorekeeper.

That journey for me, those tallies by the proverbial Scorekeeper as Duncan frames it, is tied to salmon, as the corpuscles of that species have been in my bloodline for centuries. The blood of Celts and of Scots. Why not? The word “salmon” is from Old French: salmonem, salmo, maybe even from salire.

Salire — to leap.

My mother was born and raised in British Columbia, Powell River. The stench of the largest pulp mill in the world at that time was rotting the alveoli of her lungs and hundreds of others’ respiratory tracks, eventually resulting in emphysema, or what is referred to as COPD.

I remember from one stay there how I noticed a line of cars at the town’s free car washes when the day shift switched to night shift. Acid releases, ash snows, rotten egg winds, and automobile paint flaking.

Both her parents were from Ireland and Scotland ending up on the Sunshine Coast. Some call it Sechelt (shishalh) First Nation land, again, Salish (coastal).

I remember pulling in Coho and King salmon, huge ones in the 1960s. In fact, one that I hooked was close to my eight-year-old’s size, at seventy-five pounds. My Uncle Ted (not by blood, but my grandparents’ friend and boarder) had to take over for me, pulling on the rod with his tobacco-stained hands. His own tired lungs wheezed and rattled while he wrestled the magnificent muscular Chinook close to the gunnels while directing me to gaff it.

Here I was, on this boat along this dark-dark forested coast, with Uncle Ted, friend of my Irish-Scottish grandparents. Son of a chief, from the Sliammon Reserve, 20 miles north of Powell River.

That deep red heart and liver were still connected after Ted gutted it quickly — after some word in his native language he exhorted while proceeding to smash the salmon’s head. He put the heart and liver into an old bucket, the one we used to piss in. As I watched the rhythm of that seven-year-old fish’s power train still pulsating with life in salt water, after being eviscerated, dog fish sharks surfaced near us and gulls dive-bombed our foredeck. Just along the beach a mother and her two cubs paraded around that brown bear way, scenting our kill.

That was almost five decades ago.

Strawberries, spuds and these Douglas firs that stayed with me as shapes long after any J. R.R. Tolkien dreams.

Olfactory memory. I recall those smells on a dive boat off Honduras. I remember the taste of Sockeye blood when I was snorkeling off the Baja peninsula into the thrashing sailfish that was in the grips of a 12-foot hammerhead’s jaw.

Once in Vietnam, along the Laos border, in a bat cave with British and Vietnamese scientists, I tasted that Sechelt cedar fire when Uncle Ted took me and my sister to the “reservation” for a potlatch. Dried smoked salmon was on my deja vu mind in 2006 when I was with Nez Perce friends digging camas in a field near Lolo Pass, Idaho.

It’s cliche but apropos to think some of us are shaped by anadromous destinies, like the salmon, biologically programmed millions of years ago by small but mostly large geologic transformations, and the ice barriers, leaking rivers and creeks caused by melting ice. What got salmon going was the changing nature of the oceans cooling some 30 million years ago.

Theories abound, but the prevailing science says they started out as freshwater fish. Moved to the cold Pacific where nutrient rich waters attracted their ancestors.

That destiny to move, to follow some ancient walkabout song or subsonic calling, it’s been an arousing part of my life. I was born on the ocean — San Pedro, California — and then moved as an infant to the Sunshine Coast in British Columbia.

We moved like migrating salmon, hitching our lives to the tether of my old man’s military profession. I ended up teething on the island of Terceira, part of the Azores, Portugal, about 1,600 km west from Lisbon and 3,680 km east from New York City.

Fish, bread, saints and milagros. Miracles. And stories of fishermen hitting the open waters with poveiro boats launched from the Port of Póvoa de Varzim. Thirty oarsmen making it all the way to Newfoundland. Cod, sardine, ray, mackerel, whiskered sole, snook, whiting, alfonsino and salmon.

Also, tuna, migratory and strong. They’ve been recorded by modern biology traveling some 5,000 miles in 50 days. Albacora these fishermen call them.

Piano wires, hooks and barracuda brought up from the depths. I ate their flesh around beach fires, using colorful upturned boats as barriers from the whipping winds. These fishers talked of sperm whale hunts and monsters from the depths west in the Puerto Rico trench.

A uma profundidade de cinco milha, oito quilometros. More than 26,400 feet down.

Later in college, while working as a dive master in the Sea of Cortez, I was boning up for the History of Hispania course I was taking at the University of Arizona. I read about a 1755 earthquake in an undersea “fracture zone-subduction zone” off Portugal — near the Azores. It generated a giant tsunami that went both directions, as far as Caribbean islands. It killed more than 100,000 people and destroyed the city of Lisbon. It sapped Portugal as a going concern — European power — impacting in grand scale not only the religious thinking of the time but philosophical constructs.

Salmyo, Portuguese for salmon. Some of those old salty dogs talked about fishing a river along the Spanish border — Rio Mino — for salmon.

Atlantic salmon.

For me, Pacific salmon, a calling in Salish. Words whispered by the prince and his salmon people, lured me away from that walkabout. We ended up as a family moving to Paris, France, and then Munich and Edinburgh. We harbored in Arizona, where I became, of all things, a dive master. Then, Mexico, Central America, Belize. West Texas, New Mexico.

That home stream, that electromagnetic pull, got me to Spokane. I ended up working on a study guide for six through eight graders for Claire Rudolph Murphy’s Tsimshian tale, The Prince and the Salmon People.

I am here, in Vancouver, having traveled from Seattle via Spokane. I just finished work on two magazine pieces around the 70th Anniversary of Hanford, the Manhattan Project, also couched as the A-bomb. That was 2013. My pieces were on downwinders — those people throughout Washington, Idaho, Montana, California and Oregon hit with bursts or radioactive iodine 131. Secret government experiments during the cold war. Millions of gallons of radioactive waste in tanks buried along the Columbia.

The iodine 131 came with the winds and settled into feed, hay. The milk runs to Spokane from Pasco carried the radionuclide with them.

Stories of three-eyed salmon. Sheep born with two heads. My Nez Perce and Yakima Indian friends speak about young girls with cancers. Diseased thyroids for people in their twenties. Aches, pains, stomach ailments, early deaths. Stories of the Pacific Northwest, really, as those waters around Hanford leech into the mighty Columbia as it makes it way to the Pacific.

Salmon made me a storyteller. I have a sockeye tattooed on my right calf muscle. I listen to those sidebar stories. I listen to writers born in the Pacific Northwest. Born to tell the story of their own returned journey.

It’s a story etched in fossils a hundred million years old. Over and over, the stories, yet what is literacy unless we embrace the knowledge that rivers and streams have to be clean, unimpeded, free-flowing, and cold in order to harbor life, to make the salmon. To make warm-blooded storytellers.

David James Duncan:

To learn to live with the earth on the earth’s own terms is more important to me than literacy. I lived on the Oregon Coast at a time when the most ancient Sitka spruce groves in the world were being converted daily into the LA Sunday Times. There was, in my view, nothing in the Times’ stories of that era that compared in beauty or import to the trees that were slaughtered to create the newspapers. The news those trees were emitting was something invisible, called oxygen. The news those trees published constantly was keeping the planet alive. We killed them in the name of literacy.

The end

The Prince and the Salmon People Study Guide, Developed by Paul Haeder and Claire Rudolf Murphy

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/24/how-far-do-we-go-to-save-a-species-2/feed/ 0 382853 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/13/defending-the-weelaunee-forest/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/13/defending-the-weelaunee-forest/#respond Mon, 13 Mar 2023 14:15:37 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=138734 My creed of nonviolence is an extremely active force. It has no room for cowardice or even weakness. There is hope for a violent man to be some day non-violent, but there is none for a coward. I have, therefore, said more than once….that, if we do not know how to defend ourselves, our women […]

The post Defending the Weelaunee Forest first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>

My creed of nonviolence is an extremely active force. It has no room for cowardice or even weakness. There is hope for a violent man to be some day non-violent, but there is none for a coward. I have, therefore, said more than once….that, if we do not know how to defend ourselves, our women and our places of worship by the force of suffering, i.e., nonviolence, we must, if we are men, be at least able to defend all these by fighting.

Though violence is not lawful, when it is offered in self-defence or for the defence of the defenceless, it is an act of bravery far better than cowardly submission.

We do want to drive out the beast in the man, but we do not want on that account to emasculate him. And in the process of finding his own status, the beast in him is bound now and again to put up his ugly appearance.

The world is not entirely governed by logic. Life itself involves some kind of violence and we have to choose the path of least violence.”

— Mohandas K. Gandhi, “Between Cowardice and Violence“

Earlier this week I participated in several actions in Atlanta during a Week of Action in defense of the South River Forest, also known as the Weelaunee Forest “in honor of the Muscogee Creek people who lived there until they were departed in the Trail of Tears.”¹ The primary action which I helped to organize and participated in took place on March 6 when a group of mainly elders went to the Atlanta corporate headquarters and then five active construction worksites in Atlanta of the corporation Brasfield & Gorrie.

B & G is the company which, any day now, could begin construction of a $90 million, 85-or-more-acre concrete training complex for police in the Weelaunee Forest, which is adjacent to Black and brown residential neighborhoods. The intention is that it would become a major institution where police from around the country would come to be trained, leading to significant destruction of the several hundred acre forest and thousands of trees.

While at the Brasfield & Gorrie corporate headquarters where our group was demonstrating, a Cobb County police officer came by. As the designated police liaison I spoke to him. He initiated a conversation about Cop City and why it was so needed because, he said, the existing training police facility was so rundown, “with leaks and mold.” I responded, “Why seriously damage an important forest? Why not renovate or tear down the existing building and build a new one on the existing police site?” He didn’t have much of an answer to either question.

In the leaflet which we distributed throughout the day on March 6 we explained what is wrong with Cop City:

-It would increase the use of militarized policing.
-It would destroy thousands of trees which are needed to reduce flooding that already occurs in nearby neighborhoods, help clean the already over-polluted air and reduce the urban heat island effect.
-It would worsen climate change and increase noise and particulate pollution.
-It would violate Nature’s right to exist, which provides beauty and tranquility for humans and other living things.
-There are much better uses for the Atlanta city money planned for this project, like funding non-police responses to improve security and improve health care for at-risk residents.

On my first full day in Atlanta a week ago I went to the forest to learn more about it and the resistance to its destruction, as well as to enjoy a music festival being held there. After a couple of hours I left to attend a planning meeting for our Brasfield & Gorrie action the next day. Later that day, in the words of a press release put out here: “A separate protest group with hundreds of people marched to the site leased to the Atlanta Police Foundation for Cop City. The march was in response to the murder of activist Tortuguita and a move to reclaim the Weelaunee Forest as a public commons. There are reports of construction vehicles and surveillance equipment being set on fire. Sometime after this action, police retaliated viciously by raiding the entire forest, arresting at least 35 people at the nearby music festival, including people with no connection to or awareness of the action on the other side of the nearly 600 acre forest.”

This militant action of property destruction was not the first action of this kind in the two years that the fight against Cop City has been raging. While at the music festival I picked up a 60-page pamphlet, “The Forest In The City,” a report and analysis of those two years. If you want to have a deeper understanding of the resistance movement, it is an essential document.

What “The Forest In The City” makes clear is that there are a broad range of groups with a broad range of tactics who are fighting to save the forest and oppose police militarization.

As someone who believes that nonviolent tactics are ultimately the most effective tactics in the building of the kind of mass movements needed to effect the kind of social change the world desperately needs, what is described in this “Forest” pamphlet has challenged me. It appears from the outside of this battle that the mix of tactics, including property destruction, have had an impact. Without question all of the activist opposition, combined with the repressive and violent tactics of the police and prosecutors in Georgia, has brought major media attention to the issue of forest destruction and police militarization.

50-plus years ago I was part of a sector of the Vietnam war peace movement, the Catholic Left, which engaged in property destruction, primarily pieces of paper: 1-A draft files. These were the files used by the Selective Service System to send hundreds of thousands of young men, predominantly working class young men, to Indochina to kill over a million Vietnamese in an effort by the US government to replace French colonialism with US colonialism. In addition, in one action I helped to make happen, about 200 bomb casings for “seeing eye” bombs in a railroad car that would have gone to Vietnam were sabotaged by using a large bolt cutter to gash the metal threads on the top of the casing where an electronic camera was to have been installed.

Some in the broader peace movement, particularly at the beginnings of the Catholic Left movement, were critical of these kinds of actions, seeing them as “violence.” We didn’t think so. Our main response was to say that the careful destruction (we didn’t use bombs) of these pieces of paper, or bomb casings, used to prosecute an unjust, murderous and imperialist war, was not violence.

Gandhi’s views on the question of violence above seem relevant to our situation today, and to the Cop City struggle.

Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. are probably the most well-known practitioners of nonviolence. But it is clear from what Gandhi wrote that he was not an absolutist who condemned any and all violence no matter who engaged in it. Indeed, he supported the involvement of Indians in the British Army to fight Hitler and fascism. And King, as far as I know, was never critical of groups like the Deacons for Defense, organized and armed Black people in the deep South who played a behind the scenes but very real role in the ultimate successes of the Black Freedom Movement of the ’50s and 60s.

Again, I continue to believe that nonviolent resistance when it comes to tactics is, definitely in the long run, the tactics which have been and will be most effective when it comes to transformative and revolutionary change. I also believe very strongly that it is essential that we develop a movement culture which opposes all the societal forms of violence like white supremacy, patriarchy, heterosexism and personal practices of domination.

I am glad that I took part in a small way this past week in the righteous battle to defeat Cop City and Defend the Forest in Atlanta.

1. The Forest In The City: Two Years of Forest Defense in Atlanta. Go to https://defendtheatlantaforest.com to find it.

The post Defending the Weelaunee Forest first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Ted Glick.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/13/defending-the-weelaunee-forest/feed/ 0 379044 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/06/peru-and-the-peoples-defenses/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/06/peru-and-the-peoples-defenses/#respond Mon, 06 Mar 2023 14:36:10 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=138419 Following the January mobilization to protest the removal from office of Peru’s Indigenous President Pedro Castillo, unofficial reports indicate continuing resistance to the Dina Boluarte assumed Presidency. The Boluarte government is backed by an extreme right Parliament and the country’s military. As well as the U.S. and Canada alone among countries of the Americas. It represents […]

The post Peru and the People’s Defenses first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>

Following the January mobilization to protest the removal from office of Peru’s Indigenous President Pedro Castillo, unofficial reports indicate continuing resistance to the Dina Boluarte assumed Presidency.

The Boluarte government is backed by an extreme right Parliament and the country’s military. As well as the U.S. and Canada alone among countries of the Americas. It represents the multinational corporate resource stripping interests (in Peru this includes China’s copper mining and U.S. gold mining) of an elite. The Boluarte government has murdered over sixty protesters, placed roadblocks throughout the country and regions under emergency law. Castillo is in prison without habeas corpus or trial. Large protests fueled by Indigenous groups from the countryside have gathered repeatedly in Lima and other cities. Demands of the people are largely ignored. The basic problem is that Parliament has consistently fought elected President Pedro Castillo’s attempts to nationalize portions of the country’s resources and protect the environment itself from destruction by corporate resource interests.

Boluarte’s attempts to increase government control of the press and her willingness to use the military and martial law against nonviolent protest, are normalized by the authorities and international press. Trade unions have backed the protests. 80% percent of the people are now said to be against the Boluarte government. While the protest movement has remained clearly nonviolent, its protesters are labeled “terrorists”; resistance is increasingly cast as moving toward a civil war. As financial news assures us roads to the mines are opening again, a genocide warning continues.

Meanwhile Democracy Now ! reports that in Guatemala the Indigenous movement’s candidates for Presidency, Thelma Cabrera and running mate Jordán  Rojas, have been barred from running. The likely winner of the election will be Zury Ríos, daughter of Ríos Montt, former dictator convicted of genocide against Indigenous villagers. His conviction was overturned by a court of the privileged.

One remembers, as well, the illegal removal from office of Indigenous President Evo Morales in Bolivia. Is it that democratically elected Indigenous leaders will not be allowed by the elites? Or is this a problem for the North American corporate boardrooms? Or the U.S. State Department?

Pedro Castillo is an Indigenous leader who won a very narrow election victory over Keiko Fujimori. He now sits in prison under threat of a 31-year sentence for corruption, which gives her right-wing political machinery (often charged with corruption) an immense victory, quite outside the parameters of any democracy. Her father, Alberto Fujimori, the convicted war criminal, was considered groomed for political office and supported by the U.S.. Now with U.S. and Canadian approval, Dina Boluarte and the right-wing Parliament are proceeding without popular mandate. They represent the foreign interests which sustain Peru’s elite. Under Fujimori the war criminal, authorities remained in power through military atrocities.

The mechanism of a genocide could be considered inherent in Alberto Fujimori’s militarization of the country to contain Shining Path. The army and police were largely Indigenous or mestizo, often trained out of a brutal poverty to survival. The Shining Path which continued a generational struggle for the peoples of Peru, was largely Indigenous, mestizo, trade unionist, socialist, and Maoist. The smaller allied movement of Tupac Amaru was Marxist-Leninist. The U.S. still lists Shining Path as a “Foreign Terrorist Organization,” while Canada lists it in Spanish, Sendero Luminoso, as a terrorist entity. At least 70,000 conflict deaths occurred under Alberto Fujimori; these were accompanied by government programs of birth control which included the sterilization often without informed consent of as many as 300,000 Indigenous women and over 20,000 Indigenous men. The programs were applications of birth prevention programs initiated by the U.N. and groups within the U.S..

The instigation of a civil war by government oppression of a victim group until it’s forced to fight to survive, becomes a tactic of genocide. There is some risk that this is the purpose of Boluarte and the Parliament’s takeover of the democracy. The people’s protests were met with military force when there were no reports of Peru’s protest movement defending itself with arms.

What defense do the people have against international financial interests supported by countries of origin such as Canada and the U.S.? The peoples of North America have no desire to see the Indigenous peoples of the Americas enslaved or wiped out. Unless we aspire to join the elite, what happens to the Indigenous peoples simply precedes what happens to the rest of us.

The colonial controls once applied by overt military actions are now covert. In the Guatemala genocide trial of Ríos Montt responsibility for atrocities by U.S. trained and advised troops was limited to Guatemalans. In El Salvador, responsibility for the murder of five Jesuits and their house keeper was limited to El Salvador’s army despite training and support by the U.S.. Tracing the training of atrocity units throughout the Americas has often led to the U.S. misnamed School of the Americas (now called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation). Occasionally there is a slip in the blood trail, as in Honduras where a U.S. West Point graduate was in 2021 convicted in the death squad murder of the environmental activist Berta Isabel Cáceras. What defense do the people have?

The viability of the U.N. Convention on Genocide is in question due to the long lasting, intensifying evidence of genocide by the government of Israel against Palestinians and Gazans: faced with ongoing atrocities the powerful nations have done nothing. Under the alchemy of corporate perception management, Russia’s stated attempt to protect its minorities in several regions of the Ukraine, and to counter the neo-Nazi ideology which threatened their survival, became “Putin’s war of aggression.” Despite global condemnation of Myanmar the Rohingya remain alive mostly in refugee camps while the issue of genocide is argued by paid attorneys in court. And to mention again Guatemala’s army which provably inflicted a genocide on a portion of Guatemala’s Indigenous population under Ríos Montt, Ríos Montt avoided punishment. With impunity the elite would offer the world his daughter as the country’s next president.

Despite several attempts, Peru has not yet been able to call former President Fujimori to account for genocide. This weakens the people’s defenses against genocide. Internationally, the covenants and conventions of international law are politicized and undermined by corporate agendas which advance their own interests. The U.N. has avoided forming an international peace keeping force to assure peoples of the world some protection against atrocities.

The best remaining protection against genocide may be the uncompromised outrage of people in all countries, and the commitment of “never again” made as real as possible by each.

In this instance the most helpful protector for the Peruvian people may be President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico who stands by Pedro Castillo, finds Dina Boluarte spurious, and lambastes the stripping of Peru’s resources by Peru’s elite and foreign interests. He publicly recognizes the mechanism of resource stripping as an agenda of liberal governments. Mexico holds relatively approachable laws against genocide. State signatories to the Genocide Convention might gather and record each crime against the victim people. Genocide has no statute of limitations. Because resource stripping destroys the land’s ability to sustain its people, and results ultimately in displacement and death of the people, those profiting from resource stripping should be registered by the U.N., tracked, and eventually prosecuted. Under an objective application of the law governments and individual politicians allowing profits from the attempted genocide of a people would be complicit and should be sanctioned and eventually prosecuted.

The post Peru and the People’s Defenses first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by J.B. Gerald.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/06/peru-and-the-peoples-defenses/feed/ 0 377340 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/02/28/new-genocide-bill-could-wipe-out-all-perus-uncontacted-tribes/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/02/28/new-genocide-bill-could-wipe-out-all-perus-uncontacted-tribes/#respond Tue, 28 Feb 2023 14:04:53 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=138235 Malocas (communal houses) of uncontacted people in the Isconahua Indigenous Reserve, 2015. © Melissa Medina, IBC A new bill now being considered in Peru’s Congress, described by Survival International as “a naked land grab by the oil and gas industry and their cronies”, could wipe out the country’s uncontacted tribes, Indigenous organizations and experts have warned. […]

The post New “Genocide Bill” Could Wipe out all Peru’s Uncontacted Tribes first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>
Malocas (communal houses) of uncontacted people in the Isconahua Indigenous Reserve, 2015. © Melissa Medina, IBC

A new bill now being considered in Peru’s Congress, described by Survival International as “a naked land grab by the oil and gas industry and their cronies”, could wipe out the country’s uncontacted tribes, Indigenous organizations and experts have warned. They have labelled it the “Genocide Bill” for its catastrophic consequences if approved.

The bill has been drafted by Congresspeople with ties to huge oil and gas companies. The controversial Anglo-French oil company Perenco, which is operating inside uncontacted tribes’ lands in northern Peru, is believed to be one of the companies backing the bill.

Francois Perrodo, chairman of oil company Perenco, meeting then-President of Peru Alan Garcia in 2009. © Sepres

Among the bill’s provisions:

– The 25 uncontacted and recently-contacted Indigenous peoples in the country who have been officially recognized could, at a stroke, lose that recognition, and with it, all their rights as Indigenous people.

– Indigenous Reserves already established for these peoples could be revoked.

– Their lands could be further opened up to oil and gas drilling, logging and mining.

– It would block the creation of desperately-needed reserves for uncontacted tribes whose territories currently have no protection.

Julio Cusurichi of Peru’s Amazon Indigenous organization AIDESEP said today: “If this bill is approved, regional governments will be able to extinguish Indigenous reserves and undo the official recognition of the existence of uncontacted and recently contacted tribes. This would mean genocide. We are calling on Congress to scrap this bill.”

Apu Miguel Manihuari Tamani of Indigenous organization ORPIO, within whose region live several uncontacted tribes, said today: “We categorically reject this bill. We know that our uncontacted relatives live in the most distant parts of the forest, fleeing from outsiders. This attack on uncontacted tribes is a response to the economic interests of politicians and others who want to extract oil and timber in these areas. We are defending our uncontacted relatives and for that we have received death threats.”

Indigenous organizations and their allies are campaigning against the bill. Thousands of Survival International supporters around the world have emailed Peruvian Congresspeople voicing their alarm and calling for the proposal to be scrapped.

Teresa Mayo of Survival International said today: “This bill is a naked land grab by the oil and gas industry and their cronies, which could completely destroy Peru’s uncontacted tribes. Nothing like it has ever been attempted, anywhere in the world. It would be genocidal – the Indigenous peoples concerned simply cannot survive this wholesale destruction of their rights. Their territories would be further opened up to industrial exploitation, and since they are utterly dependent on their lands for survival, they could be wiped out. It is a shockingly brazen assault on the human rights of Peru’s Indigenous peoples, and cannot be allowed to pass into law.”

The post New “Genocide Bill” Could Wipe out all Peru’s Uncontacted Tribes first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Survival International.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/02/28/new-genocide-bill-could-wipe-out-all-perus-uncontacted-tribes/feed/ 0 376039 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/02/23/bravo-lidia-thorpe-for-having-the-courage-to-unshackle-her-struggle-for-aboriginal-peoples-rights/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/02/23/bravo-lidia-thorpe-for-having-the-courage-to-unshackle-her-struggle-for-aboriginal-peoples-rights/#respond Thu, 23 Feb 2023 01:37:00 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=138063 DjabWurrung Gunnai Gunditjmara woman and prominent voice for Aboriginal rights, Lidia Thorpe today quit the Greens. The federal senator, who had been the Greens First Nations spokesperson, will now sit as an independent. Announcing her resignation from the Greens, Lidia Thorpe stated that: “This country has a strong grassroots blak sovereign movement, full of staunch […]

The post Bravo Lidia Thorpe for Having the Courage to Unshackle Her Struggle for Aboriginal People’s Rights first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>
DjabWurrung Gunnai Gunditjmara woman and prominent voice for Aboriginal rights, Lidia Thorpe today quit the Greens. The federal senator, who had been the Greens First Nations spokesperson, will now sit as an independent. Announcing her resignation from the Greens, Lidia Thorpe stated that: “This country has a strong grassroots blak sovereign movement, full of staunch and committed warriors, and I want to represent that movement fully”, “It has become clear to me that I can’t do that within the Greens.”

Earlier, targeted for her strong advocacy of Aboriginal rights and her refusal to simply roll over and accept the powerless “Voice” to parliament scheme that was being championed by small-l liberals, social democrats, “progressive”-liberals and many mainstream conservatives, Lidia Thorpe had been subjected to a despicable witch-hunt over having once dated a former member of a motorcycle gang (big deal!). Greens leader Adam Bandt failed to defend Thorpe from the witch-hunt and indeed, in a cowardly way, forced his First Nations portfolio head to resign as the Greens deputy leader in the Senate. Although our Marxist-Leninist politics are different to Lidia Thorpe’s politics, we salute her determined advocacy of Aboriginal people’s liberation right now and say: Down with the racist, right-wing and small-l liberal witch-hunt of Lidia Thorpe! Bravo Lidia Thorpe for having the courage of her convictions to resign from the Greens in order to unshackle her struggle for Aboriginal people’s rights!

Hopefully Lidia Thorpe’s resignation will encourage any progressive-minded workers or youth that have illusions in the Greens to also break from the party. And hopefully it will put pressure on those Far Left groups that tail after the Greens and give it electoral support to dump their unprincipled support to this party of the “progressive”-liberal wing of the inherently anti-Aboriginal, capitalist establishment. We say: No unity with any wing of Australia’s racist, capitalist ruling class – including the “progressive”-liberal wing represented by the Greens!

We need to break the working class free from the clutches of the social-democratic ALP and the influence of the “progressive”-capitalist Greens in order to unleash the power of the workers movement to both fight for workers’ own living standards and to support the liberation struggles of the staunch blak liberation warriors. Unite our multi-racial trade unions with Aboriginal people and all people of colour in joint struggle against all racist oppression! Resist the state removal of Aboriginal children from their families that has been happening under Liberal-National, ALP and ALP-Greens governments alike! Resist the state murder of Aboriginal people in custody! Justice for Veronica Nelson, Kumanjayi Walker, David Dungay, Rebecca Maher, TJ Hickey, Mulrunji Doomadgee, John Pat, Eddie Murray and the many other victims of Australia’s racist, rich people’s regime! Don’t let the racist ruling class cover up their crimes through their window dressing “Constitutional Recognition” and their powerless “Voice”. Fight for decent housing and services in blak communities paid for by confiscating the wealth of the greedy mining and pastoral bosses and in communities administered directly by Aboriginal people! Fight for genuine, full Aboriginal land rights!

The post Bravo Lidia Thorpe for Having the Courage to Unshackle Her Struggle for Aboriginal People’s Rights first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Trotskyist Platform.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/02/23/bravo-lidia-thorpe-for-having-the-courage-to-unshackle-her-struggle-for-aboriginal-peoples-rights/feed/ 0 374713 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/02/09/how-does-america-perform-on-bidens-test/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/02/09/how-does-america-perform-on-bidens-test/#respond Thu, 09 Feb 2023 17:00:09 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=137614 A slice of president Joe Biden’s State of the Union address that calls for closer analysis: Putin’s invasion has been a test for the ages. A test for America. A test for the world. Would we stand for the most basic of principles? Would we stand for sovereignty? Would we stand for the right of […]

The post How Does America Perform on Biden’s Test? first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]> A slice of president Joe Biden’s State of the Union address that calls for closer analysis:

Putin’s invasion has been a test for the ages. A test for America. A test for the world.

Would we stand for the most basic of principles?

Would we stand for sovereignty?

Would we stand for the right of people to live free from tyranny?

Would we stand for the defense of democracy?

“Would we stand for the most basic of principles?”

It is important to parse what Biden said. Notice how this is spoken as a series of questions. Biden is not saying that the US stands for the most basic of principles. Neither is he saying that the US (“we”) stands for all principles. He speaks to just the most basic principles. What are those “most basic of principles”?

Is sabotage not a violation of a most basic principle? Veteran journalist Seymour Hersch investigated the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines and the evidence shows that the US did it.

How about America’s much ballyhooed fidelity to so-called free trade? Take the case of China in which the US has recently begun seizing aluminum products imported from China, accusing China of using forced labor in Xinjiang for these products. The US, under Donald Trump’s tenure, had Canada arrest Huawei’s chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou in Vancouver International Airport and place her under house arrest for three years. (What is it they say about justice delayed? Meng was released with all charges against her dismissed by the judge.) The US has applied strong-arm tactics worldwide to have countries reject purchase of Huawei’s 5G network. It tried to force China to give America the social media sensation Tik Tok. It is coercing countries to prevent China from buying chip technology. Is this principled economic competition?

Adhering to signed treaties would seem to qualify as a most basic principle? Yet the string of broken treaties that the US had entered into with Indigenous nations speaks not to standing for principle.

Certainly not committing or partaking in genocide should be at, or very near, the top of a most basic principle list. But the US is founded through genocide and dispossession.

“Would we stand for sovereignty?”

This question is better posed as “Have we stood for sovereignty?”

Does the US respect the sovereignty of Venezuela in trying to impose an unelected Juan Guaido as the Venezuelan president or by abducting Venezuelan diplomats? Does the US respect the sovereignty of Syria by invading the country, stealing the oil and wheat, and attempting regime change? Has the US ever respected the sovereignty of Haiti where it has overthrown elected leaders and occupied the country, exploiting it as a low-wage workforce? In recent times, there is much speculation of an imminent invasion of Haiti by the US. There is also the US’s absence of respect for sovereignty in the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Honduras, Peru, Brazil, Guatemala, Iraq, Iran, Chagos archipelago, Cuba, etc.

And most egregiously, the US has destroyed the sovereignty of the Indigenous nations on Turtle Island.

“Would we stand for the right of people to live free from tyranny?”

How about Palestinians who suffer under Jewish Israeli tyranny? When has Biden stood for Palestinians to live free from tyranny? In fact, Biden proudly claims to be a Zionist.

What is the US but a tyranny of the 1%-ers over the masses? Universal health care, a most basic principle in many countries, is thwarted at each foray by the 1%-ers against the will of the majority of Americans. The US is a country with over half-a-million people enduring the indignity of homelessness. Isn’t that a basic principle? The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Article 25:1) says it is. And the US is a signatory. No matter. It is a non-binding declaration and not a treaty. But then treaties don’t seem to matter either to the US.

Emphatically, the Indigenous people in the undeniably stolen landmass called the US live under tyranny.

“Would we stand for the defense of democracy?”

Is democracy what the US stands for in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, Morocco, Egypt, Jordan, Libya, etc?

What is democratic about mandating experimental so-called vaccines on the population? Writer Ben Bartee considers this to reveal an anarcho-tyranny. As time passes, the establishment’s fraudulent COVID-19 narrative crumbles more and more.

In the case of the US, there are two business parties that control what is fallaciously called democracy. However, if the people would choose social democracy and the pliable Bernie Sanders is their candidate of choice, then the big-money wheels will step in to undo any democratic expression that they consider unacceptable. Thus, the US winds up with a worn-out, intellectually diminishing Biden and his reviled vice president Kamala Harris — a woman whose integrity was destroyed in the presidential debates by Tulsi Gabbard.

The US can claim to stand for democracy when its claim to be such is a sham because the media is part of the controlling apparatus. As Michael Parenti explains in his book Democracy for the Few, democracy in the US is controlled by the moneyed class.

So what the hell was Biden going on about in the speech? And why were all these politicians clapping?

And how does America fare on Biden’s test?

The post How Does America Perform on Biden’s Test? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kim Petersen.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/02/09/how-does-america-perform-on-bidens-test/feed/ 0 371265 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/02/02/residential-schools-and-other-evils/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/02/02/residential-schools-and-other-evils/#respond Thu, 02 Feb 2023 14:30:22 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=137398 Graphic by Julie Maas The Williams Lake First Nation of British Columbia has announced discovery of another 66 sites which are possibly the graves of children on land of the St. Joseph Mission Residential School which closed in 1981. 93 suspected burial sites were previously announced. Control of the school passed from the Catholic Mission […]

The post Residential Schools and Other Evils first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]> Graphic by Julie Maas
The Williams Lake First Nation of British Columbia has announced discovery of another 66 sites which are possibly the graves of children on land of the St. Joseph Mission Residential School which closed in 1981. 93 suspected burial sites were previously announced. Control of the school passed from the Catholic Mission to the federal government in 1969. Approximately two thousand “anomalies” or possible graves have been detected by earth scanning instruments. Historical records indicated the deaths of only sixteen of the attending children. Geophysical analysis has been applied to 34 hectares so far of the 782 hectares to be assessed.

In response to a class action suit brought by 325 First Nations, the Trudeau government (awaiting court approval) has awarded a 2.8 billion dollar settlement, for a Trust which will attempt to repair damages caused by residential schooling. Funding to recompense individual damages was previously provided under the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, approved by all parties in 2006 and Canada’s courts in 2007, costing the government $1.9 billion. An additional 27 million dollars was provided in 2021 to investigate unmarked graves.

There’s still a problem with this way of proceeding with historical crimes that have contravened the Convention on Genocide. Paying off damaged survivors of a genocide without addressing through the law the atrocities committed, suggests pay-offs as a business expense for the worst crimes known to humankind. But genocide isn’t simply an intentional crime — in this case, against Indigenous people — it’s a crime against society. Since this is a crime against humanity, such acts must be applied by a society under its legal system. [Whose legal system? The law of the First peoples or colonial law? — DV ed] Most of those directly responsible for the crimes of residential schools have passed away.

The challenge of a future — which will not be at the service of these crimes of the past or allow further crimes to protect the established colonial cultures — might be to identify and adjudicate the actual crimes committed, both under domestic law and the Convention on Genocide which has no statute of limitations. Does it seem ridiculous to apply the full force of international law to clerics and government administrators who facilitated the crimes of residential schooling? This possibility is rigorously avoided by the government, Canada’s left wing and right wing, and all Canadian media and alternative media.

If genocide is not confronted under law, there is little to discourage its continuation. Nightslantern.ca has noted about 50 informal genocide warnings for Indigenous peoples in Canada since 2005. To note one recent specific case: the Sipekne’katik First Nation.

In 2020, attempts were made to shut down the independent lobstering of the Sipekne’katik. The Nation’s boats were harassed on the water, one burned at the dock, and gear was stolen. Then a warehouse of Sipekne’katik’s harvest was burned to the ground by a mob of commercial fishermen, and the Indigenous people threatened, all in front of police and Department of Fisheries and Oceans personnel who were continually monitoring the First Nation for fisheries infractions. Terrorized by the crimes and threats against their people the community appealed to police and the provincial and federal governments for help. The appeals were minimally answered, leaving the First Nation community under threat for its safety.

These crimes, the terrorization of the community, the damages to the community’s fleet and gear, furthered commercial fishing interests in Nova Scotia, and furthered control of a lucrative and powerful billion-dollar lobstering industry.

Increasingly, the Canadian media portrayed lobstering by the Sipekne’katik as illegal, in this way supporting commercial interests which in turn were supported by the actions of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. The DFO, police, and Coast Guard continued to confiscate the First Nation’s fishing gear, lobster traps and catch, as if these were illegal. The Sipekne’katik lobstering effort was an independent Indigenous fishery allowed by the Supreme Court Marshall decision in 1999 which however was followed by an unsettled legal ambivalence. The government has relied on this ambivalence to assert its control of Indigenous business, i.e., the commercial season, the amounts of catch, etc. (This is familiar ‘Indian management’ policy from the 1800s on the prairies when a First Nation’s food production was limited to consumption and its farmers were not allowed sell their produce).

Without protection of its legal rights to fish, without protection for the safety of its community from corporate interests and those relying on payment from commercial fishing, the Sipekne’katik First Nation had no recourse for its protection. The First Nation’s response was to register a complaint with the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD). The Government of Canada was legally bound to answer by July 14, 2021 but failed to comply with the request until March 14, 2022, and its explanation wasn’t released to the public. The Sipekne’katik First Nation limited lobstering to harvesting a “moderate livelihood” (a food, social ceremonial FSC license) which doesn’t allow commercial sale of the harvest.

Then in August of 2021, the self regulated Sipekne’katik treaty fishery opened its season, without DFO approval. Chief Michael Sacks saw lobstering as an attempt to lift his community out of poverty. He was arrested by fisheries officers, then released and hassled. His gear was confiscated. The First Nation’s gear and traps were taken. In the past two years, 7000 of the Sipekne’katik’s lobster traps were sabotaged, or confiscated by Canada’s DFO without clear legal justification. On January 9, Nova Scotia Judge Tim Landry, threw out the arrests of three Sipekne’katik fishermen because the government prosecution hadn’t established a legal basis for their prosecution.

Chief Sacks has since been replaced by the community’s first woman chief, Michelle Glasgow. Last Spring the federal government gave the Sipekne’katik First Nation $326,700 for research on the site of the Maritimes residential school, Shubenacadie. The residential school processed Indigenous students from 1930 to 1967 with funding by the federal government and management by the Catholic Church. Official histories of the school are usually accompanied by trauma warnings. Despite testimony to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission by school survivors, no unmarked Indigenous graves have yet been identified.

Time passing mutes the community’s fear, and ignores the commercial fishermen’s quandary of having to support company interests, the source of their livelihoods, against the human and legal rights of the Indigenous people. The federal government is paying the Sipekne’katik community which is the second largest Mi’kmaq band in Nova Scotia, an allocation of 2.73 million dollars toward 20 housing units for some of the cmmunity’s homeless, as part of a larger initiative to create housing across the North. The government is aware of the community’s poverty in a lethal climate, yet deprives the Sipekne’katik’s industry a living. The pay off coincides with the deprivation of what were once legally assured Indigenous rights.

These rights are recognized by Canada’s Senate. In July 2022, a Senate report asked the Federal government a) to let the Mi’kmaq independent fishery move forward under its own rights, and b) for obvious reasons to transfer negotiations with the Indigenous fisheries from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, to Crown-Indigenous Relations. The Senate report affirmed the rights of the Indigenous nations to at least co-manage the fisheries, currently crippled by DOF laws and control. And the Senate report affirmed the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

There is a continual struggle within the national fabric of Canada, within the federal government, about righting the course of history toward the hope for justice. Consider Dr. Peter Henderson Bryce’s report in 1907 on the lethal health conditions of Residential Schools and his The Story of a National Crime: Being a Record of the Health Conditions of the Indians of Canada from 1904 to 1921 in 1922. Or the sound efforts of the 1996 Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, and the reluctant but gradual acceptance of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People. Against the good sense of the Senate report is a deeply entrenched network of privilege and profit serving corporate wealth, with no concern for the survival of any peoples.

The Senate report and the Sipekne’katik First Nation deserve the support of genocide prevention organizations such the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies (MIGS), but with government funds MIGS hasn’t to my knowledge addressed any crimes against North America’s Indigenous peoples. It does properly address the WWII Holocaust, issues affecting Rwanda, and many other areas prone to violations of human rights. Domestic considerations of genocide are dealt with more directly by former European colonies in South America. In Brazil, former President Bolsonaro is under investigation for genocide in his treatment of the Yanomami Indians. In Peru sitting President Boluarte and at east five of her Ministers and former Ministers are under criminal investigation for allegations of genocide among other crimes, as a result of the murder by authorities of largely Indigenous and Mestizo worker-protesters. Here in Canada it’s an ongoing tension, eased by the sincere good intentions of so many Canadians, betrayed by political subservience to corporate profit.¹

1. Partial sources: “‘It’s disheartening’: At least 66 more potential graves found at site of former B.C residential school,” Melanie Nagy, Jan. 25, 2023, CTV News; “Williams Lake First Nation releases early results of former residential school grounds sweep,” Amy Judd, Jan. 24, 2023, Global News; Canada settles residential schools lawsuit for $2.8bn,” Madeline Halpert, Jan. 21, 2023, BBC News; “Canada: Finally an Apology!” June 12, 2008, Unrepresented Nations & Peoples Organization; “Canada: Genocide Warnings & Updates,” J.B. Gerald, as of Jan 30, 2023, nightslantern.ca; “Sipekne’katik to receive $2.7M for 20 affordable housing units,” Feleshia Chandler, May 13, 2021, CBC; “Senate report calls for rights-based Indigenous fisheries,” The Canadian Press, July 13, 2022, Canada’s National Observer; “Nova Scotia judge dismisses charges against Sipekne’katik fishermen,” Paul Withers, Jan. 10, 2023, CBC News; “Indigenous Fisheries vs. Mob Rule,” J.B.Gerald, May 14, 2021, nightslantern.ca; “Nova Scotia cracks down on lobster operators to protect industry’s ‘integrity’” Paul Withers, Jan. 25, 2023, CBC News.

The post Residential Schools and Other Evils first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by J.B. Gerald.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/02/02/residential-schools-and-other-evils/feed/ 0 369233 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/18/allegations-of-genocide-return-to-peru/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/18/allegations-of-genocide-return-to-peru/#respond Wed, 18 Jan 2023 16:10:48 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=137030 The Peruvian Prosecutor’s Office has placed she who claims the country’s presidency, Dina Bolurate under investigation for crimes including genocide, resulting from her government’s treatment of protesters who prefer the elected President Pedro Castillo. Now much of her government is under investigation for genocide (“genocide, qualified homicide and serious injuries”): Alberto Otarola (the prime minister […]

The post Allegations of Genocide Return to Peru first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]> The Peruvian Prosecutor’s Office has placed she who claims the country’s presidency, Dina Bolurate under investigation for crimes including genocide, resulting from her government’s treatment of protesters who prefer the elected President Pedro Castillo. Now much of her government is under investigation for genocide (“genocide, qualified homicide and serious injuries”): Alberto Otarola (the prime minister who just resigned), minister of defense Jorge Chavez, minister of the interior Victor Rojas, a previous prime minister Pedro Angulo and previous Minister of the Interior Cesar Cervantes.¹

How did this happen? An intractable well entrenched right-wing Congress impeded the the people’s elected President’s agenda, brought charges against him and his appointees for corruption and tried three time to impeach him. To forestall an impeachment attempt Pedro Castillo dissolved the Congress, as allowed by Peruvian law. Publicly unverified reports may establish a meeting between the U.S. Ambassador (a former CIA agent) and Peru’s Minister of Defense²  who threw his support instead to the right-wing Congress: Castillo was displaced on Dec. 7, 2022. Immediately the U.S., Canada, European Union, supported as Peru’s president, Dina Bolurate, Castillo’s vice-president. Bolivia, Argentina, Mexico, Venezuela, Columbia among others supported President Pedro Castillo.

As of January 15, Security forces murdered about 50 protesters, including the victims of the Ayacucho massacre (Dec. 15, 2022) and Juliaca massacre (Jan. 9, 2023), in military actions by police and armed forces against Indigenous peoples, mestizos, workers who seem to be without weapons.

Displaced president Castillo is in prison, accused of attempting to overthrow the democratic process with a coup. Castillo, Indigenous, was a teacher, a union leader, a Marxist, elected in 2021 by a small majority in a race against Keiko Fujimori who wouldn’t concede defeat.

Keiko Fujimori’s forces included an entrenched Fujimori political machine and the extreme right wing. She enjoyed the support of the current U.S. Ambassador and U.S. literati favorite, the nobelist Vargas Llosa. Keiko Fujimori assured supporters her primary mission if elected was to free her father, former president Alberto Fujimori, serving extended prison sentences for human rights crimes such as murder, kidnapping etc., and embezzlement, bribery, corruption. In 2017 the elder Fujimori was pardoned by then President of Peru Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, in exchange for support in Peru’s Congress to further Kuczynski’s political agenda. The pardon was overturned by Peru’s Supreme Court in 2018 and Fujimori re-imprisoned.

Allegations of genocide accompanied Fujimori the father’s near extermination of the largely Indigenous/mestizo Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso), as well as his programs of sterilizing Indian women and men without their informed consent. Fujimori’s victories were assured by application of ruthless military force. Victims of his domestic policies were most often mestizo or Indigenous peoples but most of the military was equally mestizo and Indigenous so the huge numbers of fatalities of Shining Path adherents couldn’t be ethnically or racially differentiated from military casualties, unless one supposed a genocide of the Indigenous related population by setting one part against the other.

Through crimes of atrocity Fujimori the father gathered extremist support which remained an element of control through fear by Peru’s privileged elite. It was not surprising that as soon as Castillo took office he and his appointees came under attack from the elite’s attorneys, usually with charges of corruption. His platform for election included promises to redistribute Peru’s mining resources.

The Parliament which serves right wing corporate interests began a series of impeachment attempts. After Fujimori’s total war on the Shining Path anyone resisting fascism became a “terrorist.” The workers / protesters recently murdered by Security forces were described on police records as “terrorists.”³

In a sense this story is the familiar destabilization and takeover of a non-NATO country by the CIA. Like corporate programs, CIA policies seem not to be limited by one administration or another or time-reliant on individual leadership, but endure in waiting until applicable.

However since inception of such takeovers the world has changed.

In Venezuela of 2002, President Hugo Chávez was displaced by a parliamentary coup of the Euro-privileged – those who serve corporate interest, yet was re-instated by the people because of his strong identification with the people’s interests, mestizo, Euro, Indigenous, Black – workers. His chosen successor Nicolás Maduro has remained in power as the elected President despite the unsuccessful attempt by the U.S.,Canada, the U.K etc. to replace him with their puppet, Juan Guaidó, in a putsch which attempted the theft of a portion of Venezuela’s gold reserves.

In Guatemala the former dictator – U.S. and Israel supported Efraín Ríos Montt was convicted of genocide in 2013 for his mangement of the dirty war against the Indigenous people / workers, a judicial decision vacated by the elite’s corruption of the judicial system and challenged until his death.

In 2019 the President of Bolivia, Evo Morales (Indigenous) was replaced by the well-honed manipulative politics of Jeanine Ãñez a Senator backed by the U.S. and the country’s elite. Currently she serves 10 years in prison convicted of crimes against the state for her part in the coup.

In Argentina. 2022, a Trumpian coup by supporters of former fascist President Jair Bolsonaru was squashed by the legitimate government of socialist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

Leftists, socialist leaders, Indigenous allied leaders, are challenged by capitalist usually racist interests. Generally the poor, the workers, the majority are largely Indigenous or of mixed blood, so the European oriented elite’s control risks falling under the caveats of the Convention on Genocide.

Concerning Canada, in 2022 Pope Francis publicly understood Canadian historical treatment of First Peoples as a genocide. And the House of Commons found the Residential Schools Program to have been a genocide – the government’s initial attempts to classify its treatment of the children as victims of “cultural genocide” gives way to a people’s recognition of “genocide.” The issue of “genocide” as applied to contemporary treatment of some First People’s tribes, has not reached the courts. In Canada application of the Convention is ultimately at the discretion of the Minister of Justice.

By 2023 we live in a world where European colonialism was called to account in the 1960s with the liberation struggles of Africa. North America’s disappearance of for instance 6 million Indians in lands which became the USA is increasingly recognized as a genocide rather than a conquest or settlement of uninhabited regions. A different mindset evolves in our understanding of history and of genocide.. Covert programs of taking over nations of basically Indigenous peoples by replacing their leaders with puppets of the Euro-elite becomes genocidal.

Points to consider:

One of the first acts proposed under Peru’s right wing Congress after it ousted President Castillo was to strip the Amazon’s uncontacted tribes of land areas reserved for them, to deny them protection and safety on lands sought by resource extractors.⁴  The legislation gives evidence of a clear intent to destroy a racial. ethnic group.

The allegations of genocide which became an issue during Fujimori’s attempts to extinguish the flame of Sendero Luminoso – the Shining Path, and the clarity of his efforts to sacrifice the Indigenous related population by advancing U.S. and U.N. sourced birth control programs on native peoples without their informed consent, become more easy to prove. Attempts to charge Fujimori the father with genocide for these crimes appeared and disappeared for twenty-five years and remain unadjudicated, signifying extreme opposition to application of the Convention itself in Peru, to politicians on the far-right or in mafia-like political families. On January 11, 2021, the most recent attempt to hold a hearing on the forced sterilization of several hundred thousand Peruvian women and directly accusing Fujimorri the elder, his health ministers and various doctors, was closed after an hour due to the court’s inability to translate all twelve of the dialects spoken by native Quechua witnesses.⁵

On January 17, 2023 people from all through Peru attempted to march together in Lima to express the will of the Four Nations (not the British four nations but those derived from the ancient nations of the Inca empire): remove Dina Bolurate from 0ffice and free Pedro Castillo from prison.⁶ To begin with…. There is momentum throughout Peru to counter the coup by Peru’s Congress and reinstate Pedro Castillo as the people’s elected President.

The crime of Genocide has no statute of limitations. Aspects of the crime are cumulative. The successes of genocide’s perpetrators become evidence of guilt which the judicial systems of the Americas are likely to confront as they gain control of their own resources. This is likely to be accompanied by the increasing political power of Indigenous peoples and their rights to resource land. It’s to the interest of Peru’s privileged to assure just representation to the Peruvian people.

1. “Genocide investigation opened against Peru president after protest deaths,” Agence France-Presse, Jan 11, 2023, Guardian.
2. “CIA Coup in Peru Explodes into Violence,” Kurt Nimmo & Ben Norton, Jan. 13, 2023, Global Reseach.
3. “Peru’s President Dina Boluarte appoints new intelligence chief,” Diego Lopez Marina, Jan. 10, 2023, Perú reports.
4. “Peru lawmakers propose bill to strip Indigenous people of protections,” Dec. 23, 2022, Guardian.
5. “Peru’s government forcibly sterilized Indigenous women from 1996 to 2001, the women say. Why?” Ñusta Carranza Ko, Feb.19, 2021 Washington Post.
6. “Thousands of Farmers Continue Advancing Towards Lima,” Jan. 17, 2023, Telesur.

The post Allegations of Genocide Return to Peru first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by J.B. Gerald.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/18/allegations-of-genocide-return-to-peru/feed/ 0 365326 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/13/the-winds-of-the-new-cold-war-are-howling-in-the-arctic-circle/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/13/the-winds-of-the-new-cold-war-are-howling-in-the-arctic-circle/#respond Fri, 13 Jan 2023 01:21:59 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=136883 Spiridonov Yuri Vasilyevich (Sakha), Landlord of the Moma Mountains, 2006. In 1996, the eight countries on the Arctic rim – Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden, and the United States – formed the Arctic Council, a journey that began in 1989 when Finland approached the other countries to hold a discussion about the Arctic […]

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Spiridonov Yuri Vasilyevich (Sakha), Landlord of the Moma Mountains, 2006.

In 1996, the eight countries on the Arctic rim – Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden, and the United States – formed the Arctic Council, a journey that began in 1989 when Finland approached the other countries to hold a discussion about the Arctic environment. The Finnish initiative led to the Rovaniemi Declaration (1991), which established the council’s precursor, the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy.

The main concern for these governments at the time was the impact of ‘global pollution and resulting environmental threats’ to the Arctic, which was destroying the region’s ecosystem. There was little understanding of the scale and implications of the polar ice cap melting (consensus about that danger was amplified by the research of scientists such as Xiangdong Zhang and John Walsh in 2006 and the Fourth Assessment Report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007). The Arctic Council’s remit was later expanded to include investigations on climate change and development in the region.

More recently, at the 2021 ministerial meeting of the Arctic Council in Reykjavík (Iceland), Russia took over as the organisation’s rotating two-year chair. However, on 3 March 2022 – exactly one week after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – the other council members began to boycott meetings in protest of Moscow’s involvement in the group. In June 2022, these seven countries agreed to ‘implement a limited resumption of our work in the Arctic Council on projects that do not involve the participation of the Russian Federation’. In essence, the council’s future is at stake.

Andreas Alariesto (Sápmi), Away, Bad Spirit, 1976.

Yet, geopolitical tensions in the Arctic did not begin last year. They have been simmering for more than a decade as these eight countries have jockeyed for control over the area – not to stem the dangers of climate change, but to exploit the vast deposits of minerals, metals, and fossil fuels that are present within the 21 million square kilometres of the Arctic Circle. The region is estimated to contain 22% of the world’s undiscovered oil and natural gas (although extraction from this region remains expensive). Far more lucrative is the mining of rare earth minerals (such as neodymium for capacitors and electric motors and terbium for magnets and lasers), whose value across the Arctic – from Greenland’s Kvanefjeld to Russia’s Kola Peninsula to the Canadian Shield – is estimated to be at least one trillion dollars. Each member of the Arctic Council is racing to establish control over these precious resources, which, until now, have been locked beneath the melting ice.

Because more than half of the Arctic is made up of international waters and the continental shelves of these eight countries (i.e., landmass that extends into shallow ocean waters), its regulation largely falls under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which is ratified by 168 parties. According to the UNCLOS, the sovereignty of a coastal state extends to its territorial sea, defined as the area within 12 nautical miles from the low-water line of their coast. States also have the right to create an ‘exclusive economic zone’ within 200 nautical miles of that low-water mark, where many of these resources are located. As a result, exploitation of the Arctic’s resources is mainly the domain of the council’s member states and is largely outside of multilateral control. However, the UNCLOS does constrain individual state sovereignty by declaring that the deep seabed is the ‘common heritage’ of humanity and its exploration and exploitation ‘shall be carried out for the benefits of mankind as a whole, irrespective of the geographical location of States’.

Lucy Qinnuayuak (Kinngait), Children Followed by Bird Spirit, 1967.

The UN created the International Seabed Authority (ISA) to implement the UNCLOS treaty. In Kingston (Jamaica), the ISA’s legal and technical commission is developing a mining code to regulate exploration and exploitation of the international seabed area. It is worth noting that one fifth of the commission’s members are from mining companies. While there is no possibility of enacting a global moratorium on deep-sea mining – even in the Arctic, despite the 1959 Antarctic Treaty effectively banning mining on that continent – a mining code that favours mining companies will not only increase exploitation, but also increase competition and the risk of conflict between major powers. This competition has already intensified the New Cold War between North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) states – led by the US – and countries such as China and Russia and has led to the rapid militarisation of the Arctic.

Every member of the Arctic Council has already created military bases on the Arctic rim, with the race to dominate the region accelerating after 2007, when Russian scientists symbolically placed a titanium flag on the Arctic seabed, 4,302 metres below the North Pole. Artur Chilingarov, the Russian explorer who led this geographical expedition, said that he was motivated by science and a concern for climate change and that ‘the Arctic must be protected not in words, but in deeds’. Nonetheless, the Russian geological expedition was used as a pretext to expand militarisation in the region. For decades, the US has had a military presence deep inside the Arctic Circle, the Thule Air Base in Greenland, which it developed in the 1950s after Denmark – the colonial ruler over Greenland – joined NATO. Other Arctic littoral countries, too, have long had military forces that traverse the ice and snows of the north, a presence that has grown in recent years. Canada, for instance, is building the Nanisivik Naval Facility on Baffin Island, Nunavut, aiming for it to be operational in 2023. Meanwhile, over the past decade, Russia has renovated the Nagurskoye air base in Alexandra Land and the Temp air base on Kotelny Island.

Sivtsev Ellay Semenovitch (USSR), On the Bull, 1963.

The Arctic Council was one of the few multilateral institutions to facilitate communication between the powers in the region. Now, seven of them have decided to no longer participate. Five of these abstaining members (Canada, Denmark, Iceland, Norway, and the US) are already part of NATO, while the remaining two (Finland and Sweden) are being fast-tracked into the organisation. Increasingly, NATO is replacing the Arctic Council as a decision-making authority in the region, with its operations based out of the Centre of Excellence for Cold Weather Operations in Norway. Since 2006, this hub has brought together NATO allies and partners for biannual military exercises in the Arctic called Cold Response.

In May 2019, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo went to the Arctic Council meeting in Rovaniemi (Finland) and accused China of being responsible for environmental destruction in the Arctic. Although China has launched a Polar Silk Road project, there is no real evidence that China has played a particularly deleterious role in the northern sea lanes. This hostile comment towards China and similar sentiments about Russia’s role in the Arctic are part of the ideological battle to justify the New Cold War. Less than a month after Pompeo’s speech, the US Department of Defence released its Arctic Strategy (2019), which focused on ‘limiting the ability of China and Russia to leverage the region as a corridor for competition’ (a mood repeated in the US Air Force’s 2020 Arctic Strategy).

Per Enoksson (Sápmi), Sing, Sing, Sing-along Song, 2008–2010.

In October 2022, Reykjavík hosted its annual Arctic Circle gathering, attended by all of the major powers, except Russia, which was not invited. Iceland’s former President Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, who was embroiled in the 2016 Panama Papers corruption scandal, chaired the keynote speech given by the Dutch Admiral Rob Bauer, chairman of the NATO Military Committee. Bauer said that NATO must have a more muscular presence in the Arctic in order to check Russia as well as China, which he called ‘another authoritarian regime that does not share our values and undermines the rules-based international order’. China’s Polar Silk Road, Admiral Bauer said, is merely a shield behind which Chinese ‘naval formations could move more quickly from the Pacific to the Atlantic, and submarines could shelter in the Arctic’.

During the discussion period, China’s ambassador to Iceland, He Rulong, rose from his seat to say to the NATO admiral, ‘Your speech and remark are full of arrogance and also paranoid. The Arctic region is an area for high cooperation and low confrontation… The Arctic plays an important role when it comes to climate change… Every country should be part of this process’. China, he continued, should not be ‘singled out [from] the cooperation’. Grímsson closed the session after He’s intervention to muted laughter in the hall.

Maria Petrovna Vyucheyskaya (USSR), Going to a Demonstration, 1932–1933.

Absent from most of these discussions are the indigenous communities who live in the Arctic: the Aleut and Yupik (United States); the Inuit (Canada, Greenland, and the United States); the Chukchi, Evenk, Khanty, Nenets, and Sakha (Russia); and the Saami (Finland, Norway, Russia, and Sweden). Though these communities are represented by six organisations on the Arctic Council – the Aleut International Association, the Arctic Athabaskan Council, the Gwich’in Council, the Inuit Circumpolar Council, and the Russian Association of Indigenous People of the North, and the Saami Council – their voices have been further muted during the intensified conflict.

This silencing of indigenous voices reminds me of Nils-Aslak Valkeapää (1943–2001), the great Saami artist, whose poetry rattles like the sound of the wind:

Can you hear the sounds of life
in the roaring of the creek
in the blowing of the wind

That is all I want to say
that is all

The post The Winds of the New Cold War Are Howling in the Arctic Circle first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Vijay Prashad.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/13/the-winds-of-the-new-cold-war-are-howling-in-the-arctic-circle/feed/ 0 364173 https://www.radiofree.org/2022/12/21/ten-surprisingly-good-things-that-happened-in-2022/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/12/21/ten-surprisingly-good-things-that-happened-in-2022/#respond Wed, 21 Dec 2022 15:50:33 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=136341 Brazil’s President-elect Lula with indigenous activists at COP27 — Photo: COP27 Press Pool With wars raging in Ukraine, Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere, Roe v. Wade overturned and our resources being wasted on militarism instead of addressing the climate crisis, it can be hard to remember the hard-won progress being made. As we end a difficult […]

The post Ten Surprisingly Good Things that Happened in 2022 first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>
Brazil’s President-elect Lula with indigenous activists at COP27 — Photo: COP27 Press Pool

With wars raging in Ukraine, Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere, Roe v. Wade overturned and our resources being wasted on militarism instead of addressing the climate crisis, it can be hard to remember the hard-won progress being made. As we end a difficult year, let’s pause to remind ourselves of some of the positive changes that happened in 2022 that should inspire us to do more in the year to come. While some are only partial gains, they are all steps towards a more just, peaceful and sustainable world.

1. The growth of Latin America’s “Pink Tide.” Continuing the wave of progressive wins in 2021, Latin America saw two new critical electoral victories: Gustavo Petro in Colombia and Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in Brazil.  When President Biden’s June Summit of the Americas excluded Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela, several Latin American leaders declined to attend, while others used the opportunity to push the United States to respect the sovereignty of the countries in the region. (Stay tuned for CODEPINK’s spring forum “In Search of a New U.S. Policy for a New Latin America.”)

2. The U.S. labor movement caught fire. In 2022 we witnessed the brilliant organizing of Chris Smalls and the Amazon workers, Starbucks reached nearly 7,000 unionized workers and close to 300 unionized stores. Requests to the National Labor Relations Board to hold union elections were up 58% in the first eight months of 2022.  Labor is back and fighting the good fight.

3. Despite assaults on our elections, people fought back and gained some notable wins.

Voters delivered victories for progressives in districts across the country, including in Texas, Illinois, Michigan, Florida, Hawaii, California, Pennsylvania and Vermont, and Democrats kept control of the Senate. Young people showed up at the polls in record numbers—one out of eight voters in the midterms was under the age of 30. Abortion rights won in states where it was on the ballot (California, Michigan and Vermont) and in the “red” state of Kentucky, voters rejected a proposed amendment to the Kentucky constitution that would declare there is no constitutional right to an abortion. Another plus: Every election denier running to oversee state elections lost.

4. Peace comes to Ethiopia. After a devastating two-year civil war that left hundreds of thousands dead and millions displaced and facing starvation, the federal government of Ethiopia and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) signed a peace treaty on November 2, 2022. The surprise deal came out of peace talks convened by the African Union. So far, the fighting has ceased, and both parties vowed that they are determined to make the peace deal last.

5. Mainstream media finally did right by Julian Assange, as his international support grew.

The New York Times, the Guardian, Le Monde, El País and Der Spiegel–the media outlets that published WikiLeaks’ revelations 12 years ago—finally called on President Biden to free Assange. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese (Assange is an Australian citizen) also finally said he has personally urged the U.S. government to end its pursuit of Assange. More enthusiastic has been his support in Latin America, with calls for his release coming from President Gustavo Petro in Colombia, Mexico’s President Lopez Obrador, Nicaragua’s President Daniel Ortega, Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro, and Brazil’s President-elect Lula da Silva.

6. Indigenous and Global South voices were finally heard at the largest climate summit, COP27.

Thanks to the relentless work of Indigenous peoples and organizers from the Global South, marginalized communities not only got into COP27 this year but their voices were finally heard and a historic loss and damage fund was established to help vulnerable countries cope with the destructive impacts of climate change. The development marks an important achievement for civil society and collective action in the Global South that has been nearly three decades in the making. Now we have to push the wealthier countries to come through with the funds, and to finally get serious about our own transition to clean energy before it is too late to avoid global catastrophe.

7. Some 200 countries (minus the U.S. and the Vatican) commit to stemming the loss of nature worldwide. Another critical environmental gathering, the COP15 Biodiversity Summit in Canada, reached a watershed agreement pledging to protect nearly one-third of Earth’s land and oceans as a refuge for the planet’s remaining wild plants and animals by 2030–dubbed “30 by 30.” This agreement is critical to stemming the massive loss of diversity—about a million species are at risk of disappearing forever. But it will take constant grassroots pressure, and significant resources from the wealthier countries, to put this 30 by 30 goal into practice.

8. The passage of the Respect for Marriage Act.  The U.S. Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage nationwide in 2015 but the court’s June decision overturning a right to abortion at the federal level raised concerns that federal protections for same-sex marriage might be in jeopardy. The Respect for Marriage Act was passed to address this by guaranteeing federal recognition of any marriage between two individuals if the union was valid in the state where it was performed. It won’t force states to issue same-sex marriage licenses should nationwide marriage equality be overturned by the Supreme Court but it will extend equality under the law to all same-sex couples, no matter which state they got married in. It also protects interracial marriages.

9. The World Cup put the spotlight on Palestine. The World Cup was a spectacular event that created a sense of global solidarity and joy, with Argentina’s win lifting up all of Latin America. But the fans, especially from Muslim and Arab countries, put the spotlight on another place in the world: Palestine. Palestinian flags and chants popped up everywhere–on the field, in the bleachers, on the streets, while videos showing Israeli journalists being ostracized went viral. At least for the month of these games, the call to “Free Palestine” went global.

10. A multi-polar world is here. China’s enormously ambitious Belt and Road Initiative now encompasses over 80 countries. And with the U.S. abusing its economic power by imposing extraterritorial sanctions against countries all over the globe, the push for alternatives to the dollar has exploded. Over a dozen countries have asked to join BRICS (the alliance of the powerful economies of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), whose countries account for 40 percent of the global population and 25 percent of the world’s GDP. BRICS members are already transacting their bilateral trade in local currencies. And new or strengthened non-aligned movements have emerged in Latin America and Africa. A multi-polar world is already a reality for much of the world, and this is actually better for people everywhere–even for Americans–than one where the U.S. keeps using war, militarism and coercive financial sanctions to try to prolong its post-Cold War unipolar moment into our new century.

*****

Perhaps what we should be most thankful about in 2022 is that we are still alive, even as the conflict raging in Ukraine has brought the U.S. and Russia to the very brink of nuclear war. The civilians of Ukraine, the soldiers on both sides, and people all around the world are suffering from this brutal conflict, which is–in President Biden’s words–putting the world at risk of a nuclear Armageddon. Where there is life, there is hope, but if we hope to celebrate another holiday season in 2023, we had better find a way to bring all sides to the negotiating table. May peace prevail in 2023!

The post Ten Surprisingly Good Things that Happened in 2022 first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Medea Benjamin.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/12/21/ten-surprisingly-good-things-that-happened-in-2022/feed/ 0 359292 https://www.radiofree.org/2022/12/21/shocking-health-crisis-for-brazils-yanomami/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/12/21/shocking-health-crisis-for-brazils-yanomami/#respond Wed, 21 Dec 2022 15:24:47 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=136345 Desperately malnourished Yanomami children, Surucucus region. © URIHI – Associação Yanomami A devastating new report has revealed the full extent of the crisis in the Yanomami territory caused by a massive invasion of illegal goldminers: – Yanomami children are dying from malnutrition at a rate 191 times greater than Brazil’s average. – Deaths of Yanomami children […]

The post Shocking Health Crisis for Brazil’s Yanomami first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>
Desperately malnourished Yanomami children, Surucucus region. © URIHI – Associação Yanomami

A devastating new report has revealed the full extent of the crisis in the Yanomami territory caused by a massive invasion of illegal goldminers:

– Yanomami children are dying from malnutrition at a rate 191 times greater than Brazil’s average.

– Deaths of Yanomami children under five from preventable diseases are 9 times the national average.

Other data published recently emphasize the scale of the emergency afflicting the Yanomami:

– A study by UNICEF and Fiocruz reveals that eight out of ten Yanomami children under the age of five in the regions of Auaris and Maturacá have chronic malnutrition.

New photos released by the Yanomami health organization Urihi show desperately malnourished children and adults in villages of the Surucucus region. Just two weeks ago, goldminers attacked and destroyed a health clinic serving several Yanomami communities – it had already been abandoned by health workers, who feared an attack.

Desperately malnourished Yanomami woman, Surucucus region. © URIHI – Associação Yanomami

Junior Hekurari Yanomami, President of the Yanomami Health District, says this is a “humanitarian crisis” and that the Yanomami “are weeping [for their dead] every day and every night. They have been mourning for months…. There are no medicines and no permanent health care.”

Survival International’s Director of Research and Advocacy Fiona Watson, who has worked with the Yanomami for more than thirty years, said today: “It’s impossible to overstate just how unprecedented and appalling the situation in the Yanomami territory is now.

“The Yanomami rarely suffer from malnutrition in normal circumstances. Their forests are bountiful; they are experts at growing, gathering and hunting everything they need, and they enjoy excellent health.

“This is a deliberate, man-made crisis, stoked by President Bolsonaro, who has encouraged the mass invasion and destruction of the Yanomami’s lands. Their rivers and fish are now polluted with toxic levels of mercury, criminal gangs control access to many of the communities, the Yanomami are being attacked, raped and killed, and their children are literally starving to death.

“It’s absolutely vital that as soon as he takes office President-elect Lula acts immediately to prevent the Yanomami from being wiped out. He needs to send in emergency health teams, and evict the miners. And then ensure they don’t come back. There is absolutely no room for delay.”

*****

1. The first two health statistics above come from a new report by A Publica, using official health data obtained through Freedom of Information laws.

2. Illegal gold miners have also been spotted very near a community of uncontacted Yanomami, and a newly-constructed illegal mining road has also been discovered.

The post Shocking Health Crisis for Brazil’s Yanomami first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Survival International.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/12/21/shocking-health-crisis-for-brazils-yanomami/feed/ 0 359322 https://www.radiofree.org/2022/12/20/no-brainer-what-is-a-solstice/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/12/20/no-brainer-what-is-a-solstice/#respond Tue, 20 Dec 2022 15:54:26 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=136290 It is always funny and sad reading reports from the Chronicle of Higher Education, and now, drum roll, a 26-page report: A ‘Stunning’ Level of Student Disconnection Professors are reporting record numbers of students checked out, stressed out, and unsure of their future. In 20 years of teaching at Doane University, Kate Marley has never seen anything […]

The post No Brainer: What is a Solstice? first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>

It is always funny and sad reading reports from the Chronicle of Higher Education, and now, drum roll, a 26-page report: A ‘Stunning’ Level of
Student Disconnection Professors are reporting record numbers of students checked out, stressed out, and unsure of their future.

In 20 years of teaching at Doane University, Kate Marley has never seen anything like it. Twenty to 30 percent of her students do not show up for class or complete any of the assignments. The moment she begins to speak, she says, their brains seem to shut off. If she asks questions on what she’s been talking about, they don’t have any idea. On tests they struggle to recall basic information.

“Stunning” is the word she uses to describe the level of disengagement she and her colleagues have witnessed across the Nebraska campus. “I don’t seem to be capable of motivating them to read textbooks or complete assignments,” she says of that portion of her students. “They are kind kids. They are really nice to know and talk with. I enjoy them as people.” But, she says, “I can’t figure out how to help them learn.”

Marley, a biology professor, hesitates to talk to her students about the issue, for fear of making them self-conscious, but she has a pretty good idea of what is happening. In addition to two years of shifting among online, hybrid, and in-person classes, many students have suffered deaths in their families, financial insecurity, or other pandemic-related trauma. That adds up to a lot of stress and exhaustion. In a first-year seminar last fall, Marley says, she provided mental-health counseling referrals to seven out of her 17 students.

Oh, so much to unpack just in these paragraphs, let alone from the report. Hmm, so, since 1983 I have been teaching at colleges and universities, both community colleges and state universities, and even a private high end (sic) college. Seattle, Auburn, Spokane, El Paso, Las Cruces, and, other places, including Portland and Vancouver. I have also been a graduate student twice, with two hard-earned master’s degrees, while teaching at the same time.

Disengaged is another term for dead-end capitalism. Or, go follow the money. Or, the rich get richer and the poor get nothing. Amazing how quickly the baseline has shifted: When I was an undergraduate, I could fill up the car for $9 bucks, drive to Mexico, do a diving trip, get on a train and hit up Chihuahua and Copper Canyon and end up spending $50 with some good tequila and food thrown in. That was a trip that enabled culture, man, cross cultural learning, and using a language other than my primary one, and interacting with people, sea, land, and getting life to the fullest.

Not really possible today without a big wad of Benjamins, for sure, and, yes, there are no sleepy little calm fishing villages in Mexico or Central America anymore. It is a war zone in most places now for the on-the-cheap traveler.

This world, now especially, is part of the quickening, as youth are seeing the collapse of so much around them. Parents are on meds, and so much work is needed to patch up communities. Disengagement is also seeded throughout the public. Stay at home and slurp up terrible flicks on Netflix and see your life frittered away. The backyard is the playground. Go out to eat through the drive thru, or do take-in. The fabric of a community has always been frayed. Columbine, you know, suburbs of ennui and sick video games.

The K12 schools are rotting to the core, and that includes so much politicalization, so much mediocracy, so much empty heads, rah-rah, political incorrectness, so much cancel, litigation, and the end of history, so to speak: right-wing nuts are always right-wing nuts, and the liberal class is ugly in shutting down debate, so ugly on the PC and cultural vapidity. It costs money to do basketball or baseball since summer leagues are what it’s all about. Sick capitalism.

Main Street is rolling up, thanks to on-line hell shopping, and meds are the way for 50 percent of the peeps, and, the oppressive politics of dementia at the top, war mongering in the middle, and even the metro-sexuals and the middle of the road “liberals” have created splattered thinking. No one wants to be involved, and TikTok is Jerry Springer on steroids. Sick, painful, hurtful, prat fall, bridge jumper fun for all. That also has created a toxic background noise.

What to know, what to learn, how to move one step ahead? So, this is a racist country, but the new and next gilded age and classism are also on steroids.

It is one giant psychological experiment, swarm fear thinking, hive bandwagoning. Just one big event — Ukraine’s racism, attacks on civlians, the American Coup of Maidan, all of that, while this creep and smoke and mirrors criminal, Zelensky, gets more and more bucks, propaganda kudos and a complete psychological training on how to manipulate his own people, the gentiles, the Nazis — it is emblematic of the entire grift. And then what is happening in Europe, and in Canada, and in the USA, how this dialing for war lord bucks game never ends, nary a protest launched, and then the absolute corruption in that country, the new Jerusalem, and then the 24-hour news covering it, as in lies and bigger lies 24-7; and then China, and then COP26, and then the economy, stupid, and the celebrity venereal disease that is marketing and info-tainment and coverage of the most meaningless stuff. How can youth get a handle on anything, and so why is poetry important or learning what photosynthesis is? Where is the job and money in that?

How to bring a classroom into the community, and how to engage across all disciplines, and how to respect faculty, how to downgrade the institutional learning-management departments, and how to defund the Admin Class? Sports and campuses that are going hybrid? This must end before learning can begin.

Yep, being a true blue radical faculty is tough because careerism and the death of the true liberal class have created a campus and set of cohorts who are in many cases checked out and co-opted by capitalism.

As I’ve said many times — we need education that is cooperative teaching and mentoring across curriculums, and we need the business schools to go the way of the dodo, and why in hell are their ROTC programs in these schools, and what the hell are the drone degrees doing in schools? How much influence do those private and government grants have on the ethos and philosophy of a school?

K12? A complete overhaul, and then again, end Capitalism. You see, the people in a representative democracy need their own lobby, i.e. the poor people’s lobby, and the getting poorer lobby. End the tax abatements, the tax dodging, and alas, really, end shit jobs. Bring together the many generations, and of course, this is about dental-health-mental health-nutrition clinics in all neighborhoods, and then flip the curriculum and have those places as incubators of youth helping their communities. End this for-profit-everything/anything mentality.

Engaging youth in college? What the hell, man? So many chronic illneses, GAD (general anxiety disorder) and so much collective Stockholm Syndrome. The people in the Yale-Harvard-Elite Schools camp are running roughshod over us, the people, over the youth, with all of this techno hell, all of this tracking and Chromebook-soon-to-be-at-home-miseducation. Imagine a world without art classes, music, hiking, botany, learning city zoning by walking the hoods. Imagine a world that is 3D manipulated, thrown onto a digital dashboard, VR and AI and AR, where digital tokens are there for crumbs of incentives while the digital master metaverse mind and AI gatherers work out more ways to put youth into a digital gulag?

There should be a million boats, safari jeeps, teepees, tents, community school gardens, K12 and intergenerational stage plays, poetry slams, bio-blitzes, and so much more:  for youth to go whale watching, fishing, out in wilderness, on farms, learning ancient wisdom from Native Americans, growing food, participating with elders acting, singing, and going out to learn ecosystems. Done deal! Paid for by the corporations, the billionaires, by us, the people, the It Takes a Village to Raise a child humane person. Instead, we are atomized, and being snookered by the pigs of Capital, all of them, telling us we need to work for them more, to devote 60 or 80 hours or a 100 hours a week to them. Musk, Bezos, Buffett, Walton, et al.

On shifting responsibilities —

“Our administration has shifted responsibility onto faculty more and more. I am now expected to be an instructor, career counselor, mentalhealth adviser, and personal coach.” —Biology instructor at a California community college

“Who is caring for the faculty who are supposed to be doing all this extra stuff for students without extra (or even adequate) compensation?” —Literature professor at a public university in North Carolina

“I fear it will take some time to bring us all back mentally and emotionally to the campus life we experienced before the pandemic. Administrations can speed this up by devoting time and resources to support all of us. They can also be creative about incorporating what we’ve learned about learning and mental health in the pandemic into a “new normal” campuscommunity life. Are there campuswide actions that could be taken to support the grown-ups on campus in their efforts to reach and support students? It feels like so many things are siloed when it’s becoming apparent we’re dealing with a systemic concern that very likely would benefit from some systemic interventions that support everyone.” — Beth McMurtrie, senior writer at The Chronicle.

Disengaged means stripped of the ability to put sweat equity in your neighborhood, town, zip code, public spaces. In fact, public spaces are stripped away, public transportation is a living hell of a joke, and the silos in society — those who dictate to us — have become more draconian with computing technology. The planned pandemic and shut downs and sickening measures to social distance, to pull the Covid19 lie wool over our eyes, were just trial balloons in the capturing of more people into this world of fear-anxiety-self-doubt and bowing to the masters. We are in a constant airport line, shoes off, bodies scanned, eyes captured, treated like cattle, manure, and we have accepted this as the price of being Homo retailpithecus, Homo erectus consumopithecus.

This is not a Larson haha:

We have broken pipes and leaky roofs and dams about to burst and rivers drying up and toxins by the dozens in fetuses and unimaginable brewing chronic illnesses because of food, air, water, drugs, vaccines, and more. Yet, we have that time to spend trillions on war, and then, the cultural wars, while people die or freeze and get amputations or, well, the anxiety is the gift that keeps on giving in Capitalism as Inflammatory Disease:

Sign up for this one coming Jan. 2023:

Join our SAND Community Conversation with guests Raj Patel & Dr. Rupa Marya as they illuminate the hidden connections between our biological systems and the profound injustices of our political and economic systems. What is deep medicine?  How can re-establishing our relationships with the Earth and one another help us to heal? We will combine Patel’s latest scientific research and scholarship on globalization with stories of Marya’s work with patients living in marginalized communities to begin to grasp the deep medicine that has the potential to heal not only our bodies, but the world. (SAND — and, you can put 0[zero] into the $ for a ticket and still get the Zoom Link, if you are financially struggling!)

Like I said in a past piece, “A Bird of a Feather — Unexpected Africa” — there were 60 people at this amazing photo-slide show/talk, on a Thursday, 6:30 pm. and no one under age 55 showed up. Imagine that, a perfect opportunity to talk to an artist, photographer, bird guy who grew up in Oregon and became an illustrator. No kiddos, no college students.

There is a crisis in the home, inside the family, and throughout extended families which are spread like knapweed seeds all across the land. There is no cohesion and no multi-generational connectivity. Having kiddos play the K12 idiota game is yet another way to strip away any interest they might have or what might be developed to go outside the boxes we have set for them to, well, fail, or become great consumers.

Engaged means dynamic, loud, sometimes over the top faculty like me being supported to be that, and to do some PT Barnum teach-ins, and have people from outside the education system come on campus.

SFCC presents tree seminars

Spokane Falls Community College presents a demonstration by Northwest Plant Health Care, a local tree service, on growing healthy ponderosa pines at 11:30 a.m. Tuesday at the cluster of ponderosa pines, southeast of the athletic field, adjacent to parking lot 9P, 3410 W. Fort George Wright Drive.

Participants will learn how to remove dead limbs from their trees. Arborists use ropes and no spikes to scale the tree and the dead limbs are cut to the trunk of a limb or the tree itself.

The event is free, and refreshments will be served.

On Wednesday, a panel discussion on the significance of trees takes place at 11:30 a.m. in SFCC’s SUB Lounges A and B, Building 17.

The panel members include: Rich Baker, working arborist; Carrie Anderson, Urban Forestry Council; Jim Flott, private tree consultant and former Spokane City forester; and Joe Zubaly, owner of Northwest Plant Health Care Inc.

For more information, contact Paul Haeder, ude.sllafenakopsnull@ahluaP.

This series of food-related columns by Haeder continues with: Jobs Not Jails – Riverfront Farms is About Digging the Soil; Urban Gardens Make Community – Pat Munts, mini-farm advocate; Flat Out Community Partnership – Vinegar Flats and East-Perry Market Are Value Added; Unmasking the Food Sleuth – Melinda Hemmelgarn on Food Media and the Balance of Power

*****

Grain of Truth

by Paul H. Haeder

You probably remember Winona LaDuke as the two-time Green Party vice presidential candidate, running with Ralph Nader in 2000 and 2004. You probably didn’t know that she’s an enrolled member of the Anishinaabeg Tribe from the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota, where she’s locked in another tough battle — this time against huge multinational corporations that want to change her tribe’s traditional way of life.

At three engagements in Spokane last week, and in some private interviews, LaDuke talked about the need to defend native peoples’ rights to the Earth. And this epic debate can fit into a single grain of wild rice — the Manoominike-Giizis strain, or the “wild rice moon” grown by her people for many generations.

This small grain of plant life serves as a microcosm of the entire sustainability challenge we all face: making sure future generations — all peoples and all species — will have a planet worth living on with ecosystems and resources to achieve spiritual and material prosperity.

LaDuke has proven to be so much more than a media darling — she’s a spiritual guide for her tribe and for the thousands she’s come across along her journey. Mixing humor with a shaman’s intensity, LaDuke has written books like All Our Relations and Recovering the Sacred.

LaDuke sees the Minnesota reservations’ practice of harvesting wild rice as vital: “The wild rice harvest of the Anishinaabeg not only feeds the body, it feeds the soul, continuing a tradition which is generations old for these people of the lakes and rivers of the north.”

It struck me last week while spending time with LaDuke that her tribe’s battle to keep their wild rice wild, free from genetic manipulation, is a much more far-reaching illustration of what sustainability activists consider the struggle of our times: How to create an America that respects the land.

Many of us think along systemic lines, attempting to understand the steps the globe probably has to take to solve the collapsing systems, both environmental and societal. Yet we need reminding that this struggle to work with a burgeoning global human population — 9 billion by 2050 at the current 1.2 percent growth rate — needs nudging from storytellers like LaDuke.

Her struggle — our struggle — is tied to the biodiversity of wild rice, a sacred food. There are more than 60,000 acres of natural wild rice growing throughout the lakes and rivers of her tribal lands. But there are troubling parallels drawn to what’s happened to the sacred corn of Mesoamerica at the hands of the agri-business multinationals, where corn has been patented, controlled and even turned into what some call Frankenfood.

Domestication and genetic modification of wild rice threatens the genetic integrity of this plant. For more than 30 years, plant breeders have developed wild rice for commercial paddies. So today, most of the wild rice on the market comes from these paddies, almost 70 percent of it from California. “Millions of pounds of California wild rice comes into [Minnesota] to be processed,” says LaDuke, “some of that rice, if genetically engineered, would irreversibly contaminate our manoomin.”

LaDuke’s tenacity in understanding the sacred and reclaiming the wholeness of her people’s food is a valuable lesson for our times. She’s up against the juggernaut of Monsanto and Dupont, the largest seed companies in the world. Monsanto has spent $8 billion in the last few years buying up United States seed companies, while Dupont purchased Pioneer, the second largest seed company in the world.

“This concentration of control over world seed stocks is alarming to farmers on a worldwide scale, especially considering that the closer seeds seem to be held, the fewer there are.”

LaDuke puts all of our struggles into a feedback loop, connecting wild rice in Minnesota to sustainability in Spokane with the goal of creating a more independent, safe and stable food supply. “However you cut the statistics,” LaDuke says, “from the villages of India to the villages of northern Minnesota, there is a marked loss in worldwide biodiversity, and a closer hold on who controls the remaining seeds of the world.”

This issue of control took me back 32 years, to the time I was a newspaper reporter in the middle of a struggle for the soul of a mountain.

Environmentalists were trying to stop my school, the University of Arizona, from building roads and locating a large mirror telescope on Mount Graham, a 10,000-foot sky island sticking out of the Sonora Desert. Mount Graham was named after a white man who rode through the area many years ago, a Colonel James Graham, but for generations the San Carlos Apaches had referred to the entire range as “Pinaleno,” meaning “many deer.” It’s the holiest place for the Apaches, who acquire the power to become medicine men and women through singing and collecting herbs and water on that mountain.

Despite the importance and traditional use of the place, roads were cut and the telescope went up. LaDuke and I talked about that struggle, and she shared many similar struggles currently unfolding in Indian Country and elsewhere.

LaDuke’s power is in her ability to unearth the history of Native people’s struggles — and how that history is relevant today. There has been a lost connection between how the land should be used and how it actually is used — from wild rice in Minnesota to telescopes in Arizona. Reconnecting with the land is another step in the process, as her book puts it, of reclaiming the sacred.

**Paul Haeder is the sustainability liaison at Spokane Falls Community College, where he also teaches English. His KYRS radio show, Tipping Points: Voices on the Edge, covers sustainability issues.

+–+

Or, this one, “80-year activist continues to spread passion — Encourages young people to get more active“

For years I worked my ass off creating special events, and bringing people from outside whichever college I was working at to engage with ideas, with students and faculty. It was an uphill battle, and being in the English Departments at respective institutions, I was not dealing with people who had a full deck upstairs, if you know what I mean. I did radio weekly shows, interviewed so many people I helped to bring to town. I helped create a Vietnam 20 Years After the Fall of Saigon event, with dozens of venues and speakers and events and films.

The entire mess of USA is bleeding into everything, really, until we are at 2022-2023 with a world about to implode here there everywhere, and our youth are bogged down with commercialism, dead end education, foggy brains, endless lies and Orwellian Big Brother moves, until we have generations in the main fagged and ready to throw in the proverbial towel.

That’s not to say those rich kids, those kids in bigger cities, with government or academic or big player parents guiding them into special trips, programs, coaching, are not getting to the top of the Predatory and Insane Capitalism that is always vaunted, no matter which criminal billionaire or multimillionaire is put ont he pedestal. Imagine all the Eichmann Faustian Bargains, and these valued children of the upper economic class, the rich, will then in turn be the master blasters of the majority of good, decent youth who must follow the Dystopian Blues.

Yeah, Master Blaster a la Road Warrior:

Almost everything I did above and beyond just teaching would be disallowed today, and much of what and how I taught would be trigger warning material, stopped, and then, here we are, 2023 on the solstice horizon. Hell, most k12 kiddos don’t even know what a solstice is. Sad, destructive, anti-human.

The post No Brainer: What is a Solstice? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/12/20/no-brainer-what-is-a-solstice/feed/ 0 359051 https://www.radiofree.org/2022/12/20/no-brainer-what-is-a-solstice-2/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/12/20/no-brainer-what-is-a-solstice-2/#respond Tue, 20 Dec 2022 15:54:26 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=136290 It is always funny and sad reading reports from the Chronicle of Higher Education, and now, drum roll, a 26-page report: A ‘Stunning’ Level of Student Disconnection Professors are reporting record numbers of students checked out, stressed out, and unsure of their future. In 20 years of teaching at Doane University, Kate Marley has never seen anything […]

The post No Brainer: What is a Solstice? first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>

It is always funny and sad reading reports from the Chronicle of Higher Education, and now, drum roll, a 26-page report: A ‘Stunning’ Level of
Student Disconnection Professors are reporting record numbers of students checked out, stressed out, and unsure of their future.

In 20 years of teaching at Doane University, Kate Marley has never seen anything like it. Twenty to 30 percent of her students do not show up for class or complete any of the assignments. The moment she begins to speak, she says, their brains seem to shut off. If she asks questions on what she’s been talking about, they don’t have any idea. On tests they struggle to recall basic information.

“Stunning” is the word she uses to describe the level of disengagement she and her colleagues have witnessed across the Nebraska campus. “I don’t seem to be capable of motivating them to read textbooks or complete assignments,” she says of that portion of her students. “They are kind kids. They are really nice to know and talk with. I enjoy them as people.” But, she says, “I can’t figure out how to help them learn.”

Marley, a biology professor, hesitates to talk to her students about the issue, for fear of making them self-conscious, but she has a pretty good idea of what is happening. In addition to two years of shifting among online, hybrid, and in-person classes, many students have suffered deaths in their families, financial insecurity, or other pandemic-related trauma. That adds up to a lot of stress and exhaustion. In a first-year seminar last fall, Marley says, she provided mental-health counseling referrals to seven out of her 17 students.

Oh, so much to unpack just in these paragraphs, let alone from the report. Hmm, so, since 1983 I have been teaching at colleges and universities, both community colleges and state universities, and even a private high end (sic) college. Seattle, Auburn, Spokane, El Paso, Las Cruces, and, other places, including Portland and Vancouver. I have also been a graduate student twice, with two hard-earned master’s degrees, while teaching at the same time.

Disengaged is another term for dead-end capitalism. Or, go follow the money. Or, the rich get richer and the poor get nothing. Amazing how quickly the baseline has shifted: When I was an undergraduate, I could fill up the car for $9 bucks, drive to Mexico, do a diving trip, get on a train and hit up Chihuahua and Copper Canyon and end up spending $50 with some good tequila and food thrown in. That was a trip that enabled culture, man, cross cultural learning, and using a language other than my primary one, and interacting with people, sea, land, and getting life to the fullest.

Not really possible today without a big wad of Benjamins, for sure, and, yes, there are no sleepy little calm fishing villages in Mexico or Central America anymore. It is a war zone in most places now for the on-the-cheap traveler.

This world, now especially, is part of the quickening, as youth are seeing the collapse of so much around them. Parents are on meds, and so much work is needed to patch up communities. Disengagement is also seeded throughout the public. Stay at home and slurp up terrible flicks on Netflix and see your life frittered away. The backyard is the playground. Go out to eat through the drive thru, or do take-in. The fabric of a community has always been frayed. Columbine, you know, suburbs of ennui and sick video games.

The K12 schools are rotting to the core, and that includes so much politicalization, so much mediocracy, so much empty heads, rah-rah, political incorrectness, so much cancel, litigation, and the end of history, so to speak: right-wing nuts are always right-wing nuts, and the liberal class is ugly in shutting down debate, so ugly on the PC and cultural vapidity. It costs money to do basketball or baseball since summer leagues are what it’s all about. Sick capitalism.

Main Street is rolling up, thanks to on-line hell shopping, and meds are the way for 50 percent of the peeps, and, the oppressive politics of dementia at the top, war mongering in the middle, and even the metro-sexuals and the middle of the road “liberals” have created splattered thinking. No one wants to be involved, and TikTok is Jerry Springer on steroids. Sick, painful, hurtful, prat fall, bridge jumper fun for all. That also has created a toxic background noise.

What to know, what to learn, how to move one step ahead? So, this is a racist country, but the new and next gilded age and classism are also on steroids.

It is one giant psychological experiment, swarm fear thinking, hive bandwagoning. Just one big event — Ukraine’s racism, attacks on civlians, the American Coup of Maidan, all of that, while this creep and smoke and mirrors criminal, Zelensky, gets more and more bucks, propaganda kudos and a complete psychological training on how to manipulate his own people, the gentiles, the Nazis — it is emblematic of the entire grift. And then what is happening in Europe, and in Canada, and in the USA, how this dialing for war lord bucks game never ends, nary a protest launched, and then the absolute corruption in that country, the new Jerusalem, and then the 24-hour news covering it, as in lies and bigger lies 24-7; and then China, and then COP26, and then the economy, stupid, and the celebrity venereal disease that is marketing and info-tainment and coverage of the most meaningless stuff. How can youth get a handle on anything, and so why is poetry important or learning what photosynthesis is? Where is the job and money in that?

How to bring a classroom into the community, and how to engage across all disciplines, and how to respect faculty, how to downgrade the institutional learning-management departments, and how to defund the Admin Class? Sports and campuses that are going hybrid? This must end before learning can begin.

Yep, being a true blue radical faculty is tough because careerism and the death of the true liberal class have created a campus and set of cohorts who are in many cases checked out and co-opted by capitalism.

As I’ve said many times — we need education that is cooperative teaching and mentoring across curriculums, and we need the business schools to go the way of the dodo, and why in hell are their ROTC programs in these schools, and what the hell are the drone degrees doing in schools? How much influence do those private and government grants have on the ethos and philosophy of a school?

K12? A complete overhaul, and then again, end Capitalism. You see, the people in a representative democracy need their own lobby, i.e. the poor people’s lobby, and the getting poorer lobby. End the tax abatements, the tax dodging, and alas, really, end shit jobs. Bring together the many generations, and of course, this is about dental-health-mental health-nutrition clinics in all neighborhoods, and then flip the curriculum and have those places as incubators of youth helping their communities. End this for-profit-everything/anything mentality.

Engaging youth in college? What the hell, man? So many chronic illneses, GAD (general anxiety disorder) and so much collective Stockholm Syndrome. The people in the Yale-Harvard-Elite Schools camp are running roughshod over us, the people, over the youth, with all of this techno hell, all of this tracking and Chromebook-soon-to-be-at-home-miseducation. Imagine a world without art classes, music, hiking, botany, learning city zoning by walking the hoods. Imagine a world that is 3D manipulated, thrown onto a digital dashboard, VR and AI and AR, where digital tokens are there for crumbs of incentives while the digital master metaverse mind and AI gatherers work out more ways to put youth into a digital gulag?

There should be a million boats, safari jeeps, teepees, tents, community school gardens, K12 and intergenerational stage plays, poetry slams, bio-blitzes, and so much more:  for youth to go whale watching, fishing, out in wilderness, on farms, learning ancient wisdom from Native Americans, growing food, participating with elders acting, singing, and going out to learn ecosystems. Done deal! Paid for by the corporations, the billionaires, by us, the people, the It Takes a Village to Raise a child humane person. Instead, we are atomized, and being snookered by the pigs of Capital, all of them, telling us we need to work for them more, to devote 60 or 80 hours or a 100 hours a week to them. Musk, Bezos, Buffett, Walton, et al.

On shifting responsibilities —

“Our administration has shifted responsibility onto faculty more and more. I am now expected to be an instructor, career counselor, mentalhealth adviser, and personal coach.” —Biology instructor at a California community college

“Who is caring for the faculty who are supposed to be doing all this extra stuff for students without extra (or even adequate) compensation?” —Literature professor at a public university in North Carolina

“I fear it will take some time to bring us all back mentally and emotionally to the campus life we experienced before the pandemic. Administrations can speed this up by devoting time and resources to support all of us. They can also be creative about incorporating what we’ve learned about learning and mental health in the pandemic into a “new normal” campuscommunity life. Are there campuswide actions that could be taken to support the grown-ups on campus in their efforts to reach and support students? It feels like so many things are siloed when it’s becoming apparent we’re dealing with a systemic concern that very likely would benefit from some systemic interventions that support everyone.” — Beth McMurtrie, senior writer at The Chronicle.

Disengaged means stripped of the ability to put sweat equity in your neighborhood, town, zip code, public spaces. In fact, public spaces are stripped away, public transportation is a living hell of a joke, and the silos in society — those who dictate to us — have become more draconian with computing technology. The planned pandemic and shut downs and sickening measures to social distance, to pull the Covid19 lie wool over our eyes, were just trial balloons in the capturing of more people into this world of fear-anxiety-self-doubt and bowing to the masters. We are in a constant airport line, shoes off, bodies scanned, eyes captured, treated like cattle, manure, and we have accepted this as the price of being Homo retailpithecus, Homo erectus consumopithecus.

This is not a Larson haha:

We have broken pipes and leaky roofs and dams about to burst and rivers drying up and toxins by the dozens in fetuses and unimaginable brewing chronic illnesses because of food, air, water, drugs, vaccines, and more. Yet, we have that time to spend trillions on war, and then, the cultural wars, while people die or freeze and get amputations or, well, the anxiety is the gift that keeps on giving in Capitalism as Inflammatory Disease:

Sign up for this one coming Jan. 2023:

Join our SAND Community Conversation with guests Raj Patel & Dr. Rupa Marya as they illuminate the hidden connections between our biological systems and the profound injustices of our political and economic systems. What is deep medicine?  How can re-establishing our relationships with the Earth and one another help us to heal? We will combine Patel’s latest scientific research and scholarship on globalization with stories of Marya’s work with patients living in marginalized communities to begin to grasp the deep medicine that has the potential to heal not only our bodies, but the world. (SAND — and, you can put 0[zero] into the $ for a ticket and still get the Zoom Link, if you are financially struggling!)

Like I said in a past piece, “A Bird of a Feather — Unexpected Africa” — there were 60 people at this amazing photo-slide show/talk, on a Thursday, 6:30 pm. and no one under age 55 showed up. Imagine that, a perfect opportunity to talk to an artist, photographer, bird guy who grew up in Oregon and became an illustrator. No kiddos, no college students.

There is a crisis in the home, inside the family, and throughout extended families which are spread like knapweed seeds all across the land. There is no cohesion and no multi-generational connectivity. Having kiddos play the K12 idiota game is yet another way to strip away any interest they might have or what might be developed to go outside the boxes we have set for them to, well, fail, or become great consumers.

Engaged means dynamic, loud, sometimes over the top faculty like me being supported to be that, and to do some PT Barnum teach-ins, and have people from outside the education system come on campus.

SFCC presents tree seminars

Spokane Falls Community College presents a demonstration by Northwest Plant Health Care, a local tree service, on growing healthy ponderosa pines at 11:30 a.m. Tuesday at the cluster of ponderosa pines, southeast of the athletic field, adjacent to parking lot 9P, 3410 W. Fort George Wright Drive.

Participants will learn how to remove dead limbs from their trees. Arborists use ropes and no spikes to scale the tree and the dead limbs are cut to the trunk of a limb or the tree itself.

The event is free, and refreshments will be served.

On Wednesday, a panel discussion on the significance of trees takes place at 11:30 a.m. in SFCC’s SUB Lounges A and B, Building 17.

The panel members include: Rich Baker, working arborist; Carrie Anderson, Urban Forestry Council; Jim Flott, private tree consultant and former Spokane City forester; and Joe Zubaly, owner of Northwest Plant Health Care Inc.

For more information, contact Paul Haeder, ude.sllafenakopsnull@ahluaP.

This series of food-related columns by Haeder continues with: Jobs Not Jails – Riverfront Farms is About Digging the Soil; Urban Gardens Make Community – Pat Munts, mini-farm advocate; Flat Out Community Partnership – Vinegar Flats and East-Perry Market Are Value Added; Unmasking the Food Sleuth – Melinda Hemmelgarn on Food Media and the Balance of Power

*****

Grain of Truth

by Paul H. Haeder

You probably remember Winona LaDuke as the two-time Green Party vice presidential candidate, running with Ralph Nader in 2000 and 2004. You probably didn’t know that she’s an enrolled member of the Anishinaabeg Tribe from the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota, where she’s locked in another tough battle — this time against huge multinational corporations that want to change her tribe’s traditional way of life.

At three engagements in Spokane last week, and in some private interviews, LaDuke talked about the need to defend native peoples’ rights to the Earth. And this epic debate can fit into a single grain of wild rice — the Manoominike-Giizis strain, or the “wild rice moon” grown by her people for many generations.

This small grain of plant life serves as a microcosm of the entire sustainability challenge we all face: making sure future generations — all peoples and all species — will have a planet worth living on with ecosystems and resources to achieve spiritual and material prosperity.

LaDuke has proven to be so much more than a media darling — she’s a spiritual guide for her tribe and for the thousands she’s come across along her journey. Mixing humor with a shaman’s intensity, LaDuke has written books like All Our Relations and Recovering the Sacred.

LaDuke sees the Minnesota reservations’ practice of harvesting wild rice as vital: “The wild rice harvest of the Anishinaabeg not only feeds the body, it feeds the soul, continuing a tradition which is generations old for these people of the lakes and rivers of the north.”

It struck me last week while spending time with LaDuke that her tribe’s battle to keep their wild rice wild, free from genetic manipulation, is a much more far-reaching illustration of what sustainability activists consider the struggle of our times: How to create an America that respects the land.

Many of us think along systemic lines, attempting to understand the steps the globe probably has to take to solve the collapsing systems, both environmental and societal. Yet we need reminding that this struggle to work with a burgeoning global human population — 9 billion by 2050 at the current 1.2 percent growth rate — needs nudging from storytellers like LaDuke.

Her struggle — our struggle — is tied to the biodiversity of wild rice, a sacred food. There are more than 60,000 acres of natural wild rice growing throughout the lakes and rivers of her tribal lands. But there are troubling parallels drawn to what’s happened to the sacred corn of Mesoamerica at the hands of the agri-business multinationals, where corn has been patented, controlled and even turned into what some call Frankenfood.

Domestication and genetic modification of wild rice threatens the genetic integrity of this plant. For more than 30 years, plant breeders have developed wild rice for commercial paddies. So today, most of the wild rice on the market comes from these paddies, almost 70 percent of it from California. “Millions of pounds of California wild rice comes into [Minnesota] to be processed,” says LaDuke, “some of that rice, if genetically engineered, would irreversibly contaminate our manoomin.”

LaDuke’s tenacity in understanding the sacred and reclaiming the wholeness of her people’s food is a valuable lesson for our times. She’s up against the juggernaut of Monsanto and Dupont, the largest seed companies in the world. Monsanto has spent $8 billion in the last few years buying up United States seed companies, while Dupont purchased Pioneer, the second largest seed company in the world.

“This concentration of control over world seed stocks is alarming to farmers on a worldwide scale, especially considering that the closer seeds seem to be held, the fewer there are.”

LaDuke puts all of our struggles into a feedback loop, connecting wild rice in Minnesota to sustainability in Spokane with the goal of creating a more independent, safe and stable food supply. “However you cut the statistics,” LaDuke says, “from the villages of India to the villages of northern Minnesota, there is a marked loss in worldwide biodiversity, and a closer hold on who controls the remaining seeds of the world.”

This issue of control took me back 32 years, to the time I was a newspaper reporter in the middle of a struggle for the soul of a mountain.

Environmentalists were trying to stop my school, the University of Arizona, from building roads and locating a large mirror telescope on Mount Graham, a 10,000-foot sky island sticking out of the Sonora Desert. Mount Graham was named after a white man who rode through the area many years ago, a Colonel James Graham, but for generations the San Carlos Apaches had referred to the entire range as “Pinaleno,” meaning “many deer.” It’s the holiest place for the Apaches, who acquire the power to become medicine men and women through singing and collecting herbs and water on that mountain.

Despite the importance and traditional use of the place, roads were cut and the telescope went up. LaDuke and I talked about that struggle, and she shared many similar struggles currently unfolding in Indian Country and elsewhere.

LaDuke’s power is in her ability to unearth the history of Native people’s struggles — and how that history is relevant today. There has been a lost connection between how the land should be used and how it actually is used — from wild rice in Minnesota to telescopes in Arizona. Reconnecting with the land is another step in the process, as her book puts it, of reclaiming the sacred.

**Paul Haeder is the sustainability liaison at Spokane Falls Community College, where he also teaches English. His KYRS radio show, Tipping Points: Voices on the Edge, covers sustainability issues.

+–+

Or, this one, “80-year activist continues to spread passion — Encourages young people to get more active“

For years I worked my ass off creating special events, and bringing people from outside whichever college I was working at to engage with ideas, with students and faculty. It was an uphill battle, and being in the English Departments at respective institutions, I was not dealing with people who had a full deck upstairs, if you know what I mean. I did radio weekly shows, interviewed so many people I helped to bring to town. I helped create a Vietnam 20 Years After the Fall of Saigon event, with dozens of venues and speakers and events and films.

The entire mess of USA is bleeding into everything, really, until we are at 2022-2023 with a world about to implode here there everywhere, and our youth are bogged down with commercialism, dead end education, foggy brains, endless lies and Orwellian Big Brother moves, until we have generations in the main fagged and ready to throw in the proverbial towel.

That’s not to say those rich kids, those kids in bigger cities, with government or academic or big player parents guiding them into special trips, programs, coaching, are not getting to the top of the Predatory and Insane Capitalism that is always vaunted, no matter which criminal billionaire or multimillionaire is put ont he pedestal. Imagine all the Eichmann Faustian Bargains, and these valued children of the upper economic class, the rich, will then in turn be the master blasters of the majority of good, decent youth who must follow the Dystopian Blues.

Yeah, Master Blaster a la Road Warrior:

Almost everything I did above and beyond just teaching would be disallowed today, and much of what and how I taught would be trigger warning material, stopped, and then, here we are, 2023 on the solstice horizon. Hell, most k12 kiddos don’t even know what a solstice is. Sad, destructive, anti-human.

The post No Brainer: What is a Solstice? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/12/20/no-brainer-what-is-a-solstice-2/feed/ 0 359052 https://www.radiofree.org/2022/11/23/plymouth-rock-juan-de-onate-orange-shirt-day/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/11/23/plymouth-rock-juan-de-onate-orange-shirt-day/#respond Wed, 23 Nov 2022 16:02:23 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=134923 Below, for the local newspaper, the Newport News Times. (without the images, etc.) Below that, more on this reprehensible genocidal black death Black Friday day! The First No-Thanks Thanksgiving Trigger Warning (noun): a statement at the start of a piece of writing, video, etc., alerting the reader or viewer to the fact that it contains […]

The post Plymouth Rock, Juan de Onate, Orange Shirt Day first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]> Below, for the local newspaper, the Newport News Times. (without the images, etc.) Below that, more on this reprehensible genocidal black death Black Friday day!

The First No-Thanks Thanksgiving

Trigger Warning (noun): a statement at the start of a piece of writing, video, etc., alerting the reader or viewer to the fact that it contains potentially distressing material

This hoopla around Turkey Day —  this so-called Big Box Store Shuffle and Great American Pig-out Thanksgiving — is a National Day of Mourning.

I was not my history teacher’s favorite student in high school when I wrote essays on my country’s hypocrisy of football, apple pie and Thanksgiving while never facing the genocide against the Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island. I was called a traitor, self-loathing white and un-American when I pointed out the war against the “Indians” didn’t officially end until 1924, more than thirty years after the massacre at Wounded Knee (1890).

When I was teaching in El Paso, I got mired in a push to commemorate the “first” thanksgiving here, in Paseo del Norte. El Paso laid claim to the first undocumented/illegal settlement in North America in the form of Conquistadors and Friars.

In 1598 the Spanish explorer, Don Juan de Oñate, and his army established the first European colony in North America. The settlement was located at San Gabriel near Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo, 30 miles north of Santa Fe.

I’ve been there, and the double-edge sword of breaking bread and pavo (turkey) with the Spanish interlopers is quaint for the people of El Paso looking for tourism bucks.

However, like the Plymouth Rock celebration of 1621, this Texas one represents a foreboding of genocide. I’ve been to that “celebration.” This El Paso organization declared this first Thanksgiving took place, near San Elizario, Texas. Oñate and his battalion of soldiers, Franciscan missionaries and colonists, celebrated their safe arrival on April 30, 1598.

That same year, the Spanish colonial governor de Oñate put 507 Acoma on trial. Women between 12 and 25 were enslaved for 20 years at the Pueblo of Ohkay Owingeh. Men over age of 25 had one foot cut off, and younger men were enslaved for 20 years. Oñate was later tried for excessive cruelty.

Switching to my Canadian roots, I absorbed more revised history. As a kid, I learned of that country’s treatment of Indigenous peoples since my mother was a journalist in Vancouver who reported on stories about Canada’s maltreatment of their First Nations. On September 30, 2021 Canada established a statutory holiday observation of Orange Shirt Day. This is a remembrance of missing and murdered children from residential schools as well as a process of healing for survivors.

It’s sort of a truth and reconciliation moment to raise consciousness about the residential school system and its impact on Indigenous communities for over a century. Hundreds of children were buried in unmarked graves at just one residential site, where my sister lived, Kamloops, BC. Thousands of other graves are located throughout Canada.

Then, in my Arizona high school days, I was “adopted” by some Apache friends and their families. Starting then – as their aunties and uncles were active in the American Indian Movement and Red Nation – I’d been to various events decrying the Plymouth Rock myth. For me, since age 15, Thanksgiving has been a Day of Mourning for Indigenous Peoples who were devastated by settler colonialism and imperialism.

The National Day of Mourning protest was founded by Wamsutta Frank James, an Aquinnah Wampanoag Tribal member, and other Indigenous men and women. In 1970, Wamsutta had been invited by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to speak at a banquet commemorating the 350th anniversary of the arrival of the Pilgrims. The organizers of the banquet thought Wamsutta might deliver an honorific tribute singing the praises of the American settler colonial project. He was not about to “thanks” the Pilgrims for bringing “civilization” to the Wampanoag.

The speech that Wamsutta wrote, which was based on historical fact instead of the hollow fiction, portrayed in the Thanksgiving myth asked fundamental questions: What are the foundational myths of the United States? Who created them and who is erased and harmed?

He detailed how the English before 1620 brought diseases that caused a “Great Dying.” They took Wampanoag people captive, selling them as slaves in Europe for 220 shillings apiece. The Pilgrims robbed Wampanoag graves immediately upon landing in Massachusetts. Yes, there was a meal provided largely by the Wampanoag in 1621, but it was not a “thanksgiving.” Rather, the first official “thanksgiving” (not including the San Elizario one) was declared by the Puritans (not the Pilgrims) in 1637 to celebrate massacring hundreds of Pequot men, women and children on the banks of the Mystic River in Connecticut.

When the organizers of the celebration read the speech, they suppressed it. One of the more powerful messages in it was a collective message of Native American pride: “Our spirit refuses to die,” wrote Wamsutta. “Yesterday we walked the woodland paths and sandy trails. Today we must walk the macadam highways and roads. We are uniting… We stand tall and proud, and before too many moons pass we’ll right the wrongs we have allowed to happen to us.” (RIP, James, an elder of great weight)

Much of these histories – massacres of women and children, the enslavement of men, the amputation of feet, and the death of children ripped from families and forced into these “schools” – cannot be taught in K12, as there are no “trigger warnings” strong enough to “protect” youth from the truth. I’ve had young people complain to administrators for the negative and horrific stories a substitute brings to the high school class.

Going back to mythologies and Disneyfied presentations of history is not just retrograde; it’s dangerous. Having faculty like myself being charged with “teaching anti-white critical race theory junk” is also McCarthyite.

Thank goodness for some of my activist friends in El Paso who years ago did some statue editing: they chopped off the bronze foot of Don Onate as he is poised on a Spanish steed high above his slaves. The foot has never been found.

Part Two

Amazing curriculum,

The revised edition of Native People of Wisconsin introduces students to the historical background, cultural traditions, and treaties negotiated by the eleven federally-recognized Indian Nations in the state today, the Brothertown Indians, a group still waiting to regain federal recognition, and urban Indians. This is serious material, the only mandated subject in social studies instruction in Wisconsin.

Author Patty Loew is a member of the Bad River Band of the Lake Superior Ojibwe Nation, who based Native People of Wisconsin on the research done for Indian Nations of Wisconsin, now in its second edition, which is written for a general audience. She strongly feels the responsibility to help students gain knowledge of Indian Country from a Native perspective and from the perspective of each major tribal group represented in Wisconsin’s current population.

The authors of this accompanying teacher’s guide want you to feel confident and comfortable teaching about Native people even if you don’t have much firsthand knowledge. Of course, you and your students have been inundated with images of Indian people, and it’s important that you help your students separate the reality from the stereotypical or mythical, positive and negative. We are happy to direct instructors to real stories from Native communities in videos produced by The Ways: Stories on Culture and Language from Native Communities Around the Central Great Lakes. This online educational resource is a production of Wisconsin Media Lab. The videos are integrated into many of the activities we’ve included and are linked to their corresponding activities in the Table of Contents. Educators may use this video content in conjunction with these Student Activities: Learning from My Elders; Food That Grows on the Water; Oneida Language & Culture; Boarding Schools; Native Songs and Dances (source)

Yet, if this post were to be read by the same people reading my short piece, the one above, with the post’s title, “The First No-Thanks Thanksgiving,” which I hope will appear in the Newport News Times, what kind of backlash would I receive?

Tons of writers or bots or both calling me a kook or loony or anti-business or self-hating when I weigh in on various alternative news sites.

Bottom line is we need more nuance, more critical thinking, and more people who can be counter-intuitive and have several theses, sometimes contradictory, while holding onto strong ethical frame works. I can be for the Declaration of Human Rights, a la United Nations, but I can also be opposed to many of the UN’s programs, people, representatives.

I can see the amazing forward thinking of say The Earth Charter, but I can also think hard about systems, how we need more than a charter, and we need true communism with people power, planet power, thinking and acting globally but also living and organizing and doing locally and regionally.

How can we not engage positively with this?

Preamble — Earth Charter

We stand at a critical moment in Earth’s history, a time when humanity must choose its future. As the world becomes increasingly interdependent and fragile, the future at once holds great peril and great promise. To move forward we must recognize that in the midst of a magnificent diversity of cultures and life forms we are one human family and one Earth community with a common destiny. We must join together to bring forth a sustainable global society founded on respect for nature, universal human rights, economic justice, and a culture of peace. Towards this end, it is imperative that we, the peoples of Earth, declare our responsibility to one another, to the greater community of life, and to future generations.

Alas, though, any sort of collective and creative and earth and people centric thinking will be attacked. Any thinking around just what happened to Native Americans over the course of almost 600 years, that is not heretical.

Just what was that Union Pacific Railroad all about? Mr. Durant, getting how many millions of acres for that transcontinental feat? How many millions of buffalo slaughtered — “shot from the comfort of your railcar” Indian Killing, err, Buffalo Killing, trips?

The telegram arrived in New York from Promontory Summit, Utah, at 3:05 p.m. on May 10, 1869, announcing one of the greatest engineering accomplishments of the century:

The last rail is laid; the last spike driven; the Pacific Railroad is completed. The point of junction is 1086 miles west of the Missouri river and 690 miles east of Sacramento City.

The telegram was signed, “Leland Stanford, Central Pacific Railroad. T. P. Durant, Sidney Dillon, John Duff, Union Pacific Railroad,” and trumpeted news of the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad. After more than six years of backbreaking labor, east officially met west with the driving of a ceremonial golden spike. In City Hall Park in Manhattan, the announcement was greeted with the firing of 100 guns. Bells were rung across the country, from Washington, D.C., to San Francisco. Business was suspended in Chicago as people rushed to the streets, celebrating to the sounding of steam whistles and cannons booming.

Back in Utah, railroad officials and politicians posed for pictures aboard locomotives, shaking hands and breaking bottles of champagne on the engines as Chinese laborers from the West and Irish, German and Italian laborers from the East were budged from view. (source)

Oh, that was General Sheridan’s concept of Total War, which he utilized heading to Atlanta: three hundred miles of immolated towns, farms, livestock, crops, everything. He now was with President Grant attempting to take care of the “Indian Problem.” Imagine that, more than 120 years ago, utilizing the concept of destroying great people like the Lakota using psychology as a weapon.

Harper’s Weekly described these hunting excursions:

Nearly every railroad train which leaves or arrives at Fort Hays on the Kansas Pacific Railroad has its race with these herds of buffalo; and a most interesting and exciting scene is the result. The train is “slowed” to a rate of speed about equal to that of the herd; the passengers get out fire-arms which are provided for the defense of the train against the Indians, and open from the windows and platforms of the cars a fire that resembles a brisk skirmish. Frequently a young bull will turn at bay for a moment. His exhibition of courage is generally his death-warrant, for the whole fire of the train is turned upon him, either killing him or some member of the herd in his immediate vicinity.

I just finished the eight-part series, The American West, a Robert Redford production. Jesse James, Billy the Kid, Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Wyatt Earp, Custer. Durant is also a character in the dramatized documentary. Seeing John McCain yammering away about Indigenous peoples in this series takes some acid reflux pills, but then, Tom Selleck, and Kiefer Sutherland and Burt Reynolds?

Producers Stephen David and Tim Kelly:

What prompted you to explore the West in your latest series?

Stephen: We found that after the Civil War – the series focuses on the 25 years after the Civil War – the country was broken and divided, but 25 years later we wound up with this unified country with the same good-bad similarities going on throughout the country. Big business ran things. The American spirit that we have today came from this 25-year period. The lawman, the outlaws, the Army, the Native Americans – everything that was mixed up in this time period – contributed to who we are today.

Tell us what we can expect from the episodes.

Tim: You can expect an unknown story of the West and how the West was settled. It’s a lot of names that you know with a lot of unknown stories. You’ll see the way everything was connected and how the push West was shaped by the Civil War and the opportunity that was available. It’s a very personal story. It focuses on a group of people who aren’t necessarily directly connected, but the effect of what they do is seen throughout the West and how it is formed. There’s also focus on the Native Americans. It’s a mix of outlaws, politicians and Native Americans and the roles they played settling the West.

Yeah, I was a reporter in Tombstone, for the University of Arizona lab paper, The Tombstone Epitaph. I then was a graduated BA/BS working in Bisbee, Cochise County and along the border on both sides of the dividing line.

I was a reporter and teacher and activist in El Paso, and Las Cruces, and had tequila and empanadas on the grave of John Wesley Hardin in Concordia Cemetery.

In the mix, of course, with all these documentaries and dramas the Native Americans are either completely washed out of these stories, or set into a white man’s milieu. I’ve studied graduate courses on “planning in the West,” you know, urban and regional planning. Looking at the West as a unique place in the USA, with a large chunk of the planning course looking at water, Indian sovereignty, and more.

“One cannot be pessimistic about the West. This is the native home of hope. When it fully learns that cooperation, not rugged individualism, is the quality that most characterizes and preserves it, then it will have achieved itself and outlived its origins. Then it has a chance to create a society to match its scenery.”

― Wallace Stegner, The Sound of Mountain Water

Boom and bust, the West. In 2022, the West is all about sinking and shrinking waterways and reservoirs and fires and population influxes and the same snake oil salesmen I ran into in Tucson and throughout Arizona, New Mexico and West Texas.

I am a red man. If the Great Spirit had desired me to be a white man he would have made me so in the first place. He put in your heart certain wishes and plans, in my heart he put other and different desires. Each man is good in his sight. It is not necessary for Eagles to be Crows.

–Sitting Bull, Hunkpapa Lakota chief. God Is Red: A Native View of Religion by Vine Deloria

They want us to give up another chunk of our tribal land. This is not the first time or the last time. They will again try to gain possession of the last piece of ground we possess.

— Sitting Bull, speech against Sioux Bill of 1889

The post Plymouth Rock, Juan de Onate, Orange Shirt Day first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/11/23/plymouth-rock-juan-de-onate-orange-shirt-day/feed/ 0 352978 https://www.radiofree.org/2022/11/19/land-back-a-ploy/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/11/19/land-back-a-ploy/#respond Sat, 19 Nov 2022 16:26:51 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=135515 “UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP).” “Urgent Call to Action: You are at Risk of Losing Your Land Rights.” “Dan Fumano: After debate, outgoing Vancouver council approves ‘groundbreaking’ UNDRIP strategy” Analysis: With Vancouver’s UNDRIP strategy approved, outgoing Mayor Kennedy Stewart said he looks forward to seeing how the city’s next council will […]

The post Land Back a Ploy? first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>

“UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP).”
“Urgent Call to Action: You are at Risk of Losing Your Land Rights.”

“Dan Fumano: After debate, outgoing Vancouver council approves ‘groundbreaking’ UNDRIP strategy”
Analysis: With Vancouver’s UNDRIP strategy approved, outgoing Mayor Kennedy Stewart said he looks forward to seeing how the city’s next council will handle key decisions.

“The New World Order Has Officially Just Captured Vancouver, BC, Canada as It Moves Forward with United Nations Worldwide Agenda ‘UNDRIP.’“

The post Land Back a Ploy? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/11/19/land-back-a-ploy/feed/ 0 352160 https://www.radiofree.org/2022/10/14/columbus-is-buff-and-ready-for-genocide/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/10/14/columbus-is-buff-and-ready-for-genocide/#respond Fri, 14 Oct 2022 01:51:34 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=134388 Below the elevated platform at the Astoria Boulevard/Hoyt Avenue N train station, my neighborhood plays host to Columbus Square — which is actually shaped like a warped triangle. Let Manhattan have its mundane Columbus Circle, we in Queens are far more geometrically sophisticated. It’s a square triangle for us. Naturally, a statue of Christopher Columbus […]

The post Columbus is Buff and Ready for Genocide first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>

Below the elevated platform at the Astoria Boulevard/Hoyt Avenue N train station, my neighborhood plays host to Columbus Square — which is actually shaped like a warped triangle. Let Manhattan have its mundane Columbus Circle, we in Queens are far more geometrically sophisticated. It’s a square triangle for us.

Naturally, a statue of Christopher Columbus adorns this triangular square. As you can see from the photo above, the city has given the bare minimum effort to protect this particular monument from being, um… canceled.

Anyway, if one were to believe sculptor Angelo Racioppi’s rendition, Chris spent plenty of time in the Santa Maria Tennis and Fitness Club. This statue is pumped. He’s got biceps to die for and a set of pecs that are practically bursting out of his manly shirt.

Yep, Columbus is buff and ready for genocide.

I ponder this statue as we mark yet another Columbus Day — 24 hours set aside to revere Chris “The Continent Cleanser” Columbus.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, the estimated pre-1492 human population of what is now called the United States ranges from 5 to 15 million. By the late 1800s, the number of indigenous people was down to 25,000. Such a holocaust is only possible if the long tradition of demonization is utilized as a shield of denial.

“There is a profound historical legacy in the U.S., going back to people like George Washington, for example, describing Indians as ‘wild beasts of the forest’ and ‘savage as the wolf,’” explains Ward Churchill.

Broken treaties (over 400 signed and every single one broken), innumerable massacres (from the deliberate genocide of Powhatans to the slaughter at Wounded Knee), forced marches (e.g. the Trail of Tears relocating the Cherokee Nation from Georgia to Oklahoma), and federally sanctioned dehumanization — the treatment of Native Americans reads like a hideous catalog of crime.

Speaking of hideous crimes, a man by the name of Adolf Hitler took notice of how America’s indigenous people were nearly exterminated in the Home of the Brave.

Ward Churchill explains how der Führer “used the treatment of the native people — the policies and processes that were imposed upon them — as a model for what he articulated as being the politics of living space.”

In essence, says Churchill, Hitler took the notion of “a drive from east to west, clearing the land as the invading population went and resettling it with Anglo-Saxon stock…as the model by which he drove from west to east into Russia — displacing, relocating, dramatically shifting or liquidating a population to clear the land and replace it with what he called superior breeding stock. He was very conscious of the fact that he was basing his policies on the prior experiences of the Anglo-American population.”

To get a good idea of when this got started, let’s contemplate how — upon encountering the Arawak people in 1492 — the venerated Mr. Columbus noted that they “would make fine servants,” adding, “with fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.”

For that, he gets a day in his honor… and a square triangle. Even if his statue took as convoluted a trip as its hero. Here’s how Forgotten-NY explains that process:

The cast iron statue was built just before World War II by Italians living in Astoria, but could not be erected because they didn’t have enough money for the statue’s base. The statue was dedicated on October 12, 1941, but, by the fall of 1942, was moved to a city warehouse. Fearing the scrap metal drives of WWII, it was hidden away in the basement of the Queens Borough Hall. In 1945, the statue was reinstalled in its current location.

At Columbus Square, an engraved plate (see photo above) on the ground reads: “But not for Columbus, there would be no America.” As I stomp on those intolerable words with my dirt-infested sneakers, I envision that first interaction:

COLUMBUS: Red man, we want your land and everything on it.

INDIAN: But, muscular paleface, what could you possibly offer in return for all these wonders?

COLUMBUS: Hmm, let’s see. How about venereal disease, smallpox, the destruction of your culture, genocide, Christianity, and a really bad image in a bunch of John Wayne flicks?

The Indian starts backing away slowly before taking off in a full sprint.

COLUMBUS: (yells after him) But I promise we’ll toss in some casinos in about 500 years! (Indian keeps running) How about I get DiCaprio to walk beside you at a big climate parade one day?

With that conversation in mind, I ascend the stairs to the N train.

The post Columbus is Buff and Ready for Genocide first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Mickey Z..

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/10/14/columbus-is-buff-and-ready-for-genocide/feed/ 0 341851 https://www.radiofree.org/2022/10/11/indigenous-peoples-day-counts-only-when-we-become-human-beings/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/10/11/indigenous-peoples-day-counts-only-when-we-become-human-beings/#respond Tue, 11 Oct 2022 02:57:55 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=134260 Someone needs to explain to me why wanting clean drinking water makes you an activist, and why proposing to destroy water with chemical warfare doesnt make a corporation a terrorist. –Winona LaDuke, “Canadian Oil Companies Trample on Our Rights” by Winona LaDuke, progressive.org. June 18, 2013. Water is life. We are the people who live […]

The post Indigenous People’s Day Counts Only When We Become Human Beings first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>

Someone needs to explain to me why wanting clean drinking water makes you an activist, and why proposing to destroy water with chemical warfare doesnt make a corporation a terrorist.

–Winona LaDuke, “Canadian Oil Companies Trample on Our Rights” by Winona LaDuke, progressive.org. June 18, 2013.

Water is life. We are the people who live by the water. Pray by these waters. Travel by the waters. Eat and drink from these waters. We are related to those who live in the water. To poison the waters is to show disrespect for creation. To honor and protect the waters is our responsibility as people of the land.

–Winona LaDuke, “The Winona LaDuke Reader: A Collection of Essential Writings”, p.55, Voyageur Press (MN)

I just caught the First Voices Radio show with Marley Shebala (Diné and A:shiwi) — investigative journalist, photographer, videographer and blogger. In the Diné way, she is Tó’aheedlíinii (Water Flows Together clan), her mother’s clan, and born for Cha’al (Frog clan), which is her father’s clan. Her mom is from Lake Valley, New Mexico, which is in the eastern part of the Navajo Nation and next to Chaco Canyon, New Mexico. Her father is from the Pueblo of Zuni, New Mexico. And so her home towns are Lake Valley and Zuni. “Marley Shebala’s Notebook” is her website where she provides current news coverage of the Navajo government and Navajo communities on and off the Navajo Nation.

She talked about her work as a journalist and activist. There were some comments included near the end from Native folk about exactly what this Columbus-Indigenous Day means. It’s a start, a way to ask Native Americans what it means to be in this country now, and the history of their treatment. Listen to it on this “indigenous people’s day, official federal holiday called Columbus Day!

She talks about uranium on her Navajo land. I know of another source of that uranium that murdered Japanese in World War Two:

“The word Shinkolobwe fills me with grief and sorrow,” says Susan Williams, a historian at the UK Institute of Commonwealth Studies. “It’s not a happy word, it’s one I associate with terrible grief and suffering.” (source).

Here’s a history of Navajo mining. I’ve been there as a reporter a very long time ago.

Once Upon a Mine: THE LEGACY OF URANIUM ON THE NAVAJO NATION

The host of the show, Tiokasin:

We have to stop with the idea of creating peace on earth and begin with creating peace with Mother Earth. We’ve tried the first alternative for thousands of years, but look where that has led us; now is the time of the Original Ways, the Native ways, after all … it is coming this way – that we all must make peace with Mother Earth – there is no more altering the native way.

Marley talks about the uranium coming from her tribe’s lands, and how the people of her tribe were told “the uranium would give people jobs.” Nothing about those bombs being developed to drop on two Japanese cities not to win a war, so to speak, but to tell the Soviet Union who is the big, bad toxic kid on the block.  She states that when that immolation occurred, the elders and others were totally distraught about what they played a part in, and that that scar is evident today, generations later.

Then there is the Congo — “The forgotten mine that built the atomic bomb”

[During the Cold War, the US supported a military coup by Mobutu Sese Seko as it was eager to prevent Shinkolobwe falling into Soviet hands (Credit: Getty Images)]

The story of Shinkolobwe began when a rich seam of uranium was discovered there in 1915, while the Congo was under colonial rule by Belgium. There was little demand for uranium back then: its mineral form is known as pitchblende, from a German phrase describing it as a worthless rock. Instead, the land was mined by the Belgian company Union Minière for its traces of radium, a valuable element that had been recently isolated by Marie and Pierre Curie.

In no other mine could you see a purer concentration of uranium. Nothing like it has ever been found – Tom Zoellner

It was only when nuclear fission was discovered in 1938 that the potential of uranium became apparent. After hearing about the discovery, Albert Einstein immediately wrote to US president Franklin D Roosevelt, advising him that the element could be used to generate a colossal amount of energy – even to construct powerful bombs. In 1942, US military strategists decided to buy as much uranium as they could to pursue what became known as the Manhattan Project. And while mines existed in Colorado and Canada, nowhere in the world had as much uranium as the Congo.

This says it all now, no, about how horrific the Anglo Saxons are, were, and will be, having treated the so called underdeveloped world, which is really the overexploited world, as slaves, lab rats, nobodies.

The Nobodies by Eduardo Galeano

Fleas dream of buying themselves a dog, and nobodies dream of escaping poverty: that one magical day good luck will suddenly rain down on them–will rain down in buckets. But good luck doesn’t rain down yesterday, today, tomorrow, or ever. Good luck doesn’t even fall in a fine drizzle, no matter how hard the nobodies summon it, even if their left hand is tickling, or if they begin the new day with their right foot, or start the new year with a change of brooms.

The nobodies: nobody’s children, owners of nothing. The nobodies: the no ones, the nobodied, running like rabbits, dying through life, screwed every which way.

Who are not, but could be.
Who don’t speak languages, but dialects.
Who don’t have religions, but superstitions.
Who don’t create art, but handicrafts.
Who don’t have culture, but folklore.
Who are not human beings, but human resources.
Who do not have faces, but arms.
Who do not have names, but numbers.
Who do not appear in the history of the world, but in the police blotter of the local paper.
The nobodies, who are not worth the bullet that kills them.

My own state, Oregon:

For thousands of years, more than 60 Native American tribes lived in Oregon’s diverse environmental regions. At least 18 languages were spoken across hundreds of villages. This civilizational fabric became unraveled in just a few short decades upon contact with white settlers in the 19th century.

And now, the ZioLensky is demanding from those underdeveloped Black nations fealty:

“African nations [must] stand by international law, territorial integrity, and peace,” not only by condemning the strikes on Kiev, Odessa, Dnepr, Kharkov, Rovno, Lviv, and Ivano-Frankovsk, but also by opposing with a UN vote Moscow’s “annexation” of the formerly Ukrainian territories, his message demanded. (source)

Now, again, bears repeating, how the USA is part of that global terror network, working with UK, Five Eyes. Native Americans have paid the ultimate genocidal price of the Anglo Saxons:

The longest war in history, as we see it as America’s real longest war, was the conflict against Indigenous Americans, called the American Indian Wars, which most historians characterize as beginning in 1609 and ending in 1924 or 313 years, mainly over land control.

The USA-UK is in on the killing machines, dropping nukes on civilians, the bombing of civilians in Germany, and Japan.

In February 1942, the British abandoned their “precision bombing” strategy. For the rest of the war, the British concentrated on the systematic widespread destruction of German cities by RAF nighttime air raids, a strategy called “area bombing.” One reason the British took this fateful step was to “dehouse” the German people, which hopefully would shatter their morale and will to continue the war.

The clearest demonstration of the destructiveness of British area bombing occurred in 1943 during three night raids on Hamburg, Germany. On the second night of bombing, something unexpected happened. The fire bombs dropped by 731 RAF bombers started thousands of fires. They merged to create a huge firestorm, sucking up oxygen and generating hurricane force winds. Many who did not burn to death were asphyxiated in underground bomb shelters. The firestorm killed more than 40,000 people in one night.

When the United States entered the war in Europe, its Army Air Corps had better fighter-plane support and bombsights than the RAF. It could maintain its longstanding policy of daytime precision bombing. The Americans believed that the most effective way to destroy the enemy’s ability to continue the war was to strike specific targets like aircraft factories and oil refineries.

Following German rocket attacks against London late in the war, almost 800 RAF bombers bombed Dresden, a center of German art, architecture, and culture. It had been untouched by previous Allied bombing raids. The attack’s stated purpose was to disrupt German troop transports to the Russian front. But at least 35,000 civilians died, mainly by inhaling toxic gases created by the second major firestorm of the war. American bombers killed more civilians the next day when they had difficulty hitting their targets through all the smoke.

Firestorms in Japan

After Germany surrendered in May 1945, America wanted to quickly end the war against Japan. As plans went ahead for a costly invasion of the Japanese islands, Major General Curtis LeMay took command of the bombing campaign against Japan, which had started in late 1944. Having studied British area-bombing tactics, LeMay decided to adopt them in a final effort to force the Japanese to surrender.

On the night of March 9-10, 1945, LeMay’s B-29 bombers attacked Tokyo, a city of 6 million people. Nearly 600 bombers dropped 1,665 tons of fire bombs on the Japanese capital, destroying 16 square miles of the city. The resulting firestorm killed 100,000 people, more than died at Hiroshima or Nagasaki from atomic bombs a few months later. Most of the victims were women, children, and old men. The B-29 crew members put on oxygen masks to keep from vomiting at the smell of burning human flesh.

LeMay’s planes continued firebombing Tokyo and more than 60 other Japanese cities in the following months. He thought he could end the war quickly by destroying Japan’s economy and crushing the morale of the Japanese people. LeMay argued against using atomic bombs. He believed that his firebombing tactics would force Japan to surrender before American forces were scheduled to invade the homeland. (source)

So, there is not much to celebrate when we think about this Anglo-Saxon world dominating (sic), and we know the British were in on bombing the bridge in Crimea, and who did the bombing of the Nord Stream 1 & 2? All part of the treatment of indigenous people in India, Amazon, Congo, Turtle Island, wherever. Russians are their nobodies!

“Before Ukraine blew up Kerch Bridge, British spies plotted it.”

On Becoming Human: This discussion was conducted in 2005 for The 11th Hour by Leila Conners. The discussion covers Trudell’s worldview that encompasses his call for humans to return to their intelligence and their humanity to forge a pathway forward. His responses to the questions now seem prophetic.  John Trudell was a Native American author, poet, actor, musician, and political activist. He was the spokesperson for the United Indians of All Tribes’ takeover of Alcatraz beginning in 1969, broadcasting as Radio Free Alcatraz. During most of the 1970s, he served as the chairman of the American Indian Movement, based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. After his pregnant wife, three children and mother-in-law were killed in 1979 in a suspicious fire at the home of his parents-in-law on the Shoshone-Paiute Tribes Duck Valley Indian Reservation in Nevada, Trudell turned to writing, music and film as a second career. He acted in films in the 1990s. The documentary Trudell (2005) was made about him and his life as an activist and artist.

Here, the Anglo-Saxons, the USA, out of balance with not just nature, but against humanity!

U.S. laboratories created, developed and operating under Pentagon leadership are scattered throughout Africa, Latin America and practically all the countries that made up the former Union of Socialist Republics. It is estimated that at least 200 biological research laboratories worldwide are financed by Washington.

The presence of U.S. specialists in the construction of chemical and biological weapons, especially in post-Soviet territory, is part of the evidence of the objectives of U.S. administrations to carry out a policy of maximum pressure against the Russian Federation. In these facilities, U.S. agencies are working on creating and modifying pathogens of deadly diseases, for their probable use, either in the military field or in sabotage actions within the broad field of the so-called hybrid wars. Both the UN and various international conventions, aware of their capacity and ease of destruction, have established regulatory agreements to prevent their use and proliferation. However, this decision does not prevent Washington from plaguing the world with research centers aimed at creating weapons of mass destruction (WMD). (source)

And then, on the same community station, I heard a piece about water, man, on the Food Sleuth show, Melinda Hemmelgarn’s show,  and I interviewed her a long time ago on my show: Tipping Points: Voices from the Edge (scroll down and see it and listen to it!). “Did you know that bottled water purchases can predict political involvement? Join Food Sleuth Radio host and Registered Dietitian, Melinda Hemmelgarn, for her interview with Manny Teodoro, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and lead author of The Profits of Distrust: Citizen-Consumers, Drinking Water, and the Crisis of Confidence in American Government. Teodoro discusses the connections between the rise of the commercial drinking water industry, distrust in and failure of government, and broader withdrawal from civic life.”

We are talking about just the metal lead in our water pipes. There are over 50,000 water districts in the USA, and they are all messed up, and the poor communities, well, underserved, dirty, toxic, killer water in some cases. And, a trillion dollars to fix those pipes and systems. The worst water is on reservations in the USA. Forget about those overexploited peoples, those indigenous peoples.

Historically speaking, we went from being Indians to pagans to savages to hostiles to militants to activists to Native Americans. Its five hundred years later and they still cant see us. We are still invisible.

–John Trudell

“When Columbus got off the boat, he asked us who we were. We said we’re the Human Beings, we’re the People.

Conceptually the Europeans didn’t understand that, it was beyond their conceptual reality. They didn’t see us. They couldn’t see who we were.

Historically speaking, we went from being Indians to pagans to savages to hostiles to militants to activists to Native Americans. It’s five hundred years later and they still can’t see us. We are still invisible.

They don’t see us as human beings, but we’ve been saying to them all along that’s what we are.

We are invisible to them because we are still the Human Beings, we’re still the People, but they will never call us that. They taught us to call ourselves Indians, now they’re teaching us to call ourselves Native Americans. It’s not who we are. We’re the People.

They can’t see us as human beings. But they can’t see themselves as human beings. The invisibility is at every level, it’s not just that we’re tucked away out of sight. We’re the evidence of the crime. They can’t deal with the reality of who we are because then they have to deal with the reality of what they have done. If they deal with the reality of who we are, they have to deal with the reality of who they aren’t.

So they have to fear us, not recognize us, not like us.

The very fact of calling us Indians creates a new identity for us, an identity that began with their arrival. Changing identity, creating a new perceptual reality, is another form of genocide. It’s like severing a spiritual umbilical cord that reaches into the ancestral past.

The history of the Indians begins with the arrival of the Europeans. The history of the People begins with the beginning of the history of the People.

The history of the People is one of cooperation, collectivity, and living in balance. The history of the Indians is one of being attacked and genocide, rather than a history of peace and balance. The history of the People under attack, the Indians, in an evolutionary context, is not very long, it’s only five hundred years.

The objective of civilizing us is to make Indian history become our permanent reality.

The necessary objective of Native people is to outlast this attack, however long it takes, to keep our identity alive.”

John Trudell, Happy Columbus Day Everybody.

The post Indigenous People’s Day Counts Only When We Become Human Beings first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/10/11/indigenous-peoples-day-counts-only-when-we-become-human-beings/feed/ 0 340476 https://www.radiofree.org/2022/09/05/miniature-gulags-native-american-boarding-schools-in-the-united-states/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/09/05/miniature-gulags-native-american-boarding-schools-in-the-united-states/#respond Mon, 05 Sep 2022 07:47:56 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=133130 In May 2022, the Assistant Secretary of Indian Affairs, Bryan Newland, released the first volume of an investigative report examining the complicity of hundreds of federal boarding schools in the destruction of indigenous nations. This is the perfect occasion to revisit and shed a light on one of the most shameful episodes in American history. […]

The post Miniature Gulags: Native American Boarding Schools in the United States first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]> In May 2022, the Assistant Secretary of Indian Affairs, Bryan Newland, released the first volume of an investigative report examining the complicity of hundreds of federal boarding schools in the destruction of indigenous nations. This is the perfect occasion to revisit and shed a light on one of the most shameful episodes in American history.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz argues that after nearly a century of uninterrupted westward expansion and incremental genocide, the US government tried to assimilate rather than exterminate rebellious Indians clinging on to dwindling reservations in the late 1800s. The man who led the charge was General Richard Henry Pratt, the first superintendent of the Carlisle Indian Boarding School based in Pennsylvania.

Pratt ran Carlisle like a military boot camp. Tabatha Booth says that Indian children were strictly forbidden from speaking native languages upon entering the school. Teachers and staff ruthlessly purged any outward expressions of tribal culture by assigning English names to their students.

Yet historians K. Tsianina Lomawaima and Jeffrey Ostler emphasize that Pratt, for all his faults, at least believed that Native Americans possessed the intellectual capacities to become fully-fledged citizens of the US in the fullness of time. His contemporaries and successors, however, did not.

Alexandria Gough says Estelle Reel, the national Superintendent of Indian Schools in the early 1900s, echoed American public opinion when she declared that Indians were “too dull to excel in academics”. Vocational training and “outing programs” (exchanges that allowed Indian youths to live and work in white society) quickly superseded traditional education.

Indian boarding schools, therefore, abandoned the pretence of moulding “savages” into enlightened citizens and transformed into miniature gulags dedicated to churning out generations of unskilled laborers.

Euro-Americans have condemned indigenous peoples to toil in menial jobs since before the founding of the United States. Scholars and journalists like Margaret Newell, Brett Rushforth, and Rebecca Onion amply demonstrated that English, French, and Spanish colonists, along with their descendants, perceived Native American tribes as little more than expendable resources.

In the 1630s, New England colonists, eager to replenish a minuscule workforce, waged war against the Pequot peoples with the explicit intention of capturing Indians and turning them into slave laborers. Colonists in Massachusetts even drafted the first laws that regulated slavery on the continent in the Body of Liberties, a document which codified ownership of Native Americans and laid the groundwork for African enslavement.

When English colonists crushed Pequot resistance in Connecticut, they sold defeated Indian men to plantations in the West Indies, while captured women and children became maids and servants at the service of wealthy households in New England. French colonists yearning for domestic labor in Montreal also purchased Sioux Indians shipped over from British colonies. Rushforth estimates that 2 to 4 million indigenous peoples in North and South America suffered the indignity of slavery for centuries.

The implicit aim of seemingly benign and well-intentioned boarding school work experience programs, then, was to keep Indian children inextricably shackled to the kind of degrading labor that blighted the lives of their ancestors.

Gough’s extensive research reveals that in cities like Phoenix, which lacked large immigrant or African American communities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, white middle and upper-class families often relied on Indian children or teenagers to complete backbreaking chores. As one boarding school superintendent said so cynically, “the hiring of an Indian youth is not looked upon by the people of this valley from a philanthropic standpoint. It is simply a matter of business”.

Many patrons had no qualms exploiting unsupervised and vulnerable Indian children. Irene McAfee claimed her day began at four in the morning and finished around nine at night. A young girl named Stella complained that whenever she tried to take a break from her exhausting schedule just to clean her own clothes, her patron would berate her for not ironing family clothes first.

Reports even stated that some Indian girls either quit the outing program or had to be transferred to different families because they weren’t given enough food to eat. Clara Lewis, braving loneliness and agonizing back pain during her time as a domestic in Tucson, said she never worked so hard in her life and defiantly exclaimed “I am not going to be a slave to anybody I tell you that”.

Meanwhile, Indian boys ended up as cheap labor in construction sites, mines, or farms. The Genoa School in Nebraska sent boarders to plant and harvest sugar beet in return for squalid living quarters. They also could not afford to spend more than 35 cents a day for food. Gough writes the Arizona Cotton Growers Association wanted outing students to pick at least ten acres of cotton in the summer, yet the company refused to provide Indian children with the tools or transportation required to complete the task.

In her resignation letter, one matron neatly summarized why outing programs had little pedagogical value and utterly failed to “civilize” or assimilate Indian children: “the people for whom the girls work teach them nothing, but simply pile up the hard and dirty work…”

Historian Margaret Jacobs added that many Indian women employed as domestics in the San Francisco Bay Area, most of whom graduates of the Carson Indian School in Nevada, resented having nearly every aspect of their professional and private lives closely policed by various authorities.

The few Indian women who dared speak out loudly about their inability to break free from the BIA’s (Bureau of Indian Affairs) stifling control, abysmal working conditions, overly demanding or abusive employers, restricted leisure time, or indifferent work placement staff determined to “keep Indian girls down” and forever trapped in low-paying jobs, faced dire consequences. For example, Indian women who resisted officials attempting to separate them from their children born out of wedlock risked being locked away in asylums.

Worst of all, outing programs generally did not help Indians thrive or survive in American society. Despite learning a trade and training in home economics in boarding schools, graduates still struggled to find rewarding jobs due to endemic discrimination. Upward mobility was an impossibility, and many returned to impoverished reservations bereft of modern technology or opportunities.

Nora Naranjo-Morse lamented that boarding school prepared her for a comfortable middle-class lifestyle far out of reach for most of her people: “By the time I returned to the village I could sew, but few of the people had heard of sewing machines…The machine I learned to operate as my trade could not be carried here and there…”

William Ketcham, a Catholic missionary, member of the US Board of Indian Commissioners, and friend of the Choctaw Nation concluded that outing programs were morally repugnant, irredeemably flawed, and unjustifiable. His scathing and deeply moving report to the Department of the Interior in 1919 wondered how white parents would react if the government decided to hire out their children to strangers instead.

The totalitarian discipline meted out in boarding schools, combined with arduous and occasionally dangerous year-long work experiences, left an indelible mark on countless Indian children. Tragically, as Ward Churchill observed, some victims inflicted variations of the physical and psychological torment they endured at school to their own children and grandchildren.

Scholar Kathie Bowker discovered that Lakota women who attended the St. Joseph Indian School or Our Lady of Lords School in South Dakota found parenting extremely challenging. One woman regretted growing up without a family because her alcoholic parents did not feel responsible for taking care of her or her siblings. As a result, she had great difficulty becoming a nurturing mother. Having received little love or affection in childhood meant that some Lakota women had trouble caring for others in turn.

Lydia Whirlwind Soldier also blamed her stay at the St. Francis Indian Mission in South Dakota for her disruptive behavior: “Our contemporary disrespect for elders, parents, and authority in general are the results of the treatment children received in the boarding schools”. Leaving behind highly regimented and puritanical environments encouraged certain Indians to indulge in hedonistic activities like vandalism, drug use, and unhealthy relationships.

Moreover, social worker Sharon Brunner found that brutal teaching methods and excessive negative feedback traumatized Indian children. A woman named Yulanda attended the Holy Childhood Boarding School in Michigan and avoided jobs involving numbers, budgets, or mathematics throughout her life due to her harrowing ordeals in class: “The hair was pulled out of my head. Plus they would grab you by the hair and slam you into the chalkboard.”

Extreme corporal punishment was the norm. Beatings, whippings, and floggings caused severe injuries like broken bones. Minor infractions, like wetting the bed, earned students an overnight stay in the fire exit outside—no matter the season or weather. Yet runaways would rather brave a blizzard than remain a moment longer in a boarding school, according to Maureen Smith.

Jennifer of the Ojibway tribe remembered hearing children locked in dungeons scream all night long. The Haskell Institute in Kansas even had a jail called a guard house- a stone room with no windows. Children could be imprisoned there for days.

Evidence of this appalling mistreatment rarely trickled out of school grounds. Priests and nuns, some of whom were guilty of rampant sexual abuse, forced children like Yulanda to write bland and predictable letters to parents every other week. Censors removed any mention of the sadistic cruelty and borderline torture children had to go through in the name of assimilation.

Bryan Newland’s report is a monumental achievement, but more needs to be done to make a real difference for Native Americans living in the shadow of the boarding schools. Brunner suggests social workers dealing with indigenous populations have to be aware of the symptoms of what psychologists call “residential-school syndrome”, like alcoholism, domestic violence, and child abuse, before developing treatment plans that would benefit Indian communities as a whole.

Finally, as Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz mentioned previously, the US government has a legal and moral obligation to honour the numerous treaties it signed with Indian nations—treaties which guarantee the reconstruction, expansion, and preservation of sacred lands. Only then will Native Americans retrieve their stolen sovereignty and dignity.

The post Miniature Gulags: Native American Boarding Schools in the United States first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jean-Philippe Stone.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/09/05/miniature-gulags-native-american-boarding-schools-in-the-united-states/feed/ 0 331054 https://www.radiofree.org/2022/07/18/feeling-the-squeeze/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/07/18/feeling-the-squeeze/#respond Mon, 18 Jul 2022 16:00:40 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=131552 Artificial intelligence reaches a new and unexpected milestone while the human condition continues to worsen. As supply chains are pushed to the brink, working people around the globe struggle with new realities of stagnated wages and out of control inflation. While oil corporations celebrate record profits, the people of Ecuador are fighting back with work […]

The post Feeling the Squeeze first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]> Artificial intelligence reaches a new and unexpected milestone while the human condition continues to worsen.

As supply chains are pushed to the brink, working people around the globe struggle with new realities of stagnated wages and out of control inflation. While oil corporations celebrate record profits, the people of Ecuador are fighting back with work stoppages, road blocks, and riots across the country.

Meanwhile, in Tanzania, tensions have flared as the government tries to displace many indigenous Maasai people from their ancestral homelands for yet another playground for capitalist elites.

Finally, we follow up with our coverage of Giannis Michailidis, anarchist prisoner in Greece, who has now been on hunger strike for over a month.

The post Feeling the Squeeze first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by subMedia.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/07/18/feeling-the-squeeze/feed/ 0 316140 https://www.radiofree.org/2022/06/29/declare-your-independence-from-tyranny-america/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/06/29/declare-your-independence-from-tyranny-america/#respond Wed, 29 Jun 2022 17:22:29 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=131036 Imagine living in a country where armed soldiers crash through doors to arrest and imprison citizens merely for criticizing government officials. Imagine that in this very same country, you’re watched all the time, and if you look even a little bit suspicious, the police stop and frisk you or pull you over to search you […]

The post Declare Your Independence from Tyranny, America first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]> Imagine living in a country where armed soldiers crash through doors to arrest and imprison citizens merely for criticizing government officials.

Imagine that in this very same country, you’re watched all the time, and if you look even a little bit suspicious, the police stop and frisk you or pull you over to search you on the off chance you’re doing something illegal.

Keep in mind that if you have a firearm of any kind (or anything that resembled a firearm) while in this country, it may get you arrested and, in some circumstances, shot by police.

If you’re thinking this sounds like America today, you wouldn’t be far wrong.

However, the scenario described above took place more than 200 years ago, when American colonists suffered under Great Britain’s version of an early police state. It was only when the colonists finally got fed up with being silenced, censored, searched, frisked, threatened, and arrested that they finally revolted against the tyrant’s fetters.

No document better states their grievances than the Declaration of Independence, drafted by Thomas Jefferson.

A document seething with outrage over a government which had betrayed its citizens, the Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4, 1776, by 56 men who laid everything on the line, pledged it all—“our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor”—because they believed in a radical idea: that all people are created to be free. [Sounds so humanistic until one reads that they demeaned the Indigenous peoples as “merciless Indian Savages” — DV ed]

Labeled traitors, these men were charged with treason, a crime punishable by death. For some, their acts of rebellion would cost them their homes and their fortunes. For others, it would be the ultimate price—their lives.

Yet even knowing the heavy price they might have to pay, these men dared to speak up when silence could not be tolerated. Even after they had won their independence from Great Britain, these new Americans worked to ensure that the rights they had risked their lives to secure would remain secure for future generations.

The result: our Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the Constitution.

Imagine the shock and outrage these 56 men would feel were they to discover that 246 years later, the government they had risked their lives to create has been transformed into a militaristic police state in which exercising one’s freedoms—at a minimum, merely questioning a government agent—is often viewed as a flagrant act of defiance.

In fact, had the Declaration of Independence been written today, it would have rendered its signers extremists or terrorists, resulting in them being placed on a government watch list, targeted for surveillance of their activities and correspondence, and potentially arrested, held indefinitely, stripped of their rights and labeled enemy combatants.

Read the Declaration of Independence again, and ask yourself if the list of complaints tallied by Jefferson don’t bear a startling resemblance to the abuses “we the people” are suffering at the hands of the American police state.

Here’s what the Declaration of Independence might look and sound like if it were written in the modern vernacular:

There comes a time when a populace must stand united and say “enough is enough” to the government’s abuses, even if it means getting rid of the political parties in power.

Believing that “we the people” have a natural and divine right to direct our own lives, here are truths about the power of the people and how we arrived at the decision to sever our ties to the government:

All people are created equal.

All people possess certain innate rights that no government or agency or individual can take away from them. Among these are the right to Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

The government’s job is to protect the people’s innate rights to Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. The government’s power comes from the will of the people.

Whenever any government abuses its power, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish that government and replace it with a new government that will respect and protect the rights of the people.

It is not wise to get rid of a government for minor transgressions. In fact, as history has shown, people resist change and are inclined to suffer all manner of abuses to which they have become accustomed.

However, when the people have been subjected to repeated abuses and power grabs, carried out with the purpose of establishing a tyrannical government, people have a right and duty to do away with that tyrannical government and to replace it with a new government that will protect and preserve their innate rights for their future wellbeing.

This is exactly the state of affairs we are under suffering under right now, which is why it is necessary that we change this imperial system of government.

The history of the present Imperial Government is a history of repeated abuses and power grabs, carried out with the intention of establishing absolute tyranny over the country.

To prove this, consider the following:

The government has, through its own negligence and arrogance, refused to adopt urgent and necessary laws for the good of the people.

The government has threatened to hold up critical laws unless the people agree to relinquish their right to be fully represented in the Legislature.

In order to expand its power and bring about compliance with its dictates, the government has made it nearly impossible for the people to make their views and needs heard by their representatives.

The government has repeatedly suppressed protests arising in response to its actions.

The government has obstructed justice by refusing to appoint judges who respect the Constitution and has instead made the courts march in lockstep with the government’s dictates.

The government has allowed its agents to harass the people, steal from them, jail them and even execute them.

The government has directed militarized government agents—a.k.a., a standing army—to police domestic affairs in peacetime.

The government has turned the country into a militarized police state.

The government has conspired to undermine the rule of law and the constitution in order to expand its own powers.

The government has allowed its militarized police to invade our homes and inflict violence on homeowners.

The government has failed to hold its agents accountable for wrongdoing and murder under the guise of “qualified immunity.”

The government has jeopardized our international trade agreements.

The government has overtaxed us without our permission.

The government has denied us due process and the right to a fair trial.

The government has engaged in extraordinary rendition.

The government has continued to expand its military empire in collusion with its corporate partners-in-crime and occupy foreign nations.

The government has eroded fundamental legal protections and destabilized the structure of government.

The government has not only declared its federal powers superior to those of the states but has also asserted its sovereign power over the rights of “we the people.”

The government has ceased to protect the people and instead waged domestic war against the people.

The government has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, and destroyed the lives of the people.

The government has employed private contractors and mercenaries to carry out acts of death, desolation and tyranny, totally unworthy of a civilized nation.

The government through its political propaganda has pitted its citizens against each other.

The government has stirred up civil unrest and laid the groundwork for martial law.

Repeatedly, we have asked the government to cease its abuses. Each time, the government has responded with more abuse.

An Imperial Ruler who acts like a tyrant is not fit to govern a free people.

We have repeatedly sounded the alarm to our fellow citizens about the government’s abuses. We have warned them about the government’s power grabs. We have appealed to their sense of justice. We have reminded them of our common bonds.

They have rejected our plea for justice and brotherhood. They are equally at fault for the injustices being carried out by the government.

Thus, for the reasons mentioned above, we the people of the united States of America declare ourselves free from the chains of an abusive government. Relying on God’s protection, we pledge to stand by this Declaration of Independence with our lives, our fortunes and our honor.

In the 246 years since early Americans first declared and eventually won their independence from Great Britain, “we the people” have managed to work ourselves right back under the tyrant’s thumb.

Only this time, the tyrant is one of our own making: the American Police State.

The abuses meted out by an imperial government and endured by the American people have not ended. They have merely evolved.

“We the people” are still being robbed blind by a government of thieves.

We are still being taken advantage of by a government of scoundrels, idiots and monsters.

We are still being locked up by a government of greedy jailers.

We are still being spied on by a government of Peeping Toms.

We are still being ravaged by a government of ruffians, rapists and killers.

We are still being forced to surrender our freedoms—and those of our children—to a government of extortionists, money launderers and corporate pirates.

And we are still being held at gunpoint by a government of soldiers: a standing army in the form of a militarized police.

Given the fact that we are a relatively young nation, it hasn’t taken very long for an authoritarian regime to creep into power.

Unfortunately, the bipartisan coup that laid siege to our nation did not happen overnight.

It snuck in under our radar, hiding behind the guise of national security, the war on drugs, the war on terror, the war on immigration, political correctness, hate crimes and a host of other official-sounding programs aimed at expanding the government’s power at the expense of individual freedoms.

The building blocks for the bleak future we’re just now getting a foretaste of—police shootings of unarmed citizens, profit-driven prisons, weapons of compliance, a wall-to-wall surveillance state, pre-crime programs, a suspect society, school-to-prison pipelines, militarized police, overcriminalization, SWAT team raids, endless wars, etc.—were put in place by government officials we trusted to look out for our best interests.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the problems we are facing will not be fixed overnight: that is the grim reality with which we must contend.

Yet that does not mean we should give up or give in or tune out. What we need to do is declare our independence from the tyranny of the American police state.

The post Declare Your Independence from Tyranny, America first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/06/29/declare-your-independence-from-tyranny-america/feed/ 0 311115 https://www.radiofree.org/2022/06/29/declare-your-independence-from-tyranny-america/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/06/29/declare-your-independence-from-tyranny-america/#respond Wed, 29 Jun 2022 17:22:29 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=131036 Imagine living in a country where armed soldiers crash through doors to arrest and imprison citizens merely for criticizing government officials. Imagine that in this very same country, you’re watched all the time, and if you look even a little bit suspicious, the police stop and frisk you or pull you over to search you […]

The post Declare Your Independence from Tyranny, America first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]> Imagine living in a country where armed soldiers crash through doors to arrest and imprison citizens merely for criticizing government officials.

Imagine that in this very same country, you’re watched all the time, and if you look even a little bit suspicious, the police stop and frisk you or pull you over to search you on the off chance you’re doing something illegal.

Keep in mind that if you have a firearm of any kind (or anything that resembled a firearm) while in this country, it may get you arrested and, in some circumstances, shot by police.

If you’re thinking this sounds like America today, you wouldn’t be far wrong.

However, the scenario described above took place more than 200 years ago, when American colonists suffered under Great Britain’s version of an early police state. It was only when the colonists finally got fed up with being silenced, censored, searched, frisked, threatened, and arrested that they finally revolted against the tyrant’s fetters.

No document better states their grievances than the Declaration of Independence, drafted by Thomas Jefferson.

A document seething with outrage over a government which had betrayed its citizens, the Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4, 1776, by 56 men who laid everything on the line, pledged it all—“our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor”—because they believed in a radical idea: that all people are created to be free. [Sounds so humanistic until one reads that they demeaned the Indigenous peoples as “merciless Indian Savages” — DV ed]

Labeled traitors, these men were charged with treason, a crime punishable by death. For some, their acts of rebellion would cost them their homes and their fortunes. For others, it would be the ultimate price—their lives.

Yet even knowing the heavy price they might have to pay, these men dared to speak up when silence could not be tolerated. Even after they had won their independence from Great Britain, these new Americans worked to ensure that the rights they had risked their lives to secure would remain secure for future generations.

The result: our Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the Constitution.

Imagine the shock and outrage these 56 men would feel were they to discover that 246 years later, the government they had risked their lives to create has been transformed into a militaristic police state in which exercising one’s freedoms—at a minimum, merely questioning a government agent—is often viewed as a flagrant act of defiance.

In fact, had the Declaration of Independence been written today, it would have rendered its signers extremists or terrorists, resulting in them being placed on a government watch list, targeted for surveillance of their activities and correspondence, and potentially arrested, held indefinitely, stripped of their rights and labeled enemy combatants.

Read the Declaration of Independence again, and ask yourself if the list of complaints tallied by Jefferson don’t bear a startling resemblance to the abuses “we the people” are suffering at the hands of the American police state.

Here’s what the Declaration of Independence might look and sound like if it were written in the modern vernacular:

There comes a time when a populace must stand united and say “enough is enough” to the government’s abuses, even if it means getting rid of the political parties in power.

Believing that “we the people” have a natural and divine right to direct our own lives, here are truths about the power of the people and how we arrived at the decision to sever our ties to the government:

All people are created equal.

All people possess certain innate rights that no government or agency or individual can take away from them. Among these are the right to Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

The government’s job is to protect the people’s innate rights to Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. The government’s power comes from the will of the people.

Whenever any government abuses its power, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish that government and replace it with a new government that will respect and protect the rights of the people.

It is not wise to get rid of a government for minor transgressions. In fact, as history has shown, people resist change and are inclined to suffer all manner of abuses to which they have become accustomed.

However, when the people have been subjected to repeated abuses and power grabs, carried out with the purpose of establishing a tyrannical government, people have a right and duty to do away with that tyrannical government and to replace it with a new government that will protect and preserve their innate rights for their future wellbeing.

This is exactly the state of affairs we are under suffering under right now, which is why it is necessary that we change this imperial system of government.

The history of the present Imperial Government is a history of repeated abuses and power grabs, carried out with the intention of establishing absolute tyranny over the country.

To prove this, consider the following:

The government has, through its own negligence and arrogance, refused to adopt urgent and necessary laws for the good of the people.

The government has threatened to hold up critical laws unless the people agree to relinquish their right to be fully represented in the Legislature.

In order to expand its power and bring about compliance with its dictates, the government has made it nearly impossible for the people to make their views and needs heard by their representatives.

The government has repeatedly suppressed protests arising in response to its actions.

The government has obstructed justice by refusing to appoint judges who respect the Constitution and has instead made the courts march in lockstep with the government’s dictates.

The government has allowed its agents to harass the people, steal from them, jail them and even execute them.

The government has directed militarized government agents—a.k.a., a standing army—to police domestic affairs in peacetime.

The government has turned the country into a militarized police state.

The government has conspired to undermine the rule of law and the constitution in order to expand its own powers.

The government has allowed its militarized police to invade our homes and inflict violence on homeowners.

The government has failed to hold its agents accountable for wrongdoing and murder under the guise of “qualified immunity.”

The government has jeopardized our international trade agreements.

The government has overtaxed us without our permission.

The government has denied us due process and the right to a fair trial.

The government has engaged in extraordinary rendition.

The government has continued to expand its military empire in collusion with its corporate partners-in-crime and occupy foreign nations.

The government has eroded fundamental legal protections and destabilized the structure of government.

The government has not only declared its federal powers superior to those of the states but has also asserted its sovereign power over the rights of “we the people.”

The government has ceased to protect the people and instead waged domestic war against the people.

The government has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, and destroyed the lives of the people.

The government has employed private contractors and mercenaries to carry out acts of death, desolation and tyranny, totally unworthy of a civilized nation.

The government through its political propaganda has pitted its citizens against each other.

The government has stirred up civil unrest and laid the groundwork for martial law.

Repeatedly, we have asked the government to cease its abuses. Each time, the government has responded with more abuse.

An Imperial Ruler who acts like a tyrant is not fit to govern a free people.

We have repeatedly sounded the alarm to our fellow citizens about the government’s abuses. We have warned them about the government’s power grabs. We have appealed to their sense of justice. We have reminded them of our common bonds.

They have rejected our plea for justice and brotherhood. They are equally at fault for the injustices being carried out by the government.

Thus, for the reasons mentioned above, we the people of the united States of America declare ourselves free from the chains of an abusive government. Relying on God’s protection, we pledge to stand by this Declaration of Independence with our lives, our fortunes and our honor.

In the 246 years since early Americans first declared and eventually won their independence from Great Britain, “we the people” have managed to work ourselves right back under the tyrant’s thumb.

Only this time, the tyrant is one of our own making: the American Police State.

The abuses meted out by an imperial government and endured by the American people have not ended. They have merely evolved.

“We the people” are still being robbed blind by a government of thieves.

We are still being taken advantage of by a government of scoundrels, idiots and monsters.

We are still being locked up by a government of greedy jailers.

We are still being spied on by a government of Peeping Toms.

We are still being ravaged by a government of ruffians, rapists and killers.

We are still being forced to surrender our freedoms—and those of our children—to a government of extortionists, money launderers and corporate pirates.

And we are still being held at gunpoint by a government of soldiers: a standing army in the form of a militarized police.

Given the fact that we are a relatively young nation, it hasn’t taken very long for an authoritarian regime to creep into power.

Unfortunately, the bipartisan coup that laid siege to our nation did not happen overnight.

It snuck in under our radar, hiding behind the guise of national security, the war on drugs, the war on terror, the war on immigration, political correctness, hate crimes and a host of other official-sounding programs aimed at expanding the government’s power at the expense of individual freedoms.

The building blocks for the bleak future we’re just now getting a foretaste of—police shootings of unarmed citizens, profit-driven prisons, weapons of compliance, a wall-to-wall surveillance state, pre-crime programs, a suspect society, school-to-prison pipelines, militarized police, overcriminalization, SWAT team raids, endless wars, etc.—were put in place by government officials we trusted to look out for our best interests.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the problems we are facing will not be fixed overnight: that is the grim reality with which we must contend.

Yet that does not mean we should give up or give in or tune out. What we need to do is declare our independence from the tyranny of the American police state.

The post Declare Your Independence from Tyranny, America first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/06/29/declare-your-independence-from-tyranny-america/feed/ 0 311116 https://www.radiofree.org/2022/06/17/it-is-not-love-that-abandons-its-treaties/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/06/17/it-is-not-love-that-abandons-its-treaties/#respond Fri, 17 Jun 2022 14:37:13 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=126160 The Tsilhqot’in Struggle On 26 March 2018, Canada’s prime minister Justin Trudeau spoke of the six Tsilhqot’in chiefs who were arrested during a sacred peace-pipe ceremony and subsequently hanged for their part in a war to prevent the spread of smallpox by colonialists: “We recognize that these six chiefs were leaders of a nation, that […]

The post It is Not Love that Abandons Its Treaties first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]> The Tsilhqot’in Struggle

On 26 March 2018, Canada’s prime minister Justin Trudeau spoke of the six Tsilhqot’in chiefs who were arrested during a sacred peace-pipe ceremony and subsequently hanged for their part in a war to prevent the spread of smallpox by colonialists: “We recognize that these six chiefs were leaders of a nation, that they acted in accordance with their laws and traditions and that they are well regarded as heroes of their people.”

“They acted as leaders of a proud and independent nation facing the threat of another nation.”

“As settlers came to the land in the rush for gold, no consideration was given to the rights of the Tsilhqot’in people who were there first,” Trudeau said. “No consent was sought.”

In recent years, the Tsilhqot’in people were engaged in a long, drawn-out fight to gain sovereignty over their unceded territory, spurred by the attempts of Taseko Mines to situate an open-pit copper-and-gold mine near the trout-rich Teẑtan Biny (Fish Lake). Also proposed was “destroying Yanah Biny (Little Fish Lake) and the Tŝilhqot’in homes and graves located near that lake, to make way for a massive tailings pond.”

The Supreme Court decision in Tsilhqot’in Nation v British Columbia, (2014), upheld Indigenous title as declared in an earlier Supreme Court decision, Delgamuukw v British Columbia, (1997).

The Wet’suwet’in Struggle

Sometimes the law works (even colonial law), and sometimes it doesn’t. Neither the Tsilhqot’in or Delgamuukw legal precedents have, so far, buttressed the Wet’suwet’en people’s fight against the encroachment of a pipeline corporation.

In the unceded territory of the Wet’suwet’en First Nation, corporate Canada and the government of Canada are violently seeking to ram a pipeline through Wet’suwet’en territory despite its rejection by all five hereditary chiefs; i.e., no consent has been given for the laying of a pipeline.

The Gidimt’en land defenders of the Wet’suwet’en turned to the international forum and made a submission to the United Nations Human Rights Council’s Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous People on the “Militarization of Wet’suwet’en Lands and Canada’s Ongoing Violations.”  The submission was co-authored by leading legal, academic, and human rights experts in Canada, and is supported by over two dozen organisations such as the Union of BC Indian Chiefs and Amnesty International-Canada.

The submission to the UN was presented by hereditary chief Dinï ze’ Woos (Frank Alec), Gidimt’en Checkpoint spokesperson Sleydo’ (Molly Wickham), and Gidimt’en Checkpoint media coordinator Jen Wickham. It makes the case that forced industrialization by Coastal GasLink and police militarization on Wet’suwet’en land is a repudiation of Canada’s international obligations as stipulated in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP).

Their submission states:

Ongoing human rights violations, militarization of Wet’suwet’en lands, forcible removal and criminalization of peaceful land defenders, and irreparable harm due to industrial destruction of Wet’suwet’en lands and cultural sites are occurring despite declarations by federal and provincial governments for reconciliation with Indigenous peoples. By deploying legal, political, and economic tactics to violate our rights, Canada and BC are contravening the spirit of reconciliation, as well as their binding obligations to Indigenous law, Canadian constitutional law, UNDRIP and international law.

Sleydo’ relates the situation:

We urge the United Nations to conduct a field visit to Wet’suwet’en territory because Canada and BC have not withdrawn RCMP from our territory and have not suspended Coastal GasLink’s permits, despite the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination calling on them to do so. Wet’suwet’en is an international frontline to protect the rights of Indigenous peoples and to prevent climate change. Yet we are intimidated and surveilled by armed RCMP, smeared as terrorists, and dragged through colonial courts. This is the reality of Canada.

In the three large-scale police actions that have transpired on Wet’suwet’en territory since January 2019, several dozens of people have been arrested and detained, including legal observers and media. On 13 June 2022, the Unist’ot’en Solidarity Brigade expressed outrage that the BC Prosecution Service plans to pursue criminal contempt charges against people opposed to the trespass of Wet’suwet’en territory, including Sleydo’.

Treaty Treatment

The Wet’suwet’en are on their ancestral unceded lands. Would it have made a difference if they had signed a treaty with the colonial entity?

The book We Remember the Coming of the White Man (Durville, 2021), edited by Sarah Stewart and Raymond Yakeleya, does not augur a better outcome for the First People.

We Remember adumbrates how the treaty process operates under colonialism:

When our Dene People signed Treaty 11 in 1921, there had been no negotiation because the Treaty translators were not able to translate the actual language used in the document. There was not enough time for our People to consult with each other. Our Dene People were given a list that had been written up by bureaucrats declaring the demands of Treaty 11. They dictated to the Dene, ‘This is what we want. You have to agree, and sign it.’ We did not know what the papers contained. (p ix)

Treaties and contracts signed under duress are not legally binding. Forced signing of a treaty is on-its-face preposterous to most people with at least half a lobe. It is no less obvious to the Dene of the Northwest Territories:

How can you demand something from People who cannot understand? That’s a crime. I have often said that Treaty 11 does not meet the threshold of being legal. In other words, when we make a treaty, it should be you understand, I understand, and we agree. In this case, the Dene did not understand. (p x)

Unfortunately, the Dene trusted an untrustworthy churchman. The Dene signed on the urging of Bishop Breyant, a man of God, because they had faith in the Roman Catholic Church. (p x)

Oil appeals to those with a lust for lucre. This greed contrasts with traditional Dene customs. Walter Blondin writes in the Foreword,

We Dene consider our land as sacred and owned by everyone collectively as it provides life…. [T]here were laws between the families that insured harmony and sharing. No one was left behind to face hardships or starve when disasters such as forest fires devastated the lands. The Dene laws promoted sharing, and this was taken seriously as failure to follow these laws could lead to war and bloody conflict. (p 3)

The Blondin family of Norman Wells (Tlegohli) in the Northwest Territories experienced first hand the perfidy of the White Man. The Blondins gave oil samples from their land to the Roman Catholic bishop for testing. The Dene family never received any report of the results. Later, however, a geologist, Dr Bosworth staked three claims at Bosworth Creek that were bought by Imperial Oil in 1918. (p 5-6)

Imperial Oil told the families: “You are not welcome in your homes and your traditional lands and your hunting territory.” The Dene people were driven out. “Elders say, ‘It was the first time in living memory where the Dene became homeless on their own land.'” (p 6)

The Blondin family homes were torn down with possessions inside and pushed over the river bank. “No apology or compensation was ever received from Imperial Oil. Imperial Oil considered Norman Wells to be ‘their town—a White Man’s town’ and the Blondin family and other Dene were not welcome.” (p 6)

“Treaty 11 became the ‘treaty for oil ownership.'” (p 8)

“One hundred years after the fact, the Dene can see the collusion between the British Crown, Imperial Oil [now ExxonMobil] and the Roman Catholic Church in the fraud, theft and embezzlement of Dene resources.” (p 10)

Sarah Stewart writes, “Treaty 11 was a charade to legitimize the land grab in the Northwest Territories.” The land grab came with horrific consequences. Stewart laments that the White Man brought disease, moved onto Dene lands and decimated wildlife, and that the teaching of missionaries and missionary schools eroded native languages, cultures, and traditions. (p 14)

Indigenous People, whose land it was, were never considered equal partners in benefiting from the resource. As Indian Agent Henry Conroy wrote to the Deputy General of Indian Affairs in January 1921, the objective was to have Indigenous people surrender their territory ‘to avoid complications in the exploitation of oil.’ (p 15)

Filmmaker Raymond Yakeleya elucidates major differences between the colonialists and the Dene. He points to the capitalist mindset of the White Man: “‘How can we make money off this?’ Dene People are not motivated by that.” (p 24) A deep respect and reverence for all the Creator’s flora and fauna and land is another difference. “When you kill an animal, you have a conversation with it and give it thanks for sharing its body. There are special protocols and ceremonies you have to go through.” (p 28)

While Yakeleya acknowledges that not all missionaries were bad, (p 30) he points to a dark side:

A major confusion came to our People with the coming of the Catholic missionaries. I see the coming of the Black Robes as being a very, very dark cloud that descended over our People. All of a sudden you have people from another culture with another way of thinking imposing their laws. We see that they did it for money, control, and power. I heard an Elder say to me once that the Christians who followed the Ten Commandments were the same people who broke all of them.

The first time we ever questioned ourselves was with the coming of the Christians and to me, I think there was something evil that came amongst our People…. The missionaries were quick to say our ways were the ways of the devil, or the ways of something not good…. Now we see they are being charged with pedophilia and other crimes. (p 29)

As for the discovery of oil, Joe Blondin said, “The Natives found it and never got anything out of it and that’s the truth.” (p 159) As for Treaty 11, John Blondin stated emphatically, “We know that we did not sell our land.” (p 171)

At the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry in Fort McPherson [Teetł’it Zheh], Dene Philip Blake spoke words that resonate poignantly with the situation in Wet’suwet’en territory today:

If your nation chooses … to continue to try and destroy our nation, then I hope you will understand why we are willing to fight so that our nation can survive. It is our world…. But we are willing to defend it for ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren. If your nation becomes so violent that it would tear up our land, destroy our society and our future, and occupy our homeland, by trying to impose this pipeline against our will, but then of course we will have no choice but to react with violence. I hope we do not have to do that. For it is not the way we would choose…. I hope you will not only look on the violence of Indian action, but also on the violence of your own nation which would force us to take such a course. We will never initiate violence. But if your nation threatens by its own violent action to destroy our nation, you will have given us no choice. Please do not force us into this position. For we would all lose too much. (p 229)

The Nature of Colonialism and Its Treaties

Spoken word poet Shane L. Koyczan captures the nature of colonialism in Inconvenient Skin (Theytus Books, 2019):

150 years is not so long
that the history can be forgot

not so long that
forgiveness can be bought with empty apologies
or unkept promises

sharpened assurances that this is now
how it is

take it on good faith
and accept it

except that
history repeats itself
like someone not being listened to
like an entire people not being heard

the word of god is hard to swallow
when good faith becomes a barren gesture

there were men of good faith
robbing babies from their cradles
like the monsters we used to tell each other about

ripping children out of their mother’s arms
to be imprisoned in the houses of god
whose teachings were love

did no one hear?
did god mumble?

god said love

but the things that were done
were not love

our nation is built above the bones
of a genocide

it was not love that pried apart these families
it is not love that abandons its treaties
…

The post It is Not Love that Abandons Its Treaties first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kim Petersen.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/06/17/it-is-not-love-that-abandons-its-treaties/feed/ 0 307908 https://www.radiofree.org/2022/06/04/until-the-destruction-of-the-last-cage/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/06/04/until-the-destruction-of-the-last-cage/#respond Sat, 04 Jun 2022 16:11:19 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=130196 Welcome to another Episode of System Fail. In this episode we will be covering the trend of rising state repression around the globe. We start in so-called Chile where the newly elected ostensibly left-libertarian president Gabriel Boric has failed to deliver on his promise to free political prisoners. Meanwhile in Munich, police have raided a […]

The post Until the Destruction of the Last Cage first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]> Welcome to another Episode of System Fail. In this episode we will be covering the trend of rising state repression around the globe.

We start in so-called Chile where the newly elected ostensibly left-libertarian president Gabriel Boric has failed to deliver on his promise to free political prisoners.

Meanwhile in Munich, police have raided a number of apartments, an anarchist library, and a print shop.

Then in Greece, long term anarchist prisoner Giannis Michaildis has announced a hunger strike demanding his release.

Finally, a run down of the recent events at the Defend the Forest Atlanta encampment.

The post Until the Destruction of the Last Cage first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by subMedia.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/06/04/until-the-destruction-of-the-last-cage/feed/ 0 304282 https://www.radiofree.org/2022/02/25/american-genocide/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/02/25/american-genocide/#respond Fri, 25 Feb 2022 18:50:51 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=127029 The comments of principal man Ian Zabarte of the Western Bands of the Shoshone Nation of Indians to the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council, characterize the ongoing abuse suffered by the Western Shoshone people as a result of US military and commercial nuclear development. There has been no explicit act of Congress to diminish […]

The post American Genocide first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]> The comments of principal man Ian Zabarte of the Western Bands of the Shoshone Nation of Indians to the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council, characterize the ongoing abuse suffered by the Western Shoshone people as a result of US military and commercial nuclear development. There has been no explicit act of Congress to diminish or extinguish Indian title to 30 million acres of land owned by the Western Shoshone Nation defined by Article 5 of the Treaty of Ruby Valley. We seek creation of a reservation by the President under Article 6 of the treaty as a remedy for the safety, protection and benefit of the Western Shoshone people.

Consultation is not consent but when done, should be according to the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People with free, prior informed consent of Indigenous people affected–a right of self-determination, and in the planning and implementation of projects on our lands. The law needs to be enforced and resources directed to indigenous communities for clean-up efforts and proper enforcement.

Our nation has, and is, being destroyed by nuclear weapons testing and nuclear material disposal. The pattern and practice of the Department of Energy and cooperating agencies inflict conditions intended to bring about the destruction of Shoshone Nation, violating peremptory norms in International Law that the United States has acceded to under the Proxmire Act in 1988 (18 USC 1091–GENOCIDE).

In 1990, the Department of Energy created “cultural triage” used in the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository project defined as, “the forced choice decision-making by an ethnic group to a development project” claiming Indians were involved in Yucca Mountain development. Cultural triage features are it is forced upon ethnic Native Americans for development.” Federally recognized Indian tribes are deemed by the US Supreme Court as incompetents under the superintendence of the Secretary of the Interior and therefore cannot consent. It is the US that is wholly responsible for the outcomes. The systematic use of cultural triage is genocide.

Origin is important. Shoshone individuals must be followed for health consequences. We need collaborative research funding, monitoring, surveillance and registries for Shoshone down-winders affected by radiation from nuclear weapons. We need radiation exposure compensation re-authorization (RECA). We need the President to create a Shoshone homeland under Article 6 of the Treaty of Ruby Valley. All federal actions must be required to prove ownership of federally funded project sites.

Finally, nuclear weapons are illegal under the new International law, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, that entered into force January on 22, 2021. We can protect our environment, our Mother Earth, by ending our obsession with nuclear weapons of mass destruction and join the Treaty on Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Thank you.

The post American Genocide first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Ian Zabarte.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/02/25/american-genocide/feed/ 0 277017 https://www.radiofree.org/2022/02/19/the-right-to-protest-in-the-stolen-indigenous-territory-called-canada/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/02/19/the-right-to-protest-in-the-stolen-indigenous-territory-called-canada/#respond Sat, 19 Feb 2022 22:46:59 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=126710 Canada will always stand up for the right of peaceful protest anywhere around the world and we are pleased to see moves to deescalation and dialogue. — Justin Trudeau So said Canada’s prime minister Trudeau about the farmer protests in India. One assumes that “anywhere” includes Canada. Nonetheless, Trudeau has rejected dialogue with the peaceful […]

The post The Right to Protest in the Stolen Indigenous Territory Called Canada first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>

Canada will always stand up for the right of peaceful protest anywhere around the world and we are pleased to see moves to deescalation and dialogue.

— Justin Trudeau

So said Canada’s prime minister Trudeau about the farmer protests in India. One assumes that “anywhere” includes Canada. Nonetheless, Trudeau has rejected dialogue with the peaceful trucker convoy, and instead of deescalation he turned to his “final option,” the Emergencies Act that seemingly permits police violence against Canadians.

It is time for a renewed, nation-to-nation relationship with First Nations peoples, one that understands that the constitutionally guaranteed rights of First Nations in Canada are not an inconvenience but rather a sacred obligation.

— Justin Trudeau

What does the sacred obligation of a nation-to-nation relationship with First Nations peoples look like for Trudeau? On 7 February 2020, the Unist’ot’en Solidarity Brigade reported a RCMP raid with helicopters, snipers, police dogs, and tactical teams.

The invasion was carried out by heavily armed RCMP despite the Wet’suwet’en having made it clear that they are unarmed and peaceful. The Wet’suwet’en had also made it clear through the unanimity of the hereditary chiefs that they do not want a pipeline going through their unceded territory.

Carleton University criminology professor Jeffrey Monaghan questioned police legitimacy and police violence against legitimate dissent by the Wet’suwet’en. The professor considers the RCMP unreformable and called for its dismantling.

Police violence is Canada’s method of settling differences. This is now being witnessed against truckers and their supporters.

This is how peaceful protest is handled by Trudeau’s government:

The current scene at Parliament Hill in Ottawa as police continue to drive protestors back.

Footage by @PuffinsPictures pic.twitter.com/IyGTYPQsNQ

— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) February 19, 2022

And the tweet below says it all for police (at this point shouldn’t police be called for what their actions reveal them to be?: goons) tactics as they barge on horseback through crowds of people and end up trampling a woman with a walker.

This is disturbing. Is the woman with the walker trampled by Mounted Unit horses alive? Is she in surgery? Has ⁦@SIUOntario⁩ been notified? Do you have any concerns or comment ⁦@OttawaPolice⁩ ⁦@JustinTrudeau⁩ ⁦@fordnation⁩ ⁦@JimWatsonOttawa⁩ – Why? pic.twitter.com/X251vZiIaq

— Joe Warmington (@joe_warmington) February 18, 2022

The peaceful protest was turned violent by police on Trudeau’s order.

I have spent 12 days live streaming from Ottawa. I did not see one shred of violence until the police showed up.

— Viva Frei (@thevivafrei) February 18, 2022

The below image is sure to immortalize Trudeau’s push for power.

Breaking : woman trampled by a Canadian Police horse just died at the hospital #Trudeau

कनाडा में पुलिस के घोड़ो से कुचलकर महिला प्रदर्शनकारी की मौत #FreedomConvoyCanada pic.twitter.com/ksvbO2gzSR

— Live Adalat (@LiveAdalat) February 19, 2022

The trampled upon woman, identified as Roberta Paulsen, is one of the growing list of victims of Trudeau’s Emergencies Act. Rebel News reporter Alexa Lavoie was hit three times with a club by a cop who then shot a tear gas canister at her leg from point-blank range.

This is Trudeau’s legacy: the lengths one man, backed by his party, will go to force people to surrender autonomy over their bodies and, in the case of Indigenous peoples, their land.

The post The Right to Protest in the Stolen Indigenous Territory Called Canada first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kim Petersen.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/02/19/the-right-to-protest-in-the-stolen-indigenous-territory-called-canada/feed/ 0 275355 https://www.radiofree.org/2022/02/19/the-right-to-protest-in-the-stolen-indigenous-territory-called-canada-2/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/02/19/the-right-to-protest-in-the-stolen-indigenous-territory-called-canada-2/#respond Sat, 19 Feb 2022 22:46:59 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=126710 Canada will always stand up for the right of peaceful protest anywhere around the world and we are pleased to see moves to deescalation and dialogue. — Justin Trudeau So said Canada’s prime minister Trudeau about the farmer protests in India. One assumes that “anywhere” includes Canada. Nonetheless, Trudeau has rejected dialogue with the peaceful […]

The post The Right to Protest in the Stolen Indigenous Territory Called Canada first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>

Canada will always stand up for the right of peaceful protest anywhere around the world and we are pleased to see moves to deescalation and dialogue.

— Justin Trudeau

So said Canada’s prime minister Trudeau about the farmer protests in India. One assumes that “anywhere” includes Canada. Nonetheless, Trudeau has rejected dialogue with the peaceful trucker convoy, and instead of deescalation he turned to his “final option,” the Emergencies Act that seemingly permits police violence against Canadians.

It is time for a renewed, nation-to-nation relationship with First Nations peoples, one that understands that the constitutionally guaranteed rights of First Nations in Canada are not an inconvenience but rather a sacred obligation.

— Justin Trudeau

What does the sacred obligation of a nation-to-nation relationship with First Nations peoples look like for Trudeau? On 7 February 2020, the Unist’ot’en Solidarity Brigade reported a RCMP raid with helicopters, snipers, police dogs, and tactical teams.

The invasion was carried out by heavily armed RCMP despite the Wet’suwet’en having made it clear that they are unarmed and peaceful. The Wet’suwet’en had also made it clear through the unanimity of the hereditary chiefs that they do not want a pipeline going through their unceded territory.

Carleton University criminology professor Jeffrey Monaghan questioned police legitimacy and police violence against legitimate dissent by the Wet’suwet’en. The professor considers the RCMP unreformable and called for its dismantling.

Police violence is Canada’s method of settling differences. This is now being witnessed against truckers and their supporters.

This is how peaceful protest is handled by Trudeau’s government:

The current scene at Parliament Hill in Ottawa as police continue to drive protestors back.

Footage by @PuffinsPictures pic.twitter.com/IyGTYPQsNQ

— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) February 19, 2022

And the tweet below says it all for police (at this point shouldn’t police be called for what their actions reveal them to be?: goons) tactics as they barge on horseback through crowds of people and end up trampling a woman with a walker.

This is disturbing. Is the woman with the walker trampled by Mounted Unit horses alive? Is she in surgery? Has ⁦@SIUOntario⁩ been notified? Do you have any concerns or comment ⁦@OttawaPolice⁩ ⁦@JustinTrudeau⁩ ⁦@fordnation⁩ ⁦@JimWatsonOttawa⁩ – Why? pic.twitter.com/X251vZiIaq

— Joe Warmington (@joe_warmington) February 18, 2022

The peaceful protest was turned violent by police on Trudeau’s order.

I have spent 12 days live streaming from Ottawa. I did not see one shred of violence until the police showed up.

— Viva Frei (@thevivafrei) February 18, 2022

The below image is sure to immortalize Trudeau’s push for power.

Breaking : woman trampled by a Canadian Police horse just died at the hospital #Trudeau

कनाडा में पुलिस के घोड़ो से कुचलकर महिला प्रदर्शनकारी की मौत #FreedomConvoyCanada pic.twitter.com/ksvbO2gzSR

— Live Adalat (@LiveAdalat) February 19, 2022

The trampled upon woman, identified as Roberta Paulsen, is one of the growing list of victims of Trudeau’s Emergencies Act. Rebel News reporter Alexa Lavoie was hit three times with a club by a cop who then shot a tear gas canister at her leg from point-blank range.

This is Trudeau’s legacy: the lengths one man, backed by his party, will go to force people to surrender autonomy over their bodies and, in the case of Indigenous peoples, their land.

The post The Right to Protest in the Stolen Indigenous Territory Called Canada first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kim Petersen.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/02/19/the-right-to-protest-in-the-stolen-indigenous-territory-called-canada-2/feed/ 0 275356 https://www.radiofree.org/2022/02/02/why-wouldnt-biden-grant-clemency-to-leonard-peltier/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/02/02/why-wouldnt-biden-grant-clemency-to-leonard-peltier/#respond Wed, 02 Feb 2022 17:59:13 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=126117 Last Friday, it became known that the 77-year-old native American political prisoner Leonard Peltier was sick with COVID-19. Peltier has been in prison for over 46 years, which makes him the oldest political prisoner in the United States. This fact has brought attention to his case, but the truth is that his freedom has been […]

The post Why Wouldn’t Biden Grant Clemency to Leonard Peltier? first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]> Last Friday, it became known that the 77-year-old native American political prisoner Leonard Peltier was sick with COVID-19. Peltier has been in prison for over 46 years, which makes him the oldest political prisoner in the United States.

This fact has brought attention to his case, but the truth is that his freedom has been a permanent demand of a movement since the first day of his unfair incarceration.

For decades, American and foreign activists along with renowned personalities like the Dalai Lama, Reverend Jesse Jackson, Senator Patrick Leahy, and even Pope Francis have demanded justice to be done in his case. However, former presidents Bill Clinton, George Bush, and Barack Obama all turned a blind eye to the issue, neglecting their role of correcting a penal system that is cruel and dysfunctional at best, as is so vividly demonstrated in the case of Peltier.

Since President Joe Biden got the White House, several petitions have been presented to him but they all remain unanswered. Among those demanding Biden to grant executive clemency to the Native American civil rights activist is former prosecutor James Reynolds, who helped send Peltier off to prison in 1977 and took part in two out of three appeals filed by Peltier’s defense. In his letter to the president, Reynolds acknowledged he was part of rigged trials to send Peltier behind bars with no evidence of guilt.

But why should Biden grant executive pardon to an Indigene who allegedly killed two FBI agents? Recognizing the injustice might be the first reason to do it since there is plenty of evidence supporting Peltier’s long-standing innocence.

Taking into account Reynolds’ statements and all the evidence gathered throughout these 4 decades, it is clear that the court system sided with the government agencies, namely the FBI, to find Peltier guilty of a double homicide, even when there was overwhelming evidence  supporting his innocence. The FBI threatened and intimidated witnesses to get prejudiced testimonies, and hid ballistic tests assuring that Peltier’s rifle had not shot the bullets that killed the two FBI agents.

The trial was such a fake that after the prosecutors actually admitted they did not know who really killed the agents, Peltier was found guilty of aiding and abetting the murders and sentenced to two life terms in prisons. It is also suspicious that the other two people who were initially indicted together with Peltier were found innocent due to the lack of consistent evidence. At one point Peltier was the only suspect left and someone had to pay for the death of those two agents.

Another aspect of the case is that it is sadly another example of COINTELPRO’s work since, at the time of his arrest Peltier was under FBI surveillance for his activities in defense of Indigenous people’s rights. The government wanted to make an example of him to others about what could happen to them for standing up for justice for their own people.

Another reason why Biden should grant clemency is that Peltier fulfills the criteria for commutation. It was perfectly described by the head of the Senate Committee that oversees the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Senator Brian Schatz. He wrote a letter to the president saying that Peltier is old and suffers from critical illnesses; he has already served enough time in prison; and lastly, the unavailability of other remedies in prison.

Leonard Peltier suffers from diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease, and high blood pressure. For an aging man in his condition, getting COVID-19 amidst these circumstances is nothing less than a death sentence. Peltier had complained before that the authorities at the high security federal prison in Coleman Florida have refused to give him a Covid booster shot. Peltier has described the prison as a “torture chamber” since the pandemic began.

How it is possible that despite Peltier’s pleas to get a booster dose, he had been denied by prison authorities? The Bureau of Prisons (BOP) argues that they have not been able to vaccinate, even elder prisoners, with the booster dose. Notwithstanding, in the outside world, the government issues vaccine mandates. So the problem is not the lack of vaccines and resources but the will to treat prisoners as human beings.

However, Peltier is just an example of the treatment that political prisoners get in the US. As we mentioned in a related article titled “Political Prisoners in Cuba and in the United States; Facts and Fiction, Part 2,” other political prisoners like Sundiata Acoli or Mumia Abu-Jamal also got COVID last year and are also suffering critical illnesses, and their lives are still at high risk. The judicial – penal system seems committed to indifference to prisoners in general and in particular political prisoners and are content to just allow them to die as was the case of Russell Maroon Shoats, who was released in critical health condition and died just 51 days later.

Political Prisoners are the most visible cases, but the problem affects the entire in-jail population, accounting for 2.3 million people. One in 4 incarcerated people in the world are in the US; a country that makes up less than 4% of the world’s population. It is twisted that the United States does not care about them. Why? Because the great majority are Latinos, black and poor people? Where is the respect for Human Rights? Where is the empathy and social conscience? This is something that American society needs to look at in earnest.

Most of those people might be guilty of some crimes but remain victims of a social and political system that marginalizes them and takes away any chances of any decent developmental training or reintegration back into society. In other cases, the only crime they might be guilty of is being loyal to their ideals and fighting for a more equitable and fairer country, as is the case of Leonard Peltier. Based on that alone everybody who loves justice and fair causes should stand with Peltier and demand Biden to save an innocent life.

“In and out of lockdown last year at least meant a shower every third day and a meal beyond a sandwich wet with some peanut butter, but now with COVID as an excuse, nothing. No phone, no window, no fresh air, no humans to gather with, no loved ones’ voice, no relief,” as Peltier described his current situation in Coleman. There is no better description of the inhumane conditions of the United States prison network, which is the biggest and most crowded in the world.

Today these terrible conditions became even more exacerbated when the entire 120 federal US prisons in the US went into complete lockdown after 2 inmates were murdered in the federal prison in Beaumont Texas, a notorious prison where Cuban political prisoner Ramon Labanino of the Cuban 5 spent many years for monitoring the activity of Cuban terrorists operating in the US against his country.

It is evident that Peltier’s life is in grave danger making Biden’s executive pardon  a life-or-death decision. The buck stops with the president who with a stroke of a pen could free him.

The US government is not known for making decisions based on a moral obligation but Biden could take the opportunity to do just that. The life of Leonard Peltier, the courageous Indigenous fighter for justice, is in his hands. And the critical question remains, what reason could Biden have not to free him?

The post Why Wouldn’t Biden Grant Clemency to Leonard Peltier? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Gustavo A Maranges and Bill Hackwell.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/02/02/why-wouldnt-biden-grant-clemency-to-leonard-peltier/feed/ 0 270735 https://www.radiofree.org/2022/01/25/protest-at-londons-science-museum-as-indigenous-peoples-slam-adani-sponsorship-deal/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/01/25/protest-at-londons-science-museum-as-indigenous-peoples-slam-adani-sponsorship-deal/#respond Tue, 25 Jan 2022 14:44:27 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=125770 Local people look out on to the massive PEKB coal mine that has taken over their lands, Chhattisgarh, India. © Pranav Capila Photo opportunity: January 26, 2022, 5pm – 6pm Science Museum, Exhibition Rd, South Kensington, LONDON SW7 2DD Protestors will gather outside the Science Museum in London on Wednesday to call for an end […]

The post Protest at London’s Science Museum as Indigenous Peoples Slam Adani Sponsorship Deal first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>
Local people look out on to the massive PEKB coal mine that has taken over their lands, Chhattisgarh, India. © Pranav Capila

Photo opportunity:
January 26, 2022, 5pm – 6pm
Science Museum, Exhibition Rd, South Kensington, LONDON SW7 2DD

Protestors will gather outside the Science Museum in London on Wednesday to call for an end to the museum’s sponsorship deal with Adani, a huge conglomerate operating highly contested coal mines on Indigenous peoples’ ancestral lands.

The protest is in solidarity with Indigenous peoples from India, Australia and Indonesia – all countries where Adani operates mines on Indigenous land. It’s supported by Survival International, Extinction Rebellion Scientists, London Mining Network, Culture Unstained, UK Student Climate Network and Coal Action Network.

Protesters will urge the museum to listen to Indigenous voices and drop Adani Green Energy as a sponsor of its new “Energy Revolution” exhibition.

Indigenous representatives from India, Australia and Indonesia have written a letter to the museum urging it to cut its ties with the Adani Group. They state: “Indigenous communities in all these countries are experiencing land-grabs, repression, the destruction of sacred lands, pollution of air, land and water and, of course, the worsening impacts of climate change exacerbated by burning coal.” Their letter was a response to the public dismissal of Indigenous concerns by the museum’s director, Sir Ian Blatchford. Testimonies will be heard at the protest from Indigenous communities directly affected.

In India, Adani is playing a part in a massive, government-approved coal rush focused on the forested central tribal belt in Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, and Odisha, despite fierce resistance.

In Chhattisgarh, Adani has targeted the priceless Hasdeo Forest, home to 20,000 Adivasi (Indigenous) people. Adani already operates one mine there, and another, Parsa, has just been approved.

Phillip, an Oraon activist from Jharkhand, said: “We Adivasi people can save the Earth… but they [the government] see no value for this. They just want us to be dead… To Adani and Ambani: big corporations like you people need to also pay attention. We Adivasi people will not just leave our lands to you. Because, if anything can save the world, it is the worldview of the Adivasi people. There is no other way. You are destroying the environment, which is Adivasi people’s life, by mining. Hear me straight: Change yourself, or nature will change you for the better.”

Dr Jo Woodman of Survival International said today: “The Science Museum’s deal with Adani is the worst kind of greenwashing. Indigenous people from India to Indonesia and Australia are campaigning against the company and its mines. Coal mining is not only destroying Indigenous lands, it’s catastrophic for the fight against climate change. The museum should scrap its sponsorship deal with Adani immediately. It’s on the wrong side of history.” The post Protest at London’s Science Museum as Indigenous Peoples Slam Adani Sponsorship Deal first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Survival International.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/01/25/protest-at-londons-science-museum-as-indigenous-peoples-slam-adani-sponsorship-deal/feed/ 0 268417 https://www.radiofree.org/2022/01/24/activists-in-canada-build-construction-site-on-pipeline-executives-front-lawns/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/01/24/activists-in-canada-build-construction-site-on-pipeline-executives-front-lawns/#respond Mon, 24 Jan 2022 19:30:09 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=125729 World Beyond War Toronto, Ontario, Canada — This morning, Toronto supporters of the Wet’suwet’en land defense struggle against the Coastal Gaslink pipeline set up construction sites at the Toronto homes of TC Energy Board Chair Siim Vanaselja and Royal Bank of Canada Executive Doug Guzman. The supporters also flyered the neighborhood with photos of the […]

The post Activists in Canada Build Construction Site on Pipeline Executives’ Front Lawns first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>

World Beyond War

Toronto, Ontario, Canada — This morning, Toronto supporters of the Wet’suwet’en land defense struggle against the Coastal Gaslink pipeline set up construction sites at the Toronto homes of TC Energy Board Chair Siim Vanaselja and Royal Bank of Canada Executive Doug Guzman. The supporters also flyered the neighborhood with photos of the two men with signs warning, “Your neighbour is pushing the Coastal Gaslink pipeline through Wet’suwet’en Territory at gunpoint.”

Rachel Small, Canada Organizer for World BEYOND War, said, “Today supporters took action to bring the message home to Siim Vanaselja and Doug Guzman, two men leading companies that are orchestrating, funding, and profiting off of the violent colonial invasion of unceded Wet’suwet’en territory. The decisions they make are directly linked to the militarized violence that the RCMP has carried out on Wet’suwet’en people over the past several months to shove through the Coastal Gaslink pipeline at gunpoint.”

In November, RCMP deployed military-style police units – including snipers, heavily-armed assault teams, and canine units – against unarmed Wet’suwet’en land defenders during a raid on land defense camps set up to stop pipeline construction crews from drilling under the Wedzin Kwa river. During these raids, the RCMP destroyed several of the land defenders’ homes, using axes and a chainsaw, and burned one home to the ground.

“The home of my sister, Jocelyn Alec, was burned down and bulldozed after she was violently arrested and removed at gunpoint,” said Wet’suwet’en Land Defender Eve Saint. “She is the daughter of Hereditary Chief Woos, and her home was on our traditional, unceded Wet’suwet’en territory.”

Rachelle Friesen from Community Peacemaker Teams expressed support for the action, “We can’t stand by and let executives like Siim and Doug continue to ignore the impacts of their decisions while militarized police force through their investments. Across Turtle Island people are rising up to show that we will not back down until the Coastal Gaslink pipeline project and the RCMP leave Wet’suwet’en territory.”

TC Energy is constructing Coastal GasLink, a $6.6 billion dollar 670 km pipeline that would transport fracked gas in northeastern B.C. to a $40 billion LNG terminal on B.C.’s North Coast. The project runs through the unceded territory of the Wet’suwet’en Nation and has been met with ongoing resistance from the nation’s hereditary leadership who hold authority over traditional territories. Wet’suwet’en land defenders and their supporters have vowed that they will not allow construction to continue on unceded Wet’suwet’en territory without the consent of Wet’suwet’en Hereditary Chiefs.

RBC is one of the Coastal GasLink pipeline’s primary financiers, and played a leading role in securing the project finance package that would cover up to 80% of the pipeline’s construction costs.

On January 4, 2020, Wet’suwet’en Hereditary Chiefs issued an eviction order to Coastal GasLink, which one of the nation’s five clans, the Gidimt’en, enforced in November by blocking roads and preventing pipeline workers from accessing work sites. The eviction orders Coastal GasLink to remove themselves from the territory and not return and highlights that TC Energy’s construction on Wet’suwet’en land ignores the jurisdiction and authority of Hereditary Chiefs and the feast system of governance, which was recognized by the Supreme Court of Canada in 1997.

Said Gidimt’en spokesperson Sleydo’ of the ongoing invasion of unceded Wet’suwet’en territory, “It’s infuriating, it’s illegal, even according to their own means of colonial law. We need to shut down Canada.”

The post Activists in Canada Build Construction Site on Pipeline Executives’ Front Lawns first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by David Swanson.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/01/24/activists-in-canada-build-construction-site-on-pipeline-executives-front-lawns/feed/ 0 268206 https://www.radiofree.org/2021/12/22/more-blockades-set-up-by-wetsuweten-activists/ https://www.radiofree.org/2021/12/22/more-blockades-set-up-by-wetsuweten-activists/#respond Wed, 22 Dec 2021 01:15:27 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=124744 In so-called British Columbia, Wet’suwet’en activists have set up more blockades in the Coastal GasLink pipeline dispute.

Last month more than 30 people were arrested by RCMP who were enforcing an injunction that allows the company to operate in the area.

The post More Blockades Set up by Wet’suwet’en Activists first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by APTN.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2021/12/22/more-blockades-set-up-by-wetsuweten-activists/feed/ 0 259846 https://www.radiofree.org/2021/12/17/what-does-it-mean-for-the-dispossessor-to-compensate-the-dispossessed/ https://www.radiofree.org/2021/12/17/what-does-it-mean-for-the-dispossessor-to-compensate-the-dispossessed/#respond Fri, 17 Dec 2021 15:00:00 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=124547 Settlers enjoyed a seeming free permission: to dispossess natives at will of all the best land, turn them out of traditional fishing locations, disrespect elders, women, children and religion, leave whole communities without political representation and punish men for breaking laws which they could have no means of knowing existed. It was inconceivable that all […]

The post What Does It Mean for the Dispossessor to “Compensate” the Dispossessed? first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>

Settlers enjoyed a seeming free permission: to dispossess natives at will of all the best land, turn them out of traditional fishing locations, disrespect elders, women, children and religion, leave whole communities without political representation and punish men for breaking laws which they could have no means of knowing existed. It was inconceivable that all this change could happen overnight without violence. Instead, there was the greatest imaginable violence: genocide.

— Tom Swanky, The Great Darkening, 2012

Somehow, even “genocide” seems an inadequate description for what happened, yet rather than viewing it with horror, most Americans have conceived of it as their country’s manifest destiny.

— Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, 2015

Imagine, if you can, that someone would take almost everything from you — your home, your culture, your language, your spirituality, your connection to the past, your children, your elders — and render you spiritually, emotionally, and economically destitute. In subsequent years, the thief uses the purloined land and resources to amass enormous material wealth. While others around you have suffered injury and death, you are among those still breathing — a survivor? Sometimes the word survivor seems so inappropriate. Isn’t it possible to breathe the air and still feel as if you have not survived?

Canada exists because it conducted a genocide. Canada prefers that the genocide have an adjective attached: cultural. A cultural genocide sounds like there were no bodies, that only some traditions were ripped away. But that is a lie. Many Indigenous children taken from their families did not return. Indigenous children with contagious tuberculosis were intentionally kept in dorms with otherwise healthy children. Smallpox is also known to have been deliberately passed on to First Nations. The purposeful propagation of lethal diseases is, first and foremost, biological not cultural. Land is a lot easier for the taking when there are no people on it.

But history sometimes has a seemingly morality-attuned quirk for re-emerging and biting the backs of those, or their progeny, who reaped unjust fruits.

Canadian society and its government have been dominated by European settler-colonialists. Many of the settlers denigrated Indigenous peoples, viewing them as savages, lazy, uncouth, and inferior. So the Indigenes were removed to postage-stamp sized reserves far from White society’s sensibilities. In the meantime, the plan to disappear Indigenous peoples, by way of assimilation, was being carried out by the church and state.

The long-buried crimes would eventually resurface and set off a paroxysm of consternation in sensible society.

One powder keg, was the launching of a national class-action lawsuit by Indigenous peoples concerning a long-standing human rights complaint over the underfunding of First Nations child welfare. The Canadian government fought it, but sometimes a form of justice prevails. Canada was found culpable for racially discriminating against First Nations kids living on reserves. Canada was ordered to pay the statutory maximum of C$40,000 to victims of discrimination and some family members.

Canada’s Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN) reported: “The federal government is pledging up to $40 billion [approximately US$30 billion] to compensate First Nations kids and reform the child-welfare system.”

What is a pledge from the Canadian government worth? After all, prime minister Justin Trudeau promised to lift all long-term drinking-water advisories by March 2021. Progress was made, but as of 9 December 2021 there are still 42 long-term drinking-water advisories in 33 communities.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission — whose raison d’être was to come to grips with the tattered legacy of forced assimilation and abuse in the residential school system — issued a report in July 2015 with 94 Calls to Action. As of 8 October 2021, 13 calls were completed, 29 had projects under way, 32 had projects proposed, and 20 calls had no action started. More than 6 years later, Canada has completed almost 14% of the actions. What does that indicate about fidelity to reconciliation?

Then there is the question unexplored: from where did the Canadian government derive the money to “compensate” First Nations kids? Is the Canadian state not filling its coffers with resources extracted from First Nations, Michif, and Inuit land? Land, much of which is unceded or obtained through fraudulent treaty negotiations.

Consider what reconciliation and compensation looks like to the Wet’suwet’en people who are facing militarized Canadian gendarmes helping force a pipeline route through unceded Wet’suwet’en territory.

What should be done?

If someone (especially someone of means) steals something precious from you, don’t you want it returned? If someone unlawfully tosses you out of your home and off your property, don’t you want it back? There is an Indigenous-led movement calling for Land Back. If land was stolen should it not be returned to the original users? Users because many First Nations do not believe in ownership of the land, meaning that it cannot be bought or sold.

The post What Does It Mean for the Dispossessor to “Compensate” the Dispossessed? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kim Petersen.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2021/12/17/what-does-it-mean-for-the-dispossessor-to-compensate-the-dispossessed/feed/ 0 258741 https://www.radiofree.org/2021/12/01/resistance-on-the-territory-and-across-turtle-island-continues/ https://www.radiofree.org/2021/12/01/resistance-on-the-territory-and-across-turtle-island-continues/#respond Wed, 01 Dec 2021 13:47:45 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=124048 Despite the attempts of the BC and Federal government to use a massive show of force, and cruel conditions of imprisonment to intimidate land defenders and stop Wet’suwet’en assertion of their inherent rights and title to their land, the struggle on Wet’suwet’en territory and beyond continues! Below is a collection of recent updates, photos, videos and ways […]

The post Resistance on the Territory and Across Turtle Island Continues first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]> Despite the attempts of the BC and Federal government to use a massive show of force, and cruel conditions of imprisonment to intimidate land defenders and stop Wet’suwet’en assertion of their inherent rights and title to their land, the struggle on Wet’suwet’en territory and beyond continues!

Below is a collection of recent updates, photos, videos and ways to take action!

UPDATE FROM FRONT LINES:

Freda Huson shared a video message on CGL and the RCMP burning down the cabin at Coyote Camp and the long history of arson used against Wet’suwet’en people.

Resistance on the territory continues as two more arrests were made yesterday after a fire was set on the Morice Service Road stopping CGL work.

Sleydo’ gave an interview on Democracy Now this morning detailing the ways RCMP acts on behalf of industry with little accountability or oversight.

The Haida Nation sent a delegation of supporters and supplies to Wet’suwet’en Territory in solidarity with the ongoing struggle.

Gitxsan allies have been maintaining a constant presence at the CN rail tracks which have been heavily patrolled by RCMP since they violently arrested Denzel Wilson Sutherland.

After that arrest Gitxsan Hereditary Chiefs issued an eviction notice to MLA Nathan Cullen who’s office is on their territory.

Solidarity actions continue across turtle island and beyond with powerful actions taking place in nearly every major city in Canada and several Canadian embassy, and investor offices abroad!

There is an action in Vancouver tomorrow at 666 Burrard St at 11:30 AM!

Chief Howihkat (Freda Huson) Speaks out on the ongoing use of arson to remove Wet’suwet’en from their land

Post from Unist’ot’en Camp Facebook:
“Our hearts are with our Gidim’ten neighbors at Gidimt’en Checkpoint following the illegal and immoral destruction of their cabin on unceded Gidim’ten territory. We know all too well the pain of arson on our homes and attempts at displacing our people from our Yintah as a land-grab tactic by Industry and different colonial Canadian government institutions.

Chief Howihkat (Freda Huson) provides context for the long legacy of arson and destroying Unist’ot’en property at various places on our unceded Yintah since her maternal grandfather’s occupation and use of our territory, up to recent experiences by our current Chief Knedebeas.

Despite these efforts to erase our presence and interfere with our ability to live on our lands we remain, we rebuild, and we reclaim forever what is and always will be Wet’suwet’en Yintah.

#WetsuwetenStrong”

Freda recently was one of four international recipients of the Right Livelihood award for her work to defend Wet’suwet’en territory and bring healing to her community.

Since the 2020 raids she has been running programs for Wet’suwet’en members out of the Healing Centre on Wet’suwet’en territory.

Update from the ongoing restistance in Gidimt’en Territory posted on Yintah Access Instagram Yesterday

“Early this morning, a fire was set on the road and CGL work was stopped. Another two arrests were made on Gidimt’en territory, for a growing total of 34 arrests in the last several weeks. That makes 36 arrests since Coyote Camp was established on Sept 25th, 2021.”

Despite racist, colonial state repression, Wet’suwet’en law will continue to be upheld. We will never back down.

The post Resistance on the Territory and Across Turtle Island Continues first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by UnistotenCamp.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2021/12/01/resistance-on-the-territory-and-across-turtle-island-continues/feed/ 0 253655 https://www.radiofree.org/2021/12/01/why-are-catholic-churches-being-trashed/ https://www.radiofree.org/2021/12/01/why-are-catholic-churches-being-trashed/#respond Wed, 01 Dec 2021 13:26:06 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=124041 Catholic church burns to the ground, Attawapiskat First Nation Hello Mr Annett, I am a Detective with the Vancouver Police Department, and my partner and I have been assigned to look into some of the more recent incidents in the city of Vancouver that relate to the vandalism towards Catholic Churches and ongoing protests from […]

The post Why are Catholic Churches Being Trashed? first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]> Catholic church burns to the ground, Attawapiskat First Nation

Hello Mr Annett,

I am a Detective with the Vancouver Police Department, and my partner and I have been assigned to look into some of the more recent incidents in the city of Vancouver that relate to the vandalism towards Catholic Churches and ongoing protests from the heightened tension in society today.

I noted in my reading online that you have a background in understanding the residential school history in the Province and the role of the Catholic Church. I was hoping that you may have time to sit down with my partner and I, or to discuss over the phone if you prefer, some of you thoughts on the tensions currently existing, and your perspective on them. Our goal is to promote public safety, and of course any understanding helps us to do that.

I hope to hear from you!

Mike Scoretz

Desk: 604-717-9948
ac.dpvnull@zterocs.leahcim

Investigation Division
3585 Graveley Street
Vancouver BC
V5K 5J5

REPLY from Kevin Annett

Dear Michael and Alen,

Hello to you both and thank you for writing.

I would be happy to speak to you about the social tensions and conflict caused by unpunished crimes committed by the Roman Catholic church, including its standing policy known as Crimen Sollicitationas that requires that Catholics not report in-house child abuse to the police and help cover it up. That criminal conspiracy has helped caused the death of tens of thousands of native children in the misnamed “Indian residential schools” and intergenerational trauma, suicide and misery. And the failure of the government, the courts, and police to hold the Catholic church accountable under the law has created the outrage and frustration that leads to broken church windows and what you call “vandalism”.

Considering that the Catholic church is actively subverting the law by witholding from your police force evidence of child abuse in its Vancouver churches, many people are wondering why neither the courts nor your Department are taking action to stop such criminality by the church. Instead, your main concern appears to be protecting their property. I am sure that neither of you wish to appear to collude with criminality, no matter who commits it.

Over the years, we have provided to the police and media considerable evidence of child trafficking networks being operated in Vancouver and at such locations as Holy Rosary Cathedral and the Vancouver Club. And yet the police have time and again done nothing about it. Such a tacit collusion with a criminal conspiracy to protect child rapists may account for the frustration felt by people victimized by that church that leads to attacks against church property. But surely the systematic violation and taking of children’s lives by that church is as serious and much worse a crime than the breaking of church windows.

Under international law, the Roman Catholic church is considered a Transnational Criminal Organization (TNCO) because of its proven record of laundering drug cartel money, child torture and trafficking, arms dealing, and centuries of deliberate genocide. Under the United Nations Convention on TNCO’s (2000), such a criminal body has lost its right to its own property and assets, which can be lawfully seized, including by citizens if the police and courts refuse to act. And so what you may consider vandalism against the Catholic church and the seizure of its buildings by indigenous people is actually prescribed by the requirements of international law.

During December, indigenous elders and I are holding a series of public forums and actions that will hold the Catholic church accountable for its many crimes. As part of that effort I will be addressing the matter raised in your letter, including on my upcoming global blog radio program this Sunday. I welcome you or other representatives of the Vancouver Police Department to speak with me live on that program concerning why people feel the need to resort to vandalism when they are denied justice; and what steps the Vancouver police will take now to investigate and prosecute crimes committed by the Roman Catholic church in our city.

I look forward to your reply.

Sincerely,

Rev. Kevin D. Annett, M.A., M.Div.
Canadian Field Secretary of the International Tribunal of Crimes of Church and State (ITCCS)
www.murderbydecree.com

cc: public media , ITCCS head office

The post Why are Catholic Churches Being Trashed? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kevin Annett.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2021/12/01/why-are-catholic-churches-being-trashed/feed/ 0 253658 https://www.radiofree.org/2021/11/30/uncontacted-tribes-land-invaded-and-destroyed-for-beef-production/ https://www.radiofree.org/2021/11/30/uncontacted-tribes-land-invaded-and-destroyed-for-beef-production/#respond Tue, 30 Nov 2021 13:42:02 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=123969 A recent overflight has revealed large-scale cattle ranching inside the Piripkura territory, a blatant violation of a new Land Protection Order. © Rogério Assis/ISA New overflight photos have revealed that the land of one of the world’s most vulnerable uncontacted tribes is being illegally invaded and destroyed for beef production. The land invasion now underway […]

The post Uncontacted Tribe’s Land Invaded and Destroyed for Beef Production first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>

A recent overflight has revealed large-scale cattle ranching inside the Piripkura territory, a blatant violation of a new Land Protection Order. © Rogério Assis/ISA

New overflight photos have revealed that the land of one of the world’s most vulnerable uncontacted tribes is being illegally invaded and destroyed for beef production.

The land invasion now underway is in flagrant violation of a 6-month Land Protection Order issued in September which bans all outsiders from the Piripkura Indigenous Territory.

A major cattle ranching operation is now underway. © Rogério Assis/ISA

Only two members of Brazil’s Piripkura tribe are known to live in the territory, though others are also believed to live there, having retreated to the depths of the forest. Many Piripkura have been killed in past massacres.

Piripkura men Baita and Tamandua, photographed during an encounter with a FUNAI unit. The two men, who are uncle and nephew, have had sporadic interactions with the local FUNAI team, but returned to live in the forest. © Bruno Jorge

The overflight was conducted last month for the “Uncontacted or Destroyed” campaign and petition organized by COIAB (the Coordinating Body of Indigenous Organizations of the Brazilian Amazon) and OPI (the Observatory for the Human Rights of Uncontacted and Recently Contacted Indigenous Peoples), with the support of APIB (Articulação dos Povos Indígenas do Brasil), ISA (Instituto Socioambiental) and Survival International.

Photographs revealed an airstrip within the Piripkura Indigenous Territory. © Bruno Jorge

The campaign has just released a dossier “Piripkura: an indigenous territory being destroyed for beef production.“ It’s revealed:

– Land clearances for cattle ranching have now reached an area where the uncontacted Piripkura are known to live.

– Roads, fencing and even an airstrip have been constructed, and hundreds of cattle brought in.

– The rate of deforestation in the territory has “exploded” – by more than 27,000% in the last two years.

Huge swathes of rainforest have been cleared, right next to the headwaters of the Duelo River (circled), where the Piripkura are known to live. © ISA

OPI has also released a report on the invasion of the Piripkura lands. Their research has revealed that the Piripkura’s is now the most deforested uncontacted indigenous territory in Brazil. More than 12,000 hectares has already been destroyed.

The Uncontacted or Destroyed campaign highlights several uncontacted territories currently shielded by Land Protection Orders which are due to expire soon.

The only contacted Piripkura, a woman known as Rita, recently told Survival in a unique video appeal that outsiders operating illegally inside her people’s territory could soon kill her relatives, and described how nine of her relatives were massacred in one attack.

Sarah Shenker, head of Survival’s Uncontacted Tribes campaign, said today: “There could be no greater proof of the total impunity – indeed, active support – that land invaders enjoy under President Bolsonaro than this: commercial ranching operations in a vitally important indigenous territory that’s supposed to be protected by law. The invaders are fast approaching the uncontacted Piripkura. They’re resisting with all their might, and so must we. Only a major public outcry can prevent the genocide of the Piripkura and other uncontacted tribes. And an added bonus? A far cheaper and more effective way to protect Amazon rainforest than the fatal ‘solutions’ pushed by governments at COP.”

Elias Bigio of OPAN said today: “That area we flew over has been newly-cleared for beef production. They’ve already logged it, now they’re turning it into pasture for cattle.”

OPI said: “The Indigenous Territory and the Piripkura are extremely threatened. It’s the same thing that’s happened in other uncontacted tribes’ territories – the destruction is the ‘Bolsonaro Effect’, as it’s accelerated since 2019.”

The post Uncontacted Tribe’s Land Invaded and Destroyed for Beef Production first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Survival International.

]]>https://www.radiofree.org/2021/11/30/uncontacted-tribes-land-invaded-and-destroyed-for-beef-production/feed/0 253376 https://www.radiofree.org/2021/11/30/uncontacted-tribes-land-invaded-and-destroyed-for-beef-production-2/ https://www.radiofree.org/2021/11/30/uncontacted-tribes-land-invaded-and-destroyed-for-beef-production-2/#respond Tue, 30 Nov 2021 13:42:02 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=123969 A recent overflight has revealed large-scale cattle ranching inside the Piripkura territory, a blatant violation of a new Land Protection Order. © Rogério Assis/ISA New overflight photos have revealed that the land of one of the world’s most vulnerable uncontacted tribes is being illegally invaded and destroyed for beef production. The land invasion now underway […]

The post Uncontacted Tribe’s Land Invaded and Destroyed for Beef Production first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>

A recent overflight has revealed large-scale cattle ranching inside the Piripkura territory, a blatant violation of a new Land Protection Order. © Rogério Assis/ISA

New overflight photos have revealed that the land of one of the world’s most vulnerable uncontacted tribes is being illegally invaded and destroyed for beef production.

The land invasion now underway is in flagrant violation of a 6-month Land Protection Order issued in September which bans all outsiders from the Piripkura Indigenous Territory.

A major cattle ranching operation is now underway. © Rogério Assis/ISA

Only two members of Brazil’s Piripkura tribe are known to live in the territory, though others are also believed to live there, having retreated to the depths of the forest. Many Piripkura have been killed in past massacres.

Piripkura men Baita and Tamandua, photographed during an encounter with a FUNAI unit. The two men, who are uncle and nephew, have had sporadic interactions with the local FUNAI team, but returned to live in the forest. © Bruno Jorge

The overflight was conducted last month for the “Uncontacted or Destroyed” campaign and petition organized by COIAB (the Coordinating Body of Indigenous Organizations of the Brazilian Amazon) and OPI (the Observatory for the Human Rights of Uncontacted and Recently Contacted Indigenous Peoples), with the support of APIB (Articulação dos Povos Indígenas do Brasil), ISA (Instituto Socioambiental) and Survival International.

Photographs revealed an airstrip within the Piripkura Indigenous Territory. © Bruno Jorge

The campaign has just released a dossier “Piripkura: an indigenous territory being destroyed for beef production.“ It’s revealed:

– Land clearances for cattle ranching have now reached an area where the uncontacted Piripkura are known to live.

– Roads, fencing and even an airstrip have been constructed, and hundreds of cattle brought in.

– The rate of deforestation in the territory has “exploded” – by more than 27,000% in the last two years.

Huge swathes of rainforest have been cleared, right next to the headwaters of the Duelo River (circled), where the Piripkura are known to live. © ISA

OPI has also released a report on the invasion of the Piripkura lands. Their research has revealed that the Piripkura’s is now the most deforested uncontacted indigenous territory in Brazil. More than 12,000 hectares has already been destroyed.

The Uncontacted or Destroyed campaign highlights several uncontacted territories currently shielded by Land Protection Orders which are due to expire soon.

The only contacted Piripkura, a woman known as Rita, recently told Survival in a unique video appeal that outsiders operating illegally inside her people’s territory could soon kill her relatives, and described how nine of her relatives were massacred in one attack.

Sarah Shenker, head of Survival’s Uncontacted Tribes campaign, said today: “There could be no greater proof of the total impunity – indeed, active support – that land invaders enjoy under President Bolsonaro than this: commercial ranching operations in a vitally important indigenous territory that’s supposed to be protected by law. The invaders are fast approaching the uncontacted Piripkura. They’re resisting with all their might, and so must we. Only a major public outcry can prevent the genocide of the Piripkura and other uncontacted tribes. And an added bonus? A far cheaper and more effective way to protect Amazon rainforest than the fatal ‘solutions’ pushed by governments at COP.”

Elias Bigio of OPAN said today: “That area we flew over has been newly-cleared for beef production. They’ve already logged it, now they’re turning it into pasture for cattle.”

OPI said: “The Indigenous Territory and the Piripkura are extremely threatened. It’s the same thing that’s happened in other uncontacted tribes’ territories – the destruction is the ‘Bolsonaro Effect’, as it’s accelerated since 2019.”

The post Uncontacted Tribe’s Land Invaded and Destroyed for Beef Production first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Survival International.

]]>https://www.radiofree.org/2021/11/30/uncontacted-tribes-land-invaded-and-destroyed-for-beef-production-2/feed/0 253377 https://www.radiofree.org/2021/11/25/no-thanks-thanksgiving-national-day-of-sorrow-mourning/ https://www.radiofree.org/2021/11/25/no-thanks-thanksgiving-national-day-of-sorrow-mourning/#respond Thu, 25 Nov 2021 03:05:17 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=123779 Yep, a broken record, or to update that, another one of a million cries in the dark digital dungeon to relearn history, and unlearn the rotten past. I have been looking at the Reclaiming the Sacred since I met Winona LaDuke decades ago. That’s a whole other story. But it doesn’t matter, especially in a […]

The post No thanks, Thanksgiving . . . National Day of Sorrow . . . Mourning first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]> Yep, a broken record, or to update that, another one of a million cries in the dark digital dungeon to relearn history, and unlearn the rotten past. I have been looking at the Reclaiming the Sacred since I met Winona LaDuke decades ago. That’s a whole other story.

But it doesn’t matter, especially in a time of Branch Covidians and the Trump-Biden-Obama-Clinton-Bush-Carter-Nixon-Ford-LBJ Days of Wine and Roses. Full of military industrial complex disease, and forget about American Indian Movement or Joan Baez or Leonard Peltier or even that guy, Marlon Brando.

Forget about the PhDs and MDs and leaders and elders alive today from the many diverse tribes of Turtle Island.

Retail, and weepy, “Oh, cherish the time, the Thanksgiving, with family, oh cherish these holiday days with family gathered around the consumer kitchen and the fine eye for a deal tables. A day of pulling out all the paper and digital flyers to see where old Saint Nick will be going FRIDAY.”

Even lowly Time Magazine, tries to grapple with something tied to the 1863 start of Thanksgiving: “What Thanksgiving Means Today to the Native American Tribe That Fed the Pilgrims.”

I personally think that it’s just another reminder of all the horrible things that this nation has done to not only us, but all native people,” the Chairman of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe, 29 year-old Brian Weeden tells TIME of that “first” Thanksgiving, adding that he and his tribe feel largely forgotten. Courtesy of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe.

That is 2021, November, in Time Magazine, the lede, as they say. We’ll see what the Matt Taibbi sorts, or Carlson types, or Trump lovers, or even all those on the Blue side of racism have to say, do, and how to act on Thanksgiving. Because, alas, as the Catholic Church is begrudgingly paying out for abuse in places like France, the rest of the white organized criminal-religious enterprises will be wringing their hands, but not righting the wrongs. Disappeared Indigenous here, everywhere. That Church, in Canada, and those graves. What a tip to the genocide iceberg.

Note what Brian Weeden says in the next citation:

For this nation to right a lot of their wrongs, they’re gonna have to own up to their racism, which they don’t want to do.

Oh, the theater is set — presidential pardon for a Tom Turkey, and the homilies by Biden and Jill, the perennial kindergarten teacher who is a college faculty member (so many of them, democrats, and white women like Jill Biden are in the end, wannabe Special Ed teachers, but in the classrooms of college students!). Yeah, Kyle Rittenhouse is with Donald LLC Trump, not putting on the Black Face this time, but in the skin of their old favorite team, The Washington Redskins. White psychopath kid is being wined and dined by white psychopath geriatric. The irony, well, there is none. Kyle will get a cherished Washington pro team war bonnet. Manufactured and assembled in, well, of course, China.

The optics are amazing, and right on line for 2024, for sure. This kid (above) has a job in the Trump LLC Republican Party juggernaut. To-Be-Sure!! And, they are having a great good white ugly boy-man time. Imagine the potential for an SUV, with Trump 2024 stickers on the bumpers and Stars and Bars noose flags on the double antennae, going for a group of protestors like these:

Yet, we still have those Nazi types, pulling from their book of sayings — this in response to my op-ed in the local conservative rag acknowledging National Native American Heritage Month — at DV, “Another Genocide Month: Plying the Ignorance of K12, USA Lower/Higher Ed.” I’ll quote this Lincoln County fellow, here:

“By all means, let’s teach history in its fullness of truth, as we ourselves learn and free ourselves from bias. The basic fact is, Stone Age tribes were crushed by more advanced and more powerful tribes, and we’re all still dealing with the outcome of the shattering of those societies.

The fact is, genocide was sporadic and not generally practiced or effective. Displacement and an often cruel paternalism was the rule. The pre-Columbus Americas were not a rustic paradise.

These were societies with their own particular pluses and minuses. When we teach the revised histories now, may it be said that among Northwest tribes, at potlatch gatherings, a rich chief might kill one or two slaves, just to demonstrate his immense wealth? (Something like the modern cliché of a rich businessman lighting his cigar with a $50 bill.) May we say that in the Four Corners area of the Southwest, villages raided other villages, killing and sometimes cannibalizing their victims? That the Aztec gods demanded bloody sacrifice of thousands of captives each year, and that the victims were cannibalized? That scalping existed in southwest and eastern North America before the entry of white settlers?”

That is the old canard, the old Mel Gibson fun in his Maya-land Holly-Dirt lies. Oh, just teach the youth ALL of each and every detail, no? Thank goodness we have this response to my article in the Newport News Times:

I appreciated Paul Haeder’s commentary (“Native American Heritage Month”) in the News-Times’ Nov. 12 “Viewpoint” on the Opinion page. I agree, our education system has not provided a very accurate view of Native American history in this country. In the early ’70s, I read Vine Deloria’s Custer Died For Your Sins. This book gave me a new historical perspective of Native American history, written by a Native American.

The Oregon public school system would benefit from exposing its teachers to the history of the Siletz Tribe of Western Oregon. It is available in the book The People Are Dancing Again, by Charles Wilkinson. I suggest that reading parts of this history should be required reading for Oregon high school students. As Oregonians, we should have at least a basic understanding of the history of what the Native Americans experienced when westward expansion crossed the Cascade Mountains.

As a resident of Lincoln County, I often read of how the Siletz Tribe gives back to this community, donating hundreds of thousand of dollars to coastal social programs. The Siletz and other tribes are writing their own history. They are alive and well, going forward, and we should celebrate that.

The writer is referencing the staid short piece I did for the News Times — “Native American Heritage Month.” This is the caliber of the responses on both sides of the historical line. Talking about the sacred sites is important, and recovering the sacred, is the only way to bring these sites into the mindset of youth after youth. Vine:

Standing on Sacred Ground: The four-part film.

A Lakota Sioux, Vine Deloria, Jr. is one of the most outspoken figures in Native American affairs. His works promote Native American cultural nationalism and a greater understanding of Native American history and philosophy. In his work, Deloria fights prejudice against American Indians while addressing current issues, such as political and treaty rights. He is also concerned with the struggle between a religious view of life and the secularization that science and industry promote. He warns that people need to re-evaluate their stance to planet earth or humans may be one of the few species that has permanently ruined their habitat.

“In a time of global turmoil, our planet needs the wisdom of people who remain one with their land. The Sacred Land Film Project gives voice to guardians of sacred sites around the world, offering hope for a new path forward.”

    —Peter Matthiessen

He talks about how the Indian names are tied to bears — bears all over the plains, mountains, valleys. Bears are part of healing and prophecy. So are buffalo. Listen to him in the latter part of the talk above.

So, this Biden, yaks about “I stand with Mashpee” during his failed campaign for his failed presidency in 2020. It’s all political theater, which is a nice term for bold faced lies, and there are plenty of lies tied to Native Americans, at contact, and during those crazy fictional writings called Thanksgiving.

This May 16, Weeden became the youngest person elected chairman of the Mashpee Wampanoag, a tribe of 2,600 enrolled citizens. This tribal center is in Mashpee, Massachusetts. He and his tribe believe the biggest issue any tribe faces today— is land, holding onto it, getting it back.

I think that a lot of politicians say whatever they want to say to get elected. When they get there, it’s a whole different story. I was [part of the] White House Tribal Nations summit, and there really weren’t a lot of opportunities for leadership to address the administration. To add insult to injury, he’s going to be in Wampanoag territory on [Thanksgiving]—the supposed holiday that we don’t celebrate.

Oh Biden, part of that Inquisition:

Or, some days, he’s Jewish:

Or, is he that Redskin guy?

On Monday night, CNN aired Fight for the White House: Joe Biden’s Long Journey, a special program on the Democratic nominee’s career that included a popular photograph of Biden and one of his sons at what looks like a sports stadium (it’s not clear whether the son pictured is Hunter or Beau, who died in 2015). In the original photograph, which Biden himself posted on social media earlier this year, the kid pictured is wearing a maroon hat with the logo of the Washington football team which, until recently, used the Native American slur “Redskins” for its name. In the image that CNN includes in its documentary, the team logo has been entirely removed.

That is it in a nutshell, no? America whitewashing everything, even their own white washing.

Here, ending with the Time Magazine article:

Time: What’s the biggest issue the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe is currently facing?

29 year-old Brian Weeden: The biggest issues facing the Mashpee tribe right now are with our land, the health and general welfare of our tribal citizens, and climate change and environmental impacts. We were fine living off the land; we were smart people to the point where we knew how to navigate this world. Had people listened to us, I don’t think we’d be in the situation that we are in with global warming and everything else. But I think the biggest [singular] struggle right now for our tribe is our struggle with the federal government, which has been a battle for over 400 years.

The post No thanks, Thanksgiving . . . National Day of Sorrow . . . Mourning first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2021/11/25/no-thanks-thanksgiving-national-day-of-sorrow-mourning/feed/ 0 252302 https://www.radiofree.org/2021/11/22/what-do-an-apology-reconciliation-and-a-sacred-obligation-to-constitutionally-guaranteed-rights-of-first-nations-look-like-in-canada/ https://www.radiofree.org/2021/11/22/what-do-an-apology-reconciliation-and-a-sacred-obligation-to-constitutionally-guaranteed-rights-of-first-nations-look-like-in-canada/#respond Mon, 22 Nov 2021 19:44:18 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=123602 They send a hundred RCMP to go protect a pipeline and not protect people’s lives so we need to push back. They put industry, they put fracking, they put gas and oil over everyone’s lives. — Eve Saint, a Wet’suwet’en land defender In the nineteenth century, Gilbert Malcolm Sproat, a colonial official, wrote an account […]

The post What Do an Apology, Reconciliation, and a Sacred Obligation to Constitutionally Guaranteed Rights of First Nations Look Like in Canada? first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>

They send a hundred RCMP to go protect a pipeline and not protect people’s lives so we need to push back. They put industry, they put fracking, they put gas and oil over everyone’s lives.

— Eve Saint, a Wet’suwet’en land defender

In the nineteenth century, Gilbert Malcolm Sproat, a colonial official, wrote an account — The Nootka: Scenes and Studies of Savage Life — of his time among the Nuu Chah Nulth people on the west coast of Vancouver Island. He noted that the Nuu Chah Nulth (mistakenly first called Nootka by captain Cook) have “known every inch of the west coast for thousands of years.” In his account, Sproat recorded a conversation that he had had with a Tseshaht chief.

Chief: “Ah, but we don’t care to do as the white men wish.”

Sproat: “Whether or not, … The white men will come. All your people know that they are your superiors…”

Chief: “We do not want the white man. He will steal what we have. We wish to live as we are.”

The brunt of Sproat’s message: the white man would decide, and the Indigenous peoples had only to obey.

It took many years, but indigenous rights would later become codified. On 21 June 2021, the federal government of Canada overcame its initial objections and gave royal assent to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP).

The annex to UNDRIP calls for:

Encouraging States to comply with and effectively implement all their obligations as they apply to indigenous peoples under international instruments, in particular those related to human rights, in consultation and cooperation with the peoples concerned,

There are several Articles within UNDRIP that would militate against Canada’s invasion of the unceded territory of the Wet’suwet’en First Nation — done to push through a corporate pipeline. However, Article 26 should suffice to demonstrate that Canada is in violation of UNDRIP:

1. Indigenous peoples have the right to the lands, territories and resources which they have traditionally owned, occupied or otherwise used or acquired.

2. Indigenous peoples have the right to own, use, develop and control the lands, territories and resources that they possess by reason of traditional ownership or other traditional occupation or use, as well as those which they have otherwise acquired.

3. States shall give legal recognition and protection to these lands, territories and resources. Such recognition shall be conducted with due respect to the customs, traditions and land tenure systems of the indigenous peoples concerned.

The Wet’suwet’en First Nation, who have been indefatigable in defense of their land, issued a statement through the Unist’ot’en Solidarity Brigade after the RCMP invaded their territory:

Militarized RCMP raided Coyote Camp today, arresting 14 people including Sleydo’, Chief Woos’s daughter, and three accredited journalists.

They came in with assault rifles and dogs, and without a warrant, used axes to break down the door of the cabin Sleydo’ and Chief Woos’s daughter were in, and violently removed them from their territory.

Of the people arrested yesterday, most were released this afternoon. Five people refused to sign conditions of release that barred return to the territory and are being brought to jail in Prince Rupert where they face court on Monday.

Solidarity actions continued across the country, with rallies, marches, rail blockades, and road closures.

Is this how past violations are patched up?

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was convened in January 2008 to gather testimonies of the survivors, families, communities, and others about the Indian Residential Schools under the aegis of the federal government and churches. (Kevin Annett has spoken for years of the unmarked graves of residential school children in Canada. Despite much denigration in the mass media, he remained firm in his conviction; therefore, he has gravitas into the crimes of state. In the preamble of his book Murder by Decree, he writes that it was “prompted by the enormous miscarriage of justice engineered by the government and churches” and “written as a corrective response to [the TRC’s] unlawful and deceptive efforts to conceal the extent and nature of deliberate Genocide in Canada by church and state over nearly two centuries.) An amendment to Canada’s racist Indian Act paved the way for the Indian Residential Schools. The purpose of the residential schools was to disappear the Indian. The deputy superintendent general of Indian Affairs, Duncan Campbell Scott, made this crystal clear in his testimony before a Special Committee of the House of Commons in 1920:

I want to get rid of the Indian problem.
…
Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question, and no Indian Department, that is the whole object of this Bill.

On 11 June 2008, prime minister Stephen Harper apologized for the Indian Residential Schools. Not everyone was impressed by the apology. As Indigenous activist Mike Krebs noted, “If there is one thing that Mr. Harper’s ‘apology’ provided that could be considered groundbreaking or new, it’s the idea that there can be crimes without criminals.” At its conclusion, the TRC issued a six volume report in 2015 that included 96 Calls to Action for the federal government to bring about reconciliation.

What do the steps toward reconciliation look like in Canada?

Do the RCMP in militarized gear displaying weapons point the way to reconciliation? Can this be what reconciliation looks like?

APTN National News has been underwhelmed by federal action on the Calls for Action. In an opinion piece on APTN titled “An inquiry is not enough for international crimes against Indigenous children at the Indian residential schools,” Cheryl Matthew, the Executive Director of the Protect Our Indigenous Sisters Society, wrote:

There was an apology, but for what use is an apology when there is little change in the actions that led to it?

…

Haven’t we suffered enough from pre-contact times to the genocide of the Indian residential schools and colonial policy where we lost our lands, languages, children, cultures and our families? At what point will the federal government of Canada stop its war against Indigenous people?

It is said that the best predictor of the future is the past. Based on reconciliation efforts—which up until today have been little more than lip service—it is clear that Canada will not stop its war against Indigenous people. We had the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples in 1996, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2015, the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women in 2019, and nothing has changed.

The Wet’suwet’en are also skeptical of Canada’s true intentions for reconciliation.

“I do not see any reconciliation in this. For our brothers and sisters of all Indigenous organizations, let this be a sign that reconciliation in their eyes is really the white paper in disguise.” -Dinϊ Ze’ Woos #WetsuwetenStrong #AllOutForWedzinKwa #ShutDownCanada #FreeSleydo pic.twitter.com/He7HajlfEW

— Gidimt’en Checkpoint (@Gidimten) November 20, 2021

It may be that some of the police were discomfited about trespassing on Wet’suwet’en territory in violent garb, but the fact that they obeyed orders instead of following their conscience speaks to integrity.

Do the RCMP’s actions reflect a “a renewed, nation-to-nation relationship with First Nations peoples” that Canada’s prime minister Justin Trudeau called for?:

It is time for a renewed, nation-to-nation relationship with First Nations peoples, one that understands that the constitutionally guaranteed rights of First Nations in Canada are not an inconvenience but rather a sacred obligation.

Whose territory?

Just how is it that the Canadian government claims jurisdiction over unceded Wet’suwet’en territory? The Indigenous Peoples have been living on their land for at least 14,000 years, while so-called British Columbia was a colony formed in 1858, which confederated with Canada in 1871.

Call to Action 47 stipulates:

We call upon federal, provincial, territorial, and municipal governments to repudiate concepts used to justify European sovereignty over Indigenous peoples and lands, such as the Doctrine of Discovery and terra nullius, and to reform those laws, government policies, and litigation strategies that continue to rely on such concepts.

Whose law?

(Coastal GasLink Pipeline Map. Photo: APTN File)

How is it that the government of the settler-colonial newcomers can legitimately or morally impose settler law over the law of the people who have inhabited the land for millennia?

If the territory is unceded by the Wet’suwet’en, then application of settler law must be null and void.

The Supreme Court of Canada Delgamuukw v British Columbia decision in 1997 held that the Wet’suwet’en People still possessed their land rights and titles to 22,000 square kilometers of land in northern BC. The ruling also recognized the rights invested in the hereditary chiefs.

Consequently, Canadian law has recognized that Wet’suwet’en territory is unceded. Delgamuukw was further upheld by the 2014 Canadian Supreme Court ruling in Tsilhqot’in Nation v British Columbia.

Moreover, British king George III’s Royal Proclamation of 1763 stipulated that the territory east of Quebec was the Hunting Grounds of the Indigenous peoples where they “should not be molested or disturbed in the Possession of such Parts…”

Thus, both colonial law and Canadian law uphold Indigenous title. But should that even matter? Morally and legally, one would infer ipso facto that the people who have lived since time immemorial in a territory have the right of first occupation and that their law would apply in the territory.

In the interest of reconciliation, Call to Action 50 states:

In keeping with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, we call upon the federal government, in collaboration with Aboriginal organizations, to fund the establishment of Indigenous law institutes for the development, use, and understanding of Indigenous laws and access to justice in accordance with the unique cultures of Aboriginal peoples in Canada.

Also applicable is Call to Action 42:

We call upon the federal, provincial, and territorial governments to commit to the recognition and implementation of Aboriginal justice systems in a manner consistent with the Treaty and Aboriginal rights of Aboriginal peoples, the Constitution Act, 1982, and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, endorsed by Canada in November 2012.

Given all the aforementioned, a question begs: What the heck is Canada’s unwelcomed armed gendarmerie doing in the territory of the Wet’suwet’en people?

The post What Do an Apology, Reconciliation, and a Sacred Obligation to Constitutionally Guaranteed Rights of First Nations Look Like in Canada? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kim Petersen.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2021/11/22/what-do-an-apology-reconciliation-and-a-sacred-obligation-to-constitutionally-guaranteed-rights-of-first-nations-look-like-in-canada/feed/ 0 251511 https://www.radiofree.org/2021/11/20/canadian-police-raid-wetsuweten-pipeline-blockade-arrest-15-land-defenders-3/ https://www.radiofree.org/2021/11/20/canadian-police-raid-wetsuweten-pipeline-blockade-arrest-15-land-defenders-3/#respond Sat, 20 Nov 2021 00:47:51 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=123592 Wielding assault rifles, helicopters, and canine units, Canadian police raided Wet’suwet’en territory this week and arrested 14 people in effort to break up the Indigenous-led blockade of the multibillion dollar Coastal GasLink pipeline being constructed by TC Energy. The occupation started in September and halted the company’s efforts to build a key portion of the […]

The post Canadian Police Raid Wet’suwet’en Pipeline Blockade, Arrest 15 Land Defenders first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]> Wielding assault rifles, helicopters, and canine units, Canadian police raided Wet’suwet’en territory this week and arrested 14 people in effort to break up the Indigenous-led blockade of the multibillion dollar Coastal GasLink pipeline being constructed by TC Energy. The occupation started in September and halted the company’s efforts to build a key portion of the over 400-mile pipeline within Wet’suwet’en lands that violates both Wet’suwet’en and Canadian laws. We speak with land defender and matriarch of the Gidimt’en Clan of Wet’suwet’en Nation Molly Wickham, one of the witnesses to the police raid. “This project does not have free, prior, informed consent of the Wet’suwet’en people,” says Wickham. “It’s as if we don’t exist as Indigenous people, and that we don’t have our own governance and that we don’t have our own system of law.”

The post Canadian Police Raid Wet’suwet’en Pipeline Blockade, Arrest 15 Land Defenders first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Democracy Now!.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2021/11/20/canadian-police-raid-wetsuweten-pipeline-blockade-arrest-15-land-defenders-3/feed/ 0 250942 https://www.radiofree.org/2021/11/19/rcmp-are-currently-raiding-gidimten-checkpoint/ https://www.radiofree.org/2021/11/19/rcmp-are-currently-raiding-gidimten-checkpoint/#respond Fri, 19 Nov 2021 13:44:48 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=123569 RCMP are currently illegally invading Wet’suwet’en territory. They have moved in on both sides of Gidimt’en Checkpoint and at least 14 arrests have been made including legal observers, elders, and media. Watch and share the urgent call-out for support made by Sleydo below and take action! (Watch the video update) “This is Sleydo over here […]

The post RCMP are Currently Raiding Gidimt’en Checkpoint! first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]> RCMP are currently illegally invading Wet’suwet’en territory. They have moved in on both sides of Gidimt’en Checkpoint and at least 14 arrests have been made including legal observers, elders, and media.

Watch and share the urgent call-out for support made by Sleydo below and take action! (Watch the video update)

“This is Sleydo over here on Cas Yih Yintah. The RCMP have moved in this morning on Gidimt’en Checkpoint. CGL is enforcing their own injunction order.

They started this morning on both ends of the blockade at 63 with a bunch of heavy machinery, chasing somebody with a dozer, they had rock trucks.

Currently right now the state of Gidimt’en Checkpoint is that dozers have rolled in (as well as) Heavy Machinery, CGL workers and RCMP. We just got word that they released K9 units at the bridge at Gidimt’en Checkpoint. Our warriors are down there. Our matriarch is there. There’s a lot of people that are there that are at risk of this police violence.

We need everybody to have ears to the ground and eyes on what is happening here.

There was just another planeload of RCMP that just landed in Smithers this morning, and they’re headed out to the territory. They came out last night in busloads with snowmobiles, quads, and they’re advancing on both ends of the blockade.

Currently, we’re defending this space as best as we can. The warriors down at Gidimt’en Checkpoint are defending that space as best as they can. They’ve sent the atack dogs, the K-9 units in on them and we have no word yet of what is happening. They read the injunction to everybody there and said that those people are under arrest for impeding the Supreme Court injunction.

We’tsuwet’en Hereditary chiefs and our clans have full jurisdiction here. They have no right to be on our territory. They have no right to be bringing K-9 units onto our unarmed people that are defending this land and upholding Wet’suwet’en law.

They are trespassing, they are violating human rights, they are violating indigenous rights, and most importantly they’re violating Wet’suwet’en law.

We need boots on the ground, we need everybody out there. We need everybody who’s an ally of Wet’suwet’en, of Haudenosaunee, a supporter of indigenous rights, a supporter and a warrior of climate justice to take action now!

We need you to shut shit down everywhere that you can to show this industry, this government, and the world that they cannot do this to Indigenous people anymore!”

Last night, with police approaching #Wetsuweten territory and blocking access, land defenders gathered around the fire, singing songs, drumming, and gathering strength from what this movement has been and has become.

The post RCMP are Currently Raiding Gidimt’en Checkpoint! first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by UnistotenCamp.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2021/11/19/rcmp-are-currently-raiding-gidimten-checkpoint/feed/ 0 250789 https://www.radiofree.org/2021/11/18/rcmp-set-up-illegal-exclusion-zone-blocking-food-medicine-and-people-from-reaching-healing-center-and-homes-on-the-territory/ https://www.radiofree.org/2021/11/18/rcmp-set-up-illegal-exclusion-zone-blocking-food-medicine-and-people-from-reaching-healing-center-and-homes-on-the-territory/#respond Thu, 18 Nov 2021 00:13:49 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=123507 Is this what Canada’s prime minister Justin Trudeau meant when he told Indigenous leaders:

It is time for a renewed, nation-to-nation relationship with First Nations peoples, one that understands that the constitutionally guaranteed rights of First Nations in Canada are not an inconvenience but rather a sacred obligation.

The post RCMP Set up Illegal Exclusion Zone Blocking Food, Medicine, and People from Reaching Healing Center and Homes on the Territory first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by UnistotenCamp.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2021/11/18/rcmp-set-up-illegal-exclusion-zone-blocking-food-medicine-and-people-from-reaching-healing-center-and-homes-on-the-territory/feed/ 0 250301 https://www.radiofree.org/2021/11/17/gidimten-takes-land-back/ https://www.radiofree.org/2021/11/17/gidimten-takes-land-back/#respond Wed, 17 Nov 2021 14:49:21 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=123501 Yesterday, we took our land back. With our Haudenosaunee allies, we enforced our ancient trespass laws and have permanently closed access to our territory. The Morice Forest Service Road has been destroyed and access to Coastal Gaslink is no longer possible. We are upholding our responsibility to defend our sacred headwaters and put an end […]

The post Gidimt’en Takes Land Back! first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]> Yesterday, we took our land back.

With our Haudenosaunee allies, we enforced our ancient trespass laws and have permanently closed access to our territory. The Morice Forest Service Road has been destroyed and access to Coastal Gaslink is no longer possible.

We are upholding our responsibility to defend our sacred headwaters and put an end to the destruction of the Yintah.

We will never give up.

The post Gidimt’en Takes Land Back! first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by UnistotenCamp.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2021/11/17/gidimten-takes-land-back/feed/ 0 250183 https://www.radiofree.org/2021/11/17/gidimten-evict-coastal-gaslink-from-wetsuweten-territory/ https://www.radiofree.org/2021/11/17/gidimten-evict-coastal-gaslink-from-wetsuweten-territory/#respond Wed, 17 Nov 2021 14:44:36 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=123498 Members of the Gidimt’en clan ordered all Coastal GasLink employees to leave the Wet’suwet’en territory in the interior of British Columbia on Sunday in a move the company said contradicts a court order. Starting at 5 am Sunday, the clan told workers they had eight hours to “peacefully evacuate” the area before the main road […]

The post Gidimt’en Evict Coastal GasLink from Wet’suwet’en Territory first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]> Members of the Gidimt’en clan ordered all Coastal GasLink employees to leave the Wet’suwet’en territory in the interior of British Columbia on Sunday in a move the company said contradicts a court order.

Starting at 5 am Sunday, the clan told workers they had eight hours to “peacefully evacuate” the area before the main road into the Lhudis Bin territory was closed at 1 pm.

The post Gidimt’en Evict Coastal GasLink from Wet’suwet’en Territory first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by APTN.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2021/11/17/gidimten-evict-coastal-gaslink-from-wetsuweten-territory/feed/ 0 250185 https://www.radiofree.org/2021/11/15/pipeline-workers-served-mandatory-evacuation-notice-from-gidimten-land/ https://www.radiofree.org/2021/11/15/pipeline-workers-served-mandatory-evacuation-notice-from-gidimten-land/#respond Mon, 15 Nov 2021 22:57:11 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=123452 This morning [14 November], we upheld our laws and issued a mandatory evacuation order for all pipeline workers trespassing on our territory. We are enforcing the eviction order from January 2020, where Wet’suwet’en Hereditary Chiefs representing all clans of our nation stood together and removed Coastal GasLink from our lands. We will never abandon our […]

The post Pipeline Workers Served Mandatory Evacuation Notice from Gidimt’en Land first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]> This morning [14 November], we upheld our laws and issued a mandatory evacuation order for all pipeline workers trespassing on our territory. We are enforcing the eviction order from January 2020, where Wet’suwet’en Hereditary Chiefs representing all clans of our nation stood together and removed Coastal GasLink from our lands.

We will never abandon our children to live in a world with no clean water. We uphold our ancestral responsibilities. We continue to protect our yintah and invite all of our supporters to join us on the ground or to take action where you stand.

There will be no pipelines on Wet’suwet’en territory.

The post Pipeline Workers Served Mandatory Evacuation Notice from Gidimt’en Land first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by UnistotenCamp.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2021/11/15/pipeline-workers-served-mandatory-evacuation-notice-from-gidimten-land/feed/ 0 249720 https://www.radiofree.org/2021/10/15/reporters-alert-part-vi-2/ https://www.radiofree.org/2021/10/15/reporters-alert-part-vi-2/#respond Fri, 15 Oct 2021 18:45:05 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=122209 Reporters at major newspapers and magazines are hard to reach by telephone. Today it is increasingly hard to converse with them about timely scoops, leads, gaps in coverage, and corrections to published articles. We started an online webpage: Reporter’s Alert. From time to time, we use Reporter’s Alert to present suggestions for important reporting on topics that are […]

The post Reporter’s Alert: Part VI first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]> Reporters at major newspapers and magazines are hard to reach by telephone. Today it is increasingly hard to converse with them about timely scoops, leads, gaps in coverage, and corrections to published articles.

We started an online webpage: Reporter’s Alert. From time to time, we use Reporter’s Alert to present suggestions for important reporting on topics that are either not covered or not covered thoroughly. Reporting that just nibbles on the periphery won’t attract much public attention or be noticed by decision-makers. Here is the sixth installment of suggestions:

1. More states are recognizing Indigenous Peoples’ Day, giving rise to the need for a broad report on all the treaties tribal nations signed with the U.S. government that are still intact and that are still violated by the U.S. government. Recall for example, on Thursday July 9, 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court had occasion to recognize the Muscogee (Creek) Nation’s rights to the land in much of Tulsa and eastern Oklahoma as being part of their reservation. (See, https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/19pdf/18-9526_9okb.pdf). There will be fascinating revelations from a report on this topic.

2. Numerous people have been asking me “What’s happened to all those lawsuits against Trump?” Trump has escaped the grips of the law for years, most recently the stalled civil justice (tort law) suits by several women claiming sexual assaults, by prosecutors in New York, Washington, D.C., and Georgia. Trump has even managed to escape, so far, depositions under oath, including one that Robert Mueller should have demanded. This is so remarkable that there should be a seminar at Harvard, Yale, and Georgetown Law Schools about how Trump has escaped, with all the ways his lawyers have shielded this serial outlaw from federal, state, and local laws.

To make his escapes more current, since Trump is a clear-cut violator of criminal statutes, including the Hatch Act and the Anti-Deficiency statute, obstruction of justice, again and again, brazenly and openly, one might expect the Justice Department should be readying some law enforcement. See letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland recounting the DOJ’s avoidance of its duties vis-à-vis Trump’s sexual violations, thus demonstrating that Donald J. Trump is indeed repeatedly ABOVE THE LAW. Also remarkable is that this topic has to be suggested to the Fourth Estate as a major, comprehensive inquiry.

3. State legislatures and governors in many states are using “pandemic” pretexts to eliminate rights and democratic procedures. In California, which has one of the more liberal legislatures, lawmakers are taking bills to the floor discarding past rules providing every bill have committee staff analysis and a legislative hearing with questions from legislators, and testimony from citizens. Assembly Bill 2167 is one such example, favoring the insurance industry. Imagine what more conservative state legislatures are doing. Also, the California State Assembly voted to allow votes on bills without members being present in the chamber, despite an opinion from the state’s legislative counsel that it likely violates the state Constitution.

Governors, citing the pandemic, have issued dubious executive orders that let vendors in healthcare avoid the tort laws for their negligent (or worse) injuries to innocent persons. For reporters, the quest is to find out how widespread these strictures have become and how permanent.

4. Sports injuries are more prevalent than ever before. Despite, more advanced knowledge, training, and self-care by athletes, professional teams are experiencing so many recurrent injuries that some sports announcers have started a regular “Injury Report” on sports radio. In baseball, injuries have become epidemic, when in the 1950s and 1960s they were quite rare. It is not a candidly discussed subject among the sports media and fans receive few if any explanations. The injury epidemic is so pronounced that the Yankees baseball radio announcer has started a daily Injury Report brought to you by an orthopedic practice ad in New York.

Some reasons suggested are (1) the players are bigger, and (2) the play is more strenuous. In baseball, pitchers’ arms start getting strained in their teenage years, given the dreams about throwing 100 miles per hour fastballs in the major leagues. These days after every pitch announcers note what the mph was. Tommy John operations are numerous every year. With the ever-greater emphasis on home runs, players are becoming muscle-bound with added risks of straining a ligament. Certainly today, baseball professionals have better equipment – helmets, gloves, safer shoes, and they are protected by padded walls in the outfield. These advances prevent injuries, yet today’s players are placed on the injury list far more than those in the past. What with the many years of covering up concussions in football etc., it seems important to look into this broad area. (See, leagueoffans.org). Sports reporters take note!

5. What’s happened to NASA? It has increasingly become an agency that outsources or contracts out, losing the technical and scientific capacity to better pay offers by the contractors. The brain drain is rampant: nearly 80% of NASA’s budget is contracted out. The Old NASA did far more things itself and kept its intellectual property close to the vest. NASA is now a shadow of itself, a trademark on press releases; so much so that it is losing control over policy and other matters to the contractors. A reporter should get copies of these contracts and see the extent of the multiple giveaways, corporate welfare, and undue influence taking the search all the way to congressional committees.

P.S. Next week from October 22-23, 2021, corporate crime specialists from around the world will attend the symposium at Georgetown Law Center titled, Imagining a World Without Corporate Criminal Law (Register for the event here).

The post Reporter’s Alert: Part VI first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Ralph Nader.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2021/10/15/reporters-alert-part-vi-2/feed/ 0 241975 https://www.radiofree.org/2021/10/12/free-indigenous-political-prisoner-leonard-peltier-2/ https://www.radiofree.org/2021/10/12/free-indigenous-political-prisoner-leonard-peltier-2/#respond Tue, 12 Oct 2021 23:13:40 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=122145 In this special Indigenous Peoples’ Day episode of Rattling the Bars, TRNN Executive Producer Eddie Conway speaks with author and activist Ward Churchill about the wrongful imprisonment and deteriorating health of Indigenous political prisoner Leonard Peltier. A member of the American Indian Movement who was sent to prison in 1977 after a dubious trial sentenced […]

The post Free Indigenous Political Prisoner Leonard Peltier first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]> In this special Indigenous Peoples’ Day episode of Rattling the Bars, TRNN Executive Producer Eddie Conway speaks with author and activist Ward Churchill about the wrongful imprisonment and deteriorating health of Indigenous political prisoner Leonard Peltier. A member of the American Indian Movement who was sent to prison in 1977 after a dubious trial sentenced him to two consecutive life sentences, Peltier’s continued imprisonment remains a stain on our “criminal justice” system.

The post Free Indigenous Political Prisoner Leonard Peltier first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by The Real News Network (TRNN).

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2021/10/12/free-indigenous-political-prisoner-leonard-peltier-2/feed/ 0 241150 https://www.radiofree.org/2021/10/09/taking-the-long-way-home/ https://www.radiofree.org/2021/10/09/taking-the-long-way-home/#respond Sat, 09 Oct 2021 16:12:22 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=121361 Finding one’s identity and purpose can be mystifying, especially for the the poor and displaced. Tom LaBlanc, aka Strong Buffalo didn’t know he was Indigenous until he sneaked a peek at a document on his social worker’s desk when he was 15. Until then, the only clue about his identity came from the grandmother of […]

The post Taking the Long Way Home first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]> Finding one’s identity and purpose can be mystifying, especially for the the poor and displaced. Tom LaBlanc, aka Strong Buffalo didn’t know he was Indigenous until he sneaked a peek at a document on his social worker’s desk when he was 15.

Until then, the only clue about his identity came from the grandmother of two brothers he’d met at a Catholic boys home in south Minneapolis. He remembers vividly sitting on her lap while “she patted my head like a dog” and listening to her Ojibwa words as her daughter translated them into English — “this little boy is Indian… look at his eyes… he looks like lost deer that come out of woods. You boys take care of him — he’s your brother — we take care of lost children. That’s his name — Little Lost Deer.”

Even though LaBlanc’s unmarried mother was a Dakota Sioux from the Lake Traverse Reservation in South Dakota, he knew nothing about Native Americans. All he knew, was that the wrinkled, white-haired woman wearing a beaded headband and a buckskin dress with a brain-tanned scent looked beautiful and made him feel like he was part of a family. And that to him, felt powerfully good.

His father was presumed to be Japanese-American and LaBlanc was taken from his mother who was sterilized without her knowledge four days after his birth in Minneapolis. After that he was handed off to the Catholic Welfare Association in Hennepin County where he bounced back and forth between foster care facilities throughout south and north Minneapolis for 13 years. His earliest memories are being tied to a chair when he was three and beaten and called derogatory names by a WWII Veteran who didn’t like the way he looked. He remembers his surrogate mother wearing a bra and panties and drinking beer in the living room. LaBlanc said the vet screamed “I fought your kind in the war” and “Why do I have to take care of you?” at him.

Offensive comments about his appearance continued to dog him, and he recalled a teenager repeatedly teasing him about being a “fish-head” or a “chink” until an Ojibwa foster brother told him those words were bad. Not understanding all the implications of ethnic slurs, the 10 year old LaBlanc sat in his chair seething until school was out and then chased down the teenager and fought him until he ran away. Not content to win the fight, he followed the kid home and ended up getting swatted in the backyard with a straw broom by the boy’s mother who told him he was a “damn savage.”

By redirecting this drive and determination he became a Minneapolis (North Side) City Champion in Junior Golden Gloves for two years. He said his boxing coach told him he had “the killer-instinct like Rocky Marciano”

There was little applause outside the ring. He got into trouble frequently, received poor grades and was already playing with cigarettes and alcohol. He also lost his part-time job climbing up drainpipes or trees to crawl through 2nd and 3rd story windows and open back doors for a North Side burglary ring. A visit from detectives who he said, “were looking for a little brown monkey” involved in area break-ins put the kibosh on a racket that paid about five-dollars a caper.

He’d had it with adoption interviews, too, after noticing white orphans were getting farmed-out to foster homes and he wasn’t. It got to the point where he became reluctant to show up for interviews because those who were looking to adopt were almost invariably white and wanted white kids. Sometimes he wouldn’t hold back his contempt for what he considered to be a charade and would snarl or growl at potential foster parents.

It wasn’t long before there was talk about sending LaBlanc, who had been through 105 social placements, to a state correctional facility in Minnesota until he was 21. Not wanting to spend the next 8 years in jail, he was given the option of going to a Catholic boarding school in Nebraska called Boys Town. About a week later he was put on a Greyhound bus to Omaha with a note pinned on him that said “To Whom it May Concern.”

The new school soon found a spot for him on their football team which gave him a chance to take buses and planes to cities around the country. During the summers he’d travel back to south Minneapolis to an ongoing seasonal romance with the widow of a friend who he thought of as a brother. Their relationship with plans to marry ended abruptly a few months before he was supposed to graduate prompting the bewildered and enraged star football player to run away from Boys Town, steal a car and break into a family’s house and eat some food.

He was caught later in suburban Minneapolis, but was able to escape extradition back to Nebraska when then Attorney General Walter Mondale intervened on his behalf. After that, he skipped town with a girlfriend and rented a dumpy apartment in Chicago where he fathered a child who died shortly after birth from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). This brought about an inquest and spurious accusations from policemen who thought the couple murdered their baby.

The sorrow of living in a place where the baby died became too much. He began drinking heavily, wandered off and took a job on a Kansas ranch for a year or so where he learned how to ride horses. His Boss, who LaBlanc said liked him, fired him though after he got into a mean fight with another Indigenous person from an Oklahoma prison.

If you don’t remember your heritage, you don’t know where you came from — consequently, you don’t know where you’re going.”
— Jim Northrup, Anisihinaabe poet, author, and story teller

Military

Back in Minneapolis and not believing there was much to live for, he joined the Marines. He had hoped to be an infantryman, but the Marines had other ideas when he scored high on a technical ability test. Making matters worse, was his new girlfriend’s naval captain father who hated his guts. “Her dad made me stand at attention for maybe 45 minutes while he yelled racist things in my ears,” said LaBlanc

Thinking the captain would find more ways to punish him, he went AWOL and walked or hitchhiked through Tennessee, Arkansas, and Texas until he was picked up by the highway patrol and sent to the brig in San Diego. He said he was released a few days later by a lieutenant who remembered his athletic abilities from Boys Town on the condition that he play football for the Marines. He started boxing again too.

Leadership skills emerged after he joined a tough, advanced-infantry outfit. At the request of his superior and after winning the the respect of troops for his fighting skills, he helped train them. He was “Marine of the Month” before going to Vietnam.

The first of his 7 military operations was in the Vietnam Central Highlands in 1968 where he first saw fellow Marines ripped apart by bullets. That scenario along with adrenaline rushes and feeling his leg shake uncontrollably during a firefight changed his mind about not caring if he lived or died.

Excellent eyesight along with his ability to analyze predicaments didn’t go unnoticed by higher-ups who started including him in briefings and he was put on point by the battalion commander. He saw a lot of action and used crumpled napkins and pastry plates at our coffee shop table as visual aids to show me combat strategies he’d devised. He also wrote about 250 poems when he was in the service that he left on a bus.

His views on the war’s legitimacy started to change after he caught a glimpse of an enemy who looked remarkably like him plus, he was beginning to feel sorry for unarmed and starving Vietnamese he saw creep out of the jungle at night to get food. He began to talk out loud against the war and became more disgusted with his deployment after he was assigned to guard a Coca-Cola plant and a Mobile Oil refinery near the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

Plans for his promotion and awards including medals were canceled he said after word of his open dissent got back to headquarters. He left Vietnam disillusioned along with thousands of dollars that he’d saved from monthly checks and some clandestine side-deals.

Agent Orange, White and Blue

While the enemy was digging caves
to hide underground from the chemical war
to force out the guerrilla
the smart men of war
forgot or intentionally allowed
their own sons to stand naked above
breathing the agent Bother’s stench,
I am, now, the son of Dioxin
and you shall see me groping out
of hidden underground caves
looking for you!

— Tom LaBlanc

Activism and Artistic Pursuits

When he got off the bus in Minneapolis it was 1970 and he was still in uniform when an Indigenous woman near the Leamington Hotel downtown said, “Hey Jarhead, are you an Indian? — you should be in here.” A few minutes later he was inside a bar listening to the principle founders of the American Indian Movement (AIM) and others making plans to interrupt a huge meeting organized by the National Indian Education Association (NIEA) at the hotel.

Which they did by walking on stage en masse and taking away microphones from other speakers to tell the audience things they felt they should know There was some applause at the end of their talk with the NIEA finally agreeing to give AIM speakers a platform at the conference. LaBlanc would later become the Minneapolis, AIM Executive Director for two years.

Meanwhile, he was getting to know his relatives after meeting some of them for the first time in a notorious dive-bar that used to be called Mousey’s. Soon he was playing basketball with his many relations and started feeling proud to be an Indian. He was also partying hard between advocating for Indian rights, Sun Dancing and visits to his mother’s reservation to learn about tribal traditions. In south Minneapolis he’d become an outspoken luminary to Native Americans and a perceived trouble-maker to local law enforcement. The Dick Bancroft photograph in this article became a familiar poster in south Minneapolis and other parts of the world.

Eventually he would be worked-over by the police during encounters and mentioned that a policeman in south Minneapolis once told him: “You’re not going to look so pretty when we get done with you” and was beaten unconscious by 3 or 4 cops. He spent some nights in jail too and served 18 months in a South Dakota prison in Sioux Falls after he was implicated in a huge fight outside a bar. The prosecution had asked for 325 years contending that LaBlanc and others were guilty of a long list of crimes including attempted murder. Indigenous peoples who were incarcerated with him appreciated reading the stories he was writing that portrayed Indigenous peoples as comic book super-heroes (which guards failed to censor) and his dedication to Indian solidarity. He said he was given a rabbit skin hat with eagle feathers when he was released in 1976.

”The Warriors” — photo by Dick Bancroft in July 1978 at the Longest Walk in DC. Standing in front of the FBI building, left to right: Stacy LaBlanc, John Blue Bird, Tom LaBlanc

Two years later he joined several hundred other Indigenous people in a five month march from San Francisco to Washington DC called the Longest Walk to draw attention to the mistreatment of Indigenous peoples. Members of the group eventually occupied the Bureau of Indian Affairs building and raised enough awareness to put a stop to proposed legislation that would have further violated Indian treaty rights.

After giving up bourbon he started writing more and involved himself further with First Nation and environmental causes that put him on a path that zig-zagged around the world.

In 1983 we organized the first U.S. veteran’s delegation to revolutionary Nicaragua which was besieged by the CIA’s Contra terrorists. The CIA was also pushing Indigenous groups on Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast to fight against the Sandinista government, and there had already been several deadly clashes. Tony Gonzales and Tom LaBlanc both associated with AIM, were invited to join peacemaking talks between Miskito Indians and the Sandinistas. Their participation was reported to be very helpful. I remember Tom being strong, centered, peaceful and friendly.
— Gerry Condon, activist and former national president of Veterans For Peace

His book Dakota which was published in Norwegian provided an additional incentive for him to revisit Norway over a dozen times for peace conferences, poetry readings and to establish the One People Trust Foundation. He also flew to Japan numerous times to participate in spoken word events and raise awareness about the dangers of nuclear power by running marathons between nuclear reactor sites where he stopped to pray with Buddhist monks. And he has a hilarious story about riding side-saddle on a horse when he went to Libya with Black Panthers and Brown Berets to meet with Muammar Gaddafi after Gaddafi’s daughter was killed during a U.S airstrike.

Interrelated interests with art and social justice led him to accept humanitarian invitations and participate in poetry readings across the U.S. as well. He chuckled about crossing paths unexpectedly with AIM friend Russell Means, at a poetry recital in Davis, California, who he said yelled from the other side of the room, “Hey Tom, I didn’t know you could write.” He retorted, “Hey Russ, I didn’t know you could read.”

And he could be hard to track sometimes. One never knew if his stint with a San Francisco social service outfit would last five years, how long he’d work with the International Indian Treaty Council, remain Executive Director of the Indigenous Uranium Forum or if he’d impulsively leave Minneapolis for two years to work with a band in New Orleans. Among other notable missions, he went to Los Angeles in the early 80’s to help stop the production of the adult video game “Custer’s Revenge” that used an image of an Indigenous woman as a rape target.

In the Twin Cities, he remains involved with AIM and a number of other organizations that focus on Indigenous issues and art projects including Oyate Hotanin which are Dakota words for the Voice of the People. He was part of a committee that persuaded the city of St. Paul last Summer to recognize Indian Mounds Park as a burial ground and is a regular emcee/promoter for the monthly Buffalo Show at Bryant Lake Bowl in south Minneapolis.

Singer-songwriter and community organizer Larry Long remembered writing a song with LaBlanc and letting him stay at his house in south Minneapolis before ever meeting him. He believes LaBlanc “is hitting his stride.”

Now 75, LaBlanc continues writing, performing and occasionally releases a CD or chapbook while remaining seriously committed to Indian traditional ways and his children and wife Laura.

As long as I have known Tom, I have known his first love is for his children. He prays for each of them and their children every day, he prays for their health and happiness. He prays for all of us.
— Laura LaBlanc

At the end of the interview, this father of 10 and grandfather and great grandfather of over 60, recollected watching his two-year old grandson Warrior Tommy LaBlanc dance at a pow wow last August. Judging from the beatific expression on his face — this too, must have felt powerfully good.

The post Taking the Long Way Home first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Craig Wood.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2021/10/09/taking-the-long-way-home/feed/ 0 240575 https://www.radiofree.org/2021/10/02/first-peoples-the-first-and-forgotten-slaves-on-turtle-island/ https://www.radiofree.org/2021/10/02/first-peoples-the-first-and-forgotten-slaves-on-turtle-island/#respond Sat, 02 Oct 2021 01:55:12 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=121706 Modern perceptions of early modern slavery associate the institution almost solely with Africans and their descendants. Yet slavery was a ubiquitous institution in the early modern world…The story of European colonialism in the Americas and its victimization of Africans and Indians follows a central paradigm in most textbooks. The African “role” encompasses the transportation, exploitation, […]

The post First Peoples: The First and Forgotten Slaves on Turtle Island first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>

Modern perceptions of early modern slavery associate the institution almost solely with Africans and their descendants. Yet slavery was a ubiquitous institution in the early modern world…The story of European colonialism in the Americas and its victimization of Africans and Indians follows a central paradigm in most textbooks. The African “role” encompasses the transportation, exploitation, and suffering of many millions in New World slavery, while Indians are described in terms of their succumbing in large numbers to disease, with the survivor’s facing dispossession of their land. This paradigm—a basic one in the history of colonialism—omits a crucial aspect of the story: the indigenous peoples of the Americas were enslaved in large numbers. This exclusion distorts not only what happened to American Indians under colonialism, but also points to the need for a reassessment of the foundation and nature of European overseas expansion.

— The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History

The Commission majority voted for key recommendations, including the following: The United States expects all nations to live up to their treaty obligations; it should live up to its own…We exchanged 400 million plus acres of land, and our way of life, and our very lives, for peace, and for the provisions that are provided for in the treaties, and a basic human dignity of having basic services for American Indian and Alaska Native people.

— Broken Promises: Continuing Federal Funding Shortfall for Native Americans: US Commission on Civil Rights, 2018

*****

No Context Required

A nineteenth century engraving depicting a battle from the Pequot War via Wikimedia Commons

As a full-time substitute teacher in a school system on the Eastern US seaboard, I am assigned to cover for state-certified teachers who are absent from duty. I’ve had many assignments over the past couple of years including working with special education/students with disabilities, and monitoring Spanish, Math, Art, and US History classes. It was the content, or lack thereof, of the US History class that was the impetus for this article.

Students in the US History class were learning about the various Indigenous tribes located across the United States. The assignments included determining former tribal locations on a blank map of the United States using crayons, and writing a postcard about the hunting, foraging and tools/technologies of assorted tribes such as the Lakota of the Great Plains, the Haudenosaunee of the Northeast Forests, and the Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw of the Pacific Northwest.

Some of the 6th and 7th grade students found the assignments boring with one saying, “What’s the point of writing a postcard.” Most liked using coloring pencils to note the locations of the tribes on the map (who doesn’t like coloring?). As far as I could tell, the lesson plans presented by the certified teachers depict the Indigenous peoples as living bucolic lives and being “one” with nature. Lessons exclude study of tribal wars over fur and Bison and, at this point in the US History class, no mention of the horrors inflicted on them by European settlers has taken place, or why that course of events happened at all. I spent a few minutes talking to the students about the Trail of Tears. They listened to my short talk with indifference. They all knew what Black Lives Matter is/stands for but were unaware of the Indigenous peoples plight other than the few tidbits they may have been told by their parents and me.

During one of the US History classes I was covering, a visiting teacher arrived and discussed, among other matters, some of the natural resources available to Indigenous peoples. He told the students that the salmon run in the Pacific Northwest was “so thick you can reach your hand in the water and grab a salmon or even walk across the river on the backs of the salmon.” I mentioned to him that the Lower Snake River Dams (Snake River is a tributary of the Columbia River) have pushed the salmon population to near extinction and with it the Salmon people’s way of life.  According to America’s Most Endangered Rivers, “The dams on the lower Snake River are an ongoing source of injustice and the loss of salmon is violating Native American rights ensured by treaty with the U.S. government. The dams and reservoirs submerged or impacted between 600 and 700 important tribal cultural sites along the lower Snake and its tributaries, thousands of acres of treaty-based hunting and gathering places, and countless graves of loved ones and sacred and ceremonial places.”

In the midst of social justice efforts such as Black Lives Matter, the Transgender Movement and even the revisionist 1619 Project, among many others, it seems that American citizens in-and-out of those movements have selective amnesia when it comes to remembering the destruction of the First Peoples by their own United States government; and, prior to that genocide, the British Colonists brutalization and enslavement of Native Americans. Why the great forgetting of Indigenous history by the American people at this late date: 2021?

Human Capital for the Taking

It is hard to know where to begin this tale of woe. It is clear that from the start Indigenous peoples were fated to be steamrolled first by British colonists and then by the US Government and the economic interests that destroyed their homelands and enslaved them. The First Peoples were viewed as intellectually and culturally inferior by British colonists and by the empire builders of the early United States and, moreover, were simply in the way of “progress”.

According to The Gilder-Lehrman Institute for American History,

the Colonists participated in Indian slave trading to obtain capital. It was as if capital could be created out of thin air: one merely had to capture an Indian or find an Indian to capture another. In South Carolina, and to a lesser extent in North Carolina, Virginia, and Louisiana, Indian slavery was a central means by which early colonists funded economic expansion. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, a frenzy of enslaving occurred in what is now the eastern United States. English and allied Indian raiders nearly depopulated Florida of its American Indian population. From 1670 to 1720 more Indians were shipped out of Charleston, South Carolina, than Africans were imported as slaves—and Charleston was a major port for bringing in Africans. The populous Choctaws in Mississippi were repeatedly battered by raiders, and many of their neighboring lower Mississippi Valley Indians also wound up spending their lives as slaves on West Indies plantations. Simultaneously, the New England colonies near eliminated the Native population from southern New England through warfare, slaving, and forced removal.

Hope?

The Biden Administration promised to increase federal funding for Indigenous peoples and followed through in March 2021 via the American Rescue Plan signed into law by President Joe Biden. It provides $1.75 billion in funding for “Indian Country” infrastructure, social services, health care and public safety. The US Department of Interior, Bureau of Indian Affairs will funnel the dollars to tribal interests.

Reuters reported that

Federal officials will meet with Native American tribes next month to gather recommendations as the federal government seeks to move ahead with efforts to protect and restore tribal homelands…Tribal leaders will be asked for advice on several topics, including the process to take land back into trust, leasing and treaty rights, among other issues under the Biden administration’s initiative to streamline steps allowing tribes to regain their land.

The two sides plan to meet in mid-October.

That’s good news but the redress efforts of the Biden Administration are tempered by the knowledge of events like the Bear River Massacre. According to the Washington Post:

The Bear River Massacre of 1863 near what’s now Preston, Idaho, left roughly 350 members of the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation dead, making it the bloodiest — and most deadly — slaying of Native Americans by the U.S. military, according to historians and tribal leaders. The Indians were slain after soldiers came into a valley where they were camping for the winter and attacked, leaving roughly 90 women and children among the dead.

Martin Luther King’s comments (below) on Indigenous peoples should be mandatory reading for students and adults from sea-to-shining-sea. It is a stinging assault on the United States’ character and bitter medicine to swallow, but it’s part of American history and should not be relegated to the dust bin.

Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race. Even before there were large numbers of Negroes on our shore, the scar of racial hatred had already disfigured colonial society. From the sixteenth century forward, blood flowed in battles over racial supremacy. We are perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population. Moreover, we elevated that tragic experience into a noble crusade. Indeed, even today we have not permitted ourselves to reject or feel remorse for this shameful episode. Our literature, our films, our drama, our folklore all exalt it. Our children are still taught to respect the violence which reduced a red-skinned people of an earlier culture into a few fragmented groups herded into impoverished reservations.

— From MLK’s book Why We Can’t Wait, 1963

The post First Peoples: The First and Forgotten Slaves on Turtle Island first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John Stanton.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2021/10/02/first-peoples-the-first-and-forgotten-slaves-on-turtle-island/feed/ 0 238773 https://www.radiofree.org/2021/09/30/wetsuweten-occupy-cgl-drill-site-and-call-for-support-on-the-ground-and-action-in-solidarity/ https://www.radiofree.org/2021/09/30/wetsuweten-occupy-cgl-drill-site-and-call-for-support-on-the-ground-and-action-in-solidarity/#respond Thu, 30 Sep 2021 22:54:20 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=121701 Support on the ground needed! Full Press release from Gidim’ten Checkpoint: The access road to Coastal GasLink’s drill site at the Wedzin Kwa river was destroyed. Blockades have been set up and sites have been occupied to stop the drilling under the sacred headwaters that nourish the Wet’suwet’en Yintah and all those within its catchment […]

The post Wet’suwet’en Occupy CGL Drill Site and Call for Support on the Ground and Action in Solidarity! first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>

Alisa Singer (USA), Changing, 2021. Source: IPCC.

In late March 2021, 120 traditional owners from 40 different First People’s groups spent five days at the National First People’s Gathering on Climate Change in Cairns (Australia). Speaking on the impact of the climate crisis on First People, Gavin Singleton from the Yirrganydji traditional owners explained that ‘From changing weather patterns to shifts in natural ecosystems, climate change is a clear and present threat to our people and our culture’.

Bianca McNeair of the Malgana traditional owners from Gatharagudu (Australia) said that those who attended the gathering ‘are talking about how the birds’ movements across the country have changed, so that’s changing songlines that they’ve been singing for thousands and thousands of years, and how that’s impacting them as a community and culture. … We are very resilient people’, McNeair said, ‘so it’s a challenge we were ready to take on. But now we’re facing a situation that’s not predictable, it’s not part of our natural environmental pattern’.

Arone Meeks (Australia), The Gesture, 2020.

The Yirrganydji traditional owners live on Australia’s coastline, which faces the Great Barrier Coral Reef. That majestic reef faces extinction from climate change: a period of consecutive years of coral bleaching from 2014 to 2017 threatened to kill off the precious coral, during which fluctuating temperatures caused coral to expel symbiotic algae that are crucial to the nutritional health of the coral. Scientists assembled by the United Nations found that 70% of the earth’s coral reefs are threatened, with 20% already destroyed ‘with no hope for recovery’. Of the reefs that are threatened, a quarter are under ‘imminent risk of collapse’ and another quarter are at risk ‘due to long-term threats’. In November 2020, a UN report titled Projections on Future Coral Bleaching suggested that unless carbon emissions are controlled, the reefs will die and the species they support will die out too. The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority notes that ‘climate change is the greatest threat to the Great Barrier Reef and coral reefs worldwide’. That is why the Yirrganydji traditional owners created the Indigenous Land and Sea Rangers to care for the reef against all odds.

‘Most of our traditions, our customs, our language are from the sea’, says Singleton, ‘so losing the reef would impact our identity. We were here prior to the formation of the reef, and we still hold stories that have been passed down through generations – of how the sea rose and flooded the area, the “great flood”’. The Yirrganydji Rangers, Singleton points out, ‘have their hearts and souls’ in the reef. But they are struggling against all odds.

Pejac (Spain), Stain, 2011.

Not long after the National First People’s Gathering disbanded, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its sixth report. Based on the consensus of 234 scientists from over 60 countries, the report notes that ‘multiple lines of evidence indicate the recent large-scale climatic changes are unprecedented in a multi-millennial context, and that they represent a millennial-scale commitment for the slow-responding elements of the climate system, resulting in worldwide loss of ice, increase in ocean heat content, sea level rise, and deep ocean acidification’. If warming continues to reach 3 °C (by 2060) and 5.7 °C (by 2100), human extinction is certain. The report comes after a string of extreme weather events: floods in China and Germany, fires across the Mediterranean, and extreme temperatures across the world. A study in the July issue of Nature Climate Change found that ‘record-shattering extremes’ would be ‘nearly impossible in the absence of warming’.

Importantly, the 6th IPCC report shows that ‘historical cumulative CO₂ emissions determine to a large degree warming to date’, which means that the Global North countries have already taken the planet to the threshold of annihilation before countries of the Global South have been able to attain basic needs such as universal electrification. For instance, 54 countries on the African continent account for merely 2-3% of global carbon emissions; half of Africa’s 1.2 billion people have no access to electricity, while many extreme climate events (droughts and cyclones in southern Africa, floods in the Horn of Africa, desertification in the Sahel) are now taking place across the continent. Released on World Environment Day (5 June) and produced with the International Week of Anti-Imperialist Struggle, our Red Alert no. 11 further explains the scientific and political dynamics of the climate crisis, the ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’, and what can be done to turn the tides.

Frédéric Bruly Bouabré (Ivory Coast), Le serment du Jeu de Paume, 2010.

Governments will gather in October for the 15th Conference of the Parties (COP15) in Kunming (China) to discuss progress on the Convention on Biological Diversity (ratified in 1993) and in November for the 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) in Glasgow (UK) to discuss climate change. Attention is on COP26, where the powerful Global North will once more push for ‘net zero’ carbon dioxide emissions and thereby reject deep cuts to their own emissions while insisting that the Global South forgo social development.

Meanwhile, there will be less attention paid to COP15, where the agenda will include cutting pesticide use by two-thirds, halving food waste, and eliminating the discharge of plastic waste. In 2019, an Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services report showed that pollution and resource extraction had threatened one million animal and plant species with extinction.

The link between the assault on biological diversity and climate change is clear: the opening of wetlands alone has released historic stores of carbon to the atmosphere. Deep emission cuts and better stewardship of resources are necessary.

Amin Roshan (Iran), Wandering, 2019.

Strikingly, just as the IPCC released its report, US President Joe Biden’s administration asked the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries to boost output of oil production. This makes a mockery of the Biden pledge to cut 50% of US greenhouse emissions by 2030.

A recent paper in Nature shows that the passage of the 1987 Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer banned the use of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), whose gradual elimination from aerosol sprays, refrigerants, and Styrofoam packaging prevented ozone depletion. The Montreal Protocol is significant because – despite industry lobbying – it was universally ratified. That treaty provides hope that sufficient pressure from key countries, pushed by social and political movements, could result in stringent regulations against pollution and carbon abuse as well as meaningful cultural change.

Simone Thomson (Australia), Awakening, 2019.

Places associated with global negotiations to save the planet include cities such as Kyoto (1997), Copenhagen (2009), and Paris (2015). First amongst these should be Cochabamba (Bolivia), where the government of Evo Morales Ayma held the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in April 2010. Over 30,000 people from more than 100 countries came to this landmark conference, which adopted the Universal Declaration of Rights of Mother Earth. Several points were discussed, including the demand for:

1. The states of the Global North to cut emissions by at least 50%;
2. Developing countries to be given substantial assistance to adapt to the effects of climate change and to transition away from fossil fuels;
3. Indigenous rights to be protected;
4. International borders to be opened to climate refugees;
5. An international court to be set up to prosecute climate crimes;
6. People’s rights to water to be recognised, and that people have the right not to be exposed to excessive pollution.

‘We are confronted with two paths’, former President Morales said: the path of ‘pachamama (Mother Earth) or the path of the multinationals. If we don’t take the former, the masters of death will win. If we don’t fight, we will be guilty of destroying the planet’. Gavin Singleton and Bianca McNeair would certainly agree.

So would the Yorta Yorta poet and educator Hyllus Noel Maris (1933-1986), whose ‘Spiritual Song of the Aborigine’ (1978) awakens hope and lays the soundtrack for those who march to save the planet:

I am a child of the Dreamtime People
Part of this land, like the gnarled gumtree
I am the river, softly singing
Chanting our songs on my way to the sea
My spirit is the dust-devils
Mirages, that dance on the plain
I’m the snow, the wind, and the falling rain
I’m part of the rocks and the red desert earth
Red as the blood that flows in my veins
I am eagle, crow and snake that glides
Through the rainforest that clings to the mountainside
I awakened here when the earth was new.

Warmly,

Vijay

The post I Awakened Here When the Earth Was New first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Vijay Prashad.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2021/08/27/i-awakened-here-when-the-earth-was-new/feed/ 0 229595 https://www.radiofree.org/2021/08/26/afghanistan-the-abomination-of-white-mans-burden-and-fake-feminist-narratives/ https://www.radiofree.org/2021/08/26/afghanistan-the-abomination-of-white-mans-burden-and-fake-feminist-narratives/#respond Thu, 26 Aug 2021 13:54:46 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=120360 Take up the White Man’s Burden, send for the best ye breed, Go bind your sons to exile, to serve your captives need – new-caught, sullen peoples, Half-devil and half-child… Take up the White Man’s burden, the savage wars of peace. — Rudyard Kipling (1899) The 2011 UK census recorded that Asian groups together numbered […]

The post Afghanistan:  The Abomination of “White Man’s Burden” and Fake Feminist Narratives first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>

Take up the White Man’s Burden, send for the best ye breed,
Go bind your sons to exile, to serve your captives need – new-caught, sullen peoples, Half-devil and half-child…
Take up the White Man’s burden, the savage wars of peace.

— Rudyard Kipling (1899)

The 2011 UK census recorded that Asian groups together numbered roughly 7% of Britain’s population, Black people 3% and mixed-race 2%, making a BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) total of 12%.  In various combinations they are the decedents of people who’ve once been owned, colonised, lost their lands, original culture, languages etc, and in modern societies have little or no collective institutional or financial power, to combat their ghettoisation in the lower reaches the UK class system.  The reason they are here, subject to western structural racism, is because the Tony Blairs of the 18th and 19th C slaughtered and enslaved their ancestors.  Throughout this period of the slavery and racist-imperialist gravy-train – and as Rudyard Kipling’s famous sentiments demonstrate – this oppression was represented as doing indigenous peoples some sort of service or favour.

Elites abandoning the post-war decolonisation consensus in our era, returned to this racist faked foreign policy benevolence, force-feeding the public the narrative, that from intrusive Iraq, Afghanistan wars and elsewhere, ‘America is spreading democracy’.  The extent to which America is itself a democracy is up for debate, but this marketing is simply a rehash, of the 19th C ‘Onward march of western civilisation’ expansionist ideology. When asked, Ghandi is reputed to have mocked the notion of western civilisation saying ‘I think it would be a good idea’.

Modern racist-imperialists – prominently Blair, his former ministers and his media enablers – blatantly reuse tropes of the same racist propaganda.  As the US project in Afghanistan grinds to a halt and tragedy overtakes the country, this propaganda practice has again gone into overdrive.  The BBC and most of the corporate media continue to re-spin the years of western domination of Afghanistan as about, educating its women and children.  In light of the new US withdrawal position, this is not just last year’s Orwell-like Ministry of Truth-style propaganda, but also a racist narrative that’s again hundreds of years old.  During the period of the 18th/19th C imperialist gravy-train, western conquest was similarly represented as ‘civilising the primitive savage’ and justified by narratives of supposedly ‘teaching the ‘w*gs/ darkies Christianity’.  Obscuring the slurs of implied ethnic primitivism from modern media presentation, hardly changes the truth of the material and ideological dynamic.

The ‘educating Afghan women and children’ narrative would, as public discourse, be treated with the shocked incredulity it deserves, were indigenous Afghan casualties, from western conquest and occupation, not as a editorial agenda frequently media played down, effaced and censored from representation,   No matter how many Afghan mothers protest the western killing of their children, this phenomenon has been mainly absented from prominence in news agendas.

When the UK Times unusually broke ranks reporting a 2009 US atrocity, it was left to campaigning scrutiny site Media Lens to follow up in 2010, writing… “American-led troops dragged Afghan children from their beds and shot them during a night raid on December 27 last year, leaving ten people dead. Afghan government investigators said that eight of the dead were schoolchildren, and that some of them had been handcuffed before being killed.”

The extent of the problem meant in 2011 after a further nine children died in a NATO air strike, even President Karzai – an ambitious local politician in effect, simply a western satrap – was forced against potential self-interest, to embarrass General Petraeus publicly stating   “On behalf of the people of Afghanistan I want you to stop the killings of civilians” and the subsequent apology was “not enough”.   The France 24 news site covering Karzai’s statement, also referred to the similar indigenous 65 non-combatants killed during operations in Kunar province’s Ghaziabad district; six civilians killed in neighbouring Nangarhar province, and the hundreds who took to the streets of Kabul protesting the killing of children, all by western forces.

The brutal Taliban shooting of Malala Yousafzai was used as a propaganda boost to the ‘advancing civilisation’ narrative by western media and political elites.  But it is perhaps significant that the Taliban who are hardly public relations sophisticates, felt they need only appeal to the lived experience of indigenous people in Afghanistan and the bordering area of Pakistan – in a 2013 response to the surviving Malala, publicly questioning…

if you were shot but [by] Americans in a drone attack, would world have ever heard updates on your medical status? Would you be called ‘daughter of the nation’? Would the media make a fuss about you? Would General Kiyani have come to visit you and would the world media be constantly reporting on you?… Would a Malala day be announced?… More than 300 innocent women and children have been killed in drones attacks but who cares… (numbers unverified).

Even career politician former President Karzai was similarly in line with grassroots experiences, after this year’s withdrawal announcement, telling Russia’s RT (UK) “The US has lost the war in Afghanistan…years ago, when it bombed Afghan homes”.  And that this western violence had recruited for the indigenous Afghan Taliban and enabled them. “Things went wrong. They (Taliban) began to re-emerge and the part of the population went with them.”

Given that women and their children are most often the first victims of war, there has never been a significant grassroots pro-imperialism feminist movement.  In fact, in contrast to the attempts by pro-war neoliberals to camouflage their atrocities in the clothing of women’s concerns, a generational spanning tradition of anti-war feminists exists, including figures like Jane Adams, Ruth Adler, Vera Brittain, Betty Reardon, and Sylvia Pankhurst who opposed the Italian conquest of Ethiopia.  Current media spin about supposedly helping women in Afghanistan also deliberately side-lines significant figures like CodePink’s Medea Benjamin who recently commented…“A shout out to all who joined CODEPINK and other peace groups to oppose the invasion of Afghanistan. From Bush to Obama, we called for our troops to come home. Now we have to stop the military-industrial complex from dragging us into new wars.”

Another issue is can altruism – particularly with regard to educating indigenous women and children – be remotely believed as a motivation for those responsible for the West’s conquest of Afghanistan? Education has been comodified in George W. Bush’s America, and resulting student debt is at record levels.  Similarly, in contradiction to previous UK Labour Party traditions, the governments comprising PM Tony Blair, Chancellor Gordon Brown and their cabinets abolished the mandatory student support grant and even introduced fees for what had previously been free education.  Consequently, the marketing of the state education policies of Blair et al were frequently parodied by Party grassroots supporters as instead ‘Exploitation, Exploitation, Exploitation’.  Blair’s New Labour cuts to lone parent benefits – primarily harming single mothers and their children – is frequently cited as the moment Labour’s traditional support realised they had been betrayed by neoliberal entryism.  Would Britain’s neoliberal political elite attacking domestic lone mothers and working-class opportunities, really expend financial resources just to help Afghan women and their children?

Historian David Stannard has documented 100 million dead indigenous people of the Americas as victims of the largest holocaust in human history, occurring as a result of the overall conquest of the continent. For its part the US currently has a population of 331+ million people.  There are only 6+ million Native Americans left as part of this population, whose life chances are largely limited by the constraints of the Reservation system. Native Americans are practically un-findable, excluded, in most US cities, and invisible on film and TV.  If President George W Bush wanted to help indigenous people, he could have started at home.

If Bush simply wanted to ‘do good’, given former manufacturing city powerhouses like Detroit are wastelands, suffering from the export of US manufacturing jobs to global sweatshop economies, he could have fought poverty and the resulting homelessness crisis.  Perhaps most significantly he could have tackled the economic underpinnings of the ongoing post-19th C Black human rights crisis.  Are then we really supposed to believe his US conquest of Afghanistan was about some sort of ‘white man’s burden’ altruism?

In contradiction to the western white man’s burden narrative, both Bush and Blair presided over torture programs victimising Muslim people-of-colour.  One victim of the UK Blair torture regime – Fatima Boudchar – was actually pregnant when kidnapped along with her husband for rendition.  In Afghanistan torture was carried out at Bagram which corporate news outlets largely misrepresent as simply an airbase.  Most of the news outlets now pretending to be outraged by human rights concerns under the new Taliban, spun western torture under the entirely new invented term ‘water boarding’ as if it were akin to harmless surfing.  For decades prior to this it was simply known as a Nazi torture technique.  Not particularly a secret given it was represented even in popular film culture.  In Battle of the V1 (1959), a Polish female partisan subjected to Nazi water torture dies after her heart gives out.  In Circle of Deception (1960), it’s features, similarly used on a Canadian officer played by Bradford Dillman.  Yet, when the victims are simply Muslim people-of-colour, the status of the torture technique suddenly changes.

So what are the real incentives behind the US-led conquest of Afghanistan?  On 9/11 the Pentagon and Twin Towers were attacked by 15 violent Sunni Whabbist Saudi Arabians and four other Muslims.  It was suggested that Saudi Whabbists had used the Afghanistan wilderness as a training ground.  The extent of cultural collusion between the Pashton Afghan Taliban and Whabbist Saudi Arabs is often disputed.  In any case Osama Bin Laden was found in neighbouring Pakistan.  The question is if you want to combat violent Saudi Arabian Whabbists, why not stop their export and go to source – Saudi Arabia itself? Saudi Arabia is not only the source of the 9/11 attackers but its appalling human rights on the oppression of women and judicial punishment arguably exceeds that of pre-invasion Afghanistan.  In fact, since 9/11 the US instead of dealing Saudi Arabia which coincidentally is also its long term regional ally and oil supplier, has attacked or militarily threatened numerous countries that either have nothing to do with the country, or even in ethnic terms have an adversarial relationship to the Saudis – among these predominantly Shia Iraq, Syria, Iran and Berber Libya.

The approach Julian Assange and Wikileaks took to the issue in 2011 was to follow the money, and consequently put some flesh on the notion of a ‘Forever War’ that President Biden is currently citing in justifying US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan.

The goal is to use Afghanistan to wash money out of the tax bases of the US and Europe through Afghanistan and back into the hands of a transnational security elite. The goal is an endless war, not a successful war.

What Assange and Wikileaks are alluding to is a form of ‘Military Keynesianism’.  Keynesian economics originated as a method of circumventing the dictatorship of the marketplace, for societies to instead allocate value to things deemed socially functional – sometimes this is augmented by printing money to maintain particular activities. It was supposed to help society’s poor and working-class.  In our era it has been a way of redirecting money to the corporate rich – here particularly the military industries.  The money printing supporting this – like so many things – has been relabelled, and now termed ‘Quantitative Easing’, but condemned as Welfare or Socialism for the Rich by working-class activists.

This is not the end of the incentives Afghanistan offers.  The corporate media are now suggesting the indigenous Afghan Taliban might be motivated by the country’s wealth in Lithium – vital for cell phone products – and Copper deposits.  Strange in two decades of coverage, it has never been suggested this was a motivation for the US to go halfway around the world.

It is also worth looking at how Afghanistan fits into the entire Neo-Con agenda.  Globalised capitalism is very good at internalising its profits, while externalising its costs onto the general public and society at large.  Economically, globalised capitalism doesn’t’ actually work unless subsidised by unfeasible levels of fossil fuel supply at therefore unfeasible low cost levels.  The general public has to bear the social cost, the environmental cost, the cost of wars for oil and the potential national security cost of not having localised manufacturing production.

In keeping with this and in contrast to any genuine post-9/11 agenda, US Neo-Con wars have predominantly had two functions – attacking oil rich and/or Russian allied nations.  It only takes a casual look at the regional map to show that a US military presence in Afghanistan provides a useful jumping off point for a war or simple military intimidation of Iran.  It also gives access to gas powerhouse Turkmenistan and potentially moves America’s military ever closer to Russia’s borders.  Predictably, despite Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya, at no time during the US-led occupation did the corporate media query the military’s relationship to the country’s borders in the manner that they are doing now the indigenous Taliban are in charge.

Fuel prices are close to record highs, something that is regarded as a detriment to global trade.  As Biden announced his intention to go through with the troop withdrawal in Afghanistan, OPEC said they were willing to increase global supply.  Iran seeing the knife about to taken from its throat seemed believe they were about to be let back into the global oil market, and boasted of being able to boost production.  Israel contrived a dispute with Iran over a tanker, apparently believing that this might have a negative effect on any potential ongoing US/Iran negotiations, designed to bring the country in from the cold.

If this conjunction plays-out the way it appears, then Biden ironically for equally capitalist materialistic and environmental hazardous reasons, is going to be the first prominent Democrat in decades, to open up clear blue water between himself and the Republican pro-war Neo-Con agenda, but at least hopefully we will be avoiding attacks on Iran and other future wars.

In the meantime those like Tony Blair who have hitched their careers to the Neo-Con imperialist wagon train will continue to impotently stamp their rhetorical feet, while demanding that their ridiculous white saviour narrative be believed.  While aided and abetted by the BBC and corporate media, seemingly unaware they are doing last year’s Ministry of Truth propaganda, and repeating century old racisms.

Afterword:

In reaction to Tony Blair’s latest media temper tantrum, Peter Galbraith, former UN deputy special representative for Afghanistan, said:

In terms of what was imbecilic, frankly it was the strategy that was followed for 20 years, which was to try to build a highly centralised state in a country that was as diverse – geographically and ethnically – as Afghanistan, and to engage in a counterinsurgency strategy without a local partner and the local partner was corrupt, ineffective, illegitimate.

The post Afghanistan:  The Abomination of “White Man’s Burden” and Fake Feminist Narratives first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Gavin Lewis.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2021/08/26/afghanistan-the-abomination-of-white-mans-burden-and-fake-feminist-narratives/feed/ 0 229167 https://www.radiofree.org/2021/08/26/afghanistan-the-abomination-of-white-mans-burden-and-fake-feminist-narratives-2/ https://www.radiofree.org/2021/08/26/afghanistan-the-abomination-of-white-mans-burden-and-fake-feminist-narratives-2/#respond Thu, 26 Aug 2021 13:54:46 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=120360 Take up the White Man’s Burden, send for the best ye breed, Go bind your sons to exile, to serve your captives need – new-caught, sullen peoples, Half-devil and half-child… Take up the White Man’s burden, the savage wars of peace. — Rudyard Kipling (1899) The 2011 UK census recorded that Asian groups together numbered […]

The post Afghanistan:  The Abomination of “White Man’s Burden” and Fake Feminist Narratives first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>

Take up the White Man’s Burden, send for the best ye breed,
Go bind your sons to exile, to serve your captives need – new-caught, sullen peoples, Half-devil and half-child…
Take up the White Man’s burden, the savage wars of peace.

— Rudyard Kipling (1899)

The 2011 UK census recorded that Asian groups together numbered roughly 7% of Britain’s population, Black people 3% and mixed-race 2%, making a BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) total of 12%.  In various combinations they are the decedents of people who’ve once been owned, colonised, lost their lands, original culture, languages etc, and in modern societies have little or no collective institutional or financial power, to combat their ghettoisation in the lower reaches the UK class system.  The reason they are here, subject to western structural racism, is because the Tony Blairs of the 18th and 19th C slaughtered and enslaved their ancestors.  Throughout this period of the slavery and racist-imperialist gravy-train – and as Rudyard Kipling’s famous sentiments demonstrate – this oppression was represented as doing indigenous peoples some sort of service or favour.

Elites abandoning the post-war decolonisation consensus in our era, returned to this racist faked foreign policy benevolence, force-feeding the public the narrative, that from intrusive Iraq, Afghanistan wars and elsewhere, ‘America is spreading democracy’.  The extent to which America is itself a democracy is up for debate, but this marketing is simply a rehash, of the 19th C ‘Onward march of western civilisation’ expansionist ideology. When asked, Ghandi is reputed to have mocked the notion of western civilisation saying ‘I think it would be a good idea’.

Modern racist-imperialists – prominently Blair, his former ministers and his media enablers – blatantly reuse tropes of the same racist propaganda.  As the US project in Afghanistan grinds to a halt and tragedy overtakes the country, this propaganda practice has again gone into overdrive.  The BBC and most of the corporate media continue to re-spin the years of western domination of Afghanistan as about, educating its women and children.  In light of the new US withdrawal position, this is not just last year’s Orwell-like Ministry of Truth-style propaganda, but also a racist narrative that’s again hundreds of years old.  During the period of the 18th/19th C imperialist gravy-train, western conquest was similarly represented as ‘civilising the primitive savage’ and justified by narratives of supposedly ‘teaching the ‘w*gs/ darkies Christianity’.  Obscuring the slurs of implied ethnic primitivism from modern media presentation, hardly changes the truth of the material and ideological dynamic.

The ‘educating Afghan women and children’ narrative would, as public discourse, be treated with the shocked incredulity it deserves, were indigenous Afghan casualties, from western conquest and occupation, not as a editorial agenda frequently media played down, effaced and censored from representation,   No matter how many Afghan mothers protest the western killing of their children, this phenomenon has been mainly absented from prominence in news agendas.

When the UK Times unusually broke ranks reporting a 2009 US atrocity, it was left to campaigning scrutiny site Media Lens to follow up in 2010, writing… “American-led troops dragged Afghan children from their beds and shot them during a night raid on December 27 last year, leaving ten people dead. Afghan government investigators said that eight of the dead were schoolchildren, and that some of them had been handcuffed before being killed.”

The extent of the problem meant in 2011 after a further nine children died in a NATO air strike, even President Karzai – an ambitious local politician in effect, simply a western satrap – was forced against potential self-interest, to embarrass General Petraeus publicly stating   “On behalf of the people of Afghanistan I want you to stop the killings of civilians” and the subsequent apology was “not enough”.   The France 24 news site covering Karzai’s statement, also referred to the similar indigenous 65 non-combatants killed during operations in Kunar province’s Ghaziabad district; six civilians killed in neighbouring Nangarhar province, and the hundreds who took to the streets of Kabul protesting the killing of children, all by western forces.

The brutal Taliban shooting of Malala Yousafzai was used as a propaganda boost to the ‘advancing civilisation’ narrative by western media and political elites.  But it is perhaps significant that the Taliban who are hardly public relations sophisticates, felt they need only appeal to the lived experience of indigenous people in Afghanistan and the bordering area of Pakistan – in a 2013 response to the surviving Malala, publicly questioning…

if you were shot but [by] Americans in a drone attack, would world have ever heard updates on your medical status? Would you be called ‘daughter of the nation’? Would the media make a fuss about you? Would General Kiyani have come to visit you and would the world media be constantly reporting on you?… Would a Malala day be announced?… More than 300 innocent women and children have been killed in drones attacks but who cares… (numbers unverified).

Even career politician former President Karzai was similarly in line with grassroots experiences, after this year’s withdrawal announcement, telling Russia’s RT (UK) “The US has lost the war in Afghanistan…years ago, when it bombed Afghan homes”.  And that this western violence had recruited for the indigenous Afghan Taliban and enabled them. “Things went wrong. They (Taliban) began to re-emerge and the part of the population went with them.”

Given that women and their children are most often the first victims of war, there has never been a significant grassroots pro-imperialism feminist movement.  In fact, in contrast to the attempts by pro-war neoliberals to camouflage their atrocities in the clothing of women’s concerns, a generational spanning tradition of anti-war feminists exists, including figures like Jane Adams, Ruth Adler, Vera Brittain, Betty Reardon, and Sylvia Pankhurst who opposed the Italian conquest of Ethiopia.  Current media spin about supposedly helping women in Afghanistan also deliberately side-lines significant figures like CodePink’s Medea Benjamin who recently commented…“A shout out to all who joined CODEPINK and other peace groups to oppose the invasion of Afghanistan. From Bush to Obama, we called for our troops to come home. Now we have to stop the military-industrial complex from dragging us into new wars.”

Another issue is can altruism – particularly with regard to educating indigenous women and children – be remotely believed as a motivation for those responsible for the West’s conquest of Afghanistan? Education has been comodified in George W. Bush’s America, and resulting student debt is at record levels.  Similarly, in contradiction to previous UK Labour Party traditions, the governments comprising PM Tony Blair, Chancellor Gordon Brown and their cabinets abolished the mandatory student support grant and even introduced fees for what had previously been free education.  Consequently, the marketing of the state education policies of Blair et al were frequently parodied by Party grassroots supporters as instead ‘Exploitation, Exploitation, Exploitation’.  Blair’s New Labour cuts to lone parent benefits – primarily harming single mothers and their children – is frequently cited as the moment Labour’s traditional support realised they had been betrayed by neoliberal entryism.  Would Britain’s neoliberal political elite attacking domestic lone mothers and working-class opportunities, really expend financial resources just to help Afghan women and their children?

Historian David Stannard has documented 100 million dead indigenous people of the Americas as victims of the largest holocaust in human history, occurring as a result of the overall conquest of the continent. For its part the US currently has a population of 331+ million people.  There are only 6+ million Native Americans left as part of this population, whose life chances are largely limited by the constraints of the Reservation system. Native Americans are practically un-findable, excluded, in most US cities, and invisible on film and TV.  If President George W Bush wanted to help indigenous people, he could have started at home.

If Bush simply wanted to ‘do good’, given former manufacturing city powerhouses like Detroit are wastelands, suffering from the export of US manufacturing jobs to global sweatshop economies, he could have fought poverty and the resulting homelessness crisis.  Perhaps most significantly he could have tackled the economic underpinnings of the ongoing post-19th C Black human rights crisis.  Are then we really supposed to believe his US conquest of Afghanistan was about some sort of ‘white man’s burden’ altruism?

In contradiction to the western white man’s burden narrative, both Bush and Blair presided over torture programs victimising Muslim people-of-colour.  One victim of the UK Blair torture regime – Fatima Boudchar – was actually pregnant when kidnapped along with her husband for rendition.  In Afghanistan torture was carried out at Bagram which corporate news outlets largely misrepresent as simply an airbase.  Most of the news outlets now pretending to be outraged by human rights concerns under the new Taliban, spun western torture under the entirely new invented term ‘water boarding’ as if it were akin to harmless surfing.  For decades prior to this it was simply known as a Nazi torture technique.  Not particularly a secret given it was represented even in popular film culture.  In Battle of the V1 (1959), a Polish female partisan subjected to Nazi water torture dies after her heart gives out.  In Circle of Deception (1960), it’s features, similarly used on a Canadian officer played by Bradford Dillman.  Yet, when the victims are simply Muslim people-of-colour, the status of the torture technique suddenly changes.

So what are the real incentives behind the US-led conquest of Afghanistan?  On 9/11 the Pentagon and Twin Towers were attacked by 15 violent Sunni Whabbist Saudi Arabians and four other Muslims.  It was suggested that Saudi Whabbists had used the Afghanistan wilderness as a training ground.  The extent of cultural collusion between the Pashton Afghan Taliban and Whabbist Saudi Arabs is often disputed.  In any case Osama Bin Laden was found in neighbouring Pakistan.  The question is if you want to combat violent Saudi Arabian Whabbists, why not stop their export and go to source – Saudi Arabia itself? Saudi Arabia is not only the source of the 9/11 attackers but its appalling human rights on the oppression of women and judicial punishment arguably exceeds that of pre-invasion Afghanistan.  In fact, since 9/11 the US instead of dealing Saudi Arabia which coincidentally is also its long term regional ally and oil supplier, has attacked or militarily threatened numerous countries that either have nothing to do with the country, or even in ethnic terms have an adversarial relationship to the Saudis – among these predominantly Shia Iraq, Syria, Iran and Berber Libya.

The approach Julian Assange and Wikileaks took to the issue in 2011 was to follow the money, and consequently put some flesh on the notion of a ‘Forever War’ that President Biden is currently citing in justifying US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan.

The goal is to use Afghanistan to wash money out of the tax bases of the US and Europe through Afghanistan and back into the hands of a transnational security elite. The goal is an endless war, not a successful war.

What Assange and Wikileaks are alluding to is a form of ‘Military Keynesianism’.  Keynesian economics originated as a method of circumventing the dictatorship of the marketplace, for societies to instead allocate value to things deemed socially functional – sometimes this is augmented by printing money to maintain particular activities. It was supposed to help society’s poor and working-class.  In our era it has been a way of redirecting money to the corporate rich – here particularly the military industries.  The money printing supporting this – like so many things – has been relabelled, and now termed ‘Quantitative Easing’, but condemned as Welfare or Socialism for the Rich by working-class activists.

This is not the end of the incentives Afghanistan offers.  The corporate media are now suggesting the indigenous Afghan Taliban might be motivated by the country’s wealth in Lithium – vital for cell phone products – and Copper deposits.  Strange in two decades of coverage, it has never been suggested this was a motivation for the US to go halfway around the world.

It is also worth looking at how Afghanistan fits into the entire Neo-Con agenda.  Globalised capitalism is very good at internalising its profits, while externalising its costs onto the general public and society at large.  Economically, globalised capitalism doesn’t’ actually work unless subsidised by unfeasible levels of fossil fuel supply at therefore unfeasible low cost levels.  The general public has to bear the social cost, the environmental cost, the cost of wars for oil and the potential national security cost of not having localised manufacturing production.

In keeping with this and in contrast to any genuine post-9/11 agenda, US Neo-Con wars have predominantly had two functions – attacking oil rich and/or Russian allied nations.  It only takes a casual look at the regional map to show that a US military presence in Afghanistan provides a useful jumping off point for a war or simple military intimidation of Iran.  It also gives access to gas powerhouse Turkmenistan and potentially moves America’s military ever closer to Russia’s borders.  Predictably, despite Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya, at no time during the US-led occupation did the corporate media query the military’s relationship to the country’s borders in the manner that they are doing now the indigenous Taliban are in charge.

Fuel prices are close to record highs, something that is regarded as a detriment to global trade.  As Biden announced his intention to go through with the troop withdrawal in Afghanistan, OPEC said they were willing to increase global supply.  Iran seeing the knife about to taken from its throat seemed believe they were about to be let back into the global oil market, and boasted of being able to boost production.  Israel contrived a dispute with Iran over a tanker, apparently believing that this might have a negative effect on any potential ongoing US/Iran negotiations, designed to bring the country in from the cold.

If this conjunction plays-out the way it appears, then Biden ironically for equally capitalist materialistic and environmental hazardous reasons, is going to be the first prominent Democrat in decades, to open up clear blue water between himself and the Republican pro-war Neo-Con agenda, but at least hopefully we will be avoiding attacks on Iran and other future wars.

In the meantime those like Tony Blair who have hitched their careers to the Neo-Con imperialist wagon train will continue to impotently stamp their rhetorical feet, while demanding that their ridiculous white saviour narrative be believed.  While aided and abetted by the BBC and corporate media, seemingly unaware they are doing last year’s Ministry of Truth propaganda, and repeating century old racisms.

Afterword:

In reaction to Tony Blair’s latest media temper tantrum, Peter Galbraith, former UN deputy special representative for Afghanistan, said:

In terms of what was imbecilic, frankly it was the strategy that was followed for 20 years, which was to try to build a highly centralised state in a country that was as diverse – geographically and ethnically – as Afghanistan, and to engage in a counterinsurgency strategy without a local partner and the local partner was corrupt, ineffective, illegitimate.

The post Afghanistan:  The Abomination of “White Man’s Burden” and Fake Feminist Narratives first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Gavin Lewis.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2021/08/26/afghanistan-the-abomination-of-white-mans-burden-and-fake-feminist-narratives-2/feed/ 0 229168 https://www.radiofree.org/2021/08/25/global-protests-as-brazils-supreme-court-set-to-begin-landmark-indigenous-rights-ruling/ https://www.radiofree.org/2021/08/25/global-protests-as-brazils-supreme-court-set-to-begin-landmark-indigenous-rights-ruling/#respond Wed, 25 Aug 2021 15:36:49 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=120344 Over 6,000 indigenous people from approximately 170 peoples are protesting at the Struggle For Life camp in Brasilia against the Time Limit Trick. © Survival Indigenous peoples from all over Brazil are protesting in a week-long action in Brasilia against the “Marco Temporal” (or “Time Limit Trick”), draft bill 490 known as the “Bill of Death”, […]

The post Global Protests as Brazil’s Supreme Court Set to Begin Landmark Indigenous Rights Ruling first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>
Over 6,000 indigenous people from approximately 170 peoples are protesting at the Struggle For Life camp in Brasilia against the Time Limit Trick. © Survival

Indigenous peoples from all over Brazil are protesting in a week-long action in Brasilia against the “Marco Temporal” (or “Time Limit Trick”), draft bill 490 known as the “Bill of Death”, and a series of other genocidal plans and actions by the Bolsonaro government.The “Struggle for Life” (“Luta pela Vida”) global action is led by APIB – the Association of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil.

Indigenous protestors hold a vigil in Brasilia on the night before the Supreme Court begins its vote on the Time Limit Trick. © Survival

APIB have held a vigil outside the Supreme Court, which is due to restart voting on the Time Limit Trick, a proposal put forward by the agribusiness sector claiming that indigenous peoples only have the right to territory that they were physically occupying on October 5, 1988 – the day the current Constitution came into force.

A series of actions have taken place across the globe, including in San Francisco and London, by protestors calling for an end to the genocidal attacks being waged by President Bolsonaro and his supporters against Brazil’s indigenous peoples.

Protest outside Brazilian Embassy in London on the day the Supreme Court begins its ruling on the Time Limit Trick. © Survival

The Time Limit Trick poses a threat to hundreds of indigenous territories, hundreds of thousands of indigenous people and dozens of uncontacted tribes, including:

• The Xokleng: one of their territories is the subject of the Supreme Court ruling which will judge the validity, or not, of the Time Limit Trick.

Large parts of Xokleng land and other indigenous territories were allocated to
Europeans settlers encouraged by the Brazilian government early last century. The government also financed a so-called “Indian-hunting militia”, which accelerated the colonial land grab and the genocide of indigenous peoples. The Supreme Court could now set the effects of these and subsequent evictions in stone, establishing a precedent which would have far-reaching consequences for indigenous peoples in Brazil.

• • The Guarani: nearly all their land was stolen before 1988 and is now used for agribusiness. They would be among the hardest hit. Their campaign to get their land back, already a mammoth battle, would become even harder and bloodier.
  • The uncontacted Kawahiva: their existence and location was officially confirmed after 1988, like many other uncontacted tribes.
  • Many other uncontacted tribes, whose existence still hasn’t been officially confirmed by the government, despite plenty of evidence. There are 86 such cases, one of which is the uncontacted people of Ituna Itatá indigenous territory, whose emergency Land Protection Order is due to expire imminently.

Indigenous people lay out the names of indigenous territories that will be affected if the Time Limit Trick were to be passed by the Supreme Court, Brasilia, 2021. © Survival

If approved, the Time Limit Trick would set indigenous rights back decades and could wipe out whole uncontacted tribes. The indigenous movement and their allies are campaigning for it to be scrapped.

APIB said: “May the country listen to its indigenous peoples. Our lives are linked to the earth, as we live in communion with it. We are the guardians of the forests and all forms of life that live there. We are facing a Congress that continues to push its anti-indigenous agenda. We are fighting against the Time Limit Trick, scheduled to be voted by the Supreme Court on August 25th. We will resist!”

Caroline Pearce, director of Survival International said today: “This is the most critical court ruling for Brazil’s indigenous peoples for decades. The future of hundreds of thousands of people is at stake. It is also a crucial test of Brazil’s judiciary and democracy. It is up to the Supreme Court judges to uphold the constitution which recognizes indigenous peoples’ original rights to their lands as the country’s first inhabitants.”

Protesters in London stand in solidarity with Brazil’s Indigenous Peoples outside the Brazilian Embassy in London. © Suzanne Plunkett / GreenpeaceThe post Global Protests as Brazil’s Supreme Court Set to Begin Landmark Indigenous Rights Ruling first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Survival International.

]]>https://www.radiofree.org/2021/08/25/global-protests-as-brazils-supreme-court-set-to-begin-landmark-indigenous-rights-ruling/feed/0 228908 https://www.radiofree.org/2021/08/25/global-protests-as-brazils-supreme-court-set-to-begin-landmark-indigenous-rights-ruling-2/ https://www.radiofree.org/2021/08/25/global-protests-as-brazils-supreme-court-set-to-begin-landmark-indigenous-rights-ruling-2/#respond Wed, 25 Aug 2021 15:36:49 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=120344 Over 6,000 indigenous people from approximately 170 peoples are protesting at the Struggle For Life camp in Brasilia against the Time Limit Trick. © Survival Indigenous peoples from all over Brazil are protesting in a week-long action in Brasilia against the “Marco Temporal” (or “Time Limit Trick”), draft bill 490 known as the “Bill of Death”, […]

The post Global Protests as Brazil’s Supreme Court Set to Begin Landmark Indigenous Rights Ruling first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>
Over 6,000 indigenous people from approximately 170 peoples are protesting at the Struggle For Life camp in Brasilia against the Time Limit Trick. © Survival

Indigenous peoples from all over Brazil are protesting in a week-long action in Brasilia against the “Marco Temporal” (or “Time Limit Trick”), draft bill 490 known as the “Bill of Death”, and a series of other genocidal plans and actions by the Bolsonaro government.The “Struggle for Life” (“Luta pela Vida”) global action is led by APIB – the Association of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil.

Indigenous protestors hold a vigil in Brasilia on the night before the Supreme Court begins its vote on the Time Limit Trick. © Survival

APIB have held a vigil outside the Supreme Court, which is due to restart voting on the Time Limit Trick, a proposal put forward by the agribusiness sector claiming that indigenous peoples only have the right to territory that they were physically occupying on October 5, 1988 – the day the current Constitution came into force.

A series of actions have taken place across the globe, including in San Francisco and London, by protestors calling for an end to the genocidal attacks being waged by President Bolsonaro and his supporters against Brazil’s indigenous peoples.

Protest outside Brazilian Embassy in London on the day the Supreme Court begins its ruling on the Time Limit Trick. © Survival

The Time Limit Trick poses a threat to hundreds of indigenous territories, hundreds of thousands of indigenous people and dozens of uncontacted tribes, including:

• The Xokleng: one of their territories is the subject of the Supreme Court ruling which will judge the validity, or not, of the Time Limit Trick.

Large parts of Xokleng land and other indigenous territories were allocated to
Europeans settlers encouraged by the Brazilian government early last century. The government also financed a so-called “Indian-hunting militia”, which accelerated the colonial land grab and the genocide of indigenous peoples. The Supreme Court could now set the effects of these and subsequent evictions in stone, establishing a precedent which would have far-reaching consequences for indigenous peoples in Brazil.

• • The Guarani: nearly all their land was stolen before 1988 and is now used for agribusiness. They would be among the hardest hit. Their campaign to get their land back, already a mammoth battle, would become even harder and bloodier.
  • The uncontacted Kawahiva: their existence and location was officially confirmed after 1988, like many other uncontacted tribes.
  • Many other uncontacted tribes, whose existence still hasn’t been officially confirmed by the government, despite plenty of evidence. There are 86 such cases, one of which is the uncontacted people of Ituna Itatá indigenous territory, whose emergency Land Protection Order is due to expire imminently.

Indigenous people lay out the names of indigenous territories that will be affected if the Time Limit Trick were to be passed by the Supreme Court, Brasilia, 2021. © Survival

If approved, the Time Limit Trick would set indigenous rights back decades and could wipe out whole uncontacted tribes. The indigenous movement and their allies are campaigning for it to be scrapped.

APIB said: “May the country listen to its indigenous peoples. Our lives are linked to the earth, as we live in communion with it. We are the guardians of the forests and all forms of life that live there. We are facing a Congress that continues to push its anti-indigenous agenda. We are fighting against the Time Limit Trick, scheduled to be voted by the Supreme Court on August 25th. We will resist!”

Caroline Pearce, director of Survival International said today: “This is the most critical court ruling for Brazil’s indigenous peoples for decades. The future of hundreds of thousands of people is at stake. It is also a crucial test of Brazil’s judiciary and democracy. It is up to the Supreme Court judges to uphold the constitution which recognizes indigenous peoples’ original rights to their lands as the country’s first inhabitants.”

Protesters in London stand in solidarity with Brazil’s Indigenous Peoples outside the Brazilian Embassy in London. © Suzanne Plunkett / GreenpeaceThe post Global Protests as Brazil’s Supreme Court Set to Begin Landmark Indigenous Rights Ruling first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Survival International.

]]>https://www.radiofree.org/2021/08/25/global-protests-as-brazils-supreme-court-set-to-begin-landmark-indigenous-rights-ruling-2/feed/0 228909 https://www.radiofree.org/2021/08/14/justice-and-politics-when-words-are-betrayed-by-deeds/ https://www.radiofree.org/2021/08/14/justice-and-politics-when-words-are-betrayed-by-deeds/#respond Sat, 14 Aug 2021 20:47:18 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=119884 Michael Kovrig-Meng Wanzhou-Michael Spavor. Photograph: (Agencies) For neither man nor angel can discern hypocrisy, the only evil that walks invisible, except to God alone. — John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book III Simply put, hypocrisy is when words and actions don’t agree. It is revealing when one applies this straightforward definition to the cases involving two […]

The post Justice and Politics: When Words are Betrayed by Deeds first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]> Michael Kovrig-Meng Wanzhou-Michael Spavor. Photograph: (Agencies)

For neither man nor angel can discern hypocrisy, the only evil that walks invisible, except to God alone.

— John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book III

Simply put, hypocrisy is when words and actions don’t agree. It is revealing when one applies this straightforward definition to the cases involving two Canadian detainees in China, business consultant Michael Spavor and former diplomat Michael Kovrig, and the Chinese detainee in Canada, Huawei Technologies executive Meng Wanzhou.

The United States is seeking the extradition of Meng for fraud-related charges. The two Michaels were apprehended soon after in China and charged with spying on national secrets and providing state secrets to foreign entities.

On Wednesday 11 August, Spavor was sentenced by a Chinese court to 11 years in prison.

Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau was dismissive of the verdict. “Today’s verdict for Mr. Spavor comes after more than two and a half years of arbitrary detention, a lack of transparency in the legal process, and a trial that did not satisfy even the minimum standards required by international law.”

There are many parts of this statement by Trudeau that require deeper consideration.

First, Trudeau notes the duration of the detention, more than two and a half years. It is commonly held that justice delayed is justice denied. When the wheels of justice grind too slowly, there is a danger of a gross injustice being committed. When detainees are found to be not guilty, a nonrecoverable portion of their lives has been squandered. If Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig are innocent, then a gross injustice has occurred. However, this applies equally in the case of Meng Wanzhou who has been under house arrest for over two and a half years.

Does Trudeau’s concern for long-term detention only apply to Canadians? Has Trudeau ever uttered one word regarding the over a decade-long detention and torture of Julian Assange for revealing US war crimes, a detention for which Canada may well be complicit?

Second, Trudeau claims the detentions are arbitrary. However, if the verdict reached was just, then the fact that Spavor was found guilty would indicate that his detention was not arbitrary.

The Global Times argued:

The Dandong Intermediate People’s Court handled the case of Spavor in strict accordance with the law, fully protected Spavor’s litigation rights, respected and honored the Canadian side’s consular rights such as visiting and receiving notification, and arranged for the Canadian side to attend the trial. However, Canada, disregarding the political nature of the Meng Wanzhou incident and acting as an accomplice of the US, has detained Meng, an innocent Chinese citizen who didn’t violate any Canadian law, for nearly 1,000 days. This is arbitrary detention in every sense of the term, the embassy in Canada said.

The Chinese Embassy in the US also said Meng has never violated any Canadian law but has been detained by Canada until today. Canada chooses to be an accomplice to the US and this is a textbook example of arbitrary detention by “exercising leverage over a foreign government.”

And as the film The Secret Trial 5 makes clear, arbitrariness is part of Canada’s so-called justice system; people can be locked away for many years in Canada without ever being charged.

Third, Trudeau has not denied or refuted the charges against the two Michaels. His words are directed against the process.

Fourth, as for the process, rightly or wrongly, a lack of transparency is the norm when the cases involve state secrets. The same lack of transparency holds true in Canada.¹ A lack of transparency is antithetical to protecting the rights of the accused and for seeking justice. Nonetheless, to cast stones at the actions of another while carrying out the self-same actions speaks to hypocrisy.

Trudeau’s statement continues: “For Mr. Spavor, as well as for Michael Kovrig who has also been arbitrarily detained, our top priority remains securing their immediate release. We will continue working around the clock to bring them home as soon as possible.” In this regard, the Canadian authorities’ sentiments and actions for the Michaels are shared by Chinese authorities for Meng.

Canadian foreign affairs minister Marc Garneau said the verdict against Kovrig is “not acceptable in terms of international rules-based law.” Such a statement falls flat in light of the recent charge that Canada is violating international law by selling arms to Saudi Arabia, arms that can be used to continue its aggression against Yemen. One needs to dig much deeper into what the rule of law means for Canada. There is no escaping the fact that the country is a colonial-settler state imposed through genocide against the Original Peoples of the landmass designated Canada by navigator Jacques Cartier. Still today, one headline makes clear that “Canada Is Waging an All-Front Legal War Against Indigenous People.” This points to the quintessence of Canada and its political class. Despite having seized political control through genocide, having committed to reconciliation, and having pledged (as Trudeau did) to a “renewed, nation-to-nation relationship with First Nations peoples … [as] a sacred obligation,” the words have exposed betrayal. Instead capitalist exploitation continues unabated while the Canadian state stonewalls reconciliation and legal redress for the Original Peoples.

Cong Peiwu, China’s ambassador to Canada, rejected accusations that Spavor’s trial was unfair and not open. “I would like to say that the minimum standard is for other countries to respect our judicial sovereignty. So here I would like to stress that actually it’s the Canadian side which did not meet the minimum standard of the international norm.”

What is the American Gambit?

Foreign affairs minister Garneau seems to have faith in American president Joe Biden being able to secure the release of the Michaels by “treating them as if they were American citizens detained by China.” This is following previous president Donald Trump politicizing Meng’s proceedings: “If I think it’s good for what will be certainly the largest trade deal ever made – which is a very important thing – what’s good for national security, I would certainly intervene if I thought it was necessary.”

It points to a double standard for extradition as a means for achieving justice. Consider the case of Anne Sacoolas, the wife of a US diplomat who the US refuses to send to Britain to stand trial for her hit-and-run accident that killed teenager Harry Dunn in 2019. Some Americans, it seems, are beyond the reach of the law.

China is well aware of what is transpiring. China’s Huawei is the world leader in cutting-edge 5G technology. The US fears being left behind and is seeking to dissuade other states from using that technology. Thus, China’s government views Meng’s arrest as part of US efforts to hamper its technology development. Neither are the allies of the US exempt from America’s extraterritorial reach as a weapon to stymie competition. The French company Alstom experienced this as its former senior executive Frederic Pierucci was arrested and imprisoned for over 2 years in New York. Alstrom eventually had to pay a huge fine of US$772 million. Said Pierucci, “That [fine] facilitated the buyout of 70 per cent of Alstom by its main American competitor General Electric, blocking a potential merger between Alstom and Shanghai Electric Company.”

Canada is harming its relationship with the rapidly developing economic colossus of China to appease the United States. However, it ought to bear in mind how the US swooped in to replace Australian exports to China. This was after Australia aligned itself with a belligerent US policy toward China causing China to curtail imports from Australia.

A Possible Deal?

Yesterday (14 August), Canada’s National Observer published an ad hominem piece calling for an exchange of detainees. It begins, “The ugly messy truth about the two Michaels is that we must get past our indignation, however justified, over China’s gross violations of all international norms.” What is the justification? What if Chinese indignation is justified? What adduces the hyperbolic “China’s gross violations of all international norms.” All?

The National Observer grants, “Meng is charged purely for geo-political gamesmanship.” What the newsletter does not discuss is that Meng previously turned down an offer for her release in return for admitting wrongdoing.

Doubts can be gleaned from the notes of the associate chief justice Heather Holmes who is presiding over the extradition case,

Isn’t it unusual that one would see a fraud case with no actual harm, many years later, and one in which the alleged victim — a large institution — appears to have numerous people within the institution who had all the facts that are now said to have been misrepresented?

The National Observer insults China by calling its government a “regime.” The Chinese “regime” is one that lifted its entire population out of absolute poverty. Elsewhere on Canadian streets, one will see too many homeless people, people whose dignity is disparaged by having to rely on food banks, begging, or dumpster diving to quell hunger.

So which “regime” is interested in looking after the people — all its people?

Meanwhile, Kovrig, who stood trial in March, continues to await word on a verdict. And Meng awaits a decision on the extradition outcome.

1. Read “Kafka’s Canada at 15: The secret trials of Mohamed Harkat” and “Canada’s Supreme Court authorizes secret trials and arbitrary, indefinite detention.”

The post Justice and Politics: When Words are Betrayed by Deeds first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kim Petersen.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2021/08/14/justice-and-politics-when-words-are-betrayed-by-deeds/feed/ 0 226253 https://www.radiofree.org/2021/07/29/trudeau-speaks-to-a-lack-of-judgment/ https://www.radiofree.org/2021/07/29/trudeau-speaks-to-a-lack-of-judgment/#respond Thu, 29 Jul 2021 20:53:01 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=119304 The Montreal Canadiens hockey team drafted a player fined for a sex-related offence. The 17-year-old player, Logan Mailloux, surreptitiously took photos of a consensual sex act and showed them to his teammates — this without the consent of the other person. The draft selection was a major PR gaffe on the part of the team, […]

The post Trudeau Speaks to a Lack of Judgment first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]> The Montreal Canadiens hockey team drafted a player fined for a sex-related offence. The 17-year-old player, Logan Mailloux, surreptitiously took photos of a consensual sex act and showed them to his teammates — this without the consent of the other person.

The draft selection was a major PR gaffe on the part of the team, especially since the player, now 18-years old, asked not to be drafted so that he could work on bettering himself as a person. The opprobrium became so heated that, finally, the owner of the team, Geoff Molson, felt compelled to write a letter that disavowed Mailloux’s actions and avowed that such actions do not reflect the team’s values.

Even Canada’s prime minister Justin Trudeau decided to voice his displeasure with the team’s draft selection:

As a lifelong Habs fan, I have to say I am deeply disappointed by the decision. I think it was a lack of judgment by the Canadiens organization. I think they have a lot of explaining to do, to Montrealers and to fans from right across the country.

There are few among us who are perfect and have not shown, at one time or another, a lack of judgement. Trudeau, the son of a former long-time prime minister in Canada, has a record that speaks to his own struggles with “a lack of judgment.”

• In his younger days Trudeau would occasionally appear in blackface/brownface. Youthful indiscretion?

• Maclean’s magazine carried a piece on Trudeau’s “bad judgment.” When Trudeau accepted the billionaire Aga Khan’s hospitality on his private island, this raised many red flags. It was an obvious conflict-of-interest, and Canada’s ethics commissioner ruled that Trudeau was guilty of a breach of ethics. Hopefully, the PM would learn from this “bad judgement.”

• Aga Khan was strike one. Then came strike two. The ethics commissioner Marcel Dion ruled that Trudeau had again violated ethics when he interposed himself into criminal proceedings against the disgraced company SNC-Lavalin, this to the chagrin of his justice minister Jody Wilson-Raybould who felt the pressure of the party machinery being applied to her. Wilson-Raybould, Canada’s first Indigenous justice minister, would find herself forced out of the Liberal Party, along with a supportive party colleague, Jane Philpott. In the next election, the electorate pronounced judgement by returning Wilson-Raybould to parliament — this time as an independent. Trudeau and the Liberal Party fell from a majority to a minority government.

• Back on 8 December 2015, Trudeau made a pledge to First Nation leaders “that the constitutionally guaranteed rights of First Nations in Canada are … a sacred obligation.” So what was Trudeau thinking when he sent in the RCMP, ill-famed for such moral transgressions as carrying out the abduction of Indigenous children from their families, to deal with First Nations? When the RCMP invaded the unceded territory of the Wet’suwet’en they came with helicopters, snipers, police dogs, and tactical teams even though the Wet’suwet’en made it clear that they were unarmed and peaceful. How sacred was that?

• But Canada is about the rule of law, isn’t it? At least, so claims Trudeau. Based upon this stipulation and acting on an extradition request from the United States, Canada intercepted and apprehended Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of Chinese telecom giant Huawei, while in transit at Vancouver International airport. Meng is alleged to have misled HSBC bank about Huawei’s relationship with another company, putting the bank at risk of violating US sanctions against Iran. Recently, Meng’s legal team had documents released from HSBC through a court agreement in Hong Kong that indicate no misleading had occurred. However, the BC Supreme Court judge rejected the documents as insufficient. Meng has been awaiting a judicial determination since 1 December 2018. Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig, two Canadians detained in China, have been awaiting a judicial determination since 10 December 2018.

Canada has long been pressured to follow US foreign policy with little leeway. Justin Trudeau’s father, Pierre Trudeau, likened Canada’s situation to a mouse sleeping next to an elephant. For instance, Canada’s international trade is so highly dominated by ties to the US that Canada can be strong-armed to even stir up confrontation with its second largest trading partner, China.

• Since the US considers Israel sacrosanct to its global hegemonic aspirations, it is unsurprising that Canada finds itself embracing the criminality and racism of the Israeli state with the Canadian mass media abetting Israeli apartheid.

• And, as was revealed the other day, Trudeau’s government has approved the sale of $74 million of explosives to Saudi Arabia. This is the Saudi government whose agents assassinated journalist Jamal Khashoggi and chopped up his body to dispose of it. This is the same government which carries out public beheadings, public floggings, and is committing genocide in Yemen.

What is Lacking?

A teenager, lacking judgement and rectitude, committed a despicable act and was punished for it. It is hoped that he can fully atone for the transgression and grow past it.

Trudeau, however, is an adult who is the leader of a country. Unfortunately, his lack of judgment appears almost inconsequential to the lack of morality.

The post Trudeau Speaks to a Lack of Judgment first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kim Petersen.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2021/07/29/trudeau-speaks-to-a-lack-of-judgment/feed/ 0 222112 https://www.radiofree.org/2021/07/27/what-is-the-difference-between-swastikas-and-crosses/ https://www.radiofree.org/2021/07/27/what-is-the-difference-between-swastikas-and-crosses/#respond Tue, 27 Jul 2021 07:10:22 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=119111 On 24 July 1534, French navigator Jacques Cartier voyaged to the Gulf of Kaniatarowanenneh (River of the Mohawks, St Lawrence) and planted a cross on the shore of Gaspé. It signified claiming possession of the territory on behalf of the king of France, Francis I. Donnacona, chief of Stadacona (Québec city), was unhappy at this […]

The post What is the Difference between Swastikas and Crosses? first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>

Cartier Erecting a Cross at Gaspé
Charles W. Jefferys
Canada’s Past in Pictures, 1934, p.12

On 24 July 1534, French navigator Jacques Cartier voyaged to the Gulf of Kaniatarowanenneh (River of the Mohawks, St Lawrence) and planted a cross on the shore of Gaspé. It signified claiming possession of the territory on behalf of the king of France, Francis I. Donnacona, chief of Stadacona (Québec city), was unhappy at this effrontery. Surmising this, Cartier lied and downplayed the significance of the 9-meter (30-ft) cross.

A Thought Experiment

Imagine that your childhood experience was being forcibly separated from your family and placed in church-run schools. Imagine hearing that you were a savage; being forbidden to speak in your savage tongue; being forced to dress in your oppressor’s sartorial; being made to pray to the oppressor’s god; being fed strange, insalubrious, unpalatable meals; being used as slave labor; being subject to beatings; and, even worse, being sodomized or raped. If you survived this cruel assimilation project, how would your feelings be toward the government, its gendarmerie, and the church? And what of your feelings toward the cross, that ubiquitous symbol of your stolen childhood and your people’s dispossession?¹

The Blowback to Colonialism

Red dresses replace captain Cook statue. iheartradio

On Canada Day, 1 July, a statue of the British navigator James Cook was torn from its pedestal and tossed into the murky waters of the Inner Harbor of Camosack (Victoria). Afterwards, several wooden red dresses, commemorating missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, were arranged in the bronze Cook’s sted. Half a block away, a statue of queen Victoria situated on the lawn in front of the Parliament Buildings somehow eluded the anti-imperialist fervor of the day. However, the Victoria statue in front of Winnipeg’s Manitoba Legislature did not escape its fate. It was decapitated and toppled, as was the statue of the current monarch, Elizabeth. Victoria’s head was thrown in the Assiniboine River.²

Then, sometime between 16 July and 17 July, a steel cross atop Mt Ts’uwxilum (known to most by its anglicized spelling of Mt Tzouhalem), in the Cowichan Valley on Vancouver Island, was cut down. People are drawing a link between the removal of the cross with the revelation of unmarked graves at former Indian Residential Schools in Canada. The taking down of the Mt Ts’uwxilum cross came on the heels of a confirmed 160 unmarked graves on the grounds of the former Kuper Island Residential School on Penelakut Island (the restored First Nation designation for Kupfer Island).

View across Cowichan Valley from 788-m Swuq’us (Mt Prevost) toward 536-m Ts’uwxilum (Mt Tzouhalem, arrow). Photo credit Dan Petersen

Ladysmith Chemainus Chronicle spoke to Penelakut member Steve Sxwithul’txw, an acclaimed filmmaker and a survivor of the Kuper Island Residential School, who started a GoFundMe with his partner Michele Mundy and Tom LaFortune for Vancouver Island First Nations to search former residential school sites on their territory. Is fundraising something First Nations should have to do?

“I think it’s important that the government fund this. In no way shape or form that First Nations should be funding this. In no way shape or form should a residential school survivor be fundraising to find bodies,” said Sxwithul’txw.

Sxwithul’txw demands accountability of the government and churches.

The work is going to continue for the next number of years — the unearthing of our lost children. We can keep unearthing them, but at the same time, what is going to happen? Who is going to be accountable? Is the Government of Canada going to take responsibility? They’re culpable. Same with the churches. So what’s going to be the process? I’m asking non-Indigenous Canadians to apply for answers. Write to your MP to get answers and move forward with investigations.

The government and churches are culpable, but so is the RCMP.

North Cowichan mayor Al Siebring knows of the devastation caused to many lives by the residential schools, but he nonetheless bemoans the removal of a cross first placed on Mt Ts’uwxilum in 1976: “That is not how we as a society should be dealing with our past. We need to respect each other and get along.”³

In other words, Siebring says the symbols of colonialism — the symbols of the institutions that brought about the dispossession of First peoples and sought their disappearance through assimilation — should remain on display or should not be summarily removed. This sentiment is expressed for a symbol now merged with genocide that was erected on the mountain named after chief Ts’uwxilum on the territory of the Quw’utsun (Cowichan) people.

Would Siebring argue similarly for mutual respect regarding swastikas displayed as symbols in Europe?⁴

As for how to deal with the symbols and symbolism, of course, First Nations should be consulted and lead the way. However, there is also an argument to be made that the current generation of non-Indigenous Canadians, who are ashamed of the heinous crimes of previous generations and wish to repudiate these crimes by removing the symbols of oppression, have a right to repurpose the spaces to better reflect sincerity for reconciliation.

The Cross and Original Peoples

Meanwhile, although reconciliation is the buzzword, many actions speak to the continuation of colonial-settler dispossession. For instance, the Mi’kmaq still struggle against government ennui and white racism for their right to harvest lobster as they have done centuries before the White Man arrived. The Wet’suwet’en First Nation are still resisting the construction of a pipeline through their unceded territory, abetted by the RCMP. Mi’kmaw groups are opposed to the construction of a LNG export facility in Mi’kma’ki (Nova Scotia) and have an understandable fear of “man camps” that would house the construction workers. And the RCMP are still killing Indigenous people.

I just got out from #Gidimten clan territory on #Wetsuweten yintah, where RCMP conducted an aggressive, pre-dawn raid. Six land defenders arrested: pic.twitter.com/JkKempHUGM

— Jesse Winter (@jwints) February 6, 2020

Yet, the moral solution is clear. If you steal something, then elementary morality demands that you return what you have stolen — in the same condition and with additional compensation as required. Land back:

Land Back is really about the decision-making power. It’s about self-determination for our Peoples here that should include some access to the territories and resources in a more equitable fashion, and for us to have control over how that actually looks. — Jesse Wente, a dad, husband, and Ojibwe man

Dolefully, it seems that colonialism in both its historical and present-day forms remains a cross Indigenous peoples are forced to bear.

1. I am not indigenous to Turtle Island, and do not pretend to know what it feels like to have experienced what the Indigenous people of Turtle Island have experienced. I can only attempt to imagine it.
2. Queen Victoria’s legacy is tarnished by her reigning over the racist dispossession of peoples throughout the British empire.
3. Quoted by Kevin Rothbauer, “Cross that overlooked Cowichan Valley from Mount Tzouhalem cut down,” Cowichan Valley Citizen, 22 July 2021, A1 and A35.
4. It is acknowledged that Nazis purloined the swastika from the East where it was a common symbol with a positive connotation and a long history for Hindus and Buddhists.

The post What is the Difference between Swastikas and Crosses? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kim Petersen.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2021/07/27/what-is-the-difference-between-swastikas-and-crosses/feed/ 0 221259 https://www.radiofree.org/2021/07/17/needed-urgently-new-us-national-myth/ https://www.radiofree.org/2021/07/17/needed-urgently-new-us-national-myth/#respond Sat, 17 Jul 2021 16:00:11 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=118907 Empires rise and fall. And usually burn themselves out rather quickly. What else is new? ‘American decline’ is a Wikipedia page. You can feel it in the air. One greets it with dread or hope, or better dread-hope. America’s sins are adding up, yet the US is a behemoth for well over two centuries and […]

The post Needed Urgently! New US National Myth first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>

Lenin dismantled in Berdiansk, Ukraine. Confederacy President Jefferson Davis in Richmond. Lieutenant-general Cornwallis in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Empires rise and fall. And usually burn themselves out rather quickly. What else is new? ‘American decline’ is a Wikipedia page. You can feel it in the air. One greets it with dread or hope, or better dread-hope. America’s sins are adding up, yet the US is a behemoth for well over two centuries and will not go in peace.

It’s biblical in dimensions: elites brazenly steal from the poor, then use the money to lobby, privatization, to make ever more money, with God’s wrath hovering like a sword overhead, as such vile behaviour undermines the whole system.

It’s so painful to watch, yet again, how perverse capitalism makes people act. How it rewards scoundrels unimaginable fortunes. It’s the same with atom-splitting, computers, drones, what happens to good leaders everywhere who don’t follow the script, in short: everything capitalism touches (which is by now just about everything, including sex, now retouched as gender) turns to sh*t.

And what about the US? It presides over this bacchanalia, consuming/ destroying all it touches (consumption is derived from the Latin ‘destroy’, so I could just leave it at ‘destroy’). And what does America produce? Not an awful lot in real terms, and less and less all the time. Actual industrial output in the US has been falling for decades. What the US is producing is more and more debt. The world ‘buys’ US debt and sells it consumer goods, chained as it is to US dollars. I.e., chained to US debt. But Americans themselves are slaves to personal debt. Now, as the US totters on, ruling the waves and waving the rules, the world has reached an apotheosis.

A quick history of the American story/ epic/ saga is:

*20,000 years of tribal hunter gatherers, in harmony with nature,

*settler colonialism, i.e., war, theft, genocide,

*declaration of bourgeois revolution promising life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness (scaled back to life, liberty and private property in the constitution),

*2 centuries of wild, uncontrolled, ‘creative destruction’, using and discarding resources at an insane pace, blanketing the continent in square grids of endless roads, cookie-cutter suburbs, cities turning into ghost towns, arriving at

*a car-choked dead end, where the threat of nuclear war and environmental Armageddon loom ever closer.

There is already a cottage industry of Chicken Littles on US collapse, collapsarianism, Dmitry Orlov the oldest and most celebrated. Orlov is a Russian American engineer, born in 1962 in Leningrad. He emigrated with his parents in 1970s. Like the Soviet Union, the US collapse will be the result of huge military budgets, government deficits, an unresponsive political system, plus, for the US, declining oil production. Orlov’s Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Experience and American Prospects (2008, 2011) and  The Five Stages of Collapse (2013) are entertaining as well as informative, as is his legendary 2006 article ‘Closing the ‘Collapse Gap: the USSR was better prepared for collapse than the US’ which brought the collapsarianism into the mainstream.

Martyanov, like Orlov, was born in the 1960s, though Martyanov hails from Baku, and studied at the Caspian (Kirov) Naval Academy. Their writings are both polemics by engineers. Sort-of Marxist:

Orlov: *When faced with a collapsing economy, one should stop thinking of wealth in terms of money.

Martyanov: *The Republican embrace of China in the 2000s shows how the capitalist will sell the very rope on which he will be hanged.

*America’s cultural and political decline are direct consequences of its precipitously diminishing ability to make—produce, that is—things which matter and that Americans need.

Ex-Soviets are tough nuts. And they pull no punches. Engineers, more so. Having had to bite their lips too many times pre-fall, they are unqualified in their openness and critical faculties, and generally love/hate America in equal portions. A popular saying of the day in the USSR was: “They tell us that capitalism stinks, but what a delightful smell.” Orlov enjoys the stink. (His blog ClubOrlov’s latest: Why are empires, especially dying ones, drawn to Afghanistan like moths to a flame?)

Martyanov is unrelentless and unapologetically contrarian. He has a lot of bones to pick, with lots of detours into modern Russia.

*He argues Germany’s economy is in free fall, overburdened by a green energy chimera, refusing to air condition airports. (Greta Thunberg is dismissed as an ‘illiterate girl from Sweden’).

*He (and, news to me, Putin) insist climate warming is not due to human activity (not a shred of viable evidence, except for ever unreliable models, that humanity’s activity drives climate change), (p71)

*Covid is a fraud,

*American environmentalists are pushing an agenda which undermines the very foundation of modern human civilization.

US mass culture a straitjacket

He is right, though, to argue that consumerism as an ideology is a straitjacket. The rise of postmodernism since WWII has accelerated the decline of American culture. Harold Bloom observes that “instead of the pursuit of truth, there is an adolescent certainty that all is uncertain.” He criticizes such cultural icons as Mick Jagger, who portrays himself as  a nihilistic rebel, both hetero and homosexual, embracing drugs and “the rock ideal of universal classless society founded on love.” Because youth bond with such decadent anti-heroes, they miss embracing the positive heroes of the past, never achieving a deep love for culture.

Weimar Germany is the classic example of decadent culture before the deluge. Rome in its later years was famous for its decadence, sexual promiscuity and homosexuality. It’s happening again before our very eyes. The current obsession with transsexualism, and the reforming of our sexuality according to a radical critique of ‘hetero-patriarchy’ and its replacement with an array of designer sexualities, is perhaps the strongest indicator of imminent collapse.

Saul Bellow’s The Dean’s December (1982) chronicles the state of urban culture and race relations in Chicago in the 1960s as compared to socialist eastern Europe, where traditional culture ruled. Already by the 1980s, within sight of the collapse behind the Iron Curtain, their culture was beginning to look good to outsider Bellow. The farther we ‘progress’ from those days, the better things there look.

Just as the Soviet Union denounced western decadence, Russia too is the empire’s spoilsport. Again, today’s news: the European Court of Human Rights determined that Russian law, which defines marriage as only between a man and a woman, breached the right to private and family life enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights.The decision obliges the country to legislate for recognition of LGBT+ marriages. The Court also awarded €2,200 in costs to the claimants.

The backlash against the new sexuality being promoted by the West has begun, with protest politics in Hungary, Poland, and half the US pitted against the other half, with sexual politics at the centre of the divide. It seems Putin’s rush to change the constitution to limit marriage to male-female last year was just in the knick of time.

On the consumer side of ideology, Veblen identified the importance that status takes on in a consumer-oriented society, where spending more on goods is a status symbol, the Veblen effect. This effect cancels the upper limit on personal consumption. The sky is literally the limit, as the billionaires Bezos and Branson  with their trips into outerspace a mere drop in their financial buckets. Where one’s worth is measured solely in money, society becomes a stage for moneyed giants to act out for the rest of society, who worship these successful, glamorous idols. And feel worthless.  With the ascendancy of Black Lives Matters, with the gay liberation forces martialed behind it, US culture lies in shreds. Consumption as the be all and end all is literally destroying the planet. Help!

Magic numbers

Having dispensed with lots of damned MAGA lies, we are left with statistics. When Simon Kuznets invented GDP in the 1930s (I’m not joking), he deliberately left two industries out of this then novel, revolutionary idea of a national income: finance and advertising. Kuznets’ logic was simple, not mere opinion, but analytical fact: finance and advertising do not create new value, they only allocate, or distribute existing value (Marx’s unproductive labour), in the same way that a loan to buy a television isn’t the television, or an ad for healthcare isn’t healthcare. They are only means to goods, not goods themselves.

Congress ignored Kuznets, and included advertising and finance in the statistic. As a result, actual American GDP is formed primarily by non-productive sectors such as finance, insurance, and real estate, known as the FIRE economy. (I’m not joking, though I can’t resist fantasizing about lighting a match to all that paper ‘wealth’.)

Martyanov’s Soviet education allows him to step back from the appearance (illusion) of wealth in US stats, and recognize that real wealth is not in financial ‘services’ — mutual shining of each other’s boots by two close friends and then paying each other $10 for doing this does not produce $20 of value, something that seems to escape most American economists.

All the above does is yet further monetize our lives. Real value resides in food on the table, a roof over your head, a secure job and good education. There are lots of modern day shoe shiners, busily shining every day, inflating statistics, but producing no value. Viewed in real teams, the US looks more and more like a 3rd world country.

Subtract finance and advertising from GDP, and what’s left? Well, since more than 50% every year of GDP comes from finance and advertising,  we would immediately see that the economic ‘growth’ that the US chases never actually existed at all, that the actual size of the American economy is grossly inflated. Growth itself has only been an illusion, a trick of numbers. I.e., the economy is a hollow shell. When the dollar goes, it will take the US ‘economy’ with it. That explains the consistent pattern of the ever-increasing overall trade deficit for the United States since 1970, when Nixon took the US off the gold standard.

Food insecurity

Martyanov and Orlov are weak on ways out of our dead end. That’s not their purpose. (Orlov: hope that the rest of the world manages to come together and build at least the scaffolding of a functional imperial replacement) but we need to prepare.

Orlov urges us to look to Soviet experience for lessons. There is already a germ of Soviet thinking at play in food banks. Any national crisis (WWII, today) pushes us towards a communal (i.e., socialist) answer. Covid-era news has highlighted the growing  importance of food banks throughout the US, where lines of cars circled the block and shelves were constantly depleted.

It’s as if Basic Income was being invented out of dire necessity. 30+% of Americans have food insecurity. This phenomenal growth of food banks is a clear symptom of decline, dread-hope. My foodbank is called the ‘Essentials Market’, and is always stocked with bread, some vegetables (in season or as spillover from imports from Mexico and the US), plus bizarre things like chicken flavoured peanuts. This week, sweat peas, delicious but with black spots. Also goods with package flaws, or funny shaped potatoes and carrots. It was bi-weekly before covid but is now weekly and looks like this will continue. Portions are equal, and quantity depending on supply.

It is much more enjoyable shopping than at a ‘super’market. i donate monthly, so i’m probably not saving much on what I take home. I only go to Loblaws for frozen orange juice and canned pineapple.

I lived in Soviet Union in its twilight years, when ”defitsiti’ were the norm, but even then, shopping was an adventure, a hunt, and your spoils brought a feeling of accomplishment. Gift parcels at work were a cause for celebration. We are programmed to think that mind-numbing, ice-cold supermarkets are the pinnacle of personal happiness, but there are other ways of structuring consumption: solidarity, social justice, modesty, gifting.

You share or trade with others what you don’t really want. The fact that money doesn’t enter into the equation (or in Soviet times, was not important), makes it more like a social gathering. But then my foodbank is small, well-run and adequately funded. Large foodbanks are less welcoming but still provide an essential service for free. There isn’t a lot of waste — if a big load of toothpaste comes in, you might get two tubes. If you are lucky, you might get the last cake or brick of cheese, but there’s always tofu, frozen meat, potatoes and carrots.

As for food production, while the US is roughly balanced on food imports/ exports now, there are serious problems of water access and increasing wild fires which will lead to troubles, even if government starts right now to address them.

National myth? Israel?

Martyanov makes an unwieldy comparison of US and Russia on the culture front. He approves of the new Russian constitution where the State language on all the territory of the Russian Federation is the Russian (Russkii) language, the language of the State-founding people. That it helps bind the nation. He then argues that nowadays in America anything even remotely comparable to acknowledging that Euro-Americans represent the core nationality of the United States would be an anathema for the primarily globalist establishment. 

His logic should mean recognizing the natives as the founding people. No one invited the white settlers, who Martyanov seems to be arguing are the ‘founding nation’. Russian nation building was radically different, where Russians lived more or less peacefully alongside natives across Siberia, so fit well with the first ‘founding fathers’. And his attempt to square the Trumpian circle is to include black slaves and hispanics and forget the Philippinos, Vietnamese and other flotsam, doesn’t work either. Captives and other settlers are no more ‘founding peoples’ than these other settlers.

But he’s right that America’s lack of a myth-that-fits-all is at the heart of its disintegration, and that Russia indeed has big advantage as it limps along, trying to recover. It has many moments that all Russian citizens can relate to, though the two images that stand out as icons in all Russians’ minds are surely these.

Russians are powerful myth makers, and even look back fondly on their Soviet experience and increasingly honour it. Their Soviet national myth crashed on the hidden rocks of commodity fetishism. The ‘soviet man’ was supposed to be ascetic, a consumer minimalist, devoting himself to study, self-improvement, social activities, preserving nature, things we all wish we had time for but don’t, until retirement, when you are too old and lame to be much good to anyone. That’s good for priests and revolutionaries, maybe 10%, but not as a founding myth.

Though flawed, Martyanov is worth reading for his details, the Russia asides. It’s fascinating to see a sharp Soviet-Russian mind at work, deconstructing the US. Martyanov would probably be writing the same book if he were still Soviet, living in still extant socialism. I’m sure Putin’s advisers think along similar lines.

What really is missing in both Orlov and Martyanov is a chapter on how Israel contributes to US disintegration. Or rather a framing of the whole topic as referring to US-Israel, as they function as siamese twins, joined at the hip, with two heads, one much more clever than the other. Israel has pushed the US for the past 7 decades to do much self-harm, to discredit the US on the world stage, to push the entire Middle East into ceaseless, tragic turmoil. Without Israel, the US would be in much better shape, perhaps not even disintegrating.

Hopeful signs

If politicians heeded Hudson on debt forgiveness, maybe we could reboot the US. But it would still mean revolution.The Bezoses and Bransons stick out like sore thumbs. In the meantime, decline is relentless. There are good signs in the slow-motion US disintegration:

*Biden’s backing off Nord Stream 2 allowing Europe to manage its own energy,

*Biden’s bid to nab corporations in tax havens. Even Canada and Europe are on board. Can this plug the hole in the dyke propping up the rise sea of toxic dollars? As with the climate, storms are more frequent and more lethal. It’s hard to see a happy ending in all this but it won’t hurt.

*Pride Month’s black eye, when Supreme Court allowed the Catholic church to exclude same sex couples in adoption in Philadelphia,

*a groundswell of support, with young people at the forefront on global warming and against Israeli apartheid. As with South Africa in the 1980s, the world is slowly mobilizing to bring the Israeli part of US-Israel to justice.

These groundswells, which Martyanov got wrong, ignores or belittles, are the seeds of a new, better post-US-imperialism. Martyanov and Orlov are engineers, not writers. Just as Martyanov dismisses nonengineers from climate policy, we can’t take engineer think as the last word to resolve the complex problems engineers have created that brought us to this fix. Orlov, dubbed a survivalist, currently is producing affordable house boats for apres le deluge.

As for a credible founding myth, it’s not going to happen, unless you go back to the distant past. 1619+ meant slavery and genocide, 1776 meant a bourgeois revolution glorifying profit, wealth, and reaffirming slavery and genocide, 1899 seizing Philippines meant empire, though now minus slavery. Canada doesn’t have the slavery baggage, [Myth? See “Canada’s slavery secret: The whitewashing of 200 years of enslavement” — DV Ed] but the native genocide was pretty much the same. This year’s Canada Day on July 1 was without major fireworks, more a day of reflection, contrition. We’re already wrestling with a new national myth. It’s not easy. But it’s gonna be a lot hard south of the border.

Inspired by Trump’s angry circus performance at Mount Rushmore, [the renaming of what the Lakota people called Tȟuŋkášila Šákpe, Six Grandfathers — DV Ed] last year, a landback movement has begun. We land’owners’ can give back our lands to natives whose land it really is, and let them be custodians, our high priests. We must embrace the native cultures where we live. That should be our founding myth. Such a post-consumer-settler-colonial society has a chance. We can do our accounting according to a happiness index, ridding ourselves of the financial intermediaries sucking up the real wealth and leaving only debt.

The post Needed Urgently! New US National Myth first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Eric Walberg.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2021/07/17/needed-urgently-new-us-national-myth/feed/ 0 219240 https://www.radiofree.org/2021/07/17/needed-urgently-new-us-national-myth/ https://www.radiofree.org/2021/07/17/needed-urgently-new-us-national-myth/#respond Sat, 17 Jul 2021 16:00:11 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=118907 Empires rise and fall. And usually burn themselves out rather quickly. What else is new? ‘American decline’ is a Wikipedia page. You can feel it in the air. One greets it with dread or hope, or better dread-hope. America’s sins are adding up, yet the US is a behemoth for well over two centuries and […]

The post Needed Urgently! New US National Myth first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>

Lenin dismantled in Berdiansk, Ukraine. Confederacy President Jefferson Davis in Richmond. Lieutenant-general Cornwallis in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Empires rise and fall. And usually burn themselves out rather quickly. What else is new? ‘American decline’ is a Wikipedia page. You can feel it in the air. One greets it with dread or hope, or better dread-hope. America’s sins are adding up, yet the US is a behemoth for well over two centuries and will not go in peace.

It’s biblical in dimensions: elites brazenly steal from the poor, then use the money to lobby, privatization, to make ever more money, with God’s wrath hovering like a sword overhead, as such vile behaviour undermines the whole system.

It’s so painful to watch, yet again, how perverse capitalism makes people act. How it rewards scoundrels unimaginable fortunes. It’s the same with atom-splitting, computers, drones, what happens to good leaders everywhere who don’t follow the script, in short: everything capitalism touches (which is by now just about everything, including sex, now retouched as gender) turns to sh*t.

And what about the US? It presides over this bacchanalia, consuming/ destroying all it touches (consumption is derived from the Latin ‘destroy’, so I could just leave it at ‘destroy’). And what does America produce? Not an awful lot in real terms, and less and less all the time. Actual industrial output in the US has been falling for decades. What the US is producing is more and more debt. The world ‘buys’ US debt and sells it consumer goods, chained as it is to US dollars. I.e., chained to US debt. But Americans themselves are slaves to personal debt. Now, as the US totters on, ruling the waves and waving the rules, the world has reached an apotheosis.

A quick history of the American story/ epic/ saga is:

*20,000 years of tribal hunter gatherers, in harmony with nature,

*settler colonialism, i.e., war, theft, genocide,

*declaration of bourgeois revolution promising life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness (scaled back to life, liberty and private property in the constitution),

*2 centuries of wild, uncontrolled, ‘creative destruction’, using and discarding resources at an insane pace, blanketing the continent in square grids of endless roads, cookie-cutter suburbs, cities turning into ghost towns, arriving at

*a car-choked dead end, where the threat of nuclear war and environmental Armageddon loom ever closer.

There is already a cottage industry of Chicken Littles on US collapse, collapsarianism, Dmitry Orlov the oldest and most celebrated. Orlov is a Russian American engineer, born in 1962 in Leningrad. He emigrated with his parents in 1970s. Like the Soviet Union, the US collapse will be the result of huge military budgets, government deficits, an unresponsive political system, plus, for the US, declining oil production. Orlov’s Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Experience and American Prospects (2008, 2011) and  The Five Stages of Collapse (2013) are entertaining as well as informative, as is his legendary 2006 article ‘Closing the ‘Collapse Gap: the USSR was better prepared for collapse than the US’ which brought the collapsarianism into the mainstream.

Martyanov, like Orlov, was born in the 1960s, though Martyanov hails from Baku, and studied at the Caspian (Kirov) Naval Academy. Their writings are both polemics by engineers. Sort-of Marxist:

Orlov: *When faced with a collapsing economy, one should stop thinking of wealth in terms of money.

Martyanov: *The Republican embrace of China in the 2000s shows how the capitalist will sell the very rope on which he will be hanged.

*America’s cultural and political decline are direct consequences of its precipitously diminishing ability to make—produce, that is—things which matter and that Americans need.

Ex-Soviets are tough nuts. And they pull no punches. Engineers, more so. Having had to bite their lips too many times pre-fall, they are unqualified in their openness and critical faculties, and generally love/hate America in equal portions. A popular saying of the day in the USSR was: “They tell us that capitalism stinks, but what a delightful smell.” Orlov enjoys the stink. (His blog ClubOrlov’s latest: Why are empires, especially dying ones, drawn to Afghanistan like moths to a flame?)

Martyanov is unrelentless and unapologetically contrarian. He has a lot of bones to pick, with lots of detours into modern Russia.

*He argues Germany’s economy is in free fall, overburdened by a green energy chimera, refusing to air condition airports. (Greta Thunberg is dismissed as an ‘illiterate girl from Sweden’).

*He (and, news to me, Putin) insist climate warming is not due to human activity (not a shred of viable evidence, except for ever unreliable models, that humanity’s activity drives climate change), (p71)

*Covid is a fraud,

*American environmentalists are pushing an agenda which undermines the very foundation of modern human civilization.

US mass culture a straitjacket

He is right, though, to argue that consumerism as an ideology is a straitjacket. The rise of postmodernism since WWII has accelerated the decline of American culture. Harold Bloom observes that “instead of the pursuit of truth, there is an adolescent certainty that all is uncertain.” He criticizes such cultural icons as Mick Jagger, who portrays himself as  a nihilistic rebel, both hetero and homosexual, embracing drugs and “the rock ideal of universal classless society founded on love.” Because youth bond with such decadent anti-heroes, they miss embracing the positive heroes of the past, never achieving a deep love for culture.

Weimar Germany is the classic example of decadent culture before the deluge. Rome in its later years was famous for its decadence, sexual promiscuity and homosexuality. It’s happening again before our very eyes. The current obsession with transsexualism, and the reforming of our sexuality according to a radical critique of ‘hetero-patriarchy’ and its replacement with an array of designer sexualities, is perhaps the strongest indicator of imminent collapse.

Saul Bellow’s The Dean’s December (1982) chronicles the state of urban culture and race relations in Chicago in the 1960s as compared to socialist eastern Europe, where traditional culture ruled. Already by the 1980s, within sight of the collapse behind the Iron Curtain, their culture was beginning to look good to outsider Bellow. The farther we ‘progress’ from those days, the better things there look.

Just as the Soviet Union denounced western decadence, Russia too is the empire’s spoilsport. Again, today’s news: the European Court of Human Rights determined that Russian law, which defines marriage as only between a man and a woman, breached the right to private and family life enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights.The decision obliges the country to legislate for recognition of LGBT+ marriages. The Court also awarded €2,200 in costs to the claimants.

The backlash against the new sexuality being promoted by the West has begun, with protest politics in Hungary, Poland, and half the US pitted against the other half, with sexual politics at the centre of the divide. It seems Putin’s rush to change the constitution to limit marriage to male-female last year was just in the knick of time.

On the consumer side of ideology, Veblen identified the importance that status takes on in a consumer-oriented society, where spending more on goods is a status symbol, the Veblen effect. This effect cancels the upper limit on personal consumption. The sky is literally the limit, as the billionaires Bezos and Branson  with their trips into outerspace a mere drop in their financial buckets. Where one’s worth is measured solely in money, society becomes a stage for moneyed giants to act out for the rest of society, who worship these successful, glamorous idols. And feel worthless.  With the ascendancy of Black Lives Matters, with the gay liberation forces martialed behind it, US culture lies in shreds. Consumption as the be all and end all is literally destroying the planet. Help!

Magic numbers

Having dispensed with lots of damned MAGA lies, we are left with statistics. When Simon Kuznets invented GDP in the 1930s (I’m not joking), he deliberately left two industries out of this then novel, revolutionary idea of a national income: finance and advertising. Kuznets’ logic was simple, not mere opinion, but analytical fact: finance and advertising do not create new value, they only allocate, or distribute existing value (Marx’s unproductive labour), in the same way that a loan to buy a television isn’t the television, or an ad for healthcare isn’t healthcare. They are only means to goods, not goods themselves.

Congress ignored Kuznets, and included advertising and finance in the statistic. As a result, actual American GDP is formed primarily by non-productive sectors such as finance, insurance, and real estate, known as the FIRE economy. (I’m not joking, though I can’t resist fantasizing about lighting a match to all that paper ‘wealth’.)

Martyanov’s Soviet education allows him to step back from the appearance (illusion) of wealth in US stats, and recognize that real wealth is not in financial ‘services’ — mutual shining of each other’s boots by two close friends and then paying each other $10 for doing this does not produce $20 of value, something that seems to escape most American economists.

All the above does is yet further monetize our lives. Real value resides in food on the table, a roof over your head, a secure job and good education. There are lots of modern day shoe shiners, busily shining every day, inflating statistics, but producing no value. Viewed in real teams, the US looks more and more like a 3rd world country.

Subtract finance and advertising from GDP, and what’s left? Well, since more than 50% every year of GDP comes from finance and advertising,  we would immediately see that the economic ‘growth’ that the US chases never actually existed at all, that the actual size of the American economy is grossly inflated. Growth itself has only been an illusion, a trick of numbers. I.e., the economy is a hollow shell. When the dollar goes, it will take the US ‘economy’ with it. That explains the consistent pattern of the ever-increasing overall trade deficit for the United States since 1970, when Nixon took the US off the gold standard.

Food insecurity

Martyanov and Orlov are weak on ways out of our dead end. That’s not their purpose. (Orlov: hope that the rest of the world manages to come together and build at least the scaffolding of a functional imperial replacement) but we need to prepare.

Orlov urges us to look to Soviet experience for lessons. There is already a germ of Soviet thinking at play in food banks. Any national crisis (WWII, today) pushes us towards a communal (i.e., socialist) answer. Covid-era news has highlighted the growing  importance of food banks throughout the US, where lines of cars circled the block and shelves were constantly depleted.

It’s as if Basic Income was being invented out of dire necessity. 30+% of Americans have food insecurity. This phenomenal growth of food banks is a clear symptom of decline, dread-hope. My foodbank is called the ‘Essentials Market’, and is always stocked with bread, some vegetables (in season or as spillover from imports from Mexico and the US), plus bizarre things like chicken flavoured peanuts. This week, sweat peas, delicious but with black spots. Also goods with package flaws, or funny shaped potatoes and carrots. It was bi-weekly before covid but is now weekly and looks like this will continue. Portions are equal, and quantity depending on supply.

It is much more enjoyable shopping than at a ‘super’market. i donate monthly, so i’m probably not saving much on what I take home. I only go to Loblaws for frozen orange juice and canned pineapple.

I lived in Soviet Union in its twilight years, when ”defitsiti’ were the norm, but even then, shopping was an adventure, a hunt, and your spoils brought a feeling of accomplishment. Gift parcels at work were a cause for celebration. We are programmed to think that mind-numbing, ice-cold supermarkets are the pinnacle of personal happiness, but there are other ways of structuring consumption: solidarity, social justice, modesty, gifting.

You share or trade with others what you don’t really want. The fact that money doesn’t enter into the equation (or in Soviet times, was not important), makes it more like a social gathering. But then my foodbank is small, well-run and adequately funded. Large foodbanks are less welcoming but still provide an essential service for free. There isn’t a lot of waste — if a big load of toothpaste comes in, you might get two tubes. If you are lucky, you might get the last cake or brick of cheese, but there’s always tofu, frozen meat, potatoes and carrots.

As for food production, while the US is roughly balanced on food imports/ exports now, there are serious problems of water access and increasing wild fires which will lead to troubles, even if government starts right now to address them.

National myth? Israel?

Martyanov makes an unwieldy comparison of US and Russia on the culture front. He approves of the new Russian constitution where the State language on all the territory of the Russian Federation is the Russian (Russkii) language, the language of the State-founding people. That it helps bind the nation. He then argues that nowadays in America anything even remotely comparable to acknowledging that Euro-Americans represent the core nationality of the United States would be an anathema for the primarily globalist establishment. 

His logic should mean recognizing the natives as the founding people. No one invited the white settlers, who Martyanov seems to be arguing are the ‘founding nation’. Russian nation building was radically different, where Russians lived more or less peacefully alongside natives across Siberia, so fit well with the first ‘founding fathers’. And his attempt to square the Trumpian circle is to include black slaves and hispanics and forget the Philippinos, Vietnamese and other flotsam, doesn’t work either. Captives and other settlers are no more ‘founding peoples’ than these other settlers.

But he’s right that America’s lack of a myth-that-fits-all is at the heart of its disintegration, and that Russia indeed has big advantage as it limps along, trying to recover. It has many moments that all Russian citizens can relate to, though the two images that stand out as icons in all Russians’ minds are surely these.

Russians are powerful myth makers, and even look back fondly on their Soviet experience and increasingly honour it. Their Soviet national myth crashed on the hidden rocks of commodity fetishism. The ‘soviet man’ was supposed to be ascetic, a consumer minimalist, devoting himself to study, self-improvement, social activities, preserving nature, things we all wish we had time for but don’t, until retirement, when you are too old and lame to be much good to anyone. That’s good for priests and revolutionaries, maybe 10%, but not as a founding myth.

Though flawed, Martyanov is worth reading for his details, the Russia asides. It’s fascinating to see a sharp Soviet-Russian mind at work, deconstructing the US. Martyanov would probably be writing the same book if he were still Soviet, living in still extant socialism. I’m sure Putin’s advisers think along similar lines.

What really is missing in both Orlov and Martyanov is a chapter on how Israel contributes to US disintegration. Or rather a framing of the whole topic as referring to US-Israel, as they function as siamese twins, joined at the hip, with two heads, one much more clever than the other. Israel has pushed the US for the past 7 decades to do much self-harm, to discredit the US on the world stage, to push the entire Middle East into ceaseless, tragic turmoil. Without Israel, the US would be in much better shape, perhaps not even disintegrating.

Hopeful signs

If politicians heeded Hudson on debt forgiveness, maybe we could reboot the US. But it would still mean revolution.The Bezoses and Bransons stick out like sore thumbs. In the meantime, decline is relentless. There are good signs in the slow-motion US disintegration:

*Biden’s backing off Nord Stream 2 allowing Europe to manage its own energy,

*Biden’s bid to nab corporations in tax havens. Even Canada and Europe are on board. Can this plug the hole in the dyke propping up the rise sea of toxic dollars? As with the climate, storms are more frequent and more lethal. It’s hard to see a happy ending in all this but it won’t hurt.

*Pride Month’s black eye, when Supreme Court allowed the Catholic church to exclude same sex couples in adoption in Philadelphia,

*a groundswell of support, with young people at the forefront on global warming and against Israeli apartheid. As with South Africa in the 1980s, the world is slowly mobilizing to bring the Israeli part of US-Israel to justice.

These groundswells, which Martyanov got wrong, ignores or belittles, are the seeds of a new, better post-US-imperialism. Martyanov and Orlov are engineers, not writers. Just as Martyanov dismisses nonengineers from climate policy, we can’t take engineer think as the last word to resolve the complex problems engineers have created that brought us to this fix. Orlov, dubbed a survivalist, currently is producing affordable house boats for apres le deluge.

As for a credible founding myth, it’s not going to happen, unless you go back to the distant past. 1619+ meant slavery and genocide, 1776 meant a bourgeois revolution glorifying profit, wealth, and reaffirming slavery and genocide, 1899 seizing Philippines meant empire, though now minus slavery. Canada doesn’t have the slavery baggage, [Myth? See “Canada’s slavery secret: The whitewashing of 200 years of enslavement” — DV Ed] but the native genocide was pretty much the same. This year’s Canada Day on July 1 was without major fireworks, more a day of reflection, contrition. We’re already wrestling with a new national myth. It’s not easy. But it’s gonna be a lot hard south of the border.

Inspired by Trump’s angry circus performance at Mount Rushmore, [the renaming of what the Lakota people called Tȟuŋkášila Šákpe, Six Grandfathers — DV Ed] last year, a landback movement has begun. We land’owners’ can give back our lands to natives whose land it really is, and let them be custodians, our high priests. We must embrace the native cultures where we live. That should be our founding myth. Such a post-consumer-settler-colonial society has a chance. We can do our accounting according to a happiness index, ridding ourselves of the financial intermediaries sucking up the real wealth and leaving only debt.

The post Needed Urgently! New US National Myth first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Eric Walberg.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2021/07/17/needed-urgently-new-us-national-myth/feed/ 0 219241 https://www.radiofree.org/2021/06/26/the-canadian-greenhouse-and-genocide/ https://www.radiofree.org/2021/06/26/the-canadian-greenhouse-and-genocide/#respond Sat, 26 Jun 2021 19:54:21 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=117305 In February I wrote, As a rule, basic decency would require that one clean up one’s own yard (except in Canada’s case, the yard was stolen from its Indigenous peoples) before criticizing someone else’s yard. This was in response to a plurality of members of parliament in Canada condemning China for committing genocide in the […]

The post The Canadian Greenhouse and Genocide first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]> In February I wrote,

As a rule, basic decency would require that one clean up one’s own yard (except in Canada’s case, the yard was stolen from its Indigenous peoples) before criticizing someone else’s yard.

This was in response to a plurality of members of parliament in Canada condemning China for committing genocide in the country’s Xinjiang province. It was flabbergasting, given that Canada is a state erected on the territory through a dispossession of its Original Peoples by European colonial-settlers. The dispossession was — and is — genocidal.

Canada’s minister of Foreign Affairs, Marc Garneau, issued a statement:

The Government of Canada takes any allegations of genocide extremely seriously. We have the responsibility to work with others in the international community in ensuring that any such allegations are investigated by an independent international body of legal experts.

This investigation must be conducted by an international and independent body so that impartial experts can observe and report on the situation first-hand.

That action would come back to bite Garneau and the MPs.

Forensic Evidence of Genocide

To those who listen to First Peoples and study how settlers came to rule over the First Peoples, the news announced on 27 May of 215 individual graves of children from the Kamloops Indian Residential School, while jarring was not surprising. The school, which operated from 1890 to 1969, had its hidden past revealed by ground-penetrating radar used by Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation in BC.

“To our knowledge, these missing children are undocumented deaths,” Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc Kukpi7 (Chief) Rosanne Casimir said. In a press release she said:

We sought out a way to confirm that knowing out of deepest respect and love for those lost children and their families, understanding that Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc is the final resting place of these children.

Many thought the discovered bodies to be the tip of the ice berg. That was in late May.

Less than a month later, the Cowessess First Nation in southern Saskatchewan, using the same ground-penetrating radar, announced with certainty 600, but possibly 751, unmarked graves in its community cemetery.

The graves belong to children from the Marieval Indian Residential School said Chief Cadmus Delorme. The school operated from 1899 to 1997.

Both schools were run by the Catholic Church. The Pope has yet to apologize.

Chinese officials who have welcomed everyone to come to Xinjiang were quick to notice the forked tongue of Canadian officials. China spokesperson Hua Chunying recognizes what genocide looks like.

This is real #genocide.https://t.co/ZA5iGXfxHk pic.twitter.com/qYn3SXFQ4d

— Hua Chunying 华春莹 (@SpokespersonCHN) June 6, 2021

Meanwhile Xinjiang has seen a noticeable bump in visitors to the autonomous region.

*****

I emailed Kevin Annett who early on, as a United Church minister, spoke to atrocities in the logging town of Port Alberni on Vancouver Island. Annett, it must be stated, is a very controversial figure. But just because someone is off base or wrong on certain topics (and who is always correct?) does not mean that everything a person says should be dismissed. In a 2008 Tyee article he was ridiculed by a detractor: “Annett is busy with another one of his crusades against church and state, with new claims about a network of mass graves across Canada containing the remains of perhaps thousands of aboriginal children, murdered by priests and nuns.” The detractor, Terry Glavin, even went so far as to write that “the story of secret residential-school mass graves is an urban legend.” Ouch!

In Annett’s documentary Unrepentant, First Peoples spoke to abuse, trauma, torture, and deaths in residential schools. The number that specifically stood out was a woman holding a sign that read 50,000 killed. I asked Annett if he expected ground-penetrating radar to adduce the deaths at the residential school in Port Alberni?

Annett replied: “The general problem is that the serial killer is in charge and the truth works around the edges of the ‘mainstream’. GPR surveys have already been done at the Alberni death camp and the records are public info, also held in our ITCCS archives. They indicate sinkholes and massive soil dislocation.”

What about the churches — Catholic, Anglican, and United — how can they atone for the crime of genocide?

Annett: “The churches can only atone by being shut down and having their property and assets seized as criminal organizations – a requirement under international law; and having their officers arrested and jailed under standing warrants from our 2013 court action.”

Annett spoke to the role of the governments of Canada and its RCMP in the entrenchment of colonialism on First Nation land.

Annett: “But as long as they’re protected by ‘crown’ jurisdiction that won’t happen, hence the need for a new political arrangement – the Republic of Kanata (www.republicofkanata.ca).”

Idle No More, the Indigenous rights movement, stated:

We will not celebrate stolen Indigenous land and stolen Indigenous lives. #​CancelCanadaDay. Instead we will gather to honour all of the lives lost to the Canadian State – Indigenous lives, Black Lives, Migrant lives, Women and Trans and 2Spirit lives – all of the relatives that we have lost.

Victoria (Camosack in Lekwungen language) city council voted unanimously to cancel Canada Day celebrations. Several jurisdictions in Canada have followed suit canceling celebrations slated for the first day in July.

The post The Canadian Greenhouse and Genocide first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kim Petersen.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2021/06/26/the-canadian-greenhouse-and-genocide/feed/ 0 214228 https://www.radiofree.org/2021/05/24/land-governance-future/ https://www.radiofree.org/2021/05/24/land-governance-future/#respond Mon, 24 May 2021 16:40:14 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=117081 The third video in the “Land governance” series explores potential paths toward just systems of land management that honor Indigenous rights and responsibilities, including implementation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, inclusion of Indigenous systems of governance and stewardship, potential mechanisms to recognize Indigenous land ownership and the need for […]

The post Land Governance: Future first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]> The third video in the “Land governance” series explores potential paths toward just systems of land management that honor Indigenous rights and responsibilities, including implementation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, inclusion of Indigenous systems of governance and stewardship, potential mechanisms to recognize Indigenous land ownership and the need for meaningful relationships to serve as a foundation for moving forward.

See:

“Land Governance: Past”

“Land Governance: Present”

The post Land Governance: Future first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by David Suzuki.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2021/05/24/land-governance-future/feed/ 0 203249 https://www.radiofree.org/2021/05/24/land-governance-present/ https://www.radiofree.org/2021/05/24/land-governance-present/#respond Mon, 24 May 2021 16:20:27 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=117079 The second video in the “Land Governance” series highlights the current crisis in land management in Canada, which has sparked, among other initiatives, the Indigenous-led Land Back movement. It explores what happens when two systems of law and governance come head-to-head, on land, and about land, highlighting the move toward activism and the need for […]

The post Land Governance: Present first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]> The second video in the “Land Governance” series highlights the current crisis in land management in Canada, which has sparked, among other initiatives, the Indigenous-led Land Back movement. It explores what happens when two systems of law and governance come head-to-head, on land, and about land, highlighting the move toward activism and the need for difficult conversations.

See:

“Land Governance: Past”

“Land Governance: Future”

The post Land Governance: Present first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by David Suzuki.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2021/05/24/land-governance-present/feed/ 0 203251 https://www.radiofree.org/2021/05/24/land-governance-past/ https://www.radiofree.org/2021/05/24/land-governance-past/#respond Mon, 24 May 2021 15:58:27 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=117077 The first video in the “Land Governance” series examines the historical context of Indigenous Peoples’ dispossession from the lands that sustain them within Canada, and identifies the legal and policy landscape that created the conditions for today’s environmental and social crises. It explores the need to build on the rights and responsibilities of Indigenous Peoples, […]

The post Land Governance: Past first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]> The first video in the “Land Governance” series examines the historical context of Indigenous Peoples’ dispossession from the lands that sustain them within Canada, and identifies the legal and policy landscape that created the conditions for today’s environmental and social crises. It explores the need to build on the rights and responsibilities of Indigenous Peoples, which are rooted in inherent governance of their territories.

See:

“Land Governance: Present”

“Land Governance: Future”

The post Land Governance: Past first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by David Suzuki.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2021/05/24/land-governance-past/feed/ 0 203253 https://www.radiofree.org/2021/05/19/reconciliation-means-rethinking-parks-governance/ https://www.radiofree.org/2021/05/19/reconciliation-means-rethinking-parks-governance/#respond Wed, 19 May 2021 00:30:02 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=116835 Protection and restoration are two sides of the conservation coin — protection for spaces that haven’t yet been damaged or destroyed by large-scale human impacts and restoration for ecologically critical places that have. Although both might seem like relatively straightforward scientific tasks, they have been and continue to be significantly shaped by colonialism — globally […]

The post Reconciliation Means Rethinking Parks Governance first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>
Protection and restoration are two sides of the conservation coin — protection for spaces that haven’t yet been damaged or destroyed by large-scale human impacts and restoration for ecologically critical places that have.

Although both might seem like relatively straightforward scientific tasks, they have been and continue to be significantly shaped by colonialism — globally and in Canada.

Landscape-level restoration initiatives are somewhat new. It’s only recently that the scale of our activities has degraded entire ecosystems. Yet restoration initiatives are still subject to colonial approaches.

Consider one recent European-led, nature-based approach to climate change, part of an initiative to plant a billion trees. It included the Serengeti plains and Kruger National Park in Africa as potential reforestation areas. According to the Yale Journal of Forestry, “By not excluding conservation areas and traditional rangelands … these maps promote the idea that Africa’s natural heritage can be turned into industrial tree plantations to offset the rich world’s carbon emissions.”

Protected areas were established in Canada decades before Newfoundland and Labrador joined other provinces and territories to form the country we know today. Most are rooted in a colonial approach that defied Indigenous rights and fractured Indigenous Peoples’ relations with land.

Jasper National Park’s website provides this overview: “When Jasper Park Forest Reserve was created in 1907… Indigenous peoples were seen as obstacles to the enjoyment of nature. According to wilderness conservation policies at the time, Indigenous peoples were considered incompatible with nature and so couldn’t live in, hunt, or harvest within park boundaries. First Nation and Métis peoples were physically removed from the landscape, blocked from accessing it and banned from harvesting plants and animals, holding gatherings and accessing cultural sites.”

This is not unique to Jasper. Indigenous people were also forcibly removed to create Vancouver’s Stanley Park and Quetico Park in Ontario, among others.

As Indigenous writer Robert Jago remarks in “National Parks Are Colonial Crime Scenes,” “Canada’s Parks Departments have treated Indigenous peoples like an infestation ever since the founding, in 1885, of what is now Banff National Park.”

How can we, who find solace and communion in parks, help overcome these past injustices?

Indigenous Peoples are already leading on many fronts, including championing land repatriation and Indigenous land governance, and by asserting rights and responsibilities that provincial and federal governments have long denied. These initiatives deserve broad public support.

As one example, in Jasper, Simpcw First Nation Chief Nathan Matthew announced in 2017 that his tribe was going to resume hunting deer, sheep and elk within the park, after being banned from doing so when the park was established. “We’re determined to exercise our title and right within our territory,” he said.

In “Return the National Parks to the Tribes,” Indigenous American David Treuer writes, “For Native Americans, there can be no better remedy for the theft of land than land. And for us, no lands are as spiritually significant as the national parks. They should be returned to us. Indians should tend — and protect and preserve — these favored gardens again.”

Canada too must explore new means of land governance. Indigenous Peoples have long histories of responsibly stewarding ecosystems, of living within them without causing their demise. Many national and provincial parks are not succeeding in their primary objective to maintain biodiversity. Jasper recently announced extirpation of a resident caribou herd, and conflict continues over management decisions that could affect the two remaining, highly imperilled, herds.

According to Treuer, “it’s not clear that today’s model of care and custodianship best meets the needs of the land, Native people, or the general public. Nor is it clear that the current system will adequately ensure the parks’ future. That’s something Indians are good at: pushing ahead while bringing the past along with us.… Placing these lands under collective Native control would be good not just for Natives, but for the parks as well.”

It’s our collective responsibility to engage in conversations about how new systems of land governance could look. Everything should be on the table, including ownership and governance of current protected areas. As Jago notes, “The places Canada has made into parks are filled with our stories — every mountain, every valley has a name and a history for Indigenous peoples.”

With contributions from Boreal Project Manager Rachel Plotkin.

Image credit: Jasper National Park

The post Reconciliation Means Rethinking Parks Governance first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by David Suzuki.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2021/05/19/reconciliation-means-rethinking-parks-governance/feed/ 0 202106 https://www.radiofree.org/2021/05/15/indigenous-fisheries-vs-mob-rule/ https://www.radiofree.org/2021/05/15/indigenous-fisheries-vs-mob-rule/#respond Sat, 15 May 2021 15:18:41 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=116664 On September 17, 2020, the Sipekne’katik First Nation of Nova Scotia opened its independent fishery, affirming the Band’s rights under Canada’s Supreme Court ruling of 1999 (the Marshall Decision), which allowed the Band to fish for a moderate living under its own regulations. On the 17th and in following days from 80 to 200 fishing […]

The post Indigenous Fisheries vs. Mob Rule first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>

Suspicious fire destroys Potlotek First Nation cabins. CTV.news

On September 17, 2020, the Sipekne’katik First Nation of Nova Scotia opened its independent fishery, affirming the Band’s rights under Canada’s Supreme Court ruling of 1999 (the Marshall Decision), which allowed the Band to fish for a moderate living under its own regulations. On the 17th and in following days from 80 to 200 fishing boats of the commercial fishing industry came to St. Mary’s Bay to protest the new fishery. There were boat rammings, flare guns, intimidation, and destruction of lobster traps and gear. Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans, the DFO Conservation and Protection Divison, the RCMP, the Coast Guard, were there but provided the Band no protection.¹

This began two months of intimidation, burnings, assaults, destruction and confiscation of lobster traps and gear, with mob actions by commercial fishermen unhampered by the few police on hand.

The Sipekne’katik First Nation requested and received from Nova Scotia’s Supreme Court a temporary injunction assuring protection from attacks until mid-December 2020. Canadian law was not protecting them. The Band was faced with mobs of men understood to represent commercial fishing interests but under the colors of conserving lobster stock. The commercial seafood industry is known for the near extinction of several Atlantic species of fish. If the non-Indigenous fishermen of Nova Scotia who attacked the Sipekne’katik First Nation were free men, why wouldn’t they form worker-owned fishing cooperatives similar to the Indigenous fisheries?

Prime Minister Trudeau’s Liberal government said the violence was a terrible thing and although military intervention was suggested by the Sipekne’katik First Nation, the number of RCMP officers was increased. While the RCMP was not able to intervene when a mob of over two hundred commercial fishermen torched a Sipekne’katik fisherman’s van and destroyed his catch, eventual arrests of over 20 participants resulted in a court date March 29th. As of mid-May reports of their trial aren’t available in the media.

Then, instead of de-escalating, the government aggressively pursued its policies of licensing restrictions and seasonal limits affecting Indigenous fisheries, despite the serious doubts of the government’s right to interfere in the Indigenous self-regulatory process. The Department of Fisheries and Oceans, using the same argument of the commercial fishermen that the variant Indigenous lobster season (with its tiny catch) endangered the lobster stock, is legitimizing mob rule and the crimes of November and December 2020.

The Potlotek First Nation of Cape Breton is one of several bands self-regulating its native fishery. Durng this past April 37 lobster traps belonging to a Potlotek fisherman were seized by the DFO² which has steadily confiscated the Band’s lobster traps since last October.³  To continue to assert its fishing rights the Potlotek Band has had to bring suit against Canada, May 10th at the Halifax Supreme Court.⁴

The DFO confiscates lobster traps of the Sipekne’katik First Nation as well, asserting regulations requiring conformity with the commercial industry’s season; the restrictions are imposed without Sipekne’katik’s consultation and permission as required. As a law unto itself the DFO also confiscates crab traps protected by Section 35 of the Constitution and the Sparrow Decision.⁵  The regulations risk closing and bankrupting native fisheries and stripping them of their Supreme Court guaranteed rights to fish for a “moderate livelihood.” The expense of proving that the government has exceeded its legal authority is placed on the First Nations.

Lack of visible prosecution of the primary crime here – terrorizing of a selected ethnic group, encourages the perpetrators.

From the perspective of the Convention on Genocide the concern is whether Canada’s government is intentionally continuing policies which lead to the extermination of Indigenous people. To limit discussion here to fishing rights, an indication of the controls on First Peoples is available in DFO licensing policy (as of November 2020); as revealed in response to a suit by Sipekne’katik First Nation against the Nova Scotia Seafood Alliance: the Alliance revealed that the seafood buyers were only permitted by the DFO to buy from fisheries licensed by the DFO, and these purchases had to be within the DFO defined seasons.⁶  These government regulations exclude the Sipekne’katik First Nation and other newly formed Indigenous fisheries from the right to market their small catches of seafood.

Divisions between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples serve those who control both for profit. I tend to see current adversarial anti-Indigenous actions, with their similarities to KKK tactics and controls in the U.S. during the last century or so, as the result of corporate interests facilitated by the government. The criminal controls don’t really benefit the often desperate commercial fishermen who effect the terrorizing. While Prime Minister Trudeau’s government expressed horror at the violence dealt the Sipekne’katik fishery, his government’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans increased the dissent by confiscating Sipekne’katik’s lobster traps — much as boats from the commercial fleet had stolen them. The government failed to protect an Indigenous community requesting protection.¹  Sipekne’katik First Nation Chief Sack suggested military intervention to protect his people but was refused.⁷  (The government was able to deploy sixty Canadian Armed Forces members to assist at Nova Scotia centres testing for COVID-19.⁸

The Sipekne’katik First Nation has given every indication that it will pursue justice under the law, and that this would include appeals to the U.N.. Canadian political science Professor John McGarry, described by the CBC as “an international expert on conflict management,” has assured Canadians the U.N. wouldn’t provide “peacekeepers” since the Canadian government would have to approve of any intervention. By this, Professor McGarry acknowledges the seriousness of acts against the Sipekne’katik First Nation as possibly requiring the armed military intervention of ‘peacekeepers.’⁹

The U.N. has refused to leave the Sipekne’katik First Nation to the promises of the Canadian State when faced by its commercial fishing industry. An April 30th letter from the head of the U.N.’s Committee on Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), Yanduan Li, asks Canada to answer the allegations made by Sipekne’katik First Nations band: “According to the information received during September and December 2020, especially between 13th and 17th October, Mi’kmaw people, and in particular Mi’kmaw fishers, have been subject to escalating racist hate speech, violence, including with firearms, intimidation, burning and destruction of their property, including lobster traps, lobster processing facilities and work vehicles.” Also noted: “It is further alleged that, despite being aware of the high risks of violence, the competent Canadian authorities – in particular the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) – failed to take appropriate measures to prevent these act of violence and to protect the Mi’kmaw fishers and their properties from being vandalized.” The three page letter challenges the government’s inaction and asks for a thorough investigation. It verifies the need to ask the Canadian government to “respect, protect and guarantee the rights of Mi’kmaw peoples in relation to their fishing activites and territories,” among other guaranteed rights.¹⁰ The deadline for response is July 14th.

1. “DFO, RCMP knew violence was coming but did nothing to protect Mi’kmaw lobster harvester: Documents,” Brett Forester, February 10, 2021, aptn.
2. “Traps seized by DFO in first day of Potlotek’s moderate livelihood lobster fishery,” Ardelle Reynolds, April 30, May 1, 2021, Saltwire.
3. “Potlotek chief says band losing patience with DFO over fishery,” Tom Ayers, October 23, 2020, CBC News.
4. “Potlotek First Nation seeks injunction against DFO over self-regulated fishery,” Erin Pottie, May 11, 2021, CBC News.
5. “Mi’kmaw fisherman has crab traps seized by DFO during food fishery,” Angel Moore, April 14, 2021, aptn.
6. “Nova Scotia Seafood Alliance says licences only let them buy from DFO-authorized fisheries,” Paul Withers, Novemher 17, 2020, CBC News.
7. “’We’re being targeted now’: Mi’kmaq chief wants military called in to N.S. lobster clashes, attacks,” Greg Mercer, October 18, 19, 2020, Globe and Mail.
8. “Canadian Armed Forces deploying personnel for Nova Scotia COVID-19 response,” April 27, 2021, CBC News.
9. “UN peacekeepers won’t monitor Sipekne’katik fishery, says expert,” Paul Withers, April 30, 2021, CBC News.
10. “Letter to H.E. Ms. Leslie Norton, Permanent Representative of Canada to the United Nations Office, Geneva, from Yanduan Li, Chair, Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination,” Reference CERD/EWUAP/103rd Session/2021/MJ/CS/ks, 30 April 2021, Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, United Nations, Geneva Switzerland.

The post Indigenous Fisheries vs. Mob Rule first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by J.B. Gerald.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2021/05/15/indigenous-fisheries-vs-mob-rule/feed/ 0 201449 https://www.radiofree.org/2021/05/12/put-the-banks-under-state-control/ https://www.radiofree.org/2021/05/12/put-the-banks-under-state-control/#respond Wed, 12 May 2021 01:13:53 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=116448 In recent years, the ripping off of customers, deceit and even outright fraud practiced by Australian finance sector businesses has gained much attention. Four years ago it was revealed how CommInsure, the insurance arm of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA), had refused to make promised life insurance payments to heart attack survivors. They “justified” […]

The post Put the Banks Under State Control! first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>
In recent years, the ripping off of customers, deceit and even outright fraud practiced by Australian finance sector businesses has gained much attention. Four years ago it was revealed how CommInsure, the insurance arm of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA), had refused to make promised life insurance payments to heart attack survivors. They “justified” this by using a definition of a heart attack that was so dodgy that even some people who had such a severe heart attack that they had to be resuscitated were denied their entitled pay outs! Such devious practices have been undertaken by finance sector enterprises big and small – from the big four banks and insurance giants to brokers and loan enablers and to retail businesses that hand out loans. As a result the banks, insurance companies and the brokers and others connected to them are widely hated by the masses. With good reason! Yet finance sector institutions have a decisive influence on society. For it is they who determine how credit is distributed and credit is absolutely critical to the running of modern economies. Especially at this desperate time when this country and much of the world face both a public health emergency and economic collapse, it is vital that credit is allocated in ways that can best respond to the COVID-19 virus threat and into areas that can best ensure that the jobs and wages of millions of working class people are guaranteed. Yet would you trust the lying, greed-driven bosses of the banks and insurance companies to do this? You would be totally nuts if you did! We need to put all the banks and insurance companies under state control! In other words, we need to nationalise the finance sector.

In late 2017, there was so much anger built up against the banks, insurance giants and brokers that former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, realising the need to “restore the credibility” of the finance sector, finally acceded to widespread demands for a royal commission into the banking and insurance industry. That Royal Commission revealed more details of what many of us already knew. Banks were giving secret commissions to brokers to entice them to get home buyers to take out home loans with their particular banks. Banks hid these payments in order to trick their customers into believing that their customers’ “own” brokers were “independent.” But, actually, the payments that these brokers received from particular banks gave them an incentive to get people to take out mortgages with these same particular banks even if that was not the best option for the broker’s customer. And the brokers did this in spades! Moreover, since the commission received by the broker got larger the bigger the loan taken out by their customers, the brokers, with a nod and a wink from the banks paying them, often pushed their customers into buying a more expensive house than they could actually afford. That is part of why household debt is so frighteningly high in Australia.

One of the aspects of the finance sector industry that was exposed is the practice of charging clients fees for no service. Banks and insurance companies and their financial planning and superannuation subsidiaries were found to be charging people “advice” and “service” fees for their investments and superannuation accounts but then providing no advice at all. Put simply, the banks and insurance companies were downright stealing from hundreds of thousands of their customers. AMP, NAB, CBA, ANZ and Westpac were found to be the worst offenders. The amount that these companies stole from their customers through fees for no service was officially estimated to be well over a billion dollars. The real figure could be even higher. Moreover, some of these institutions had even knowingly continued to charge their customers fees for no service … after they had died! The fees would then be paid out of the estate of the deceased customers – in other words, be paid largely by the close relatives of the deceased customers, most often their spouses and children. The Commonwealth Bank even knowingly charged one of their dead clients fees for “financial planning advice” for more than a decade after they died! Meanwhile, insurance giant AMP continued to charge some of their dead customers life insurance premiums.

A Slap on the Wrists for the Swindling Banks and Insurance Companies

The banking royal commission and the media coverage surrounding it tended to focus on atrocities committed against small business owners, farmers and other middle class customers – especially upper-middle class ones – or against better paid workers able to acquire substantial savings. Indeed, under the capitalist system the big capitalists – at the apex of which stand the bank owners – rip off the small-scale capitalist exploiters and all of them, while leaching the most from wage workers, skim off also from the middle class, even from the upper middle class. Yet, the people most hurt by the thieving greed of the banks and insurance companies are average income workers and especially lower-paid, casual and unemployed workers. They are the people most hurt by the banks charging large set fees as these fees often make up such a big proportion of their modest savings. It is poorly paid workers, retrenched workers and long term unemployed workers who are also the most burdened by the extortionate interest rates charged by banks in credit card accounts. It is the low income of these people which pushed them to get into debt in the first place, while the cruel interest rate they must pay off with their debts plus their meagre incomes ensures that many have little possibility of ever paying off these debts. And often desperate for credit, casual and unemployed workers, low income single mothers and people with disabilities are the most vulnerable to being ripped off by loan brokers and short term credit providers handing out loans with exorbitant interest rates.

The banking royal commission did hear about how insurance companies were using aggressive telemarketing and deceptive policies to rip off Aboriginal customers, many struggling on low incomes. It was told of how insurance companies operating in remote Aboriginal communities took advantage of language barriers and Aboriginal people’s tendency to be friendly and polite to sign up on the phone Aboriginal people to life and funeral insurance that they neither truly consented to nor even needed. One of the enterprises exposed for pushing unnecessary funeral insurance on Aboriginal people is the “Aboriginal Community Benefit Fund” (ABCF). With its name including “Aboriginal Community” and its use of a rainbow serpent image, ABCF gave the impression that it was an Aboriginal community-run organisation. But it was not! It was a private, profit-driven company that was neither owned nor managed by Aboriginal people. However, ABCF used the trust gained by the appearance of being a community-run organisation to push Aboriginal people into forking out large amounts for funeral insurance that they did not need. Thus ABCF often signed up healthy young Aboriginal woman in their twenties and early thirties for funeral insurance. They even pushed thousands of Aboriginal parents into getting funeral insurance for their babies in schemes that would cost up to $100,000 over a lifetime! ABCF owners then quietly excluded families of Aboriginal people who died from suicide from receiving payouts, thus ensuring that they would not to have to pay claims of a very large proportion of the insured children that actually did die young.

The banking royal commission did also hear snippets about the massive exploitation of low-income people by businesses handing out consumer leases and so-called payday loans – where people are lent money until their next pay check at massive interest rates. Aboriginal financial counsellor, Lynda Edwards, also told of how car dealers took advantage of the necessity for cars in remote areas to sell Aboriginal people dud cars with ultra-high interest loans. A report published a year ago by Flinders University detailed how one Aboriginal customer was made to pay $52,000 for an $18,000 car at an interest rate of 35% despite the fact that the over-priced used car stopped working long before the loan was repaid! Indeed, the royal commission was told of how some Aboriginal people had been charged even higher interest rates for car loans, rates of 48%!

Yet the nature of the Royal Commission was such that it did not compel those involved in such scams and high-interest loan pushing to defend their actions. As senior counsel assisting the commission, Rowena Orr QC, explained: “We will not be considering consumer leases, payday loans or in-store credit arrangements in these hearings because they do not fall within the terms of reference of the commission.” Put simply, the Royal Commission was not meant to truly protect the interests of low-income people from the predatory behaviour of banks, insurance firms and retail business owners. To the extent that the banking royal commission was not entirely about “restoring the credibility of the finance sector” or simply about allowing the furious masses to vent steam in a way that does not actually harm the interests of the finance industry bigwigs, the investigation was aimed at curbing the excesses of the bank owners in the interests of other sections of the capitalist class – including retail sector bigwigs, “small and medium size” enterprise bosses and big farm owners – as well as the more privileged sections of the middle class that the upper class rely on for social and political support. After all, the state in capitalist countries is an executive committee for managing the affairs of the capitalist labour-exploiting class as a whole. At times they have to slightly clip the wings of even their most powerful section – the finance sector bigwigs – in order to ensure the interests of the rich ruling class as a whole. But even here the Royal Commission’s impact was minimal. Sure, there were some stunning revelations of the depth of the banks and insurers’ greed and deceit. Several finance sector CEOs and directors also had to resign from their positions in the wake of the revelations and, mind you, then take away multi-million dollar severance pay and shareholdings, thank you very much. Yet Royal Commission head, Kenneth Hayne, did not recommend one single charge against any specific finance sector boss despite the fact that the hearings of the commission plainly showed that banks and insurance companies had stolen and swindled well over a billion dollars from hundreds of thousands of their customers. Instead, the commissioner handed over 24 recommendations to the regulators over instances of misconduct and charged them with the responsibility of considering any action. However, he refused to even name the people and institutions involved. And over a year since the final report of the commission was handed down, not a single finance sector boss has been charged let alone been put behind bars. Meanwhile, even after having promised to implement nearly all of Commissioner Hayne’s recommendations, the government has yet to even introduce legislation to turn several of the recommendations into law.

The more important point is that Commissioner Hayne’s report only recommended cosmetic changes to the finance sector. Cold calling of financial products over the phone was recommended to be banned and mortgage brokers would be required to act in the best interests of their customers (as if that is going to actually happen!). However, the economic power, profitability and overall impunity of the finance sector corporations will be largely untouched. In fact, the bank owners were so delighted with the outcome of the Royal Commission that the first stock market trading after the commissioner handed down his final report saw the share prices of the big four banks skyrocket by almost A$20 billion – their biggest one day rise ever!

The limp recommendations of the Royal Commission are, indeed, what the right-wing Australian government always intended to be the outcome. Indeed, the Liberal government was so intent on enhancing the reputation of the bank bosses that shortly before the Royal Commission was announced, they and the bank heads arranged for the bank bosses to send a letter to the government themselves calling for the Royal Commission! This enabled the government to put the bank bigwigs in good light by saying that the banks themselves wanted the inquiry. Indeed, the relationship between bank owners and the government is so cosy that the letter from the heads of the big four banks to the government calling for the Royal Commission was first sent in draft form to the then treasurer, Scott Morrison, to be vetted by him before being made an official letter the next day! Let’s not forget that the then prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, who, kicking and screaming, called the Royal Commission was himself the owner of an investment banking firm and later a managing director for the Australian arm of U.S. banking giant, Goldman Sachs.

In order to appease their working class base and appeal to widespread middle class public opinion, the ALP Opposition has been more critical of the banks than the Coalition government. But let us remember that when they were in government previously from 2007 to 2013, when some of the most blatant fraud by the finance sector companies was being committed, the ALP also did nothing to stop it. Today in the wake of the Royal Commission, the ALP only called for implementing its weak recommendations. Nothing more. The ALP are certainly not calling for putting the banks under state control or even under greater regulation. After all it was the former Hawke-Keating ALP government that carried out the biggest deregulation of the finance sector in Australian history. They removed the cap on the interest rates that banks could charge for home loans and abolished other controls on bank interest rates. In short, the Hawke-Keating Labor government freed up bank owners to do whatever it takes to maximise profits regardless of the consequences to society. Most harmfully, they also privatised the formerly state-owned Commonwealth Bank.

While the ALP is a party with a working class base, its futile program of trying to improve the lot of workers while accepting the capitalist order means that it necessarily needs to collaborate with – and ultimately kowtow to – that apex of capitalist power, finance capital. Thus, the ALP’s ties to the bank bosses are not far behind those of the conservatives. The investment banking firm that Malcolm Turnbull established, referred to above, was actually set up in a partnership with none other than former NSW ALP premier, Neville Wran, and Nicholas Whitlam – the son of former prime minister and ALP icon, Gough Whitlam. The bank was actually called Whitlam Turnbull & Co Ltd. Today, the CEO of the Australian Banking Association, who has done so much to deceive the population by being the chief apologist for the bank bosses is former Queensland ALP premier, Anna Bligh. Meanwhile, during the last financial year that disclosures of political donations have been revealed, 2018-19, the ALP received more than $2.5 million from Westpac alone! They were also given $50,000 from the main body representing general insurance firms, the Insurance Council of Australia, as well as plenty of other big donations from individual insurance companies and other banks. And that does not include the large amount of political donations that are disguised or hidden.

Of course, the banks and insurance companies also made big donations to the Liberal Party too. The Insurance Council of Australia gave them $27,500 and Anna Bligh’s Australian Banking Association the same amount. For its part, CBA donated $55,000. Westpac Bank donated a hefty $82,500 to the Liberals but that pales against their $2.5 million donations to the ALP during 2018-19. Likely, the Westpac bigwigs knew that they already had the Liberals fully in their bag!

The Myth that the Big Corporations are Owned by “Everyday Australians” through Our Superannuation

The problem isn’t simply that the banks and other finance businesses sometimes engage in open theft from their customers and other deceptive conduct. It’s the normal working of these enterprises that is the main problem. Banks make their money by extracting fees from account holders and primarily by charging a higher interest rate on the loans that they give out than the rate that they pay depositors. And they leach a lot of money that way! In the 2018-19 financial year, the “big four” Australian banks and the three biggest Australian-owned insurance companies, IAG, Suncorp and QBE, together extracted nearly $29 billion from us and that’s not including the huge amounts also grabbed by smaller banks and insurers as well as by mortgage brokers, consumer lease providers and payday cash operators. And that was considered a bad year for them! All this money extracted by the finance sector businesses is like an extra tax on the masses. But it is a tax where the proceeds don’t go into the public budget but into the hands of the wealthy finance sector business owners. If we note that there are currently about 9.8 million households and then do a quick calculation we find that the biggest four Australian-owned banks and largest three Australian-owned insurers are leaching $3,000 in profit, on average, from each household every year. To put that in perspective, that is more than one in five dollars of what an unemployed single person receives in the Newstart Allowance (if one excludes the temporary increase to the Newstart Allowance granted during the Covid-19 pandemic)!

Most working class and middle class people are only too aware that “The Banks” are ripping us off. But who do we exactly mean when we talk about “The Banks” that leach from us. Most of us think of the CEOs and the directors that award themselves huge salary packages. And with good reason! Last year, Westpac’s CEO took home over $5 million, ANZ CEO Shayne Elliot even more and IAG CEO Peter Harmer topped the lot receiving a five and a half million dollars package. And that was all in a year when the bank bosses, aware that they were under the spotlight, wanted to pretend that that they were feeling contrition for their devious deeds by awarding themselves lower payments than usual!

Yet as obscene are the payments are to the bank executives, that is still only a small percentage of bank profits. Where else are banks gigantic earnings going? Certainly not to their rank and file employees! So let’s take a look at Australia’s biggest bank, CBA. Last financial year CBA had a total operating income of $24 billion. Some of it they spent on equipment, wages, occupancy and operating costs. Most of their income then, after paying tax, ends up as profit for their owners. Nearly $8.5 billion to be precise. Of that nearly a billion went to beef up the assets of the bank to help its owners make greater profits in the future and $7.6 billion was given as dividends to the banks shareholders, i.e. to the banks owners. That’s who is taking most of the wealth extracted from the masses by the banks. By contrast, the more than 48,000 employees of the CBA received $5.5 billion in salaries and superannuation, which is a lot less than the shareholders received for doing absolutely no work at all. The amount received by the bank employees is also less than a quarter of the bank’s overall operating income. And of these more than 48,000 employees, the majority of them, the rank and file employees – say at least 40,000 of the workers – would each receive small slices of the salary cake while the managers and executives each take gluttonously big slices. After all, the bank’s top executives and other directors (there are just 20 of them), alone were paid $40 million last year; and that is counted as a “staff” cost. By contrast the average salary package, including superannuation, of CBA’s other employees is $114,000 – which is 40 times less than what the CEO took home. Moreover, when you exclude the managers and others in the top 20% of highest paid staff who would bring up that average income number, one would find that the annual wage of the vast majority of CBA workers wouldn’t be much more than – and in many cases less than – $75,000 and certainly well below $100,000. Moreover, to the bank bigwigs, these bank workers are expendable. As soon as the bank bosses decide that they can make a still higher profit with fewer workers, they will throw into the dole queues the employees whose hard work has allowed bank executives and big shareholders to acquire such immense wealth. Over the last several years, the bigwigs of the big four banks have together retrenched tens of thousands of workers. In late 2017, then NAB CEO, Andrew Thorburn, infamously announced the axing of 6,600 jobs at the very same time that he gloatingly announced that the bank had made a whopping annual profit of $6.6 billion.

So, who then are the shareholders who are reaping the rewards of the banks’ ripping off of the masses’ money? The finance corporations’ bosses and their bigwigs try to sell us the line that their companies are owned mostly by superannuation funds and through the dividends distributed to these funds their profits end up going to “ordinary, everyday Australians.” Nothing could be further from the truth! But before exploring this point in more detail, it is important to here make a point about superannuation more broadly. Superannuation, as a means of distributing income to the aged, in contrast to pensions, is not fair. It is not fair not only in practice but in the very concept of it.

Under the superannuation system a proportion of people’s income (9.5% of their gross wage currently) when they are working goes into their personal accounts which gets managed by superannuation companies and is then accessible when they retire. So a worker on the minimum wage in a full-time job gets $3,467 of superannuation put into their account each year. By contrast, the Westpac CEO last year received $44,320 in superannuation payments, nearly 13 times more than a worker on the minimum wage gets. Many bosses get even more. Last year, the CEO of Australian-owned mining giant, BHP, received a staggering $425,000 in superannuation payments – that’s more than 120 times greater than what a worker on the minimum wage gets! By contrast if you are a worker unfortunate enough to be either unemployed or one of the increasing number of cash in hand workers or a domestic worker or a casual worker who gets only a few hours in a month of work you get no super whatsoever. Yet it is precisely these people who need higher payments when they are aged because they would have much less savings and assets than people who had been receiving higher superannuation contributions. Moreover, the superannuation system reinforces the discrimination in employment affecting women, Aboriginal people and migrants from African, Middle Eastern and Asian countries. For in addition to the gender pay gap that women endure, the racist discrimination that causes Aboriginal people to have a much higher rate of unemployment than the broader population and the greater propensity of migrants to only be given lower paid jobs, women and migrants are much more likely to be in non-super receiving cash in hand and domestic work jobs than their male and Australian-born counterparts.

There is one rationale for superannuation – that wealth produced today needs to be set aside for when we have an ageing population in the future – that does have validity. But this should be addressed by making the bosses pay into a single, common pension fund out of which aged pensions can be paid equally to all of the elderly. Instead of the system of low pensions supplemented by people’s individual superannuation accounts, there should be much higher pensions for all and no individual superannuation. At least when a group of people are at an age when none of them are working, they should finally get paid equally! The current system, instead, carries through all the terrible inequality when people are of working age through to when people are retired.

So given how unequal people’s superannuation balances are, even if it were true that the banks and other big corporations are owned mainly by superannuation funds this would be grossly unfair. However, the truth is even more inequitable. For it is the very rich who own most of the stocks of the banks and other big companies. Superannuation funds own just a minority. How small a minority? Let us calculate that here using publicly available data. Given how much mythology there is about superannuation funds owning corporations, we will show each stage of the calculation. According to the Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia, i.e. the industry body of the superannuation companies themselves, at the end of December 2019 these funds had a total of 1.9 trillion dollars in assets of which 22.0% was invested in Australian equities (https://www.superannuation.asn.au/resources/superannuation-statistics , accessed 3 April 2020). That comes to a figure of $418 billion for the total holdings in the Australian share market by the superannuation funds. Now the total market capitalisation of the Australian share market at the same time, the end of December, was $2339.71 billion (see https://www.gurufocus.com/global-market-valuation.php?country=AUS and scroll to 20 December 2019 in the graph “Australian Total Market Cap”). That gives the proportion of the shares in the Australian stock market owned by domestic superannuation funds at just 17.9%. That is a lot less than one in five shares.

To see the significance of this truth that local superannuation funds own just a minority of major Australian corporations, let us consider the following scenario. Imagine in the year 2022, after having to prune their profits slightly in 2019 following the exposure of some of their fraudulent practices and the lower profits that they could expect in the coming two years in the wake of the COVID-19 induced recession, the banks seek to raise their profits back to the extreme levels of a few years ago. Through hitting their customers with still higher fees and by charging a high interest rate on the loans they lend out relative to that which they give to depositors the banks raise their profits by, say, an extra $10 billion. Now the bank bosses and their many apologists in parliament would then spin the line that these higher profits are a good thing as they end up in the pockets of “ordinary everyday Australians” through the dividends being accumulated by superannuation funds investing in the banks. However, if all these additional profits end up being distributed as dividends to shareholders and assuming that the percentage of bank shares owned by Australian super funds is about the same as the overall proportion of Australian stocks owned by these funds, just $1.79 billion of these extra share dividends would go to these funds. Even less would make their way into actual superannuation accounts. For the superannuation companies would take a healthy portion of the dividends as commissions and fees – and as we know even as advice fees when they give no advice! And guess what, many of these superannuation companies are themselves directly owned by banks or insurance companies. So part of the bank profits supposedly going into superannuation funds end up going back to the bank and, thus, into the pockets of its big non-superannuation shareholders. The amount actually going to the superannuation accounts of the public may be closer to $1.4 billion. Yet, to get to this scenario of higher bank profits, we have paid out $10 billion in extra fees and higher interest payments. So, excluding the big shareholders of the banks, the public end up much worse off overall, worse off by about $10 billion less the approximately $1.4 billion that we reclaim in higher returns on our super; i.e. we together end up about overall $8.6 billion worse off. And it is working class people who would suffer the pain disproportionately. For a low-paid worker, while paying the higher fees and higher interest rates paid by others, gets very little back in the way of higher returns on their superannuation and many workers none at all.

While we are dealing with this subject, the same analogy would apply to the issue of wages and profits. If the bosses managed to drive down our wages throughout the economy so that they collectively make a $10 billion higher profit than they otherwise would, the apology that business leaders give, that this ends up back in workers’ pockets through increases to their superannuation, is completely false. Wage and salary earners would collectively end up about $8.6 billion worse off. And again the pain would be borne most by lower paid, cash-in-hand and unemployed workers. So, the next time a co-worker, who has been influenced by ruling class propaganda, tries to tell you that higher profits for banks and other corporations is good for us, please, please, please educate them about the reality!

Who are “the Banks”?

So now that it is clear that we are not the indirect owners of the banks through our superannuation funds, who then are the actual owners of these hated corporations? The second lie that apologists for the banks promote, other than the one about superannuation funds, is that the banks are simply owned by “ordinary, everyday Australians” – so called “mum and dad shareholders.” This is actually an even bigger lie than the first one! Why? Firstly, most working class people don’t have the significant savings that would enable them to invest in the stock market. Low paid workers, unemployed workers and casual workers struggle to replace worn out clothes, deal with high electricity costs, pay the rent and often keep up with credit card debts too, let alone save significants amounts of money. Meanwhile, more decently paid workers often spend most of their working life paying off their home mortgage. Far from the majority of the working class being able to invest in shares, the reality is that household debt in Australia is at record levels. A small layer of better paid, more skilled and often older workers do sometimes invest in shares or alternatively in wealth management schemes that in turn invest in shares. However, most of the people holding shares are members of the capitalist, business-owning upper class and the more comfortable layers of the middle class – especially high-paid, upper-middle class professionals. So the “mum and dad shareholders” who supposedly hold most of the banks should more precisely be referred to as the “affluent mum and dad shareholders.” However, even this tells only a small part of the story. For average middle class shareholders – and even the upper middle class ones – while they are large in number only hold a very small portion of bank ownership. To see this, let us have a look at the latest annual report, the one for 2019, for Australia’s largest bank, CBA. According to the bank’s own report, those owning less than a 1,000 shares, who make up nearly three quarters of shareholders, own just one in ten of all shares. Now, given that the share price of the bank at the time that those figures were quoted for (15 July 2019) was $81.06, any one shareholder who was not in this category, i.e. was a shareholder who had more than 1,000 shares in the bank, had more than $81,060 invested there. These big investors who each invested more than $81,060 in the bank own 90% of the bank. Few workers and average middle class people could afford to put that kind of money in the shares of one company. Moreover, even amongst the upper middle class and wealthy capitalists who own most of the bank shares, it is the latter who own the lion’s share. Thus, the people and institutions who own more than 5,000 shares – that is who have the spare cash to invest more than $405,000 in the shares of just one company – own over two-thirds of the CBA. Moreover, the top 20 shareholders alone own nearly half the bank!

So who then are these very rich individuals owning most of Australia’s banks? That is censored information! The wealthy own much of their stakes in the finance sector through other banks acting as nominees for them. In other words, these rich investors get other banks to hold shares on their behalf in a way that hides their own identities. Without exception, in Australia’s big four banks at least the top six shareholders in each bank are these bank nominee holders. In the case of ANZ, all the top eight shareholders, who own 57% of the bank, are these nominee holders. That about typifies the nature of “democracy” within capitalist countries. The ruling class talk a lot about “transparency” but really it is only things that don’t matter too much that are transparent whereas the really important stuff is hidden from the masses. So here we have the most powerful economic institutions in the country, the ones who decide how credit is distributed and whose combined assets of $3.4 trillion (for the big four banks alone) are almost twice the country’s entire annual GDP … and we don’t even really know who owns them!

We do, however, know a few things about the major owners of the Australian banks and insurance companies. One thing that we do know is that they are rich Australians rather than people from overseas. CBA, for instance, is nearly four-fifths Australian-owned. You can bet that among the major owners of the banks and insurance companies, hidden through bank nominee holders, are many of Australia’s richest 200 people – capitalists whose combined wealth last year was found to be a staggering $342 billion! So if you managed to break through the secrecy wall of nominee holdings you would surely find that among the major shareholders of the banks would be people of the ilk of Andrew Forrest, Gina Rinehart, James Packer, Anthony Pratt, Clive Palmer and Kerry Stokes.

Where there is greater transparency is in the holdings of the executives and directors of these finance sector corporations. And they do have big shareholdings. ANZ CEO, Shayne Elliot, held nearly $5 million of shares in that bank. IAG boss, Peter Harmer, owned an even larger stake in his corporation, owning $7.6 million of shares. However, compared to the murky holdings held in secret by nominee companies, even these huge numbers are pretty small. One big bank shareholder who is not hidden behind a nominee company is the couple, Barry and Joy Lambert, who at the time of the CBA’s last annual report owned a whopping $220 million dollar stake. Joy and Barry Lambert are indeed, by the way, a “mum” and a “dad” – and these are precisely the type of “Australian mums and dads shareholders” that own the lion’s share of this country’s banks and other major corporations!

The Big Banks, Big Insurers and the Owners of Smaller Finance Companies

What about the institutions holding major stakes in the big finance corporations – that is, other than the companies acting as nominees for others? One such institutional investor, which is among the top twenty shareholders of each of Australia’s big four banks as well as of the big insurers, Suncorp and QBE, is Netwealth Investments. If we look at the last annual reports of these big finance corporations, we find that at that time, Netwealth held a total stake of $814 million in them. Now Netwealth Investments are a wealth management firm, so they are largely investing the money of other capitalists and upper middle class individuals in the big finance corporations. But Netwealth also takes a big chunk out of the money invested through these shareholdings as commissions and management fees. And who owns Netwealth? More than half of it is owned by the joint managing directors of the firm, Michael Heine and his son Matt. The last published Australian rich list has the family holding a combined wealth of more than $1.5 billion. As we can see, a big part of this wealth comes from grabbing a share of the profits that the banking and insurance corporations leach out of all of us.

So there you have it, the big banks and insurance companies act as a big collective feeding trough for capitalist pigs. Different capitalist exploiters come to put their snouts into the mega-earnings extracted by the big banks and insurers. And when they do so, they get a huge feed. The last CBA annual report, for example, boasted that shareholders gained a total return on their investments of 21% in just one year. That means, for instance, that the Lambert family’s stake in the bank would have given them a $46 million return in just one year … and that from doing no work whatsoever! By contrast a full-time cleaner doing hard and especially crucial and dangerous work at this time of pandemic will get 1,200 times less than this and only if her boss actually pays her the minimum wage.

The Heine family who own Netwealth are one of many owners of smaller finance sector businesses that have made a fortune by engaging in a similar kind of parasitism as the big banks do. At least fifteen of the people on Australia’s list of the richest 200 people extracted much of their money by running such enterprises. You very often see these people being interviewed on ABC current affairs programs related to the economy, which is worth noting for anyone who thinks that the ABC is substantially fairer and more independent of capitalist influence than the tycoon-owned media outlets. Among the finance sector bigwigs are Hamish Douglass, the biggest shareholder of wealth management firm, Magellan Financial; Jeff Chapman, owner of Bennelong Funds Management; Graham Tuckwell, owner of investment management firm, ETF Securities; David Paradice, owner of Paradice Investment Management and Kerr Neilson, the billionaire who owns the main stake in Platinum Asset Management. Supporters of public housing may recognise the latter name. Neilson was one of the ultra-rich people who notoriously bought up former public housing and publicly-owned buildings in Sydney’s inner-city Millers Point after the right-wing NSW government drove out low-income working class tenants and sold off the housing to wealthy individuals and speculators. In 2018, Neilson bought up three historic dwellings in Millers Point, known collectively as the George Talbots Townhouses, for $5 million.

Another filthy rich owner of a finance sector corporation is the boss of buy-now-pay-later company, Flexigroup, Andrew Abercrombie. Abercrombie is also a Liberal Party powerbroker and major donor and is notorious for having stridently supported right-wing extremist, media commentator Andrew Bolt, when Aboriginal people took legal action against Bolt over vile racist slurs. Recently, Abercrombie was in the news after a high-society party that he hosted at his extravagant chalet in the US Aspen ski resort became the source of COVID-19 infection clusters after several of the super-rich guests refused to self-isolate and after returning to Australia spread the disease acquired at the party to Melbourne, Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula and Sydney.

Many of the finance sector bosses in Australia’s rich list run businesses that not only make profits from operations here but also leach profits from people overseas. That is to be expected from major components of a ruling class that is not only capitalist but imperialist. However, as well as making profits from their own operations, these owners of smaller finance sector companies stand alongside mining magnates, media moguls and industrial capitalists in grabbing hefty slices of the loot extracted by the operations of the big banks and big insurers. This is both through their own major shareholdings in the banks – like those of the Lambert family who made their initial wealth through Barry Lambert’s previously owned financial planning company, Count Financial – and through gaining a big slice of the dividends from bank shares received by the funds that they manage. In this sense, the big banking and insurance companies operate like a legal, crime syndicate. Different, loosely connected capitalists come together through these corporations to jointly loot the masses.

Nationalize the Banks! Nationalize the Entire Health System!

The banks extract money from the masses in four different ways. The first two ways are obvious: through charging interest and fees and through exploiting the mental labour of their own workers. Thirdly, by lending to those buying investment properties, banks, from the interest that they receive, gain a share of the rent extracted by greedy landlords from tenants. There is also an important additional way that banks extract their revenue. For banks, insurance companies and investment managers put some of the money under their control into the shares and bonds of other businesses. In the case of banks they also make loans to these other firms. These other business bosses, whether they be those of manufacturing firms, retailers, developers, telecommunication and IT firms, transportation companies, mining corporations or agribusiness operations in turn make a profit through exploiting their own workers. Part of the wealth extracted from these workers is then returned to the banks as interest on loans and on any bonds held by the banks and also returned to finance sector firms more broadly as dividends on the stocks that they hold in these other companies. In this way, the owners of the finance sector companies gain a share of the profits exploited from workers throughout the economy.

This role of the finance sector – and the banks in particular – in the whole economy points to perhaps the biggest problem with the capitalist-owned finance sector. It is not simply that they leach from the people, it is also the way that they allocate credit and financial resources. And like everything else they do, they allocate credit almost solely on the basis of what can bring them the highest returns. That is partly why there is so much speculation in the housing sector and so little affordable housing available, both to buy or to rent. Banks know that they can gain much higher and more secure returns by giving loans to wealthy people buying multiple holiday homes and speculative high-end investment properties than to lend for the construction of cheaper housing for working class people to buy or to rent. Similarly, banks would rather allocate loans and investments to climate change-inducing coal mines and fossil fuel power stations that have little long term future than to focus their credit allocation into renewable power projects even if the former bring only slighter higher and more secure returns to the bank. Meanwhile, the profit-driven mode of the banks mean that medical research in Australia can struggle to get funding unless the chances of an immediate profit-making breakthrough are immediate. Yet medical science cannot but advance except through the trialling of many different ideas, only a tiny proportion of which will end up being used. Similarly in Australia, important technological development and scientific research – especially in basic sciences where the monetary benefits are not immediate – struggle to get bank loans or investment. By contrast, casino operators and advertising firms – who produce no net benefit to society but instead only help one lot of business owners to get richer at the expense of their rivals (and then vice versa!) – don’t seem to have any trouble raising credit.

If the misdirection of credit causes terrible problems in “normal” times, it can be literally fatal at a time of public health emergency and economic implosion like we are experiencing right now. Although, as we go to press, the rate of new infections in Australia appears to be slowing, people continue to die from COVID-19 and, what is more, the threat of much greater virus spread will emerge once social distancing measures are eased. That is why immediately, we need financial resources directed to urgent medical research to help find vaccines and better treatments for COVID-19. We need this research not only for the few projects seemingly most likely to bring financial profits in the future but for a wide range of research. That includes work into developing any non-vaccine treatment methods for the virus. Such research into treatment methods can be hugely life-saving but its results are also likely non-patentable and would bring the researchers – and thus their bank creditors – no real financial rewards. Even more urgently we need loans directed to particular manufacturers that are able to very quickly turn their factories into making personal protective equipment, infra-red thermometers, virus testing kits and ventilators. We also need credit being allocated into areas that will help reduce the level of job losses and at the same time direct jobs into areas that would aid the virus response – for instance by making home delivery of groceries and food more widespread. Yet the only way any of this has even a chance of happening is if control of the organisations that have the power over lending – that is, the banks – are taken out of the hands of their profit-driven owners and brought under state control. This gives the potential to plan the allocation of financial resources to both respond to the virus threat and avert economic collapse. For such planning to be effective, the banks really need to be run together as a single national entity. Modern computing technology and big data make that quite simple whether or not the banks actually operate under one logo. In summary what we need is the nationalisation of the banks and their conversion into a single state-run bank. We need that right now and we need that all the time!

Putting the banks under state control is not the only thing that the working class masses need right now. To respond to the COVID-19 threat we need health resources mobilised in a planned way. The government has announced that it would requisition the resources of private hospitals to deal with the crisis. But this measure is partial and predicated on a massive bailout of private hospital owners. In contrast to the Morrison government’s half-baked hospital plan we need the immediate nationalisation of the entire health system – including not only private hospitals but smaller health facilities like pathology labs. This must remain even after this epidemic is over. Having a big part of the Medicare budget going into the bank accounts of greedy private health operators – for example, Medicare pays 75% of the schedule fee of private patients – as opposed to the actual treatment of patients not only drains the public budget but means that less resources are available for the long overdue tasks of increasing the number of available public hospital beds and public health nurses and reducing the waiting times at public hospitals. Furthermore, for the level of one’s access to health care to depend on the “logic of the market” – in other words how much money one has to fork out for health care – goes against the needs of the working class and all principles of decency. The irrationality of having health facilities being run by for profit operators has been proved during this COVID-19 crisis by the fact that private health care operators like Healthe Care in March stood down, or laid off, hundreds of nurses at a time when the virus was spreading rampantly and nurses were needed more than ever.

The section of Australia’s population most vulnerable to contracting COVID-19 is the well over hundred thousand homeless people. This includes not only those forced to sleep the streets but those “couch surfing” in the homes of friends and relatives. With so many people thrown out of work or stood down on reduced or no pay, homelessness is set to skyrocket. The government’s tentative six-month moratorium on evictions does not provide adequate security to tenants. There are so many loopholes that landlords are already evicting tenants. Moreover, current measures do not stop landlords and estate agents from pressuring tenants to pay rent even when they have little income. Therefore, there must be a six month halt to all rent payments for residential tenants from now. We also need an immediate halt to the sell-off of public housing and for homeless people to be housed in public housing dwellings slated for sale. This will help but will not in itself be enough to house all homeless people. Therefore, we also need a massive increase in public housing. Another crucial reason why we need more public housing is so that low-income women can move away from any abusive relationships and know that they will still have a roof over their heads if they do so. This is an even more urgent matter now than ever as COVID-19 restrictions are leaving women copping domestic abuse in situations where they are more socially isolated and, thus, more vulnerable to violent attack. But new public housing cannot be built fast enough right now in the midst of a pandemic. Therefore, the state must requisition the unoccupied holiday homes and investment properties of people owning more than three homes and convert them immediately into public housing.

We must also demand that the millions of casual workers in this country be immediately granted permanency with all the rights of permanent workers – including being granted guaranteed minimum work hours and sick leave. This is necessary to both protect the rights of casual workers and to ensure that such workers have no compulsion to risk their own well-being and that of others by going to work when ill. Similarly, we must ensure that all workers be granted special paid pandemic leave for self-isolation, quarantining and treatment if they may have COVID-19, or to care for ill family members. The government’s new scheme only allows for unpaid leave which for many low-paid workers will not only cause hardship but may push them to try sticking it out at work when they could be a risk to themselves and others.

At this time of economic crisis, temporary migrant workers and wage-working international students are the hardest hit section of the working class. Many have lost jobs or are casual workers who have suffered big cuts to the number of shifts that they get and, like most casual workers, the government’s much touted scheme to pay bosses of businesses that have lost significant revenue to retain workers will not help them at all. Moreover, unlike all other workers they will not get any Centrelink payments and international students are not even covered by Medicare. This is outrageous! These migrant workers face destitution and many now not only have no money to return to their home countries but cannot even do so due to travel restrictions. That is why it is absolutely urgent that we demand that all workers resident here get the same rights as people who are citizens. Full citizenship rights for everyone who is here! Moreover, in counter-position to the government’s JobKeeper scheme that will still allow hundreds of thousands of workers to lose their jobs while giving a windfall to many bosses, we must fight for jobs for all through preventing companies that have been making a profit over the years from cutting their workforce and by forcing still profitable companies to increase hiring at the expense of their profits.

Such an agenda can only be won through working class-led struggle. Although, at this moment, it may even be from the point of view of the overall interests of the capitalist class partly rational to put the banks under state control in order to avert an economic collapse, the exploiting class will resist any demands for such measures, not least because such a nationalisation would immediately pose the question that if the capitalist owners cannot be trusted to run the banks themselves then why shouldn’t the banks and the rest of the economy be taken completely out of their hands and put into public ownership. As a crucial part of any working-class fightback the workers movement must champion the cause of all other sections of the oppressed. In particular the working class must support Aboriginal people’s struggle against racist state killings of black people in custody, a movement that has been injected with renewed energy in the wake of the mass anti-racist resistance struggles in the U.S.

Mass struggle at this time of pandemic is, of course, difficult. However, let’s not forget that the working class movement has had to struggle in the past – and often in the present too in not only openly capitalist dictatorships but to some degree in the so-called “democracies” as well – in difficult conditions where protests, strikes and leftist political activity have faced repression or even been outright outlawed. This time of virus-related restrictions is, of course, very different in that we ourselves uphold – and actually actively promote – genuine social-distancing measures. However, like in times of intense of police-state repression, it is still a matter of finding ways to overcome major obstacles. We certainly don’t need to come up with all the ways that we can have an impact here. Politically active working class people will themselves come up with suitable methods – the masses are very innovative and that has been proven over decades and decades of struggle.

State-Controlled Banks and COVID-19 Response: A Case Study

If anyone wants to see why we need to put the banks under state control they should look at how the finance sector works in the world’s most populous country – and Australia’s biggest trading partner – the Peoples Republic of China (PRC). In China all the major banks are nationalised. And that was part of why the PRC was so effectively able to respond to the COVID-19 threat. Although China was the place where the virus – whose exact origin remains unknown – first spread in a really big known way, the PRC was able to respond so effectively and quickly that today in China, and even in the city of Wuhan, the former centre of the outbreak, people are again socialising, starting to resume eating out at cafes and restaurants, travelling long distances on public transport, slowly returning to tourist sites, working at factories and other works sites and gradually returning to full school operations. More importantly, the PRC’s response has been so successful that per million residents, far less people have died from the virus in China than have died in wealthier countries that have had much, much more time to prepare for the virus spread. Thus, the number of deaths per resident as of July 18 is already 45% higher in Australia than in China, 133 times higher in the U.S. than in China and in Switzerland, the country famous for its free-wheeling, scantily regulated capitalist banks, the number of deaths per resident is already 71 times higher than in China.

It is important to see why the PRC has been able to respond so effectively to the virus threat. In particular let us see how having a nationalised banking sector made a difference. Crucially, as soon as it become apparent just how contagious and deadly the then newly discovered virus was, China’s banks started supplementing PRC government outlays to firms to boost production of – or in many cases to entirely switch over the output of their operations to produce – items crucial to the epidemic response. Such products included surgical masks, goggles and full protective suits for medical workers, face masks for the public, COVID-19 testing kits, ambulances, disinfectant and ventilators. Within two weeks, PRC banks had already lent out tens of billions of dollars in very low interest rate loans to support the production of these items. By March 13, the amount that the PRC’s state-controlled banks had lent out to contain the impact of the virus had grown to $330 billion!

The production of pandemic relief goods – especially PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) for medical workers – is absolutely vital in the fight against this pandemic. Unfortunately, in the very early days of the outbreak in Wuhan, before it was realised just how contagious the virus was – and even what it was – and how crucial was the need for protective gear, many medical staff in Wuhan became infected with the virus and also spread it to other colleagues, and several of the infected staff later died. In late January, with a large number of ill people pouring into Wuhan hospitals the hospital system in Wuhan was obviously overwhelmed and there was a shortage of protective gear, medicine and equipment. However, before long, with PRC manufacturers, armed with cheap credit doled out at lightning speed by her nationalised banks, rapidly switching over to producing protective gear, all nurses, hospital cleaners and doctors in China were wearing full space-suit-style head-to-toe protective gear. As a result, not a single one of the more than 42,600 health workers who travelled from other parts of China to Hubei Province to aid the virus response became infected, let alone died from the disease. By contrast, the capitalist countries with their private, profit-driven banks have not been able to equip their health workers with PPE effectively. Capitalist banks resist any loans that do not guarantee them a sizable and secure return. Moreover, they would also take considerable time approving any loans made for epidemic response as they ponder and calculate what they can get out of lending large amounts to any particular project for manufacturing epidemic prevention materials. In Australia, any switching over of production to aid the pandemic response by manufacturers is happening way too little and way too late. Therefore, even though authorities in countries like the U.S., Australia and Italy have had the big advantage of knowing for several weeks, if not months, just how infectious the virus was before it spread widely in their own countries, they have not even been able to ensure adequate protective equipment for their health workers. In the U.S., many nurses have had to resort to wearing home-made “protective gear,” like garbage bags, as poor substitutes for personal protective equipment. In Italy, as of April 17, at least 159 medical workers had died from COVID-19. Apart from the personal tragedies here, the effects of health workers becoming infected is devastating for the overall pandemic response. It means that large numbers of medical staff are not able to contribute to the response effort as they languish in quarantine, while other doctors and nurses, before they are identified as having COVID-19, end up passing on the virus to other medical staff and to patients who have come in for non-COVID-19 illnesses. In Australia, the failure to be able to outfit all health workers with the head-to-toe PPE that China’s nurses, doctors and janitors are equipped with has meant that as of July 18 over 400 nurses, doctors and health workers in Victoria alone have been infected. The failure to provide adequate PPE for health and aged care workers is also a key reason for the deadly virus spreads in North-West Tasmanian hospitals and in the Christian-run nursing home in Sydney’s Outer West that took the lives of 30 people between them.

Build toward the Future Confiscation of Banks, Industry, Mines, Communications Infrastructure and Agricultural Land and their Transfer into Public Ownership

It is not only in responding to the direct virus threat that the PRC’s nationalised banks have come into their own. To avert mass layoffs and economic shocks during this pandemic, China’s banks have sacrificed profits by rolling over and extending loans to hard-hit firms and self-employed people and by lending large amounts of money at low interest rates to assist enterprises to re-start production with the curbing of the epidemic spread. In a similar way, the PRC’s nationalised banking sector played a crucial role in allowing China to sail through the late noughties Global Recession as they lent huge amounts of money to finance high-speed rail lines, water conservation projects, environmental projects and the massive construction of low-rent public housing.

Yet it is not just during a crisis that the advantages of the PRC’s state-controlled finance sector is apparent. These Chinese banks have been directed to ensure that their lending practices are in lockstep with the PRC’s “Homes Are For Living In, Not for Speculation” policy. Thus, they have provided much credit to support public housing construction. Moreover, very different to Australia’s profit-obsessed banks, China’s banks charge any family seeking a bank loan for buying a second home a much higher interest rate than they charge those buying their first home, while they don’t lend at all to anyone trying to buy a third home. More broadly, China’s state-controlled banks are directed to lend to projects that may not be very profitable for the banks but which are important for the society and for the people’s economic development. Thus, these banks have specially lent to research and development projects in areas that are important for that country’s future economic progress like nanotechnology, advanced materials, artificial intelligence, advanced electronic hardware, aircraft research etc. Meanwhile, given that the PRC state has identified environmental protection as one of its three principal tasks, alongside poverty alleviation and curbing financial risks, the banks have directed a significant part of their lending to projects aimed at curbing water and air pollution. In particular, by supporting renewable energy projects with credit, they have helped China to become the world leader in renewable energy, with more than three times the installed solar power capacity of any other country and more than twice the wind generation capacity of the next biggest wind power producer. However, the most crucial practice of the PRC’s nationalised banking sector is its support for the country’s poverty alleviation drive. Over the last several years, as part of the PRC’s drive to lift every resident out of extreme poverty by the end of 2020, China’s state banks have lent literally hundreds of billions of dollars to poverty alleviation projects in poorer parts of the country. Many of these projects involve renovation of shantytowns and upgrading of infrastructure in impoverished and remote parts of the country as well as supporting community-based aged care facilities provided for lower income residents. Crucially, the PRC’s state-controlled banks have also provided credit for the development of job-creating industries in poorer, rural parts of the country including food processing operations, agricultural co-operatives, rural tourism and renewable energy projects. Partly as a result of such support for her poverty alleviation drive from her nationalised finance sector, China remains on track to achieve her poverty alleviation target by the end of this year despite the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

It is important to be aware that the PRC’s banks are not just state-controlled, they are overwhelmingly also state-owned. Thus, each and every one of China’s big four commercial banks are state-owned. Indeed, even if we include all the medium-sized banks in China, we find that majority state-owned banks so dominate the PRC’s finance sector that there is really only one significant sized bank – China’s tenth largest bank – that can be considered to be truly privately-owned; and even in that one case state-owned companies have recently become its largest shareholders owning around a quarter of the bank. Moreover, in addition to her commercial banks, the PRC has three massive, 100% state-owned policy banks whose lending is completed devoted to projects that are deemed in society’s overall interest. Two of these policy banks in particular, the China Development Bank and the Agricultural Development Bank of China, whose combined assets would make them China’s second largest bank, have been at the forefront of lending to support China’s poverty alleviation drive and more recently for the pandemic response effort.

There is a notable difference between banks being merely state-controlled and being actually state-owned. For one, even if banks are state-controlled, if they remain privately-owned their wealthy owners will act as a constant pressure on the state pushing for the banks to be run largely according to the profit motive as opposed to according to social needs. Secondly, if banks remain only state-controlled their massive profits would still be flowing into the hands of their largely ultra-rich owners rather than into the public budget. Remember, last year, in a “bad” year for them, Australia’s big four banks alone leached $26 billion in profits. To be sure, if they became state-controlled their profits would drop somewhat as their lending and investment becomes partially re-directed away from areas that simply bring the highest return. Nevertheless, even if their profits were halved as a result of being placed under state control, that’s still $13 billion that could go into the public budget if these corporations were only brought into state ownership. How much badly needed public housing could we get with that?! Well, actually, we can calculate that. According to the government’s own figures (see Table 18A.43 in the appendix of Excel spreadsheets under Part G, Section 18 of the Report on Government Services 2020 in the Australian Government Productivity Commission website https://www.pc.gov.au/research/ongoing/report-on-government-services/2020/housing-and-homelessness/housing), the average annual cost of a public house unit, including the capital cost, is $39,714 per dwelling. So if we had even half the current profits extracted by the biggest banks in Australia go into the public coffers we could support an extra 327,340 public housing dwellings which would easily more than double the existing stock of public housing. That could really solve the problem of homelessness and make good strides towards addressing the extreme shortage of low-rent housing in Australia.

That is why what is finally needed is to confiscate all the banks, insurance corporations, superannuation companies, wealth management firms and securities businesses from their ultra-wealthy owners and bring them all into state-ownership. This should be accomplished without giving any compensation to the big shareholders. However, to avoid unnecessarily antagonising the middle class, the stock holdings of the numerous small shareholders who together own a tiny fraction of these corporations can be bought out. Since the superannuation firms will be confiscated too, workers won’t need to worry about losing their super when the banks get taken. They will still get their retirement funds from the now publicly owned providers and with less eaten in fees by billionaire finance sector bosses to boot. However, the retirement payment system will progressively be switched from one based on individual superannuation accounts to one based on a higher and equal pension for all.

Our agitational demand to put the banks under state control, that is to nationalise the banks, that we made in the headline of this article, is not in itself a call to confiscate the banks and put them into public ownership. Russian revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin made a similar call some six weeks prior to the working class seizure of power in the October 1917 Russian Revolution. As Lenin explained:

It is absurd to control and regulate deliveries of grain, or the production and distribution of goods generally, without controlling and regulating bank operations….

The ownership of the capital wielded by and concentrated in the banks is certified by printed and written certificates called shares, bonds, bills, receipts, etc. Not a single one of these certificates would be invalidated or altered if the banks were nationalised, i.e. if all banks were amalgamated into a single state bank…. whoever owned fifteen million rubles would continue after the nationalisation of the banks to have fifteen million rubles in the form of shares, bonds, bills, commercial certificates and so on.

— V.I. Lenin, The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It, September 1917

Lenin’s Bolsheviks made the demand for the nationalisation of the banks in this period as an urgent measure to control economic life at a time when Russia’s masses were being struck down by mass unemployment, disorganised industry and terrible shortages of food and other staple items. However, the revolutionaries also understood that by showing the masses the need to take the control of the banks out of the hands of the capitalists they were thus leading working class people to the conclusion that they ultimately need to also take the ownership of the banks from the capitalists. Indeed, in the period after the October Revolution, the new workers government of Soviet Russia confiscated the banks along with the railways, industries and agricultural land and transferred them into public ownership.

Putting the banks under state control or even confiscating the finance sector, while a vital measure, does not solve all problems – not even the most urgent ones. So while we need state banks to lend to certain manufacturers to aid them to switch their operations to produce vitally needed pandemic relief goods, if the manufacturing bosses still can’t find a way to make a big profit out of those operations, even with low-interest loans, they are very unlikely to change over their factories; and if they do many would do it too slowly or only in a token way to gain positive publicity. So we need to have a perspective of confiscating not only the finance sector but also taking the key industries, the mines that produce the raw materials, transport and distribution means, power, communications and other infrastructure as well as construction out of the hands of the profit-driven capitalists and placing them into the collective hands of the people. In China it is not just their banks that are under state-ownership but all their key sectors. As a result when there was a need for firms to switch over their production to make pandemic relief goods, the relevant state-owned enterprises not only got access to cheap credit to assist them but were basically ordered to make the conversion. That is why you have all sorts of Chinese industries, seemingly unrelated to making protective and medical gear, contributing to China’s pandemic relief effort. For example, state-owned Shanghai Three Gun group, China’s biggest producer of underwear, is now producing more than one million masks per day.

What a society where public ownership plays the backbone role can do was seen most clearly in the way that the PRC built two large brand new hospitals from the ground up in less than two weeks when the number of people getting seriously ill from COVID-19 started surging in late January. The challenge in building these hospitals in Wuhan so quickly was especially steep given that these specialist infectious disease hospitals, unlike other hospitals, needed to have negative pressure wards to ensure that the air leaving wards with the infected patients is ejected safely rather than seeping out to potentially infect hospital workers and others. The first of these hospitals put into service, the 1,000 bed Huoshenshan (“Fire God Mountain”) Hospital was built in just 10 days. The second, the 1,600 bed Leishenshan (“Thunder God Mountain”) Hospital was put into service just days later. And it was thousands of workers organised through the PRC firms under public ownership that played the key role in pulling off these amazing feats. Financing for the project was provided both from the central government and by the 100% state-owned policy bank, the China Development Bank. The design of the hospital was performed by the CITIC General Institute of Architectural Design and Research, a subsidiary of the giant PRC public-owned conglomerate, CITIC. The actual construction of the hospitals was undertaken by the Third Engineering Bureau of state-owned China State Construction Engineering, the largest construction company in the world. Meanwhile, China State Grid organised 260 workers in around the clock shifts to ensure that the power connection was ready in time. Communications within the hospital and a stable 5G internet connection was achieved within 36 hours through a collaborative effort of China’s state-owned communication giants China Mobile, China Telecom, China Unicom and China Tower. Meanwhile, CT scanning equipment and X-rays were provided by Shanghai United Imaging, a high-tech firm jointly held by a range of PRC state-owned firms.

Right now the mass of working class people in Australia does not yet appreciate the need for the confiscation of the banks and industry from the capitalists and their transfer into public ownership. The very most politically advanced workers and leftist activists do understand that this is what is needed. However, ruling class propaganda has been able to tentatively convince the majority of working class people that private ownership of the economy should be “respected.” Nevertheless, right now there is widespread distrust of the banking system at the very same moment that many working class people are very worried about the pandemic, about whether they will have a job and about their ability to pay rent and buy essentials. That is why we today emphasise the call for the nationalisation of the banks as a slogan around which to mobilise united front struggle that will, on the one hand, demand this immediate measure necessary for both the COVID-19 response effort and to protect the masses from unemployment and poverty and that will, on the other hand, in the course of their struggle to win this demand, point working class people towards the ultimate need for the confiscation of the banks and all key sectors and their transferal into public ownership.

We Need a Workers State

If powerful working class struggle were able to force the capitalist government to nationalise the banks, the question then becomes posed: who would be administering this now state-run finance system? Sure, a finance system under state control would face more mass pressure to run its operations according to people’s interests than privately owned banks do. However, would you trust the anti-working class Morrison government or the desperate-to-not-scare-the-capitalists-Albanese led ALP to ensure that a state bank would actually serve the masses rather than the big end of town?

The problem is not simply the government but the bureaucracy. No matter the political stripe of who sits in ministers’ chairs and who wins elections, the fact is that the same layer of high-ranking state officials who have been allowing the finance sector corporations to fleece the public will still be the ones “regulating” them. The “regulator” of the finance sector, ASIC (Australian Securities and Investments Commission) has been so deferential to the finance industry bosses that even the limp Royal Commission criticised it for its “softly, softly approach” to illegal activity by the banks. However, ASIC is not going to fundamentally change. If you see who leads it, even now after getting a slap on the wrist from the Royal Commission, you will know why. ASIC’s leadership remains people with strong ties to the finance sector bosses and other corporate bigwigs. Thus ASIC chair, James Shipton, spent ten years as the managing director of various divisions of the Asia-Pacific office of American banking giant, Goldman Sachs. Of the six other commissioners who lead ASIC, one previously had senior roles in NAB and ANZ (and does anyone expect him to now go hard on them?!!), two had been top bosses of other finance services companies and one had been most recently CEO of the Myer Family Company.

Yet, it is not only their leaders’ previous links to the corporate bosses that tie state institutions like ASIC to the capitalist class. For one, the wealth that these ASIC heads would have acquired when they were high fliers in the banking and broader corporate world – and the ensuing investing of part of this wealth that they have no doubt made into shares and/or share-investing wealth management schemes – would make them very much identify their interests with those of the big end of town and not with working class people. Moreover, since wealthy business owners control the economy and, thus, largely determine who gets hired and at what pay, they can, without even saying a word, entice senior bureaucrats at state institutions with the prospect of future lucrative jobs at their companies should they “respect” their interests; and, in effect, threaten these state officials with being locked out of future employment prospects should these bureaucrats dare step on their toes. One only has to look at who are the directors leading the big finance sector companies and other corporations and one will see how this works. Let’s take ANZ bank as a case study. ANZ’s David Gonski, prior to being appointed chairman in 2014, had been a top official of a number of Australian state bodies. He had been head of the Future Fund which directs government investments into long-term projects. From 2010 to 2011 he also headed a government commission to look into education funding which produced the well-known Gonski Report. In the year prior to becoming ANZ chairman, Gonski had also been appointed to ASIC’s External Advisory Panel and actually continued there until last year. Consider this: say Gonski had, if he hypothetically wanted to, tried to direct Future Fund investments in a way that actually benefited working class people rather than the corporate owners, had in his Gonski Report called to slash public funding for private schools rather than agree to perpetuate it and while on ASIC’s External Advisory Panel pushed for a severe crackdown on the banks, does anyone think that ANZ’s big shareholders would have then appointed him their chairman? And wouldn’t being aware of how his future career prospects in the corporate world are affected by how he acts while heading state institutions colour his conduct when being a high-ranking Australian state bureaucrat? Actually, Gonski is not the only ANZ boss who had been on ASIC’s External Advisory Panel. One of ANZ’s top executives had previously been Vice-Chair of this ASIC body and the current chairman of Suncorp is still on that panel, all of which highlights further the links between ASIC and the finance sector bosses that they supposedly “regulate.” Meanwhile, an ANZ director had previously held the top bureaucrat position, Secretary, in both the Australian Department of Finance and the Australian Department of Health. This director, Jane Halton, is currently also one of the ten council members that lead the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, the state defence think tank notorious for being the most fanatical force promoting Australia’s military build up and its war-mongering hostility to socialistic China. This also highlights the fact that some capitalists hold key positions in the state machinery even while they are still directors of corporations. Thus, one of the NAB’s directors, is also a director of Infrastructure Victoria. Moreover, the chairman of the NDIS, Helen Nugent, is also a director of insurance corporation IAG. So if disabled and ill workers are wondering why they often face intrusive interrogations from the NDIS and sometimes even cop bullying threats to cut them off the Disability Support Pension just know this, the boss of the NDIS is a director of one of the leaching insurance giants who holds over $220,000 worth of shares in that corporation (according to their last annual report) and is paid by them almost a quarter of a million dollars a year for basically attending a meeting every 16 days (on average) and reading some reports. Prior to being appointed NDIS supremo in 2017, Nugent had been up until 2014 a director of Macquarie Group for 15 years. And controversially, the NDIS has awarded Macquarie a contract to build disability housing for them while Nugent actually conducts her leadership of the NDIS in an office rented from Macquarie!

The intertwining between the capitalist bosses and the upper echelons of the bureaucracy extends into state institutions crucial to shaping the ideological direction of society. Thus, much of the leadership of the universities is held by corporate bigwigs. The chancellor of UTS is, for example, none other than the chairman of CBA. Meanwhile the deputy chairman of the broadcaster SBS, George Savvides, is a director of IAG, while another member of the nine-member board that sets SBS’s direction, Peeyush Gupta, is a director of NAB. This is worth knowing in case anyone is tempted to believe that SBS is any more “independent” of the capitalists than the Murdoch media or the commercial TV and radio stations.

Through their economic power and wealth, the capitalists not only ensure that the upper ranks of the state bureaucracy are tied to them by thousands of threads – if they are not actually personally holding these positions themselves – they also subordinate to their interests all the other coercive bodies of the state. This includes the legal system. ASIC have not only been extremely timid when facing the banks because of their ties to the bank bosses. That is, of course, very true. However, part of the reason for ASIC’s prostration is that they are downright intimidated at the prospects of taking on the banks in the courts. Since the courts are biased towards the corporate bigwigs and since the bank bosses have enormous financial resources to hire the best, most expensive barristers and to fund expensive court proceedings and appeals, ASIC fears losing expensive court battles with the banks.

That is why alongside agitating for putting the finance system under state control, we need to fight for people’s supervision of the banks. We cannot trust state institutions tied to the capitalists to regulate even a state-controlled finance system. Therefore, we must demand – and indeed assert – inspection of all commercial bank transactions and big accounts by committees consisting of unionised bank employees’ representatives alongside of representatives of other unions and mass organisations. Such committees can call in financial experts as consultants to help make sense of information but the great advantage of having class-conscious finance sector employees involved in these inspections is that they themselves understand all the terminology of the finance world. These working peoples’ committees can then collate the information and highlight the key results – as well as egregious cases of fraud and manipulation by the very rich – to the public in a form easily understood by the masses. In that way the people can know to which businesses and which sectors credit is being lent and what is the proportion of housing loans going into homes for the debtors to actually live in as opposed to for the sake of housing speculation. Moreover, we will be able to finally discover who the exact owners of the finance sector corporations are. We will also be able to expose which wealthy capitalists have been hiding their true income to avoid tax and by how much. Similarly, the extent to which corporate bosses have been ripping off the public budget when acting as contractors for state projects as well as bribery of state officials by the capitalists can be exposed.

Thus, a state-controlled finance sector where working people’s committees make transparent to the masses the operations of a united state bank will enable the masses to exert enough pressure to have some control over this key pivot of a modern economy. Yet this will only be some control. For as long as the state as a whole – including its key coercive organs of the courts, the police, the prison, army, the regulators and the broader bureaucracy – remains the existing capitalist state that has been created and built up to serve the interests of the wealthy business owners then any attempt to exert workers’ control over the economy will face sabotage and obfuscation through bureaucratic means. As Leon Trotsky, leader of the Fourth International, which at the time (albeit with some mis-steps) continued the fight for the revolutionary internationalist program that guided Lenin’s Bolsheviks, emphasised in The Transitional Program, the program that the Fourth International adopted in 1938 at a time of acute capitalist crisis in the lead up to World War II:

“… the state-ization of the banks will produce these favourable results [large scale industry and transport directed by a public bank to serve the vital interests of the workers and all other toilers] only if the state power itself passes completely from the hands of the exploiters into the hands of the toilers.”

This is the goal that we must advance towards: the sweeping away of the capitalist state and the construction of a new state to serve the interests of the working class and all the other oppressed. The building of such a workers state is needed not only to ensure that any state bank truly operates for the masses but as the pre-condition necessary to enable the confiscation of all the backbone sectors of the economy and their transferral into socialist, that is public, ownership. For while the capitalist class, in a crisis, may, to save their system as a whole, nationalise some sectors and in other cases may acquiesce to some nationalisations as a concession to powerful working class struggle, they will never accept the wholesale dispossession of their ownership of the economy unless they are actually deposed from political power.

China’s Bank’s are Genuinely under Public Ownership because the PRC is a Workers State

It took the revolutionary overthrow from power of the capitalists, the agricultural landlords and the henchmen of Western imperialism in 1949 to enable China’s banks, industry, mines and agricultural land to be transferred into collective ownership by the people. The 1949 Revolution was a heroic struggle in which tens of millions of agricultural labourers, poor tenant farmers and workers directly participated. However, although this great revolution brought the toiling classes to power, because the revolutionary forces were heavily based on hard-to-unite tenant farmers (unlike the 1917 October Revolution that was based on united workers organised through elected workers-led councils) who, while suffering common exploitation by greedy landlords, nevertheless produced for themselves and competed in the markets to sell their produce, the new society had to be held together and administered from above. The ruling middle class bureaucracy, while they still had to administer the society in the interests of the victorious toilers, did so in an imperfect way and in a manner that ensured their own privileges. In the late 1970s, the bureaucratic PRC government, faced with the need to boost production and in the face of intense pressure from the surrounding capitalist world, turned to pro-market reforms. In the following years, a sizeable private sector has developed in China, far in excess of the partial concessions to a private sector that can sometimes be needed in the transition phase between capitalism and socialism. This has brought with it some of the vices of capitalist society such as inequality. Nevertheless, the socialistic public sector still thoroughly dominates the key means of production in China.

Moreover, the fact that the PRC is a socialistic state and the mostly smaller private businesses rely on state-owned giants for raw materials, transportation and energy means that even China’s private sector is sometimes constrained to partially serve broader social goals. If we compare China with capitalist countries, we find that the relationship between private bosses and the state are the very opposite of each other. In Australia, Indonesia, India, Italy or the U.S., the capitalist state and its officials suck up to the rich capitalists who are the real power. In contrast in Red China, the private business owners that do exist suck up to the workers state and are desperate to show their deference to the socialistic order. As a result, during this COVID-19 pandemic even some privately-owned businesses contributed to the relief effort. Indeed, even greedy capitalist billionaire, Jack Ma, with rumours swirling that he was forced to retire last year to try and head off being cracked down upon – as has deservedly happened to so many other high-flying capitalist exploiters in China before him – tried to win favour with authorities by making significant donations to the pandemic response.

However, the existence of a too large private sector remains a problem in China. Although the PRC was able to mobilise its state-dominated economy to very quickly and effectively build hospitals and produce urgently needed items for the pandemic response, the fact is China would have been able to respond even faster had the proportion of the economy under state ownership been even higher. And that would have saved still more lives. Moreover, the existence of a sizeable capitalist class with wealth and influence presents a mortal threat to China’s socialistic system. These capitalists are not happy that they are largely cut out of the most profitable sectors of the Chinese economy like the banks, the oil and gas companies and the other strategic sectors. They resent being pressured to sometimes sacrifice their profits for the social good. These frustrated capitalists are, thus, constantly seeking to expand their tenuous “right” to “freely” exploit labour unrestricted by any constraints. Moreover, many of these capitalists quietly harbour more ambitious aims. They are waiting for the moment, during some sort of social or economic crisis, when they can make a bid for power. They know that they will have the full backing of the capitalist powers around the world in this endeavour.

Indeed, the COVID-19 pandemic has seen the already intense hostility towards China of the U.S., Australian, British, Japanese, German and other imperialist rulers rise to still higher levels. These imperialist ruling classes have engaged in a hysterical campaign of lies to blame socialistic China for the pandemic spread. The capitalist rulers fear that their own working class masses will compare China’s effective and successful response to the virus threat with their own flawed and ineffective response and will thus draw the conclusion that the socialist system is superior and needs to be fought for in their own countries. This is, in fact, the greatest fear of the capitalist rulers. But for the very same reason that the capitalists hate the fact that the world’s most populous country is under socialistic rule – and is actually proving that socialism works – the working classes in the capitalist world should defend socialistic rule in China. For the existence of the PRC workers state – despite all its bureaucratic deformations, its concessions to capitalists and its resulting fragility – makes the struggle for working class rule in Australia and the rest of the capitalist world stronger. That is why the workers movement must oppose the Australian regime’s military build up against China and her socialistic North Korean ally, must stand against the U.S. and Australian Navy’s military’s provocations against China in the South China Sea, must oppose Australian support for anticommunist forces within China (from the far-right Falun Dafa outfit to the pro-colonial, rich kid rioters in Hong Kong) and must resist the Australian regime’s attempts to intimidate and silence pro-PRC voices within Australia – including those of pro-PRC Chinese international students. Right now we especially need to refute all the China-bashing lies being spread over the COVID-19 pandemic. We also need to explain to the masses that for all the incompleteness of China’s transition to socialism, the fact that public ownership plays the backbone role in her economy was what made the PRC so effectively able to respond to the virus threat. In doing so we will at the same time motivate the need to fight here for a system of public ownership based on working class rule, i.e. a socialist system.

However, working class people will not be won to seeing the need for socialist revolution simply through hearing explanations of its necessity. The masses learn mainly through participating in – and drawing lessons from the experience of – struggles for their immediate interests. That is why all those who understand the need for a socialist future must fight to build such campaigns. At the same time, we must work hard to ensure that these struggles for immediate gains are waged in such a manner as they teach the working class to distrust all the parties and factions of the capitalist class, convince the masses to trust only their own power, place no reliance on any institutions of the capitalist state and are based on slogans that advance the working class towards the conclusion that they will in the future need to take both the economy and state power into their own collective hands. Today that means building struggles to fight for the nationalisation of the banks and for the winning of jobs for all through forcing companies to hire (and in many cases re-hire) more workers at the expense of their profits.

The Program of Nationalization of the Banks vs the Green Party’s Agenda

If anyone thinks that urgently needed measures like the nationalisation of the banks can be won merely through the parliamentary process, one has only to look at the agenda of the current parliamentary parties to see why not. Of all the parliamentary parties the Australian Greens have been the most critical of the current banking system. So their program deserves to be given some scrutiny. The Greens call for more regulation of the banks. As a policy principle, they say that, “Publicly-owned financial institutions should form a key component of Australia’s banking sector”, without offering any program about how that would arise. But they fail, even now during this time of public health and economic emergency, to call for the nationalisation of the banks. At most their agenda amounts to a return to the system that we had before the Hawke-Keating reforms of the 1980s and 1990s – and in some ways not even that since the Greens do not call for the reimposition of state control over bank interest rates. Yet, while the banks were slightly more constrained in their operations before the Hawke-Keating reforms, they hardly operated even then in the service of the people. They were still largely driven by the imperative to maximise profits.

A major part of The Greens agenda for turning back the clock is to split up financial planning and superannuation operations from the banks. However, the banks themselves are doing this now in the wake of bad publicity. Indeed, in good part they have already completed this. Last year Westpac sold off its financial advice arm BT Financial and CBA sold off its financial planning arm, Count Financial. The Greens hope that making the banks smaller will reduce abuses by them. However, the new broken up or sold off, but still massive, corporations will still be run for profits. Moreover, the new wealth management corporations will likely be significantly owned by the very same very rich people – yes and through those “bank nominee” fronts – as the banks are. The bank owners quite happily pursued this break up option because by separating out its wealth management arms that had a particularly bad reputation, their banking operations can be shielded from the foul publicity arising from the openly fraudulent practices of the financial planning operations.

Much of the remainder of The Greens practical program for the finance sector like calling for “effective regulatory supervision to enforce prudential regulation” is very similar to what the limp Royal Commission recommended. Overall, The Greens platform will not fundamentally change the way the financial system operates. Banks will still be run largely on the profit motive and will still have freedom to decide who they lend to and at what rates. And many working class people couldn’t care less if the banks own wealth management operations or not because they have little money to put into these funds anyway! So even though The Greens say in the abstract that the “banking and finance industry should serve the broader public interest”, their actual program will not get anyway near this. The reason that The Greens’ agenda cannot come even close to advocating what is really needed to begin to make “banking and finance industry serve the broader public interest,” that is the nationalisation of the banks, is that such an agenda can only be won through working class struggle against the capitalist class. But The Greens cannot truly promote such an agenda as their party includes and appeals to all classes – including capitalists. Owning operations in areas like renewable energy, services, online business, hospitality, tourism and the arts, the full-blown capitalist exploiters that support The Greens feel that the Greens push to favour their sectors over fossil-fuel and energy guzzling sectors would dovetail with their own business interests. Sure, these capitalists accept a more far-sighted view of the threat of climate change than coal mining bosses do. But they are still capitalists who exploit workers! To even speak of nationalisation of any sector would scare these “enlightened capitalist” exploiters as it would make them fear that their own operations could face nationalisation next. Meanwhile, playing a very prominent role in The Greens are well-heeled, upper-middle class professionals. This latter chunk of Greens supporters are, to be sure, somewhat “progressive” minded. But, just like the actual capitalists in The Greens, this does not stop them from having considerable sums put into wealth management products – who in turn invest this money in shares (including bank shares) – or into their own direct shareholdings. So, they would not be too thrilled about any measures that could radically slash the profits of banks.

This same dilemma faces The Greens more broadly – an abstract wish for less inequality and a more “people-oriented society” but no program that would deliver this. Take, for instance, the signature policy of The Greens and its new leader Adam Bandt: “A Green New Deal.” They say that the aims of this “Green New Deal” are “tackling social and economic inequality,” reducing underemployment, increasing wages, having more secure jobs, giving young people more hope of buying a house and ensuring action to beat the climate crisis. OK, but The Greens say this would be achieved through “a government-led plan of investment and action.” However, any reduction of inequality requires struggle against the exploiting class by the working class masses. Government investment in social programs and “clean jobs” requires someone to pay for such measures which requires a struggle against the capitalists to make them pay. The Greens do not even mention this crucial element of class struggle without which talk of building “a caring society” is meaningless. They want to make capitalist society fairer without standing up to capitalist power. And how could they when actual capitalists play a significant role in their own party! Without challenging capitalist power, any government spending and policies will inevitably bend to the demands of this powerful class. That is why when The Greens have actually been in office they have administered society in a way barely different to the other pro-capitalist parties. As part of a coalition with the ALP, the Greens had two ministries in the Tasmanian governments from 2010 to 2014 that cut the jobs of hundreds of nurses, closed public hospital beds, reduced funding for ambulance services, slashed funding for public housing maintenance, cut public sector jobs and reduced public sector pay increases below inflation. In his portfolio as minister for Education and Corrections in these governments, then Tasmanian Greens leader, Nick McKim, oversaw a prison system with substandard conditions for prisoners and tried to close 20 public schools before angry mass opposition forced him to back down. Meanwhile, the Australian Greens counterpart in Austria proved the commitment of this brand of politics to the anti-working class status quo by earlier this year joining in a government coalition with the right-wing, anti-union and anti-immigrant Austrian People’s Party.

Therefore, while we support action to fight for certain particular policies that Bandt has also advocated – like dental into Medicare and free education – we oppose overall The Greens and Bandt’s program of refusing any challenge to the power of the capitalists, while greening capitalism, under a “Green New Deal.” Remember how The Greens’ platform, including the Green New Deal, does not even call for the nationalisation of the banks. Unfortunately, however, much of the far-left in Australia have been cheering The Greens program. The Socialist Alliance have been the most enthusiastic. The Solidarity group are not far behind, only adding that “Adam Bandt’s Green New Deal won’t be won through electoral dead end.” The Communist Party of Australia (CPA) meanwhile ran an editorial in the February 17 issue of their paper, The Guardian, that pushed for overall (albeit qualified) support for Bandt’s Green New Deal, even while very correctly acknowledging that The Greens are a bourgeois party. This despite several contributors to their newspaper insightfully and convincingly attacking the Green New Deal agenda last year. Thus, in the 19 September 2019 issue of the CPA’s newspaper, an article titled “Socialism or perish” rightly argued that “we should be openly and loudly challenging the ideas put forward by many young climate activists and NGO groups who argue for a `Green New Deal’ or other policies that amount to the greening of capitalism.” In effect, in response to such points, the February 17 CPA editorial raises the argument that supporting the Green New Deal would be a united front with The Greens. Here they confuse agreements between communists and one or more reformist tendencies within the workers movement – which may include Laborite union leaders, “democratic socialist” groups and mass social democratic parties based on our unions (of which the ALP is a very right-wing version) – to launch particular united-front actions, or a series of actions, when common demands arise (like supporting a strike for higher wages or a protest march against right-wing welfare cuts) with ongoing support, however qualified, for the program of a bourgeois party. In the former case, building workers’ united front actions, when it is advantageous for the overall struggle to do so, will result in increased class struggle of the working class against the capitalists and an opportunity for communists to explain to the masses the need for more deep-going attacks on the power of the capitalists. However, in the latter case, a “people’s front” alliance between leftist workers parties and a bourgeois party (that is, a party like The Greens that does not even see itself as a party for workers’ particular class interests and which includes – and is thus subordinate to – members of the dominant capitalist class), the effect is to retard class struggle by promoting the notion of salvation through a supposed “progressive” wing of the exploiting class. Now it must be said that those nominally Marxist groups that promote The Greens party’s signature platform do in their own right call for class struggle against the capitalists and for policies that do begin to challenge capitalist influence, like calling for the nationalisation of the banks. However, promoting the platform of a bourgeois party like The Greens and seeking an ongoing alliance with such a party undercuts the class struggle aspects of these left groups’ own agenda, because it ties the workers that they influence to a section of the capitalists and, thus, also promotes the illusion that the masses can win concessions without struggle against the exploiting class.

The Struggles of Today that Can Blaze the Path to a Socialist Future

There is another reason why genuine socialists should not be promoting The Greens party, in however a qualified form. For The Greens are just as much as the Liberal-Nationals, the ALP and the far-right One Nation Party part of the Cold War drive against the world’s biggest socialistic country. Indeed, Greens NSW upper house MP, David Shoebridge, has been just as fanatical in inciting hostility to the PRC workers state as the likes of hard-right Coalition politicians like Peter Dutton, Andrew Hastie, Tim Wilson and Eric Abetz. Although Shoebridge seems to be today rejecting the far-right conspiracy theories about the World Health Organisation and China, he has spent the last several years energetically promoting other far-right conspiracy theories against China, including the ridiculous claims that China is executing members of the extreme right-wing (and rabid Trump-supporting) Falun Dafa group to harvest their organs.

The harm done by The Greens’ support for the anti-communist drive against the PRC does not only consist of the anti-Asian racist violence that it is fuelling and the blows against the Chinese workers state that it is landing. For by attacking the world’s largest socialistic state, The Greens, no matter what else they may say, are assisting the Australian ruling class to trick the masses into believing that there is no real alternative to capitalist “democracy” and that a socialistic state dominated by public ownership would be a nightmare. In other words, The Greens’ opposition to Red China makes them an enemy of the fight for socialism in this country.

That The Greens, a party that many young leftists have hopes in, and the Labour Party, the party that retains the support of most workers, have agendas that support the ruling class drive against the world’s biggest socialistic country, that fail to call for putting the banks under state control and which accept the “right” of capitalists to sack workers whenever it is most profitable to do so proves that we need to build a new workers’ party that will truly serve the interests of the exploited and oppressed. Such a party would refuse to restrict its program to what can be tolerated by the capitalists but would, instead, lay out an agenda based on what the working class and all the downtrodden actually need. Instead of feeding into the nauseating talk, that we are hearing so much of lately, that we are “all in the same boat”, the workers party that we need would be based on a clear understanding that the interests of the working class are counterposed to those of their capitalist exploiters. Thus rejecting “national unity” with the capitalists, such a party would instead fight for the closest possible alliance between the working class in Australia and the working classes of the world. In summary, the workers party that we need must be an authentic communist party like the Bolshevik party that led the Russian Revolution. We in Trotskyist Platform work hard to contribute to the building of such a party. We understand that such a party will be built in the course of laying out a perspective based on militant class struggle in the course of joining in actions that fight for the urgent needs of the masses. Today, at this time of public health emergency, massive unemployment and growing immiseration of the masses that means agitating and mobilising to demand: Put the banks and insurance companies under state control! For the complete and permanent nationalisation of the health system! For jobs for all workers through preventing companies that have been making a profit over the years from cutting their workforce and by forcing still profitable companies to increase hiring at the expense of their profits! Permanency for all casual workers! Grant the rights of citizenship to all migrants, refugees and international students! For a six-month halt to all rent payments for residential tenants! Requisition the unoccupied dwellings of people owning more than three homes and convert this immediately into public housing!

See bibliography here.

The post Put the Banks Under State Control! first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Trotskyist Platform.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2021/05/12/put-the-banks-under-state-control/feed/ 0 200598 https://www.radiofree.org/2021/05/08/brazil-european-colonial-history-exposed-in-landmark-court-case/ https://www.radiofree.org/2021/05/08/brazil-european-colonial-history-exposed-in-landmark-court-case/#respond Sat, 08 May 2021 19:54:40 +0000 https://www.radiofree.org/?p=196335
Indigenous protest, Brazil April 2018. “By painting the streets red, we’re showing how much blood has already been shed in the struggle to protect indigenous territories” – Sônia Guajajara, a spokeswoman for APIB (Brazilian indigenous organization). © Marcelo Camargo/Agência Brasil

The land rights of the Xokleng, a tribe that was violently expelled from its territory in the 19th and 20th centuries to make way for European colonists, are now the focus of a landmark court case in Brazil.

The Xokleng were brutally persecuted and evicted by armed militias to make way for European settlers. The Supreme Court hearing into the so-called “Time Limit Trick” could now set the effects of these and subsequent evictions in stone, establishing a precedent which would have far-reaching consequences for indigenous peoples in Brazil.

Other Xokleng communities are also fighting to recover some of their territory. The Konglui Xokleng in Rio Grande do Sul state have launched a ‘retomada’ (reoccupation) of their land, which is now occupied by a national park. The government wants to make it an ‘ecotourism’ destination. © Iami Gerbase/Survival

The case centers around the demarcation of the “Ibirama La Klãnõ” Indigenous Territory in the state of Santa Catarina in southern Brazil. If they win, the Xokleng would be able to return to a significant part of their ancestral territory.

However, the official demarcation of the territory has been suspended following a lawsuit filed by non-indigenous residents and a logging company operating in the area. They argue that on October 5, 1988 – the date the Brazilian Constitution was signed – the Xokleng only lived in limited parts of the territory and therefore have no right to most of their original land. If this argument succeeds, it would legitimize centuries of evictions experienced by indigenous peoples throughout Brazil.

The Brazilian government encouraged Europeans to settle on indigenous land, and allocated them large parts of the Xokleng and other indigenous territories at the beginning of the 20th century. It also financed a so-called “Indian-hunting militia”, which accelerated the colonial land grab. This militia specialized in the extermination of indigenous peoples and hunted down the Xokleng.

“The Redskins are interfering with colonization: this interference must be eliminated, and as quickly and thoroughly as possible,” German colonists demanded at the time.

German settlers resented Xokleng attempts to defend their territories, and frequently subjected them to cruel “punitive expeditions.”

The Xokleng territory was continuously reduced over several decades. In the 1970s, a dam was built in the small part that remained.

Map of the current (Ibirama) and planned (Ibirama La Klãnõ) indigenous territory. The expansion of the territory is the cause of the legal dispute. © Marian Ruth Heineberg/Natalia Hanazaki based on data from FUNAI/IBGE/MMA.

If Brazil’s Supreme Court votes in favor of the “Time Limit Trick”, it would have devastating consequences for many other indigenous peoples, and their chances of reclaiming their ancestral territories. It could enable the theft of land that is rightfully owned by hundreds of thousands of tribal and indigenous people. The validity of existing indigenous territories could then also come into question.

Brasílio Priprá, a prominent Xokleng leader, said: “If we didn’t live in a certain part of the territory in 1988, it doesn’t mean it was “no man’s land” or that we didn’t want to be there. The “Time Limit Trick” reinforces the historical violence that continues to leave its mark today.”

Indigenous organizations and their allies, including Survival, began raising fears about the “Time Limit Trick” in 2017, calling it unlawful because it violates the current Brazilian Constitution and international law, which clearly states that indigenous peoples have the right to their ancestral lands.

President Bolsonaro is turning back the clock on indigenous rights, attempting to: erase their right to self-determination; sell off their territories to logging and mining companies; and ‘assimilate’ them against their will. Survival International and tribal peoples are fighting side by side to stop Brazil’s genocide.

This article was posted on Saturday, May 8th, 2021 at 12:54pm and is filed under Brazil, Colonialism, Jair Bolsonaro, Original Peoples.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2021/05/08/brazil-european-colonial-history-exposed-in-landmark-court-case/feed/ 0 196335 https://www.radiofree.org/2021/05/08/brazil-european-colonial-history-exposed-in-landmark-court-case-2/ Sat, 08 May 2021 19:54:40 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=116356 Indigenous protest, Brazil April 2018. “By painting the streets red, we’re showing how much blood has already been shed in the struggle to protect indigenous territories” – Sônia Guajajara, a spokeswoman for APIB (Brazilian indigenous organization). © Marcelo Camargo/Agência Brasil The land rights of the Xokleng, a tribe that was violently expelled from its territory […]

The post Brazil: European Colonial History Exposed in Landmark Court Case first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>
Indigenous protest, Brazil April 2018. “By painting the streets red, we’re showing how much blood has already been shed in the struggle to protect indigenous territories” – Sônia Guajajara, a spokeswoman for APIB (Brazilian indigenous organization). © Marcelo Camargo/Agência Brasil

The land rights of the Xokleng, a tribe that was violently expelled from its territory in the 19th and 20th centuries to make way for European colonists, are now the focus of a landmark court case in Brazil.

The Xokleng were brutally persecuted and evicted by armed militias to make way for European settlers. The Supreme Court hearing into the so-called “Time Limit Trick” could now set the effects of these and subsequent evictions in stone, establishing a precedent which would have far-reaching consequences for indigenous peoples in Brazil.

Other Xokleng communities are also fighting to recover some of their territory. The Konglui Xokleng in Rio Grande do Sul state have launched a ‘retomada’ (reoccupation) of their land, which is now occupied by a national park. The government wants to make it an ‘ecotourism’ destination. © Iami Gerbase/Survival

The case centers around the demarcation of the “Ibirama La Klãnõ” Indigenous Territory in the state of Santa Catarina in southern Brazil. If they win, the Xokleng would be able to return to a significant part of their ancestral territory.

However, the official demarcation of the territory has been suspended following a lawsuit filed by non-indigenous residents and a logging company operating in the area. They argue that on October 5, 1988 – the date the Brazilian Constitution was signed – the Xokleng only lived in limited parts of the territory and therefore have no right to most of their original land. If this argument succeeds, it would legitimize centuries of evictions experienced by indigenous peoples throughout Brazil.

The Brazilian government encouraged Europeans to settle on indigenous land, and allocated them large parts of the Xokleng and other indigenous territories at the beginning of the 20th century. It also financed a so-called “Indian-hunting militia”, which accelerated the colonial land grab. This militia specialized in the extermination of indigenous peoples and hunted down the Xokleng.

“The Redskins are interfering with colonization: this interference must be eliminated, and as quickly and thoroughly as possible,” German colonists demanded at the time.

German settlers resented Xokleng attempts to defend their territories, and frequently subjected them to cruel “punitive expeditions.”

The Xokleng territory was continuously reduced over several decades. In the 1970s, a dam was built in the small part that remained.

Map of the current (Ibirama) and planned (Ibirama La Klãnõ) indigenous territory. The expansion of the territory is the cause of the legal dispute. © Marian Ruth Heineberg/Natalia Hanazaki based on data from FUNAI/IBGE/MMA.

If Brazil’s Supreme Court votes in favor of the “Time Limit Trick”, it would have devastating consequences for many other indigenous peoples, and their chances of reclaiming their ancestral territories. It could enable the theft of land that is rightfully owned by hundreds of thousands of tribal and indigenous people. The validity of existing indigenous territories could then also come into question.

Brasílio Priprá, a prominent Xokleng leader, said: “If we didn’t live in a certain part of the territory in 1988, it doesn’t mean it was “no man’s land” or that we didn’t want to be there. The “Time Limit Trick” reinforces the historical violence that continues to leave its mark today.”

Indigenous organizations and their allies, including Survival, began raising fears about the “Time Limit Trick” in 2017, calling it unlawful because it violates the current Brazilian Constitution and international law, which clearly states that indigenous peoples have the right to their ancestral lands.

President Bolsonaro is turning back the clock on indigenous rights, attempting to: erase their right to self-determination; sell off their territories to logging and mining companies; and ‘assimilate’ them against their will. Survival International and tribal peoples are fighting side by side to stop Brazil’s genocide.

The post Brazil: European Colonial History Exposed in Landmark Court Case first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Survival International.

]]> 197485 https://www.radiofree.org/2021/05/05/star-trek-a-viewpoint-beyond-liking-it/ https://www.radiofree.org/2021/05/05/star-trek-a-viewpoint-beyond-liking-it/#respond Wed, 05 May 2021 15:16:31 +0000 https://www.radiofree.org/?p=194779 by B.J. Sabri / May 5th, 2021

See Part 1.

What is the point of Star Trek? When examined under apposite practical context, the conclusion may validate the argument that Star Trek filmography cannot be separated from the business enterprise that created it. Consequently, it is no-brainer to deduce that special interests control the content, direction, and purpose of such films.

Star Trek (ST) sagas are fascinating—even addictive. One explanation could be that the modifier Star makes us feel good about a Trek that would take us far from problems afflicting our planet. Another may suggest that imagination, storylines, characters, costumes, etc. are put together in such a way that earned them enduring allure and a place in the cultural landscape. Those among us who, as if under “cultic” influence, enjoy watching the various Enterprise ships roaming between the stars may justify the “addiction” in terms of relaxation without guilt. Is that the whole story? No. Beyond the assumed relaxation, progressives would want to see their ST experience as a means to uncover possible new metrics denoting freedom, progress, and effective humanistic principles.

Yet, are we so delusional that we embrace fictional tales of dubious value despite our realization that the hyped trek is not only crudely fictitious but also a mirror for Hollywood greed, its false worlds of extraterrestrial civilizations where most are bad, and only the Federation is good? On a serious note: is it conceivable that all these treks among the stars are, in fact, subtle ways to spread and justify U.S. policies, ideology, militarism, and interventionism?

To be sure, delusion has nothing to do with our affection toward Star Trek. We well know that fictional space adventures cannot possibly ascend to any appreciable value except that of entertainment. We also know that what we watch is only a rendering of fictional tales made in accordance with the cultural and business values of producers and writers. Of course, then, as we do not take this faking seriously, we still enjoy the twists to a story, seeing special effects and futuristic technologies in action, cinematography, and the visions for advanced societies.

Could Star Trek offer clues or means to examine social, cultural, and political situations? Highly improbable— such tasks are manifestly antithetical to the objectives of films that want to dazzle and entertain. Conversely, distancing from (or escaping into) filmic fiction while maintaining connections to it by other means is not vacillation of choice between two contrasting sets of behavior: adolescence coupled with nonchalant innocence and maturity tempered by discernment. There is no competition between these two sets. Proving this point, viewing a fictional story in space (in whatever set of behavior) could be much more gratifying than watching a documentary on, for example, the behavior of desert insects.

Ultimately, fiction will always remain fiction, and material reality will always remain material reality. Besides, neither fiction nor non-fiction has ever changed anything in the mentality and actions of modern states and societies where misinformation, disinformation, blatant political demagogy, gossip as culture, pervasive triviality, pomposity, and inconsequentiality dominate unchallenged—with no end in sight—every crevice of today’s culture.

Did a great movie such as One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest change anything in the behavior and ethics of hospitals, caregivers, and people toward mental instability? Did the U.S. prison system change after the movie Brubaker? In the book world, did Tolstoy’s War & Peace novel (1869) on the horrors of Napoleonic wars in Russia hinder the path to WWI? Did U.S. violence against countless nations of the planet cease after James William Gibson published his exceptional book: The Perfect War: Techno War in Vietnam? Did Ramsey Clark’s book, The Fire This Time (1992), stop the United States from invading Iraq in 2003?

Along the same lines, did ST stories influence anything important in the real world? The answer is no. Did they, at least, elicit intellectual response to certain topics relevant to empowerment and emancipation? The short answer is still no. Although some ST episodes or films could eventually stimulate some to engage in articulate debates, they are not the proper forums for intellectual tension and analytical drive (to be fair, a few productions do present topics deserving of reflection and respect). Meaning, they seldom contribute to achieving higher levels of consciousness in any concrete way. Does curiosity have a role? The answer is another no. Curiosity for how a plot would end is by no means equivalent to exploratory curiosity of the mysteries enveloping our outer space or the vast universe. Are there morality paradigms, ethical values, or philosophies we could learn from Star Trek? Once again, the answer is no.

To take on ST in a critical context, maybe it is a good idea to relate its significance vis-à-vis similar filmic and writing experiences. For starters, attributing to ST a science-fiction quality is deceptive. This cannot be otherwise. Star Trek is all fiction and just a very little science. Encyclopedia Britannica gives a terse definition for the concept of science. It states, “Science, any system of knowledge that is concerned with the physical world and its phenomena and that entails unbiased observations and systematic experimentation. In general, a science involves a pursuit of knowledge covering general truths or the operations of fundamental laws.”

Accordingly, while Star Trek fits all formats of fiction, it does not conform to the definition of science. However, dubbing the science of ST and similar stock as pseudoscience is acceptable. Regardless, ST remains a fictional menagerie of good and bad—even contentious— scripts. To evaluate ST, it is relevant to point out the basic feature epitomizing the film industry. Together with the vast entertainment, music, and sport industries, the film industry is the highest expression of vulture capitalism where astronomical-paying jobs and moneymaking machines are the norm (in 2018, the global film industry was worth $136 billion).

Within such an environment, the ST franchise (like all similar widescreen and TV movies) is out there to sell a product and make good profits. Concerns for productions conducive to cultural or political debates rarely figure in the calculation of producers. Simply, the gluttonous underpinnings of such industry where business decisions start and end with eyes fixated on advertisers and box office cannot possibly be a voice for social progress through fictional dialog. Even independent filmmakers cannot escape this fate. At the end of the day, they need money for production, for living, and for lifestyle.

About fact-based films, Konstantinos Gavras’ great American film Missing (starring Jack Lemmon) went into fast oblivion despite all awards it garnered. Observation: Generally, American moviegoers are not interested in serious topics such as the abduction and killing of an American journalist in Chile (in the aftermath of the fascist military coup of Augusto Pinochet, 1973) that Henry Kissinger abetted and helped organize. By understated indoctrination, most Americans disproportionately look for entertainment over content.

Another great fact-based film that remained obscure is Z—also by Gavras. U.S. moviegoers and critics have no inclination to see political dramas in foreign lands—Greece in this case. Then there is Gillo Pontecorvo’s outstanding fiction-based film: Queimada (Burn!) that encapsulated the core and modus operandi of British colonialism. It went unnoticed despite an outstanding script and superlative performances by Evaristo Marquez and Marlon Brando.

It is an empirical fact that made-for-high-profit U.S. film industry is resistant to produce quality films in terms of progressive humanistic, artistic, political, or social values. Factors such as the type/size of prospected audience and expected revenues play fundamental roles in the decisions to make films. Consider Finding Forrester. This greatly distinguished film had no success at market level. Despite an impressive thematic value, the system will falsely claim that such movies are not what the moviegoers want.

Because so-called science fiction films have no inclination for intellectual subjects of any sort, filmmakers of this genre compensate by wrapping their productions with attractive illusions of technology with the intent to slide over all other deficiencies including poor dialogs. In addition, because producers follow pre-established financial-ideological guidelines, one specific consequence is notable: their pervasive tendency to treat the audience like kids. That is, to count on viewers’ intellectual passivity versus the meaning and purpose of films. The quid pro quo is apparent: visual and narrative “excitement” in exchange for intellectual indifference to the value of films.

What is preponderant in this context, therefore, is the viewing experience as an end. Mind you, the audience does not accept everything—people are not stupid. What appears to be working, though, is this: as we close our eyes to stupidities, we open them wide in the attempt to enjoy and understand the story. The keyword, therefore, is “enjoyment”. We enjoy, so to speak, seeing Leonard Nimoy pretending to be a logical person from Vulcan while knowing that nearly none of his “logical” remarks relate to the rhetorical craft of logic; and we like to see William Shatner exude “toughness” in the execution of his agenda as Captain Kirk, and so on.

In the same vein, Picard, Janeway, Sisko, Archer, McCoy, Ryker, Data, Worf, Crusher, La Forge, young Kirk (Chris Pine), etc. all had their big share of people’s affection for no other reason than being fictional characters with certain appeal. With the exception of Picard (Patrick Stewart, a fine Shakespearian actor, contributed to make the character excel in the delivery of the act), most other ST characters offered no serious intellectual provocations meant to challenge the mind.

If pertinence matters, Star Trek tales are not liberating experiences either. Gene Roddenberry, creator of the original series, put his ship in orbit and loaded it with topics borrowed from mentality, cultural, political, and military matters typical of his time. Unlike other fictional writers of the caliber of Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, and others, and despite his visionary approach to the future of humanity, Roddenberry, being a TV producer, appeared to have been inclined to tell commercially appealing adventurous stories. In practice, he sacrificed substance for commercial success.

What is relevant to the analysis of ST is that unlike Wells, for example, whose impassioned anti-imperialist impulses are known, Roddenberry chose the safe ground of the self-centered American culture. He imbued Star Trek with many problematic plots that, when interpreted rigorously, appear to be glorifying American colonialism, imperialism, militarism, racism, unilateralism, and gratuitous violence. Despite all that, Roddenberry redeemed himself in several valid episodes in the original series and in The Next Generation.

There is no doubt that other Star Trek series after Roddenberry such as Star Trek: Deep Space 9, Star Trek: Voyager, Star Trek: Discovery and all spin-off series could have merits under certain circumstances. My focus is ST: The Original Series, and ST: The Next Generation. These two series represent the foundations upon which all other series were fashioned, not so much in terms of characters but rather in terms of the ideas that propel the ships and their crews into the infinity of space. Compare Star Trek to George Lucas’ Star Wars franchise. Lucas remained a prisoner of superficial characters and story-lines à la Edgar Rice Burroughs. In contrast, Star Trek evolved far beyond the intent of Roddenberry.

Are there critical issues to debate about Star Trek: the Original Series (ST: TOS) and Star Trek: The Next Generation (ST: TNG)?

First things first, the history of post-WWII science fiction filmography is disappointing. From the moment in which Hollywood took firm control of the genre with its impressive, high-tech production capabilities and computer-generated imagery, filmic artistic values literally went down the notorious drain. There was one superlative exception: Kubrick’s film: 2001: A Space Odyssey (novel by Arthur C. Clark). From its release in 1968 until present, no film has ever matched it—not even close. (Of less artistic/intellectual value but with significant science fiction appeal are Close Encounters of the Third Kind by Steven Spielberg and Gravity by Alfonso Cuarón)

As for Odyssey, who could ever forget the spectacular scene when one among the fighting man-apes threw a large bone (weapon) up into the sky, which then transmuted into a future artificial satellite? With that scene, a glimpse into the marvelous evolution and accomplishments of the human species was depicted to a lofty pinnacle of expression. Kubrick’s cinematography of 2001: A Space Odyssey elevated the film into a unique standard by which all science fiction films are measured. The appendix to this thought cannot be more direct: when the force propelling a film defines its trajectory by embracing the evolving purpose of humanity, the outcome would be another chapter celebrating life and the riches it offers. Do socio-humanistic and progressive cultural values propel so-called science fiction movies (e.g., Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, Armageddon, Aliens, etc.)? That is, do they fit the evolving purpose of humanity? Does our “revered” Star Trek fit the purpose of humanity?

The answer to the first question is a resounding no. Films such as these are essentially void of intrinsic values that could promote equality, peace, and social progress. When films concentrate on special effects as substitutes for the story itself, on glorifying wars in space, on creating conflicts with imaginary space nations, on extreme violence, and on simplistic story-lines, they cannot possibly be ascribed to having any valuable purpose except unspecified excitement. To answer the question whether Star Trek fits that same purpose, we need to examine the situation with unbiased feelings and approach. This is understandable: despite our unapologetic, strong affection, the answer is no.

Earlier, I stated that Roddenberry imbued Star Trek: The Original Series with problematic plots that one may interpret as glorifying American colonialism, imperialism, militarism, and even violence as a means to resolve problems. Is there any truth to this assertion? Were these plots a conscious effort to tell a story as a means to re-write history, justify events, or maybe to perpetuate certain ideologies and social philosophies? Could it be that plots’ development was no more than “innocent” expedients meant only to excite, hence people should accept them at face value? Either way, we should never stand for unclear agendas—doing otherwise means that our intent to examine Star Trek has failed.

Was Star Trek: The Next Generation any different from The Original Series? Yes. Keep in mind that 19 years separate the two, which is a long period where daring technical innovations had taken place. Second, with an excellent team of producers, executive producers, directors and writers such as Rick Berman (who later became the head of the franchise), Michael Piller, Brannon Braga, and Ronald D. Moore, the franchise flew to a higher level of quality. (Roddenberry was also a consultant to the new series for some time). Most important, ST: TNG was superior vis-à-vis the original in a very specific way. It induced the demanding viewers not only to interact with the plot, think about variables, and investigate contradictions, but also to react on plot development and conclusion. The following are a few observations with focus on certain episodes from both series.

“Where no man has gone before,” announces captain Kirk. Is that an indirect tribute to so-called American exceptionalism? You bet. With the exception of Spock, Chekov, Sulu, and Uhura, most other recognizable crew members appear to be and are Americans. The mission is American; the Starfleet command is in San Francisco, the computer and medical sciences aboard the ship are American, and many of the stories are replicas of American stories. To stress the American-ness of ST, when a strange magnetic storm catapults the ship back to the 20th century (episode: “Tomorrow is Yesterday”), it does not end up flying over China, Senegal, or Argentina. It flew over an American base on U.S. soil. In short, “To boldly go where no man has gone before”, was supposedly a “modest” American way to declare the “prowess” of Americans who “dare” to challenge the odds of galactic travel.

Again, “Space, the final frontier,” the solemn voice of Captain James T. Kirk intones. But what was the first frontier? Is there a correlation between the first and the final—why frontier in the first place? Could a word such as destination (or any other appropriate synonym) have been more expressive of the intent?

There is a distinct possibility that Roddenberry did not consider that he was juxtaposing the so-called American frontier, which is the conquest of what is now the United States, with the proposed final conquest of the space and its planets by the same colonialist power. Did he overlook a basic fact about the first American frontier expansions—the near extermination of the Original Peoples? If so, why did he not care to set the record straight? On the subject of recorded history, it is of no use that someone would try to minimize or void the juxtaposition, because in both cases the intent and its linguistic expression (final frontier) denotes a planned conquest of the outer space in emulation of the old conquest of Turtle Island—North American continent.

Generally, in the histories of British colonialism and its successors American, Canadian, New Zealander, and Australian colonialisms, for example, the notion of frontier was synonymous with never-ending geographical exploration—all of which are euphemisms for bloody conquests. In the so-called American experience, Manifest Destiny was the embodiment of a frontier always in motion to accumulate one conquest after another.

They wanted to discover new worlds. So they say. It is verifiable history that once European explorers landed their ships on the shores of these new worlds, they started to destroy them, remove and exterminate their indigenous populations, put their own populations in control, and create rules and laws to dominate and govern. Second, what is the purpose of discovering a new life and new civilizations only to destroy them? This happened in many science fictions movies—including Star Trek.

In “The Man Trap” episode, Kirk and crew did find such a life, a shapeshifter who needs salt to survive. Soon enough, they ended by vaporizing its molecules because the shapeshifter was effectively killing some crewmembers to get their body salt. Strange thing is, Professor Robert Crater and his wife (the creature in a shape-shifting mode as a former flame of McCoy), did ask for salt tablets without explaining the reason. Had the creators of ST envisioned a different course of action for the shapeshifter—and for humanity as an altruistic model—, an ideal ending could have been the following.

Instead of killing the new life, for which the crew traveled from planet Earth to find, Kirk could have provided the needed salt (ship replicators can replicate any food item) and deliver tons of it to the surface? Are we missing something? Yes. What lurks behind the concept of killing as entertainment?

Why is it important to discuss the fictional killing of a space life form? First, the concept moving the fictional killing is dialectically tied to the justification for real killing under similar but often invented premises. Second, this raises the question whether killing, as a solution for a problem, could be unilaterally justified by the killer. The answer is no. Killing is an objective-centered action. It is a rationalized act taught by humans to other humans throughout the ages—modern war colleges are an example. Alternatively, could it be that killing is intrinsic to the human genetic code? The answer is still no. Killing is a complex act that involves countless supporting factors including conditioning, thinking, prevailing societal patterns of violence, and ideological motivations. In addition, humans have evolved and eventually learnt to co-exist without murdering each other—ancient villages and cities, and modern urban living could attest to that.

Let us consider the issue of the shapeshifter under this light: do we kill sharks because sharks attack humans? Essentially, sharks attack humans only in water—it is their natural habitat and they need to eat to live. Humans, who cannot live in water, kill sharks either for flesh and fins, for “medicinal” cartilage, or, hypocritically, to fend off potential danger to humans. However, the empress of all universal truths is that killing to feed exemplifies the food chain in nature. With that, it is a common sense to state that the shapeshifter was exercising her or his right to live—does anyone blame the lions for hunting zebras?

Surprisingly, the murder of the shapeshifter on board of the Enterprise was not the end. In the episode “The Squire of Gothos,” the salt-sucking life form appears again but this time as a mummified body placed in a wall niche for exhibition by the villain of turn, the alien Trelane. There are two possible explanations as to why the producers decided for the “macabre” exhibition. The first: may be due to poor budget or poor taste in trying to fill the castle hall with trophies for the childish Trelane. The second is more complex. It is reasonable to speculate that the exhibition had an ulterior motive. It conveys the impression that not only Earth people could kill the “obnoxious creature” but also other space species such as Trelane’s people. To wade into a wider interpretation, it is as if ST producers are saying that killing is normal if the killer “declares it justified”. (U.S. imperialists call it collateral damage.)

A correlated topic: what is the nature of the five-year mission to “explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations”? Was the USS Enterprise travelling through space as a warship or as a peace ship? Rodenberry did not specify. Let us assume that the Enterprise was on a peaceful mission. If that were so, how could one explain the frightening weapons it carries? To be clear, there is no such thing as offensive or defensive weapons—only intent can determine their use. So where does the starship stand on this issue?

For those who are unfamiliar with the making and naming of the various American military divisions, suffice it to say that the starship has a military hierarchy. The top is captain (also used in civilian ships), but admirals and commanders are everywhere in space—they give orders, expect obedience, and can, at will, remove captains from the chair of command. In this case, what gives away the military nature of this ship is the presence of cadets. A cadet is a junior trainee in an army. For those who are familiar with the naming processes of the American Navy, they know that the prefix USS and number in the name of the Enterprise stands for United States Ship followed by the numerical sequence of its deployment. (In real context, the U.S. navy has had many maritime ships named USS before the creators of Star Trek introduced a ship sailing through space and named it United Space Ship (USS) Enterprise, NCC-1701.)

To make a comparison, unlike American warships that navigate through our oceans to intimidate nations they deem adversaries, Federation/American fictional starships roam the outer space ostensibly to explore “new worlds”. In more than just one situation though, USS Enterprise ships do use their “shock and awe” weapons to intimidate “stubborn” newly encountered space nations and individuals. In the episode “A Piece of the Action,” a tough Kirk forced two gangster groups (by demonstrating, through Scotty, what the ship can do) to stop fighting among themselves. In effect, he imposed Pax Americana in space on behalf of Federation.  A question: what is the positive in making peace between criminals? Did the city-planet benefit? Who knows—we only saw squabbling gangsters.

What kind of weapons do Starfleet ships have, anyway? Memory Alpha (MA) at Fandom dot com gives “serious technical details” on these weapons. Starships, as told by MA, have an impressive array of offensive weapons from phasers that vaporize people, all the way to the formidable photon torpedoes that vaporize ships, asteroids, and small planets. Now, why arm ships with such weapons if the intentions are peaceful? Why take all these imaginary weapons to the stars unless the Federation wants to use them as “torpedo” diplomacy against space species not yet discovered? Was that because this enemy has no interests in establishing diplomatic relations with the Federation?

More intriguing, how do we interpret the stubborn ideological tendency of ST writers to characterize the various space nations as being inherently hostile to the Federation? To push further, did Kirk or other captains of the Federation ever try to invent adversaries and enemies? Star Trek procedures never stated that directly in any episode. It often happens, though, that those the Enterprise encounters are often portrayed as unfriendly, bellicose, treacherous, and, more than often, imagined as having human or human-like bodies but with strange-looking heads and weird facial anatomy.

If observed closely, the message that ST tries to convey about the species populating the universe invariably dances to the Earthly tunes of racism, chauvinism, and imperialism: only the Federation and its implied boss, the United States, are good. In this guise, most space nations, be they Romulans, Cardassians, or Ferengi, etc., are naturally bad, while those who joined the Federation (does NATO ring a bell?) are good. Among these, you find Vulcans, Bajorans, and Klingons. (The latter incessantly dub the Romulans as having no honor. However, are the Klingons themselves honorable people according to the makers of ST? In the episode, Sins of the Father (ST: TNG), producers implicitly conveyed the judgement that the Klingon ruling establishment is conniving, traitorous, and without honor—they colluded to punish Worf to cover up for the misdeeds of a warlord.

Countless viewers and the media celebrated when Kirk kissed Uhura in the episode “Plato’s Stepchildren.” Eventually, that kiss entered the racial history of the United States. The uproar was possibly due to the perception that racial segregation and miscegenation in American society, at least in Hollywood, was on its way out. Those who jubilated placed the kiss in the context of changing U.S. race relations.

One moment please: but the episode was supposedly taking place in the 23rd century where race problems were supposed to have been resolved at least two centuries earlier! Then why celebrate a fictional kiss in the future (in outer space, nevertheless), but, in the process, convert it into real progress on Earth? One more thing: Kirk and Uhura kissed under duress by means of the kinetic power exerted on them by the “stepchildren”. Consequently, that kiss was not genuine, not valid, and was not a product of passion or love. By force of this argument, it is outlandish to claim it has any value in the exercise of willpower in normal human and race relations just because actors of different skin colors kissed on the set in the performance of their work.

Kim Petersen and I have discussed this matter. He writes, “I strongly disagree with much of the logic you employ here. For viewers, the fact that it is depicted as happening in the 23rd century and that it was telekinetically coerced is irrelevant. For 1960s racists, the mere acting of this was blasphemy and it broke a filmic barrier…”

My counter-argument: the notion that “The mere acting of this was blasphemy, and it broke a filmic barrier”, is of limited practical consequences. Yes, it might have broken a filmic barrier; but that barrier is situated in a world of moneymaking milieus where the games are played by the rules of the film industry and market response to them. In such milieus, actors can make it or break it based on numerous factors that are inconsequential when applied to those disadvantaged sectors of society where the paradigms for conducting a normal life without discrimination and prejudice cease to work.

Incidentally, before the airing of this episode in 1968, Stanley Kramer’s film The Defiant Ones (1958; story by Nedrick Young) tested the grounds on race relations by chaining two prison escapees; one is white and a bigot (played by Tony Curtis); the other is black (played by Sidney Poitier). Despite winning many accolades, the film did not generate uproar, as did the kiss between William Shatner and Nichelle Nichols. Why is that, especially knowing that the critical content of The Defiant Ones far exceeds the superficial plot of “Plato’s Stepchildren”? Possible explanation: while the tease generated by the scene of a kiss between a white man and a black woman might have raised the anger (or consent) of some, it only broke, if that is what really happened, the taboo in a specific workplace but not in society. Consequently, in a complex societal structure, the” PARTICULAR has no chance in transforming into GENERAL.

One episode (ST: TOS), “A Taste of Armageddon,” stands out for its peculiar script, for its ideological themes, and for the actions taken by Kirk. The story-line speaks of two planets at war. As for the plot, the episode unequivocally displays a type of decision-making favoring mass violence while apparently promoting a determined intention for unsolicited intervention. There are two points to argue:

First, the co-authors (Gene L. Coon and Robert Hamner) have politicized the script in terms favorable to the American idea of supremacist beliefs. Here is how I read the script: as typical of an overconfident Kirk (or the United States ideologically looming behind him), he decided unilaterally to transform that war from a war-by-computer but with real victims into a real war with real weapons and real victims as well—with the computer numbers resulting in people being disintegrated as per the numbers. In concrete terms, Kirk’s decision was a prescription for protracted violence. No need to say that Coon and Hamner made Kirk win his gambit and the story ended without further deaths. Was there any insinuation working behind the scenes? Of course, the United States, through Kirk’s action and despite it, was “successful” at “stopping” bloodshed from continuing. It seems that a rationale comes into being: Kirk-U.S. intervention “paid off”. Implication: “American interventions are good”. Mike Pompeo expressed the doctrine for intervention in naked terms. He dubbed American wars in the Middle Eat as follows, “The United States is a force for good …”

Second, they injected a biblical term into the script with apparent intent to reinforce and spread the ideology of the “born again Christian”. A question: what was hiding behind the decision to recycle into the future of humanity the mythology of Armageddon (the end of time battle)? Was that a veiled attempt to make the meaning of the term stick in the minds of viewers as a “prophesy” that should happen in the future?

The episode has another angle. It promotes the idea that the United States (the ever-belligerent former cop of the world on planet Earth before space travel) has evolved to become, again, the top cop of the outer space in the 23rd century. (Read how the imperialist media frame the issue of U.S. policing the world: 1) Should the United States be the World’s Policeman? 2) Should the U.S. use its military and financial power to act as the world’s policeman?)

Vilification of lifeforms in space appears in the episode: “A Devil in the Dark”. What is the reason for which ST producers call a life-form, living in its own natural environment on planet Janus IV: devil (which is an evil force according to religious mythologies on Earth)? Was that life-form evil because of its physical attributes? Some may argue that film titles are no more than rhetorical gizmos. That may be true; but experience taught us that derogatory name-calling is the ideological first step to dehumanize people in order to attack them—in the American ideology of wars and discrimination words such gooks, coons, ragheads, brown peoples, etc., are omnipresent.

It seems that many writers of Star Trek series (and other fictional stories in space) do not want—by design or by ideological attitudes—to imagine a future world without wars. You can see that clearly when some writers place an oversized emphasis on wars and mortal antagonisms between imagined extra-terrestrial civilizations. Is there any message here? Are they trying to convince us that wars are normal occurrences typical of all thinking species? Are we dealing with innate predilection for wars? There is no such thing as innate predilection for war. What exists, though, is a rooted ideological construct that sees wars as a glamourous showcase for empire, dominance, and control? The imperialist New York Times explained this horrific construct as follows: “The Pitfalls of Peace: The Lack of Major Wars May Be Hurting Economic Growth“.

In the first episode of ST: TNG, “Encounter at Farpoint,” an omnipotent space “alien” (Q) transports Picard to a quixotic, strange court and puts him on trial for the crimes of humanity.

The premise is fine. But ST writer Dorothy Catherine Fontana was eloquently leading the script to an impressive indictment of Picard representing the Federation and, by allegorical extension, its boss: the United States. Speculation: Q, being a god-like omnipotent, could have brought to trial not only a captain of an American starship, but also all other leaders of the planet. Given that Fontana chose only the U.S. rep, she might have wanted to put only the United States on trial. Or could it be that Q’s (Fontana’s) indictment of Picard because the crimes of humanity pale by comparison with that of the United States?

Picard gave his most memorable performance as a captain in the episode “The Measure of a Man.” (What made Picard shine was an exceptional script written by Melinda M. Snodgrass who was a lawyer and a novelist.) The script goes like this: when a federation scientist wanted to disassemble Data to study him, Picard prevented his transfer by arguing against slavery, and that Data, albeit being an android, has the right to decide for himself if he wanted to be disassembled and studied.

Before everything, expecting that fiction could resolve real problems is non sequitur. That is, winning a solid argument in fiction is not synonymous with winning the same in reality. At one point during the hearings, Picard declares, not in so many words, that slavery ended a long time ago. To beautify an imaginative future, Picard overlooked an important aspect of slavery. While open physical slavery with shackles has disappeared, slavery by other means has continued. In our world, racism, discrimination, poverty, violence motivated by ideology, raging wars by aggressive states (U.S., NATO states, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Turkey, and Israel) on militarily weaker nations are all different forms of slavery whereby the victims often lack effective means of resistance despite putting up strenuous fights.

Since I touched on the issue of slavery by other means, there is one peculiar form of slavery that I call Behavioral Enslavement. In such form, peoples, groups, individuals think, react, and take action in accordance with transmitted, fixated ideas about other peoples, their cultures, and their ways of life. You can see such a form of slavery of the mind in the episode “The Paradise Syndrome” (ST: TOS). The script depicted Kirk and Spock encountering a peaceful oasis inhabited by a tribe of Original Peoples; most westerners still chauvinistically call them American Indians following the name coined by Christopher Columbus.

First, paradise is an idyllic imagination of a place. Consequently, dubbing it as syndrome is odd. Merriam-Webster dictionary defines syndrome as follows: “a group of signs and symptoms that occur together and characterize a particular abnormality or condition”. A question: which group of signs and symptoms did the producers find abnormal about the place they depicted?

Aside from its absurdity as imagination, what is wrong with such a depiction anyway? Are we not dealing with fiction? This is fiction; so where is the problem? Consider the following sequence of events. A writer from the 20th century imagined a situation in the 23rd century. In it, the writer continues to see the tribe as still living in teepees. Still wearing the same attire of four centuries earlier, still motivated by irrational passions (as seen when a tribesman attacks and wounds Kirk in a fit of jealous rage), and still believing in the supernatural as the sudden appearance of Kirk from a shrine pushed them to think of him as a divine entity. It is reasonable to conclude that the writer was incapable of seeing the Original Peoples in any other way except that one depicted by Hollywood. Very little thought the producers gave to tribe’s other attributes like synchrony with nature, wisdom of the mind, peaceful relations, and much, much more.

American hyper-imperialism is distinguished for playing the pretext maker, the accuser, the prosecution, the judge, the jury, and the executioner in international relations and wars. The undergirding for such a self-arrogated “extraordinary” role is sheer unaccountability—primarily due to its military power, aggressive impulses, and institutionalized gangsterism.

In one episode of ST: TNG, Commander Ryker reprised the role played by the United States on Earth but gave it the allure of a space backdrop in the 24th century. In that episode, “The Vengeance Factor,” a space woman was seeking vengeance against another group with who her people were at war (what else populates the mind of Star Trek writers except war?) Well, when the woman was lunging toward her designated target to kill him, Ryker pleaded with her not do it, which was a fine act of chivalry. To make her desist, Ryker—with a stony expression on his face and a phaser in his hand—kept stunning her. When she made her final lunge, the First Officer vaporized her with a phaser no longer set to stun.

Let us debate the killing. Because Ryker, his captain, and the crew freely express the principles of the Federation—so-called Prime Directive—, why did he not use all other sophisticated means of the Enterprise to subdue and then expel her from the ship without resorting to total annihilation? Had he done that, the viewer could surmise that the humanity of the future had come a long way from the path of violence by implementing carefully crafted humanistic mentalities…. Yes; it is impossible to read the mind of writers; but it is quite possible to read between the lines of thought. So, what to make of a pretentious script that dispenses with elementary ethical concerns for the sake of slipshod story writing that varnishes senseless violence? Alternatively, was the script a subliminal attempt to slip in an ideological architecture whose undeclared end is providing acquiescence for U.S. imperialistic violence in its self-granted role as the world’s cop?

This leads to the foremost issues whereby fictional space stories replicate, reinforce, and rationalize acts of the system’s violence on Earth. The implication is straightforward: the impulse for rationalized killing seems deeply seated on the minds of those who think of themselves as the guardians of state powers and directives. In a word, one may conclude that in travelling from our century to the 24th, the trekkers of the Enterprise have paved no new paths toward peaceful co-existence or prevention of wars. On the contrary, they were enmeshed in terror and discord wherever they went.

Before closing, I must address how Star Trek producers and writers, from the Original Series to NuTrek, composed certain stories. William Shatner once tweeted, “What is NuTrek? Is that like simonizing?” Shatner’s sarcasm is incisive—he hit the nail on the head. Star Trek filmography cannot escape the “curse” of cheap commercialism, contentious writing, poor writing, ideological writing, and writings that cannot (or do not want) to deal with fictionalized space stories on humanistic platforms.

For instance, at the end of the film Star Trek: Into Darkness, a young Kirk gave a speech to a large audience gathered at Starfleet Command. He said, “There are always people who want to harm us …” Where did that come from? Of course, it came from post-9/11 atmosphere where the phrase, “Why do they hate us…” became an everyday ideological construct in the hands of American interventionists. In the same movie, Admiral Marcus, who was plotting a war with the Klingons, angrily asked Kirk, “When war comes, who’s going to lead us: you!” His words indicate one thing: he expected that his pretext would lead to a fighting war and that he would be the one directing it. In this context, it appears that fiction writers are often keen to start wars in space. Why is that?

Star Trek: The Original Series is replete with odd scripts. Among these is the episode “Patterns of Force.” Not only is this episode highly ideological, but also very poor from the viewpoint of fiction writing. Why on earth (after all the Hollywood movies about the Third Reich), does one have to watch a space fiction story set in the 23rd century only to find Kirk and Spock fighting Nazi-like species and humans on a planet called Ekos? In political terms, “Patterns of Force” was a propaganda tool by the producers to keep the talk about Germany and Nazism going. To make the point, did anyone see a Star Trek movie having the landing party come to a planet where Americans have devastated places like Bear River, Wounded Knee, Dresden, Berlin, Korea, Vietnam, or Hiroshima, for example?

Kirk and Spock did it again in the episode “City on the Edge of Forever.” In it, Spock points out that the death of Edith Keeler is necessary to end her pacifist campaign from stopping WWII (otherwise, Germany would have a nuclear bomb). Consequently, Kirk did not try to save her by letting her die under the wheels of a passing car. What is the deal with such episodes: fixation or indoctrination? (Remark: yet, it was okay, from the viewpoint of ST writers, for the U.S. to build a nuclear device and use it on Japan. Why is that?)

To close, Star Trek: The Original Series, Star Trek: The Next Generation and all successive spinoffs are interesting to watch. On other grounds, my opinion is that the franchise in its current forms and structures has no intellectual soul. From the viewpoints of reason and hope, it is not promising to see U.S. fictional starships drift in space only to engage in wars somewhere in the galaxy. It is one thing that the United States is ruining our world with real wars; it is another when it is ruining the outer space with fictional wars.

Then there is the nowadays reality: this summer is the scheduled official standing up of the United States Space Force, the U.S. army in space. Stand by!

This article was posted on Wednesday, May 5th, 2021 at 8:16am and is filed under Arts and/or Entertainment, Hollywood, Imperialism, Militarism, Original Peoples, Prejudice.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2021/05/05/star-trek-a-viewpoint-beyond-liking-it/feed/ 0 194779 https://www.radiofree.org/2021/03/27/the-windigo-disease-of-resource-capitalism-and-global-dispossession-of-indigenous-peoples/ https://www.radiofree.org/2021/03/27/the-windigo-disease-of-resource-capitalism-and-global-dispossession-of-indigenous-peoples/#respond Sat, 27 Mar 2021 16:08:01 +0000 https://www.radiofree.org/?p=179594 This is a version of a speech given outside the headquarters of ReconAfrica in Vancouver BC on Water Day — March 22, 2021.

We are on stolen CSḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Stó:lō and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) land and what is happening here today, the assault of Indigenous peoples and the invasion of their territories by Canada, its corporations and economic elites is also happening to the San people in Southern Africa. In a recent petition by activists we have learned that: “ReconAfrica has been given permission to drill for fossil fuels in the Kavango basin between Namibia and Botswana and the Kalahari Desert extending to the south eastern banks of the Okavango River and Delta. This area includes numerous areas of international significance, but for the San indigenous people who live there this is their sacred and ancestral ‘homeland’. The San people are the rightful current inhabitants and have been the custodians of this land for thousands of years. They have never been consulted, nor have they given their consent to any entities to prospect for oil and gas in their lands. By pursuing oil and gas development in the are the governments of Botswana and Namibia, and the Southern African region contravene their commitments to various international declarations an agreements as well as their own national laws. The oil and gas drilling operations will ruin roads, damage Indigenous livelihoods, deplete water resources and negatively impact biodiversity within the precious region. The Kavango Basin, which includes the Okavango Delta, lies beneath one of Africa’s most biodiverse habitats. It is home to a myriad of bird and megafauna species—including the largest herd of African elephants and African wild do populations—as well as many other threatened and endangered species. Potential impacts to local people and ecosystems include: massive water resource depletion, human induced earthquakes, disruption of avian species communication, breeding and nesting.”

Sounds familiar? This is because it is.

San hunter-gatherers walking across the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa. (Courtesy of L.K. Marshall and L.J. Marshall. Copyright President and Fellows of Harvard College, Peabody Museum #2001.29.390.)

The struggles of the San people connect with the struggles of Indigenous peoples here in settler Canada. We should remember that despite the fact that we are separated by different colonial contexts and most importantly by continents and oceans the history of colonization in the two continents is very similar even though the trajectories are different; and what happens here also happens there. Because in a globalized world we are all interconnected and what we do here has a violent impact there. As Ina-Maria Shikongo, a climate activist from Namibia states: “The problem with this whole deal is we can really see what is happening all around the globe, it is a total take over of the oil industries of the last reserves of the green spaces that we have. They don’t care about the people, the animals, nothing! They just care about the money. We can all see that the weather patterns are changing drastically and we are still talking about digging up fossil fuels when we should stop.”

ReconAfrica is a Canadian-US corporation whose headquarters are based here in so-called Vancouver, that is on stolen land. And I can’t help it but notice the irony that this Canadian company on stolen land is set to seize the land of the San people in Southern Africa. The theft might affect different peoples but bears the same racist and colonial violence. The theft follows the same patterns of white supremacy and environmental racism that has devastated First Peoples and their sacred territories around the globe.

ReconAfrica does not come out of the blue. It continues the early legacies of racist colonialism and racial capitalism, systems that are 500 years old but have now mutated into resource capitalism spurred by oil and gas corporations and new forms of land grabs. The very country this company operates from, (Canada), is itself a petro-state, that often behaves as a corporation and has a violent and non-consensual relationship with its own Indigenous peoples. Canada consistently props up the mining and fossil fuel industries and together state and industry break treaties, invade Indigenous territories without their consent and often with the help of militarized police and the criminal justice system, pillage their lands, criminalize land defenders and throw them in prisons. By displacing them from their land, Canada and its corporations systematically destroy their cultural and food systems and subject Indigenous communities into abject poverty, homelessness, and food and water insecurity, all in the name of profit. Canadian companies either wreck the homes of Indigenous peoples here domestically or the homes of First Peoples there, internationally. The game and the pattern are the same: there is no corner of the earth and no people that resource capitalism will not ravage.

Let there be no mistake: ReconAfrica is an extension of the colonial project that began in Europe 500 years ago and has morphed today into local and global extractivism. Since the emergence of capitalism in the 16th century European extractivism intensified and ran rampant during colonialism through the extraction of materials such as minerals, gold, silver, timber, furs, fish an so on. Naomi Klein tells us that before Canada became a nation it was an extractivist company, the Hudson Bay Company trafficking in furs, and pelts. Recon’s greed for oil follows in the footsteps of the Hudson Bay Company. Through Recon the Canadian model of unbridled extraction and devastation of ancestral Indigenous land and livelihoods is being now exported from this continent to the African continent and the ransacking of its First Peoples, the San people.

And like the Hudson Bay Company, ReconAfrica is genocidal: it is a symptom of toxic colonial land grabs that some commentators link to the industrial genocide of Indigenous peoples. Original peoples across the globe have experienced genocide since the moment the European colonizers arrived uninvited on their territories. By pillaging their land, reducing it to commodities whose goal was to flow into and eventually industrialize Europe, the violent eviction and systematic extermination of Indigenous peoples became the very foundation of the wealth of Europe and settler states such as Canada. Indigenous peoples not only lost their land and thus their sustenance, and their livelihoods, they impoverished, relocated into reserves, starved, and their children were abducted, abused and experimented upon in residential schools to be assimilated in settler society and their cultures to be ethnically cleansed. Their communities are still experiencing profound poverty, higher rates of incarceration, addiction and suicide, and lack of fundamental human rights such as access to health, education and clean drinking water. As Jason Hickel has forcefully claimed in The Divide the Western world including Canada are the developed and industrialized First World that they are today because they have methodically and brutally de-industrialized and underdevelop the rest of the world.

In other words, their industry and wealth are not some sign of good luck or ingenuity or innovation owed to European and Western superior genes of civilization; rather it was built on the violence of colonialism and stolen from Indigenous peoples. Western industrial “progress” has been made on the backs of First peoples and what is happening today to the San people is an iteration of that earlier colonial and genocidal project. It is fair to say that the economic prosperity of Canada and its corporations depends on the racist violence that is about to be inflicted onto the San people. And it is also fair to say that ReconAfrica’s money is nothing but blood money. And it is also fair to say that some prosper on the death of others and the destruction of their homes. And it is also fair to say that our energy greed is built on the devastation of people, lives, homes, ecosystems, the planet. I don’t know what you call Recon but to me they sound like parasites and scavengers of lives in pursuit of profit.

In fact, ReconAfrica is guilty of environmental injustice that is racist, white supremacist and colonial. In “Let Them Drown: The Violence of Othering in a Warming World,” Naomi Klein argues that environmental injustice is also directly connected to environmental racism through the process of othering of sacrificial and disposable people. For ReconAfrica and the political and local elites of Namibia and Botswana the San people are not people but just obstacles to their drilling goals and so called economic development of these countries. Their land and entire rich ecosystems are simply impediments and the groundwater, the aquifiers, the endangered species are nothing but hindrance to the oil and gas that lie beneath.

Recon and economic elites have so dehumanized and othered the San people and their land that they do not count and therefore they can be removed or poisoned, or pillaged or destroyed. Who cares if the groundwater is contaminated through the drilling and mining operations? Who cares if this impacts the health and food security of the San people? Economic development and profit matter more than Indigenous peoples’ lives. As Klein further reminds us othering is also directly connected to notions of racial and civilizational superiority because in order to have other and disposable people you need to have people and cultures that they count so little for their exploiters that they deserve sacrifice for the ever expanding energy needs of the Global North. And in contrast, you need to have people that see themselves as superior, as uniquely human and thus deserving of having it all, excessive lifestyles at the expense of those other thought of as subhuman.

Our economic elites think of our culture as superior because we are developed; we arrogantly call ourselves the “developed world,” and we call the cultures we ravage and dehumanize “underdeveloped,” “not yet advanced,” “primitive savages” that just sit on oil and precious metals used for our laptops and electronic devices. And we arrogantly think that all we need to do is remove them to get to that black gold. In the early colonization of the so-called Americas, Indigenous peoples often were completely shocked to see the deranged behaviour of the Spaniards lusting after gold. And there is an urban legend that tells the story of how some Original peoples of this continent thought of gold as the “excrement of the devil.” Who would have thought that Recon continues the legacy of the Spanish conquistadores in its frenzied greed after the excrement of the devil we now call black gold, oil.

Klein also cautions us that toxic colonialism justifies the sacrifice of people and dispossession of land through virulent intellectual theories that Western culture has harnessed to legitimize their destruction. Colonialism has always been aided by scientific racism and its cousin, Social Darwinism, theories that are fraught with racist ideas about the superiority of Northern races destined to rule weak Southern races economically, politically, culturally. Again we might want to remember that we call Northern cultures “developed” and Southern cultures “under- or un- developed.” And we keep saying to ourselves the patronizing and self-serving myth: “They do not know their own good, they can’t understand the wealth they sit on and if only they let us develop them. This is also called the “White man’s burden” that the Northern nations have to bring civilization in the form of economic prosperity to Southern peoples living in the dark ages. We are the advance and they are the barbaric.

But my friends, I know of no other barbarism than the one Western economic elites inflict in devastating the home of First peoples, driving the climate crisis and destroying the planet. The eviction of the San people is a barbarity and those who do it are the barbarians and the savages. The climate crisis is a barbarity, not progress, and certainly not civilization. The collapse of the planet is a barbarity and those who are responsible for it are criminal and genocidal. Our economic institutions, our corporations and our economic elites are driving us all to destruction; not development. They are a threat to all Indigenous peoples across the globe and the existential annihilation of all life on this planet. I call them profiteers of death.

As Bay Street depicts the Kavango Basin (green patch)

What is happening in the Kavango basin is not just outright racism. It is also the story of commodity frontiers and capitalist expansion and is an extension of the colonial principle of the “doctrine of discovery” or in the words of some commentators “the doctrine of Native genocide.” You may know that when Europeans arrived here they thought of it as empty land that they had just discovered. Of course, what is really arrogant and foolish about it is that “you can’t discover something that is already the home of Indigenous peoples living here.” For Europeans the doctrine of “Discovery” served to remove the Original people to settle on their land, commodify it, exploit it and eventually degrade it, cut down its forests, toxify its watersheds, poison the soil, overfish it, kill its buffalo, endanger and eclipse multiple species. Here in so-called British Columbia, settler culture is wiping out the salmon along with countless plant and non-human animals. But I’m digressing. The doctrine of discovery serves the capitalist desire for a never ending expansion and growth. As land is being exhausted in one place and its peoples are driven out, “new” land needs to be “discovered and thus occupied.”

Today the global capitalist economy and financial markets of which Recon is a symptom continue to “discover new land” to grab. They might not call these “discovered territories” but they have invented highly elaborate euphemisms that mean exactly the same thing. They now call “discovered land” “new market opportunities” or “land investments” or “economic development.” We must see these new terms for what they are: “the emperor has no clothes” because the naked truth is that the global empire we call capitalism continues to treat the entire world as a frontier of conquest and terra nullius, or empty land to satisfy larger economic interests that are specifically located in the Global North. And that entails genocide of traditional peoples that live on those lands.

The truth of the matter is that African countries since colonization were “discovered” by European powers only to be harnessed to the global economy and serve as the economic satellites of the Global North. African countries have always been used as exporters of raw materials including human enslaved labour to Europe and later its colonies and even later what we call the Global North. In parallel, African nations have been importers of manufactured products from the North. This condensed history of unequal economic relationships mired in brutal exploitation must not also omit the violent legacy of the slave trade in which millions of Africans were abducted from their ancestral homelands to work in what is euphemistically called plantations—but were actual death camps—in the American continent and industrialize its economy. And there we have it again: the enslavement of humans that gave rise to the economic prosperity of this continent is not separate from the enslavement of land and nature through the extraction of energy and raw materials for the enrichment of corporate elites in the Global North.

African American scholar, Cedric Robinson calls this phenomenon racial capitalism. This is an economic system that on the one hand was built on the exploitation of the free labour of African people who were once Indigenous to the African continent; and on the other racial capitalism thrives on the genocide of First peoples in the American continent that are displaced from their ancestral homelands. Racial capitalism is also a system that treats the world as a storehouse of endless commodities or commodity frontier ever expanding to amass more land. As Robinson suggests, capitalism “emerged within the European feudal order and flowered in the cultural soil of a Western civilization already thoroughly infused with racialism and racial hierarchies about superior people and inferior others whose land and labour can therefore be exploited. Capitalism and racism, in other words, did not break from the old order but rather evolved from it to produce a modern world system of racial capitalism dependent on slavery, violence, imperialism, and Indigenous genocide.” Within this context, we can clearly see how ReconAfrica is a symptom of a larger disease: that of racial capitalism.

Let there be no mistake: when you treat the world and its Original Peoples as a frontier of conquest you establish with the earth an exploitative relationship based on ever expanding places to commodify and people to remove or enslave. And when that place is exhausted and its populations ethically cleansed the search begins again for another place, another frontier and another people to dispossess so long that your degradation of the “new” land and your crimes against the communities you displace remain invisible to energy consumers in the Global North. Out of sight, out of mind, none of us need to worry where did this energy or coltan for our electronic devices came from.

We see the logic of the frontier of conquest not just in the Kavango basin but here closer to home and the way domestic companies including the Crown corporation of TMX and foreign corporations have been stealing Indigenous land, breaking their treaties, dispossessing them from their territories, and fuelling the climate crisis, we are all subjected to today.

Windigo by Norval Morrisseau

Ojibwe activist and scholar Winona LaDuke calls this form of greed the Windigo disease: In Anishinaabe tradition understanding the need to avoid a culture of commodification, domination, exploitation, greed, consumption, and destruction of the planet is guided by the Windigo teachings. The Windigo is a cannibalistic being that is cursed with an overwhelming hunger that can never be satisfied, no matter how much it consumes. The Windigo wanders the Earth, destroys whatever it finds in its path, in an agonizing and unending quest for satisfaction, an unending quest for more land to pillage and more people to destroy in the name of profit and greed. ReconAfrica is Windigo. TMX is Windigo. Coastal Gas Link is Windigo. Line 3 is Windigo. Barrick Gold is Windigo. Enbridge is Windigo. Imperial Metals is Windigo. Anvil Mining Limited is Windigo. Suncor is Windigo. Teck Resources is Windigo. Canada and its extractivist economy are Windigo.

While Indigenous peoples across the globe have been treating the land as our sacred home corporations such as Recon have been treating it as a frontier of conquest. Unfortunately, we are running against severe ecological limits: this is called climate crisis and the collapse of living ecosystems as well as the extermination of Indigenous peoples across the world.

We denounce ReconAfrica and its crimes against the San people and the land. We denounce Recon’s environmental racism. We denounce the Canadian government’s complicity in allowing this company to exploit and potentially destroy million acres of the Kalahari Desert. We will resist along the San people who are the rightful custodians of their land against the Windigo disease called ReconAfrica. We will remain unwaveringly committed to Indigenous peoples in Turtle Island and their fierce resistance that began 500 years ago and still continues strong till they slain all the snakes of pipelines, and the Windigo of corporate greed in this continent and defend their land.

Litsa Chatzivasileiou is a sessional instructor at the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia and teaches critical race, Indigenous, diaspora and gender studies. Read other articles by Litsa.

This article was posted on Saturday, March 27th, 2021 at 9:08am and is filed under Botswana, Canada, Capitalism, Colonialism, Culture, Environment, Genocide, Namibia, Oil, Gas, Coal, Pipelines, Original Peoples, Racism, Resistance, Turtle Island.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2021/03/27/the-windigo-disease-of-resource-capitalism-and-global-dispossession-of-indigenous-peoples/feed/ 0 179594 https://www.radiofree.org/2021/03/10/history-shows-privatized-space-colonization-will-be-disastrous/ https://www.radiofree.org/2021/03/10/history-shows-privatized-space-colonization-will-be-disastrous/#respond Wed, 10 Mar 2021 02:14:25 +0000 https://www.radiofree.org/?p=171864 Elon Musk and his company SpaceX have become a regular feature in news cycles. SpaceX succeeded in landing a team of astronauts on the International Space Station in November 2020, in partnership with NASA. The next month, the company lost a rocket in an explosion while attempting to land after a test flight. Another rocket exploded during landing in early February. In mid-February, SpaceX launched sixty satellites as part of the Starlink program to provide broadband internet access to the globe, and is now working to double the speed of this internet service and extend it to most of the planet by the end of 2021. Additional crewed missions to the International Space Station are planned for the coming months, as is a four-person civilian-only space voyage.

These accomplishments and setbacks from SpaceX and the world’s richest man are the most recent in a long series of launches by the first private company to engage in spaceflight. SpaceX is pushing many new boundaries to popular acclaim, but they are also simply the most recent continuation of a decades-long effort to privatize space travel, albeit an effort that is accelerating in recent years.

Yet, while SpaceX may be developing beneficial new technologies and finding ways to lower the costs of space travel, their free-market perspective on space exploration will not provide the benefits they claim. Such privatization will only reproduce the Earth’s current exploitative economy and environmental destruction in outer space.

Our climate and economic crises today are not inevitable outcomes of human existence, or of human population growth as other space-obsessed technocrats like Jeff Bezos have argued. They are instead the result of a particular set of social and economic forces, mostly arising during the last five centuries, which constitute capitalism. Capitalism requires the exploitation of both nature and people, leads to outward expansion and colonization, and is really the root cause of climate change.

Yet instead of working to develop new social and economic structures here on Earth, Elon Musk is planning the colonization of Mars explicitly as a backup plan for Earth. He is not alone, as Jeff Bezos’ own aerospace company, Blue Origin, operates with the long-term goal of outsourcing destructive manufacturing to space in order to save Earth by shifting the exploitation of nature and people into orbit. With plans such as these, SpaceX and related companies are advocating escapism instead of dealing with the reality of deteriorating conditions on our own planet. By failing to acknowledge that privatizing industry and taking advantage of workers and the environment are the true causes of these Earthly crises, SpaceX will inadvertently reproduce the same conditions that are destroying the Earth in space.

We need not engage in speculation informed by science-fiction to know this, either. History is full of examples of privatized, for-profit exploration and colonization that have caused more harm than good. For some of the clearest lessons, we can look to the colonization of what is now the United States, just a few hundred years ago.

*****

This past autumn marked the four hundredth anniversary of the Mayflower landing on the shores of what is now Massachusetts. Stories of this ship and its Pilgrim passengers are familiar to many people who were educated in the American school system. As the common narrative goes, these Puritan settlers sought freedom from religious persecution in England, and thus set sail to the “New World.” The Mayflower arrived in North America, and finding the land beautiful and productive, the Pilgrims “fell upon their knees and blessed the God of Heaven” for delivering them to safety and freedom.

Yet key details of this story were not emphasized in our elementary school educations, such as the motivations behind the actual owners of the Mayflower. The Pilgrims did not own the ship they sailed upon, nor could they have afforded the voyage on their own. They needed investors, and the financial backers of this journey were not religious separatists seeking freedom, but some of the modern world’s first international venture capitalists. They funded the Pilgrims in the hope that they could reap the rewards of a profitable colony in North America capable of yielding cheap goods for European markets: largely fish, timber, and furs. The Pilgrims who established a colony at Plymouth may have been seeking liberty, but the financiers who backed them hardly cared. They were just in it for the money, and there was a lot to be made.

There was also a lot of damage to be done. Within fifteen years of the Mayflower making landfall, epidemic disease had decimated the Indigenous population of New England. Wars and genocide followed, with Indigenous peoples being killed and enslaved across the continent, before largely being forced onto reservations which still experience shockingly poor conditions today.

All the while, the land of New England was gradually being divided into privately owned parcels of land in a process known as enclosure. When European colonists arrived in New England, they entered into a variety of agreements with Native peoples pertaining to land rights. European settlers often paid Indigenous tribes or leaders for the right to limited use of tribal land, but the colonists often interpreted these transactions as wholesale, permanent purchase of land. These lands which were often communally owned by the tribe and managed as a “commons” – land or resources collectively owned by a community – were slowly carved up into privately owned parcels over the course of the 17th and 18th centuries.

This privatization of land ownership and the incorporation of colonial New England into a globalized market economy led to profound environmental destruction nearly immediately. Settlers cleared forests for timber and farmland, nearly deforesting much of New England by the early 20th century. Beaver and deer were all but exterminated in the region by the 19th century, hunted for their pelts which were sold for profit in European markets. As early as 1646, Portsmouth, Rhode Island established the first prohibitions on hunting deer out of season, recognizing that the species’ population was dwindling. All of this local extirpation and deforestation occurred within a few decades of European arrival in New England, while the Indigenous peoples of the region had hunted deer and beaver and managed their forests sustainably for millennia prior.

Exploitation of labor arose alongside this exploitation of nature. European settlers in 17th century New England exploited Indigenous hunters to acquire beaver furs, obtaining these pelts at little cost to themselves through the exchange of cheap cloth, metal trinkets, and shell beads. Merchants then in turn exploited these European settlers, paying only a small fraction of what these furs would be worth, and manufacturers back in Europe exploited their workers, paying them less than their labor was worth to produce products like fashionable felt hats for sale to the high-society aristocrats of the time.

This exploitation of nature and labor is not a bug, but a feature of privatized, for-profit capitalist ventures. It is inherent in a capitalist economic model, as history has shown time and again. If profit maximization for the benefit of investors and owners is the goal, as it was for the owners of the Mayflower and as it is for SpaceX, the necessary materials and labor must be cheaply obtained. If they are not cheap, earnings will suffer.

Colonization is a short-sighted solution to this problem. Colonialist companies and nations incorporate peripheral locations into their global economic system, where resources and labor can be cheaply obtained. The mercantile capitalism of the 17th century Atlantic world reflected this economic structure, with abundant timber, furs, and fish being obtained at low costs in New England and returned to European markets where they had greater value. Whether in the form of colonialist extraction of raw materials or the contemporary outsourcing of jobs, this search for cheap labor and resources is necessary for the perpetuation of capitalism, and remains the structuring force behind the global economy to this day.

This same outward expansion in search of cheap raw materials and labor is exactly what will end up driving the colonization of space. The Moon, Mars, and even asteroids may all become the peripheral, privatized, and exploited locations that permit corporations on Earth to profit. Similar to Indigenous understandings of certain land rights in precolonial New England, space is currently viewed as a global commons. This means that all people have rights to it and none should be able to claim exclusive rights over it. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 prevents any nation from claiming territory in space, although the treaty is known to be vague concerning the power of corporations in space and will certainly be challenged legally in the coming years. The enclosure and privatization of space may therefore lead not only to the direct and immediate exploitation of the environment and of people, but may also lay the groundwork for long-term systems of exploitation and dispossession.

*****

Elon Musk intends to colonize Mars as soon as possible. Thankfully, there is no potential for genocide of indigenous Martians as there was for Indigenous “Americans” and other Indigenous peoples around the world under European colonialism. Yet because the endeavor is privatized and operating under centuries-old colonialist mindsets, exploitation and destruction will assuredly manifest in other ways.

Mining and resource extraction is one avenue for profit, although Musk acknowledges that it is unclear if the natural resources on Mars could be extracted for the profit of companies on Earth. Even if the costs of transporting raw materials back to Earth are too great, natural resources extracted in space could be manufactured in space and shipped to Earth. Colonization of Mars may therefore differ slightly from cases of colonization on Earth, but the fundamental exploitative relationship remains.

Plus, there are other ways to profit besides the extraction of raw materials. Space tourism by wealthy thrill-seekers is poised to be a cash cow for companies, and a relatively autonomous SpaceX colony on Mars could also have a potentially great degree of freedom to profit from all sorts of business ventures, especially if they are legally independent of the United States government as has been hinted. Musk has also alluded to other “extraordinary entrepreneurial opportunity” on Mars, ranging from manufacturing to restaurants to tourism. However, it remains to be seen just how the financing, ownership, and taxation of these enterprises will be handled in what may be a semi-autonomous colony. In the case of English colonists arriving in North America, it was often the case that the company financing the colony claimed ownership over all property and all economic products of the settlers for a set number of years. Any colonists on a settled Mars will certainly be exploited as well, in one form or another, for the profit of shareholders and company executives. More than a colony of Earth, Mars may become a colony of SpaceX, and this is a troubling thought.

Resisting exploitation is exceedingly difficult in a privately funded, owned, and operated colony because such a colony is, by its very nature, undemocratic. Private companies like SpaceX are not democracies. CEOs are not elected representatives of the employees and business decisions are not voted upon by all workers. Thus, with a corporation calling the shots, settlers on Mars may have disturbingly little input in decision-making processes concerning their businesses and lives.

Fundamentally, the privatization of space exploration is not the beneficial solution that many think it is. It will simply result in a continuation of the colonial exploitation of nature and people as our capitalist global economy transcends our own atmosphere. Exploitation is an inherent part of such for-profit ventures in a capitalist system, and this will carry over into space. Privatized exploration of our solar system will be biased towards profitable ventures instead of those with public benefits and will certainly have numerous detrimental environmental impacts.

As private corporations begin to stake claims and enclose the commons of space, the rest of us lose our rights to it. We must avoid this outcome at all costs. Studying the repercussions of historical and contemporary colonialism on Earth permits us to engage with questions of space exploration from a decolonial and democratic perspective. Space cannot be privatized or exploited for profit, but must remain a commons for the benefit of all humanity.

• Image credit: Memory-alpha
• Elic M. Weitzel is a human ecologist, anthropologist, and archaeologist interested in understanding humans in their environmental and social contexts. He is affiliated with the Department of Anthropology at the University of Connecticut. Read other articles by Elic, or visit Elic’s website.

  This article was posted on Tuesday, March 9th, 2021 at 6:14pm and is filed under Capitalism, Colonialism, Mining, Original Peoples, Privatization, Science/Technology, Turtle Island.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2021/03/10/history-shows-privatized-space-colonization-will-be-disastrous/feed/ 0 171864 https://www.radiofree.org/2021/01/10/usa-unsafe-at-any-speed/ https://www.radiofree.org/2021/01/10/usa-unsafe-at-any-speed/#respond Sun, 10 Jan 2021 16:15:24 +0000 https://www.radiofree.org/?p=148249 The number of gun sales in Oregon by Christmas Day, 2020, was a whopping 4,000,000. The year before, an anemic 300,000.

It is the law of the gun. Guns in jets, guns in bombers, guns in schools, guns here on the streets, in Salem, at the Capital, guns in Grand Theft Auto V, guns in purses, guns in boudoirs, guns in locker-rooms, guns in nurseries, guns in  churches, guns in cars, guns in drones, guns guns guns.

Dalton Trumbo, quote from Johnny Got His Gun :

An equation: 40,000 dead young men = 3,000 tons of bone and flesh, 124,000 pounds of brain matter, 50,000 gallons of blood, 1,840,000 years of life that will never be lived, 100,000 children that will never be born (the last we can afford: there are too many starving children in the world already)….

Did anybody ever come back from the dead any single one of the millions who got killed did any one of them ever come back and say by god I’m glad I’m dead because death is always better than dishonor? Did they say I’m glad I died to make the world safe for democracy? Did they say I like death better than losing liberty? Did any of them ever say it’s good to think I got my guts blown out for the honor of my country? Did any of them ever say look at me I’m dead but I died for decency and that’s better than being alive? Did any of them ever say here I am I’ve been rotting for two years in a foreign grave but it’s wonderful to die for your native land? Did any of them say hurray I died for womanhood and I’m happy see how I sing even though my mouth is choked with worms?

Of course, the sideshow bantering about the attack on the Capitol, the five dead in DC (“Four Dead in Ohio”), who did what, is it a coup, are the halls of Congress sacred and hallowed, and something never seen before in the history of the United Snakes of America.

Of course, hysterical bantering on both sides of the political manure pile. Then all those “defund the police” woke people now wanting to throw the book at anyone and everyone at the “event,” even those milling around, or those who just came in for a selfie and had nothing to do with the ramming.

This is an inside job, of course — white nationalists in the police department, and a bunch of others flashing badges to get inside the Rotunda.

Impeach again, do a 25th amendment thing, call out the Guard, more laws, more fences, more surveillance tools, more eye, face, skin recognition AI. The trillions being made, passed back and forth, and the people with MAGA hats, and the people with Biden Buttons, the moldy media, the entire shit show really doesn’t give us a look at the new normal. This is old hand, the Cool Hand Luke world of Indian Slaughtering and Slave Torturing.

Oh, the upside world of right-side thinking — Many people arrested during the J20 protests of Trump’s inauguration, as you will recall, faced decades in prison for breaking storefront windows. Then, those two Black Lives Matter protesters who are lawyers, Colin Mattis and Urooj Rahman, went to town on an empty NYPD police car (vandalizing it) and are now facing federal charges with a sentence of 45 years to life.

The slippery slope that is the United Snakes of America. Lock her up. Abu Ghraib them all. Throw the key away.

Look, I have been thrown down and handcuffed several times over the years for, get this, peaceful protests. Protests where we had a fucking license (parade permit) to do our little First Amendment show.

In Arizona, in Texas, in Washington, in Oregon. I have been thrown down and cuffed as a teacher. As a frigging journalist. Try and protest the timber tyrants, or push for dam removal, or how about protesting Sea World or a zoo or circus for their elephant imprisonments.

I guarantee, those Proud Boys, those MAGA women we see at events, at the Capitol, all those bearded bikers, those blue-collar millionaires, come on, liberals, there is no dialogue. They never has been. You think there is dialogue here?

So, that was a whopping 64 years ago, the year I was born.  We can go back farther:

Notice the smiles:

Sure, remarkable what the old deplorables did at the Capitol?

Well, let’s go back to 1919, when a white mob rioted through the streets of Washington, DC, while cops passively stood by and President Woodrow Wilson remained silent. A Black community in what’s now the Shaw neighborhood (Utah Avenue and Logan Circle) drove back the rampagers. Forty people were killed over a three day period. Who incited it? It took more than a 100 years for the esteemed Washington Post to admit to inciting and abetting it. The NAACP wrote a scorching letter to Wilson, the most racist president of the 20th century:

the shame put upon the country by the mobs, including United States soldiers, sailors, and marines, which have assaulted innocent and unoffending negroes in the national capital. Men in uniform have attacked negroes on the streets and pulled them from streetcars to beat them. Crowds are reported …to have directed attacks against any passing negro.

I don’t know. I hate to pull rank, but I am surrounded by people who to put it lightly have been so insulated, so cloistered, so self-isolating, that the things I have done on the streets, and the people I ran with and those I worked with and those I still work with, and the ground-truthing, and, well, I can’t say so much more here because I have a job that requires me to have a spotless record, of sorts. I won’t even get into what expungement means to me.

But I am hearing these bizarre things about the entire Capitol Siege, and alas, more censorship, more incarceration, more DA’s, more scrutiny, and, sure, we have a messed up country, but it has ALWAYS been that. The elites and the so-called liberal class have not been warriors of true egalitarianism and Marxist economy and organization. This here country is all about opportunities, and hoarders, and many of those “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” la-la land folk, well, they are dream hoarders. I guarantee many of those caught in the scandals involving paying bribes to get their vaunted children in the best schools are/were/will be Obama-Hillary-Biden backers.

The country was set up for a gilded age, followed by another and another gilded age. Now it’s Bitcoin Age, with the Digital Technologists and the Millions Working on Apps and AI and Robotics, well, they are right smack at the top of that next Fourth Industrial Revolution Gilded Few.

There is no housing guaranteed. There is no medical care guarantee. Teeth rotting? Good luck, Charlie. Bosses strip away any semblance of our rights, and we can organize into collective bargaining units without $2000 an hour legal outfits swooping in with their Leer Jets to denigrate and dissolve solidarity through every trick of the book.

The son-in-law Jared Kushner’s old man, pardoned. For what? Here we have it, no, the chosen elite:

Jared’s father was actually prosecuted back in the early 2000s by Chris Christie, then the US Attorney for New Jersey.

While under investigation, Charles hatched a revenge plot against his brother-in-law, William Schulder, for cooperating with prosecutors in a tax evasion case against him. Charles hired a hooker to have sex with Schulder in a Jersey motel room, where a hidden camera was rolling. The elder Kushner then sent the footage to Schulder’s wife, Ester, who is Charles’ sister.

The revenge plot backfired … the Schulders gave the footage to prosecutors, who tracked down the prostitute. She eventually snitched on Charles.

Christie recalled Charles’ plot last year, calling it “one of the most loathsome, disgusting crimes” he ever prosecuted.

Look, there are people even on sites like DV who really believe there is a dialogue to be had with those Trumpies. This is the first sign of weakness and sickness. I live in a rural local. I have lived in big cities but spent much time in flyover country, much time with ranchers, blue collars types, farmers, construction folk, pipe fitters, cement workers, and more. I guarantee, I have had hundreds of conversations with people who truly believe they are the great white race, that the great USA is a land of KKK milk and Slaver honey.

Flags that appeared at the MAGA-Rage: Trump flag, Gadsden Flag, American flag, Blue Lives Matter Flag, monarchist Iranian flag, Confederate flag, Israeli flag. But, sorry Robert Reich, didn’t see one flag for the Russian Federation.

Old Mitch, in his youth:

Then there is the quintessential white hope, Trump, pushing off the Medal of Freedom to South African golfer Gary Player, who believed that South African blacks were not as evolved as his white ass: Here, endorsing apartheid in his 1966 book Grand Slam Golf:

I must say now, and clearly, that I am of the South Africa of Verwoerd and apartheid … a nation which … is the product of its instinct and ability to maintain civilised values and standards amongst the alien barbarians.

Barbarians, one and all. Think of all the people working 80 or 90 hours a week, for staffing agencies. Mostly women, pounded and pounding the keyboard, the spreadsheet, the phone, to get people jobs in the warehouse, manufacturing, trucking, logistics et al business.

In a Time of Covid-19. Think of all the people trying to survive, waiting for the revenuers and the repo men and women and the eviction notices from those Black Live Do Not Matter Blue Lives Matter deputies. Knocking on the trailer door at 10 pm. Serving papers after millions of papers served.

The cops, lording over the forced evictions, the cars and furniture and appliances hauled off. Their, in their SWAT Team gear, fancy squad SUV, amazing, stoic and mean, while the babies and children and old people in wheelchairs are carted off.

Scenes from the Nazi’s coming into France and overtaking homes, belongings.

Thuggery.

My aged friend, Barbara, 71, writes this to me today:

Meanwhile, Wall Street is booming, Bitcoin is soaring, and Big Tech is consolidating to fend against anti-trust actions.
Co-ordinated efforts? Seems to be the PUSH for the privatization of EVERYTHING as good soldiers for “democracy..  (little d)
All the world is a STAGE, Paul.  All this nonsense of defending anything is a ruse….
The media PLATFORMS have never made so much money all over the world…this is a gold rush…they won’t be stopping this anytime soon.

And then I just have to go back a few centuries, and remember the number 1.5 billion. 1,500,000,00 acres. Stolen. From Native Americans:

Their tenuous grasp of the subject is regrettable if unsurprising, given that the conquest of the continent is both essential to understanding the rise of the US and deplorable. Acre by acre, the dispossession of native peoples made the US a transcontinental power. To visualize this story, I created ‘The Invasion of America’, an interactive time-lapse map of the nearly 500 cessions that the US carved out of native lands on its westward march to the shores of the Pacific.

I guarantee those MAGA’s and Deplorables and their Backers are not shedding any tears for the First Nations? No tears for slaves or the legacy of generational trauma. Is it a brain wiring problem? Is it education? Family influences? Look at that map above.

I also guarantee those writers and prognosticators are not having real dialogue with redneck lumber guys and gals, redneck fishers, redneck construction gals and guys. Ex-military. Current cops.

Europe’s 20th century atrocities are easier for most people to envision than the dispossession of Native Americans. Stalin’s gulags destroyed millions of people in the 1930s and ’40s; Germany systematically murdered two-thirds of the continent’s Jews during the Second World War; Yugoslavia devolved into a bloodbath of so-called ‘ethnic cleansing’ in the early 1990s. Accounts of those episodes describe the victims as men, women and children. By contrast, the language used to chronicle the dispossession of native peoples – ‘Indian’, ‘chief’, ‘warrior’, ‘tribe’, ‘squaw’ (as native women used to be called) – conjures up crude stereotypes and clouds the mind, making it difficult to see the wars of extermination, forced marches and expulsions for what they were. The story, which used to be celebratory, is now more often tragic and sentimental, rooted in the belief that the dispossession of native peoples was unjust but inevitable. 
— Claudio Saunt, Richard B Russell Professor in American History, co-director of the Center for Virtual History, and associate director of the Institute of Native American Studies, all at the University of Georgia. His latest book is Unworthy Republic (2020). He lives in Athens, Georgia.

The post USA: Unsafe at any Speed first appeared on Dissident Voice.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2021/01/10/usa-unsafe-at-any-speed/feed/ 0 148249 https://www.radiofree.org/2020/12/11/irresponsible-happenings-juukan-gorge-rio-tinto-and-the-never-again-report/ https://www.radiofree.org/2020/12/11/irresponsible-happenings-juukan-gorge-rio-tinto-and-the-never-again-report/#respond Fri, 11 Dec 2020 19:34:54 +0000 https://www.radiofree.org/?p=138176 “Never Again.”  These words are used with boring, stage managed frequency by political and company figures who should know better.  They title the interim report from the Joint Standing Committee on Northern Australia investigating the destruction of rock shelters at Juukan Gorge in Western Australia by Rio Tinto.  This act of spectacular cultural vandalism destroyed sites 46,000 years old.  The company initially thought it was worth the bill: AU$135 million worth of iron ore.

The efforts of Rio Tinto were given that more punch as they took place on the eve of Reconciliation Week on May 24.  They were approved through existing mining laws long shaped by wily developers and land users.  The company had previously boasted of its rapport with the local indigenous peoples, including the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura (PKKP).  But a bleak picture emerged.  PKKP concerns, according to the company’s statement, “did not arise through the engagements that have taken place over many years under the agreement that governs our operations in the country.”  (Rio was trimming the truth on that one.)  Flaws in the company’s decision-making structure were detected.  There was insufficient oversight.  The London-based head of corporate relations, Simone Niven, had little idea what the Juukan Gorge caves were before the blasting took place.

In October, committee members were told that Rio Tinto had been all too keen to muzzle traditional owners in their efforts to save the rock shelters.  Amply lawyered, the company shot off letters warning that agitators could not speak publicly about their cause.  The PKKP were also told that an application for an emergency halt to the works to the federal government could only take place with Rio Tinto’s permission, and giving 30 days’ notice.  As Carol Meredith, chief executive of the PKKP Aboriginal Corporation recalls, “What we were reminded of by Rio’s lawyers was that we were not able to engage seeking out an emergency declaration that perhaps would have stopped proceedings, because of our claim-wide participation agreement.”

Rio Tinto does not come out shining.  It was found to be strategic and calculating in approaching its mining, taking a “legalistic approach to heritage protection,” and adopting a self-interested approach in relying on “outdated laws and unfair agreements”.  “The evidence before the committee demonstrates severe deficiencies in the company’s heritage management practices, internal communication protocols and relationship practices with the PKKP.”  The company’s own board review had done little to address them.  The commercial incentive remained all-conquering.

The report takes issue with the cobwebbed Aboriginal Heritage Act, a West Australian law from 1972.  The statute is meant to protect and preserve Aboriginal sites, a purpose it serves shabbily.  While section 17 of the current Act makes the destruction, damage or altering to an Aboriginal site a criminal offence, Section 18 provides a route of dispensation for the aspiring cultural vandal.  Breaches of the Act (in other words, damage to the site) will be excused provided the applicant seeks consent from the Aboriginal Cultural Material Committee (ACMC).  The ACMC, in turn, assesses the importance and cultural significance of the site, conveying the notice to the Minister with a written recommendation on how to proceed.  In making a decision, the Minister has full discretion.

A draft bill, acknowledged by the committee, would remove Section 18 of the Act.  The report also recommends that new legislation involve traditional owners in the decision.  A commitment to stay all actions under Section 18 permissions obtained by Rio Tinto is sought till “they are properly reviewed to ensure that free, prior and informed consent has been obtained from Traditional Owners and is current”.  The new legislation should also prohibit agreements “which seek to restrict Traditional Owners from exercising their rights to seek protections under State and Commonwealth laws.”

Gag clauses or restrictions in agreements as deployed by Rio Tinto to stifle protest are also recommended for removal.  Committee members also list a few other recommendations for the mining giant. These include negotiating a restitution package for the destruction of the rock shelters with the PKKP and full reconstruction and remediation of the site “at its own expense, with guidance and oversight from the PKKP, acknowledging Rio Tinto’s undertaken in this regard and the steps taken to date.”

All mining companies currently operating in Western Australia, whether or not on Native Title land are also told to undertake independent reviews of existing agreements between them and the Traditional Owners, while also committing “to ongoing regular review to ensure consistency with best practice standards.”

The predations of Rio Tinto opened up cataracts of condemnation.  Finding individual villainy would be tempting but inaccurate.  The company operates in an industry deaf, and increasingly deafened, to social policy.  A co-authored piece in The Conversation by academics specialising in social responsibility and mining (oxymoronic flair is rife in this field) claims that “community relations departments [in the industry] have seen sizeable reductions.”

As with other entities driven by free market avarice, mining companies are also cool to the idea of greater protections for Aboriginal heritage sites, policed by federal regulations.  BHP, Rio Tinto, Roy Hill, Woodside and Fortescue Metals have told the inquiry that agreements with traditional owners have generally worked.  Juukan Gorge was merely an aberration.  Such giants remain taken with the fantasy that their arrangements arise from positions of equal bargaining power and adequate resources.  These agreements, according to Jamie Lowe of the National Native Title Council, “enable the pretence that when destruction is authorised, it is what traditional owners would have agreed had legislation given them the right to say no.”

The Australian parliamentarians are inadvertently right.  This will never happen again, because the rock shelters have ceased to exist.  History and cultural traces, eradicated.  A spot in time, never to be repeated.  Harm caused by the mining industry to cultural heritage will simply continue in new forms, with consent manufactured.  Till the laws are changed and demand for natural resources slides, companies such as Rio Tinto will continue milking and reaping, whatever pull social responsibility has.

This article was posted on Friday, December 11th, 2020 at 11:34am and is filed under Australia, Cultural Vandalism, Mining, Original Peoples.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2020/12/11/irresponsible-happenings-juukan-gorge-rio-tinto-and-the-never-again-report/feed/ 0 138176 https://www.radiofree.org/2020/12/03/decolonizing-thanksgiving-and-supporting-indigenous-peoples/ https://www.radiofree.org/2020/12/03/decolonizing-thanksgiving-and-supporting-indigenous-peoples/#respond Thu, 03 Dec 2020 15:13:24 +0000 https://www.radiofree.org/?p=131560

This week, as some people in the United States celebrated the mythical ‘Thanksgiving’ dinner, Indigenous Peoples held a National Day of Mourning and continued their resistance to defend the land and water. As Native American, Matt Remle, writes:

Despite colonial efforts to exterminate, terminate, relocate, and assimilate Indigenous populations, Native communities continue to resist efforts to both desecrate Unci Maka and strip Native peoples of their languages, spirituality and communities.

Settler colonialism continues to this day in the United States and around the world as do resistance efforts to reclaim what has been lost, including land, access to sacred sites, clean water, culture and sovereignty. Remle makes the point that non-Indigenous people benefit from this resistance. Around the world, Indigenous people are leading the way to end exploitation and build a better future for all of us.

Bridge blockade in Halifax (Twitter)

Over the past week, Indigenous Peoples held national days of action in Canada. In Vancouver, activists shut down the port. They erected tents and lit a ceremonial fire in a major intersection to call attention to destructive projects like the Trans Mountain Pipeline and the need for “meaningful reconciliation for historic and recent injustices committed by Canada.” A solidarity protest against the Trans Mountain Pipeline was held by Extinction Rebellion activists who shut down a railroad track.

Across the country in Halifax, people blockaded a major bridge in solidarity with the Mi’kmaq and their struggle to defend their land and way of life. Virtual events were also held, and people sent solidarity messages on social media using the hashtag #CoastToCoast.

In the United States, protectors locked down to a pipeline pump station in South Dakota to protest the Keystone XL pipeline. Protectors also locked down to stop construction of the Line 3 Pipeline by Enbridge in Minnesota. The Trump administration recently gave the final permits to build Line 3.

Be aware that the Trump administration is also rushing through permits to give the San Carlos Apache Nation’s sacred Oak Flat to Rio Tinto, a copper mining company with a history of destructive behavior.

The Warriors of the Sunrise, made up of mostly Shinnecock Tribal elders in New York, are ‘occupying’ their land in The Hamptons to protest a state lawsuit against them over a monument they erected that also advertises Indigenous-owned businesses to wealthy people traveling to their vacation homes. The Shinnecock are struggling with extreme poverty and lack of rights because they are not federally-recognized.

In St. Paul, Minnesota, protesters are demanding justice for Karina Chosa, a young Indigenous mother who was struck and killed by a teenage driver. The driver, who is white, has not been detained or charged. Local organizers report there have been several incidents where prosecutors have not held white people accountable for injuring or killing people of color.

On a positive note, four tribes around the Klamath River recently won the removal of four out of six dams that are polluting the water and destroying the salmon population, which they depend on. This will be the largest dam removal in the world. I spoke with Regina Chichizola on Clearing the FOG about the campaign, which is an excellent model of an Indigenous-led struggle.

The United States’ holiday called Thanksgiving is another opportunity for non-Indigenous people to work towards reconciliation and reparation for the American Genocide. Indigenous people refer to the holiday as “Thanks-taking” because of all that was stolen by settlers.

There are many cultures that celebrate the harvest in the fall and give thanks for it. The United States’ version of this is problematic because it has been used as an opportunity to whitewash the American Genocide. It teaches children a mythical history in which occupying settlers were good people who treated Native Americans well. It covers over the facts that the United States was built using stolen wealth and chattel slavery. This is the foundation that made the US one of the wealthiest nations in the world while many Native Americans live in extreme poverty.

That same mindset of white supremacy, racism and capitalism continues today. It dominates the structures and systems that make this country what it is from the worldview and cultural norms that are taught in our schools to the policies and practices that oppress and exploit Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) to the US’ abusive treatment of people in predominantly non-white countries.

All of our struggles are connected and our hopes for a better future are inextricably linked to struggles for liberation. None of us can be free until we are all free. The people best suited to lead us to freedom are those who have been engaged in these struggles for centuries and who have survived with their humanity intact.

It is nothing less than heroic that BIPOC have suffered so greatly and yet are willing to work for the collective good. The reality is that we can’t end settler-colonialism by mimicking it. We need alternative systems and ways to structure our society. Indigenous nations provide many different models.

Jason Umtuch carries supplies during a mutual aid drop-off to the Warm Springs community.  Lukwaiya  (Mitchell Lira).

Just as people have worked to stop the celebration of Christopher Columbus and replace Columbus Day with Indigenous People’s Day, we must work to change Thanksgiving. It can still be a day to appreciate family and all that we do have, but it must not be wrapped in myths. Instead, it is an opportunity to learn about Indigenous nations and to perform acts of support.

Acts could include education about the truth of the American Genocide, learning about the history of the land where you live, participating in mutual aid projects for Indigenous peoples or buying from Indigenous-owned businesses. Visit Truthsgiving for more information and ideas.

The reality is that we don’t have to wait for next Thanksgiving to do these actions. We can support Indigenous people every day through the above actions and by decolonizing our activism as Regina Chichizola explains in the Clearing the FOG interview.

The post Decolonizing Thanksgiving And Supporting Indigenous Peoples first appeared on Dissident Voice.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2020/12/03/decolonizing-thanksgiving-and-supporting-indigenous-peoples/feed/ 0 131560 https://www.radiofree.org/2020/11/04/pbs-and-other-u-s-media-are-spreading-disinformation-about-nicaragua/ https://www.radiofree.org/2020/11/04/pbs-and-other-u-s-media-are-spreading-disinformation-about-nicaragua/#respond Wed, 04 Nov 2020 05:06:37 +0000 https://www.radiofree.org/?p=109363 In 36 years of living in Latin America I have learned that any time a country changes its conditions so that poverty decreases and the standard of living improves, the United States wages some kind of war on that country. It has waged unconventional warfare on Nicaragua since the Sandinistas returned to the presidency in 2007 providing millions of dollars to nongovernmental organizations, more than 25 different media, three “human rights” groups and many individuals whose job is to lie for their salaries.  Since 2017, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) has disbursed over $89 million with the primary focus on “governance” and promoting challenges to the Nicaraguan government. Another aspect of US aggression is the economic sanctions. The U.S. uses its influence to oppose any loan, financial or technical assistance to the government of Nicaragua from international banks and organizations.

In July this year, USAID contracted a US company to head up the current phase of their war through the November 2021 elections. The plan is titled RAIN – Responsive Action in Nicaragua. It is a thinly veiled plan to mount domestic and international pressure for “regime change” in Nicaragua. RAIN is a plan to undermine public order with actions [violent and otherwise] before, during and after the 2021 elections. The document suggests there is a crisis and “economic debacle” with potential to become a “humanitarian emergency” due to Covid-19. Since March the opposition focused most of their attention on telling lies in the media. This strategy had some success internationally but not much at home since Nicaragua has the lowest Covid mortality rate in the region.

The opposition is now on to new topics – like trying to spread the lie that some of the grass-fed beef that is exported to the US is from Indigenous land supposedly stolen in recent years. Although Nicaragua has had some problem with this, it has been much less under the Sandinista government than under the three previous US-supported governments.

One reason the government has a good relationship with much of the Indigenous is their commitment to granting title to the original territories. There are now autonomous indigenous governments elected according to their ancestral forms of organization. There are 23 original territories with 314 communities and 200,000 people. Nearly 38 thousand square kilometers have been titled to the indigenous groups.  They have non-transferrable titles, helping to curb illegal land sales and deforestation. The authorities that administer these lands are designated by the communities themselves.

This is 31% of the national territory and more than 55% of the territory of the Caribbean Coast where 61% have some type of forest. Nicaragua has gained great credibility in environmental issues and was just voted to be part of the World Bank’s Carbon Fund Board (Informe Pastran, 23 Oct. 2020).

There is now a special battalion patrolling these extremely large expanses of land in coordination with many of the Miskito and Mayagna communities.  Since 2007 special emphasis has been given to improving every aspect of life in the Autonomous Regions increasing dramatically health and school facilities, electricity, potable water, sanitation, good paved roads and decreasing every aspect of poverty.

There are internal disputes related to selling land among the 75 different communities of the Mayagna. Their communities elect their own authorities. But things aren’t perfect and the violence is sometimes internal. On January 29, Gustavo Sebastian, president of the Mayagna indigenous territory government, said that a group of Mayagnas shot at a group of community members in an act of revenge for a December 2019 action. Four men were killed, two hospitalized with injuries and 12 homes burned. Then on February 12 the police captured the leader of the group responsible for the January violence in Alal and Wakuruskasna. (Radio La Primerisima, 12 February 2020)

On October 22, Solón Guerrero, director of the Federation of Nicaraguan Cattlemen’s Association, stated that they will present documents that prove that their group signed agreements to protect the reserves held by the indigenous populations. The executive director of the Nicaraguan Chamber of the Meat Industry, Juan Bautista Velásquez, said that the cattle that are processed are identified with two tags, because the cattle come from farms certified by the Institute for Agricultural Protection and Health (IPSA). He said that if the North American market was cancelled, more than 600 thousand people would lose their jobs and 140 thousand producers would be affected.

This misleading story is being promoted by members of Nicaragua’s opposition who are paid with USAID or NED (National Endowment for Democracy) funds. It is a new attempt to interfere with and hurt Nicaragua. Now it is under the guise of protecting indigenous people. While it is true that things are not perfect in Nicaragua, the advances and protections for Indigenous people are much better than in most other countries. Certainly the U.S. treatment of indigenous people is no model to follow. While there are periodic incidents of friction or conflict in the vast expanse of the autonomous zones, this has little to do with the cattle raising and beef export industry where hundreds of thousands of Nicaraguans work.

This article was posted on Tuesday, November 3rd, 2020 at 9:06pm and is filed under “Regime Change”, Daniel Ortega, Disinformation, Elections, Land Use, Lies, Media, Militarism, Nicaragua, Original Peoples, Sanctions, United States.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2020/11/04/pbs-and-other-u-s-media-are-spreading-disinformation-about-nicaragua/feed/ 0 109363 https://www.radiofree.org/2020/11/02/sawing-the-sacred-felling-the-djab-wurrung-directions-tree/ https://www.radiofree.org/2020/11/02/sawing-the-sacred-felling-the-djab-wurrung-directions-tree/#respond Mon, 02 Nov 2020 07:30:17 +0000 https://www.radiofree.org/?p=108273

Djab Wurrung women are in an abusive relationship with Victoria’s government.

— Sissy Eileen Austin, The Guardian, September 14, 2019

It was a penultimate day in the Australian state of Victoria.  The state government had announced that some of harshest coronavirus lockdown restrictions in the developed world would be easing.  Melbourne’s restaurants, bars and cafes could resume inviting customers through their doors.  Retail outlets could reopen.  Confident claims of “crushing the virus” frothed and bubbled on social media.

This elevation of mood provided ideal distraction for another ugly event.  Early last week also saw the arrest of 60 people protesting the removal of a fiddleback tree deemed sacred to some members of the Djab Wurrung people.  It was akin, one academic suggested, to seeing Notre Dame cathedral in Paris burn.  The tree was the fruit of a practice involving the placing of a child’s placenta, with a seed, into the earth.  This is not the only one: other birthing trees of even older vintage are threatened by the Western Highway upgrade.  Over centuries, they have provided sanctuary for the safe delivery of generations of Djab Wurrung people.

The removal of the 350 year old “directions tree” – a spiritual site for guidance – is seen as cold and necessary business, part of a widening of a section of the Western Highway between Buangor and Ararat.  It is also a stretch of highway connecting Melbourne and Adelaide, a bloody section of road known for fatalities and injuries.  In the words of Premier Daniel Andrews, “If we waited around for an absolute consensus, then that deadly stretch of road would go unimproved, and we would see more people dying.”

As a spokesperson for Victoria Police explained in a statement, “Police have a strong dedicated presence along the Western Highway today as part of an operation to remove camps and protestors from restricted areas as highway work construction continues between Buangor and Ararat.”

Since 2018, the Djab Wurrung Heritage Protection Embassy has had a presence along the existing highway between Ararat and Buangor, a generally peaceful guerrilla faction protecting cultural, sacred growth.  The protest group sees the contested area as “part of the song line” bolstered by the findings of artefacts.  Were the full upgrade to be implemented along the 12km stretch, “3,000 trees will be gone, including the sacred trees and their protected habitats.”

According to Greens senator Lidia Thorpe, the destruction of such trees was tantamount to inflicting spiritual murder.  Their forms evoked human shape – such as the “grandfather tree” resembling “an old man guarding” the birth site.  “When these trees, these places are destroyed, it’s like a death.  We can’t get them back.”

With the eviction by police last week, one of the embassy members, Amanda Mahomet, claimed to have been expelled from her home.  “It’s been our home not by choice, for 3 years.  Everything you have physically, mentally and spiritually has been ripped from us in a matter of minutes, and to watch innocent friends and family there protecting country forcibly and violently removed was traumatic.”

Journalist Madeline Hayman-Reber of the Gomeroi yinnar was furious and inconsolable.  “The Andrews Government had used today as a political distraction from the desecration of a sacred Djab Wurrung women’s site, to silence the voices of Djab Wurrung mob, women and allies.”  The action was “completely sinister.  While the colony is celebrating, mob are in mourning.”

The picture is a more clotted one.  The Victorian government claims that the felled tree did not have cultural significance – at least to the members of the Eastern Maar Aboriginal Corporation, who were consulted in assessing the site.  Aged and majestic as it was, local elders failed to detect the standout markers of cultural significance present in other vegetation.  In a statement by the EMAC, the tree sported “no cultural modifications” and was “unlikely to have pre-dated European civilisation”.  In February 2019, the government did make a concession of sorts, agreeing to change the originally planned route of the highway.  In the process, 15 trees inside the boundary were spared.

As with other battles over matters of cultural importance, development objectives clash with local political differences.  Thorpe is adamant that the Corporation did not have a monopoly of a voice for all Djab Wurrung people.  Lawyer Michael Kennedy, who represents Thorpe’s mother, Marjorie, wonders why a cheaper route which would follow the old northern part of the highway was not taken.  The reply from Major Road Projects Victoria has been unequivocal: that route fell short of design standards and environmental protection; 8,000 trees would have also been lost, as opposed to the current number of 3,000.

To date, the protesters have had some measure of success in the courts.  Despite the arrests and the loss of the directions tree, an interim injunction was granted by a Victorian Supreme Court judge halting the road project till the next court hearing on November 19.  Federal intervention, however, has not been forthcoming.

The executive officer of the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Legal Services, Roxanne Moore, has also demanded an inquiry into the circumstances leading to the arrests at the embassy camp.  She had her eye on “the use of these COVID-19 powers by Victoria Police” and instances of police violence.  “We really need to see some serious scrutiny being put on to police actions for the Djab Wurrung protest.”

Victoria Police subsequently confirmed that a number of protesters were arrested for breaching COVID-19 regulations, yet another instance of protests being quelled by the use of pandemic powers.  In a statement, the police claimed that there was no inappropriate use of force, or “issues requiring medical attention”.  Gabriel Lillington, the last protestor at the site, described a rough, workmanlike approach by the authorities in removing members of the embassy.  The police “just tried to read out a trespass statement and they immediately started forcibly moving protesters and the Indigenous Djab Wurrung people.”

The message of reconciliation has certainly taken a concerted beating.  Rhetorically, the Andrews government has been pleased to pursue negotiations towards a treaty.  Functionally, and practically, the agenda for development continues, marked by weaknesses in the Traditional Owner Settlement Act and the legal structure on protecting sacred sites.  As with other instances of sacred site desecration in Australia, the pattern is similar: proposed development, potentially destructive to the site in question; claims of full consultation with elders and local community members; disagreement among indigenous members.

For Djab Wurrung woman Sissy Eileen Austin, this was all too much.  She promises to step down from the First Peoples’ Assembly, the body representing aboriginal interests in the Victorian treaty negotiations.  The felling of the fiddleback, and the removal of the protestors, has soured an already troubled process.  “There are conflicting agendas here,” writes Austin, “one where the government is supporting the progression of the treaty and the other where they’re comfortable in proceeding with the irreversible destruction of significant cultural heritage.” A relationship complex and abusive.

The post Sawing the Sacred: Felling the Djab Wurrung Directions Tree first appeared on Dissident Voice.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2020/11/02/sawing-the-sacred-felling-the-djab-wurrung-directions-tree/feed/ 0 108273 https://www.radiofree.org/2020/11/01/system-fail-4-landback/ https://www.radiofree.org/2020/11/01/system-fail-4-landback/#respond Sun, 01 Nov 2020 14:57:45 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?p=108119 by subMedia / November 1st, 2020

[embedded content]

In this episode we take a look at the many Indigenous-led struggles currently taking place across Turtle Island.

For more information on how you can follow and support these struggles:

Indigenous People Day of Rage
indigenouspeoplesdayofrage.org/
indigenousaction.org

O’odham Anti-Border Collective
facebook.com/AntiBorderCollective/

Justice for Joyce
#JusticePourJoyce
#JusticeForJoyce
gofundme.com/f/justice-pour-joycejustice-for-joyce/

Mi’kma’ki
#AllEyesOnMikmaki

Secwepemc
#StopTMX
#TinyHouseWarriors
#Secwepemc
tinyhousewarriors.com/

Wet’suwet’en
#WetsuwetenStrong
YintahAccess.com/
facebook.com/wetsuwetenstrong

#1492LandBackLane
facebook.com/1492LandBackLane/

gofundme.com/f/legal-fund-1492-land-back-lane

This article was posted on Sunday, November 1st, 2020 at 6:57am and is filed under Canada, Colonialism, Original Peoples, Racism, Resistance, Turtle Island, Video.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2020/11/01/system-fail-4-landback/feed/ 0 108119 https://www.radiofree.org/2020/10/14/breaking-wetsuweten-women-occupy-pipeline-drillsite-to-stop-cgl-from-drilling-beneath-their-sacred-headwaters/ https://www.radiofree.org/2020/10/14/breaking-wetsuweten-women-occupy-pipeline-drillsite-to-stop-cgl-from-drilling-beneath-their-sacred-headwaters/#respond Wed, 14 Oct 2020 02:58:50 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?p=98349 The standoff is ongoing

by UnistotenCamp / October 13th, 2020

We call for solidarity actions from coast to coast. Take action where you stand, or come stand with us on the yintah.

— Gidimt’en Checkpoint

---

Support on the ground needed!

Full Press release from Gidim’ten Checkpoint: The access road to Coastal GasLink’s drill site at the Wedzin Kwa river was destroyed. Blockades have been set up and sites have been occupied to stop the drilling under the sacred headwaters that nourish the Wet’suwet’en Yintah and all those within its catchment area. Cas Yikh and supporters have gained control of the area and refuse to allow this destruction to continue. Days ago CGL destroyed our ancient village site, Ts’elkay Kwe. When Gidimt’en Checkpoint spokesperson Sleydo’ attempted to monitor the CGL archaeological team and contest the destruction of Wet’suwet’en cultural heritage she was aggressively intimdated by CGL security guards. Tensions have continued to rise on the Yintah as CGL pushes a reckless and destructive construction schedule with the support of private security and the RCMP. Now, CGL is ready to begin drilling beneath our sacred headwaters, Wedzin Kwa. We know that this would be disastrous, not only for Wet’suwet’en people, but for all living beings supported by the Wedzin Kwa, and for the communities living downstream. Wedzin Kwa is a spawning ground for salmon and a critical source of pristine drinking water. “our way of life is at risk. Wedzin Kwa is the river that feeds all of Wet’suwet’en territory and gives life to our nation.” -Sleydo’, Gidimte’en Checkpoint Spokesperson As Coastal Gaslink Continues to trespass, we will do everyting in our power to protect our waters and to uphold our laws. Gidimt’en Checkpoint has issued a call for support, asking people to travel to Cas Yikh Territory to Stand with them.”

Video Update from Yintah_access Warriors Watch Over Wedzin Kwa “Sleydo’ and Shay speak about the importance of defending Wedzin Kwa. Every day is a fight when you commit to living an Indigenous way of life. They have been trying to kill us since contact. What they haven’t learned yet and what Sleydo’ articulates so perfectly is: “Our warrior spirits are stronger than they’ll ever be” Our ancestors fought for our yintah, we have stories of great wars, and we will continue their work. Today there was another arrest, after release the person was sent to get medical attention in an ambulance. There are no broken bones thankfully and the person is resting comfortably tonight. We anticipate more RCMP tomorrow. We ask anyone thinking of coming out to support locally please come early in the day, we will have coffee on and a place for you to gather. Check in at 44 km. Covid protocols in place, please bring a mask and a mug. For more information visit yintahaccess.com. The post Wet’suwet’en Occupy CGL Drill Site and Call for Support on the Ground and Action in Solidarity! first appeared on Dissident Voice. This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by UnistotenCamp. ]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2021/09/30/wetsuweten-occupy-cgl-drill-site-and-call-for-support-on-the-ground-and-action-in-solidarity/feed/ 0 238333 https://www.radiofree.org/2021/09/25/decolonizing-minds-including-my-own-about-u-s-capitalist-state-settler-colonialism/ https://www.radiofree.org/2021/09/25/decolonizing-minds-including-my-own-about-u-s-capitalist-state-settler-colonialism/#respond Sat, 25 Sep 2021 17:46:40 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=121357 The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the hunting of black skins, signaled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic […] The post Decolonizing Minds, Including My Own, About U.S. Capitalist State Settler Colonialism first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]> The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the hunting of black skins, signaled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation. On their heels tread the commercial wars of the European nations, with the globe for a theatre. — Karl Marx1 The first fact of the history of American immigration is genocide: the displacement and destruction of the Native people of North America. This is part of the story of immigration, it is not some other, parallel history. — Paul Spickard2 Through the centuries, the Republic that eventuated in North America has maintained a maximum of chutzpah and a minimum of awareness in forging a creation myth that sees slavery and dispossession not as foundational but as inimical to the founding of the nation now known as the United States. But, of course, to confront the ugly reality would induce a persistent sleeplessness interrupted by haunted dreams, so thus far this unsteadiness has prevailed. — Gerard Horne3 Destitute Peasants Leave Norway For The American Frontier On April 21,1885, a steamship left Christiana (now Oslo), Norway for Liverpool, England and then on to a 9-day voyage for North America. Among the ship’s 1500 passengers, most of them in steerage, which meant below the water line, no windows and only scant light and ventilation, was the recently widowed Elizabeth Thorson and her five children. The youngest was ten-year-old Emma who would become my grandmother. Elizabeth’s decision to emigrate was an act of awe-inspiring courage and resolve even though she had more than ample reason to fear for her family’s future if she remained in Norway and realized that the American frontier was her only option. There is insufficient space to detail Norway’s rigid social order that allowed no opportunity for advancement. Suffice it here to say that the apex of the class system consisted of an aristocracy of professional men who controlled the economy and the government. Their rule included the hierarchy of the powerful and reactionary Norwegian state Lutheran church for which it was unlawful not to be a member. Due to topographical dictates, only 3 percent of the land was tillable and most of that was held by the King (the “King’s Commons”), the church and other large landowners. Property relations were such that the vast majority of rural folk were landless. Although some resistance sprang up in the 1850s, it was easily crushed by the state’s large-scale police action. Some 85 percent of the population was rural, consisting of small farmers, cotters (poor tenants) and servants. However, unlike the English feudal dispossession of the peasants from their land and replacement of them of them with sheep which occurred in the sixteenth century in what became known as the enclosure movement, Norwegian peasants lacked even the option of selling their labor to toil in factories under debasing Dickensian conditions. In 1825, the first organized emigration of Norwegians occurred when a small group of religious dissidents, many of them Quakers, departed from Norway on the sloop Restauration and after a hazardous three-month crossing landed in New York harbor, most of them eventually settling in rural New York state. In the 1840s, immigrants did a reverse journey on a promotional tour sponsored by U.S. financial interests to spread “America fever” and this prompted more departures. Subsequently, the first major wave occurred from 1866 to 1873 (111,000) when income inequality in Norway reached unusually high levels. This was followed by several years of depression, agricultural disasters causing famines, mounting debts and forcing people to sell themselves into indentured servitude just to survive. Intrepid voyagers like Elizabeth joined the second surge from 1879-1893 (250,000), that averaged more than 18,000 annually, such that only Ireland had a higher rate of emigration. A third and final wave from 1900 to 1910 saw more than 200,000 departures, in part due to a substantial population increase. Altogether, nearly one million people emigrated to North America during the second half of the century. Whatever else might be said about them later it’s indisputable that this was an emigration of severely oppressed people whose lives had become unbearable. They faced two choices: emigrate or starve. For a visual, albeit fictional sense of this period, I recommend two internationally-acclaimed films, The Emigrants (1971) and the sequel, The New Land (1972), that graphically convey the travails of, in this case, Swedish emigrants in a manner that closely mirrors that of my Norwegian ancestors.4 My take is that my ancestors were pushed and pulled by forces over which they had little to no control over forces which sociologist Karen Hanson contends, “dislocated peasants and dispossessed Native peoples.”5 Hanson doesn’t go into specifics about these “missing pieces” but prefiguring later discussion and as one other astute observer explains, upon arriving in North America, the ends were unchanging. That is, the intentions of those responsible for colonialism was “to shore up access to Indigenous people’s property for the purpose of state formation, settlement, and capitalist development.”6 The genesis of these global forces originated far in advance of England’s rise which eventually led to London’s invasion of North America, settler colonialism, slavery, white supremacy and 1776. The continuity continues apace today with the U.S. capitalist global empire.7  As such, I’ve tried to be mindful of Frank Joyce’s wise counsel that “Knowing how the system was created is essential to working out how to take it apart and reconstruct it.”8 In what follows I attempt to revisit and unpack the reasons for my previous externally manufactured ignorance and vast storehouse of misinformation about the reasons for my ancestor’s arrival here and in dispossessing the indigenous people. My conceit is to insert instances of personal memoir in hopes they will help explicate the subject. I discuss the capitalist logic of dispossession, invasion, elimination, role of settlers, the “whiteness” factor, mascots, state policies of brainwashing Indigenous children through boarding schools, cultural misappropriation, assimilation, revisionist history and the future. What lessons might we learn from deconstructing this history and begin doing what Kenyan novelist and postcolonial scholar Ngugi wa Thiog’o describes as “decolonizing the mind.” He used it to explain how colonized people needed to liberate themselves from an insidious, brainwashing colonial mentality that all things “Western” were superior to being indigenous.9  Here I’m suggesting that we descendants of a colonial state also need to liberate our minds no matter where that leads. It’s an awkward, uncomfortable, and oftentimes gut-wrenching undertaking, but we need to critically reconsider what we’ve internalized about U.S. history. We need to reconstruct it because substantial portions were lies. Absent that deprogramming, the most propitious path for moving forward will remain elusive. Finally, in initiating this exploration, my intent was not to shame, blame, exculpate or pronounce absolution on settlers but to find at least a close approximation of the truth.  Further, I readily acknowledge that over time my ancestors assumed a white identity with all its attendant benefits, many of which adhered to their descendants, including, of course, myself. My Grandparents Obtain Land My grandfather, Tobias Aanonson, also of peasant stock, was not the eldest son in the family therefore not in line to inherit any property. His prospects in Norway were nil and he left Norway for Minnesota during that same period and began toiling as a lumberjack in the state’s North Woods. Prior to marrying Tobias, my grandmother Emma had been sold into indentured servitude by her indigent mother to a wealthy family owning a boarding house in northern Minnesota who paid for her steerage tickets. There, she labored under harsh and restrictive rules and it was common for young girls to perform this work under 5-7-year contracts but in many cases the servitude for a child would last until maturity. Conceivably, the term for my grandmother continued until she reached 17 and married my grandfather who was 15 years her senior. Family anecdotes have it that her experience as a boarding house servant was embittering and exacted an emotional toll for the remainder of her life. One result was bitterness toward her mother and another was that she despised indoor work like cooking and cleaning. These were left to the five daughters as Emma labored outdoors alongside Tobias. I suspect that variations on this story could be recounted by many others. My grandparents began farming in southern Minnesota in 1892. Given that the best land was already claimed, documents show that they purchased their plot from someone who had almost certainly received it “free” under The Homestead Act of 1862, signed by President Abraham Lincoln. In a speech in February, 1861, Lincoln had told the nation that “wild lands of the country should be distributed so that every man should have the means and opportunity of benefiting his condition.” Indigenous people did not fit this category. With their passage, the Homestead Acts became, “unquestionably the most extensive, radical redistribute government policy in US history” as they granted 246 million acres to 1.6 million individuals, some ten percent of the land in the United States.10 In terms of Norwegian-Americans, it’s impossible to overstate the importance of the Homestead Act because “Individuals without property to earn a living in their home country now had an opportunity to become landed.”11 Claimants had only to be U.S. citizens, intend to become one, file an application, pay a fee of $18, improve the land while remaining on it for five years and file a deed of ownership. In 1863, some 20,000 claims were immediately filed in Minnesota and the total acreage was the largest allotment for any state in the nation. Less well known is the fact that all the elements needed to actually start a farm were expensive, roughly $795 (or $17,500 in 2003 dollars) and thus beyond the reach of many. And we learn from the National Archives, that through massive fraud, “Most of the land went to speculators, cattlemen, miners, lumbermen and railroads.”  12 Betty Bergland, professor emerita of history at the University of Wisconsin/River Falls, makes the important, clarifying observation about the Homestead Act that it was primarily the federal policies of war, removal, exile and reservations that enabled Norwegian immigrants to “claim land, gain citizenship and opportunities to pass that along to succeeding generations.”13 Again, as will be addressed later, the motives behind these policies require further explication. The “pull” of the land was also furthered by the Federal government’s after-the-fact legalization of “squatting” on unsurveyed land, boosterism from land agents, government officials, and town promoters, ads appearing in local newspapers and letters from immigrants themselves sent back to Norway. In the 1890s and early 1900s, my mother and her seven siblings were born and raised on one of these parcels of land near Belgrade, Minnesota. I should state that my Norwegian immigrant ancestors are neither abstract “settler colonialists” to me nor tinged with its pejorative connotation. Perhaps part of my inability to conjure up that image stems from fond memories of summer visits to my grandparent’s farm in Minnesota with its plain, wood frame farmhouse, heated only with a wood-burning stove in the kitchen. Across the farmyard, I recall outbuildings that included a sagging, red painted barn with a hay loft and empty stalls. A ramshackle poultry house with cobweb laced broken windows but still containing some scattered chicken feathers, an aging tractor, two-hole outhouse and a rusty water pump that required priming. (Note: My mother told me that rope was strung between the house and the barn for safe passage for doing chores during whiteout winter blizzards.) One experience indelibly imprinted on my mind occurred when I was about seven or eight years old. My Grandpa Tobias let me be his “hired hand” for the day and we started in the wheat field. My assignment was to gather and stack several bundles of wheat together to form a shock. After a long morning in the field I’d only managed to assemble one vague facsimile and it was falling apart due to my inept application of baling twine. On our conversational-less walk back to the house for lunch, my Grandpa uttered a few words in Norwegian and pressed a silver fifty cent coin into my palm. The coin disappeared soon thereafter, but a few years ago, I purchased three of them, all dated 1951, to pass along to my grandchildren one day along with a story about their great, great, grand-father. (Note: When the farm was sold after my grandparent’s death, no proceeds were passed along to my mother and her siblings and instead went to pay taxes.) Settler’s Preconceptions? Some evidence suggests that the newcomers believed a vast virgin wilderness was waiting to be settled, a “land without people for people without land,” the founding deception so effectively employed by Zionists to lure unsuspecting Diaspora Jews to Palestine. Another interpretation is that settlers were under the impression that the Natives had moved on long before the settlers arrived. As will be explored in some detail later, we know that in the 1860s, Norwegian journalists helped spur a sizable influx of Norwegians to North Dakota and Minnesota. For just one example, aware of the major economic collapse in Norway and its desperate land-poor peasants, Paul Hjelm-Hansen, a journalist employed by the governor of Minnesota, portrayed the region as an agricultural oasis “with places for many thousand farmers.”14 Minnesota and North Dakota were magical landscapes where “one only had to arrive, put plow in the ground, and throw seeds into the rich black earth.”14 Hjelm-Hansen’s articles appeared in several Norwegian newspapers in 1869 and had the desired effect. Whatever their preconceptions might have been, one authoritative source explains that as immigrants surged into the Minnesota territory they found that the land was “already settled by Native Americans.” Due to a devious, semantic sleight-of-hand this was taken to mean “the right of occupancy, not the right of ownership.”15 According to Swedish scholar Gunlog Fur: “The fiction of empty land available for cultivation required an active denial of an Indian presence, even when they were everywhere… It also served to deny the integral role of violence in the expansion of white settlement across the North American continent.16 Two brief scenes, highlighting a few fairy tale assumptions are found in the aforementioned film, The Emigrants. In the first one, two boys are excitedly reading a promotional booklet about the promising New World and one exclaims “Even slaves have a higher standard of living than most European peasants. I want to sign up to be a slave!” In the second, some Scandinavian immigrants are on a paddle boat heading across the Great Lakes toward Minnesota, when one expresses amazement at seeing wealthy, first-class passengers strolling on the upper deck. A fellow passenger patiently explains that the U.S. is not at all like the class society they fled because in America “These people who have been here long enough are already rich. We’re still poor because we just got here. It takes a little time.” The historical record reveals soon enough that many of these naive settlers began experiencing the “promised land” as a cruel lie when the power of capital emerged with the likes of robber barons Cornelius Vanderbilt, J.D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and J.P Morgan. In short order, a substantial number of farmers lost their land as the very wealthy, white 1% claimed ownership of over half the property in the country and one fourth of the nation’s wealth. By 1900, that grew to 10 percent owning 90 percent of the country’s wealth. In response, class conflict began with a railroad strike on July 16, 1977 and the consequent Great Upheaval of workers was met with massive state violence against strikers, workers and protestors over the next three decades.”17  Historian Mary Neth captures what this meant for family farmers: “In rural America, the development of industrial capitalism directed collided with a family-based labor system” and many people were displaced, “…including farmers on small farms, tenants, hired workers, and unpaid women and youths.18 Foreshadowing a position amplified later in this essay, I’m suggesting that the immigrants had performed their indispensable function for the capitalist colonial state in settling expropriated land, increasing population numbers and legitimizing the property state. It only remained for elites and their enablers to retain settler allegiance via myriad forms of scapegoating, repression, and propaganda, especially a stepped-up emphasis on “whiteness.” Concurrently, if not literally eradicating all the remaining Indigenes, they began devising methods to commence cultural genocide. Beneficiaries Of Government Policy By the year 2000, the number of adult descendants of the original Homestead Act recipients numbered at least 46 million people or a quarter of the US adult population, virtually all of them white.10 Only 5000 African-Americans benefited from the 1862 Act. It’s beyond disputation that these government programs and policies funneled myriad opportunities to white people at the expense of others. As one student of the subject points out, “For the wealthy, inheritance provides a genealogical distance from conquest, genocide, and colonial slavery that offers a cover of ostensible innocence and launders accumulated incomes.”19 Confining ourselves solely to approximate economic calculations and excluding cultural capital which is immensely important but harder to determine, land acquisition itself translated to several trillion dollars. This bookends the dollar value that white Americans profited from unpaid Black slave labor with those estimates starting at $1 trillion dollars, a sum attaching graphic numbers to “white privilege.” By contrast, there are three million descendants of the native peoples who once inhabited this land and we know that indigenous people as a whole have the highest poverty rate among all minority groups in the United States. In the South, there were some four million emancipated African-Americans in 1865 and the Southern Homestead Act (SHA) was passed on June 21, 1866. The Act opened some 46 million acres of public land — much of it unsuitable for farming because of swamps and forests — in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana and Mississippi. African Americans were given priority until January 1, 1867. However, several insurmountable obstacles blocked recently freed slaves from benefiting from it. The most egregious barrier was that at the end of the war, former slaves had been tricked, cajoled or forced into signing labor contracts, often to work on former plantation land as sharecroppers where they also accrued steep debts. Breaking a contract resulted in onerous consequences, including the chain gang. As historian Keri Leighton makes clear, Blacks were “locked into these contracts until the very day when they would stop receiving special homestead benefits” As a result, by 1869, only 4,000 African Americans succeeded in staking a claim under the SHA and only 1,000 property deeds were issued. Again, most of the recipients were white.10 The law was repealed in 1876. If it’s not been done, a research project on the fate of the original recipients and their descendants would be valuable. My hypothesis is that because of state sanctioned oppression and myriad forms of informal white supremacy, any positive gains were stillborn. The Logic Of Indigenous Removal In terms of Indigenous removal, the picture will remain opaque if we don’t grasp that the logic of dispossession was not premised on race but on where Indigenous people lived. In Deborah Bird Rose’s pithy observation, “To get in the way of settler colonialism, all the victim had to do was stay at home.20  The Australian anthropologist and ethnographer Patrick Wolfe, famously argued that “It is ‘territoriality’ that remains the colonialist’s irreducible element, not race, or religion, ethnicity, grade of civilization, etc.21 This operates through a “protracted invasion” and the logic of elimination” that necessitates the destruction of indigenous people — but not necessarily genocide, as land is the objective. Eventually, this even allows for granting limited individual rights and cultural protections as these help rationalize expropriation, tie the indigenous remnant to the state and help to convince white people that they are superior and the more deserving occupants of the land. The methods for violently oppressing Indigenous peoples and Blacks were different. On the one hand, as noted, the colonialist state’s policies of extermination and forcible relocation of Indigenes was for the singular purpose of seizing land. To reiterate, in political scientist’s Walter Hixson’s concise wording, this was a “winner takes all” proposition. On the other, the Black experience centered on enslaving, breeding and violent control in pursuit of cheap labor. Their bodies were commodities. Both cases involved massive state terrorism, rooted in the categorical capitalist imperative of “Expand or Perish” — by any means necessary. It’s in this specific economic context that we have the artificial social construction of white supremacy and race. After the Civil War, for Blacks it was Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan, exclusion from key provisions of the New Deal, formal and informal segregation, COINTELPRO, the prison-military complex, Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” a racially biased “drug war” leading to the incarceration state, revival of Jim Crow stereotyping, “super-predators,” decimation of black wealth, racist police violence, and the complicity of the black mis-leadership class. For Indians, after 1890, it was more broken treaties, continued dispossession, slaughter, exile, the reservation, writing Indigenous people out of history, cultural appropriation, commodification and forcible assimilation. The latter means that 80 percent of Native Americans reside off the reservation, primarily in large urban areas. Assimilation As A Disingenuous Euphemism Assimilation deserves special attention in that nothing approaches its magnitude and unspeakable cruelty more than the cultural genocide practiced by Indian Boarding Schools. Their purpose, in the pithy words of Gen. Richard Henry Pratt, who founded the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, was “To Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” Over the years, hundreds of thousands of children were taken from their families and communities, beginning with the Civilization Act of 1819 which sought to introduce children as early as six years old to “the habits and arts of civilization.” Uncle Sam paid bounties to those capturing runaways from the schools. Later, under the Indian Appropriation Act of 1851 and the Peace Act of 1869, these schools went off-reservation and parents were not even allowed to visit their children because it might retard the pace of the civilizing process. The children were schooled in the importance of private property, material wealth and Christianity. David Wallace Adams was not engaging in hyperbole when he titled his book on Indian Boarding Schools, “Educating for Extinction.” By 1926, more than 60% children or 83 percent of Indian school-age children were attending these boarding schools. Coincidentally, in 1924, the government had imposed full citizenship on Indigenous peoples, also meant to foster assimilation in the form of nationalism, patriotism, and accepting the “American Way of Life” — while further distancing themselves from their tribal identity, culture and language. As for the boarding schools, it’s almost unfathomable to realize that parents did not gain the legal right to deny their children in one of schools until 1978 with passage of the Indian Child Welfare Act. Indigenous Dispossession It’s not generally known that for much of the West, homesteading was not the primary means of dispossession. It may sound like a difference without distinction but the 1830 Indian Removal Act used the U.S. Army to force several tribes to relocate west of the Mississippi River in order to accommodate white settlers. In Nebraska, the federal government had already seized some 30 million acres from Nebraska tribes before 1862. Further, in many places, white vigilantes and local “militias” acted on their own in tracking down and murdering Natives with the government a convenient few steps behind. In Minnesota, some indigenous land was taken by the Treaty of Traverse des Sioux, signed on July 23, 1851 under which the Sioux were forced to cede 24,000,000 acres of their territory and “relocated” to temporary reservations along the Minnesota River. Payments for the land proved to be far less than promised and then were halted altogether. Nevertheless, in the Dakotas and Minnesota, after 1862, homesteading played the major role in dispossession. In 1862, the Dakota Sioux, in retaliation for years of mistreatment by whites and facing imminent starvation, embarked on an implacable, fierce, but ultimately futile attempt to drive out the colonial invaders. They were crushed by the U.S. Army in the Dakota War of 1862 and this culminated on December 26, 1862 with the largest mass execution in American history. After a hastily convened military commission and totally unfair trial, 303 Dakota were sentence to death and on signed orders from President Abraham Lincoln, thirty-eight of them were hanged from a giant scaffold in the center of Mankato, Minnesota (another town in which I lived) an event attended by 4,000 spectators. Just as the trap door began to open, each one called out his or her name in native tongue and declared “I’m here. I’m here.” (Note: Confederate generals killed over 400,000 union soldiers. Lincoln never ordered the execution of a single one.) After the hanging, the remaining Dakota were evicted from their ancestral homeland to prison camps in Iowa, others were forced to march barefoot in the snow to Crow Creek, SD. Many died in prison or in a concentration camp in Sisseton, SD while still others escaped to Canada. A bounty was placed on the scalps of every Dakota man, woman and child. The hangings followed six weeks of fighting between Indigenous peoples and the U.S. Army that had signaled the advent of three decades of fighting between Indigenous peoples and the U.S. government across the Great Plains. Several accounts agree that many Norwegian-Americans began voicing increased antipathy toward Indigenes after 1862. In 1877, the Dawes Act was enacted and led to catastrophic consequences for Indigenous people. Named after Sen. Henry Dawes of Massachusetts, Dawes left the Sioux Nation broken into isolated, fragmented small reservations surrounded by immigrants. Each Indian head of household was given a plot while the remaining substantial tribal land was declared “surplus” and made available to white homesteaders. Under the Dawes Act and the “Dead Indian Act” of 1902, 100 million more acres were lost, some 65 percent of reservation land. By 1920, all the prime land had been taken over by non-Indigenous ranchers. In February, 1890, the federal government broke a treaty with the Great Sioux Nation and divided the reservation in North Dakota into five smaller ones. The primary reason was to make more land available for settlers but it was meant “to break up tribal relationships” and “conform Indians to the white man’s ways, peaceably if they will, or forcibly if they must.”22 On December 29 of the same year at Wounded Knee Ridge in South Dakota, the U.S. Army surrounded a Lakota Sioux encampment at Wounded Knee Ridge in South Dakota. After setting up Hotchkiss guns that fired one shot per second, the troops proceeded to mow down some 300 unarmed old men, women and children. After this bloody massacre, the government awarded Congressional Medals of Honor to 20 of the soldiers for demonstrating “conspicuous and intrepid bravery.” Skirmishes punctuated the next several years but Wounded Knee demarcated the “closing of the frontier.” After this final military defeat of the Indigenes, white identity and a host of other factors merged to rationalize dispossession. However, I will tip my hand and suggest examining these factors should not divert and obscure our attention from the fact that the United States was founded as a capitalist state colonial entity. The state and its enablers were the legitimating authority for genocide and whereas “Whiteness” assumed a critical instrumental role, it was not the determining one. As I will argue later, class retains primacy over other important, coterminous but ultimately among auxiliary secondary factors in our search for the ultimate causal explanation. Today, two of the five poorest communities in the United States — Allen #1 and Wounded Knee #5 — are located in Oglala Lakota County which is totally contained within South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation. The county also has the lowest life expectancy, highest unemployment, and at $8,768, is the poorest in the United States. The “Fighting Sioux” Mascot Although I also lived in Minnesota and South Dakota, my formative years were spent in Fargo, North Dakota along the Red River of the North on the eastern border of the state. The city was named for William Fargo, an owner of the Wells-Fargo Express Company and one the directors of the Union Pacific Railroad whose tracks ran through the center of town and held up traffic three times a day. When UP engineers and surveyors first arrived, they were accompanied by U.S. Army officers. This continuing symbiotic partnership between the capitalist state and big business was exemplified by Congress granting rail companies 10 million acres of free public land in Minnesota, amounting to 20 percent of the state’s land area. It was, of course, in the interest of railroad officials to lure immigrants to the region because it increased the value of their line. The construction of Fort Abercrombie in 1857, just thirty miles south of Fargo and the first fort in North Dakota, helped prompt immigrants to surge into the region through the “Gateway to the West” and stake their claims. Fort Abercrombie was followed by six more military bases across the state in the 1860s and early 1870s. A program closely related to the aforementioned Dawes legislation was The Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862 and expanded in 1890, which gave the proceeds of the sale of federal land expropriated from indigenous tribes to state governments to set up land grant colleges and universities. Our house in Fargo was not far from North Dakota State University (NDSU), a college established under The Morrill Land Grant Act. As with so much else, I was totally ignorant of this history and if I thought about it all, I probably felt Morrill was actually something that the government got right. NDSU’s athletic teams are called “The Bison” or “The Thundering Herd” and their traditional in-state rival is the University of North Dakota (UND), “The Fighting Sioux.” After a seven-year legal battle with the NCAA and a state-wide vote, in 2015, UND’s name was officially changed to the “Fighting Hawks” in 2015. Opponents of the change said the logo showed “pride and tradition” but the 21 Native American-related organizations argued that it disrespected their culture and the strongest advocates for the name change were members of the Standing Rock Tribe. Even in 2021, the Fighting Sioux logo remains on seats in the hockey arena, on a huge statue of Sioux Chief Sitting Bull sitting astride a horse outside the arena, and many fans still wear clothing adorned with the vintage logo to games. This Indigenous cultural appropriation was perfectly normal to me and reinforced stereotyping while simultaneously having a damaging effect on Native Americans’ sense of self-worth, self-confidence and self-image. In the words of Paul Chat Smith, a curator at the National Museum of the American Indian, “Multiple studies have shown that these mascots, which are stereotypes of Native peoples, cause real damage.” The American Psychological Society concurs and in 2005, after citing voluminous research on self-esteem and social identity development, called for “the immediate retirement of all-American Indian mascots, symbols, images and personalities by high schools, colleges, universities, athletic teams and organizations” A.P.A. President Ronald Levant added these negative lessons “are sending the wrong message to all students.”23 Emblematic of its continuing currency is the fifteen-year controversy that was only resolved this year in nearby Radnor, Pennsylvania. The issue that divided this affluent community and its highly rated high school (#4 in the state) was the high school’s mascot: An American Indian warrior known as the Radnor “Red Raider” Starting in 2016 and again in 2018, the school newspaper began condemning the “Tomahawk Chop” performed at athletic contests and advocated rethinking the mascot. After several contentious public meetings and vehement opposition from older alumni, a list of names, minus Red Raiders, was whittled down to four, and students chose the name “Raptors.” In 2020, some 2,000 schools and institutions continue to retain these mascots.  In my home state of Pennsylvania, 64 high schools still retain Indigenous mascots and names. Indian Head Penny For Your Thoughts? A personal example that might seem innocuous on first glance and not fit the mascot designation, is the Indian Head Penny. Having Native-Americans on my mind in recent months, I recalled that in my youth I’d been given a small collection (10-12) of these Indian-themed coins from my mother who’d probably received them from her parents. The coins were produced by the United States Bureau of the Mint from 1859 to 1909 when they were replaced by the Lincoln penny. James Longacre, Chief Engraver of the Philadelphia Mint, designed the coin and used the facial image of his daughter Sarah to depict “Lady Liberty,” an Indian princess adorned in a traditional Indian headdress. Longacre found nothing morally objectionable or inconsistent about the image and certainly not “repulsive to be associated with Liberty.” He said the implicit message was that “We were never in bondage to anyone.” The Mint’s director loved the depiction and wrote that the new “Indian Head would present an ideal of America — the sweeping plumes of the North American Indian giving it the character of North America.” There was some initial grousing about the image of a “savage” Indian on the face of America’s legal tender but using “a sanitized Caucasian girl with Greek features to represent an Indian made it okay.” She was in fact a “Good Indian,” the direct opposite of those marauding ones who were resisting the gifts of civilization proffered by the colonialist state.24  The fact that the coin was being praised and circulated during the period when the mass slaughter of Indians was in overdrive qualifies the statements as an early example of chutzpah. Lest one think this is now discredited thinking, in surveying sites that buy and seek rare coins in 2021, I found the consensus view remains that the “The Indian Head Penny embodies the bold, independent, timeless spirit as much today as when was first minted in 1859.” Not only does it reflect “Native Americans’ unique role in shaping U.S. history,” it’s motif “honors the United States’ Native American heritage” and “When it comes to American coins it is hard to get more American than Lady Liberty and Native Americans.” In writing about the motives behind employing such images, Yale historian Alan Trachtenberg concludes they were about the fact that “Indians had been slaughtered for the sake of the new race of Americans; they must be resurrected and commemorated, their ‘pure’ image pressed in gold” — or in this case, copper.25 The coin sanctified manifest destiny and conveyed the message that Indians were done an enormous favor for which they were ungrateful. Finally, to return to my earlier point, the Indian Head Penny was “an early version of an Indian mascot,” some of which could be found over a century later in valuable rare coin collections. It’s another image lodged in America’s delusional, collective, colonized mind. Another egregious example to which I was oblivious was that the two states admitted to the union on November 2, 1889, were North and South “Dakota,” appropriating the name the Sioux nation called itself and meaning “friends or allies.” Today, about half the names of American states are Indigenous in origin, a not subtle assumption of ownership whereby “white dominant society assumes control of the meaning of Nativeness.” It justifies the “maintenance of a system of domination and control — whether intentionally or unintentionally — where white supremacy is safeguarded.”25 in short, this was and remains a crude attempt to sever Native people from their cultural heritage as they are subsumed by white supremacy and are continually reconquered by other means. Finally, there’s a long history of cultural misappropriation on behalf of commercial projects and one egregious example is the travel industry. From 1933 to 1950 there were “Wigwam Motels,” mostly in the Southwest, the Wooden Indian Bar in New York City’s Americana Hotel only closed in 1992 after protests and in 2017, Airbnb issued an apology for an ad promising a “true Sioux” experience in Joshua Tree California even though no members of the tribe ever resided there. Squaw Valley, site of the 1960 Winter Olympics, is changing its name after complaints from Native Americans that the name is a racist and sexist slur. Just this year, an Arizona businessman proposed building a massive glamping resort on the outskirts of Flagstaff. Called “2 Guns,” it would have all the usual amenities but also feature 70 tepees, 12 hogans and incongruously, 43 Conestoga wagons. The premise was that “authenticity” would lure well-heeled tourists.26 My Episodic Encounters With “Indians” In terms of my personal experience, I had few direct contacts with Indians — or were they simply unseen? That five percent of the state’s population was scattered on five reservations and North Dakota remains the only state with a majority of Indians living on reservations. I recall a few Indians hanging out on one seedy downtown street in Fargo where they would sometimes purchase liquor for under-age guys and be repaid with a bottle of ultra-cheap Thunderbird, what we called “bum wine” and associated it with Indians. Here, one anecdote that merits retelling concerns Fort Yates in North Dakota. It was constructed to keep the Indians in line and after Col. George Custer’s “tragedy” at the Battle of Little Big Horn” on June 25, 1876, the number of troops stationed at the Fort peaked at 3,000 and 65 buildings. The fort was named to honor Captain George Yates who died in the battle. Also, after Sitting Bull was killed on December 14,1890, he was buried at Fort Yates and earlier, white missionary assimilationist nuns had started an Indian boarding school there in 1877. I mention this background because like so much else, I was totally ignorant of this history and only several decades later did I began to recognize more examples of constructed Indian-ness, really, manufactured ignorance, for the racism they embodied. In 1961, as a high school, cross-country runner, I competed in the state xc championships against the storied runners from Fort Yates, the perennial favorite to win the title. A town some 60 miles from Bismarck, Fort Yates had a population of 1100 at the time which has now dwindled to less than 200. Before the race, my coach cautioned me that my major competition for individual honors was an Indigene from Fort Yates. Curious, a few minutes before approaching the starting line, I asked a member of his team to point him out. His teammate replied with a laugh, “Oh, he was too hungover this morning and missed the team bus.” I mention this because that conversation undoubtedly reinforced the idea in my mind — one common at the time — that Indians were weak, unreliable and naturally predisposed toward alcoholism. I had internalized the dominant society problematizing of Indigenous youth that contributed to stereotyping of Natives as inferior to whites. I went on to win the race but is it totally implausible to speculate that the outcome was a symptom of the colonial condition? Whether or not it was applicable in that particular case, I was totally oblivious to the historical context which is summed up by two authoritative researchers on alcohol use in Indian country: “What is not recognized is that alcohol use and even suicide may be functional behavior adaptations within a hostile and hopeless social context.” In other words, we need to know more about alcohol abuse and historical trauma. Eduardo Duran and Bonnie Duran go on to advocate a need for a “postcolonial history of alcohol.”27 Parenthetically, the following year I raised funds at my Minnesota college for SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s civil rights activism in the South and even hitch-hiked to Louisiana in an attempt to get involved. At no point did I connect those actions with the historical and ongoing oppression of Indigenous peoples in my own backyard. Growing up on the Great Plains, I knew nothing about this actual history and like my peers was subjected to disingenuous, sanitized, elite-serving origin stories. There’s Gold In Them Thar Hills! A Different View of Mount Rushmore A microcosm that serves to encapsulate several points in this essay and is illustrative of the woeful state of my political awareness at the time is Mount Rushmore. Carved into the granite slope over the Black Hills of South Dakota. Mount Rushmore was a popular and almost obligatory destination for family car trips. Until only a few years ago, I was unaware that this “Shrine of Democracy,” this revered site of Americana, was known to the Lakota as Six Grandfathers Mountain. Its location was considered not only sacred religious ground but the apex of the universe for the Lakota people. After signing the 1968 Treaty of Laramie with the U.S. government, the Lakota obtained exclusive use of the Black Hills. Ten years later, when gold was discovered and thousands of miners rushed to the area, the government rescinded the treaty. On February 28, 1977, the federal government officially stole the land for the second time and began profiting from the gold, minerals and timber. The following essential background, which like so much else, is egregiously ignored by historians and missing from the classroom, is as follows: In 1874, President Ulysses S. Grant ordered Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer to take his troops in the Black Hills and his official mission was to find the optimum site for a military post. Left out of the narrative is that Grant paid out of his own pocket for two prospectors to accompany Custer to follow up on rumors that the Black Hills was rich in gold. The first dispatch from a journalist on the expedition confirmed the rumors when he wrote: “From the grass roots down it was ‘pay dirt.” A “New El Dorado” had been discovered and Grant began scheming about how to renege on his earlier, solemn “Peace Policy” pledge toward the Indians. Documents unearthed by diligent researchers at the Smithsonian reveal that in a closed meeting, Grant said, “The Lakotas must go or get whipped” which was a subterfuge to begin manufacturing complaints against the indigenous population. In the meantime, believing they would refuse to leave, a secret plan was hatched to launch a campaign against unsuspecting Indian villages. And in response to his insistent instigation, Grant’s Indian agents in the West sent back totally fabricated stories about the Indians not only being defiant and “hostile” but recommending that a thousand soldiers be dispatched to the Black Hills “to throw the ‘untamable’ Lakotas into subjugation. One unanticipated consequence was the Little Big Horn debacle but after the Indians had been subdued, Secretary of War J. Donald Cameron assured Congress and the nation that “the accidental discovery of gold” did not cause U.S. military operations in the Black Hills. On October 4, 1927, the sculptor Gutzon Borglum took on the Mount Rushmore carving project, in his words, as “a testament to American exceptionalism” and “a space for uncomplicated patriotism.”28 Looking back, what if instead of presented with a totally fabricated history, a visit to Mount Rushmore could have been a lesson in critical thinking, a teaching moment? Formal Miseducation A closely related adjunct to the above, is that undergraduates at my Minnesota college were in a potentially privileged position to learn about the truth about these matters, and especially immigrants’ settlements and in our own Red River Valley, from a nationally acknowledged expert on the topic. A local farmer himself, Hiram Drache was a professor in the History Department, author of a dozen books and invited speaker for hundreds of talks around the country. Even after this long passage of time, I hoped I would recall at least one class lecture on the near annihilation of Native-Americans but none come to mind. To check my unreliable memory, I went back and looked at Drache’s books and found only a few scant references to Indians including “Indian problems,” a single mention of the terrifying “Sioux outbreak” of 1862 and a military garrison being constructed “to watch the southern Minnesota Indians.” In what was arguably his well-known book (now in 12 printings) from 1964, the five stages of settlement, from rugged frontiersman to the frontier’s end with the arrival of urbanization I was unable to detect even a hint at the violent methods by which all the free, fertile land had been obtained.29 In an effort to see if he’d made amends for his earlier professorial sins of omission, I looked over his 343-page book from 1992, titled Taming of the Wilderness, the focus of which was on the northern half of Minnesota. It was praised for its enlightened treatment of this “huge empty space” I was not surprised by the meticulous research and attention to the smallest detail. However, the only reference to Native Americans was about the Minnesota State Supreme Court ruling that Indians living on Federal property could not vote in a referendum on changes in the liquor laws.30 We might also have learned from a bona fide expert that at the higher levels of officialdom, Territorial Governor, Alexander Ramsey’s wasn’t an outlier when he wrote to President Lincoln in 1862 and placed all the blame on the “savage” Indians: “This is not our war, it is a native war… More than five hundred whites have been murdered by the Indians.”  Another individual who was emblematic of elite opinion and the rhetoric of extinction was the aforementioned Henry Hastings Sibley from the Dakota War of 1862. I recall Sibley’s name being memorialized by counties, parks, streets and schools across the state including my traveling on the Sibley Memorial Highway near the Twin Cities. As with so much else about local history, I was totally ignorant of the fact that Sibley, Minnesota’s first Governor, was also Ethnic Cleanser-in-Chief on land that he’d once characterized as “pristine.” Col. Sibley commanded 1,200 troops U.S. troops during his “punitive expeditions” and in 1862, he wrote the following to Alexander Ramsey about Indians: “My heart is steeled against them, and if I have the means, and can catch them, I will sweep them with the besom of death.” Fittingly, after being mustered out of the military, Sibley served as president of the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce, on the boards of railroads, banks and was a regent of the University of Minnesota. Princeton University bestowed an honorary doctorate on Sibley in 1888. It’s encouraging that, in 2020, under pressure from Native Americans and citizens who’d previously known only a sanitized version of his past, Sibley’s name was erased from a high school in the Twin Cities and changed to Two Rivers High School. A quarter of the current students and many previous graduates signed a petition supporting the name change. On a related note, after years of fierce wrangling and court reversals, the name Lake Calhoun in Minneapolis was restored to its original Lakota name, Bde Maka Ska. It had been named to honor U.S. Secretary of War John C. Calhoun, prominent slave owner and author of the Indian Removal Act. In a split decision in 2021, the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled in favor of the change and shortly thereafter, shopping centers, public squares, entire neighborhoods, cycle shops, and gyms quickly shed the name “Calhoun.” The speed of change was undoubtedly expedited by the new awareness following George Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis and the Black Lives Matter movement. A final example, although not specifically about Minnesota and the Dakotas, concerns my miseducation about Lt. Col. Kit Carson, the iconic frontier hero of the Old West. As a child I had a Kit Carson cap pistol, wanted to be Carson when playing Cowboys and Indians and in the early 1950s I faithfully watched The Adventures of Kit Carson every day after school. Undoubtedly, this was also true for kids in Colorado where I later did my graduate work from 1968-1973 and became familiar with the 14,000-foot Mount Kit Carson, one of the “Elevens” revered by climbers in the state. Yet, even though then in my mid 20s, I confess to being unaware of the fact that Carson was a war criminal who spearheaded the U.S. government’s genocidal campaign against the Navahos. In 1862-63, after some “Indian trouble” — translated: they refused to accept confinement on a reservation — Col. Carson led a brutal campaign against the Navajos, burning their crops, destroying their villages, and slaughtering their livestock. He then proceeded to round up 8,000 Navajo men, women and children and forced them on what became known as the “Long Walk” of 300 miles from Arizona to the Bosque Redondo Reservation in New Mexico, a trek taking over two months. In 2011, by a 10-0 vote, a federal agency denied a request to rename the mountain. However, an encouraging development occurred last year when the Kit Carson elementary school in Las Vegas changed its name. The annual Kit Carson Mountain Men Rendezvous goes on in Kit Carson, Colorado where participants are strongly encouraged to wear “primitive” clothing as they participate in gun-shooting centered festivities. And if one is in California, they can relax at the “rustically elegant” Kit Carson Lodge in the Sierra Nevada mountains, a resort that dates back 95 years. Yet another available option for “pioneer fun” and an authentic legend of the Old West experience is the five-day Kit Carson Wagon Train re-enactment. Finally, on the educational site “Kids-n-Cowboys” we learn that Kit Carson helped make “the great American expansion possible.” Socialists Among The Settlers? At this point, I admit that before starting this undertaking I assumed I’d come across a few heroes, some radical dissenters who at least raised the matter of indigenous dispossession even as they gained from it?  We know that by 1920, some 50,000 immigrants returned to Norway. Many had sent money orders to the old country for the eventual purchase of land. It’s not inconceivable that some of them also returned out of disgust with what they learned on the American frontier but, in general, the record is silent. In terms of those who remained, two of the most instructive, albeit troubling cases I came across were Marcus Thrane, a radical Midwest socialist and GAA PAAS (Press Forward), the leading Norwegian-language socialist newspaper of the time. Marcus Thrane admired the Paris Commune, organized the first rural workers’ union in Norway with some 30,000 members, edited it’s newspaper and framed union demands that included universal suffrage and land reform. Sensing a threat from below, on July 7, 1851, Thrane and several other leaders were arrested in a large-scale police action that easily crushed any incipient revolt. Thrane and 132 other union members were arrested and sent to prison in 1855. After serving eight years, Thrane resumed his organizing efforts but with little success and, frustrated, he emigrated to the United States in 1862. Upon arrival, he immediately resumed his radical politics among Norwegian immigrants including the editorship of two socialist newspapers, public speaking and writing populist plays, including some satirizing the Lutheran Church. The latter prompted church leaders to condemn his socialist ideas further diminishing his radical project. After once having seen so much potential in his adopted country and having urged others to seek a new life there, Thorne became thoroughly disenchanted with American society and its government. He was prescient in predicting that the United States would never be “The Shining City on a Hill,” or the “Citadel of Democracy” admired across the world. Thrane died in Eau Claire, Wisconsin in 1890 and later, the Norwegian Labor Party referred to him as one of its founding fathers and today monument honoring him sits in his hometown of Drammen, Norway.31 In retrospect, if anyone should have recognized that the Indian was, in legal scholar Felix Cohen’s words “the miner’s canary” in flagging the sham of American democracy it would have been Marcus Thrane. However, I searched the record in vain for even a passing reference to this vexing indictment of “liberty and equality for all” and found only a glaring moral blind spot. However, can I say with conviction that I would have acted differently? The second example is GAA PAA (Press Forward) the prominent Norwegian-language socialist newspaper in Minnesota. In an important article, the noted Scandinavian studies expert Odd Lovoll described GAA PAA thusly: “The collective life of the Norwegian-American community can be viewed through the prism of this socialist organ” and the paper’s editorial position was that Norwegian farmers were the natural allies of the working class “…in the battle to defeat capitalism.”32 All the more striking to find that any concern for the indigenous population never surfaced in any issue of the paper, perhaps early evidence of colonized minds, including socialist ones. Parenthetically, I should mention that growing up in North Dakota I was always proud of the state’s history of agrarian radicalism which began in the 1880s. In 1918, the Nonpartisan League (NPL) won all three branches of government and immediately enacted its program of “state socialism,” easily the most progressive in the entire country. Concurrently, voices across the board cried out against farmers and laborers being exploited by bankers, Twin City grain merchants and the railroads. I mention this because at no point did it occur to me that Indian dispossession was ever mentioned. What Did They Know And What Does It Matter? Here we return to the question of whether the vast majority of these first Norwegian-Americans were cognizant of the formal and informal structures, the nefarious mechanisms involved in colonialism, the broken treaties, officially sanctioned bloodshed, myriad injustices, toxic ideology, and the economic motives of rapacious empire builders? If they were not, is it necessary to parse the meaning of “settlers” and perhaps reconfigure their role as being closer to self-interested pawns manipulated by others? For me, the answer to questions regarding the ordinary immigrant’s self-perception and view of the Indigenes remains maddeningly problematic. I recently came across sociologist Karen V. Hanson’s inestimably valuable book, Encounter On The Great Plains, the focus of which is Scandinavian immigrants to North Dakota from 1890-1930. These settlers included some of her ancestors who’d settled on Indian Reservation land near Devil’s Lake and although their circumstances were not identical, her take on them is as follows: Norwegians like my great-grandmother did not come to be settler colonialists or to usurp the place of others. They deeply resented having been colonized by Danes and Swedes and could not conceive of themselves as occupying an oppressive position in a foreign country. As newcomers, immigrants were searching desperately for a place to make a home: they were steered onto the reservation enterprise by forces largely beyond their control and outside the kin. With vivid memories of the suffering endured in Norway and Sweden and the sacrifices made during migration, they judged themselves and their descendants worthy of the land… They dwelt on the present and future as land takers often do, and they rarely probed the past or questioned laws that privileged them and disadvantaged others.33 As I began delving further into the history I found contrary opinions among elite opinion shapers, those farther up the social hierarchy. For the area where my grandparents settled, I came across this official history of Stearns County, Minnesota which contained a telling excerpt: What title did the Indian have to the land? Why should the Indian be considered the owner of the land? Just because he occupied it first? One would judge that by the highest ethical standards the superior civilization has the right to the land. And then, this statement about the meager sums frequently paid for the land: The Indian, this simple child of nature has been given a fortune which he could not care for… If the Indian had used wisely what our government has paid them, every man, woman and child of the race today would be well-to-do.34 We also have Anders Bo Rasmussen’s meticulous, indispensable research which strongly suggests that the Scandinavian immigrant elite, including opinion shapers like newspaper editors, historians and Civil War officers “transplanted Old World perceptions of class and race to the New World, which, in turn, helped to inform how Scandinavians immigrants confronted the post-war reality of slavery’s abolition.” The very first edition of the Norwegian-language newspaper, The Fatherland, described the new American republic as a “glorious institution in accordance with human and divine law” that was created “on liberty and equality.” Articles like these were widely shared in Norway, especially in rural areas. Rasmussen makes a compelling case that many Norwegian immigrants arrived with preconceived perceptions of white men “at the top of a racial hierarchy,” who deserved a higher rung on the “agricultural aristocratic ladder.” They resisted Black people having equal opportunities in the Northern labor market and believed “whiteness separated them from what they described as a “lower class of people.”35 Soon, it was no contest between egalitarian ideals and economic opportunities for whites. This view is reinforced by Terje Mikael Hasle Joranger, Curator of the Norwegian Emigrant Museum in Oslo and a widely acknowledged expert on the subject. In his generous response to my inquiry, he wrote: In my research I have come across very few references to America in letters, for example, showing any sign of remorse or thoughts connected to land-taking seized in an improper manner from indigenes. There is a great silence connected to references to the indigenous population among Norwegian immigrants in letters, diaries, and reminiscences. References to land in letters are to a large extent tied to concrete mention of land prices of government land, to heads of cattle, and to the growth of various crops.” Joranger continues that the letters largely reflected a concern of practical matters and thinking about how to improve his lot. These individuals “were not looking back in order to judge any harm done to the indigenous settlers.11 A related explanation comes from Hanson’s aforementioned research. Drawing on 130 oral interviews and fifteen years of archival research, Hanson concludes that these early immigrants were not consciously “settler colonialists” but were, nevertheless indispensable to the colonialist state’s imperial expansionist project. In short, they unwittingly solved the government’s “Indian problem.” Indeed, by 1929, Scandinavians owned more reservation land than the Lakotas. Hanson’s search was prompted, in part, by trying to come to terms with her “troubled conscience” over a past that privileged her at the expense of others. Her observation about Scandinavians surely applies to virtually everyone of immigrant descent in the United States: “Scandinavians past and present have eluded the thorny past by misrepresenting it or by living uncomfortably with their personal or ancestral history.”5 Given only those two choices, my sense is that misrepresentation still prevails, leavened with heavy doses of denial to reduce the discomfort level. However, this essay suggests that filling a gaping lacuna of ignorance with the actual facts regarding the past might open a third choice and I now turn to sketching out more of that context. Demythologizing History And Decolonizing Our Minds Consistent with the abiding concern of another analyst looking into this past, my motive has been “…to understand the ongoing processes that have shaped our world… The predicaments in which we find ourselves derive in part from the history of colonial conquest, slavery, imperial warfare, and the inequalities that emerged from this history we might discern the scope, force, direction and likelihood of the change ahead — and be guided by the example of our ancestors.36 Put another way, believing the “personal is political,” I began this exploration with a combination of personal and political activist motives. On the one hand, I was uncomfortable with the lacuna about my ancestral background and wanted some resolution — wherever that might lead. On the other, would an objective understanding contribute to greater clarity and utility regarding my existing political commitments? At this point, after substantially enlarging the scope of my inquiry, it feels as if I’ve tentatively arrived at a productive intersection of the two concerns. By now it’s apparent to the reader that I’m ambivalent about portraying my Norwegian-American ancestors with the broad, often pejorative brush of “settler colonialist” as the last word on the subject. My sense is that there remains a larger, more politically propitious perspective that’s routinely overlooked or avoided. At the same time, I’ve been sensitive to Gerald Horne’s accusation that many hypocritical analysts have avoided giving sufficient attention to his assertion that after being “deputized,” European settlers became accessories in victimizing the indigenous.37 Trying to assess degrees of moral culpability is both unavoidable and necessary in terms of advancing our political understanding with an eye on the future. For radicals like Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, the capitalist state bears the major responsibility whereas for many conventional historians, settler colonialism operated from the bottom up. For example, in one recent book which was fulsomely praised in establishment circles and was a National Book Award Finalist, the author makes much of newcomers in the 1830s being enthusiastic exterminators and being “too avaricious” to allow indigenous people to remain. And he almost offhandedly contends that a consistent application of the Republic’s “radical revolutionary values” could have avoided this outcome altogether.38 Again, I could not find a negative word about “capitalism” in this 396-page tome and perhaps needless to mention, mythical feel-good origin myths about the country are simply taken for granted. Most historians simply evade, dismiss or gloss over the entire matter. Where so many mainstream writers miss the mark is that whereas dispossession was a zero-sum game, these would-be settlers, mostly peasants, were fleeing feudalism at home. It may seem a distinction without a difference, but there is no evidence suggesting they arrived here with the conscious intent of exploiting the indigenous population for economic gain. Their complicity, if that’s the proper word, is that they functioned as foot soldiers to the unceasing capitalist logic of elimination, in service to a merciless capitalist logic from which they initially benefited. Horne argues that for these settler recruits, land was their “combat pay” for serving as white invaders. Again, another reading of this period suggests that, indeed, a cross-class convergence of interests occurred but only one partner was dimly aware, if that, of being used as an indispensable tool in establishing the property state for private capital accumulation while also serving elite interests in offsetting the vast number of slaves in the country, the “enemy within” feared by the existing polity. If so, I don’t believe it’s exonerating the settlers to recalibrate the term “settler colonialist” when applied to them. Building on earlier discussion, I’m suggesting that it’s impossible to arrive at a meaningful answer to my overall inquiry or draw any useful lessons without engaging the work of some of the revisionist critics who have convincingly undermined comfortable American origin myths about liberty and equality. Regrettably, many people, including most scholars and some of the self-identified left insist on portraying the American Revolution as besieged patriotic colonists, forthrightly standing up against British economic tyranny, a glorious confirmation of U.S. exceptionalism. One of countless examples is Joseph J. Ellis, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his book, Founding Fathers. Ellis recounts that “No less an authority than George Washington observed at the end of that any historian who managed to write an accurate account of the war for independence would be accused of writing fiction.”39 Washington was not wrong about the fictional accounts, only just how far they would depart from the actual truth. Ellis’s own fawning account of Washington would qualify as he extolled the countless virtues of the “brothers” as men who would win the title for “The Greatest Generation” hands down. According to Ellis and countless other myth-making historians, the great activity of this revolutionary generation was their devotion to popular sovereignty and their “common sense of purpose.40 The transparent truth is that the American Revolution was “[T]he first chapter in an inter-imperial war between Great Britain and its dissident elites in North America” and also the advent of American imperial warfare.”41 We know that as early as 1760, less than five hundred men in just five colonial cities controlled most of the shipping, banking, mining, manufacturing and commerce on the eastern seaboard. In truth, our venerable Founding Fathers were slave owners, wealthy men who wanted a system that would further their interests.42 Founding Father Alexander Hamilton (subject of a recent, disingenuous Broadway musical) bought and sold slaves for his wife’s family, owned slaves himself and spoke about Indigenous peoples as aggressive “savages.” In her new book, Dunbar-Ortiz includes Stanford law professor and historian Gregory Ablavsky’s observation that Hamilton and his fellow federalists resolved to “solve the problem of Indian affairs by committing the federal state to empowering, not restraining the inexorable westward tide.”43 Many of the Founders, including George Washington, were land speculators and long before King George III issued the Proclamation of 1763, forbidding settlements west of the Appalachian Mountains, these men had begun making claims on this native land. They were eager to push forward into Indian territory. Jumping ahead a bit and in what was already a fait accompli, in the 1783 Treaty of Paris, the British agreed to recognize American independence all the way to the Mississippi River. These wealthy slave owners wanted a system that furthered their interests and fifty-six of these noteworthy members of the propertied class later signed the Declaration of Independence. All of these famous “patriots” had only contempt for actual democracy, feared it and recoiled from it. As one American historian corrects the historical record, “The American state, even in its earliest incarnations, was more concerned with limiting popular democracy than securing and expanding it.”44 Here it’s imperative to remember that Europeans did not think of themselves as “white people” until it became an arbitrary social construction and to the extent that my ancestors did it was a relatively recent phenomenon. In earlier times, people saw themselves as members of a clan, tribe, religion or geographic area. And when the transformation began, its contingency was tied to its service to England and later the United States’ exploitation of “the other,” including Blacks and Indians. Gerald Horne adroitly depicts the latter transformation with only a trace of hyperbole when he writes: All of a sudden when crossing the Atlantic, in a narrow manner that would make Madison Avenue blush, all are rebranded as ‘white’ which subsumes many of the tensions, ethnic and class among them, in a new monetized and militarized ‘identity politics’ of whiteness based on expropriation of the indigenous and enslavement of the Africans.45 In two works, Horne demonstrates how, since the sixteenth century, whiteness/white supremacy “became the ideological glue allowing disparate European nations and peoples to justify confiscating resources, land and labor from those on the darker side of the color line.”46 This was racial capitalism and the operative words here are “ideological glue.” As noted earlier, this tool was honed to perfection by European and later the American capitalist class in “settling” North America. I’m acutely aware of accusations of class reductionism that are lodged by apologists for identity politics. In response, I don’t deny for a moment that the arbitrary social construct of race, its sociology, exerted and continues to impact people’s lives in hideously consequential ways. And, of course, working people of color are simultaneously exploited and suppressed. However, as exceptional political scientist Victor Wallis reminds us, “Of all the non-class or cross-class identities, race is the one that comes closest to having been created in the service of class interest.” And further, concentrated class power collectively suppresses all intersectional constituencies.47 Finally, I would be hard pressed to come up with a better, consciously created, ruling class tool than white identity. It’s integral to the sleight of hand deceit, the manufactured ignorance that racial capitalism employs to conceal the underlying brutality of our capitalist order. I’m suggesting we make a serious error if we mistake the means of domination for the end.48 The incipient and then full-fledged capitalist state project required what David Harvey, in a different context, described as “accumulation by dispossession.”49 Colonization was not peripheral but was, along with slavery, a central pillar in the development of capitalism in the modern United States. This required the dispossession of the Indigenes, followed, as we’ve seen, by erasure through cultural assimilation. A line can be run from crucial moments in the sixteenth century on to Marx’s “so-called primitive accumulation,” which he illustrated by the clearing and privatizing of the commons, on to Boston’s merchant class rebellion against the monarchy, to dispossession of the Indigenous tribes which also was the genesis of the U.S. military establishment and finally, extending to the U.S. empire spanning the globe today and which is enforced by massive direct violence. Ripping off surplus value via dispossession of Indigenous tribes initially appears problematic because it doesn’t directly involve wage-labor exploitation. However, as Couhart and others clarify, although there were early efforts to enslave Indians, colonization was “uniquely oriented toward the seizure of indigenous lands, rather than the labor-power of Indigenes.” However, “…the ends have always remained the same: to shore up continued access to Indigenous people’s territory for the purpose of state formation, settlement and capitalist development.”50 Hence, I would argue that only an intentionally tortured reading of Marx would deny a close relationship between primitive capital accumulation and land dispossession. If we think of settler colonialism as a stage in a long-term project there’s no contradiction. Horne asserts that for these settler recruits, the “free land” was their combat pay for serving as white invaders. Perhaps deviating slightly from Horne, I’m suggesting that another reading of this history divulges a cross-class convergence of interests where only one partner was only dimly aware, if that, of being an indispensable tool in establishing a private property state for private capital accumulation — primitive accumulation — while also serving the elite goal objective of offsetting the vast number of slaves, the feared “enemy within” to the existing polity. Howard Zinn and Gerald Horne are two preeminent, groundbreaking historians who’ve helped to further our understanding. I have no reason to believe that Zinn would disagree with Horne’s assessment that 1776 marks the date when nascent capitalists “pulled the ultimate coup and exhibited a novel display of patriotism by ousting London altogether from the mainland colonies south of Canada, while convincing the deluded and otherwise naive (to this very day) that this naked grab for land, slaves and profit was somehow a Great Leap Forward for humanity.”51 Horne goes on to refer to the United States as Great Britain’s “revolting spawn,” the “bastard child” determined to establish its own empire. And in 150 years it went to become Britain’s global capitalist rival. In support of my assertion, here are a few excerpts from Zinn’s magisterial book, A People’s History of the United States, in which he cogently explains that over a relatively short period of time, the colonial elite was able to: …take over land, profits and power from the British empire. In the process they could hold back a number of potential rebellions and create a consensus of popular support for the rule of a new, privileged leadership. When we look at the American Revolution in that way it was a work of genius. [The Declaration of Independence] was a wonderfully useful device, the language of liberty and equality which could unite just enough whites to fight the Revolution, without ending either slavery or inequality. …the rebellion against British rule allow a certain group of the colonial elite to replace those loyal to England, give some benefits to small holders and leave poor white working people and tenant farmers in very much the same situation.52 Prof. Horne’s more recent work complements Zinn while devoting considerably more attention to events long preceding the Declaration in 1776 and even, 1492. In his 2018 book, Horne cogently outlines the genesis of emerging capitalism in England as the “dawning of the apocalypse for non-European people.” The most pivotal moment is the much misinterpreted “Glorious Revolution of 1688” when the propertied classes triumphed over absolute monarchy. The former wanted access to the “Crown’s control over the wildly lucrative African slave trade which ultimately provided the wherewithal for the overthrow of the reign of the monarch in 1776.” Horne doesn’t mince words in concluding this “blatant power and money grab by merchants was then dressed up in the finery of liberty and freedom, as the bourgeois revolution was conceived in a crass and crude act of staggering hypocrisy.” As such, “…1776 completed the apocalypse began in the seventeenth century.”53 In an earlier book, Horne depicts two events that explain why the colonists finally broke with the Mother Country and neither flatters the consensus origin story of the nation’s founding. The first was a judgement of the English Court of King’s Bench in June,1772. This was the issuance of the Somerset Decision by the Chief Justice of England, Lord Mansfield and involved James Somerset who was a slave then residing in England after being brought there by his owner from Boston. Somerset was about to be sold to a plantation in Jamaica but Mansfield declared that “The state of slavery is of such a nature it is incapable of being introduced on any reason, moral or political…and therefore the black [James Somerset] must be discharged” from his enslavement. Although Mansfield offered no judgement on overseas territories of the British Empire, the future Patriots, mostly slave owners and slave traders, feared that Somerset abolition in Britain and set a precedent applicable to the thirteen colonies, thus jeopardizing their existing and future financial gains.54 The second event that further heightened anxiety and finally tipped the scales in favor of the colonial elites breaking with Britain happened in November, 1775 when Lord Dunmore in Virginia offered to not only liberate but arm North American slaves. According to Horne, with that proclamation, Dunmore “entered a pre-existing maelstrom of [colonial] insecurity about slavery and London’s intentions.” It also “effectively barred any further possibility of rebel conciliation with London.”55 In short, the “Patriot” portion of the colonial elite was petrified, and not without cause, that the British would cease supporting the right to own slaves in the thirteen colonies. In the words of historian Colin Calloway, the colonial elite “saw tyranny in Britain’s interference with their ability to make a [financial] killing in the West.”56 What remained was to rally ordinary people to support separation from the Mother Country. In pursuit of that end Horne points to an often-overlooked statement within the Declaration of Independence. In the list of grievances against the King we find: He has excited domestic insurrections among us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages, whose rule of warfare, is an indistinguishable destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions. Through a combination of Jefferson’s lofty rhetoric and disingenuous appeals such as this one, the “rebels” prevailed in the propaganda war and convinced “enough” of the remaining skeptics and were able break with the Mother Country in 1776. After bourgeois democracy was established the former “Patriots,” among other pursuits, methodically proceeded to extirpate the indigenous population. Notably, my ancestors began arriving some one hundred years later. In any event, even as they wittingly or unwittingly collaborated in dispossession, most settlers would soon become members of the working class and victims of the merciless logic of capitalism, “subject to the tyranny of the market in its stead.”6 Wealth was extracted from their labor and their share of the colonial booty declined in favor of economic elites. Lest I be misunderstood, I’m not for a moment suggesting equivalency for what befell blacks under slavery and subsequently under racial capitalism and the plight of the white working class. I’m asserting that a narrow focus on settlers per se, tends to divert attention from the capitalist project itself and its identical state agency. Finally, I would argue that we’re further from grasping the dynamics of that project today — from realizing class consciousness — than our working class ancestors were at the time. In Lieu of a Final Conclusion I began this project, in part, to investigate what it means to be a descendent of Norwegian-American settlers. It remains a gray area because we don’t know for certain if they knew they were the “boots on the ground” for the capitalist state project of dispossession. But, if they did know, would it have made any difference? The word “silence” appears with regularity in writings about Scandinavian self-awareness about encounters with Indigenes in Minnesota and North Dakota or postulating about why the land was available and perhaps that approximates a certain unease or an almost total self-denial. Reaching a definitive conclusion on the above is less important to me now then it was at the outset of my search. As I expanded the inquiry to encompass the power forces of capital accumulation, and the identity, motives and methods of the penultimate colonizers, these assumed pride of place in terms of explanatory power. I don’t think it’s exculpatory to suggest that the settler’s role paled in significance. The settlers were instrumentalized on the ground and functioned, in Horne’s term, as “handmaidens.” As such, refocusing the familiar settler-indigenous dichotomy through the lens of class analysis and objective historical contextualization, reveals a more plausible picture. When I was still teaching undergraduates, I often said that one reason to study history, arguably the most important one, is to discover that it’s an illusion to believe that certain events were inevitable, as somehow preordained. At various interstices, choices are made that if made differently can lead to vastly different outcomes. In that vein, in response to a question I posed to noted historian Steven Hahn about the prospects he foresaw for serious political change, Hahn wrote, “Change is not linear by any means. I think the arc of the universe is a very long one, and the struggle is over which way to pull it. There is no natural bent. For the most part it has bent toward injustice. But we need to think it can be bent toward justice – and that is a struggle worth having and participating in.”57 Finally, noted activist and author Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz draws our attention to the words of the late indigenous scholar Jack Forbes who “always stressed that while living persons are not responsible for what their ancestors did, they are responsible for the society they live in, which is a product of the past.58 This is especially germane for those who, after a certain age, have had the luxury of time, education and access to a wide spectrum of information. For them, ignorance about the past is no excuse. ***** As always, I’m grateful to have Kathleen Kelly as my in-house editor and co-conspirator. I’m also grateful to Faramarz Farbod for his meticulous reading of an earlier version as well as his crackerjack computer skills. Capital 1: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, ed. Frederick Engels, (New York: International Publishers, 1967), p. 703. Almost Aliens: Immigration, Race and American History and Identity. (New York: Routledge, 2007). p. 25. The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in Seventeenth-Century North America and the Caribbean, (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020), p. 191. Directed by Jan Troell and starring Liv Ullman and Max von Sydow, they are based on Vilhelm Moberg’s novel, The Emigrants. During the film’s production, Troell made extensive use of locations in Minnesota.  For a brief but poignant sequence from early in the film, see Liv Ullmann, On the Emigrants and The New Land. Karen V. Hanson, Encounter of the Great Plains (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013) p. 238. G.S. Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014) p. 25. I’m referencing the work of the historian Gerald Horne. The importance of his masterful, original, and path-breaking studies on these origins cannot be overstated. See, especially, Gerard Horne, The Dawning of the Apocalypse: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the Long Sixteenth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020); and on the seventeenth century, Horne. Frank Joyce, “Exploring America’s Hidden Past as a Center for the Slave-Breeding Trade,” Caricon, 9/16/2016. In terms of steps toward re-education I profited from viewing “Exterminate All the Brutes,” the 4-part series written and directed by Raoul Peck. It’s based, in large measure, on Sven Lundquist’s eponymous book, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous People’s History of the United States and Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past. Ngugi wa Thiong’o. See his Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1986). Keri Leigh Merritt, “Land and the roots of African-American poverty,” Aeon, March 11, 2016. Terji Mikael Hasle Joranger, “The Creation of a Norwegian-American Identity in the USA,” Journal of Migration History 5 (2019) p. 489-511. Lee Ann Potter and Wynell Schmel, “The Homestead Act of 1862,” Social Education, 61,6 (October, 1997); Ray Allen Billingston, Westward Expansion: A History (New York: Macmillan, 1960). Betty A. Bergland, Norwegian migration and displaced peoples: Toward an understanding of Nordic whiteness in land-taking. Jana Sverljuk, et al. Nordic Whiteness and Migration to the USA (New York: Routledge, 2020). Kathleen Ruth Brokke, Transformation of the Red River Valley of the North: An Environmental Study. Ph.D. Dissertation, The University of North Dakota, Grand Forks, North Dakota, December, 2015, p. 53-54. Susan Granger and Scott Kelly, Historic Context Study of Minnesota Farms, 1820-1860, Vol.1. June, 2005. Gunlog Fur, “Indians and Immigrants,” Journal of American Ethnic History, Spring, 2014, 33/2. 58. For a trusted source on this period, I can recommend Jeremy Brecher, STRIKE (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2020, revised and updated) which I regularly assigned as a text in my courses. Also, Nell Irvin Painter’s highly accessible treatment, Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877-1919. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1989). Mary Neth, Preserving the Family: Women and the Foundation of Agribusiness in the Midwest, 1900-1949 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), p. 3 and 5, as cited by Hanson, p. 219. Aloysha Goldstein, “On the Reproduction of Race, Capitalism and Settler Colonialism,” Race and Capitalism: Global Territories, Transnational Histories, October, 2017, p. 45. Deborah Bird Rose, Hidden Histories, (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1991), p. 45. Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research, Vol.8, 2006, pp. 387-409. Anthony F.C. Wallace, “Revitalization Moments: Some Theoretical Considerations for Comparative Study,” American Anthropologist, 58, (2) 1958. pp. 264-81. Andrew C. Billings and Jason Edward Black, Mascot Nation: The Controversy Over Native-American Reproductions in Sports (Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2018); Laurel R. David Delano, Joseph Gone & Stephanie Frybers, “The psychological effects of Native-American mascots: a comprehensive review of empirical findings,” Journal of Race, Ethnicity and Education, June 8, 2020; For a revealing interview with a female, Native-American, Division 1 basketball player, see, Jaden Urban, “Offensive Mascots Take Toll on Indian Athlete,” Indian Country Today (n.d.). Bob Schmidt, “The Indian Head Penny,” Newspaper Rock, December 18, 2008. The author is an expert on several Native-American issues and contributor to Indian Country Today. As cited by Rick Green, “What It Means to Be an Indian in America,” The Hartford Courant, January 9, 2009. Karen Schwartz, “Is Travel Next in Fight Over Profiting from Indigenous Culture?” The New York Times, August 9, 2021, B5. The quotes are from Eduardo Duran and Bonnie Duran, Native American Postcolonial Psychology. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995) as cited by Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz and Dina Gilio-Whitakers, “Indians Are Naturally Predisposed to Alcoholism,” Myth #18, in Dunbar-Ortiz, 130-136. The entire sordid story is laid out in meticulous detail and by Peter Cozzens, “Ulysses S. Grant Launched an Illegal War Against the Plains Indians, Then Lied About It,” Smithsonian Magazine, November, 2016; Also, Amy McKeever, “The heartbreaking, controversial history of Mount Rushmore,” National Geographic, October 28, 2020. The sculptor’s previous project upon which he worked closely with the Ku Klux Klan, was a massive bas-relief at Stone Mountain, Georgia in which he memorialized Confederate leaders. Hiram Drache, The Day of the Bonanza. (Fargo: North Dakota Institute for Regional Studies, 1964), p.3. In his conclusion, Drache mentions that one of the truly memorable contributions of the settler era is that it served as a “dramatic basis for innumerable tales of greatness and folklore which are only matched by Paul Bunyan.” p. 220; The Challenge of the Prairie (Fargo: ND: North Dakota Institute for Regional Studies, 1970); Taming of the Wilderness: The Northern Boundary Country: 1910-1939. (Danville, Illinois: Interstate Publishers, 1992). Hiram Drache, Taming of the Wilderness: The Northern Boundary Country: 1910-1939. (Danville: Illinois: Interstate Publishers, 1992). Anders Bo Rasmussen, “On Liberty and Equality: Race and Reconstruction Among Scandinavian Immigrants, 1864-1858,” in Jana Sverljuk. Terje Leiren, “Lost Utopia? The Changing Image of America in the Writing of Marcus Thrane,” Scandinavian Studies, Vol. 60, No.4; and by the same author, Selected Plays of Marcus Thrane, New Directions in Scandinavian Studies. The University of Washington, 2008. Odd Lovell, “GAA. PAA: A Scandinavian Voice of Dissent,” Minnesota History, Fall 1990, pp. 87-89. William Bell Mitchell, History of Stearns County, Minnesota, 1915. Email to author, July 27, 2021. Brad Evans, Interview with Vincent Brown, “Histories of Violence: Violence, Power and Privilege,” Los Angeles Review of Books, March 1, 2021. Gerald Horne, “Against Left-Wing White Nationalism (Organizing Upgrade).” Claudio Saunt, Unworthy Republic (New York: W.W. Norton, 2020). Joseph J. Ellis, The Cause: The American Revolution and Its Discontents, 1773-1783. (New York: Liveright, 2021), No page. According to pre-publication reviews, the book attempts to shed light on some unsung heroes of the period; Joseph J. Ellis, Band of Brothers (New York: Random House, 2000); Another recent, celebratory example is Mike Duncan, Hero of Two Worlds: The Marquis de Lafayette. (New York: Public Affairs, 2021). Book Browse, An Interview with Joseph J. Ellis (nd). In 1779, this “common purpose” included Washington’s explicit order for the genocidal Sullivan expedition against the Iroquois nation in upstate New York. According to plan, more than 40 villages were burned to the ground and all crops and winter provisions were destroyed. Their morale totally broken, those not killed or captured fled to Canada. The Haudenosaunee named the first president, the “Town Destroyer.” Historian William Hogeland, interviewed by Jonah Waters, “Not Our Independence Day,” Jacobin, 07/04/2006. 48. Michael Parenti, Democracy for the Few, Ninth Edition (Boston: Wadsworth, 2011) p.11. Gregory Ablavsky, “The Savage Constitution,” Duke Law Journal, 63, No.5 (February 2014): pp. 999-1000, as cited by Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, Not ‘A Nation of Immigrants’ Boston: Beacon Press, 2021) p. 40. Hogeland. Gerald Horne; Charisse Burden-Shelley makes this point in her critique of Isabel Wilkerson’s book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents in “Caste Does Not Explain Race,” Boston Review, December 15, 2000. Horne. Victor Wallis, “Intersectionality’s Binding Agent: The Political Primacy of Class,” New Political Science, 2015, Vol 37, No.4, p. 614. Gary Olson, “A Few Thoughts on White Identity,” Dissident Voice (June 12, 2021); David Barber, “Renouncing White Privilege: A Left Critique of Robin DiAngelo’s ‘White Fragility,” Counterpunch, August 3, 2020. Sai Englert neatly summarizes this in “Workers, Settlers, and the Logic of Accumulation by Dispossession.” Coulthard, p.125. Also, see the fine analysis in Siddhant Issar, “Theorizing ‘Racial/colonial primitive accumulation: settler colonialism, slavery and racial capitalism, Race & Class, 2021, Vol.63 (1) pp. 23-50. As detailed by Andres Resendez, colonists did, indeed, enslave Native Americans, especially in the West and Southwest in what Resendez terms “the other slavery.” Because these labor regimes were illegal, they differed in form from African slavery and were mostly covert and clandestine. Andres Resendez, The Other Slavery (New York: Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt, 2017, paper). Gerald Horne, The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2018) p. 67. I found this related interview with Horne to be helpful: “The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Origins of the United States of America,” Zinn Education Project, June 29, 2021. This site has several additional background readings on the American Revolution. All quotes are from Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States. (New York: Harpers, 1980, 2015). Gerald Horne, The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism. p. 16-17. Gerald Horne. The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and The Origins of The United States of America. (New York: New York University Press, 2014) p. 209-218. Horne, p. 222 & 237; Horne cites historian Alan Watson’s assertion that Lord Dunsmore’s edict “did more than any other British measure to spur uncommitted white Americans into the camp of rebellion.” p. 224. Colin Calloway, The Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the Transformation of North America. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), as cited in Walter L. Hixson, American Settler Colonialism: A History (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2013) p. 56. Email from Hahn to author, June 24. Cited by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, p. 235. My intellectual debt to Dunbar-Ortiz for this magisterial volume and her other work is immense. Her most recent book is, Not ‘A Nation of Immigrants’ (Boston: Beacon Press, 2021). The post Decolonizing Minds, Including My Own, About U.S. Capitalist State Settler Colonialism first appeared on Dissident Voice. This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Gary Olson. ]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2021/09/25/decolonizing-minds-including-my-own-about-u-s-capitalist-state-settler-colonialism/feed/ 0 237063 https://www.radiofree.org/2021/08/27/i-awakened-here-when-the-earth-was-new/ https://www.radiofree.org/2021/08/27/i-awakened-here-when-the-earth-was-new/#respond Fri, 27 Aug 2021 14:55:49 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=120416 Alisa Singer (USA), Changing, 2021. Source: IPCC. In late March 2021, 120 traditional owners from 40 different First People’s groups spent five days at the National First People’s Gathering on Climate Change in Cairns (Australia). Speaking on the impact of the climate crisis on First People, Gavin Singleton from the Yirrganydji traditional owners explained that […] The post I Awakened Here When the Earth Was New first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>

Callout from Gidemt’en Checkpoint Coastal GasLink has called in the RCMP to try and remove Wet’suwet’en community members and Indigenous youth as they hold a ceremony at a proposed drill site for Coastal Gaslink’s pipeline. Coastal Gaslink has been evicted from our territories by the Wet’suwet’en Hereditary Chiefs – who have full jurisdiction over Wet’suwet’en lands. As CGL continues to trespass, we will do everything in our power to protect our waters and to uphold our laws. We will not let CGL break our Wet’suwet’en laws and drill under the headwaters of the Wedzin Kwa river, which nourishes all of Wet’suwet’en territory. The standoff is ongoing. We call for solidarity actions from coast to coast. Take action where you stand, or come stand with us on the yintah. [embedded content] The Unis’tot’en (C’ihlts’ehkhyu / Big Frog Clan) are the original Wet’suwet’en Yintah Wewat Zenli distinct to the lands of the Wet’suwet’en. Over time in Wet’suwet’en History, the other clans developed and were included throughout Wet’suwet’en Territories. Read other articles by UnistotenCamp, or visit UnistotenCamp’s website. This article was posted on Tuesday, October 13th, 2020 at 7:58pm and is filed under Canada, Oil, Gas, Coal, Pipelines, Original Peoples, Police, Resistance, Video.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2020/10/14/breaking-wetsuweten-women-occupy-pipeline-drillsite-to-stop-cgl-from-drilling-beneath-their-sacred-headwaters/feed/ 0 98349 https://www.radiofree.org/2020/10/13/supporting-indigenous-resistance/ https://www.radiofree.org/2020/10/13/supporting-indigenous-resistance/#respond Tue, 13 Oct 2020 19:14:18 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?p=98396 (Photo Credit: Jenna Pope)

This weekend, celebration of Indigenous People’s Day will replace the federal holiday, Columbus Day, in at least eight states and over 130 cities in 34 states. Along with the toppling of Columbus statues and the removal of a racial slur as a name for a major football team, this signals a shifting awareness in the United States of our colonial roots and ongoing Indigenous genocide and a desire for change.

If, like me, you are not indigenous, there are ways each of us can educate ourselves and those around us about the land we live on, to whom it belonged and how it was taken away from them. We can learn about the ways our actions may silence indigenous voices or otherwise contribute to their oppression. We can support indigenous people by buying from their businesses, contributing to their organizations or showing up to assist with their struggles. Taylor Payer (Anishinaabe) wrote this guide for ways to celebrate Indigenous People on this day and every day.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, writes:

By and large the history of relations between Indigenous and settler is fraught with conflict, defined by a struggle for land, which is inevitably a struggle for power and control. Five hundred years later, Native peoples are still fighting to protect their lands and their rights to exist as distinct political communities and individuals.

Here are a few of the current efforts by Indigenous Peoples to protect their sovereignty, right to exist and lands.

Navajo and Hopi Families COVID-19 Relief Fund

Prioritizing Health During COVID-19

Indigenous communities in the United States are more likely than other communities to lack basics such as running water, electricity, access to the internet and other necessities that support public health measures, the ability to get information and to stay at home.

The Navajo Nation, which was hit very hard early in the pandemic, received federal funds after a long delay, but this money has to be spent by the end of the year or they lose it. While much of it was used to provide protective equipment, food and health care, leaders argue they also need to build infrastructure to support health now and in the long term, but those projects take time. There is a bill in Congress to extend the deadline for when the funds must be used, but it is not likely to pass in time.

In the Great Sioux Nation, tribes such as the Cheyenne River Sioux and the Oglala Sioux created checkpoints at the entrances to their reservations to screen people for COVID-19. This is a public health measure used by nations around the world to control the spread of the virus. In South Dakota, where cases are rising, Governor Kristi Noem is opposed to the checkpoints and is threatening to withdraw aid if they aren’t dismantled. The tribes refuse to take them down and have filed a complaint with the federal government.

Protest at border wall. Rafael Carranza/The Republic

Respecting Sacred Sites

There is a long history in the United States of failure to understand Native American culture and respect sacred sites. Think of an indigenous sacred site as a church, mosque or temple. Now imagine what the reaction would be if a government or corporation tried to destroy those structures or refuse access to them. Religious freedom is protected under the First Amendment in the United States, except for Indigenous Peoples.

Sacred sites have been destroyed, such as the San Francisco Peaks where a ski resort, Snowbowl, was built. In February, the Trump administration granted permission for mining and logging on Bears Ears land. The Black Hills have long been a target for development. Cal State Long Beach is facing consequences for dumping construction debris, including asphalt, metal and concrete, on a sacred site that is registered as a national  historic place.

At present, a conflict is taking place along the US-Mexico border where construction of the wall is violating indigenous sovereignty and rights. A group of tribes in the Kumeyaay Nation are suing the federal government for blocking their access to “sacred sites, trails, plants and medicines, as well as a number of historic landmarks.” And activists in Arizona from the Tohono O’odham Nation are waging a direct action campaign to physically block construction of the wall there that will stop them from having access to a sacred site and source of water, the Quitobaquito Springs.

From the Toronto Star.

Stopping Fossil Fuel Projects

The struggle to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline is perhaps one of the most well-known efforts to stop fossil fuel infrastructure from invading and degrading indigenous land, and that struggle continues, but there are many similar struggles going on. Resistance is rising in Greater Chaco against fracking, which began there in 2010.

Two major conflicts are in Western Canada, the Trans Mountain Pipeline on Secwepemc and Ktunaxa land and the Coastal Gaslink Pipeline on Wet’suwet’en Territory. The Trans Mountain Pipeline project was bought by the Canadian government in 2018 when Kinder Morgan was about to give up on it. Construction has begun and people are trying to block it through tree sits and targeting corporations that insure the project. Similarly, the Wet’suwet’en have used blockades, and been treated violently by militarized police, and are now asking the Supreme Court to halt the project because of the violence to their communities associated with the pipeline workers’ “man camps.”

Phoenix, Arizona. Jenni Monet.

Ending Violence Against Women

The kidnapping, sexual assault and murder of indigenous women is at a crisis level. Clearing the FOG spoke with Annita Luchesi (Cheyenne) about it last year. She has been working to document the cases through the MMIW Database, win policy changes to solve the cases and prevent them from occurring through the Sovereign Bodies Institute. Red dresses are used in protests to symbolize the women and girls who have disappeared or have been killed. Not only are “man camps” that exist around fossil fuel projects directly correlated with increased violence towards women, but law enforcement, who are supposed to investigate the violence, are perpetrators of it too.

From Real Peoples Media.

Reclaiming the Land

Land defenders from the Six Nations in Canada are waging a struggle to prevent a development from being built on their land. They established a camp on the land, which is disputed territory, in July and named it 1492 Land Back Lane. Police arrested them last month and now the land defenders are receiving more support and solidarity through rallies and marches.

In this interview, two Haudenosaunee land defenders explain how settlers are encroaching upon their land with development and restricting their land base as their population grows. They describe how they need land for their sources of food, such as plants and game, and how development destroys that. It is easy to see the parallels with the situation faced by colonized people all over the world, and particularly Palestinians who are being constrained to smaller spaces and attacked right now for harvesting their olives.

This is the “American Way of War,” as Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz describes it. It has its roots in the tactics used by settlers when they first came to the Americas of destroying land, housing and crops to weaken Native Americans and drive them off their land. It continues today in places like Yemen and Syria where there are food crises and with the use of economic coercive measures against countries like Cuba, Venezuela, Zimbabwe and Iran that prevent them from buying food and medicine. It’s time for the people of the United States to demand an end to these destructive practices.

From Last Real Indians.

Moving Forward

Celebrating Indigenous People’s Day is a step towards recognizing that colonization exists. We can do more to end that colonization and respect the sovereignty of indigenous nations.

Climate Justice Alliance developed a set of  proposals for an indigenous-led just transition to a green economy. They write:

A just nation-to-nation relationship means breaking the cycle of asking Indigenous nations to choose between a colonial imposed model of an extractive economy or preservation of their Indigenous sovereignty, including protection of their traditional lands, waters and air, and the right to practice their spirituality and cultural lifeways.

The proposals include respecting the sovereignty of indigenous nations, requiring their consent for policies and projects, repairing the damage done through broken agreements and investment in indigenous communities. These principles can be applied more broadly than just addressing the climate crisis to become a template for all interactions with indigenous nations.

There is a path forward to a future where the rights of indigenous peoples are respected and protected. As we participate in the current movement to end systemic anti-black racism in the United States, let’s include the ways systemic racism and colonization impact Native Americans. Let’s show our solidarity with indigenous people through our actions to support their resistance.

This article was posted on Tuesday, October 13th, 2020 at 12:14pm and is filed under Activism, Canada, Original Peoples, United States.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2020/10/13/supporting-indigenous-resistance/feed/ 0 98396 https://www.radiofree.org/2020/09/14/rio-tinto-turns-cultural-vandal-the-destruction-of-the-juukan-gorge-caves/ https://www.radiofree.org/2020/09/14/rio-tinto-turns-cultural-vandal-the-destruction-of-the-juukan-gorge-caves/#respond Mon, 14 Sep 2020 08:41:18 +0000 https://www.radiofree.org/?p=95327 It was a calamity in cultural terms likened to the destruction of the Buddhist statues of Bamyan and the ancient city of Palmyra.  The explosive eradication of two Aboriginal sites in West Australia’s Juukan Gorge in May, said to be 46,000 years old, moved Peter Stone, the UNESCO chair in Cultural Property Protection and Peace, to call it “a black day for us all”.  This was not the dirty handiwork of Taliban zealots or Islamic State fanatics: the blasting had been an act of callous corporate desecration, a molestation of country, a renting of the earth.

These sites in the Pilbara were not parochial statements or nationalist kitsch.  They were evidence of continuous occupation by humans through the last Ice Age, sporting artefacts such as a belt made from human hair 4,000 years old.  Such artefacts could be claimed as linking the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura (PKKP) to immemorial ancestry.  As Stone remarked, “They are not only extremely important sites for Aboriginal communities, but also they were extremely important sites for archaeological understanding of the distant past in Australia.”

PKKP representative John Ashburton’s statement was a sob of desperation.  “Our people are deeply troubled and saddened by the destruction of these rock shelters and are grieving the loss of connection to our ancestors as well as our land.”

The initial approach by the company was one of justification, mixed with modest regret.  Rio Tinto had a long standing relationship with the PKKP people.  They had secured all the necessary approvals in 2013, done the necessary jigs in law.  In a statement, the mining behemoth claimed that, “We are sorry that the recently expressed concerns of the PKKP did not arise through the engagements that have taken place over many years under the agreement that governs our operations in the country.”

Commentators in the field of mining are brimming with explanations as to why Rio Tinto turned cultural vandal.  Deanna Kemp, director of the Centre for Social Responsibility in Mining at the University of Queensland, and Andrew Hopkins, sociologist at the Australian National University have a few.  There was “extreme production pressure” in the company’s iron ore division; the iron ore in the caves’ proximity was of such grade as to be irresistible, given demand for the company’s Pilbara blend.  West Australian law vested the company with authority to mine the area, one it exercised despite severe reservation and opposition.  The company’s structure is segmented: each product division – iron ore, aluminium, copper and diamonds, minerals and energy – reign separately.  When things shine, the system works, each division left to its own productive devices.  But lacking a central mechanism of oversight can be disastrous: the chance of reckless decisions with “disastrous human and environmental consequences”.

Not that Rio was unaware of these deficiencies.  Modest efforts had been made within the company to put in place chains of command run by what is drearily termed in corporation-speak “functional executives”.  Product division chiefs were not entirely free of their gaze.  And one field of importance for the functional executives was the external function of dealing with indigenous relations, subsumed under the broader title of corporate relations.  The position had been historically weak, lacking a presence on the executive committee.

Jean-Sébastien Jacques, on becoming chief executive in 2016, created a seat for the head of corporate relations at the big table.  But, note Kemp and Hopkins, the system did not work.  There was too much scatter, too many specialisations, too much scope.  News about the imminent destruction of the Juukan Gorge caves might have intruded upon the executive for corporate relations or the chief executive.  But the watch-dog failed to bark, largely because the focus of indigenous relations was, to put it mildly, minor.  Simone Niven, the distantly London-based head of corporate relations, was ignorant of the Juukan Gorge caves till days before the blasts, lacking knowledge of their significance.  The indigenous relations element was obscured in the shrubbery of corporate governance.

The sense that heads on pikes were needed started to take hold at Rio Tinto.  A Parliamentary review was instigated.  Investors were concerned.  Superannuation funds such as UniSuper, HESTA and AustralianSuper were agitated.  The Australian Council of Superannuation Investors (ACSI) demanded changes to “ensure an incident of this nature does not happen again and what accountability there will be for the issues identified.”

Interest centred on what might happen to Jacques, chief executive of iron ore Chris Salisbury, and Niven. The board, led by Simon Thompson, initially felt that withholding bonuses and releasing their own review of the incident by Michael L’Estrange were two ways of pacifying the critics.  ACSI chief Louise Davidson wondered whether the company felt that “4 million [British] pounds is the right price for the destruction of cultural heritage”.  Rio’s Australian directors L’Estrange, Megan Clark and Simon McKeon were accused by the Australian Financial Review of unconscionable weakness.  Dissent grew in the boardroom at what was a lamentably timorous response.  Stronger disciplinary measures were urged.  Eventually, the big three would face Rio’s own version of the gold gilded corporate guillotine.

Before the parliamentary committee, Rio has been subpar and deceptive.  Former Rio chief executive Sam Walsh had claimed in the press that instructions were issued in 2013 to the company’s general manager of mine operations Greg Lilleyman to ensure that the Juukan Gorge not be mined.  In response to the question on notice put by the committee, the company found no mention of the sites in any email correspondence.  Lilleyman also claimed to have “no recollection of Mr Walsh issuing any such direction.”

The company seemed to relish misleading members of parliament.  Jacques, for instance, had been reported as telling employees at a Brisbane staff meeting to “Fit in or fuck off.”  The committee was intrigued: would such an environment be conductive to questioning the proposed destruction of the Juukan Gorge caves?  The company response: “Mr Jacques was expressing the sentiment that we will not tolerate any breaches of safety in our operations around the world, by any of our employees.”  Not quite, Joe Aston points out in the Australian Financial Review.  The FIFO remark was in response to dealing with “dead wood” in the company, an effort to remove those “stuck in the past”.  Nothing about safety; nothing about good conscience.

Aston also notes another example.  To a question put by MP George Christensen about who in Rio “knew or had an inkling about the significance of Juukan Gorge caves”, the answer was equally unsatisfactory, if not mendacious.  Unnamed managers are noted at stages in 2012 to 2014 as having such knowledge.  Senior executives are spared it.  References to rock shelters or sites did not specifically mention “Juukan”.  A falsehood, Aston claims, given that Rio received a final report of archaeologist Dr. Michael Slack on December 31, 2018 assigning the caves “the highest archaeological significance in Australia”.

The Rio Tinto Board Review was also a master class in hand washing exoneration.  The media release of the report noted that legal authority to destroy the Juukan rock shelters had been obtained; it merely “fell short of the Standards and internal guidance that Rio Tinto sets for itself, over and above its legal obligations.” The findings of the review revealed “no single root cause or error that directly resulted in the destruction of the rock shelters.”  Blame the systems, data sharing, engagement with the PKKP, poor decisions over time.  But the vandal, in all of this, should be spared.

Rio, in the fashion of the times, is making its own effort at cultural re-education.  On its website, the company informs us of an unreserved apology had been made to the PKKP people.  The destruction of the rock shelters should never have been happened; “we are absolutely committed to listening, learning and changing.”  Measures in cultural heritage governance, controls and approvals in iron had been strengthened.  Vague references are made to “increasing our focus on the importance of our relationships with Traditional Owners.”  More Indigenous leadership roles were needed.

Which brings us back to the gold gilded guillotine.  Tone deaf and lacking a scintilla of empathy, the company board has given Jacques, Salisbury and Niven a fond farewell: some $40 million between them.  It affirms a rule common from the company board room to university bureaucrats: incompetence and insensitivity has its rich rewards.

This article was posted on Monday, September 14th, 2020 at 1:41am and is filed under Australia, Cultural Vandalism, Historic Sites, Mining, Original Peoples.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2020/09/14/rio-tinto-turns-cultural-vandal-the-destruction-of-the-juukan-gorge-caves/feed/ 0 95327 https://www.radiofree.org/2020/08/16/anti-racist-uprising-in-minneapolis-infiltrated-by-extreme-right-holligans/ https://www.radiofree.org/2020/08/16/anti-racist-uprising-in-minneapolis-infiltrated-by-extreme-right-holligans/#respond Sun, 16 Aug 2020 23:03:41 +0000 https://www.radiofree.org/?p=85270 Reportage from Minneapolis — The city of Minneapolis is where it all began. It is where the last drop fell on the surface of a proverbial overflowing lake, causing the dam to burst, consequently starting to destroy the foundations of the empire.

A death of just one single man can, under certain dreadful circumstances, put into motion the entire avalanche of events. It can smash the whole regime into pieces. It can fully rewrite history, and even change the identity of a nation. It can… although it not always does.

George Floyd’s death became a spark. The city of Minneapolis is where the murder occurred, and where the ethnic minorities rose in rage.

But it is also where white extreme right-wing criminals, and some even say, entire regime, perpetrated the uprising, kidnapped what could have become a true revolution and began choking legitimate rebellion by a stained duvet of nihilism and confusion.

Here, we will not speculate. We will not point fingers at “deep state” or some multi-billionaire families, and to what extent they have been involved. Let others do this if they know details. But this time, I simply came to listen. And to pass to the world what I discovered first hand and what I was told.

This time I simply went to Franklin Avenue and Lake Street, both in Minneapolis.

I spoke to Native American people there. To those who joined forces with the African-American community during those dangerous days after May 25, 2020. To people who dared to defend their neighborhoods against brutality, against  white gangs, which came to loot, infiltrate, and derail the most powerful uprising in the United States in modern history.

*****

Bob Rice is a Native American owner of Pow Wow Grounds, a local entrepreneur, and a ‘community protection organizer.’ His legendary café is located on Franklin Avenue. During the COVID-19 pandemic, it has been reduced, for the time being, to a takeaway business, but even as such, it is enormously popular among the Native Americans, as well as others.

At the back of the cafe is huge storage, full of food. Everyone hungry, in need of help, can simply come here and take whatever he or she needs.

We grab some freshly brewed coffee from the shop and take it to the public benches outside.

Author with Bob Rice on Franklin Avenue

Bob Rice then begins his story:

There has been police brutality for a very long time, against people of color. Not only talking about Minneapolis but in all these other places, since the 1991 Rodney King incident. Things were boiling and building up – leading to a big blow up.

And all this discrimination did not start here; it came centuries ago from Europe.

After the George Floyd murder, I wanted to show solidarity. Native Americans were experiencing an even higher degree of persecution than Black people. We had to stand together. I went down to the site of the murder of George Floyd, in order to support protests.

For a while, we talked about the mass media in the United States, an official and even some ‘independent one,’ and how it quickly and violently turned against the left, as well as against those who have been daring to expose endemic racism in the United States.

But soon, we returned to the events that took place here, in May and June.

I noticed the presence of strange elements right from the start. I was watching guys breaking windows. At about 6 am, the morning after, I traveled down to South Minneapolis.  There were piles of rocks in front of the rioters.  Flash hand grenades.  I kept on moving around the areas and kept on seeing rocks. I noticed the Minneapolis Umbrella Man, dressed all in black, with mask and black umbrella and black hammer smashing things – at the end being stopped by black guys. People were walking out of the store with car parts, and I thought, “why stealing those things”? These guys didn’t seem to be as part of the protest. I started moving and going away from the area, thinking that these guys would burn down stores and places soon. I even called up my insurance company the following morning to see if my policy covers civil unrest. That night they burned a lot of stores – auto stores, liquor stores, all types of businesses. I thought that if we do not do something ourselves to protect our neighborhoods, they will burn down all of our areas, too.

From what I saw, I couldn’t tell you who these guys were, but they were not from here.

So, we put up our protection zone calling out people on Facebook. We became the Headquarters of protection of Native American businesses and nonprofit organizations, as well as banks, shops, investment properties, etc. all belonging to the Native American community around here.

I noticed there were Caucasian people, driving cars very slowly with no license plates, yelling racial slurs out of the windows. We formed a human shield, chain, along Franklin Avenue, to protect ourselves and our people.

At a high point, about 300 people were protecting the area all night long for about eight days in a row. It had to be done, because here we had people from all over, including Wisconsin, descending on us — we had white supremacist group Proud Boys here. They arrived wearing masks. We had young white kids – 16 and 17 years old — coming from Wisconsin, looting liquor stores.  We caught them. Obviously, they came out here because they thought it was an exciting thing to do.  They didn’t even know where they were – this area is very dangerous with drug dealing and gang violence at night. Lucky, they got caught by us.

And the coverage? I wanted to know whether these events, in the heart of Native American neighborhoods, were described in depth by media reports.

Bob Rice replied readily:

There was no media reporting on these matters – mass media blamed everything on the Black Lives Matter movement.  When liquor stores and tobacco shops were on fire, no police or fire trucks were around. Then the National Guard took over – using tear gas.

 Mr. Rice sighed, still in disbelief:

 Just incredible how our so-called President has done all the mess going and even made it worse!

*****

Robert Pilot, Native Roots Radio host, drove me for days all around the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, explaining what really took place on both Franklin Avenue and Lake Street.

George Floyd Murder Site

But before, we visited an provisory, impromptu monument where the murder of George Floyd took place. There were flowers, graffiti, works of art; there was grief, and there was solidarity. Native American people clearly supported the plight of the African-Americans.

The area was safe; it was well organized. People of all races came here to pay tribute to the murdered man, and centuries of atrocious history of the United States.

As we drove, Robert Pilot explained:

Native American neighborhoods armed themselves after the Floyd murder. But not only that: economic hardships ensued after the murder; food banks have come up.  The Pow Wow Grounds used to be a food distribution deport but ended up becoming a food bank for anyone to donate and get what they need.

Protesters were everywhere; the young generation got fed up.  So different from other murders. The last straw was the murder of George Floyd. Four years earlier, in 2016, Philando Castile, an African American man, got murdered by police. He had worked in a school cafeteria. His murder was broadcast live on Facebook. It was a buildup. 10,000 people protested on 38th Street and Chicago in Minneapolis – the site of the murder of George Floyd. Combination of racial and overall frustration.

 We drove by burned stores, services, gas stations. Everything was resembling a war zone, and in a way, it was.

If you are there, things are extremely raw, emotional. It is not like analyzing things from a distance from the comfort of one’s home.

Robert continued explaining, as we drove by block after block of the Middle East-style combat destruction:

There is a small percentage of African American people as compared to White Americans.  We need allies, too. We have to support each other. Signs everywhere in my neighborhood, ‘Black Lives Matter.’

Some young white people have woken up. They see the truth. The opinion of the masses is moving to the left; they are feeling fed up with what is happening around them and what it is that the country is doing to the world because of oil.

What is interesting is that there is a protest every single day, which is something new and mind-blowing. The media is misreporting, minimizing the enormity and magnitude of protests, CNN, MSNBC, etc.

Robert Pilot is not only a radio host, but he is also a teacher:

White teachers are still teaching history; they are teaching it to black and Native American kids! Political standing of my students – a few are engaged, but definitely not all. Perhaps 10 percent of people are engaged and doing the work for 90 percent.

The white guilt now and then… But many of us feel: You should stand behind us and with us but not in front of us. Revolution is happening in that sense. Everything is changing since protests are happening.

Not everyone likes the changes; definitely not everyone. The establishment is fighting back, trying to survive, in its existing, horrid form.

Robert Pilot concludes:

Generally, Black and Native Americans are together, supportive of each other.

It is symbolic that the Native American movement started on Franklin Avenue, where protests began in 1968. We would never burn down our own stores like grocery stores and hospitals. Why should we?

But we had to mobilize and stop members of the KKK and Proud Boys type of guys.

 *****

We drive some 100 miles north, in order to meet Ms. Emma Needham – a young Native American activist. Emma was kind enough to bring traditional medicine from her area. We met halfway at the Sand Prairie Wildlife Management Area.

Before our encounter, along the highway, we are surrounded by true ‘Americana’: endless open spaces, half-empty highways, more than 100 car-long cargo train pulled by two monstrous engines, while pushed by yet another one. We pass by St. Cloud Correctional Facility – an ancient-looking prison that bears the resemblance of some massive medieval English mansion surrounded by an elaborate system of barbed wires and watchtowers.

Trump Shop in the sticks

In one of the towns along the road, there is a big makeshift market selling posters, T-shirts, and other memorabilia, all related to the current President. It is called Trump Shop. Big banners are shouting at passing cars: “Trump, Make America Great Again,” “Trump 2020 – No More Bullshit,” and “God, Guns & Guts Made America. Let’s Keep All Three”.

Ms Emma Needham, young activist and write

Emma is a storyteller, a writer. She is an intelligent, outspoken, sincere, and passionate person:

Where we were, we did not see a lot of white men with masks attacking, but what we did see were two young white kids, around 16, from Wisconsin, looting a liquor store which was run by Native Americans.

I stayed over Friday and Saturday nights around the Indian American Cultural Center in Minneapolis. On Friday night, within half a mile to a mile in all directors, we could see and hear the riots and looting. There were gunshots, helicopters hovering all around us. But nobody came to rescue us.

On Saturday night, we could see white people on Jeeps, waving flags, cruising around the neighborhood. “The white kids from Wisconsin were there, it appeared to me, opportunistic grabbing whatever was available.

Majority of those who came to protest and loot were outsiders, not from the neighborhoods. It does not make sense for people in Minneapolis to burn down and loot stores they rely on.

I wanted to know whether the Native Americans and African-Americans were helping each other in that difficult hour?

Emma did not hesitate:

There was big solidarity between Black people and Native American people; there was empathy.

It has been lifelong degradation for many of us growing up poor and severely marginalized in reservations, but we had never seen anything like this, so close to what resembled a war.

Those of us who were down in North Minneapolis those nights – Friday and Saturday – could not find words to describe what was happening. But we had a strong sense that what has been happening to us Native Americans was happening to Black Americans, too – 400 years of surviving in a system of oppression. Enough is enough! Shared horrors – same for both groups!

I asked whether everything changed, and this is a new beginning for the nation? As many, Emma did not sound overly optimistic:

A black American female artist once said, ‘I love my white friends, but I don’t trust you because I know when the time comes, you need to choose your skin color. You count on the freedom and safety which you have. Whether you make that conscious decision or not, it will be there for you.

*****

On my behalf, Robert Pilot asked Brett Buckner, his fellow radio host, and an African American activist, whether he could confirm that the majority of rioters were whites and not from the community. He replied:

I would say so. Based on police reports and accounts from the community members, most of the damage was done by outsiders. Unfortunately, their actions will cause our community pain for years and even decades to come.

*****

Before I finished writing this report, “Umbrella man” got ‘identified.’

On July 29, 2020, Daily Mail wrote:

Masked “Umbrella Man” who was seen smashing windows of Minneapolis AutoZone that was later burned to the ground during George Floyd protests is identified as ‘Hells Angels gang member with ties to white supremacist group’… The Star Tribune reported the 32-year-old man has links to Aryan Cowboy Brotherhood, a white supremacist gang based in Minnesota and Kentucky.

He was one of many, but the most notorious one. Looking at his photos when in action, he was bearing a striking resemblance to ‘ninja’ looking rioters — right-wing hooligans – who were unleashed in order to bring chaos to Hong Kong, people who have been supported and financed by Western governments. I know, because I work in Hong Kong, since the beginning of the riots. Coincidence? And if not: who really ‘inspired’ whom?

*****

Before I left Minneapolis, Robert Pilot and his wife Wendy interviewed me on their Native Roots Radio. What was supposed to be just 30 minutes appearance ended up being a one-hour event.

They showed me their city and their state, sharing sincere feelings and hopes, unveiling suffering of both African American and Native American communities.

This time, I traveled to the United States in order to listen. But I was also asked to talk, and so I did.

During the interview, I took them to several parts of the world, where black people still suffer enormously, due to Western imperialism and corporate greed. The world where Native people of Latin America, Canada, as well as other parts of the Planet, are brutally humiliated, robbed of everything, even murdered by millions.

We were complimenting each other. Our knowledge was.

I am glad I came to Minnesota. I am thankful that I could witness history in the making.

I am also delighted that I observed solidarity between the African American and Native American people. For centuries, both went through hell, through agony. Now, they were awakening.

Minnesota is where the latest and very important chapter of American history began. But I also went to Washington, D.C., Baltimore, New York City, Massachusetts. I witnessed protests, anger, despair. But there was also hope. Hope, despite tear gas and riot police, lockdowns, despite mismanaged COVID-19 and increasing poverty rates. Something was ending, something unsavory and brutal. Whether this could be considered a new beginning was still too early to tell.

In Minnesota, I chose to see events through the eyes of Native Americans, people who were here ‘forever,’ to whom this land used to belong. People who were exterminated by the “new America,” by European migrants, in a genocide that claimed roughly 90% of the native lives. These were people who were robbed of their culture and their riches. I am glad; I am proud that I chose this angle.

True peace, true reconciliation can only come after history as well as reality are fully understood, never through denial.

Now, both African Americans and Native Americans are speaking, and the world is listening. It has to listen. At least this is already progress. These two groups are forming a powerful alliance of victims. But also, an alliance of those who are determined to make sure that history never repeats itself.

• First published by NEO – New Eastern Outlook (a journal of the Russian Academy of Sciences)

• All photos by Andre Vltchek

This article was posted on Sunday, August 16th, 2020 at 4:03pm and is filed under Black Lives Matter, Civil Unrest, Donald Trump, Media Bias, Original Peoples, Police brutality, Protests, Racism, Resistance, Riots, Solidarity, United States, Violence.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2020/08/16/anti-racist-uprising-in-minneapolis-infiltrated-by-extreme-right-holligans/feed/ 0 85270 https://www.radiofree.org/2020/08/10/us-crimes-against-humanity-at-home-and-abroad/ https://www.radiofree.org/2020/08/10/us-crimes-against-humanity-at-home-and-abroad/#respond Mon, 10 Aug 2020 18:30:47 +0000 https://www.radiofree.org/?p=84267 Photo Credit:  Albert Eisenstaedt

This month marks the second year since former President of Bolivia, Evo Morales, announced to the world a campaign promoted by a group of Latin American writers and academics to declare August 9 as International Day of US Crimes against Humanity. Appropriately the day is to remember the second nuclear bomb dropped in 1945 on Nagasaki, Japan that came just three days after the first nuclear bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Imagine how depraved and cold-blooded the then Democratic President Truman could be to find that he had incinerated 150,000 people on one day and turned right around and did it again in Nagasaki instantly killing 65,000 more human beings. US historical accounts love to turn truth on its head by saying how many lives those nuclear bombs saved when Japan was already defeated before the bombs were dropped after 67 Japanese cities had been leveled to the ground by relentless US aerial fire bombings.

The people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were sacrificed as an exclamation point on a proclamation to the world announcing the arrival of the US as the world’s new pre-eminent super power. It also served as an example that the US would commit any murderous crime of any proportion to maintain that imperial position of dominance and they have demonstrated that to be true time and time again. Even now in decline the US has never apologized for this unnecessary crime because that could convey a sign of weakness and a step back from a policy of nuclear blackmail held over the nations of the world. Obama had the chance to do that in the final year of his presidency when he had nothing to lose in a 2016 visit to Hiroshima. Instead of apologizing to the people of Japan or easing tensions in the world Obama, in eloquent fluffy double talk, said, “Mere words cannot give voice to such suffering. But we have a shared responsibility to look directly into the eye of history and ask what we must do differently to curb such suffering again.”

The responsibility for the majority of suffering in the world was then, and continues to be, on an imperialist policy and its inherent neoliberal engine that violently throttles the ability of countries to develop in a way that would bring health and prosperity for the benefit of their majorities. In the end it is an unsustainable system that only benefits a sliver of privileged society.

The US crimes against humanity did not begin or end with the dropping of the nuclear bombs on Japan. As militant civil rights leader Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin (formerly H. Rap Brown) pointed out years ago, “Violence is as American as cherry pie.” Since its inception the US has been ingrained with a motor force of violent oppression against everyone and every country that stood in the way of its expansion for control of resources and its entitlement to limitless accumulation of vast wealth for a few.

The original thirteen colonies that rebelled against England were not motivated solely by being taxed without representation but more for the restrictions that King George had placed on the unbridled greed of the white settlers to expand and steal the lands of the indigenous nations and communities and to establish a system of slavery which was the main source of capitalist accumulation especially for the southern colonies. At the time of the revolution close to 20% of the population consisted of Black slaves.  Slavery actually ran contrary to British Common Law so the only way the emerging class of landowners in the colonies could flourish was to secede from the British Empire. In doing so it established a pivotal component of the original DNA of the United States; structural racism as a means to justify any level of discrimination and oppression with a deeply embedded belief in the inferiority of any race not white and Christian. The cries of Black Lives Matter in the streets of all the major cities and towns of the US today are a resounding echo of resistance that comes from the plantations and the slave ships that came from Africa.

The genocide of indigenous people in the US was its initial crime wave against humanity as it expanded westward destined by God to exercise their Manifest Destiny. The early history of this country is littered with hundreds of massacres of the original caretakers of the land from the Atlantic to the Pacific. And that crime continues to this day with Native Americans suffering from the highest infection rates of Covid-19 in the country as a direct result of government neglect and broken treaties that keep the reservations in grinding poverty including in many areas where there is not even running water.

On July 21 Congress passed a $740 billion military appropriations bill, the biggest ever, and $2 billion more than last year. The United States spends more on national defense than the next 11 largest militaries combined.  A well intended but feeble attempt by sections of the Democratic Party to cut 10% of the budget to go to health and human services failed because ultimately funding the 800 US military installations that occupy territory in more than 70 countries around the world takes precedence over something so basic and human as subsidized food programs. Meanwhile approximately 20% of the families in this country are struggling to obtain nutritious food every day just as one example of the growing social and health needs.

Wars and occupations are expensive and that money goes right down the drain. It does not recycle through the economy; rather it is equipment and operations meant to destroy and terrorize, and the only part of it that is reused is the militarization of police forces in the US who are geared out in advanced equipment for the wars at home not even normally seen in theaters of war abroad.

When Obama took over from Bush junior he vowed to end the war in Afghanistan and instead left office with the unique distinction of having had a war going every day of his 8 years in office. He launched airstrikes or military raids in at least seven countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan and Trump came in and did not miss a beat and has carried the war of death, destruction and destabilization of Afghanistan into its twentieth year. The Pentagon knows that the days of outright winning a war are over and relies now on hybrid wars that are perhaps even more criminal. It is now wars of attrition with proxy and contract armies, aerial bombardment, sabotage of infrastructure that turns into endless wars, the intent of which is to make sure that a country is imbalanced, exhausted and does not become independent or develop and use its resources for the benefit of its own people.

This, of course, is not the only type of criminal warfare in the Empire’s arsenal. Economic sanctions are just as much a crime against humanity as military attacks. No one should ever forget the 10 years of the US orchestrated UN sanctions against Iraq in the 1990’s that were responsible for the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children.  Primarily through executive order Trump has put some sort of sanctions on around one third of the countries of the world ranging in severity starting with the 60 year old unilateral blockade of Cuba for the crime of insisting on its sovereignty just 90 miles away, to the sanctioning of medicines and food to Venezuela causing the deaths of 40,000 people, the outright stealing of billions of dollars of their assets out of banks, and organizing coup plots against the democratically elected President, Nicolas Maduro.

Now the chickens have come to roost with Trump sending shadowy military units of federal agents into cities like Portland, Seattle and other cities like it was a military invasion of some poor country, barging in uninvited not to bring order and peace but to brutalize, escalate and provoke people in the streets who for months now have been demanding real justice and equality. The combination of the failure of the Trump Administration to confront the pandemic with any sort of will or a national science based plan, the existing economic crisis with its glaring separation of wealth and the endless murdering of people of color as normal police policy has exposed the system like never before. The growing consciousness of a majority of the US population that now seem to be getting that there has to be fundamental change will be the catalyst for real change to happen. It will not come from a government that does not reflect their interests but only through a unity of struggle will we be pointed in a direction that will push US crimes against humanity, at home and abroad, to become a thing of the past.

This article was posted on Monday, August 10th, 2020 at 11:30am and is filed under Activism, Afghanistan, Barack Obama, Bolivia, COVID-19, Crimes against Humanity, Cuba, Donald Trump, Hiroshima, Iraq, Militarism, Nagasaki, Nukes, Original Peoples, Police brutality, Police militarization, President Nicolas Maduro, Racism, Sanctions, Terrorism (state and retail), US Military, Venezuela, War Crimes, War Industry.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2020/08/10/us-crimes-against-humanity-at-home-and-abroad/feed/ 0 84267 https://www.radiofree.org/2020/07/28/a-palestine-mexico-border-equipped-by-elbit-systems/ https://www.radiofree.org/2020/07/28/a-palestine-mexico-border-equipped-by-elbit-systems/#respond Tue, 28 Jul 2020 16:45:29 +0000 https://www.radiofree.org/2020/07/28/a-palestine-mexico-border-equipped-by-elbit-systems/ by Visualizing Palestine / July 28th, 2020

A member of Tohono O’odham Nation, a migrant in the Sonoran desert, a Palestinian at an Israeli checkpoint, or a resident of a segregated and over-policed U.S. neighborhood — all are increasingly subject to the same technologies of repression.

— Gabe Schivone, journalist, co-author of Facing Down Settler Colonialism

In 2014, Elbit Systems of America (a subsidiary of Israel’s Elbit Systems) won a $145 million U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) contract to construct a network of 53 camera and radar-equipped Integrated Fixed Towers (IFTs) in Southern Arizona.

Ten of Elbit’s IFTs are situated on Tohono O’odham reservation, placing this Indigenous community under round-the-clock surveillance with the same TORCH electronic system it first developed for Israel’s annexation wall.

“Watched” highlights three human right impacts of this repressive technology in U.S.–Mexico borderlands. Below, we share a quote for each to illustrate the way different movements are acting in solidarity with one another.

Occupying Tohono O’odham Nation

The Tohono O’odham Nation is one of the most heavily militarized Indigenous communities in the United States. Our daily lives are impacted by surveillance on the ground, in the air, and now day and night with the erection of Elbit System’s Integrated Fixed Towers along the 75 mile stretch of US Mexico Border on O’odham lands. Our once peaceful existence is forever changed by the policies that are implemented to provide homeland security, but instead are causing more destruction to the natural movements of Peoples and Wildlife, such as the looming border wall. We continue to resist these harmful actions to our existence, and continue to live as we always have as People of the Desert.

— Amy Juan, Co-Founder of Tohono O’odham Hemajkam Rights Network and Community Advocate (quote given to APSA)

Killing Migrants

Much like the Palestinian people, Indigenous and Mexican populations are subjected to highly militarized policing and constriction of rights, stand accused of being criminals for being who they are, and know the pain of statelessness and separation…Until Palestinians are free, none of us are.

— Isabel Garcia, Coalición de Derechos Humanos, (quote given to APSA)

Our struggle against death and suffering here in the Arizona borderlands is deeply implicated in the struggle against US-funded war and occupation in Palestine.

— Statement of No Más Muertes/No More Deaths, humanitarian organization working in U.S.–Mexico borderlands (source)

Repressing Protest

[CBP’s] use of military technology to surveil protesters inside US borders is deeply disturbing, especially given CBP’s lack of clear and strong policies to protect privacy and constitutional rights.

— Neema Singh Guliani, ACLU Senior Legislative Counsel, speaking about CBP’s use of drones to surveil Black Lives Matter protests in Minnesota (source)

Federal policies incentivize local law enforcement’s collaboration with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) with no oversight.

— Movement for Black Lives, “Community Control of Law Enforcement” policy platform (source)

This article was posted on Tuesday, July 28th, 2020 at 9:45am and is filed under Human Rights, Migration/Migrants, Original Peoples.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2020/07/28/a-palestine-mexico-border-equipped-by-elbit-systems/feed/ 0 79059 https://www.radiofree.org/2020/07/25/racism-in-chile/ https://www.radiofree.org/2020/07/25/racism-in-chile/#respond Sat, 25 Jul 2020 07:14:29 +0000 https://www.radiofree.org/2020/07/25/racism-in-chile/ They killed black woman

Recently, when a retired Chilean U.N. employee tried to enter ECLAC (United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, based in

Santiago de Chile) to claim her pension in a bank inside the compound, her car was stopped by a U.N. security officer. She was asked to complete formalities. To her taste, the process was taking too much time, and she began honking. The head of security approached her, trying to explain the procedure, which had recently toughened up, due to the outbreak of COVID-19. The security head happened to be an African-Brazilian.

She clearly did not like this fact, and she exploded:

That spicy nigger (‘el negro picante’) is the security head? I’m going to send him to the United States so that they could kill him there! I’m going to write to ‘El Mercurio’ newspaper! Who would think that this nigger could be a boss?

Her horrid outburst was reported, and it quickly reached the ECLAC head who happens to be a progressive Mexican scientist – Alicia Bárcena – who is a vocal admirer of AMLO, Hugo Chávez, Correa, and Lula. Indignant, she took immediate action, barring the former employee’s entry to the compound and reporting the incident to the U.N. headquarters in New York.

This story could be dismissed as an ugly anecdote, as something sick and unusual. Except, it is not unusual at all. Chile is a dreadfully racist place, although, as many countries where racism thrives, it does not openly admit that it is.

Gone are the internationalist ideals of Allende’s era, gone is solidarity with other Latin American nations. It appears that only the Chilean Communist Party has at least some sympathy with the plight of Venezuelan people. And no one here is demanding the return of the access to the sea to Bolivia: access which was literally stolen during the shameful “War of the Pacific,” during which Chile disgracefully joined forces with Great Britain against Bolivia and Peru.

*****

“We are English of Latin America.” This is how Chileans like to view themselves.

And they openly despise those who are not as white as they are: Peruvians, Bolivians, Haitians.

Throughout the 20th Century, Chilean immigration policy was based on a determined effort to attract the whitest of whites, from Germans to Czechs, Croats, Swiss. Even the Italians were not good enough for them. A new wave of European migrants was mainly settling in the south, pushing indigenous, native Mapuche people to the margins, and into misery.

Chilean Left has very little to do with the indigenous struggle. It is a Western-style left, much closer to defunct “anarcho-syndicalism” in the United States, then to Cuban, Venezuelan, or Bolivian pan-Latin American struggle. The majority of Chilean ‘revolutionaries’ feel much more at home in Miami, Paris, or Rome than with their own oppressed people in such places as Puerto Saavedra or Temuco.

In Chile, race plays an extremely important role. It opens and closes doors. It determines who gets what jobs, and who ends up living in inescapable misery.

*****

Under the cover of “fight against COVID-19”, Chilean extreme right-wing government of Sebastian Piñera unleashed a new stage of the war against Mapuche people, a war that even some foreign mass media outlets could not ignore, anymore.

Fight against the fascist Pinera

According to Thomas Reuters Foundation News report from 17 June 2020:

The Mapuche, which means “Earth People” in the Mapudungun tongue, make up about 10% of Chile’s population of 19 million and mainly work as subsistence farmers in the Araucania region – one the poorest areas of the country.

Mapuche activists have gone on hunger strike, occupied and burned forestry and farming lands, and cut off highways to demand territories they say were stolen from them.

Mapuche leaders say that, like black Americans, they have lost a disproportionate number of their own young men to police violence.

One such case was Camilo Catrillanca, who was shot dead in 2018 during a police operation that sparked widespread fury among Chileans.

The 24-year-old became a symbol of police brutality, and his death triggered the resignation of the country’s police chief.

Mapuche people expressing their frustration

However, while there is now even the “Papuan Lives Matter” movement, in far-away Indonesia, until this very moment, there is nothing resembling like “Mapuche Lives Matter” movement in Chile.

The Reuters report continues:

Still, the struggles of indigenous people remain unknown to many, according to Karina Riquelme, a Chilean lawyer.

Every day they (the Mapuche) live in fear that one of their members could end up dead,” said Riquelme, who works with indigenous groups.

I don’t think people can imagine, but there are tanks, helicopters, and police installations in their communities.

Holding those responsible to account and getting justice is rare, said opposition lawmaker Emilia Nuyado, Chile’s first Mapuche congresswoman elected in 2018.

 *****

The plight of non-white migrants in Chile is horrific, particularly of those with non-white skin.

Haitians are taking the worst part.

Even Venezuelans, those who were leaving their country mainly because of the economic difficulties which have risen due to illegal U.S. sanctions against their country, have to face discrimination and often even open hostility.

When the Chilean neoliberal economy began collapsing as a result of the 2019 popular uprising, as well as mismanaged COVID-19 crisis, most of the Venezuelan migrants lost their jobs. They ended up literally on the street, facing insults, ridicule, even attacks. Hundreds gathered in front of their Embassy in Santiago, hoping to return home, but there were no flights. The temperature was dropping as winter had arrived. The Chilean state did nothing to help. In the end, it was the Communist mayor of Recoletta, who took decisive action and housed all Venezuelan people in need in his neighborhood.

Venezuelans who want to return home

The Chilean government began preparing what is termed as ‘voluntary repatriation’ of both Haitian and Venezuelan citizens, demanding that they sign an affidavit with a clause that they cannot re-enter the country for at least nine years. Thoroughly unlawful and unconstitutional move, but here nobody cares.

*****

In Chile, racism has many diverse forms, and some of them are truly monstrous.

Right after the Pinochet dictatorship officially ended, I went to Chile, to write about, and to expose “Colonia Dignidad,” an evil German enclave, run by extreme right-wing (some of them Nazis) child molesters (listen to my interview here). This huge compound, in remote Maule Region, spreading towards the Andes and the border with Argentina, was, particularly during the dictatorship, notorious for torturing, raping, and disappearing people. Its name was changed in 1991 to Villa Baviera, but even after that, for years it continued to function as a state inside the state, equipped with barbed wire at its perimeter, as well as searchlights, German shepherds, two airstrips, power plant, and the arsenal of weapons stored in the underground tunnels.

After returning to Chile, several months ago, I discovered that all major Chilean supermarket chains are stuffed with the Villa Baviera products, from German bread to sausages of all kinds.

This pinnacle of racism, bigotry, sexual abuse (mainly pedophilia), and torture, the colony is now operating as some sort of “tourist resort.” This is clearly a spit in the face to its countless victims, many of them kidnapped and ‘adopted’ Mapuche children, and to the Chilean democracy, which was broken to shards on 11 September 1973, during the fascist, US-backed military coup. Democracy, which was never restored, until this very moment.

*****

Even in the United States, one statue after another is getting desecrated, painted with graffiti, or simply destroyed. Crimes against humanity are being exposed. With each of the statues, respect to US racist past has been vanishing.

In Chile, racist, white pro-imperialist figures have always been admired and revered. During the last year’s uprising, however, several monuments were attacked, including those to the conqueror Pedro de Valdivia, in the cities of Concepcion, Valdivia, and Temuco.

History of the country has been closely tied to various brutal conquerors, butchers of the native population, and to the collaborators with the European and lately North American interests: Pedro de Valdivia, General Baquedano, and others.

Desecrated statue of mass murderer Baquedano

In Santiago de Chile, a huge statue of General Baquedano was painted over with graffiti. It served as a gathering place for the anti-government demonstrations at the end of 2019.

However, under cover of the four months long COVID-19 lockdown, the government of Sebastian Piñera managed to stop most of the protests, and consequently repaint the Baquedano’s statue. At one point, the president himself stopped his motorcade and took his own selfie in front of the monument to the butcher of Bolivia and Peru.

*****

In Chile, there is no love for the Chinese or other Asians. The country fell under the total influence of the U.S./European political and cultural propaganda.

I knew several Asian women who used to face intimidation and harassment in Santiago.

Here, to be white, to be of European stock, is worn like a coat of honor. The highest honor.

Twenty years ago, when I lived here for over two years, Chileans were obsessed with different cultures. People appeared to be thirsty for everything coming from Asia or the Middle East. Now, it is back to the mainstream Western offerings: from U.S. pop music to Hollywood junk. The number of art cinemas shrank dramatically. Santiago reduced itself to a provincial, culturally dull capital. Unless one is interested in the second-rate Western offering, there is very little of interest here now.

Little wonder. Under the neo-liberal model, Chile’s upper and upper-middle classes adopted the Western/white complex of superiority fully.

Obviously, individuals who spit at black people will not be seeking African art.

In a report published by Palabra Publica, some facts and analyses appear to be shocking:

The report ‘Manifestations of Racial Discrimination in Chile: A Study of Perception’s, published by the National Institute for Human rights (NIHR) in February of this year, indicates that 68.2% of surveyed individuals declare that they agree with measures to limit the entrance of migrants into Chile. In turn, a third of them consider themselves “whiter than other people from Latin American countries” and almost 25% in the Metropolitan Region see immigrants as “dirtier” than Chileans. Additionally, the National Institute for Human rights indicates in their report that “the fact that skin color and indigenous features are indicated as reasons for rejection denotes their use as indicators of social exclusion and, therefore, as an implicit expression of racism (…) the indicators of the responses show that over 30% of the participants do not clearly reject the idea of stigmatizing them.

Black lives do matter, increasingly, even among the many progressive groups of people in the United States. But not in Chile. Despite gross discrimination, assaults and even killing of the people with a different color of skin, (one of the most ‘famous’ cases was that of a 27-year-old Haitian immigrant, Joanne Florvil, who got, in 2017, arbitrarily detained, denied an interpreter and killed), there seems to be no organized, powerful movement in Chile, which would stand determinately against racism and continuous theft of what is left of the Mapuche lands, or for the return of access to the sea to Bolivia.

Now, during the draconical COVID-19 lockdown (Chilean neoliberal government absolutely failed in its ‘battle’ with the novel coronavirus — Chile presently having the highest number of infections in Latin America, per 1 million people), Haitian immigrants are abused more and more, openly and brutally. Bizarrely, many Chileans believe that Haitians are ‘dirty’ and that they are responsible for spreading the virus. Horrid conditions in which they have to live, as well as abuses they have to face, were recently depicted even by Al-Jazeera and otherwise staunch neo-liberal reporter Lucia Newman.

*****

In a way, Chilean racism and racial divisions are an extreme version of what is happening in several countries of South America. Here, the European descendants became what is called ‘elites.’ They control political, cultural, and economic life, and they control land, despising other ethnic groups.

Politically, they are controlling not only the right-wing, but also in some cases (like Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay), a substantial part of the Left. Here, much of the Left now has nothing to do with the Latin American Left, which is governing in countries like Cuba and Venezuela. As described above, in Chile, it is a defunct pseudo-left similar to the Western anarcho-syndicalism, which is alien to the mentality of the native, non-Western cultures. It is all about ‘rights’ and individualism, and very little or none, about internationalism. In Chile, during the big uprising which took place at the end of 2019 — an uprising which I photographed, filmed and covered — there were almost no voices supporting Venezuela or denouncing US-backed coup in Bolivia. However, there were many demands for free abortion.

*****

Chilean racism is deadly. Here, European migrants ruined great native cultures, both in the south and north. Alliance of Chile and the U.K. robbed Bolivia of its access to the sea and damaged Peru. Chile spied on Argentina, on behalf of the U.K., during the War of Malvinas. The country was the essential participant in Operation Condor, with Colonia Dignidad being one of the main torture centers on the continent. Until now, Santiago plays a crucial role in isolating and intimidating Venezuela and other left-wing countries in Latin America.

All this, because of desperate desire to be accepted, to be part of the Western club of predominately white nations.

“The English of Latin America,” Chile does not want to be a victim. It prefers to be a victimizer. And in many ways, it is. Domestically and internationally.

But the word is quickly changing, and Chile may find itself on the very wrong side of history. The Western regime, the Western empire, is rapidly collapsing. And the white color could and should, very soon, become just that and nothing more — a color.

While the great original cultures of Latin America will, no doubt, return to both prominence and former glory.

It says it all

* Written for and first published by Orinoco Tribune in Venezuela

• Photos by Andre Vltchek

This article was posted on Saturday, July 25th, 2020 at 12:14am and is filed under Chile, Opinion, Original Peoples, Racism, Sebastian Piñera.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2020/07/25/racism-in-chile/feed/ 0 78044 https://www.radiofree.org/2020/07/22/the-wisdom-of-simplicity/ https://www.radiofree.org/2020/07/22/the-wisdom-of-simplicity/#respond Wed, 22 Jul 2020 23:00:28 +0000 https://www.radiofree.org/2020/07/22/the-wisdom-of-simplicity/ Fifteen years ago or so, after getting some books from my local library Taos, New Mexico, I came upon a meeting featuring an Indigenous man from Taos Pueblo. I forget his name but I believe the topic of his lecture was related to spirituality. He was fielding questions at the time I arrived.

One middle-aged Anglo woman asked, “I know this is a bit off topic, but can you tell me what you think of the current presidential election race between John Kerry and George Bush?”

The Pueblo leader, also middle-aged, sighed and replied, “You know, our peoples have been struggling for hundreds of years for sovereignty and justice, so it doesn’t really matter who wins.”

The woman appeared stunned, stating she was “quite surprised” by his answer because this particular election was “really, really important!” and that it certainly did make a “really, really big difference” who won. “The stakes are so high!” she added.

The man smiled and sighed again. Seconds passed and he said, slowly, “Well, like I said, for Native people, our fight remains the same. It always will.”

More silence. The visibly upset woman shook her head, and the meeting ended.

Afterward, I pondered deeply about what the Taos Pueblo man had said; the simplicity of his message. I reminded myself that his view was not necessarily that of all Pueblo people, let alone the hundreds of First Nations in the United States. It’s a grave mistake to think that all Native people are the same, sharing the same opinions on everything.

Nevertheless, most if not all First Nations would agree that there is a commonality to their history, a holocaust carried out in the name of “democracy,” a history that, alongside chattel slavery, the theft of Mexican lands, and vast exploitations of human labor, laid the foundations for the expansion of U.S. capitalism and empire.

And that, as I saw it, was the whole point of what the Taos Pueblo man had said. That for him, and likely for thousands of other Native peoples, it really didn’t matter who was president. Their struggle remained the same.

And isn’t that the case for the majority of poor and working people in the U.S, to one degree or another? That our struggle for peace and social justice and liberation remains the same, no matter who’s President of the United States? Of course, all this is predicated on the continuing rule by the established Democratic and Republican parties. But isn’t that always the same too?

I’ll always remember this meeting: not just the message, but the contrast in attitudes. One calm and direct; the other fearful and filled with pending doom. “The stakes are so high!”

David Perez is a writer, journalist, activist, and actor, born in the South Bronx in New York City and currently living in Taos, New Mexico. Read other articles by David.

This article was posted on Wednesday, July 22nd, 2020 at 4:00pm and is filed under Colonialism, Original Peoples.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2020/07/22/the-wisdom-of-simplicity/feed/ 0 76846 https://www.radiofree.org/2020/07/21/environmental-disaster-and-health-crisis-in-cerrejon/ https://www.radiofree.org/2020/07/21/environmental-disaster-and-health-crisis-in-cerrejon/#respond Tue, 21 Jul 2020 16:49:02 +0000 https://www.radiofree.org/2020/07/21/environmental-disaster-and-health-crisis-in-cerrejon/ At Cerrejon (Colombia), the largest open-pit coal mine in Latin America owned equally by BHP (Australia), Anglo American PLC (United Kingdom) and Glencore (Switzerland), the situation of the indigenous people is progressively worsening. Cerrejon Limited has informed the workers that “all the existing shifts will be unified into a single 7-day work, for three days off.” With the enforcement of the new shifts, “workers would go from working 15 to 21 days and the mine would go from 4 to 3 shifts, leaving at least 25% of the current workforce unemployed.” The new shift pattern is likely to aggravate the health of workers as long working hours increase the number of work-related pathologies. Current work shift arrangements have already led to more than “700 pathologies associated with musculoskeletal, respiratory, cardiovascular and ear diseases, among others.” As the level of work becomes more stressful, these occupational diseases will start multiplying.

The present-day actions at the Cerrejon mine are one among the myriad manifestations of transnational capital’s cruelty. Cerrejon mine is located in the dry department of La Guajira which is home to more than 900,000 people. 45% of the population is indigenous, with most of the people belonging to Wayuu and the remaining coming from smaller groups such as Arhuacos, Koguis and Wiwas. 8% of the population is Afro-Colombian, thus making La Guajira the department with the highest presence of indigenous people in Colombia. When mining companies arrived in 1983 in La Guajira, they encountered these indigenous people as an obstruction in the path of development. Consequently, the appropriate solution to this problem was the initiation of “development-induced displacement.”

In 1981, the brutal behemoths of mining began shredding the social fabric of indigenous existence and left deep scars of development on the collective psyche of indigenous people. In order to make way for the Puerto Bolivar Port, mining multinationals chose to systematically exterminate the Wayuu village of Media Luna. Paradoxically, negotiations began after the displacement in which “Some 750 residents who lived in Media Luna entered into negotiations with the company for their collective relocation, but were targeted with anonymous threats of violence, which appeared to be linked to the negotiations and later led to the collapse of talks…. Subsequently, the company ordered the village to relocate for a second time and, when seven families refused, a metal fence was erected around their homes and armed guards stationed to watch over – a strategy interpreted to intimidate them into leaving.” This was a particularly counter-intuitive way of conducting negotiations wherein irregular violence, strategically organized arm-twisting and silent terrorization forced the Wayuu into accepting development.

The largest displacement came later in August 2001 when the Afro-Colombian community of the Tabaco village was violently dragooned into fleeing from the region. Eviction happened through the carefully coordinated action of the military, police and armed forces, interspersed with the presence of marauding bulldozers. Ines Perez, one of the victims of the calibrated evisceration of Tabaco, said that “The community was evicted from the land by force, with anti-riot police, in cold blood. We were thrown off our land. They destroyed our homes with machines. They punched us. They hit me and my papa. We were left nearly in a coma, with the houses torn down, in ruins. We’ve been struggling for 13 years and we’re still fighting for our health, for our food, for everything. We are demanding to be relocated and to receive compensation. We just want our lives back.”

Cerrejon mining companies have, till date, no qualms for plundering, gutting and decimating an entire village through an expeditious eruption of violence. Comprehensive reparations, relocation and apportionment of productive lands have not occurred. Even where such processes have commenced, the efforts are insubstantial and inadequate. Samuel Arregoces, a former inhabitant of Tabaco, expresses the plight of those who have been devastatingly relocated and impoverished by the dehumanizing operations of money-grubbing mines: “They destroyed the entire village. They took all our land away. We lost all our livestock, everything. They relocated us to other districts, where we now live in poverty since we cannot grow anything. Where we used to live, where the Tabaco river flows, we grew cassava, maize and bananas. For many years, our cattle grazed the land and we also had fruit trees, but today we have to buy everything. We have become destitute, since we no longer have a village.”

Another catastrophic byproduct of Cerrejon mining operations has been the unprecedented and utter ransacking of regional ecosystems. Open-pit mining is environmentally destabilizing because it “flattens mountains and devastates ecosystems. In this process, forests are clear-cut to expose the tops of mountains, which are then blown off with explosives. Coal is extracted using large machinery and the unused soil and rock are dumped into adjacent valleys, filling them up and creating a flat landscape.” After this, “New, gigantic, flat-topped walls of debris called overburden are dumped between tiny communities and along the periphery of open pit mines. They swallow farmers’ fields, impede the movement of grazing animals, disrupt rivers and streams, and leach poisons into the earth and water.”

The cultural loss associated with this disruptive process is profound as territories are spiritually significant for indigenous collectivities such as the Wayuu. In Wayuu community, communication with ancestors is a part of the primordial ethics of indigeneity and this happens primarily through the interpretation of dreams. The dream world, therefore, is the main modality for dialoguing with spirits and ancestors. But Wayuu people can only dream when they live on their own sacred territories. Correspondingly, when sacred territories are destroyed by open-pit mining, Wayuu lose their ability to dream and get culturally stripped of their distinctive identity.

Apart from cultural loss, Cerrejon mining extractivism has ecologically-materially impacted the department of La Guajira through two phenomena: water scarcity and high levels of pollution. In La Guajira, “people are dependent on tributary streams and their corresponding aquifers as a water source for agriculture, household use, and animal ranching”because the department “is a drought-prone region with two rainy seasons that are unpredictable and inconsistent.” Rivers are, therefore, extremely important for the existence of indigenous communities. Cerrejon Limited has apparently failed to comprehend the importance of rivers and has been trying consistently to completely colonize the rivers.

In 2012, Cerrejon companies had tried to divert 26km of the Rancheria River (the primary source of water) to access the 500 million metric tons of coal contained underneath the river bed. But this planned diversion was met with organized resistance and Wayúu spokesperson Jazmin Romero Epiayu has appropriately described the social unity with which the diversion was met: “In 2012, the proposal of this multinational was to divert the Ranchería River, the principal river we have in our department, and the principal river that feeds the whole department of La Guajira… Since before colonialism this [river] has represented the veins of Mother Earth, Wounmainkat, which is to say, it’s the blood of the earth. And one of the proposals in 2012 was to divert this river we have because below it there were 500 million tons of coal. But what did we say? Us, Wayúu communities, Afro-descendant communities, campesino communities, the union, the magistrates… all these sectors united in protest to stop the diversion of this river.”

Despite the united efforts of the La Guajira community, the Rancheria River has been contaminated by the mining companies. According to a study by Fulbright researchers, the Rancheria River contains high levels of mercury, making it potentially dangerous for consumption. Furthermore, the Cerrejon mine consumes more than 24 million litres of water per day (which is equivalent to the consumption of more than 70,000 people) while the Wayuu people don’t even “have access to the basic requirement of 2 l of water per person per day for cleaning and for preparing food.” Due to the aggravated effects of water scarcity, approximately 5000 children of the Wayuu tribe died in the 2007-17 period.

Not contented with contaminating water, cumulatively increasing the hardships of the Wayuu tribe and killing children, Cerrejon mining companies have embarked on a neo-colonial voyage to divert the Arroyo Bruno stream to the La Puente pit. Bruno stream has 40 million tons of coal reserves under its river bed, a valuable treasure for avaricious mining corporations. On July 8, 2020, the affected communities of La Guajira visited the artificial channel and natural channel of the Arroyo Bruno stream and observed that “the company plugged the natural channel to divert the waters in 3.6 kilometers to the new artificial channel. The alarming thing is that there is no water in either of the two channels. This situation worries the experts…who warn that the Bruno stream is at high risk of disappearing.”

In order to completely colonize the river, the company has tried three times to displace El Rocio, the community living on the bank of Arroyo Bruno. In spite of Cerrejon Limited’s aggressive efforts at strong-arming indigenous people, the general mood is militant in the department and the following statement from the Guajira Dignity Group reflects the anti-imperialist fervor of the masses: “The government cannot continue granting mining titles here, and Cerrejón cannot come every two years and say – we are planning the deviation of this stream – and tomorrow another, and so on. We have to limit this expansion because this is a deserted region and has a limited water supply. Cerrejón cannot continue diverting streams to increase profits.”

Pollution levels in La Guajira are high due to the spontaneous ignition of mined coal, daily coal blasts and coal dispersal happening due to the movement of open-top coal wagons every day. This has led to a staggering number of people afflicted with respiratory diseases, indicated by the fact the 48% of the patients arriving at the local hospital Nuestra Señora del Pilar (Our Lady of Pilar) suffer from acute respiratory problems. Air pollution has made the indigenous communities of La Guajira more vulnerable to Coronavirus as it has been found that air pollution is directly correlated to an increased Covid-19 death risk.

In La Guajira, children are more likely to get negatively affected by the presence of toxic materials and pollutants in air, soil and water. According to the United Nations Children’s Fund, “Children are more vulnerable to the localized environmental impacts of mining activity than adults – particularly water, air and soil pollution – due to their progressive and incomplete physical development; the fact that they spend more time playing than adults and hand to-mouth behaviour that makes children more likely to ingest pollutants; and their varying stages of mental development, for example, inability to read hazard and warning signs.”

As the Covid-19 pandemic wreaks havoc on La Guajira, it is becoming clear that transnational coal interests have existentially damaged the indigenous communities. Through years of imperialist pillage, multinational mining companies have converted La Guajira into one of the poorest departments of Colombia with 65% of the population living in poverty. Decades of coal mining by corporate giants to quench the coal thirst of Europe and USA has methodically undermined local agricultural arrangements and disallowed indigenous communities from achieving food sovereignty. Eder Arregoces Pinto, president of Chancleta’s community action council, pithily encapsulates the adverse effects of large-scale mono-industrialization: “It [Cerrejón Coal] may be one of the largest coal mines in Latin America but most families here can eat only one meal a day.”

Pollution and water scarcity have drastically weakened the collective health of indigenous communities and now, these immiserated people are left unprotected from the virus. Luz Ángela Uriana, an indigenous woman from Province Reserve in the south of La Guajir, painfully expresses the historical injustice which has been done with them: “What we are demanding of Cerrejón is our children’s health. We are fighting for our rights to live in a healthy territory, in a reserve without pollution, just as it was before Cerrejón came in. Here, we are exposed to mining pollution 24 hours a day. I have children, and if I have to fight against the whole world for them, I will do it. I will go wherever I have to, for my family and to honour the memory of all of the children that have died or fallen sick because of the pollution. How is it possible that we, as Cerrejón’s neighbours, don’t have access to healthcare? We don’t have potable water. We don’t have decent housing. We live in absolute poverty.” The present-day imperative is to help these people fight against the predatory and remorselessly exploitative practices of Cerrejon mining companies.

This article was posted on Tuesday, July 21st, 2020 at 9:49am and is filed under Colombia, Environment, Health/Medical, Labor, Mining, Original Peoples, Poverty, Water.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2020/07/21/environmental-disaster-and-health-crisis-in-cerrejon/feed/ 0 76163 https://www.radiofree.org/2020/07/20/building-on-victories-for-a-stronger-climate-justice-movement/ https://www.radiofree.org/2020/07/20/building-on-victories-for-a-stronger-climate-justice-movement/#respond Mon, 20 Jul 2020 22:56:44 +0000 https://www.radiofree.org/2020/07/20/building-on-victories-for-a-stronger-climate-justice-movement/

While the climate justice movement has been winning important victories, stopping and slowing pipelines and other fossil fuel infrastructure, and putting the future of fossil fuels in doubt, the political system, long connected to the fossil fuel industry, is still fighting the urgently needed transition to clean sustainable energy. Both President Trump and former Vice President Biden put forward energy plans that do not challenge fossil fuels.  The only candidate with a serious climate plan is Green Party candidate Howie Hawkins.

The movement needs to build momentum from these successes for more actions to stop fossil fuel infrastructure. As the reality of the climate crisis hits more people, fossil fuels will become high-risk investments while the cost of solar, wind, thermal, and ocean energy is declining.

Propped Up by Massive Subsidies

The fossil fuel industry is being propped up by massive subsidies without which its extinction would be faster. A 2019 IMF report found that $5.2 trillion was spent globally on fossil fuel subsidies in 2017, the equivalent of over 6.5% of global GDP. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development found “the $649 billion the US spent on these subsidies in 2015 is more than the country’s defense budget and 10 times the federal spending for education.”

In the era of the climate crisis, COVID-19, and recession, these subsidies are not justifiable. Christine Lagarde of the IMF has called for removing fossil fuel subsidies, noting the investments made into fossil fuels could be better spent elsewhere. She notes: “There would be more public spending available to build hospitals, to build roads, to build schools and to support education and health for the people.”

The era of fossil fuel domination is coming to an end. It is up to people to organize to hasten the transition to a clean, sustainable energy economy. The deeply embedded fossil fuel industry can be defeated. The people have shown they can make it impossible to build fossil fuel infrastructure.

Friends of Nelson Facebook page

Movements Can Stop Fossil Fuels

In early July, three pipeline projects suffered major blows. Their defeats were the result of more than a decade of activism by thousands of people. People risked arrest, went to jail, confronted police, petitioned, lobbied and litigated, slowing the projects down and making it impossible to profitably build pipelines and other infrastructure.

The Atlantic Coast Pipeline was canceled on July 5. On July 6, a federal court ordered Dakota Access Pipeline to shut down pending an environmental review. Unfortunately, a court of appeals ruling allows the pipeline to continue to operate while the litigation is resolved. That night, the Supreme Court let a Montana court ruling on the Keystone XL pipeline stand, meaning the project cannot be built until much of the litigation is settled.  Construction of the Keystone XL is blocked until 2021. Joe Biden has pledged to oppose the Keystone XL. If he is elected, activists will have to hold him to that promise.

The Keystone XL pipeline was designed to carry Alberta’s dirty tar sands oil across the US-Canada border into Nebraska and has been fought since 2011 by the Tar Sands Blockades, Bold Nebraska and others.  The Dakota Access pipeline was opposed by the Standing Rock Sioux uprising that brought Indigenous nations and climate activists together in a months-long struggle, often facing violent police repression. The DAPL is transporting fracked oil from North Dakota’s Bakken Shale basin to Gulf Coast refineries. And, the Atlantic Coast Pipeline would have carried fracked gas through the Appalachian Mountains from West Virginia to North Carolina. All along the route, people aligned to oppose the project. Litigation and delays forced the large companies, Dominion and Duke Energy, to cancel the project even after investing $3.4 billion in it.

In another defeat that will empower climate activists, on June 30 in a 10 to 1 decision, the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit ruled against the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to allow people impacted by fossil fuel infrastructure to sue 31 days after filing an administrative appeal on a permitted project. FERC had been preventing litigation by delaying the 30-day administrative appeal an average of 7 months and up to 15 months during which pipelines were being built.

FERC has been critical for the fossil fuel boom of the Obama and Trump eras. FERC and the fossil fuel industry act as one as all FERC funding comes from industry fees, not taxpayers. According to Ted Glick of Beyond Extreme Energy, which has been battling FERC for a decade, in an interview on WBAI, the vast majority of FERC commissioners since it was founded in 1978 have come out of the fossil fuel industry and many go back to the industry after leaving FERC. The same revolving door exists for many staff members too. FERC and the oil and gas industries have been working together to prevent court review, but with this new DC Circuit Court decision, that should stop.

All of these victories were the result of grassroots struggles by the climate justice movement. As one activist tweeted, “In case you thought that small actions don’t matter . . . this is a result of every tree-sitter, each person who chained herself to a piece of equipment, sat at an air board mtg, blocked a site.” Campaigns that challenge infrastructure at every turn make a difference. These victories are part of a nationwide uprising against fossil fuel infrastructure and the resultant thievery of private property by abusing eminent domain, the pollution of farms, rivers and forests and FERC’s steamrolling over communities.

The movement is making pipelines more expensive to build. Increased costs combined with low fossil fuel prices and low costs for solar and wind energy are making the industry a risky investment. There have been hundreds of bankruptcies. Symbolic of this is the recent bankruptcy of Chesapeake Energy, which was a leader in the fracking boom. It started to decline after one of the CEOs, Aubrey McClendon, died in a car crash in 2016 after being charged with corruption. Steve Horn reports on their ongoing corruption, writing, “Just a month ago, in fact, Chesapeake executives showered themselves with $25 million in bonuses, despite the company tumbling toward bankruptcy.”

USA Today reported that 24 oil and gas companies have already filed for bankruptcy since the COVID-19 pandemic and recession began. The Wall Street Journal reports that potentially 200 fracking corporations could declare bankruptcy in the next two years if the price of oil stays at current levels.

U.S. President Barack Obama speaks at the southern site of the Keystone XL pipeline on March 22, 2012 in Cushing, Oklahoma (Tom Pennington/Getty Images)

The Fossil Fuel Industry is Not Defeated

Fossil fuel industry ties to presidents have run deep for decades. Both George H. W. Bush and his son, George W. Bush, were oil men. President Obama, who made the US a top producer of oil and gas, bragged, “We’ve added enough new oil and gas pipeline to circle the Earth and then some.” During his term, over a period of two years, the US built 29,604 miles of new pipeline. According to NASA, the equatorial circumference of the Earth is 24,873.6 miles.

President Trump, who denies climate change, is seeking to expedite the approval of oil and gas infrastructure. Former Vice President Biden said he will protect the fracking industry and opposes the Green New Deal. His recently announced climate plans do not confront the fossil fuel industry.

The Trump administration has issued a proposed rule to undermine the 50-year old National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) by not requiring any consideration of climate impacts as part of the review of fossil fuel infrastructure. His proposal will play out over months or years during a public comment process. If it is approved, litigation can be used to stop it.

Trump is building on the work of the Obama-Biden administration that issued executive orders to speed up environmental reviews and did not include climate considerations in NEPA reviews until his final year in office. Their administration allowed large pipeline projects to be broken into small segments to skirt the NEPA review. Through the signing of the FAST Act in 2015, which led to the creation of a Federal Permit Improvement Steering Council, federal permits and the NEPA review process were streamlined.

Biden is doubling down on fossil fuels and trying to confuse people with the fraudulent phrase of “net-zero” emissions, which is a shell game that will not cut fossil fuel production. He is calling for investment in carbon capture utilization and sequestration to claim he will offset carbon emissions, but this is a political fraud as the technologies are unproven. Even inside the DNC, this strategy is questioned by their Council on the Environment and Climate Crisis, which opposes reliance of offsets and asks, “Why would we rely on it when we already have much less expensive, proven, clean green technologies?”

The movement must be clear in its demand to replace fossil fuels with solar, wind, and other clean sustainable energy sources. We must demand policies that are consistent with the reality of the climate crisis requiring urgent action.

Indigenous Environmental Network

Building On Our Victories

The recent victories indicate that the more we show our determination, risk arrest, challenge projects in the courts and build the case against fossil fuels in the era of climate crisis, the more infrastructure projects will be shelved. For those projects currently underway, the movement must continue to challenge them at every turn using the creativity and tactical variety that come from a movement composed of a broad base of people with different backgrounds, experiences and concerns.

The profitability of pipelines is already in doubt due to the strategic nonviolence of the movement and the changing energy market. Even with Trump and Biden mouthing support for the industry, they will not be able to overcome the realities of the market failure, the climate crisis and that people want funds spent on public health, remaking the economy and transitioning to a clean energy economy.

The nationwide uprising against racism and the movement against pipelines already have close connections due to environmental racism and alliances with Indigenous struggles. We need to make these cross-issue relationships stronger.

The economic collapse is an opportunity to remake the economy with the Green New Deal as the centerpiece of massive job creation, investment in education and the development of new industries. There is a growing labor uprising with PayDay Report tracking more than 900 wildcat strikes since March 1. Workers need to understand that confronting climate change will create 30 million good-paying union jobs and the Green New Deal is key to rebuilding the economy.

The climate movement against fossil fuels has already shown the ability to create this broad movement. Native Americans, climate scientists, farmers and ranchers, big environmental groups, veterans and activists all came together for the first time in some of these struggles. Future efforts can link climate justice, anti-racism, and workers’ rights work, as well as the anti-war movement because the US military is the biggest polluter and fossil fuel user on the planet, to create an unstoppable movement no matter who is the next president.

This article was posted on Monday, July 20th, 2020 at 3:56pm and is filed under Barack Obama, Climate Change, Climate Science, Courts and Judges, Donald Trump, Economy/Economics, Energy, Fossil Fuel Emissions, George W. Bush, Global Warming, Joe Biden, Oil, Gas, Coal, Pipelines, Original Peoples, Social Movements.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2020/07/20/building-on-victories-for-a-stronger-climate-justice-movement/feed/ 0 75843 https://www.radiofree.org/2020/07/12/the-ravages-of-lithium-extraction-in-chile/ https://www.radiofree.org/2020/07/12/the-ravages-of-lithium-extraction-in-chile/#respond Sun, 12 Jul 2020 22:49:49 +0000 https://www.radiofree.org/2020/07/12/the-ravages-of-lithium-extraction-in-chile/ In Chile, the Covid-19 pandemic is raging with an unprecedented speed. There are more than 300,000 confirmed cases with one of the highest per capita infection rates of 13,000 cases for every 1 million people. The economy is severely experiencing the repercussions of Coronavirus-caused restrictions and the historically high national unemployment rate of 11.2% is an indicator of such damage. Chileans have took to the street to protest against the malfunctioning right-wing government of the billionaire president Sebastian Pinera and the police force has responded aggressively by shooting dead a young agitator.

Amid this Coronavirus chaos, the Chilean lithium sector is poised to economically expand itself due to an anticipated increase in demand. Albemarle, a North Carolina-based corporation and one of the two companies extracting lithium from the Chilean salt plain Salar de Atacama with Sociedad Química y Minera (SQM) or Chemical and Mining Society, said that “the current slump in prices is belying a looming supply shortfall, especially as expansion projects are delayed by the crisis”. TDK, a Japanese multinational electronics companies and battery giant, predicts that the global market is going to witness a surge in demand for lithium. Shigenao Ishiguro, the CEO of the company, told in an interview that “Digital transformation is a huge opportunity for us and I have no doubt that the coronavirus will push the world to go that direction at a faster pace,”.

In spite of Covid-19 pandemic, the battery market is expected to grow “at a compound annual growth rate of about 7% during 2019-2024. The market in cathode for lithium ion batteries, the most common rechargeable car battery, is expected to jump to $58.8 billion by 2024 from $7 billion in 2018”. According to Bloomberg, the pandemic can prove to be an opportunity for the lithium market “with at least some governments, including those of Germany and France, using virus recovery funds to help accelerate a transition from internal combustion engines to battery-powered alternatives. France will offer about 8 billion euros ($9 billion) to its auto sector to bolster support for electric vehicles; Germany’s stimulus package includes about 5.6 billion euros for the sector and will require gas stations to install charging units.”

A likely intensification of lithium exploitation in Chile does not bode well for the working class and the myriad indigenous communities such as the Atacameños, Licanantay, Colla, Aymara and Quechua living in the Atacama desert. The most recent manifestation of the exploitative practices of lithium mining companies has been the maintenance of “operational continuity” to achieve a minimal impact on output. This basically translates into a policy of profit maximization, brutally indifferent towards the existential conditions of workers. In the lithium mining region of Antofagasta, the Coronavirus positivity rate was a stupendous 46.1%. Along with this sheer infliction of necropolitical violence upon the working class, the indigenous people are also reeling under the pressures of lithium extraction in the form of a water crisis. While singular focus has been placed on the issues of water scarcity in urban areas, it is important to remember that indigenous communities living in Salar de Atacama too are coping with an acute water scarcity, artificially caused by lithium operations. In the aforementioned mining region, 65% of water has been consumed by lithium activities. This is one among the many environmental injuries sustained by the ecosystem of the Atacama desert due to the unhindered workings of lithium imperialism.

Instead of seeing the ongoing suppressive squeezing of the working class and indigenous communities in Chile as a one-off phenomenon, it is necessary that it be contextualized in the global structure of lithium imperialism. Lithium imperialism came to be installed as a fraction of global capital and primary commodity production due to two major developments – planetary mine and green extractivism. Firstly, planetary mine, as said by Martin Arboleda, “designates a convoluted terrain where fences, walls, and militarized borders coexist with sprawling supply chains and complex infrastructures of connectivity.” This denotes the establishment of an extractive economic exoskeleton on a planetary scale through the simultaneous use of violent and militarized techniques of oppression and policing.

Secondly, green extractivism refers to “the subordination of human rights and ecosystems to endless extraction in the name of “solving” climate change.” Lithium serves as an important modality for substituting fossil fuel extractivism with green extractivism and consistently maintaining a relentless system of commodification. Instead of “tackling the systemic bloating of northern economies and the excessive demands this places on the world’s resources.”, green lithium extractivism allows capitalists to stabilize the unequal imperialist architecture of core-peripheral countries. Tesla, for examples, uses the discourse of electronic vehicles to cloak its capitalistic carnage of Latin America with the cosmetic coverings of climate change.

Lithium imperialism indicates the cohesive amalgamation of planetary mining with a climate change-covered discourse of extractivism. The fusion of these two distinct strategies initiates a reign of hyper-exploitation, extraction, violence and dispossession in the name of climate change. But this oppressive underside of lithium business is sordidly shadowed by the propagandist puffery of an energy transition which actually feeds upon the body of oppressed workers of Global South. Lithium imperialism, therefore, involves the perpetuation of core-periphery relations under the discursive regime of climate change.

Chile is a victim of contemporary lithium imperialism due to the vast lithium reserves which it has. The country has 48% of the total lithium reserves in the world which amounts to 7.5 million tonnes of lithium, of which 6 million tonnes is found in Salar de Atacama. Chile is part of the lithium-rich area christened and commodified by the bourgeoisie as the “Lithium Triangle”. It is formed by northern Chile, northern Argentina and south Bolivia and has 70% of the world’s lithium brine deposits. Apart from the abundance of lithium, Chile is also attractive for lithium neo-conquistadors “because it costs about $2,000 to $3,800 a ton to extract lithium from brine, compared with $4,000 to $6,000 a ton in Australia, where lithium is mined from rock.” Capital cost for exploration and construction is lower in brine extraction than hard rock extraction due to the different locations of brine lakes and hard rock lithium reserves: “A hard rock project in a remote mountain location with limited access to transportation and energy infrastructure is going to require a lot more money in the exploration budget than a salar in flat terrain…with well-established mining roads and a line to the electrical grid.” In terms of quality, Salar de Atacama “has the best quality reserves of lithium in terms of lithium to potassium concentration as well as low magnesium to lithium ratio.”

The low-cost and high-grade lithium brine deposits have spelled doom for the indigenous people living in the Atacama Salt Flats (AFSs). While lithium brine extraction is economically viable for capitalists, it has deleterious effects on water availability and is therefore, injurious to the social metabolism of indigenous communities. In lithium brine extraction, “up to 95 per cent of the extracted brine water is lost to evaporation and not recovered”. Furthermore, to extract a ton of lithium from brine, 500,000 gallons of water is required. The two companies, Albemarle and SQM, operating in Salar de Atacama have been given “licences to extract almost 2,000 litres of brine per second.” Besides brine water, mining companies “need the fresh water to clean machinery and pipes, and also to produce an auxiliary product from the brine – potash – which is used as a fertiliser.” The use of fresh water by mining companies is indicated by the fact that between 2000 and 2015, the amount of water that was extracted from Atacama was 21% greater than the flow of water to that area.

According to a report produced by the Observatory of Mining Conflicts of Latin America (translated from Spanish), “The greatest socio-environmental impact of lithium mining lies in the indiscriminate expenditure of water for the evaporation of brines and the production of the necessary tasks. Considering that the Atacama salt flat is located in one of the most arid regions in the world, the Atacama desert, the large-scale extraction of water and the basic processing of lithium brines generates severe damage to the fragile ecosystems that depend on those sources.” In the same report, it is written that “the communities originating from the high Andean salt flats suffer serious environmental damage due to the indiscriminate and poorly controlled extraction from the hydro-saline deposits of the salt flats, thus reinforcing their historic place of marginalization, exploitation and subordination.”

This indicates that water scarcity is not a localized phenomenon, restricted to a mere depletion in water levels. Rather, water scarcity contributes to a generalized impoverishment of indigenous people and drastically degrades their everyday living. Degeneration of existential conditions happens, inter alia, through the degradation of soil and vegetation covers. In the Atacama region, indigenous collectivities grow quinoa and look after llamas. For the growth of quinoa plants, an evenly moist soil is required and for herding llamas, it is necessary that there be an adequate vegetation cover on which they can feed. But lithium operations have undermined both these prerequisites and School of Sustainability at Arizona State University reports that “An expansion of lithium brine mining area of one square kilometre was found to correspond to a significant decrease in the average level of vegetation and in soil moisture.”

Through the deliberate disorganization of traditional occupational configurations, lithium companies are able to culturally colonize and proletarianize the spiritual and agro-pastoral practices of communal indigeneity. In the international value chains of lithium, the utter subjugation of indigenous people to the deformed logics of e-mobility is cruelly concealed and as said by the Plurinational Observatory of Andean Salares (translated from Spanish), “The incessant production of disposable electronic devices and the growing market for electric cars for the energy transition of countries in the global north…is becoming today the main threat to the subsistence of any form of life in the basins that host these [lithium] mining deposits”.

Chilean indigenous people have not acquiesced to the economically destructive and culturally catastrophic operations of mining corporations and have reacted strongly to lithium imperialism. In 2019, indigenous people protested against the water-intensive mechanisms of lithium brine extraction and the state, in response, paradoxically charged some communities for “water robbery”. The protests were initially triggered by the underhand dealings of SQM in which “the Chilean economic development agency CORFO signed a contract with SQM that enabled the company to triple its lithium extraction over the coming years and extended its mining access to the Atacama until 2030.” The tripling of lithium extraction till 2030 raised SQM’s lithium extraction quota to 350,000 tons. It is not entirely coincidental that a month after the agreement, Eduardo Bitran, head of CORFO, met with Tesla to propose “a project to Tesla in which SQM would provide brine, the raw material from which lithium is produced, to the carmaker for refining into battery component lithium hydroxide in Chile.”

It was in opposition to this intricate complex of lithium imperialism that indigenous people protested. These protests smoothly synchronized with the larger anti-neoliberal protests occurring in Chile and bolstered the indigenous-working class alliance. But this working class-indigenous movement was soon suppressed by the Chilean state which, in order to stabilize neoliberalism and lithium imperialism, cracked down on protests through rapid detentions, declaration of a state of emergency and the deployment of more than 9,000 soldiers. Because of the protection provided by the state, Ricardo Ramos, the CEO of SQM, was able to say that the protests won’t “be a strong issue in our business goals in the medium and long term.” He further added that “We are going to deliver our products to our customers according to our previous forecast despite the situation in Chile,”. From Ramos’s statement, we discern that there exists a structural arrangement for the cementing of lithium imperialism: companies like SQM economically exploit and culturally hegemonize lithium-rich areas; indigenous people combatively confront the predatory mechanisms of these companies; the Chilean state ultimately intervenes in order to regularize mining operations through the violent deactivation of protests.

While it may seem that the 2019 protest against lithium extraction was a spontaneous eruption of anger, it is necessary that we briefly examine the historical background against which it took place. Apart from signing a shady deal without any consultation, SQM “has been investigated for several cases of tax evasion, money laundering and illegal campaign-funding. In a major public scandal in 2014, politicians from across the spectrum were found to have received major sums of money to look after the company’s interests.” SQM also has a dubious distinction of causing major conflicts and in 2007, for example, there was a skirmish between the company and the Toconao community. Increased extraction of water from unauthorized wells and the contamination of water sources by sewage discharge were the contributory causes behind the SQM-Toconao conflict. Albemarle too has been progressing in its march towards class struggle-free lithium imperialism and in 2017 CORFO amended the corporation’s agreement through which Albemarle got “sufficient lithium to produce over 80,000 MT annually of technical and battery grade lithium salts over the next 27 years at its expanding battery grade manufacturing facilities in La Negra, Antofagasta.”

The rapid ramping up of lithium production by two companies in Chile has successfully benefitted major electronic companies such as Samsung, Apple and Panasonic. In the automobile sector, Toyota, General Motors, Tesla, Volkswagen and BMW are some of the companies reaping economic advantages of the lithium sources of Chile. Figure 1 and 2 depict the multiplex and labyrinthine circuit of lithium in the international market. To satiate the vampire-like thirst of different companies for lithium, there has been a global increase in production and the role of Chile in catering to the lithium hunger of “white gold rush” is indicated by the contemporaneous expansion of Chilean lithium output with world lithium output: “The value of Chile’s lithium carbonate production rose to US$200 million by 2007, to US$500 million by 2012 and to more than US$800 million by 2017. It exceeded US$1 billion in 2018. There was a parallel surge in the value of world first-stage lithium output— reaching US$484 million in 2007, US$998 million by 2013 and US$2865 million in 2017.”

Figure 1, Source: Washington Post, “Indigenous people are left poor as tech world takes lithium from under their feet“

Figure 2, Source: Danwatch, “There’s probably Chilean lithium behind the screen you’re reading this on”

With the demand for lithium expected to grow in the global market, indigenous people and the working class would start encountering greater difficulties in sustaining themselves as indigenous ecosystems are efficiently eradicated and labor productivity is ruthlessly increased. During the Fastmarkets’ 11th Lithium Supply and Markets Conference in Santiago, “Producers Albemarle, SQM and Tianqi [which has a 23.77% stake in SQM]… agreed that flexibility in production remains vital for addressing diverse industrial and technological challenges.” This was a colloquial way of saying that workers need to be ready to be exploited, discarded and denigrated as mere commodities. For the indigenous people in Chile, life would be wrung economically dry as energy transition occurs in the Global North and magnificent Tesla vehicles silently operate on their blood-stained lithium batteries.

We need to remember that this dystopia of EVs parasitically procuring lithium from the open veins of Chile is avoidable and as said by Thea Riofrancos, “A world buzzing with hundreds of millions of Teslas (or worse, e-Escalades), made with materials rapaciously extracted without the consent of local communities, manufactured under a repressive labor regime in polluting factories — in other words, a world not unlike our own, but powered by wind and sun — is not an inevitability.” To move away from such lithium imperialism, we need to listen to the smothered voices of the Global South. An economic-ecological model based upon the anti-imperialist foundations of the Global South is radically different from capitalist models of extraction. Instead of conceptualizing a “development alternative”, the oppressed masses of the Global South imagine an “alternative to development”. In the interstices of this “alternative to development”, one can locate the seeds of resistance to lithium imperialism.

This article was posted on Sunday, July 12th, 2020 at 3:49pm and is filed under Capitalism, Chile, Environment, Mining, Original Peoples.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2020/07/12/the-ravages-of-lithium-extraction-in-chile/feed/ 0 72616 https://www.radiofree.org/2020/07/11/the-hypocrisies-of-recognition-the-supreme-court-native-americans-and-the-mcgirt-case/ https://www.radiofree.org/2020/07/11/the-hypocrisies-of-recognition-the-supreme-court-native-americans-and-the-mcgirt-case/#respond Sat, 11 Jul 2020 02:02:55 +0000 https://www.radiofree.org/2020/07/11/the-hypocrisies-of-recognition-the-supreme-court-native-americans-and-the-mcgirt-case/ The Supreme Court of the United States has barely had time to gather its collective breath this last few days.  Among its decisions, including those dealing with President Donald Trump’s financial records, was that of McGirt v Oklahoma. The case furnishes a detailed discussion on the extent Native American self-governance survived the assaults of the US Congress and the creation of the State of Oklahoma in 1907.

The Creek (Muscogee) Reservation itself arose from circumstances of predation and cruelty.  Forcibly relocated from Georgia and Alabama, “the Creek nation,” wrote Justice Neil Gorsuch, “received reassurances that their new lands in the West would be secure forever.  In ceding their land East of the Mississippi River, a pledge by the 1832 treaty was made that the “Creek country west of the Mississippi shall be solemnly guaranteed to the Creek Indians.”

By the narrowest of decisions, the court found 5-4 against the state of Oklahoma.  The state authorities had claimed that the Creek Reservation did not survive the “allotment era” and had been “disestablished”.  Jimcy McGirt, convicted by an Oklahoman state court of three sexual offences that had taken place on the Creek Nation Reservation in the north-eastern part of the state, had claimed otherwise.  As a member of the Seminole Nation, he submitted in post-conviction proceedings that the State lacked jurisdiction to prosecute him.  The relevant statute was the federal Major Crimes Act, which provided that, within “the Indian country”, any Indian committing certain offences “shall be subject to the same law and penalties as all other persons committing any of [those] offenses, within the exclusive jurisdiction of the United States”.  His initial effort to seek a new trial in federal court failed, leading to the Supreme Court petition.

That period of central government nastiness in the late nineteenth century known as the “allotment era” had a purpose common to other frontier societies: the assimilation of the native intransigents through means designed to wean them off their traditional customs.  As the zealous Captain Richard Pratt opined in 1892, the United States needed to “kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”  Enough with the physical massacres; what was needed was a concerted effort to Americanize and civilise, a form of spiritual genocide.  Pratt envisaged doing so through education, including the US Training and Industrial School he founded in 1879 at Carlisle Barracks in Pennsylvania.  Out with the “savage” habits: tribal language, identity and long hair; in with the new American, albeit a stunted one with his nerves extracted.  Such education was to be rudimentary or, in the words of President Teddy Roosevelt, “very, very limited.”

In terms of property, the allotment era was trumpeted by the passage of the Dawes Act of 1887, also known as the General Allotment Act.  This entailed breaking up tribally owned reservations and allocating them to individual households, though the process came with a nasty catch: such divided land would initially be held in trust; Native American households would have to prove their competence in exercising full “fee simple” property rights.  The result, in many instances, was also the selling of Indian land to non-Indian purchasers.

In his address to Congress in 1901, Roosevelt gave his boisterous assessment of the statute.  “The General Allotment Act is a mighty pulverizing engine to break up the tribal mass.  It acts directly upon the family and the individual.” The Act had enabled sixty thousand Indians to become US citizens.  It was now essential, Roosevelt suggested, to “break up the tribal funds, doing for them what allotment does for tribal lands; that is, they should be divided into individual holdings.”

The majority, ruling in favour of McGirt, affirmed that the land in question remains a reservation that gives the federal government exclusive jurisdiction over crimes committed on it.  In doing so, the court also confirmed the continuing existence of a reservation stretching some 19 million acres including eight counties and most of Tulsa.

In their skirt through the legislative record, the majority found no statute “evincing anything like the ‘present and total surrender of all tribal interests’.”  The transfer of individual plots, whether to Native Americans or others, “did not disestablish the reservation”.   A body of statutes and treaties over time confirmed the legal standing of the Creek Reservation.  The majority rebuked the argument that States had claimed powers “to reduce federal reservations within their borders”.  To imagine such a power would enable States to “encroach on the tribal boundaries or legal rights Congress provided, and, with enough time and patience, nullify the promises made in the name of the United States.”  Despite various efforts by Congress to intrude upon Creek self-governance, these were not sufficient to suggest disestablishment.  “Oklahoma and the dissent have cited no case in which this Court has found a reservation disestablished without first concluding that a statute first required that result.”

Chief Justice John Roberts, who managed to avoid being in the majority in all 5-4 court decisions this term, was glum about the consequences.  The decision was a torch taken to state governance.  “Across the vast area, the State’s ability to prosecute serious crimes will be hobbled and decades of past convictions could well be thrown out.  On top of that, the Court has profoundly destabilized the governance of eastern Oklahoma.”  The majority judgement had also created “significant uncertainty for the State’s continuing authority over any area that touches Indian affairs, ranging from zoning and taxation to family and environmental law.”

Roberts further bristled at the idea that Congress needed to be wordily explicit in terminating a reservation, having “made abundantly clear its intent to disestablish the Creek territory”.  Just look at the historical record, the chief justice urged.  Congress “supplanted the Creek legal system with a legal code and court system that applied equally to Indians and non-Indians.”  It “systematically dismantled the governmental authority of the Creek Nation, targeting all three branches.”  It “destroyed the foundation of sovereignty by stripping the Creek Nation of its territory.”

Justice Gorsuch, in his judgment for the majority, had little time for such worries.  To suggest an army of inmates rushing to seek new trials in federal courts was “admittedly speculative, because many defendants may choose to finish their state sentences rather than risk prosecution in federal court where sentences can be graver”.  Besides, no actual intention to terminate the legal standing of the Creek Reservation could ever be found.

In all the excitement, it would have been easy to have overlooked the predecessor case of Sharp v Murphy, in which the court heard argument on the same question as that of McGirt.  The case stalled in its tracks in 2018 as Gorsuch had recused himself, having served on the 10th circuit of the US Circuit Court of Appeals, comprising Oklahoma.  Instead of going through re-arguments there, Sharp was restored to this calendar term and duly decided in favour of the inmate Patrick Murphy “for the reasons stated in” McGirt.  Murphy had also committed his crime within the boundaries of the Creek Nation.

Having anticipated the decision, somewhat, Oklahoma Attorney General Mike Hunter, along with all Five Tribes affected by the decision, including the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Seminole Nations, issued a statement committing the parties “to ensuring that Jimcy McGirt, Patrick Murphy, and all other offenders face justice for crimes for which they are accused.  We have a shared commitment to maintaining public safety and long-term economic prosperity for the Nations and Oklahoma.”

The decision of McGirt masks the crude realities of institutional, colonial violence.  It perpetuates an illusion, a discredited understanding between Native American nations and the US federal government.  That was the lingering “promise”, as Gorsuch claims, “[o]n the far end of the Trail of Tears”, one that was never kept.  Chief Justice Roberts was very much on to it.  In letting the cat out of the bag on Native American-Indian relations, he suggested that Congress had acted in a manner entirely inconsistent with preserving any semblance of Creek sovereignty.  We are left with the Native American Indian in confused legal dress, trampled, abused, deceived by history but with only a symbolic heartbeat.

This article was posted on Friday, July 10th, 2020 at 7:02pm and is filed under Original Peoples, Supreme Court, United States.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2020/07/11/the-hypocrisies-of-recognition-the-supreme-court-native-americans-and-the-mcgirt-case/feed/ 0 72290 https://www.radiofree.org/2020/07/03/a-statue-of-hatuey/ https://www.radiofree.org/2020/07/03/a-statue-of-hatuey/#respond Fri, 03 Jul 2020 19:42:31 +0000 https://www.radiofree.org/2020/07/03/a-statue-of-hatuey/

Chief Hatuey

If you look at a US $20 bill, you might notice Andrew Jackson nervously watching statues of Columbus and Robert E. Lee coming down and wondering if his face is going to disappear from currency. As Democrats ponder which militarist they wish to glorify in the next round of monuments, it is critical to realize that statues which go up are at least as important as the ones that come down. Perhaps the best nominee for a new statue is Hatuey.

A few years ago, while visiting my daughter and grandson in Havana, I learned that his favorite playmate was Hatuey. “I recognize a lot of Spanish names,” I told my daughter. “But I’ve never heard that one.”

“It’s not Hispanic,” she let me know. “It’s the name of the great Taino warrior killed by the Spaniards.”

Long, long ago, before slavery existed in the colonies that would become the US – even before the first Dutch and British slave ships ventured to Africa, Spanish invaders discovered the Taino people in Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic) and Cuba. In 1512, the Taino invited the Spaniards to a great feast in their honor.

After the Spaniards ate the food and drank the beverages prepared for them by 2500 Taino, they drew their swords and hacked their hosts – men, women and children – to pieces. Those who were not slaughtered were dragged by the Spaniards to forced labor. They ordered them to carry loads they could not possibly lift and joked among themselves as they killed more.

As the Taino lay dying, priests knelt down to share the good news of Jesus Christ with them. If they would let Christ into their hearts, they would enjoy eternal salvation.

About 400 Taino managed to escape from the massacre and took canoes from Hispaniola to eastern Cuba. Unfortunately, most of the Tainos in Cuba would not believe that people existed who were as cruel as those in the story they heard (somewhat like those in the 21st century who do not believe the potential outcomes of climate change for humanity).

Hatuey led the first guerrilla warfare against European invasion of the western hemisphere. His band conducted several hit-and-run attacks against the invaders and were not defeated in battle. But a traitor informed the Spaniards of the mountain where they hid and they were surrounded and captured.

Hatuey was brought before the Spanish general who told him, “If you accept the King of Spain as your sovereign and Jesus Christ as your savior, then we will kill you quickly and you will pass to everlasting paradise. But if you do not accept the King and Jesus, then we will burn you alive and you will be damned to burn in hell for eternity.”

Hatuey burned

Hatuey asked, “Are there Spaniards in heaven?”

“Oh, yes,” the general chuckled. “Heaven is full of Spaniards.”

Hatuey’s last words were, “I would rather burn in hell forever than spend one day in paradise with Spaniards.”

*****

One time I was telling the story of Hatuey, a listener replied, “I heard that, but I thought that Hatuey was from a tribe in Mexico. Another time, a person told me he thought Hatuey was an Inca resisting Pizarro’s invasion of Peru.

Wanting to make sure that I had it right, I checked on Google, which Wall Street would have us believe has replaced the bible as the ultimate source of wisdom and truth. Sure enough, Google confirmed Hatuey’s existence in Cuba.

But then a thought entered my mind. What if Hatuey, in some way, did exist in Mexico, Peru, and in tribes throughout North America, South America, Central America and the Caribbean? Could it be possible that the flames which consumed Hatuey’s body now burn in the hearts and minds of those who resist oppression everywhere?

*****

A monument to Hatuey is in Baracoa, Cuba. The plate at the base reads “To the memory of Chief Hatuey, unforgettable native, precursor of the Cuban liberty, who offered his life, and glorified his rebellion in the martyrdom of the flames on 2/2/1512. Monuments Delegation of Yara, 1999.”

This article was posted on Friday, July 3rd, 2020 at 12:42pm and is filed under Crimes against Humanity, Cuba, Original Peoples, Spain.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2020/07/03/a-statue-of-hatuey/feed/ 0 69669 https://www.radiofree.org/2020/07/02/the-untold-history-of-mount-rushmore-a-kkk-sympathizer-built-monument-on-sacred-lakota-land/ https://www.radiofree.org/2020/07/02/the-untold-history-of-mount-rushmore-a-kkk-sympathizer-built-monument-on-sacred-lakota-land/#respond Thu, 02 Jul 2020 18:09:53 +0000 https://www.radiofree.org/2020/07/02/the-untold-history-of-mount-rushmore-a-kkk-sympathizer-built-monument-on-sacred-lakota-land/ by Democracy Now! / July 2nd, 2020

As tribal governments call on President Trump to cancel his Mount Rushmore Independence Day celebration, we look at why Native Americans have long pushed for the removal of the monument carved into the sacred Black Hills and designed by a sculptor with ties to the Ku Klux Klan. “This place is very, very sacred to our people,” says Nick Tilsen, president and CEO of the NDN Collective. “Stealing our land and then carving the faces of four white men who were colonizers, who committed genocide against Indigenous people, is an egregious act of violence.”

This article was posted on Thursday, July 2nd, 2020 at 11:09am and is filed under Colonialism, Genocide, History, Original Peoples, Racism.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2020/07/02/the-untold-history-of-mount-rushmore-a-kkk-sympathizer-built-monument-on-sacred-lakota-land/feed/ 0 68731 https://www.radiofree.org/2020/07/01/cancelcanadaday/ https://www.radiofree.org/2020/07/01/cancelcanadaday/#respond Wed, 01 Jul 2020 15:15:24 +0000 https://www.radiofree.org/2020/07/01/cancelcanadaday/ July 1 is celebrated by many Canadians as Canada Day. Originally it was called Dominion Day to commemorate the establishment of the Dominion of Canada. But not every inhabitant of “Canada” will be celebrating. On that day, the Indigenous activist organization, Idle No More, is calling for “3 hours of Indigenous Resistance and Resurgence!”

Resurgence indeed.

Back in 2014, Gord Hill, Kwakwaka’wakw author of The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book (see review), when questioned about Idle No More, said:

Flowing from [Idle No More’s] reformist strategy was an emphasis on “peaceful” protests, pacifism, and the “flash mob” round dances in malls. So while we took one step forward with the INM mobilizations, we also took two steps back in that pacifism and “peaceful rallies” was widely promoted on a national level. This is in contrast to decades of grassroots Indigenous resistance that has used militant actions such as blockades and even armed resistance. I’m glad that the INM mobilization occurred, but I’m also glad that it had a relatively short life and hopefully those that were mobilized will learn and grow from this experience.

Black Lives Matter, whose activist credentials have also been called into question, has reemerged as a prominent protest movement following the videotaped police killing of George Floyd.

The United States has a deplorable history of genocide. But Canada is no exemplar as far as the killing of Blacks and other ethnic groups. Genocide is also a historical fact in Canada. Racism is deeply embedded in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), especially against Indigenous peoples who also suffer high levels of incarceration.

A Small Sampling of Recent Cases of RCMP Racism against First Nations

The above were just two video samples. With the ubiquity of cell phones, there is an abundance of police criminality captured on video available for viewing online.

Thus Idle No More will oppose Canada Day:

We will not celebrate stolen Indigenous land and stolen Indigenous lives. Instead we will gather to honour all of the lives lost to the Canadian state – Indigenous lives, Black lives, Migrant lives, Women and Trans and 2Spirit lives – all of the relatives that we have lost. We will use our voices for MMIWG2S, child welfare, birth alerts, forced sterilization, police/RCMP brutality and all of the injustices we face.  We will honour our connections to each other and to the water, land, and sky.

Idle No More asks its supporters,

Find or organize a #CancelCanadaDay action in your community and join Idle No More for a live #CancelCanadaDay broadcast on July 1.

Celebrating Genocide

Would anyone knowingly eat, dance, sing, play, and watch fireworks in celebration of the day that First Nation’s peoples were denationalized through genocide? Because that is the flip side of the colonialism. In order for the nation of Canada to come into being, on “home and native land” (as the lyrics of the Canadian anthem state), the other nations had to be subsumed, assimilated, and otherwise disappeared.

And this process of dispossession is not confined to the past. Witness the Canadian state wielding the RCMP to thwart the unrelenting resistance of the Wet’suwet’en traditional chiefs and people opposed to a pipeline being constructed through their unceded territory.

Today’s email from the Unist’ot’en Solidarity Brigade of the Wet’suwet’en read: “Cancel Canada Day Rally tomorrow in Vancouver and many other cities!”

“canada day” is a day of celebration for some. For those who know the history of so-called “canada”, it’s obvious this is not a day of celebration. It’s a day that represents an ongoing genocide of Indigenous peoples.

“canada” was stolen at gunpoint. Any and all treaties made, have been broken. The colonial system has been imposed through attempts of forced assimilation.

Suppression and oppression of Indigenous peoples came through land theft enforced by the #NorthwestMountedPolice (today known as the BC RCMP), weaponized starvation, #ResidentialSchools (the “kill the Indian in the child” method), medical testing without anaesthesia, beatings when people spoke our languages, the #SixtiesScoop, forced or coerced sterilization, inaction in regards to Missing & Murdered Indigenous Women & Girls #MMIW #MMIWG, mass incarceration, criminalization of culture #PotlatchBan, criminalization of #LandDefenders & #WaterProtectors, ongoing displacement to reserves, boil water advisories, enabled & encourage racially motivated violence (by elected officials), and no justice when attacks occur… and so much more.

These are not part of a “proud past”. These are acts of genocide that continue today – via forced assimilation & colonization only through which the state can exist. These are the reasons we need to #CancelCanadaDay

The hurtful, racist symbols and nomenclature of colonialism need to be dealt with promptly. The argument about preserving history does not supersede the commission of genocide and other crimes against humanity. It is past time that people of conscience join the resistance against colonialism, imperialism, oppression, and racism.

It is well understood that for people to overthrow the systems of oppression that solidarity is a must, and a sustained solidarity it must be.

This article was posted on Wednesday, July 1st, 2020 at 8:15am and is filed under Canada, Colonialism, Original Peoples, Turtle Island.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2020/07/01/cancelcanadaday/feed/ 0 67981 https://www.radiofree.org/2020/07/01/honoring-the-warrior/ https://www.radiofree.org/2020/07/01/honoring-the-warrior/#respond Wed, 01 Jul 2020 13:47:28 +0000 https://www.radiofree.org/2020/07/01/honoring-the-warrior/ Not everyone born on an Indian reservation who was sent to reform school and Vietnam ends up a renown, international writer, but Jim Northrup did.

It’s been nearly four years since Northrup passed away. He’s remembered for his syndicated newspaper column “Fond du Lac Follies,” books, humorous stories, cathartic war-poetry, and cruising the backroads in a 64 corvette his wife won at a casino.

Born on the Minnesota Fond du Lac Indian Reservation twenty miles west of Duluth, he was sent to a federal boarding school three-hundred miles away from his family when was he was six. There he was taught not to speak the Ojibwa language and learned how to fight. He had to. He was one of the smallest kids in school and lost a lot more fights than he won.

It wasn’t long before he took the path of a lippy street-fighter that eventually led to the Red Wing State Training School for Boys. When memories of his writer grandfather resurfaced, he decided to honor those memories by contributing to the reform school newspaper. He wrote with insight and humor. One time he pranked readers by asking ten questions on the front page and telling them the answers were on the seventh page of a six-page newspaper. He recalled getting a kick out of that idea during an interview.

He also remembered stories he heard around campfires on the Rez from elders about poison gas during WW1 or tales relatives told about fighting in Korea and WW2. Members of his tribe who risked death in battle were greatly respected so he signed-up to be a Marine when he was eighteen.

He survived the Vietnam War with his body intact, but the post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) he brought home stuck with him. He sometimes referred to PTSD as “party till somebody dies.” Talking with other Vietnam Vets helped him sort things out and so did writing — especially poetry and short stories. “I could just write a poem, get it in the book and close the page on it.” he mentioned it an interview.

Excerpt from his poem “Shrinking Away” below:

Survived the war but
was having trouble
surviving the peace
Couldn’t sleep more than two hours
was scared to be without a gun
nightmares, daymares
guilt and remorse
wanted to stay drunk all the time
1966 and the VA said
Vietnam wasn’t a war

He returned to the Fond du Lac Indian Reservation after working  a variety of jobs and resumed writing while developing a reputation as a funny story-teller, birch bark basket maker, Jeopardy freak and political smart-ass. Regarded as a man who wore many headbands, he embraced other Anishinaabe traditions including wild rice gathering, maple syrup collecting and moose hunting. Between writing, he found gigs as a radio commentator, newspaper editor, stage hand or anything else he found interesting or necessary. At one point he was a tribal court lawyer and lay attorney.

His writing, which focused on conditions and changes occurring within the Indian community, grew more powerful and he became an influential Native American voice through his award winning syndicated column, books, interviews, poems, radio commentaries and performances. He was know in parts of Europe and beyond.

Despite his political edginess, PTSD and success as a writer, Northrup remained a warm, folksy man who continued to tell his stories in a straightforward and humorous way until his death. In 2016, wearing a Marine Veterans baseball cap he told an applauding audience at Lambeau Field in Green Bay he used writing sometimes as a to way to deal with combat trauma and referred to that writing-process as “my brain taking a shit.”

Paiute poet Adrian C. Louis would later say “The main enemies of a warrior are the demons inside himself. Jim Northrup conquered most of those. He was a kind man, a good man, a traditional man, and my favorite Indian writer.”

Although Northrup didn’t call himself a pacifist, Artistic Director Ron Pelusu of the History Theater in St. Paul recently mentioned in an online chat he was “someone who seeks out peace.”

Northrup never achieved the luxury of continuous peace — at least not during his time on Earth. Yet he found direction, periods of solace and an understanding of himself in work, honoring the ways of his tribe and through an inside journey that inextricably connects the future to the past.

Or, as Northrup himself might say, “If you don’t remember your heritage, you don’t know where you came from — consequently, you don’t know where you’re going.”

This article was posted on Wednesday, July 1st, 2020 at 6:47am and is filed under General, Original Peoples.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2020/07/01/honoring-the-warrior/feed/ 0 67933 https://www.radiofree.org/2020/06/22/police-violence-and-racism-have-always-been-tools-of-capitalism/ https://www.radiofree.org/2020/06/22/police-violence-and-racism-have-always-been-tools-of-capitalism/#respond Mon, 22 Jun 2020 14:19:45 +0000 https://www.radiofree.org/2020/06/22/police-violence-and-racism-have-always-been-tools-of-capitalism/

The system-wide challenges the United States faces with policing are entrenched and deeply rooted. When the historical and current practices of police are examined, it is evident police have been designed to uphold the status quo including racial injustice and class inequality. Whenever political movements develop to respond to racial and class unfairness, the police have undermined their politically-protected constitutional rights.

Police have used infiltration, surveillance, and violence against political movements seeking to end injustices throughout the history of the nation. It is the deeply embedded nature of these injustices and the structural problems in policing that are leading more people to conclude police must be completely transformed, if not abolished.

We advocate for democratic community control of the police as a starting point in addition to defunding the police and funding alternatives such as programs that provide mental health, public health, social work and conflict resolution services, and other nonviolent interventions. Funding is needed for the basic human needs of housing, education, employment, healthcare, and food especially in communities that have been neglected for years and whose low-wage labor has enriched the wealthy in this unequal society.

An alleged fugitive slave being seized (Getty Images)

The Roots of Policing are Rotten

The needs of the wealthy have been the driving force for the creation of police. Policing developed to control workers, many who were Irish, Italian and other immigrants seeking fair wages in the North and African people who were enslaved in the South. Victor E. Kappeler, Ph.D writes in “A Brief History of Slavery and the Origins of American Policing” that “Slave patrols and Night Watches, which later became modern police departments, were both designed to control the behaviors of minorities.”

Police detain protesters as they march down the street during a solidarity rally for George Floyd on Saturday, May 30, 2020 (AP Photo: Wong Maye-E) 

A. Southern Police Created to Protect Slavery

In the south, the driving force of the economy was slavery where people kidnapped in Africa were brought to the Americas as chattel slaves, workers who created wealth for their owners. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database lists 12.5 million Africans who were shipped to the Americas, 10.7 million of which survived the dreaded Middle Passage. Of that, 388,000 were brought to North America. African slaves were forced to reproduce for their owners and to sell.

From the start, African people revolted against slavery and fought to escape it. This 400 years legacy of racist injustice that helped form the United States is the history we must confront. The roots of policing in what became the Confederacy and later the sheriffs who enforced Jim Crow grew out of the containment of slaves, the most valuable ‘property’ in the nation.

Olivia Waxman describes this history writing that in the South, “the economics that drove the creation of police forces were centered . . . on the preservation of the slavery system.” She describes “slave patrols tasked with chasing down runaways and preventing slave revolts” as one of the primary police institutions.

Gary Potter writes in “The History of Policing in the United States,” that:

Slave patrols had three primary functions: (1) to chase down, apprehend, and return to their owners, runaway slaves; (2) to provide a form of organized terror to deter slave revolts; and, (3) to maintain a form of discipline for slave-workers who were subject to summary justice, outside of the law, if they violated any plantation rules.

The purpose of slave patrols was to protect the wealth of the white people who owned slaves.

Potter writes:

The first formal slave patrol had been created in the Carolina colonies in 1704. During the Civil War, the military became the primary form of law enforcement in the South, but during Reconstruction, many local sheriffs functioned in a way analogous to the earlier slave patrols, enforcing segregation and the disenfranchisement of freed slaves.

Hundreds of laws were passed in the South around slavery and its enforcement but laws were also passed in northern colonies including Connecticut, New York, and others to control slaves. The US Congress passed fugitive Slave Laws allowing the detention and return of escaped slaves, in 1793 and 1850. Racist police made up the “kidnap gang” in New York City in 1830 who would capture Africans and bring them to a rubber stamp court that would send them to the South as captured slaves – often before their families knew they were arrested. Throughout this history, there were people who fought police violence and abuse as is discussed in The Black New Yorker Who Led The Charge Against Police Violence In The 1830s.

The history of racist policing did not end with the abolition of slavery. Police forces were involved in enforcing the racist Black Code, the Convict-Lease System, and JimCrow segregation. The terrorism of white supremacist groups like the KKK, the burning of black schools and churches and lynching became the common realities of the south. White police often did not stop, or seriously investigate these crimes; some even participated. In the era of Civil Rights, southern police used violence against nonviolent protesters – beatings, fire hoses and dogs.

This also occurred in the north. For example, Minnesota was infamous for arresting indigenous people on charges like vagrancy and forcing them to work for no pay.  This spurred the formation of the American Indian Movement. Dennis Banks describes, “The cops concentrated on the Indian bars. They would bring their paddy wagons around behind a bar and open the back doors. Then they would go around to the front and chase everybody toward the rear. ” They would be taken to stadiums and convention centers and forced to work for no pay. The police did not do this at white bars, only bars where Native Americans gathered.

The War on Drugs became the new disguise for police violence against black people. “We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news,” said President Nixon’s domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman to Harper’s Magazine. Mass incarceration of the 1980s, begun under President Reagan and continued under President Clinton with Joe Biden leading efforts in the Senate, disproportionately impacted black and brown people. Now slavery legally continues as prison labor.

AT&T workers on strike (Socialist Worker)

B. Northern Police Protect Commercial Interests, Hold Down Wages

The history of policing in the northern colonies was also driven by economics. Commercial interests protected their property through an informal, private for-profit form of hiring people part-time. Towns relied on a “night-watch” to enforce laws. Boston started a night-watch in 1636, New York followed in 1658 and Philadelphia created one in 1700.

As cities become more populated, the night-watch system was ineffective. Commercial interests needed more regular policing and so they hired people to protect their property and goods as they were transported from ports to other areas. Boston, a large shipping commercial center, became the first city to form a police force when merchants convinced the government that police were needed for the “collective good” thereby transferring the cost of maintaining a police force to the citizens.

A driving force for police expansion was workers, who were often immigrants, seeking better pay and working conditions. Abolishing The Police: A Radical Idea That’s Been Around For Over A Century, describes how the first state police force was formed in 1905 in Pennsylvania to combat workers forming unions. According to a study in 1969 by the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, the United States has the bloodiest and most violent labor history of any industrial nation in the world.

Sam Mitrani, author of The Rise of the Chicago Police Department: Class and Conflict, 1850-1894, writes in In These Times that “as Northern cities grew and filled with mostly immigrant wage workers who were physically and socially separated from the ruling class, the wealthy elite who ran the various municipal governments hired hundreds and then thousands of armed men to impose order on the new working-class neighborhoods. Class conflict roiled late-19th century American cities like Chicago, which experienced major strikes and riots in 1867, 1877, 1886, and 1894. In each of these upheavals, the police attacked strikers with extreme violence, even if in 1877 and 1894 the U.S. Army played a bigger role in ultimately repressing the working class.”

Martha Grevatt points out that:

Throughout labor history, one finds innumerable accounts of cops engaging in anti-union violence. Police viciously attacked unarmed pickets during the 1994 Staley strike in Decatur, Ill., as well as the 1995 Detroit newspaper strike, to name a few examples. They arrested and harassed UAW members during last year’s strike against GM.

This is not only a time of growing protest against police violence but also against the mistreatment of workers. Over the last two years, there has been a record number of strikers not seen in 35 years. PayDay Report counts more than 500 strikes in the last three weeks with a peak number on Juneteenth at “29 ports across the West Coast” and the UAW stopping production on all assembly lines “for 8 minutes and 46 seconds to honor George Floyd.”  They have tracked more than 800 strikes since March.

Protesters march in a Black Lives Matter demonstration organized by the Dallas Black Firefighters Association on Juneteenth 2020 in Dallas (AP Photo/LM Otero)

Historic Time Of Uprising and Unrest Rattles the Police and Power Structure

The rebellion by workers and anti-racism activists is unprecedented in the lives of most people alive today. There is a nationwide uprising in every state and in thousands of cities and towns.  Repression by the power structure with militarized police and the National Guard has failed to stop the protests. Democrats have failed to divert the movement of the energy into the elections, as Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi have offered inadequate reforms such as more police training. Fundamental changes are needed.

Police will continue to make efforts to shut down the unrest. The FBI and local police have a long history of combatting movements. In addition to the violent response that has been well documented against the current rebellion, we should expect infiltration, surveillance, creation of internal divisions, and other tactics, even murder.

All of these acts against labor, civil rights, peace, environmental, and other movements have happened before and we should expect them again. Documents show a nationwide effort of police and the FBI to defeat the Occupy Movement that included entrapment of activists in crimes. There has also been aggressive police violence against people protesting pipelines and seeking climate justice.

Black activists continue to be a major focus of the FBI and law enforcement. Media Justice and the ACLU reported last week that one million pages of materials on FBI surveillance were discovered in a FOIA request showing widespread surveillance of black activists.

The small victories that have been won by the movement are already causing repercussions. Police are threatening to quit because they are being held accountable for violence, even though they remain protected by immunity from prosecution. A survey last week found 3 out of 4 Washington, DC police were ready to leave the force. CNN reported police in Minneapolis, Atlanta, South Florida, and Buffalo quitting. In Atlanta, police got the “flu” after felony murder charges were brought against the officer who killed Rayshard Brooks.

New York City police are planning a strike on the Fourth of July to show people what life would be like without police. However, this may backfire as during a 1997 slowdown and also during a 2014–2015 slowdown, crime did not spike, and may even have declined a bit. The nation’s top law enforcement official, Attorney General Bob Barr threatened in December 2019 that if some communities don’t begin showing more respect to law enforcement, then they could potentially not be protected by police officers.

New York Police Department (NYPD) officers guard the main entrance of the Trump Tower in New York on November 14, 2016 (Jewel Samad AFP/Getty Images)

To Transform the Police, The Economy Must Be Transformed

The US Constitution, written by slaveholders and businessmen who profited from slave products, puts property rights ahead of individual rights. The Bill of Rights was an afterthought. The result of treating people as property, Jim Crow laws, redlining, and other racially unfair economic practices has left Black Americans with a $13 trillion dollar wealth gap.

Max Rameau told us in a recent podcast, To Deal With Police, We Must Understand Why They Even Exist, that when we understand the purpose of police is to protect property, it becomes more evident why they cannot be reformed. Unless we confront neoliberal capitalism that creates inequality and a hyper-class-based society, the wealthy will always find someone to pay to protect them.

In fact, the call to defund the police can be easily thrown off course by getting activists fighting for small gains of cuts to police budgets, while the police are increasing their funding from private corporations. Already, as reported by Eyes on the Ties, “Police foundations across the country are partnering with corporations to raise money to supplement police budgets by funding programs and purchasing tech and weaponry for law enforcement with little public oversight.” Their report documents support to police from Wall Street and finance, retail and food industries, Big Tech, fossil fuel corporations, sports, and universities.

It is fantasy to believe police exist for public safety. As Justin Podur writes, “Society doesn’t need a large group with a license to kill.” Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report advocates for community control over police but he doesn’t stop there, writing “communities should control, not just the police, but much of the rest of their neighborhoods’ vital services and resources.”

As Richard Rubinstein writes in ThePolice May Pull the Trigger but it is the System That Kills:

Racism, police brutality, and economic injustice can be thought of as separate boxes, but they are part of one self-reinforcing system. And that system’s defining characteristic – the feature most resistant to change – is that it is based on the production of goods and services for profit, not to satisfy basic human needs.

Like many conflicts in the United States, the problems of police violence comes down to corporate-capitalists vs. the people. Racial separation and inequality are ways the ownership class keeps people divided so the people can be controlled. This is the reality of the US political system and the reality of policing in the United States, but we can change that reality by continuing to organize, staying in the streets and building our power.

This article was posted on Monday, June 22nd, 2020 at 7:19am and is filed under Black Lives Matter, Discrimination, Economic Inequality, Original Peoples, Police brutality, Police militarization, Racism, Slavery, Surveillance, Transparency/Secrecy, United States.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2020/06/22/police-violence-and-racism-have-always-been-tools-of-capitalism/feed/ 0 63826 https://www.radiofree.org/2020/06/12/it-is-all-about-race-awful-hypocrisy-to-say-it-is-not/ https://www.radiofree.org/2020/06/12/it-is-all-about-race-awful-hypocrisy-to-say-it-is-not/#respond Fri, 12 Jun 2020 14:40:46 +0000 https://www.radiofree.org/2020/06/12/it-is-all-about-race-awful-hypocrisy-to-say-it-is-not/ While I am following closely various discussions on Western mass media and social media, simultaneously engaging in several direct exchanges, one overwhelming leitmotif that I see is clearly emerging: “What is happening in the United States (and the UK, France and other parts of Western Empire) is not really about the race. Let us protest peacefully, let us not allow ‘rioting’ to continue, and above all, please let us not single out the white race, Western culture as a sole villain. Let us have peace, love each other… Then things will miraculously improve; terrible occurrences will soon go away.”

I have worked and lived on all continents, from far away island nations of South Pacific (Oceania), to Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and Asia. Of course, I lived in Europe and North America, too.

Colonialism, neo-colonialism, imperialism – these are all my topics. Seriously! I have been studying them, investigating them; I wrote and made various documentary films about them. On several occasions I came very close to losing my life, confronting them.

My conclusion after all that I saw and experienced and survived? You can probably guess it:

To claim that the race is not what has been for centuries dividing our Planet is outrageous hypocrisy. Or deranged wishful thinking. Or something much worse: it is calculated blindness that serves only the ruling, white group of people.

To make it blunt: Our Planet has been reduced to only two races: White and “the other”!

On top of it, the color of one’s skin is not always identical to what the West, in general, perceives as the Caucasian/white race. To be “white” is the state of mind. It means: belonging to the culture which perceives itself as “superior”. The culture which sees itself as ‘exceptional’, and somehow ‘chosen’ to judge and advice the entire humanity.

It also means ‘a state of indoctrination and obedience, as well as lack of intellectual courage’. All this, in exchange for the privileges; fabulous privileges! “Plunder the world, and live well above your means; live grotesquely plush life! And while you are living it, do not forget to whine, demand more, and keep repeating that ‘you are also exploited and, actually, a very poor victim’”.

Denying the privileges is part of racism, too, as it demonstrates unexpectable spite for the real victims! Or, perhaps, self-imposed blindness.

Citizens of some countries, such as Russia, Cuba, and Turkey, may look mainly ‘white’, but they are actually not. They are not invited to the ‘club’, because their mindset is different because they are not submissive, because they think on their own.

*****

Such conclusions may not be popular in New York, London, Paris, or Berlin. Especially not now, when the United States and the entire West are in turmoil.

The culture which was built on blood, bones, rape, and theft, ‘culture’ shaped by more than 500 years of colonialist terror, is now turning, twisting, and trying to justify itself. It tries to survive while staying in a driving seat. Countless editorials penned by both ‘conservative’ and so-called ‘liberal’ scribes are carpet-bombing the pages of newspapers at both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.

Fear of perhaps mortally injured beast – Western regime and its citizens – is delectable by its repulsive stench, and it stinks for miles.

Suddenly, most of the so-called ‘progressive’ publications do not want to hear from those writers and thinkers who are shooting powerful projectiles in the form of highly uncomfortable truth. Actually, in the West, there are hardly any true “left-wing” sites or magazines left, of course, with some shining exceptions. What is really progressive these days? I don’t want to name the sites or publications here, but you are most likely aware of which ones I am talking about: they almost exclusively carry the stuff written by the Western/white men, for other white men’s consumption! They never cross the line: their criticism of the Western white-dominated world is half-hearted, “peaceful”; in short, cowardly.

A white man is an individual who has been brought up and indoctrinated in a certain way, who thinks, speaks, and writes in a manner that is expected from him or her by the Western regime.

And all these ‘non-whites’, all over the world, including the minorities in the Western countries, are expected to sit on their asses, shut up and listen to him or her, but mostly him. And, of course, to obey. Or else!

Or else: they will be verbally attacked and humiliated, eventually, they will get sanctioned, their governments were overthrown, countries invaded. There will be corpses all over, the stench of burning flesh, overflowing mass graves. And ‘at home’, in the West? Bullets shot at their eyes, or necks squashed by military or police boots.

So, what actually happened a few weeks ago to Mr. George Floyd, has been constantly happening to non-white people all over the world, to the entire communities and countries.

Then, suddenly, people, all over the world, had enough!

Almost everywhere, not just in China, Russia, Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, Libya, Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

*****

Enough of being treated as some lower, subservient races. Enough of being treated like a scum; brutalized, killed like Mr. Floyd!

*****

Now, in the West, both liberal and conservative media is making noises, claiming that Mr. Floyd was “not a saint”, that he used to serve some time in prison.

What can I say? People, in general, are not saints. People and countries. Very often, circumstances make them behave in a very nasty manner. But if you are raised as a second-class citizen, if you are beaten, day and night, by your own regime, are you expected to turn out to be a romantic poet? Get real!

Our countries, non-Western ones, are not always behaving like saints, either. But they are still better, much better, than those that have been murdering hundreds of millions in their colonies!

Don’t they understand, in Washington, London, and Paris, why those millions of people, from Tokyo to Buenos Aires, from Africa to Asia, are now marching in support for the African-American people? It is because all of us, outside Europe, North America, Australia, and New Zealand, are somehow related to Mr. Floyd!

Yes, we read those phony essays. We observe those cynical little smiles on the faces of the people who are denying racial and racist division of the world. Individuals who are defending the status quo, the rule of that tiny minority over the planet, so they could maintain their advantages.

Some defenders of status quo are now going as far as claiming that the rebellion against the white rulers is actually some sort of dark conspiracy theatre, triggered by the well-concealed business elites, or that it is connected to COVID-19; but above all, that it is not spontaneous at all.

It is clear where they really stand and what they want to achieve.

It is never “them”. It is always somebody else. They keep pointing fingers at some invisible bankers, or the minorities in their own countries. You know precisely what I mean. As long as it is not them! But it is all much simpler: most of Europe and North America are constructed on white racism. And so is imperialism, colonialism. Citizens in the West are voting right-wing scum, voluntarily, and consistently. Can you imagine a genuine North American or European “internationalist”? Maybe a few. Perhaps 1%. Not more! So, the proverbial gold keeps flowing in. And billions of non-whites are rotting alive in all corners of the globe.

My friends, my comrades, all over the world, are now opening their eyes, realizing what is happening in the United States and its colonialist daddy: Europe. Many of them, of course, already knew. At least they knew something. But those who did not, are now wide awake, getting well aware of the brutality of the Western regime, as well as of the racist nature of the “global arrangement”.

Those who were, for centuries, manufacturing consent, justifying and glorifying colonialism, imperialism, racial discrimination, as well as Western supremacy, can suddenly do nothing to stop the avalanche of awareness.

This may be the beginning of the end of segregation, of global apartheid. Just the beginning of the true struggle for equality.

A knee of a beefy white racist cop in Minneapolis, which had cut the supply of air, killing an African-American person, somehow managed to trigger that avalanche.

Nobody wants to live like this. Oppressed nations do not want to be threatened this way by those white Western cynics and nihilists: like Clinton and Trump, Navarro, Pompeo, and others. What a hellish troop of third-rate violent porn performers, these people!

Oppressed minorities inside the empire, be they of African descent, Hispanics or Chinese, are sick of the vicious and repulsive racism. Mostly, they are frightened to speak. But now, day by day, they are gaining courage.

*****

The United States of America has been built on the genocide of the non-white people. The great majority of native folks had been slaughtered so the small number of the first and brutal European settlers could thrive.

This is “to some extend” a known fact, but learning in-depth what really happened to the original inhabitants of ‘America’ has been thoroughly discouraged. Word ‘genocide’ is hardly ever uttered in connection with the first chapters of U.S. history. Actually, it is taboo.

Slavery has been turned into folklore. Millions, tens of millions of broken, methodically destroyed human lives, is hardly ever presented in its real, nightmarish authenticity. People in Africa were hunted down like animals, tortured, raped, killed, and shipped like cattle to the so-called ‘free’ and ‘democratic’ “New World”.

Does a country constructed on such macabre foundations have really any moral right to exist, let alone call itself ‘free’? Can it be allowed to police the world? It is as if you would allow that murder cop who killed Mr. Floyd, to run a nation!

And those states which are now forming Europe? Their citizens are the descendants of those who were hunting down millions of human beings. Offspring of those who perpetrated and then got rich on such mass-slaughters as those of the Namibians, or people who used to inhabit what is now known as Congo.

When dragged to the broad daylight, it is all very, very uncomfortable, isn’t it? Better to sweep the truth under the carpet, and talk about “love”, “goodwill”. And then keep robbing and murdering as before, far away from the cameras!

This way, nothing would ever change.

Repeating over and over again: “race does not matter; it is actually all about class”, could make those who are in control of the world feel good about themselves, even sometimes sorry for themselves, which is actually their favorite state of mind. But it is a terribly hypocritical and deceptive position. And it has to be unveiled if there is ever to be justice!

*****

On 3 June 2020, UN News, published an essay condemning the situation in the United States:

Voices calling for an end to “the endemic and structural racism that blights US society” must be heard and understood, for the country to move past its “tragic history of racism and violence”, the UN Human Rights chief said on Wednesday.

The voices calling for an end to the killings of unarmed African Americans need to be heard”, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet said in a statement. “The voices calling for an end to police violence need to be heard”.

Ms. Bachelet, a Chilean, knows precisely what she is talking about! She knows what it is to have someone’s knee choking your aorta. Her father, an army General during the socialist era of President Salvador Allende, was murdered after the U.S.-sponsored coup led by Augusto Pinochet. Ms. Bachelet herself was kidnapped and tortured.

She looked ‘white’, but obviously not ‘white enough’ for Washington and its local assassins.

What is truly significant is that even the United Nations (usually subservient to the U.S.) is now unwilling to remain silent.

*****

Race ‘issues’ have to be addressed. Racism, inside the national boundaries, as well as on the global scale, has to be fought against, by all means.

The depressing state of our planet is a result of racism.

Look at the map of the world at the beginning of the 20th century, and you will see: a great majority of the nations were colonized by the West. Colonialism is one of the most evident forms of racism. It humiliates victims, it robs them of everything: of culture, dignity, land.

To a great extent, most of the world is still being colonized. Even right now, as this is being written.

Almost the entire Planet is brutally controlled by the white race. Through the racist West-centric education system, and by the mass media which is controlled by the White boy’s Western narrative. Things have been arranged, so that the people in non-Western countries have been ‘learning’ and ‘getting informed’ about themselves from the Western curriculums and the fraudulent sources disseminated by the U.S. and British media outlets. That is grotesquely racist, isn’t it?

Close to 10 million people have died in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), in just a quarter of a century. It is because they have coltan, uranium, and other essential raw materials, desired by the West. But also, because to the West, their black lives matter close to nothing. My film, Rwanda Gambit, is clearly addressing the issue. But who cares? In the West, they rather watch porn instead of learning the greatest genocide of the 20th Century, which they helped to trigger! And who cares about the West Papuans, who are murdered with almost the same intensity by the Indonesians, on behalf of their Western masters?  After all, the West Papuans are blacks, therefore matter nothing.

On those millions, mountains of corpses, huge companies, and even entire countries are thriving, prospering. While their CEOs and Presidents are talking rubbish about some ‘corporate responsibility’ and love for democracy.

And most of the white Europeans, Canadians, Australians, have to sacrifice very little, in order to live their obnoxiously luxurious lives.

Isn’t this racist?

The entire arrangement of the world is!

Soon, it will be impossible to hide behind all those lies.

I work at the front lines. Where human bodies are crushed by all that “love” of the white colonialism and racism, directly but also indirectly. Racist violence is the most repulsive and the creepiest thing on Earth.

I want it to end; once and for all. I don’t care if some shops get looted or trashed in the process. Peaceniks who are crying over them are mostly sitting in their plush living rooms, watching censored news. They do not see those tens of millions of victims of racism rotting in tropical heat, floating on the surfaces of polluted rivers, thousands of kilometers away!

Images of Mr. Floyd being murdered, slowly and sadistically, is as close as they ever got to reality.

For centuries, they did all they could in order not to see.

Now they are running out of excuses.

Not to see, not to fight against the white, endemic global racism is a terrible crime, a crime that has been taking place for more than 500 years. The crime against humanity.

•  First published by NEO – a journal of the Russian Academy of Sciences

This article was posted on Friday, June 12th, 2020 at 7:40am and is filed under “The West”, Africa, Colonialism, Culture, Discrimination, Europe, Media, Middle East, Opinion, Original Peoples, Police brutality, Police militarization, Protests, Racism, United Nations, White Supremacy.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2020/06/12/it-is-all-about-race-awful-hypocrisy-to-say-it-is-not/feed/ 0 59589 https://www.radiofree.org/2020/03/23/coastal-gas-link-continues-work-despite-covid-19/ https://www.radiofree.org/2020/03/23/coastal-gas-link-continues-work-despite-covid-19/#respond Mon, 23 Mar 2020 21:15:11 +0000 https://www.radiofree.org/2020/03/23/coastal-gas-link-continues-work-despite-covid-19/ As people around the world are taking social distancing measures to keep their communities safe Coastal Gas Link and the RCMP continue to bring in workers from all over Canada during a pandemic putting both workers and entire northern communities with limited medical staff at grave risk.

At the same time the the oil and gas industry are mobilizing to get government bailouts as the crash in oil prices has made much of their production unprofitable and made the economics of projects like LNG Canada even more dubious.

Many investors have already pulled away from CGL, but KKR an American investment firm has stated plans to buy 65% of the Coastal GasLink pipeline.

Today Rising Tide North America has organized a digital communications blockade to flood KKR executives with calls, emails, and tweets, and demand they back away from financing such a destructive and risky project.

*****

Over the past five years, TC Energy (formally Trans Canada) has tried to build the Coastal GasLink pipeline on Wet’suwet’en land, defiantly ignoring assertions from the hereditary chiefs of their rights and title and their lack of consent for the project.

The Coastal GasLink pipeline threatens Wet’suwet’en land, water, air, and people.

KKR has plans to purchase 65% of the Coastal GasLink pipeline with Alberta Investment Management Corp (AIMCo).It’s is a US-based private equity firm with an atrocious record of putting profits over employees, people, and the environment.

If we #ShutDownKKR, we can stop the financing of the Coastal GasLink Pipeline — but we need to mobilize online together right now.

Here’s what you can do to join the KKR communications blockade TODAY and #ShutDownKKR:

• Email KKR today by using our easy messaging tool by clicking here.
• Call KKR by dialing 1-888-593-5407 and following the instructions you hear from us.Need some talking points for your call? No problemo. See below.
• Tweet at @KKR_Co and tell them just how awful they are for ignoring Wet’suwet’en concerns about their rights, the climate, land air and water. Need some tweet inspiration? See below!

Why is this important right now? Well, this fight got even worse last week.

Despite the COVID-19 crisis, TC Energy is still going ahead with Coastal GasLink pipeline construction and sending more workers and federal police officers onto Wet’suwet’en territories, putting communities at even more risk. Billionaire oil and gas CEOs see the COVID-19 crisis as an opportunity to push through whatever they can when the world is looking the other way.

KKR must be held accountable for ignoring the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs, putting Indigenous land and people at risk, endangering Indigenous women by building man camps along the route, and fueling the climate crisis.

Thanks for taking action online today and let us know how it goes by replying this to email!

Vanessa and the rest of Rising Tide North America

The Unis’tot’en (C’ihlts’ehkhyu / Big Frog Clan) are the original Wet’suwet’en Yintah Wewat Zenli distinct to the lands of the Wet’suwet’en. Over time in Wet’suwet’en History, the other clans developed and were included throughout Wet’suwet’en Territories. Read other articles by UnistotenCamp, or visit UnistotenCamp’s website.

This article was posted on Monday, March 23rd, 2020 at 2:15pm and is filed under Activism, Canada, Colonialism, Human Rights, Original Peoples, Solidarity, Turtle Island.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2020/03/23/coastal-gas-link-continues-work-despite-covid-19/feed/ 0 41398 https://www.radiofree.org/2020/03/03/callout-for-ongoing-support/ https://www.radiofree.org/2020/03/03/callout-for-ongoing-support/#respond Tue, 03 Mar 2020 14:25:26 +0000 https://www.radiofree.org/2020/03/03/callout-for-ongoing-support/ Despite a widespread media narrative spreading incorrect information, NO agreements have been made on the Coastal Gas Link Pipeline, and the call for solidarity actions remains firmly in place!

This is Not Over – Message to Supporters

“As Canada and BC have proposed an agreement to recognize Wet’suwet’en title on our unceded lands, Coastal Gaslink and the RCMP continue to violently trespass against our will.

A message to our supporters: This is not over. We want the RCMP and CGL off our lands.

This proposal from BC and Canada is long overdue, following decades of denial of Wet’suwet’en rights and title after the 1997 Delgamuukw-Gisday’wa court case. Our ancestors proved what we have always known – that these lands belong to the Wet’suwet’en – and thanks to thousands rising up across so-called Canada, the government is forced to acknowledge this.

We need to keep the pressure on.

The proposal will be reviewed by our clans, and decided upon by our nation in our bahtlats (feast hall) in accordance with Anuk nu’at’en (Wet’suwet’en law) in the coming weeks.

Stay strong. #Wetsuwetenstrong

#ShutDownCanada #ReconciliationIsDead

Callout for Solidarity: https://unistoten.camp/alleyesonwetsuweten

Gidimt’en Call to action: www.yintahaccess.com

Solidarity actions have continued at pace with new rail blockades going up across the country today, longstanding blockades remaining in place, and Indigenous youth hitting one full week of occupying the BC Legislature!

The widespread media misinformation that a deal on the pipeline has been reached is likely to have an impact on how people understand ongoing action. Please help get the truth out that no deal on the pipeline has been reached and the call for solidarity remains in place!

More public actions and educational events are planned around the country and this Wednesday students are organizing a nation wide walk out in Solidarity with Wet’suwet’en!

Keep the pressure on! Gidemt’en spokesperson urges Wet’suwet’en solidarity movement to not let up!

20 min Interview with people holding down the Kahnawake Rail Blockade

New rail Blockade in St’at’mic Territory Today

Xinca Parliament and Maritimes Guatemala Breaking the Silence Network Solidarity Statement

We support and stand in solidarity with Wet’suwet’en land defenders, who are resisting the incursion of the Coastal Gaslink (CGL) pipeline on their unceded territory.

We – Xinka people and Xinka Parliament in Guatemala – have been engaged in a similar struggle against the Escobal mine, in opposition to the BC-based company Pan-American Silver (previously Tahoe Resources) in our territory. Through numerous municipal consultations, we’ve voiced our opposition to the project. For defending our territory, our people have been met with violence, including murder and the shooting of peaceful protesters, military occupation, threats, intimidation, as well as criminalization.
We know full well the risks faced by Indigenous land defenders when state forces and the legal system are mobilized in defense of resource extraction. We’ve seen this throughout Guatemala and we’re seeing this today in Wet’suwet’en territory.

Love and Rage,
Unist’ot’en Solidarity Brigade

The Unis’tot’en (C’ihlts’ehkhyu / Big Frog Clan) are the original Wet’suwet’en Yintah Wewat Zenli distinct to the lands of the Wet’suwet’en. Over time in Wet’suwet’en History, the other clans developed and were included throughout Wet’suwet’en Territories. Read other articles by UnistotenCamp, or visit UnistotenCamp’s website.

<p class="postmeta">This article was posted on Tuesday, March 3rd, 2020 at 6:25am and is filed under <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/activism/" rel="category tag">Activism</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/turtle-island/canada/" rel="category tag">Canada</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/colonialism/" rel="category tag">Colonialism</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/original-peoples/" rel="category tag">Original Peoples</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/resistance/" rel="category tag">Resistance</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/solidarity/" rel="category tag">Solidarity</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/turtle-island/" rel="category tag">Turtle Island</a>.


]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2020/03/03/callout-for-ongoing-support/feed/ 0 33105 https://www.radiofree.org/2020/02/24/toronto-wetsuweten-solidarity-march/ https://www.radiofree.org/2020/02/24/toronto-wetsuweten-solidarity-march/#respond Mon, 24 Feb 2020 01:56:19 +0000 https://www.radiofree.org/2020/02/24/toronto-wetsuweten-solidarity-march/ February 22, 2020. The sun was brilliant, the slogans and posters striking, the round dance in the heart of Canada’s financial district, the 6 concentric circles of the real Canadians, those who honour Canada’s First Nations, made February 22, 2020 a historic occasion. The largest show of native solidarity in Canada’s history, the day was celebrated across the country. Here are a few memories courtesy of my cell phone.

And here’s my take on Presstv. I’m on at 3:30.

Not only is it obscene to dig up and export our precious natural resources, but this particular pipeline is doubly odious. It is to export FRACKED gas. That means pounding the priceless lands in the Rockies, effectively bludgeoning Mother Nature, raping her to squeeze the last gasp of poisonous gas, so we can heat up her up even faster.

Passing around the burning sage at Queens Park

The demonstrators were/are young, newly ‘energized’, using our renewable ‘energy’ without any pollution. We sense that time is short, that Mother Earth’s human children look evil these days, that we have a moral duty to protest, to stop this ‘Coastal GasLink’ pipeline, to stop all pipelines.

Passing the memorial to Canadians who died in the Boer War; i.e. , for Apartheid

GasLink snake in the grass

I love the homemade, heartfelt cardboard posters best.

Passing our halls of justice

Dancing round East, South, West, and North (black, red, yellow, white)

Long live Mother Earth! Long live the Wet’suwet’en!

• Photos by Eric Walberg

<p class="postmeta">This article was posted on Sunday, February 23rd, 2020 at 5:56pm and is filed under <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/activism/" rel="category tag">Activism</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/turtle-island/canada/" rel="category tag">Canada</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/environment/" rel="category tag">Environment</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/energy/oil/" rel="category tag">Oil, Gas, Coal, Pipelines</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/original-peoples/" rel="category tag">Original Peoples</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/protests/" rel="category tag">Protests</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/solidarity/" rel="category tag">Solidarity</a>.


]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2020/02/24/toronto-wetsuweten-solidarity-march/feed/ 0 29664 https://www.radiofree.org/2020/02/23/trudeaus-demand-the-barricades-must-come-down/ https://www.radiofree.org/2020/02/23/trudeaus-demand-the-barricades-must-come-down/#respond Sun, 23 Feb 2020 05:00:17 +0000 https://www.radiofree.org/2020/02/23/trudeaus-demand-the-barricades-must-come-down/

(Coastal GasLink Pipeline Map. Photo: APTN File)

Canada’s prime minister Justin Trudeau has called the imbroglio between the Wet’suwet’en nation and Canada a matter to be decided by the rule of law. However, the Wet’suwet’en have refused to back down and have defied the British Columbia Supreme Court injunction allowing pipeline work to continue. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) were sent in to enforce the injunction. After that Trudeau seemed to have ducked the issue of the Wet’suwet’en’s opposition to pipelines through their territory until growing solidarity actions shut down ports, railways, bridges, and highways.

On 21 February, Trudeau appeared before the media and claimed,

We have gone through exhausting every possibility for dialogue, for engagement, for finding peaceful solutions to deescalate this every step of the way, and we remain open to that but we are waiting for Indigenous leadership to show that it also understands; the onus is on them. We will be there to discuss, but the barricades must come down. [italics added]

Do Trudeau’s actions match his words? Does the presence of a heavily armed RCMP strike force on Wet’suwet’en territory speak to a peaceful solution every step of the way? Does the RCMP strategizing to shoot Indigenous activists speak to a peaceful solution every step of the way? Does the setting up of RCMP barricades to control road access in and out of Wet’suwet’en territory speak to a peaceful solution every step of the way? Do the arrests of Wet’suwet’en matriarchs speak to a peaceful solution every step of the way?

Trudeau’s questionable phraseology that “we are waiting for Indigenous leadership to show that it also understands” comes across as condescending. The Trudeau government’s waiting for a show of understanding, appears to call into question the intellectual capacity of the Indigenous leaders.

Trudeau has a demand: the Indigenous leadership must see to the removal of the barricades. Does such a demand show respect for a nation-to-nation dialogue? The Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs likewise have a demand: the RCMP must leave Wet’suwet’en territory before discussions will be entered into. The two sides are at loggerheads.

Ask yourself, who among us would willingly agree to meet a foe with a gun ready to shoot them? Why should the Wet’suwet’en accept meeting anyone while armed RCMP are on their territory?

Does the have the RCMP even have the requisite stature, reputation, and respect to engage with First Nations? The RCMP has admitted to racism against Indigenous peoples, but state that they want to fix the relationship. This admission came after a lurid 2013 report that alleged widespread RCMP abuse of Indigenous women and girls. Perhaps symptomatic of the racism toward Indigenous peoples is highway 16, dubbed the Highway of Tears, a 725-kilometer highway in northern British Columbia where many cases of missing or murdered Indigenous women remain unsolved. Amnesty International holds governments accountable for the epidemic of Indigenous women’s deaths. Rewire News was highly critical stating, “The real epidemic is the criminal way in which the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women has been historically overlooked.” It pointed a finger at White journalists.

One could continue to provide myriad examples of RCMP malfeasance; however, given that this is the case, can the RCMP’s declaration of intent to rid the RCMP of racism be trusted?

The RCMP is known, from their own utterances, to engage in disinformation and smear campaigns: “Smear campaigns are our specialty.”

The words in the above video were spoken during Operation Wallaby, a tightly controlled media disinformation campaign against the Ts’peten Defenders, launched by the RCMP and political officials. It is important to understand that disinformation is not simply a deliberate lie; it is far more sinister, having been declared a crime against humanity and peace at the 2004 Halifax International Symposium on Media and Disinformation.

The settler-colonial court framework that the RCMP operate within has also been alleged to be criminally biased.

On 8 August 1995, dr. Bruce Clark — a lawyer for the Ts’peten Defenders, wrote to RCMP staff sergeant Martin Sarich:

The domestic courts from the Supreme Court of Canada on down are just refusing to address the law because it finds them personally guilty of complicity in treason, fraud and genocide. Those courts have assumed a jurisdiction that clearly and plainly they do not lawfully enjoy, and have exercised the usurped jurisdiction to implement domestic laws which are in fact not laws but crimes.

Nonetheless, Clark called on the RCMP “for protection against a legal establishment that in willful blindness has set its face against the rule of law.”

One major media noting the long terrible history of the RCMP vis-à-vis First Nations asked, “The RCMP was created to control Indigenous people. Can that relationship be reset?”

*****A question I have not heard posed by any media in Canada: Upon what basis does Trudeau claim jurisdiction over Wet’suwet’en territory? How did colonial-settlers — relative newcomers — gain title, legal and political control over a territory where the Wet’suwet’en have lived for millennia? How is it that colonial-settler law takes precedence over Wet’suwet’en law? One can no longer refer to the Doctrine of Discovery; it has been thoroughly discredited.Is there an iota of morality backing Trudeau’s professed conviction that the settler-colonialist government has jurisdiction in unceded territory? It seems axiomatic that a first step to resolving this dispute is to settle who has jurisdiction. The Wet’suwet’en believe that this has already been settled in the settler’s own Supreme Court case of Delgamuukw v British Columbia 1997.

Does Trudeau understand Delgamuukw? Granted, confusion is easy given the notorious pedantry rife within the legal realm.

Nonetheless, Trudeau says he has been pursuing a plan to bring about reconciliation.

I think we have engaged on a new road map over the last five years, one that is a difficult journey of reconciliation, one where we engage as partners with Indigenous communities, leadership, and peoples to move forward on resolving historic land claims, on closing gaps in investments between provincial education systems per students and in Indigenous students, investing in infrastructure, housing, health services, and doing so in ways that puts Indigenous leaders at the center of that path forward. Reconciliation is a journey, and there are going to be difficult moments on that journey because it represents a significant shift in the way Canada works. But our capacity to work together requires us to engage, to yes, recognize the historic wrongs but to be present, fix them, and move forward.

Trudeau’s statement that “we have engaged on… investing in infrastructure, housing, health services” for Indigenous communities addresses a notion that should be thoroughly discredited. Turtle Island has been inhabited by Original Peoples for millennia. It was only after the arrival of Europeans who came seeking gold and other riches, seeking land, seeking conquest, and having transmitted many infectious diseases against which the Original Peoples had little immunity that political control over the land was wrested from the Original Peoples. It calls into question: where did the capital that Trudeau said was being invested into First Nations come from? Was it not the money derived from the land and resources usurped from First Nations? Is it then correct for a thief to say that money returned to the victims of theft is an investment in the victims?

It is difficult to comprehend on a logical or moral basis how colonialists through acts of genocide, such as deliberate dissemination of biological agents, starvation, cultural genocide, police and military force, and legal chicanery — not only have eluded punishment, but have profited from the genocide and have retained dominance over land that has been inhabited by several other First Nations since time immemorial.

Does not the racism; dispossession of land; longstanding, drinking water advisories for First Nations; disproportionately higher rates of incarceration; and poverty among other crimes heaped on Original Peoples by the Canadian state not call for atonement by the settler-colonial society?

On 8 December 2015, Trudeau told First Nation leaders,

[I]t is time for a renewed, nation-to-nation relationship with First Nations peoples, one that understands that the constitutionally guaranteed rights of First Nations in Canada are not an inconvenience but rather a sacred obligation. [italics added]

As Chief Woos of the Wet’suwet’en Grizzly Bear House pointed out: “There is a difference between inconvenience and injustice.”

*****Many questions lay before Trudeau. Does Trudeau believe that historic wrongs can be fixed by invading police forces? Does he think that reconciliation can be accomplished by having the RCMP invade Wet’suwet’en territory? Do the rights of a company to lay a pipeline trump the human rights of Indigenous peoples?
The imbroglio may continue to simmer as breaking news informs that the BC Environmental Assessment Office has rejected Coastal Gaslink’s technical data report “due to the omission of significant economic, environmental, social and health impacts.”

<p class="postmeta">This article was posted on Saturday, February 22nd, 2020 at 9:00pm and is filed under <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/turtle-island/canada/" rel="category tag">Canada</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/colonialism/" rel="category tag">Colonialism</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/crime/" rel="category tag">Crime</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/language/disinformation/" rel="category tag">Disinformation</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/human-rights/" rel="category tag">Human Rights</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/justice/" rel="category tag">Justice</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/original-peoples/" rel="category tag">Original Peoples</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/security/police/" rel="category tag">Police</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/resistance/" rel="category tag">Resistance</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/solidarity/" rel="category tag">Solidarity</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/justice/supreme-court/" rel="category tag">Supreme Court</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/turtle-island/" rel="category tag">Turtle Island</a>. </p>


]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2020/02/23/trudeaus-demand-the-barricades-must-come-down/feed/ 0 29455 https://www.radiofree.org/2020/02/15/shut-down-canada-until-it-solves-its-war-oil-and-genocide-problem/ https://www.radiofree.org/2020/02/15/shut-down-canada-until-it-solves-its-war-oil-and-genocide-problem/#respond Sat, 15 Feb 2020 05:39:13 +0000 https://www.radiofree.org/2020/02/15/shut-down-canada-until-it-solves-its-war-oil-and-genocide-problem/

Indigenous people in Canada are giving the world a demonstration of the power of nonviolent action. The justness of their cause — defending the land from those who would destroy it for short term profit and the elimination of a habitable climate on earth — combined with their courage and the absence on their part of cruelty or hatred, has the potential to create a much larger movement, which is of course the key to success.

This is a demonstration of nothing less than a superior alternative to war, not just because the war weapons of the militarized Canadian police may be defeated by the resistance of the people who have never been conquered or surrendered, but also because the Canadian government could accomplish its aims in the wider world better by following a similar path, by abandoning the use of war for supposedly humanitarian ends and making use of humanitarian means instead. Nonviolence is simply more likely to succeed in domestic and international relations than violence. War is not a tool for preventing but for facilitating its identical twin, genocide.

Of course, the indigenous people in “British Columbia,” as around the world, are demonstrating something else as well, for those who care to see it: a way of living sustainably on earth, an alternative to earth-violence, to the raping and murdering of the planet — an activity closely linked to the use of violence against human beings.

The Canadian government, like its southern neighbor, has an unacknowledged addiction to the war-oil-genocide problem. When Donald Trump says he needs troops in Syria to steal oil, or John Bolton says Venezuela needs a coup to steal oil, it’s simply an acknowledgement of the global continuation of the never-ended operation of stealing North America.

Look at the gas-fracking invasion of unspoiled lands in Canada, or the wall on the Mexican border, or the occupation of Palestine, or the destruction of Yemen, or the “longest ever” war on Afghanistan (which is only the longest ever because the primary victims of North American militarism are still not considered real people with real nations whose destruction counts as real wars) , and what do you see? You see the same weapons, the same tools, the same senseless destruction and cruelty, and the same massive profits flowing into the same pockets of the same profiteers from blood and suffering — the corporations that will be shamelessly marketing their products at the CANSEC weapons show in Ottawa in May.

Much of the profits these days comes from distant wars fought in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, but those wars drive the technology and the contracts and the experience of war veterans that militarize the police in places like North America. The same wars (always fought for “freedom,” of course) also influence the culture toward greater acceptance of the violation of basic rights in the name of “national security” and other meaningless phrases. This process is exacerbated by the blurring of the line between war and police, as wars become endless occupations, missiles become tools of random isolated murder, and activists — antiwar activists, antipipeline activists, antigenocide activists — become categorized with terrorists and enemies.

Not only is war over 100 times more likely where there is oil or gas (and in no way more likely where there is terrorism or human rights violations or resource scarcity or any of the things people like to tell themselves cause wars) but war and war preparations are leading consumers of oil and gas. Not only is violence needed to steal the gas from indigenous lands, but that gas is highly likely to be put to use in the commission of wider violence, while in addition helping to render the earth’s climate unfit for human life. While peace and environmentalism are generally treated as separable, and militarism is left out of environmental treaties and environmental conversations, war is in fact a leading environmental destroyer. Guess who just pushed a bill through the U.S. Congress to allow both weapons and pipelines into Cyprus? Exxon-Mobil.

Solidarity of the longest victims of western imperialism with the newest ones is a source of great potential for justice in the world.

But I mentioned the war-oil-genocide problem. What does any of this have to do with genocide? Well, genocide is an act “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group.” Such an act can involve murder or kidnapping or both or neither. Such an act can “physically” harm no one. It can be any one, or more than one, of these five things:

(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Numerous top Canadian officials over the years have stated clearly that the intention of Canada’s child-removal program was to eliminated Indigenous cultures, to utterly remove “the Indian problem.” Proving the crime of genocide does not require the statement of intent, but in this case, as in Nazi Germany, as in today’s Palestine, and as in most if not all cases, there is no shortage of expressions of genocidal intent. Still, what matters legally is genocidal results, and that is what one can expect from stealing people’s land to frack it, to poison it, to render it uninhabitable.

When the treaty to ban genocide was being drafted in 1947, at the same time that Nazis were still being put on trial, and while U.S. government scientists were experimenting on Guatemalans with syphilis, Canadian government “educators” were performing “nutritional experiments” on Indigenous children — that is to say: starving them to death. The original draft of the new law included the crime of cultural genocide. While this was stripped out at the urging of Canada and the United States, it remained in the form of item “e” above. Canada ratified the treaty nonetheless, and despite having threatened to add reservations to its ratification, did no such thing. But Canada enacted into its domestic law only items “a” and “c” — simply omitting “b,” “d,” and “e” in the list above, despite the legal obligation to include them. Even the United States has included what Canada omitted.

Canada should be shut down (as should the United States) until it recognizes that it has a problem and begins to mend its ways. And even if Canada didn’t need to be shut down, CANSEC would need to be shut down.

CANSEC is one of the largest annual weapons shows in North America. Here’s how it describes itself, a list of exhibitors, and a list of the members of the Canadian Association of Defence and Security Industries which hosts CANSEC.

CANSEC facilitates Canada’s role as a major weapons dealer to the world, and the second biggest weapons exporter to the Middle East. So does ignorance. In the late 1980s opposition to a forerunner of CANSEC called ARMX created a great deal of media coverage. The result was a new public awareness, which led to a ban on weapons shows on city property in Ottawa, which lasted 20 years.

The gap left by media silence on Canadian weapons dealing is filled with misleading claims about Canada’s supposed role as a peacekeeper and participant in supposedly humanitarian wars, as well as the non-legal justification for wars known as “the responsibility to protect.”

In reality, Canada is a major marketer and seller of weapons and components of weapons, with two of its top customers being the United States and Saudi Arabia. The United States is the world’s leading marketer and seller of weapons, some of which weapons contain Canadian parts. CANSEC’s exhibitors include weapons companies from Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere.

There is little overlap between the wealthy weapons-dealing nations and the nations where wars are waged. U.S. weapons are often found on both sides of a war, rendering ridiculous any pro-war moral argument for those weapons sales.

CANSEC 2020’s website boasts that 44 local, national, and international media outlets will be attending a massive promotion of weapons of war. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which Canada has been a party since 1976, states that “Any propaganda for war shall be prohibited by law.”

The weapons exhibited at CANSEC are routinely used in violation of laws against war, such as the UN Charter and the Kellogg-Briand Pact — most frequently by Canada’s southern neighbor. CANSEC may also violate the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court by promoting acts of aggression. Here’s a report on Canadian exports to the United States of weapons used in the 2003-begun criminal war on Iraq. Here’s a report on Canada’s own use of weapons in that war.

The weapons exhibited at CANSEC are used not only in violation of laws against war but also in violation of numerous so-called laws of war, that is to say in the commission of particularly egregious atrocities, and in violation of the human rights of the victims of oppressive governments. Canada sells weapons to the brutal governments of Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam.

Canada may be in violation of the Rome Statute as a result of supplying weapons that are used in violation of that Statute. It is certainly in violation of the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty. Canadian weapons are being used in the Saudi-U.S. genocide in Yemen.

In 2015, Pope Francis remarked before a joint session of the United States Congress, “Why are deadly weapons being sold to those who plan to inflict untold suffering on individuals and society? Sadly, the answer, as we all know, is simply for money: money that is drenched in blood, often innocent blood. In the face of this shameful and culpable silence, it is our duty to confront the problem and to stop the arms trade.”

An international coalition of individuals and organizations will be converging on Ottawa in May to say No to CANSEC with a seris of events called NoWar2020.

This month two nations, Iraq and the Philippines, have told the United States military to get out. This happens more often than you might think. These actions are part of the same movement that tells the Canadian militarized police to get out of lands they have no rights in. All actions in this movement can inspire and inform all others.

<p class="postmeta">This article was posted on Friday, February 14th, 2020 at 9:39pm and is filed under <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/anti-war/" rel="category tag">Anti-war</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/turtle-island/canada/" rel="category tag">Canada</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/colonialism/" rel="category tag">Colonialism</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/genocide/" rel="category tag">Genocide</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/energy/oil/" rel="category tag">Oil, Gas, Coal, Pipelines</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/original-peoples/" rel="category tag">Original Peoples</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/resistance/" rel="category tag">Resistance</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/solidarity/" rel="category tag">Solidarity</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/turtle-island/" rel="category tag">Turtle Island</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/militarism/weaponry/" rel="category tag">Weaponry</a>.


]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2020/02/15/shut-down-canada-until-it-solves-its-war-oil-and-genocide-problem/feed/ 0 26464 https://www.radiofree.org/2020/02/13/first-nations-pipeline-protest-14-land-protectors-arrested-as-canadian-police-raid-indigenous-camp/ https://www.radiofree.org/2020/02/13/first-nations-pipeline-protest-14-land-protectors-arrested-as-canadian-police-raid-indigenous-camp/#respond Thu, 13 Feb 2020 14:18:58 +0000 https://www.radiofree.org/2020/02/13/first-nations-pipeline-protest-14-land-protectors-arrested-as-canadian-police-raid-indigenous-camp/ by Democracy Now! / February 13th, 2020

<div class="entry" readability="61.957921854873">

        <iframe title="First Nations Pipeline Protest: 14 Land Protectors Arrested as Canadian Police Raid Indigenous Camp" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/dE6gUXUexRg?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen>[embedded content]</iframe>

In Canada, armed forces raided native Wet’suwet’en territory in British Columbia Monday, with at least 14 arrests being reported. Land defenders faced off with Royal Canadian Mounted Police as the police breached two checkpoints set up to keep pipeline workers out of protected territory. Indigenous leaders are reportedly being blocked from their territory. TransCanada Corporation has been seeking entry into indigenous territory, where they are planning to build the massive $4.7 billion Coastal GasLink pipeline. Land protectors from First Nations clans set up two encampments where they had been physically blocking entry to TransCanada workers.

We speak with In Canada, armed forces raided native Wet’suwet’en territory in British Columbia Monday, with at least 14 arrests being reported. Land defenders faced off with Royal Canadian Mounted Police as the police breached two checkpoints set up to keep pipeline workers out of protected territory. Indigenous leaders are reportedly being blocked from their territory. TransCanada Corporation has been seeking entry into indigenous territory, where they are planning to build the massive $4.7 billion Coastal GasLink pipeline. Land protectors from First Nations clans set up two encampments where they had been physically blocking entry to TransCanada workers.

We speak with Karla Tait, a member of the Unist’ot’en house group of the Gilseyhu Clan. She’s the mental wellness manager for the Northern Region with the First Nations Health Authority, serving the 54 First Nations in Northern British Columbia. Dr. Tait is also the director of clinical programming for the Unist’ot’en Healing Centre. a member of the Unist’ot’en house group of the Gilseyhu Clan. She’s the mental wellness manager for the Northern Region with the First Nations Health Authority, serving the 54 First Nations in Northern British Columbia. Dr. Tait is also the director of clinical programming for the Unist’ot’en Healing Centre.

<p class="postmeta">This article was posted on Thursday, February 13th, 2020 at 6:18am and is filed under <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/colonialism/" rel="category tag">Colonialism</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/original-peoples/" rel="category tag">Original Peoples</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/resistance/" rel="category tag">Resistance</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/video/" rel="category tag">Video</a>.

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]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2020/02/13/first-nations-pipeline-protest-14-land-protectors-arrested-as-canadian-police-raid-indigenous-camp/feed/ 0 24744 https://www.radiofree.org/2020/02/11/outpouring-of-international-solidarity-as-rcmp-arrest-unistoten-matriarchs/ https://www.radiofree.org/2020/02/11/outpouring-of-international-solidarity-as-rcmp-arrest-unistoten-matriarchs/#respond Tue, 11 Feb 2020 14:57:52 +0000 https://www.radiofree.org/2020/02/11/outpouring-of-international-solidarity-as-rcmp-arrest-unistoten-matriarchs/ As of now people in the Healing Center are safe and not being threatened with arrest, and the four brave land defenders from 44 were released today after spending the weekend in jail.

Rail lines continue to be blocked and people have poured into the streets, banks, and Government offices outraged by the RCMP’s arrest of Unist’ot’en Matriarchs and grotesque violation of Wet’suwet’en Law.

Indigenous Youth who have been occupying the ceremonial entrance to the BC Legislature with an encampment since Thursday are calling for people to join them as police action has been threatened in advance of John Horgan’s speech from the throne happening tomorrow!

Freda and Brenda before being arrested yesterday

Police Van Forcibly Removing Freda Huson from her home in Wet’suwet’en Territory. Coastal Gas Link Workers who have built a Man Camp in Unist’ot’en Territory Removed Red Dresses Symbolizing Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women from Unist’ot’en Bridge

Despite over 30 people being arrested at the Port of Vancouver early Monday morning, people returned and shut down the rail line into the port yesterday.

Indigenous Youth are hosting open meetings Wednesday to organize a shut down of all government Ministries in Victoria! This can be replicated elsewhere!

In London, New Zealand, WA DC, Seattle, The Bay and more people are shutting down Canadian Embassies and Consulates: Find one near you here.

Red dresses symbolizing Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women hung at BC Legislature in Victoria after CGL removed Red Dresses from Unist’ot’en Bridge! Join the Encampment!

Numbers at Tyendinaga Mohawk Rail Blockade after they burn Injunction

Bank of Montreal (CGL financier) Office Shut Down by over 500 people yesterday

Rail Line into Port of Vancouver Shut Down yesterday

Action at Canadian Consulate in Seattle: Find a consulate near you here

Round Dance in Intersection in Downtown Winnipeg

“Reconciliation Bridge” in Calgary Shut Down yesterday

Indigenous Youth and Supporters Occupy Carolyn Bennett; Minister of Crown and Indigenous affairs Office.

The ongoing occupation of the BC Capitol

Keep up the Pressure! This fight is just getting rolling!

<div class="author" readability="8.1534090909091">The Unis&rsquo;tot&rsquo;en (C&rsquo;ihlts&rsquo;ehkhyu / Big Frog Clan) are the original Wet&rsquo;suwet&rsquo;en Yintah Wewat Zenli distinct to the lands of the Wet&rsquo;suwet&rsquo;en. Over time in Wet&rsquo;suwet&rsquo;en History, the other clans developed and were included throughout Wet&rsquo;suwet&rsquo;en Territories. <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/author/unistotencamp/">Read other articles by UnistotenCamp</a>, or <a href="https://unistoten.camp/">visit UnistotenCamp's website</a>.</div>

        <p class="postmeta">This article was posted on Tuesday, February 11th, 2020 at 6:57am and is filed under <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/turtle-island/canada/" rel="category tag">Canada</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/colonialism/" rel="category tag">Colonialism</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/original-peoples/" rel="category tag">Original Peoples</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/resistance/" rel="category tag">Resistance</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/solidarity/" rel="category tag">Solidarity</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/turtle-island/" rel="category tag">Turtle Island</a>. </p>

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2020/02/11/outpouring-of-international-solidarity-as-rcmp-arrest-unistoten-matriarchs/feed/ 0 23725 https://www.radiofree.org/2020/02/09/by-what-right-does-canada-and-its-gendarmerie-invade-wetsuweten-territory/ https://www.radiofree.org/2020/02/09/by-what-right-does-canada-and-its-gendarmerie-invade-wetsuweten-territory/#respond Sun, 09 Feb 2020 04:37:48 +0000 https://www.radiofree.org/2020/02/09/by-what-right-does-canada-and-its-gendarmerie-invade-wetsuweten-territory/

Over 20 #Wetsuweten and supporter vehicles have amassed at 27km mark, effectively blockading the exit route to RCMP paddy-wagons leaving the territory. They’re holding a ceremony and ensuring the safety of those arrested.
Reports state Hereditary Cheifs at 27 KM are now being surrounded by RCMP.

In the nineteenth century, Gilbert Sproat, a colonial official, wrote an account of his time among the Nuu Chah Nulth people on the west coast of Vancouver Island. He noted that the original inhabitants have “known every inch of the west coast for thousands of years.”

Despite this acknowledgment of long-term habitation, the mindset of settler-colonialists toward the Original Peoples was condescending. This comes across clearly in a conversation between Sproat and a Tseshaht chief:

Chief: “We see your ships, and hear things that makes our hearts grow faint. They say that more King-George-men will soon be here, and take our land, our firewood, our fishing grounds; that we shall be placed on a little spot, and shall have to do everything according to the fancies of the King-George-men.”

Sproat: “… [I]t is true that more King-George-men (as they call the English) are coming: they will soon be here. But your land will be bought at a fair price.”

Chief: “We do not wish to sell our land nor our water; let your friends stay in their own country.”

Sproat: “My great chief, the high chief of the King-George-men, seeing that you do not work your land, orders that you shall sell it. The land is of no use to you…. The white man will give you work and buy your fish and oil.”

Chief: “Ah, but we don’t care do to as the white men wish.”

Sproat: “Whether or not, … The white men will come. All your people know that they are your superiors…”

Chief: “We do not want the white man. He will steal what we have. We wish to live as we are.”

Sproat was fine by the outcome. He and other settler-colonialists

often talked about our rights as strangers to take possession of the district [of Alberni]. The right of boná fide purchase we had, for I had bought the land from the Government, and had purchased it a second time from the natives. Nevertheless, as the Indians denied all knowledge of the colonial authorities at Victoria, and had sold the country to us, perhaps, under fear of loaded cannon pointed towards the village, it was evident that we had taken forceful possession of the district.

In a paean to white supremacism, Kleecoot, a large lake on Vancouver Island, was renamed in Sproat’s honor.

This colonial past points to widespread racism and an egregious moral mindset of white ancestors. This belongs to the distant past. Or does it?

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose

A 7 February email from the Unist’ot’en Solidarity Brigade headlines with: “RCMP Have raided the Gidemt’en Checkpoint with Helicopters, Snipers, Police Dogs, and Tactical teams.”

The invasion was carried out by heavily armed RCMP despite the Wet’suwet’en having made it clear that they are unarmed and peaceful.

They have also made it clear through the unanimity of the hereditary chiefs that they do not want a Coastal GasLink pipeline going through their unceded territory.

The state and corporate media in Canada do not delve into how it is that Indigenous peoples who have never relinquished their territory or their rights to the territory have, nonetheless, had their territory claimed by settler-colonialists.

If Martians landed on Earth and populated Turtle Island with Martian colonies, and if the Terran resistance succumbed to superior Martian weaponry and epidemics caused by Martian pathogens, would the unsurrendered territories now belong to Martians? What if the Martians had a Doctrine of Discovery that recognized Terrans as uncivilized savages? Morally? One would think not. Legally? Depends on whether Martian law now trumps Terran law.

Why then does the Canadian state and corporate media refer to BC court decisions as requiring the Wet’suwet’en to allow Coastal GasLink to lay a pipeline across their unceded territory? Why is Wet’suwet’en law not primary?

Is this what Canada means by reconciliation? Is this what prime minister Justin Trudeau meant when he said,

It is time for a renewed, nation-to-nation relationship with First Nations peoples, one that understands that the constitutionally guaranteed rights of First Nations in Canada are not an inconvenience but rather a sacred obligation. [emphasis added]

Resistance

Unist’ot’en Solidarity Brigade has issued a call for support: “While the actions of the RCMP have been grotesque and unconscionable the power on the frontlines and in the streets has been beautiful! Keep up the pressure!”

People are holding all three entrances to the Port of Vancouver for the third day in a row

<p class="postmeta">This article was posted on Saturday, February 8th, 2020 at 8:37pm and is filed under <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/turtle-island/canada/" rel="category tag">Canada</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/justice/" rel="category tag">Justice</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/justice/legalconstitutional/" rel="category tag">Legal/Constitutional</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/original-peoples/" rel="category tag">Original Peoples</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/security/police/" rel="category tag">Police</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/resistance/" rel="category tag">Resistance</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/turtle-island/" rel="category tag">Turtle Island</a>. </p>


]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2020/02/09/by-what-right-does-canada-and-its-gendarmerie-invade-wetsuweten-territory/feed/ 0 22902 https://www.radiofree.org/2020/02/07/time-to-rise-up-rcmp-invade-wetsuweten-territories/ https://www.radiofree.org/2020/02/07/time-to-rise-up-rcmp-invade-wetsuweten-territories/#respond Fri, 07 Feb 2020 01:56:57 +0000 https://www.radiofree.org/2020/02/07/time-to-rise-up-rcmp-invade-wetsuweten-territories/ by subMedia / February 6th, 2020

<div class="entry" readability="39.546391752577">

        <iframe title="Time to Rise Up: RCMP Invade Wet'suwet'en Territories" width="500" height="375" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/zDZL-08evGQ?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen>[embedded content]</iframe>

Early in the morning on Feb 6th, the RCMP launched their long anticipated raid on Wet’suwet’en land defenders. Six supporters have been arrested, at the 39 km marker of the Morice West Forest Service Road, and a large contingent of RCMP trucks and heavy equipment have moved onwards towards the Gidimt’en Access point at the 44 km marker. The time has come for supporters to rise up and #ShutDownCanada.

<p class="postmeta">This article was posted on Thursday, February 6th, 2020 at 5:56pm and is filed under <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/turtle-island/canada/" rel="category tag">Canada</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/colonialism/" rel="category tag">Colonialism</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/original-peoples/" rel="category tag">Original Peoples</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/resistance/" rel="category tag">Resistance</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/turtle-island/" rel="category tag">Turtle Island</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/video/" rel="category tag">Video</a>.

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]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2020/02/07/time-to-rise-up-rcmp-invade-wetsuweten-territories/feed/ 0 22099 https://www.radiofree.org/2020/02/05/unistoten-day-31-were-not-leaving/ https://www.radiofree.org/2020/02/05/unistoten-day-31-were-not-leaving/#respond Wed, 05 Feb 2020 01:27:45 +0000 https://www.radiofree.org/2020/02/05/unistoten-day-31-were-not-leaving/ by UnistotenCamp / February 4th, 2020

<div class="entry" readability="55.945499587118">

        <iframe title="Unist'ot'en Day 31 Update: We're not leaving." width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/I4U8NCzOkdA?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen>[embedded content]</iframe>

We’re not leaving.

As Canada prepares to violently invade our lands, we have no fear. We are peacefully living on our lands and upholding our laws, as we always have.

31 days after Coastal Gaslink was evicted from Wet’suwet’en territory, RCMP helicopters circle the Unist’ot’en healing center several times a day.

Busloads of police have taken over local community halls, airport hangers have become RCMP training grounds, while armored pickup trucks and police dogs have been spotted in the area. Canada is preparing to use militarized force to steal our lands and destroy them, with the world as witness.

Our ancestors are with us. We will win.

These lands will always be Unist’ot’en.

The Unis’tot’en (C’ihlts’ehkhyu / Big Frog Clan) are the original Wet’suwet’en Yintah Wewat Zenli distinct to the lands of the Wet’suwet’en. Over time in Wet’suwet’en History, the other clans developed and were included throughout Wet’suwet’en Territories. Read other articles by UnistotenCamp, or visit UnistotenCamp’s website.

<p class="postmeta">This article was posted on Tuesday, February 4th, 2020 at 5:27pm and is filed under <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/turtle-island/canada/" rel="category tag">Canada</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/colonialism/" rel="category tag">Colonialism</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/original-peoples/" rel="category tag">Original Peoples</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/security/police/" rel="category tag">Police</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/resistance/" rel="category tag">Resistance</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/turtle-island/" rel="category tag">Turtle Island</a>.

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]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2020/02/05/unistoten-day-31-were-not-leaving/feed/ 0 21043 https://www.radiofree.org/2020/02/02/rcmp-harassment-at-39km-gidimten-checkpoint/ https://www.radiofree.org/2020/02/02/rcmp-harassment-at-39km-gidimten-checkpoint/#respond Sun, 02 Feb 2020 05:08:28 +0000 https://www.radiofree.org/2020/02/02/rcmp-harassment-at-39km-gidimten-checkpoint/ by UnistotenCamp / February 1st, 2020

<div class="entry" readability="45.140688259109">

        January 30, RCMP attempted to enter the Gidimt’en supply and monitoring post, attempting to walk in to our camp which is outside of the injunction area. Police have undertaken a daily harassment and surveillance campaign against our supporters, and have even threatened to arrest those monitoring the road. While RCMP have publicly stated they will stand down for 7 days while our Chiefs speak with the Province of British Columbia, they continue to harass and threaten us daily.

The Unis’tot’en (C’ihlts’ehkhyu / Big Frog Clan) are the original Wet’suwet’en Yintah Wewat Zenli distinct to the lands of the Wet’suwet’en. Over time in Wet’suwet’en History, the other clans developed and were included throughout Wet’suwet’en Territories. Read other articles by UnistotenCamp, or visit UnistotenCamp’s website.

<p class="postmeta">This article was posted on Saturday, February 1st, 2020 at 9:08pm and is filed under <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/turtle-island/canada/" rel="category tag">Canada</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/colonialism/" rel="category tag">Colonialism</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/original-peoples/" rel="category tag">Original Peoples</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/security/police/" rel="category tag">Police</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/turtle-island/" rel="category tag">Turtle Island</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/video/" rel="category tag">Video</a>.

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]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2020/02/02/rcmp-harassment-at-39km-gidimten-checkpoint/feed/ 0 19811 https://www.radiofree.org/2020/01/16/rcmp-are-now-blocking-access-to-wetsuweten-territory/ https://www.radiofree.org/2020/01/16/rcmp-are-now-blocking-access-to-wetsuweten-territory/#respond Thu, 16 Jan 2020 02:42:29 +0000 https://www.radiofree.org/2020/01/16/rcmp-are-now-blocking-access-to-wetsuweten-territory/ by UnistotenCamp / January 15th, 2020

        <div class="entry" readability="56.422995031938">

            RCMP are now blocking access to Wet&rsquo;suwet&rsquo;en territory, and only allowing hereditary chiefs that THEY approve to enter our own unceded lands. Our Wet&rsquo;suwet&rsquo;en people and family members are being blocked off the territory, while RCMP say that they are in a position to decide who is and who isn&rsquo;t a chief.

Police have blocked media and supplies out, and they are enforcing a modern day pass system — forcing people to identify themselves in order to come and go from our own unceded lands.

Wet’suwet’en lands are unceded, untreatied, and unsurrendered. We maintain full jurisdiction, and the right to decide what happens on our lands. Our chiefs have unanimously asked RCMP to pack up and leave their remote detachment, but instead RCMP are increasing their presence — in anticipation of using violence against our people to force their way onto our lands.

Call to action: https://www.yintahaccess.com/

The Unis’tot’en (C’ihlts’ehkhyu / Big Frog Clan) are the original Wet’suwet’en Yintah Wewat Zenli distinct to the lands of the Wet’suwet’en. Over time in Wet’suwet’en History, the other clans developed and were included throughout Wet’suwet’en Territories. Read other articles by UnistotenCamp, or visit UnistotenCamp’s website.

            <p class="postmeta">This article was posted on Wednesday, January 15th, 2020 at 6:42pm and is filed under <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/colonialism/" rel="category tag">Colonialism</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/original-peoples/" rel="category tag">Original Peoples</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/security/police/" rel="category tag">Police</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/resistance/" rel="category tag">Resistance</a>. 


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]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2020/01/16/rcmp-are-now-blocking-access-to-wetsuweten-territory/feed/ 0 12516 https://www.radiofree.org/2020/01/14/wetsuweten-hereditary-chiefs-grant-cgl-one-time-access-to-shut-down-man-camp/ https://www.radiofree.org/2020/01/14/wetsuweten-hereditary-chiefs-grant-cgl-one-time-access-to-shut-down-man-camp/#respond Tue, 14 Jan 2020 01:09:02 +0000 https://www.radiofree.org/2020/01/14/wetsuweten-hereditary-chiefs-grant-cgl-one-time-access-to-shut-down-man-camp/ by UnistotenCamp / January 13th, 2020

Under the supervision of Lihkt’samisyu Chief Dsta’hyl, and following the eviction of Coastal Gaslink from unceded Wet’suwet’en territory, Wet’suwet’en Hereditary Chiefs granted Coastal Gaslink one-time access to Dark House yintah to winterize Site 9A. The Eviction Order we signed as Dinï ze’ and Ts’akë ze’ of these territories remains in effect, and Coastal Gaslink (CGL) will not be authorized to build the pipeline on unceded Wet’suwet’en territory.

This limited access was offered in good faith as a demonstration of wiggus or respect by us as Dinï ze’ and Ts’akë ze’ in our dealings with CGL, despite the lack of consent for CGL’s property and pre-construction activities on our unceded territory.

We remain steadfast in our position that no pipeline will be built on unceded Wet’suwet’en territory. As Hereditary Chiefs, we will continue to uphold Wet’suwet’en law on these lands and ensure that our eviction order stands.

The Unis’tot’en (C’ihlts’ehkhyu / Big Frog Clan) are the original Wet’suwet’en Yintah Wewat Zenli distinct to the lands of the Wet’suwet’en. Over time in Wet’suwet’en History, the other clans developed and were included throughout Wet’suwet’en Territories. Read other articles by UnistotenCamp, or visit UnistotenCamp’s website.

This article was posted on Monday, January 13th, 2020 at 5:09pm and is filed under Colonialism, Oil, Gas, Coal, Pipelines, Original Peoples, Resistance, Solidarity, Turtle Island, Video.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2020/01/14/wetsuweten-hereditary-chiefs-grant-cgl-one-time-access-to-shut-down-man-camp/feed/ 0 11314 https://www.radiofree.org/2020/01/13/outrage-as-controversial-indian-mining-company-opens-tribal-school/ https://www.radiofree.org/2020/01/13/outrage-as-controversial-indian-mining-company-opens-tribal-school/#respond Mon, 13 Jan 2020 14:23:42 +0000 https://www.radiofree.org/2020/01/13/outrage-as-controversial-indian-mining-company-opens-tribal-school/ A controversial Indian mining company whose operations threaten lands, forests and sacred sites vital to thousands of tribal families has opened a residential school for tribal children in Odisha, India in an effort to “transform” them.

Adani, a $13billion corporation, is embroiled in controversy in India and Australia. In India its coal mines threaten the forests and livelihoods of thousands of Gond, Santhal and Munda tribespeople.

Its new school for tribal children is a partnership with KISS (the Kalinga Institute for Social Sciences), whose existing school for 27,000 tribal children in Odisha is the largest tribal residential school in the world. KISS boasts that the institution turns “tax consumers into tax payers, liabilities into assets.”

Survival International has recently launched a campaign against these kinds of “Factory Schools,” which practice systematic cultural erasure masquerading as education, and which teach tribal children to feel ashamed of who they are and where they come from.

In a statement to mark the opening of the new school, Dr. Priti Adani, wife of Adani’s founder Gautam Adani, spoke of the need for “social transformation” of tribal children.

Tribal rights activist Soni Sori © Survival

The Indian tribal rights activist Soni Sori says: “We resist this kind of education, whoever it comes from – Adani or anyone. They give their kind of education because they want our children to hate jungles. They want our children to hate their own culture. They want to create distance between children and parents.”

Survival International’s Dr. Jo Woodman said today: “The agenda behind this school is clear: Adani wants tribal lands, and tribal resistance is a major thorn in their sides. This school is a brazen and shameless attempt to ‘reprogram’ a generation of tribal children to see mining as ‘good’ and their spiritual and cultural connections to their land as ‘bad’ or ‘backwards.’ For KISS to partner so closely with a company so notorious on issues of indigenous rights in both India and Australia shows their true colors.”

This article was posted on Monday, January 13th, 2020 at 6:23am and is filed under Education, India, Mining, Narrative, Original Peoples, Propaganda.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2020/01/13/outrage-as-controversial-indian-mining-company-opens-tribal-school/feed/ 0 11007 https://www.radiofree.org/2020/01/12/is-the-us-a-civilized-nation/ https://www.radiofree.org/2020/01/12/is-the-us-a-civilized-nation/#respond Sun, 12 Jan 2020 18:10:07 +0000 https://www.radiofree.org/2020/01/12/is-the-us-a-civilized-nation/ The title of this piece may seem stupid to many. They would respond that obviously the US is civilized. After all, we have a highly developed society and culture which is a definition of civilized. In addition, as a sign of our culture, they proudly point to our museums, theaters, and symphonies that, along with our colleges and universities, are among the best in the world.

Adjectives found in other definitions of civilized are humane, ethical and reasonable. Antonyms include barbaric, savage, and inhumane. Many of us would likely agree with the following sentence:

A civilized society or country has a well developed system of government, culture, and way of life and that treats the people who live there fairly.

Definitions or use of civilized thus allow room for interpretations. For example, I would certainly agree that the US has a highly developed society and culture. However, our highly developed system of government has been badly corrupted to benefit the wealthy and powerful. As a result of this corruption, our government and economic system unethically prioritize profit for the few over the interests of the many. Hence I would argue that having a highly developed society and culture does not necessarily imply fairness, and thus it isn’t necessarily evidence that the US is civilized. In addition, unlike much of Western Europe, the US has not implemented many of the human rights identified in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

For more evidence of our inhumane behavior, would a civilized society accept or allow:

• the genocide of American Indians or slavery;
• a large number of people, including families with children, to be homeless;
• a judicial system that is terribly biased against minorities and the poor;
• education to be so expensive that many students will be encumbered with huge debts often requiring decades to pay off;
• health insurance and pharmaceutical industries to make the cost of health care so expensive that many people cannot afford it;
• some employers to pay workers less than what is necessary to provide the basics for their families;
• some citizens being kept from voting based on their race;
• the horrific abuse of refugees and immigrants;
• industry to pollute the air, water and soil, threatening the health of people living nearby; and
• the future of coming generations to be seriously harmed through our government’s inaction or our continuing a lifestyle that leads to a climate catastrophe?

When Europeans came to the American continents, they viewed the indigenous people as being savages. However, consider the following prophecy:

Only after the last tree has been cut down, Only after the last river has been poisoned, Only after the last fish has been caught, Only then will you find money cannot be eaten.

— Cree Prophecy

The indigenous peoples understood that environmental protection was essential, that the lust for money was extremely dangerous, and that we had to consider how our actions would impact the future. We are finally beginning to appreciate these facts as the climate catastrophe becomes more obvious to all.

In addition, the immoral war crimes we have committed against other nations, including the indigenous nations, displays a shameful level of savagery and barbarism. For example, according to J. Robert Oppenheimer (father of the atomic bomb), Secretary of War Henry Stimson struggled with the moral issues raised by WWII and expressed dismay at the “appalling” lack of conscience and compassion ushered in by the war. Stimson stated that he was disturbed by the “complacency, the indifference, and the silence with which we greeted the mass bombings in Europe, and, above all, Japan.”

Army General Omar Bradley, the first chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, reiterated this point:

Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living.¹

Admiral Leahy, Chief of Staff to presidents Roosevelt and Truman, criticized the use of the atomic bomb:

It is my opinion that the use of the barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender. … My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.²

Unfortunately, we have continued with these savage and barbaric policies in, for example, Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq. We have also imposed sanctions on a number of nations such as North Korea, Venezuela and Iran that don’t comply with our policies, and these cruel and brutal sanctions are crimes against humanity. This unnecessary and illegal killing by the US of untold numbers while devastating countries and populations that were not a threat to it were hardly acts of a civilized nation.

1. Speech to Boston Chamber of Commerce, 1948. [↩]
2. I was there:  The Personal Story of the Chief of Staff to Presidents Roosevelt and Truman Based on His Notes and Diaries Made at the Time, McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc ., 1950. [↩]

Ron Forthofer is a retired professor of biostatistics from the University of Texas School of Public Health in Houston and was a Green Party candidate for Congress and also for governor of Colorado. Read other articles by Ron.

This article was posted on Sunday, January 12th, 2020 at 10:10am and is filed under Crimes against Humanity, Hiroshima, Japan, Nagasaki, Original Peoples, United States, War Crimes.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2020/01/12/is-the-us-a-civilized-nation/feed/ 0 10180 https://www.radiofree.org/2020/01/05/coastal-gaslink-evicted-from-unistoten-territory/ https://www.radiofree.org/2020/01/05/coastal-gaslink-evicted-from-unistoten-territory/#respond Sun, 05 Jan 2020 15:20:21 +0000 https://www.radiofree.org/2020/01/05/coastal-gaslink-evicted-from-unistoten-territory/ by UnistotenCamp / January 5th, 2020

        <div class="entry">

            All Coastal Gaslink workers have now been peacefully evicted from Unist&rsquo;ot&rsquo;en and Gidimt&rsquo;en territories.

Under the authority of Anuk nu’at’en (Wet’suwet’en law), and with support of the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs of all five clans, the Wet’suwet’en are standing up for the last of our lands and we need you to stand with us.

We will honour the instructions of our ancestors, and continue to protect our lands from trespassers.

[embedded content]

See also “Canada’s Respect for the Rule of Law and Its Sacred Obligation to First Nations.”

The Unis’tot’en (C’ihlts’ehkhyu / Big Frog Clan) are the original Wet’suwet’en Yintah Wewat Zenli distinct to the lands of the Wet’suwet’en. Over time in Wet’suwet’en History, the other clans developed and were included throughout Wet’suwet’en Territories. Read other articles by UnistotenCamp, or visit UnistotenCamp’s website.

            <p class="postmeta">This article was posted on Sunday, January 5th, 2020 at 8:20am and is filed under <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/turtle-island/canada/" rel="category tag">Canada</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/colonialism/" rel="category tag">Colonialism</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/justice/" rel="category tag">Justice</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/original-peoples/" rel="category tag">Original Peoples</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/resistance/" rel="category tag">Resistance</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/video/" rel="category tag">Video</a>. </p>


        </div>

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2020/01/05/coastal-gaslink-evicted-from-unistoten-territory/feed/ 0 6361 https://www.radiofree.org/2019/12/24/conciliation-requires-more-than-truth/ https://www.radiofree.org/2019/12/24/conciliation-requires-more-than-truth/#respond Tue, 24 Dec 2019 23:02:48 +0000 https://www.radiofree.org/2019/12/24/conciliation-requires-more-than-truth/ “You cannot discover lands already inhabited,” is a maxim that permeates the excellent book, Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery (InterVarsity Press, 2019), by Mark Charles and Soong-Chan Rah. It is a blatantly obvious statement of fact that eludes or has eluded so many people who accept Christopher Columbus as the discoverer of the New World.

Unsettling Truths is a profound work that delves into why American society is what it is, why the United States is the country it is, and why this is so detrimental for so many people in America, especially people of color. The church and its sinful theological interpretations of Scripture formulated the mindset that permitted racism, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and the arrogance of supremacism that undergird the USA.

The diseased social imagination of the United States has been shaped by the dysfunctional theological imagination of the western world known as the Doctrine of Discovery, which has resulted in the formation of the dysfunctional social systems of the United States. (p 29)

American supremacism is the mindset that permits nuclear weapons for itself and denies the same for others. (p 36)

The authors argue that the church should be in opposition to empire, instead the church finds itself allied with a brutal empire. (p 58) “Christendom is the prostitution of the church to the empire that created a church culture of seeking power rather than relationships.” (p 66)

Charles and Rah lay out the history of the Doctrine of Discovery which has its origin in the racist Papal Bull of 1452 Dum Diversas issued by pope Nicholas V. It distinguished between Christian Europeans and the others who could be subdued, dispossessed, and enslaved. The slaves could even be tithed to the church. “So, the slave trade becomes an act of worship in the diseased imagination of the European explorers engaged in it.” (p 18) It was the Doctrine of Discovery granted theological license for European supremacism.

Pope Alexander VI’s Inter Caetera (1493) “offered a spiritual validation for European conquest.” (p 19)

This white male supremacism has been embedded in the Declaration of Independence (p 83-84) and the US Constitution (p 90-94).

Thus the Supreme Court in the US has leaned on the Doctrine of Discovery to support the superiority of white Europeans and their right to dispossess the Original Peoples and to slaughter them. (p 104-116)

The authors challenge many concepts and phrasings. For example, “Whiteness is not a privilege nor a blessing to be shared, it is a diseased social construct that needs to be confronted.” (p 124) Or, “What most Americans miss regarding immigration reform is that without Natives at the table, the United States of America is incapable of comprehensively or justly reforming immigration law.” (p 130)

Star Trek‘s mythologizing of Abraham Lincoln: Captain Kirk’s hero in his spacechair

In particular, Charles and Rah call into question the greatness and morality of the lionized American president Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln, they write, was insouciant toward the plight of slaves, blacks, Indigenous peoples, and the Other. The authors reveal that Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was crafted in such a way that many areas and counties throughout the Confederate states were exempted from it, and freeing slaves went unmentioned for Union states where slavery was legal. (p 144) Lincoln’s Thirteenth Amendment is deemed an exchange of jurisdictions; chattel slavery would henceforth be administered by law enforcement. (p 145-146)
“Lincoln’s policies prioritized the flourishing of white landowners while disregarding the value of Native lives.” (p 148) Lincoln presided over the largest mass lynching in US history, the nullification of treaties with Indigenous nations, ethnic cleansing, scalpings, and genocide. (p 148-163)

The Doctrine of Discovery induced various traumas that have impacted the lives of many people across generations, including even in the white population. The authors argue that this latter unintended outcome has wound up affirming the agency and humanity of people of color.

Unsettling Truths is not preachy; it examine scriptures in the bible, but in bits and bites as a necessity. Neither is Unsettling Truths a religious book. As a skeptic who demands evidence, and places greater emphasis for evidence of extraordinary claims, what guided me through the book’s gripping 206 pages was the morality and logic applied to humans and their institutions.

The authors are highly critical of the church: “The American church has yielded the prophetic voice because it has not spoken a historical and theological truth.” (p 9)

Today’s church, however, has no meaningful theological plan to deal with the Doctrine of Discovery:

… a group of clergy might gather to stand and read repudiations of the Doctrine of Discovery; but no land will be returned, no reparations will be paid, and no systemic changes will be made….

Repentance is not just sorrow and confession, it is the turning around of wrong behavior toward right and just action. (p 186)

Near the end of Unsettling Truths, I was surprised to be apprised that president Barack Obama had signed an apology (House Resolution 3326) to the Indigenous peoples. (p 190-192) However, it is buried within a Department of Defense appropriations bill. Furthermore, it comes with a disclaimer that it is legally non-binding. In other words, an apology composed of empty words.

Unlike Obama’s meaningless apology that is devoid of contrition, the text of Unsettling Truths speaks to a way forward. The authors shine a powerful moral light, a light that would lead a remorseful church out of its darkness.

But the authors warn, “Conciliation, does not happen without truth telling.” (p 11) And, of course, that truth telling must be backed with meaningful, affirmative action.

Unsettling Truths makes a great Xmas stocking stuffer. It also makes great post-Xmas reading for curious people and for people interested in attaining a better and just world.

            <div class="author">Kim Petersen is a former co-editor of the <em>Dissident Voice</em> newsletter. He can be reached at: <a href="mailto:kimohp@gmail.com">kimohp@gmail.com</a>. Twitter: <a href="https://twitter.com/kimohpetersen">@kimpetersen</a>. <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/author/kimpetersen/">Read other articles by Kim</a>.</div>

            <p class="postmeta">This article was posted on Tuesday, December 24th, 2019 at 3:02pm and is filed under <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/book-reviews/" rel="category tag">Book Review</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/genocide/" rel="category tag">Genocide</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/original-peoples/" rel="category tag">Original Peoples</a>, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/category/turtle-island/" rel="category tag">Turtle Island</a>. 

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