The books focus on the malign role played in that history by organized crime, rogue elements of the CIA, and (above all) J. Edgar Hoover, who is the central character of the trilogy. 

All three novels explore vicious American racism—Mafia chieftains and J. Edgar Hoover being among the most vicious racists. All three novels indicate that American involvement in undeveloped countries (Cuba in the first book, Vietnam in the second, and Haiti and the Dominican Republic in the third) consists largely of support for Third World dictators who brutalize and oppress their impoverished subjects. Ellroy does not romanticize communism, but all of the books’ anti-communists are either far-right fanatics or greedy businessmen. Admirable, principled opponents of Communism on moral grounds are nowhere to be found.

Finally, the books embrace conspiracy theorizing in a big way. American Tabloid culminates in the assassination of JFK—murdered at the behest of organized crime, which was angered by Castro’s expropriation of its Cuban casinos (and then by Kennedy’s unwillingness to continue to try to oust Castro after the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion), and by Robert Kennedy’s crusade against organized crime. (The assassination is given tacit permission by J. Edgar Hoover, who refers to it obliquely as a measure “of great boldness.” Lee Harvey Oswald was a fall guy; the real assassin, we learn in the next volume, was a rightwing French extremist.)

Mutatis mutandis, the next volume, The Cold Six Thousand, tells a similar story. This book culminates with the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. Both of these assassinations again receive tacit permission from Hoover: King’s assassination is an offshoot of an FBI campaign (orchestrated by Hoover) to discredit the civil rights leader; Mafia leaders are responsible for the RFK—as for the JFK—hit, because they know of (and fear) his intention to fight organized crime if he is elected president in 1968. (James Earl Ray and Sirhan Sirhan are, like Oswald, patsies, made use of by the actual assassins to obscure their own guilt.)...

America itself as an entity was founded on a bedrock of racism, slavery, land-grabs, and the slaughter of the indigenous people.

I've read a bunch of James Ellroy's novels, including the L.A. quartet, American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand and a couple of others. I find his writing to be extremely intelligent, densely plotted, and remarkably thought provoking. I think that American Tabloid is the best novel I have ever read about the JFK assassination.

However, one thing disturbs me about his work, and that is the rampant racism of most of his characters, even his ostensible protagonists. Now I understand that he is depicting the thought processes of specific characters set during a specific era (usually cops in the 1950's) and I don't confuse the attitudes of a character with the attitude of the author, but I have also noticed that Ellroy never seems to depict any black character who is not a pimp, a drug addict, a rapist or a murderer. Granted, he is portraying seedy underworlds, but wouldn't at least ONE good black person pop up once in a while, even in this milieu. 

The same goes for homosexuals in his novels. They are routinely sneered at by his protagonists and are often portrayed as amoral.

Ellroy has professed a love of racist language, and in (a) video of a pre-election lunch with Rose McGowan and Bruce Wagner, the crime novelist says that Obama "looks like a lemur."

That says to me, at least that Ellroy's actual views on race deserve as much attention as his fictional depictions of race.

Now let me tell you who I can’t stand, and to top the list I would put that neo-Nazi in American writing who is James Ellroy… And to begin with he’s not a good writer. He’s a kind of methamphetamine caricature of Raymond Chandler… Each of his books is practically a Mein Kampf, it’s anti-communistic, it’s anti-Mexican, and it’s racist.

RH: When I read critics of your work, they often react: "Oh my god, he's writing these horrible homophobic, racist, misogynist, psychopathic books." And I'm thinking: "No, he's not writing from his perspective. He's getting into the heads of these ugly characters." You're not endorsing their world by any means.

JE: I think I know what's behind this, especially some of the views expressed by Mike Davis. These are fully rounded characters, and the racism and homophobia are casual attriubutes, not defining characteristics. These are not lynchers or gaybashers, toadies of the corrupt system. When you have characters that the reader empathizes with, who are carrying the story, saying "nigger" and "faggot" and "spic", it puts people off. Which is fine. I would like to provoke ambiguous responses in my readers. That's what I want. There's part of me that would really like to be one of Dudley Smith's goons and go back and beat up some jazz musicians, and there's part of me that's just appalled.

Interviewer: Would you say that current, or moderately current LAPD scandals like Rodney King or O.J. Simpson are more beyond the pale compared to the good work the LAPD does in the majority?

Ellroy: Well a couple of things. First of all, I wouldn’t call O.J. Simpson a scandal, it’s just, it’s not even a botched murder case—it’s a bad acquittal. And the second thing, Rampart wasn’t much of a scandal when truly dissected. Same thing with Rodney King if you see the entire three-minute tape. The fifty-six hammer blows that put Rodney on the ground, and the contact slash don’t look good, but moment to moment the entire three minute tape leads me to say, and I realize this is revolutionary, I don’t think they did anything wrong. There’s a moment when one of the policeman, and it might have been interestingly enough a man named Powell, kicked Rodney King in the head, which was the only out-of-line and out of policy thing that they did. Yeah he attacked Stacy Koon. The other people in the car were led to safety. He kept attacking: he took a taser, he kept getting up, getting up, getting up. He’s six foot five, two hundred and fifty pounds, and on angeldust, and you don’t engage people like that in one-on-one fights. And I think it was an aesthetic call that people made: they could either see this in the context of white racism and police corruption or overall police misconduct, or they could see it in a more localized context, which in this case, I think, is also a more broader context—that these are the exigent factors of police work, ad hoc, day to day. And you can’t let angeldust-addled shitbergs drive around at one hundred and ten miles an hour on the freeway, where they will kill people: interdict and suppress them. It doesn’t look good, the footage a million people have seen, many millions of people have seen. In a larger context, it reveals itself to be something entirely different, and so pointing to these things, and Rampart’s a crock of shit, and accepting them as historical fact is very dangerous and specious. And so what I’m morally obligated to do with interviewers is try to give them a different view of these speciously alleged facts.

 I believe it is stupid. I think the movie Panther is a joke. They were a bunch of dope-dealing idiot thugs, the Panthers themselves. And the cops were the relative good guys in that whole operation.

RB: Read a lot?

JE: No. I think a lot. I listen to classical music. I exercise. I watch boxing on TV and go to the fights occasionally. The only television show I watch is “The O’Reilly Factor.” I like O’Reilly. I profiled him for GQ.

RB: What do you think about his political ambitions?

JE: Let me put it this way. If Bill O’Reilly ever decides to run for office, I will reach into my checkbook make the maximum allowable individual campaign contribution and assist him in his quest for public office to the limits of my ability. He is not a Republican and is no where near as right-wing as most people think he is. He shares my hatred and moral concerns about the death penalty among other things. And he is a pro-environment guy.

...the prices of alcohol, soap, buckets, disinfectants such as chlorine, face mask latex glove among others have skyrocketed in recent time since it was announced that they play a greater role in combating the spread of Ebola.

Some unscrupulous business houses are also selling detergent soaps and other materials that are capable of combating the spread of the deadly Ebola virus are sold at higher prices sometimes twice the amount they were originally sold for prior to the outbreak of the Ebola virus.  (EDITORIAL NOTE: AS A FRIEND JUST COMMENTED TO ME AFTER READING THIS, " I know of no upscale across-the-counter soap/detergent that will stop the spread of Ebola better than others.  This is high octane Snake Oil. " He is, of course, correct.)

From supermarket to another, prices of these commodities have been increased on ground that more people are buying them in a bid to stop the spread of Ebola.

Latex Gloves were seen being sold at every street corner of Monrovia for the third day running and a consumer noted that the price of gloves continue to increase by the days.

It was expected that the operations centre was in full swing on a 24 hour basis. "We need quick response and decision making to speed up the process in redesigning our strategy to fight this deadly disease," President Koroma said, and urged WHO to ensure the EOC is fully operational.

President Koroma also assigned Ambassador Professor Monty Jones to monitor the operations of the EOC at all times to ensure it's up and running on a 24 hour basis. He vowed to be visiting the centre without notice.

The United States, according to the CDC, has sent a seven-person team to help in Guinea, and provided protective clothing and equipment for healthcare workers in all three countries. In the grand scheme of things, that is a minimal amount of aid – echoed by the minimal coverage the outbreak has garnered in U.S. media. (Far more attention was afforded GOP Congressman Phil Gingrey’s outlandish and factually implausible comments about refugee children crossing the border bringing Ebola into the United States from Central America.)

There is more than one way to interpret America’s disinterest. One is racism — the sense that the people dying of Ebola are so different from “us” that we really can’t identify with them. Another is compassion fatigue. Isn’t there always some horrible disease afflicting Africa and Africans?

Indeed, many of the English-language articles that have been written about the Ebola outbreak focus on “ignorant” and “superstitious” Africans who give more credence to witchcraft than to modern medicine.

This analysis, picked up by several news outlets, simultaneously reveals the kind of xenophobic Western mindset that victims of the Ebola outbreak distrust, and hints at why Western readers do not seem all that interested in learning about or from the outbreak.

From my perch as a medical sociologist, the claim that mobs attacking treatment centers are panicking reveals “troubling truths“ regarding the Western track record of medical experiments and geopolitical ambitions in Africa. Distrust of Western medicine may have less to do with superstition than with history: forced sterilizations in Peru; the intentional infection of Guatemalans with gonorrhea and syphilis; marketing campaigns urging mothers in countries lacking safe water supplies to replace breastfeeding with infant formula so that women could work in western-owned factories; the sale in Africa of pharmaceuticals that passed their expiration date for sale in the West; the harvesting of organs in India for transplants to wealthy foreigners.

In sub-Saharan Africa, outbreaks of new diseases such as Ebola (first identified in 1976) echo the spread of industrialization, urbanization, unprecedented militarization (funded by western countries), deforestation and the destruction of eco-systems that have forced communities to expand their search for food into territories that traditionally were not used for that purpose. In reports in the English-language press, however, there is little consideration of the political and economic structural forces that gave rise to the emergence and spread of Ebola. Rather, as Jared Jones writes, “African ‘Otherness’ overpowers the possibility of a non-cultural causality in the dominant discourse, and other factors are left unexamined as potentially causal or exacerbating.” Attention to sorcery rather than the inequalities of globalization obscures the fact that the biggest leaps in life expectancy in the U.S. and Europe came about because of massive government-funded public health measures — sewage systems and clean water supplies – not because we gave up our religious beliefs.

The articles I read in the English-language press decry the absence of functioning healthcare infrastructures in the African nations hit by the Ebola virus. But I am not convinced that the United States would do much better. There are a great many things that western medical institutions and personnel do extraordinarily well. We have sophisticated surgical technology and an advanced pharmacopeia of medicines to treat hundreds of diseases. But the bulk of our medical resources go towards curing rather than prevention. What we do dedicate to prevention tends to be limited to proximate factors such as germs and personal behaviors such as smoking that make individuals sick. We also divert resources into campaigns for procedures such as mammograms which detect but do not prevent disease. We pay less attention to poverty, inequality, environmental degradation and, yes, globalization, as root causes of sickness.

Perhaps it is not surprising that the United States has contributed so minimally to managing the Ebola outbreak. Effective public health endeavors need organized and sustainable systems for preventing the spread of disease. And, as I have argued before, the United States does not have a healthcare system. “System” denotes an overarching set of principles, practices, procedures and organizational structures, whereas our U.S. healthcare landscape is a decentralized and incoherent hodgepodge of financing and delivery mechanisms lacking rational methods for setting priorities.

Services and regulations, as well as thresholds for Medicaid eligibility, vary enormously from state to state. Municipal, county and state health departments rarely have mechanisms to keep track of patients who move to another jurisdiction. Hospitals around the country and even within one city or state use incompatible medical records. (Even the federal government’s Veterans Affairs and Department of Defense records are mutually inaccessible.) We have for-profit and not-for-profit hospitals. (And it’s often difficult to tell which is which.) Though many of us believe that emergency rooms serve as a safety net,federal law only requires emergency rooms to assess and stabilize patients (and they are allowed to charge a whole lot to do so), not to cure them. Walk-in clinics are proliferating in Wal-Mart and CVS branches. Hundreds of for-profit and not-for-profit insurance companies compete for “good” (that is, well-paying and relatively healthy) patients and customers. Behavioral and oral healthcare are almost never integrated with the rest of healthcare. And the Affordable Care Act — touting that “consumers” can “choose” the insurance plans that “best fit their needs” — is not designed to turn this chaos into any sort of longterm sustainable system.

We need to learn about public health emergencies around the world not only because they might become our emergencies, but also because those emergencies could be better contained and managed if we were to invest our expertise, our attention and our resources into community, national and international health preservation. For a fraction of the money that Western countries have poured into military campaigns in Africa, it would have been possible to support local governments in building functioning public health infrastructures. But let’s also not forget that despite spending more on healthcare per person than any other country in the world, here in the U.S. we are dead last among developed countries in health and life-expectancy, according to a recent study of 11 nations by the Commonwealth Fund. Ignoring the reality that the health of each of us is inexorably intertwined with the health of others is a collective disaster-in-the-making.

From Prisoner Letters

When compiling a prisoner letter writing list of bios and addresses, I came across the name “Jerome White-Bey” and couldn’t find any information about him aside from his name, prison # and address, and a one sentence mention of him founding the Missouri Prison Labor Union. After exchanging a few letters, he agreed to an interview with me with the intention of it being published, and the link below is where that interview can be located. This site was also made with the intention of publishing other interviews of those currently and previously incarcerated whose cases I feel are underrepresented in the US anarchist movement.

Jerome White-Bey 2014 (Missouri Prison Labor Union)

(A): I’m glad you said you’d be interested in doing an interview. I guess, let’s start with background: How old are you, what was growing up like, how long have you been incarcerated, and what did you get convicted of?

Jerome: Well, I am 58 years old. I was born in St. Louis MO. Growing up for me was like a two fold measure for the family support was always present. I was raise up by my Mother and Grandmother. They was of the working class, I never went to bed hunger, or without clothes or shoes, I was the oldest out of 6 siblings and the only one who been in and out of prison. I was always in trouble with the law, I have always rebel against authority. At a very young age of 17 years old I was introduce to true revolutionary ideas of George Jackson “Prison Letters”, I fall in love! I have been in prison for 36 ½ years, and was convicted for 32 armed robberies and a second degree murder case on a government agent.

(A): I understand that you are an anarchist who was involved in establishing the Missouri Prison Labor Union. How did you come to radical/ revolutionary politics?

Jerome: As as prisoner, I also was a jailhouse lawyer. I always felt that as prisoners we need to have some form of protection against the powers that be, we are force into free slave labor and if we don’t work in prison we are punish by being thrown in the hole and in some cases even beaten. I believe that a prisoner’s labor union is the one thing that will bring all of us together throughout the whole country. Can you picture such a force fighting on the inside of prisons in every state throughout the USA.

(A): When did you set up the union and what initially provoked it? Is the union still active?

Jerome: The MPLU was set up in Aug 1998 and yes we are still active, but things are now on low key until I am release from prison for obvious reasons. Working condition was the cause for setup the MPLU.

(A): Has the union achieved any victories?

Yes we have force some rule changes here in prison, but nothing major, our struggle is still on going.

(A): Can you give a brief (or lengthy- it’s up to you) description of the labor conditions in your prison or Missouri prisons in general?

Jerome: (A) can you picture you having a job out there without any benefits, no retirement plans, no nothing. Prisoners are force into work until we die, there is no such thing until retirement age, there is no vacation time, as property of the state we are told that we have no such rights. If a prisoner get hurt on the job, to were he loss a leg, finger or hand there is no compensation. In the summer months the shops and work place are extremely hot and in the winter its cold and the food we are fed is foul. Prisoners, we are force into 8 hours to 12 hours work shifts. The State is making millions of dollors off our slave labor, and it is all free money from free labor. Prisoners are human beings, but in the eyes of the State we are sub-humans, slaves, dogs, nothing!

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Rise Up

Drawing on rich interview material and adopting a life history approach, this book examines the agency of women living in insecure and uncertain conflict situations. It explores the effects of the Israeli policy of closure against Gaza and the resulting humanitarian crisis in relation to gender relations and gender subjectivity.

With attention to the changing roles of men in the household and community as a result of the loss of male employment, the author explores the extension of poor women’s mobility, particularly that of young wives with dependent children, for whom the meaning of agency has shifted from being providers in the domestic sphere to becoming publicly dependent on humanitarian aid. Without conflating women’s agency with resistance to patriarchy, Agency and Gender in Gaza extends the concept of agency to include its subjective and intersubjective elements, shedding light on the recent distortion of the traditional gender order and the reasons for which women resist the masculine power that they have acquired as a result.

gender, nation, class and the first intifada

by Aitemad Muhannah

Since Hamas was first established as an Islamic political movement within Palestinian society in December 1987 the leftist movement in Palestine has gradually come to be fragmented, and seems to be losing its popular constituency.

My own background as a women’s activist belonging to the PFLP from the 1980s until the mid-1990s leads me to argue that leftist parties and their popular grassroots organisations developed historically from incoherent ideological underpinnings, and that this has critically constrained their influence on Palestinians’ own systems of values and beliefs.

These leftist movements mostly failed to internalise their ideology among the population, because they maintained an artificial divorce between national politics and ideology on the one hand, and popular social and cultural change on the other. They were afraid of antagonising popular opinion by openly mobilising against traditional systems of values, especially those based on patriarchy and/or Islam. On the other hand Islamic political movements, especially Hamas, showed a more creative capacity to act effectively, shaping their national political and social agenda around the ideology of Islamic faith, belief and practice.

The massive popular support, emotional and even spiritual attachment that arose for leftist parties during the 1970s and until around the end of the First Intifada in 1991, could have been presumed to encourage the internalisation of at least some of the values and beliefs of leftist ideology – including democracy, social justice and individual liberties. The problem was certainly not mass rejection of these values or practices, which later became the mainstream discourse used by the leftist parties’ NGOs, which have largely been funded by the West.

However, the problem was that many poorer and less educated Palestinians, especially those marginalised social groups living in camps and smaller villages, were not influenced that much by leftist ideology. To put it another way, these social and cultural segments of the population were not actually able to relate to leftist ideology through their day-to-day life, and instead found their concerns reflected only in through involvement in national resistance. People were drawn to nationalist resistance agendas, rather than secular and leftist parties’ agendas, which reduced the appeal of the secular left when it turned from resistance to inconclusive negotiations.

During this process, many more marginalised Palestinian constituents started to feel alienated as well as patronised by the leftist leadership’s contradictory practices, and objected to the narrow factional and personal interests, the authoritarianism of the leadership and the tendency for cronyism in dealings with the population. The record thus suggests that the leftist leadership failed to seize its opportunity to create a positive model of political, social and cultural practices that could challenge the historically dominant hierarchical and authoritarian mode of governing and leadership and attract a strong following and support base among the majority of Palestinians. Few concrete positive changes and little substantial progress were achieved by secular and leftist parties’ reliance on a negotiated solution.

The result was that many ordinary Palestinians started to search for alternative forms of political organisation that could maintain their sense of national resistance, whilst providing them with a system of values and moral principles. With the entrenchment of compromised secular elite, Hamas offered a political and moral discourse to fill the social and cultural environment gap where secular and leftist parties had failed to meet the interests and desires of the disadvantaged majority.

Rethinking Leftist Discourse in relation to Islamism

This analysis is supported by some existing research. It is also a reflection of my personal experience, having been actively involved in community and political mobilisation with PFLP grass-roots students‘ and women’s unions from the 1980s to the mid-1990s.

My belonging to PFLP – the prominent leftist party within the Palestinian national movement – was politically, ideologically and spiritually profound for me, as for many others in the PFLP. As women and men within the leftist movement, we devoted much time and effort to educating and convincing other young men and women about concepts like resistance for national liberation, and the centrality of social justice in the national liberation process. We concentrated our efforts round the camps in the Gaza Strip, visiting prisoners, martyrs and injured families, providing material and emotional support. As young men and women, we also participated in public demonstrations, and in street clashes with Israeli soldiers, helping and covering for our male colleagues on resistance missions. We were collectively working for the sake of our Palestinian people who were (and are) all victimised by Israeli occupation. At that time, we were taught to combine the ideology of national resistance with the Marxist ideology of class struggle, but struggles against social and cultural discriminatory practices based on gender, were not stressed and were not core to our political concerns.

From a national resistance standpoint, I believe that the PFLP’s success in popular mobilisation in the 1970s-80s lay in organising and mobilising the masses, and was based on our personal commitment and grassroots organisations in building relationships with people on the ground. We succeeded in this because we had a legitimate (national, just) cause to defend, a mission to implement, and because we had a strong belief that it was right to oppose and try to stop the forms of colonial oppression against our people that we confronted daily. We were known and trusted by people, had easy access to them in their houses and workplaces, and cared about them, as well as being there to help them when needed. Our tasks needed daily, tiring, time-consuming effort in networking and organising, and we knew the constituency of the PFLP on a personal level, and communicated with them face-to-face. Our activism was based on conviction and voluntarism.

In the 1980s till the second or third year of the First Intifada (1988/89), I was in my early 20s, and I was enjoying my involvement in the national resistance and leftist movement, considering that this determined my national identity. I did not think or feel that I was subordinated or oppressed as a woman, because I believed that working class ‘poor refugees’ who led the national struggle against the colonial occupation would become equal and find justice through national liberation on a left agenda.

With these enthralling ideas, I shaped my personal choices. I was born and grew up in a refugee family headed by a merchant who earned a good income, and lived all my childhood in a non-refugee area with relatively good standards of living. I decided to get out of this class structure by marrying one of the PFLP resistance militants from a refugee camp, and went to live in the camp which I had not visited until before I married. I achieved this goal, and had been living in the refugee Beach camp in Gaza for one year by the time the First Intifada began.

With no education in feminism or gender equality, I shared  everything with my husband, including his tasks in political resistance. He used to ask me to help him with some missions, and never made me feel subordinate or ignored. At that time, I thought that the ethics of all members of leftist parties were like this: that they respected their wives, sisters, and daughters and considered them equals with the men in the family and in the public. Until the second year of the First Intifada, my multiple identities as a woman, Palestinian, and leftist were not in tension, and I did not experience them as in any way contradictory.

During those first two years of the First Intifada, living in the Beach camp, I became well known by many refugees as a PFLP activist, involved in the process of grass-roots mobilisation for resistance. I was seen walking in the camp unveiled, in modern though modest dress, several times a day. I was also seen involved in food distribution and social visits to families in need. I was observed participating in demonstrations against the Israeli soldiers. Yet in the summer of 1988, while walking in the camp with modest dress which showed, from my ethical leftist point of view, my respect to the martyrs of the Intifada, I was shocked at having eggs, tomatoes, and later stones thrown at me by young boys from the Beach camp.

When I later asked “why did you do this to a woman who is almost the same age as your mother?” they just replied: “you have to put on the head scarf because of the Intifada” and then ran away. I did not really take this incident seriously, however, until it was repeated by teenagers and older boys who threw things and shouted at me and at other women in the camp. Then I started to feel threatened, and started to hear more stories of women in other parts of Gaza, some of whom were attacked with acid. I was unable – within my own terms – to understand or analyze such actions and they threatened me to such a point that I felt I should leave home and proceed with my voluntary community activism elsewhere.

I assumed at that time that the whole Beach camp was secured by the PFLP. Yet the PFLP resistance group (mainly men in their early 20s) were informed about these incidents of attack and harassment, but did nothing to stop them. I also heard from friends that members of the PFLP resistance group said it was not their business to intervene in such cases, since women could solve the problem themselves simply by putting on the headscarf. The pressure to cover up meant nothing to the young men leading the First Intifada because they saw no reason for women not to be veiled in a traditional society like Gaza. I never myself thought about putting on the headscarf, or of veiling myself, whether in traditional or popular form. Not because they stood for oppression, but because they were either simply a personal religious practice or a cultural and national symbol.

I decided to negotiate this issue with my husband, who was in a leading position in the PFLP national resistance. However his reply to me was shocking. He made the same statement the young field militants had made, those who were responsible for maintaining security in the camp. He said: “We know that these incidents are most likely done by Hamas members, but we are not now in a position to open a fight with them. We need to keep our national unity against the occupation. Just you throw a scarf on your head and stop those boys harassing you in the street”.

That was the crisis point for me as a person and I started to question my gender identity, and find contradictions with my identity as a PFLP activist and Palestinian nationalist. My active commitment to national resistance and mass mobilisation counted for nothing when it came to the veil and protection by my leftist party and its members. That ran counter to my whole understanding of the leftist ideology, which stood against all forms of oppression. And I asked myself: is the imposition of a certain practice by another ideology, within the same class, not a form of oppression or discrimination? Do political and national alliances justify disrespect to women’s free choice? If so, should I compromise my gender identity for the sake of my national identity, in the time when religious veiling was not yet a dominant cultural practice (for example, my father never imposed veiling on me and many women at different age groups were unveiled in 1970s and 1980s).

That was the watershed that awakened my hidden gender identity. For the first time in my life, I started to think about my identity as a woman, and how it was obscured by my identity as a nationalist leftist subject. I also started to link the nationalist ideology with the leftist ideology which I, and other women’s activists, learnt from leftist men and based on their interpretation. I could no longer take for granted the link between national liberation and individuals/women’s freedom.

The issue of women and their subordinated position in the Gaza society was not part of the PFLP education or mobilisation agendas, and it was sidelined by the PFLP thinkers in favour of a tradition and value system which needed to be preserved as part of a national Palestinian identity. I remember that, from the leftist men’s point of view, all forms of social and cultural inequality would be resolved by national liberation, and by the leftist parties gaining political power.

Second, by the awakening of my gender identity, I also discovered the contradictory practice of leftist social and moral principles. I found out that many of the PFLP leaders (middle-aged men) restricted the movements of their wives and sisters and did not allow them to participate in national struggle: to maintain family honour. I also recalled that while I was a student at BirZeit University, the male leaders of the leftist parties, including the PFLP, were allowed to have girlfriends and sexual relations with women from middle and upper class, on the pretext of mobilising them, while refugee poor students, who led the process of mobilisation among students, encountered gossip if they deviated from cultural norms. All these examples of contradictory practices implied that the leftist parties had failed to produce a new system of social and cultural values and beliefs, despite their success at certain period of time in mobilising the masses for national resistance.

This is the historical foundation that helped Hamas, by the end of the First Intifada, to have a fertile ground for the mainstreaming of its ideological and political strategy and action. Hamas leaders, since the early years of its establishment, learnt how to bargain and cooperate to advance their political agenda, but without jeopardising the religious ideological beliefs (that were always open to reinterpretation). One early example was their statement regarding the attacks against unveiled women. They publicly announced that Hamas main concern was resistance against the occupation and it was not associated with these attacks, but they did not condemn the attacks.

Leftist secular parties, on the other hand, implicitly vindicated Hamas by stating in their bayans ‘leaflets’ that these attacks against women were done by collaborators with the Israeli occupation. This reflected the leftist leadership’s understanding of women, not as equal nationalist agents who need to be protected, but as a sexual target who may jeopardise the unity of national resistance and a social cohesion based on male domination.

Hamas won the game of mass mobilisation by maintaining the national resistance discourse on the top of its agenda, and enhanced the ideological religious values and beliefs to flexibly and consistently determine the meaning and the practice of national resistance as well as social and cultural norms. For example, the common saying Hamas leaders used is that the one who resists the Israeli occupation has to resist all forms of corruption and anti-ethical practices – presumably the anti-ethical is always anti-Islamic. Or as mentioned in a Sara Roy article, Hamas leaders advocate that Palestinians defeat the Israeli occupation by preserving their culture and value system and Islam. By this discourse, men and women, who were not influenced by a different social and cultural value system and they were historically dominated by the fluid traditional understanding and practice of Islam, felt at home with the presentation of politics within the moral principles of Islam.

The inability or reluctance of the leftist parties to protect women against the imposition of veil, attributing this to the priority of national unity, was a gift to Hamas. By 1989, the majority of women in Gaza were veiled and that was an important symbolic sign of Islamisation of Gazan society, even if it was forced in many cases. This symbolic sign was, a few years later, better consolidated by Hamas’s pragmatic strategies.

By the beginning of the Oslo peace negotiations in 1993, by the slowdown of the rhythm of national military resistance against the occupation, and by the establishment of the Palestinian Authority in 1994, a new ideological battle started. Although some leftist parties did not fully get involved in the peace negotiations and showed their rejection in the beginning, they decided to get fully involved in the establishment of the Palestinian Authority. The leftist parties also became divided and lost many of their common political and ideological views.

The secular leftist leaders, including those who partially rejected Oslo agreement, started to negotiate the division of the Palestinian Authority cake (who is controlling what and on what factional and personal bases). The performance of the Palestinian Authority, from its early phase, was characterised by high levels of corruption, patronage and clientelism. I was close to many of the PFLP male and female activists from the camps in the years of the Palestinian Authority, and I noticed that most of them were mainly concerned to get jobs in the Palestinian security forces or Ministries, as a reward for their national resistance. Some of them succeeded in getting jobs through their close connection with the PFLP leaders, but the majority, who were the poorest, were deprived because they did not have strong wasta (a network), taking into consideration that the majority of jobs were given to Fatah.

Within this context, Hamas was working in silence developing its agendas to utilise the division among the leftist parties and the losing of their constituency by not being rewarded with jobs. Hamas remained strict with its rejection of the Oslo agreement and its institutional apparatuses.

In the period of 1994-2000, Hamas realised that continuing in national militant resistance was not the appropriate strategy within the new national political equation produced by the peace process. Hamas decided to shift its concern from political military action to social and community work as well as the mass mobilisation of religious values and practices. Hamas established a large number of community-based charitable associations providing humanitarian support to families in need, as claimed by Hamas members, those who were deprived of their basic needs by the corrupt secular government. Hamas at this time enhanced religious education through the mosques, which attracted a large number of poor women and children from the camps and rural areas. This practice achieved a high level of credibility and trustworthiness, because it flourished while the secular and leftist parties displayed a corrupt and immoral model of governing.

Hamas community activists, in contrast, show an open-minded democratic vision and practice – even if expressed with a different ideological language. Based on my observation, Hamas activists allowed anyone qualified to work with them. They also tried to be fair in distributing food and cash assistance, regardless the factional loyalty of applicants. This of course pushed many of those who used to be loyal to leftist parties, with no ideological underpinnings, to benefit from the Islamic associations’ assistance, and later they became more integrated into their religious educational and social programs.

Deprived people in Gaza, like in other parts of the world, don’t need to think about the political factional motives or interests beyond these practices, as long as these practices satisfy their needs and self-respect, and are consistent with their system of values and belief. Hamas’s institutional community-based activities were largely influencing women, including those who were participating in the leftist parties’ women’s committees, because women were encouraged to get out of their homes and to participate in community activities to meet both their national and religious obligations. One of my female friends who used to be very active with the leftist grass-roots organisations said to me: “within Islamic community organisations, I feel more liberated as a woman because I really do what I want to do with respect from my family members, neighbours, and over all satisfy my God.”

Furthermore, Hamas’s strategy of social and community work was presented as well as practiced to enhance collectivism and voluntarism. Despite Hamas’s hidden political agenda and the actual sources of funds to their community work, they frequently urged Palestinian wealthy people to donate for supporting poor people appealing for Islamic justice. They also organised the collection of el Zakat and ensured its fair distributions.

I am not here arguing about accurate or inaccurate performance of social justice, but I am arguing that Hamas has deliberately focused on the immoral practices of politics by the secular and leftist leadership in order to extract more popular support to its ‘moral’ religious discourse, to the ideological ground of its politics. This discourse appealed to the poor and disadvantaged people who suffered for years from the corruption of the official institutions.

Hamas, in addition, deliberately built upon the existing traditional values of collectivism and voluntarism, and did not replace family and kin informal institutions by religious institutions. What they do is that they maintained el-dawaween and lejan el-Islah (informal traditional social and family-based institutions), but incorporated their members and preachers into them. The training of large number of young and middle age people, particularly women, to be preachers who provided in-home visits and religious counseling rapidly increased the religious awareness of the masses.

One example from my PhD field research in 2008 is that moderately educated women in their middle age with young children were competing over who has more religious knowledge and tools of interpretation than the other, and who attended more religious lectures. The more religiously educated became more legitimised to participate in public mobilisation. If I compare this with my period of activism with PFLP, I remember that the members of the regular awareness meetings of the leftist ideology rarely attended, and they did not show that much interest. In contrast, those best versed in leftist ideology were the least involved in daily mass mobilisation.

I assume that one of the obvious reasons is that the presentation and the discussion of the concepts were not conceived as relevant to the actual life of ordinary people. I myself remember how class struggle was explained to me in a way that created a hostile sense towards many of my own people who were classified by the Marxist as bourgeoisie, even those who lived in the camps but in a better material standard of living. On the contrary, through my conversations with my research participants, they express how their awareness about religion enhanced their sense of cooperation and connectedness with those who are better-off within the family and in the local community, based on the Islamic concept of a ‘person’s fate as God’s will’. Of course, I don’t deny the problematic as well as the different Islamic interpretations of this concept, but it can serve to overcome differences and promote collectivism.

The last point I need to mention is that although Hamas found its path based on community-based work and mass mobilisation, the left missed their path by abandoning their history of grass-roots work. By the establishment of the Palestinian Authority and the increasing interest of donor agencies to fund and to develop civil society institutions, most of the leftist parties’ grass-roots organisations shifted their concern and their strategy of work towards ‘NGOisation’, as it is described by Islah Jad. The grass-roots committees and unions were replaced by, or restructured as, NGOs.

Without going into arguments about the role of NGOs, I would like simply to say that this phenomenon played a critical role in undermining the politics and the ideology of the leftist parties as a whole. NGOs, in order to meet the professional requirements of the donors, have to be managed by professionals who speak the language of the donors, they also had to concentrate on networking with the international agencies at the expense of their local community, reduced to a means of generating funds for staff and structures of NGOs.

Ideologically, secular and leftist NGOs contributed to a dilution of class identities and the emergence of a new ‘class’ of professionals among those who used to act as community volunteers and activists. With such a position comes a better standard of living, and the new professionals often move to the cities, send their children to private schools and drive expensive cars. The space they vacate in poor local communities in the camps and villages was smoothly filled by the Islamic preachers and Hamas community activists. Is this not a great opportunity for the Islamist message to spread, in the absence of any alternatives at the political, ideological and socio-cultural levels?

The New York Daily News reports:

...the Sikh Coalition says it wants the feds involved because the group is not convinced the police department is doing enough.

“The NYPD needs to address the perception that it doesn't care about Sikhs,” the coalition said in a statement. “The NYPD doesn't allow turbaned Sikhs to serve in the police force. The same police force that is supposed to protect us is also discriminating against us.”

Two years to the day of the Oak Creek, Wisconsin Gurdwara massacre, the Sikh American community of New York City is organizing a rally this morning to draw attention to the plight of Sandeep Singh, a Sikh father who remains hospitalized after a driver in a pick-up truck ran him over on a public street last week and dragged him for 30 feet.

Only moments earlier, the driver had used racial and religious slurs against Sandeep, calling him a “terrorist” and telling him to “go back to your country.” While Sandeep recovers at a hospital, his attacker is still at large, and the Sikh Coalition is calling on city and federal agencies to investigate the attack on Sandeep as a hate crime.

I was attacked because I am a Sikh and because I look like a Sikh. Justice should be served so that no one else goes through what I have been through. We need to create a world without hate.

Tensions Flare Between Queens Sikhs and NYPD After Racially Motivated Hit and Run

Security still courtesy of the Sikh Coalition

The driver dragged Sandeep Singh's body 30 feet.

It was shortly after midnight on Wednesday, Sandeep Singh and three of his friends were crossing 99th Street at 101 Avenue in Richmond Hill, Queens when they crossed paths with a man in a pick-up truck. Witnesses say the driver called Singh a "terrorist," and yelled at him to "go back to your country." Singh, a Sikh, stood in the truck's path to keep the driver from leaving while his friends called the police, but the driver gassed his pick-up into Singh, hitting the 29-year-old and dragging him some 30 feet before he came loose.

2075: THE EARTH AS SEEN FROM THE  INTERNATIONAL SPACE ARK

A senior researcher with the Scientific Research Center of the Arctic, Andrei Plekhanov, speaking with the Associated Press said the crater is likely caused by a "buildup of excessive pressure" underground caused by warming regional temperatures in the area. Unusually high levels of methane were recorded by Plekhanov's team near the bottom of the sinkhole.

...researchers argue that long-term global warming might be to blame — and that a slow and steady thaw in the region could have been enough to free a burst of methane and create such a big crater. Over the past 20 years, permafrost at a depth of 20 metres has warmed by about 2°C, driven by rising air temperatures1, notes Hans-Wolfgang Hubberten, a geochemist at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Potsdam, Germany.

Hubberten speculates that a thick layer of ice on top of the soil at the Yamal crater site trapped methane released by thawing permafrost. “Gas pressure increased until it was high enough to push away the overlying layers in a powerful injection, forming the crater,” he says. Hubberten says that he has never before seen a crater similar to the Yamal crater in the Arctic.

CREDIT: flickr/ Steve Jurvetson

Russian scientists have determined that a massive crater discovered in a remote part of Siberia was probably caused by thawing permafrost.

The crater is in the Yamal Peninsula, which means “end of the world.” It caught hold of the media spotlight in mid-July when it was spotted by oil and gas workers flying over the area. At roughly 200 feet wide and seemingly bottomless, speculation abounded about the cause with the Siberian Times reporting that, “theories range from meteorites, stray missiles, a man-made prank, and aliens, to an explosive cocktail of methane or shale gas suddenly exploding.”

Since this first discovery, two other smaller craters have been spotted in the surrounding regions, fueling even more [STUPID] armchair conjecture.

Russian scientists sent to the site are now providing first-hand data showing that unusually high concentrations of methane of up to 9.6 percent were present at the bottom of the first large crater shortly after it was discovered on July 16. Andrei Plekhanov, an archaeologist at the Scientific Centre of Arctic Studies in Salekhard, Russia, who led an expedition to the crater, told The Journal Nature that air normally contains just 0.000179 percent methane.

The last two summers in the Yamal have been exceptionally warm at about nine degrees Fahrenheit above average.

According to Plekhanov, the last two summers in the Yamal have been exceptionally warm at about nine degrees Fahrenheit above average. Rising temperatures could have allowed the permafrost to thaw and collapse, releasing the methane previously trapped by the subterranean ice. Methane is the primary component of natural gas. The original crater is about 20 miles from a large natural gas plant and the entire Yamal Peninsula is rich in natural gas that is being extensively tapped to help fuel Russia’s natural gas boom.

Hans-Wolfgang Hubberten, a geochemist at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Potsdam, Germany, told Nature that climate change and the slow, steady thaw of the region could be to blame.

“Gas pressure increased until it was high enough to push away the overlying layers in a powerful injection, forming the crater,” he said.
This frame grab made Wednesday, July 16 shows the 200-foot wide crater discovered in the Yamal Peninsula.

While staring down into the abyss of these craters is a scary thought, the release of large quantities of greenhouse gases from melting permafrost is existentially daunting. A study from earlier this year found that melting permafrost soil, which typically remains frozen all year, is thawing and decomposing at an accelerating rate. This is releasing more methane into the atmosphere, causing the greenhouse effect to increase global temperatures and creating a positive feedback loop in which more permafrost melts.

“The world is getting warmer, and the additional release of gas would only add to our problems,” said Jeff Chanton, the John Widmer Winchester Professor of Oceanography at Florida State and researcher on the study. According to Chanton, if the permafrost completely melts, there would be five times the current amount of carbon equivalent in the atmosphere.

Kevin Schaefer, a permafrost scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center, told ThinkProgress that there are actually two sources of GHGs released by melting permafrost: methane hydrates that destabilize when permafrost temperatures rise, as has been the case in Siberia, and frozen organic matter.

“Note that the methane hydrate and the decaying organic matter emissions result from two completely different mechanisms,” said Schaefer. “Methane hydrate emissions come from deep permafrost due to purely physical processes. The decaying organic matter emissions come from near-surface permafrost due to purely biological processes.”

He said that as the permafrost thaws, the organic matter will also thaw and begin to decay, releasing CO2 and methane into the atmosphere. “Published estimates indicate 120 gigatons of carbon emissions from thawing permafrost by 2100, which would increase global temperatures by an additional 7.98 percent,” he said.

As with other processes in the permafrost zone, abrupt changes appear to be as or perhaps more important than slow gradual change.

Schaefer said the phenomenon of the Siberian craters was a surprise to him because he thought the methane would leak out more slowly. Capturing these large bursts of methane before they enter the atmosphere could be possible, according to Schaefer, however extremely difficult. [Yes, and monkeys might fly out of his ass.]

“The key is drilling into the permafrost before the methane escapes,” he said. “However, creating the infrastructure just to get to these remote locations is daunting.”

He said that capturing the emissions from decaying organic matter would be impossible.

Ted Schuur, a professor of ecosystem ecology at the University of Florida and leader of the Permafrost Carbon Network, told ThinkProgress that the

Siberian craters remind him of ‘hot spots’ of methane bubbling that occur both in lakes and undersea in the permafrost zone. [This was my initial thought.]

“This could be a terrestrial version that was previously capped by ground ice in permafrost,” he said. “If indeed they are the result of warming permafrost they could be a significant pathway of greenhouse gas release to the atmosphere. As with other processes in the permafrost zone, abrupt changes appear to be as or perhaps more important than slow gradual change.”

A survey of 41 permafrost scientists in 2011 estimated that if human fossil-fuel use remained on a high projection and the planet warmed significantly, gases from permafrost could eventually equal 35 percent of present day annual emissions. In the few years since then, emissions have continued to rise. If emissions are heavily curtailed, greenhouse gases from permafrost could make up as little as around the equivalent of 10 percent of today’s human-caused emissions. This is far lower, but still highly disconcerting.

“Even if it’s 5 or 10 percent of today’s emissions, it’s exceptionally worrying, and 30 percent is humongous,” Josep G. Canadell, a scientist in Australia who runs a global program to monitor greenhouse gases, told the New York Times at the time of the study. “It will be a chronic source of emissions that will last hundreds of years.”

HARD TO ARGUE

Denise Stewart, who had just taken a shower and was wearing only a towel, was forced out of her apartment by 12 police officers, Press TV's correspondent Susan Modaress reports from New York.

The officers kept the 48-year-old mother half-naked in the hallway until she passed out.

Stewart was in her apartment on July 13 when she heard police pounding on her door and demanding entry.

When she declined to let them in, the police dragged the mother of four out of her apartment into the hallway and forced her against the wall.  

Stewart, who suffers from asthma, was pinned to the wall for over two minutes and was yelling, "oxygen…. get my oxygen." Her son is also heard in the chaotic video saying, "her asthma….her asthma". Stewart fainted and fell to the floor.

“What we see here on streets of New York is where people of color, women and children, are dehumanized, dragged out of their homes, have their homes broken into, or killed in their homes and treated as less than human under the guise of ‘well, we are doing it to prevent crimes and protect the community,’” human rights activist Greg Butterfield told Press TV.

Ms. Stewart is a respected member of her community and she committed absolutely no crime.  These officers conducted themselves in a deplorable manner.  They pepper sprayed her four year old grandson and a male officer punched her twelve year old daughter, the same twelve year old they claim they were there to protect.

What these officers did exemplifies not only a disrespect for women in general but a disrespect for women of color in particular because of a general disrespect for communities of color.   The recent murder of Mr. Eric Garner is but an example of the same disrespect for communities of color.  There has to be some remedy for this kind of police misconduct.  These officers are discriminating against communities of color and they are doing it under color of law

“Denise Stewart was charged with assaulting a police officer, and she and her 20-year-old daughter Diamond Stewart were charged with resisting arrest, criminal possession of a weapon, and acting in a manner injurious to a child.

Stewart’s 24-year-old son Kirkland Stewart was also charged with resisting arrest, and her 12-year-old daughter was charged with assaulting a police officer, criminal mischief, and criminal possession of a weapon.”

“and I am going to keep writing it down
how they carried her body out of the house
dress torn up around her waist
uncovered
past tenants and the neighborhood children
a mountain of Black Woman”

Gus diZerega is a political scientist/theorist with a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley. While living and working as an artist and craftsperson to finance his degree, he met and later studied with teachers in NeoPaganism, the earth religions more generally, and shamanic healing. 

The past 25 years Gus has aimed to bring together the disparate strands of modern social science, Pagan spirituality, and shamanic spiritual practices. He has done so through his own practice and through his teaching and writing. 

The piece below which takes a gander and provides a different sort of analysis of the Tea Party is from a blog site, I am unfamiliar with.  My guess, from reading what I am about to post, is that the guy writing it is a New Hampshire sort of liberal, but again who knows and why label.  I am not here to endorse, as usual, everything in it, but I think the overall idea is a good one, and many points are well made.

The following is from the Weekly Sift.  The Weekly Sift describes itself as, '“the political blog for people who don’t have time for political blogs”. It’s aimed at ordinary Americans who want to stay informed without making a full-time job out of it."

Not a Tea Party, a Confederate Party

Tea Partiers say you don’t understand them because you don’t understand American history. That’s probably true, but not in the way they want you to think.

---

Late in 2012, I came out of the Lincoln movie with two historical mysteries to solve:

• How did the two parties switch places regarding the South, white supremacy, and civil rights? In Lincoln’s day, a radical Republican was an abolitionist, and when blacks did get the vote, they almost unanimously voted Republican. Today, the archetypal Republican is a Southern white, and blacks are almost all Democrats. How did American politics get from there to here?
• One of the movie’s themes was how heavily the war’s continuing carnage weighed on Lincoln. (It particularly came through during Grant’s guided tour of the Richmond battlefield.) Could any cause, however lofty, justify this incredible slaughter? And yet, I realized, Lincoln was winning. What must the Confederate leaders have been thinking, as an even larger percentage of their citizens died, as their cities burned, and as the accumulated wealth of generations crumbled? Where was their urge to end this on any terms, rather than wait for complete destruction?

The first question took some work, but yielded readily to patient googling. I wrote up the answer in “A Short History of White Racism in the Two-Party System“. The second turned out to be much deeper than I expected, and set off a reading project that has eaten an enormous amount of my time over the last two years. (Chunks of that research have shown up in posts like “Slavery Lasted Until Pearl Harbor“, “Cliven Bundy and the Klan Komplex“, and my review of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ article on reparations.) Along the way, I came to see how I (along with just about everyone I know) have misunderstood large chunks of American history, and how that misunderstanding clouds our perception of what is happening today.
Who really won the Civil War? The first hint at how deep the second mystery ran came from the biography Jefferson Davis: American by William J. Cooper. In 1865, not only was Davis not agonizing over how to end the destruction, he wanted to keep it going longer. He disapproved of Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, and when U. S. troops finally captured him, he was on his way to Texas, where an intact army might continue the war.
That sounded crazy until I read about Reconstruction. In my high school history class, Reconstruction was a mysterious blank period between Lincoln’s assassination and Edison’s light bulb. Congress impeached Andrew Johnson for some reason, the transcontinental railroad got built, corruption scandals engulfed the Grant administration, and Custer lost at Little Big Horn. But none of it seemed to have much to do with present-day events.
And oh, those blacks Lincoln emancipated? Except for Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver, they vanished like the Lost Tribes of Israel. They wouldn’t re-enter history until the 1950s, when for some reason they still weren’t free.
Here’s what my teachers’ should have told me: “Reconstruction was the second phase of the Civil War. It lasted until 1877, when the Confederates won.” I think that would have gotten my attention.
It wasn’t just that Confederates wanted to continue the war. They did continue it, and they ultimately prevailed. They weren’t crazy, they were just stubborn.
The Lost Cause. At about the same time my American history class was leaving a blank spot after 1865, I sawGone With the Wind, which started filling it in like this: Sadly, the childlike blacks weren’t ready for freedom and full citizenship. Without the discipline of their white masters, many became drunks and criminals, and they raped a lot of white women. Northern carpetbaggers used them (and no-account white scalawags) as puppets to control the South, and to punish the planter aristocrats, who prior to the war had risen to the top of Southern society through their innate superiority and virtue.
But eventually the good men of the South could take it no longer, so they formed the Ku Klux Klan to protect themselves and their communities. They were never able to restore the genteel antebellum society — that Eden was gone with the wind, a noble but ultimately lost cause — but they were eventually able to regain the South’s honor and independence. Along the way, they relieved their beloved black servants of the onerous burden of political equality, until such time as they might become mature enough to bear it responsibly.

A still from The Birth of a Nation

That telling of history is nownamed for its primary proponent, William Dunning. It is false in almost every detail. If history is written by the winners, Dunning’s history is the clearest evidence that the Confederates won. [see endnote 1]
Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel had actually toned it down a little. To feel the full impact of Dunning-school history, you need to read Thomas Dixon’s 1905 best-seller, The Clansman: a historical romance of the Ku Klux Klan. Or watch the 1915 silent movie made from it, The Birth of a Nation, which was the most popular film of all time until Gone With the Wind broke its records.
The iconic hooded Klansman on his horse, the Knight of the Invisible Empire, was the Luke Skywalker of his day.
The first modern war. The Civil War was easy to misunderstand at the time, because there had never been anything like it. It was a total mobilization of society, the kind Europe wouldn’t see until World War I. The Civil War was fought not just with cannons and bayonets, but with railroads and factories and an income tax.
If the Napoleonic Wars were your model, then it was obvious that the Confederacy lost in 1865: Its capital fell, its commander surrendered, its president was jailed, and its territories were occupied by the opposing army. If that’s not defeat, what is?
But now we have a better model than Napoleon: Iraq.
After the U.S. forces won on the battlefield in 1865 and shattered the organized Confederate military, the veterans of that shattered army formed a terrorist insurgency that carried on a campaign of fire and assassination throughout the South until President Hayes agreed to withdraw the occupying U. S. troops in 1877. Before and after 1877, the insurgents usedlynchings and occasional pitched battles to terrorize those portions of the electorate still loyal to the United States. In this way they took charge of the machinery of state government, and then rewrote the state constitutions to reverse the postwar changes and restore the supremacy of the class that led the Confederate states into war in the first place. [2]
By the time it was all over, the planter aristocrats were back in control, and the three constitutional amendments that supposedly had codified the U.S.A’s victory over the C.S.A.– the 13th, 14th, and 15th — had been effectively nullified in every Confederate state. The Civil Rights Acts had been gutted by the Supreme Court, and were all but forgotten by the time similar proposals resurfaced in the 1960s. Blacks were once again forced into hard labor for subsistence wages, denied the right to vote, and denied the equal protection of the laws. Tens of thousands of them were still physically shackled and subject to being whipped, a story historian Douglas Blackmon told in his Pulitzer-winningSlavery By Another Name.
So Lincoln and Grant may have had their mission-accomplished moment, but ultimately the Confederates won. The real Civil War — the one that stretched from 1861 to 1877 — was the first war the United States lost.
The missed opportunity. Today, historians like Eric Foner and Douglas Egerton portray Reconstruction as a missed opportunity to avoid Jim Crow and start trying to heal the wounds of slavery a century sooner. Following W.E.B. DuBois’ iconoclastic-for-1935 Black Reconstruction, they see the freedmen as actors in their own history, rather than mere pawns or victims of whites. As a majority in Mississippi and South Carolina, and a substantial voting bloc across the South, blacks briefly used the democratic system to try to better their lot. If the federal government had protected the political process from white terrorism, black (and American) history could have taken an entirely different path.
In particular, 1865 was a moment when reparations and land reform were actually feasible. Late in the war, some of Lincoln’s generals — notably Sherman — had mitigated their slave-refugee problem by letting emancipated slaves farm small plots on the plantations that had been abandoned by their Confederate owners. Sick or injured animals unable to advance with the Army were left behind for the slaves to nurse back to health and use. (Hence “forty acres and a mule”.) Sherman’s example might have become a land-reform model for the entire Confederacy, dispossessing the slave-owning aristocrats in favor of the people whose unpaid labor had created their wealth.
Instead, President Johnson (himself a former slave-owner from Tennessee) was quick to pardon the aristocrats and restore their lands. [3] That created a dynamic that has been with us ever since: Early in Reconstruction, white and black working people sometimes made common cause against their common enemies in the aristocracy. But once it became clear that the upper classes were going to keep their ill-gotten holdings, freedmen and working-class whites were left to wrestle over the remaining slivers of the pie. Before long, whites who owned little land and had never owned slaves had become the shock troops of the planters’ bid to restore white supremacy.
Along the way, the planters created rhetoric you still hear today: The blacks were lazy and would rather wait for gifts from the government than work (in conditions very similar to slavery). In this way, the idle planters were able to paint the freedmen as parasites who wanted to live off the hard work of others.
The larger pattern. But the enduring Confederate influence on American politics goes far beyond a few rhetorical tropes. The essence of the Confederate worldview is that the democratic process cannot legitimately change the established social order, and so all forms of legal and illegal resistance are justified when it tries.
That worldview is alive and well. During last fall’s government shutdown and threatened debt-ceiling crisis, historian Garry Wills wrote about our present-day Tea Partiers: “The presiding spirit of this neo-secessionism is a resistance to majority rule.”
The Confederate sees a divinely ordained way things are supposed to be, and defends it at all costs. No process, no matter how orderly or democratic, can justify fundamental change.
When in the majority, Confederates protect the established order through democracy. If they are not in the majority, but have power, they protect it through the authority of law. If the law is against them, but they have social standing, they create shams of law, which are kept in place through the power of social disapproval. If disapproval is not enough, they keep the wrong people from claiming their legal rights by the threat of ostracism and economic retribution. If that is not intimidating enough, there are physical threats, then beatings and fires, and, if that fails, murder.
That was the victory plan of Reconstruction. Black equality under the law was guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. But in the Confederate mind, no democratic process could legitimate such a change in the social order. It simply could not be allowed to stand, and it did not stand.
In the 20th century, the Confederate pattern of resistance was repeated against the Civil Rights movement. And though we like to claim that Martin Luther King won, in many ways he did not. School desegregation, for example, was never viewed as legitimate, and was resisted at every level. And it has been overcome. By most measures, schools are as segregated as ever, and the opportunities in white schools still far exceed the opportunities in non-white schools.
Today, ObamaCare cannot be accepted. No matter that it was passed by Congress, signed by the President, found constitutional by the Supreme Court, and ratified by the people when they re-elected President Obama. It cannot be allowed to stand, and so the tactics for destroying it get ever more extreme. The point of violence has not yet been reached, but the resistance is still young.
Violence is a key component of the present-day strategy against abortion rights, as Judge Myron Thompson’s recent ruling makes clear. Legal, political, social, economic, and violent methods of resistance mesh seamlessly. The Alabama legislature cannot ban abortion clinics directly, so it creates reasonable-sounding regulations the clinics cannot satisfy, like the requirement that abortionists have admitting privileges at local hospitals. Why can’t they fulfill that requirement? Because hospitals impose the reasonable-sounding rule that their doctors live and practice nearby, while many Alabama abortionists live out of state. The clinics can’t replace them with local doctors, because protesters will harass the those doctors’ non-abortion patients and drive the doctors out of any business but abortion. A doctor who chooses that path will face threats to his/her home and family. And doctors who ignore such threats have been murdered.
Legislators, of course, express horror at the murder of doctors, just as the pillars of 1960s Mississippi society expressed horror at the Mississippi Burning murders, and the planter aristocrats shook their heads sadly at the brutality of the KKK and the White Leagues. But the strategy is all of a piece and always has been. Change cannot stand, no matter what documents it is based on or who votes for them. If violence is necessary, so be it.
Unbalanced. This is not a universal, both-sides-do-it phenomenon. Compare, for example, the responses to the elections of our last two presidents. Like many liberals, I will go to my grave believing that if every person who went to the polls in 2000 had succeeded in casting the vote s/he intended, George W. Bush would never have been president. I supported Gore in taking his case to the Supreme Court. And, like Gore, once the Court ruled in Bush’s favor — incorrectly, in my opinion — I dropped the issue.
For liberals, the Supreme Court was the end of the line. Any further effort to replace Bush would have been even less legitimate than his victory. Subsequently, Democrats rallied around President Bush after 9/11, and I don’t recall anyone suggesting that military officers refuse his orders on the grounds that he was not a legitimate president.
Barack Obama, by contrast, won a huge landslide in 2008, getting more votes than any president in history. And yet, his legitimacy has been questioned ever since. The Birther movement was created out of whole cloth, there never having been any reason to doubt the circumstances of Obama’s birth. Outrageous conspiracy theories of voter fraud — millions and millions of votes worth — have been entertained on no basis whatsoever. Immediately after Obama took office, the Oath Keeper movement prepared itself to refuse his orders.
A black president calling for change, who owes most of his margin to black voters — he himself is a violation of the established order. His legitimacy cannot be conceded.
Confederates need guns. The South is a place, but the Confederacy is a worldview. To this day, that worldview is strongest in the South, but it can be found all over the country (as are other products of Southern culture, like NASCAR and country music). A state as far north as Maine has a Tea Party governor.
Gun ownership is sometimes viewed as a part of Southern culture, but more than that, it plays a irreplaceable role in the Confederate worldview. Tea Partiers will tell you that the Second Amendment is our protection against “tyranny”. But in practice tyrannysimply means a change in the established social order, even if that change happens — maybe especially if it happens — through the democratic processes defined in the Constitution. If the established social order cannot be defended by votes and laws, then it will be defended by intimidation and violence. How are We the People going to shoot abortion doctors and civil rights activists if we don’t have guns?
Occasionally this point becomes explicit, as when Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Anglesaid this:

You know, our Founding Fathers, they put that Second Amendment in there for a good reason and that was for the people to protect themselves against a tyrannical government. And in fact Thomas Jefferson said it’s good for a country to have a revolution every 20 years. I hope that’s not where we’re going, but, you know, if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies and saying my goodness what can we do to turn this country around? I’ll tell you the first thing we need to do is take Harry Reid out.

Angle wasn’t talking about anything more “tyrannical” than our elected representatives voting for things she didn’t like (like ObamaCare or stimulus spending). If her side can’t fix that through elections, well then, the people who do win those elections will just have to be intimidated or killed. Angle doesn’t want it to come to that, but if liberals won’t yield peacefully to the conservative minority, what other choice is there?
Gun-rights activist Larry Pratt doesn’t even seem regretful:

“The Second Amendment is not for hunting, it’s not even for self-defense,” Pratt explained in his Leadership Institute talk. Rather, it is “for restraining tyrannical tendencies in government. Especially those in the liberal, tyrannical end of the spectrum. There is some restraint, and even if the voters of Brooklyn don’t hold them back, it may be there are other ways that their impulses are somewhat restrained. That’s the whole idea of the Second Amendment.”

So the Second Amendment is there not to defend democracy, but to fix what the progressive “voters of Brooklyn” get wrong.

It’s not a Tea Party. The Boston Tea Party protest was aimed at a Parliament where the colonists had no representation, and at an appointed governor who did not have to answer to the people he ruled. Today’s Tea Party faces a completely different problem: how a shrinking conservative minority can keep change at bay in spite of the democratic processes defined in the Constitution. That’s why they need guns. That’s why they need to keep the wrong people from voting in their full numbers.

These right-wing extremists have misappropriated the Boston patriots and the Philadelphia founders because their true ancestors — Jefferson Davis and the Confederates — are in poor repute. [4]
But the veneer of Bostonian rebellion easily scrapes off; the tea bags and tricorn hats are just props. The symbol Tea Partiers actually revere is the Confederate stars and bars. Let a group of right-wingers ramble for any length of time, and you will soon hear that slavery wasn’t really so bad, that Andrew Johnson was right, that Lincoln shouldn’t have fought the war, that states have the rights of nullification and secession, that the war wasn’t really about slavery anyway, and a lot of other Confederate mythology that (until recently) had left me asking, “Why are we talking about this?”
By contrast, the concerns of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and its revolutionary Sons of Liberty are never so close to the surface. So no. It’s not a Tea Party. It’s a Confederate Party.
Our modern Confederates are quick to tell the rest of us that we don’t understand them because we don’t know our American history. And they’re right. If you knew more American history, you would realize just how dangerous these people are.

---

---

Endnotes
[1] The other clear evidence stands in front of nearly every courthouse in the South: statues of Confederate heroes. You have to be blind not to recognize them as victorymonuments. In the Jim Crow era, these stone sentries guarded the centers of civic power against Negroes foolish enough to try to register to vote or claim their other constitutional rights.

Calhoun way up high

In Away Down South: a history of Southern identity, James C. Cobb elaborates:

African Americans understood full well what monuments to the antebellum white regime were all about. When Charleston officials erected a statue of proslavery champion John C. Calhoun, “blacks took that statue personally,” Mamie Garvin Fields recalled. After all, “here was Calhoun looking you in the face and telling you, ‘Nigger, you may not be a slave but I’m back to see you stay in your places.’ ” In response, Fields explained, “we used to carry something with us, if we knew we would be passing that way, in order to deface that statue — scratch up the coat, break up the watch chain, try to knock off the nose. … [C]hildren and adults beat up John C. Calhoun so badly that the whites had to come back and put him way up high, so we couldn’t get to him.”

[2] The vocabulary of this struggle is illuminating. A carpetbagger was a no-account Northerner who arrived in the South with nothing more than the contents of a carpetbag. Ascalawag was a lower-class Southern white who tried to rise above his betters in the post-war chaos. The class-based nature of these insults demonstrates who was authorizing this history: the planter aristocrats.
For a defense of the claim that the aristocrats intentionally led the South into war, see Douglas Egerton’s Year of Meteors: Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, and the Election that Brought on the Civil War.
[3] Though Congress had to find other “high crimes and misdemeanors” for their bill of impeachment, Johnson’s betrayal of the United States’ battlefield victory was the real basis of the attempt to remove him.
[4] Jefferson Davis and the Confederates also misappropriated the Founders. It started with John Calhoun’s Discourse on the Constitution and Government of the United States, published posthumously in 1851, which completely misrepresented the Founders and their Constitution. Calhoun’s view (that the Union was a consortium of states with no directly relationship to the people) would have made perfect sense if the Constitution had begun “We the States” rather than “We the People”.
Calhoun disagreed with Jefferson on one key point: All men are not created equal.
Modern conservatives who attribute their views to the Founders are usually unknowingly relying on Calhoun’s false image of the Founders, which was passed down through Davis and from there spread widely in Confederate folklore.

SERVING WHITE SUPREMACY AND CAPITAL PROTECTING WHITE SKIN PRIVILEGE AND PROPERTY

...an educator in Ontario’s post-secondary sector and an organizer with the Network for Pan-Afrikan Solidarity and the Network for the Elimination of Police Violence.

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THREE DAYS THAT SHOOK THE NEW WORLD ORDER

I have attempted to do something here that I think has not been done before and that is to put the following analysis from the Chicago Surrealist Group on the 1992  L.A. Rebellion in a non-PDF form, on the internet.  I did have to leave out some little quotes that were scattered here and there which is too bad, because they were indeed to the point,  but such is life in the world of cutting and pasting.  I've been reading some stuff on Surrealism by the Chicago Surrealist Group of late and that led me to this posting below for Scission Theoretical Weekend.  I am hoping that I got everything pasted in the right order, if not, well, think of it as surrealist poetry or something.  I did my best.

I do thank Lib.com for the PDF version.

Read on.

Three Days That Shook the New World Order

The Chicago Surrealist Group’s Statement on the 1992 L.A. Rebellion

First published in Race Traitor #2, Summer 1993 

THINGS AIN’T WHAT THEY USED TO BE

“Wherever you find injustice, the proper form of politeness is attack.”

– T-Bone Slim

“We were not able to choose the mess we have to live in – this collapse of a whole society – but we can choose our way out.”

– C.L.R. James

“Don’t be afraid. Just go ahead and play.”

– Charlie Parker

With flames hundreds of feet high and spread out over dozens of square miles, the Los Angeles Rebellion of April-May 1992 lit up the horrible domestic reality of the “New World Order.” Thanks to what is usually the most invisible sector of the U.S. population – the despised “underclass” – the fundamental injustice of American society suddenly became visible to the whole world. In a year of preposterously insipid electioneering and “opinion polls,” as Pogo pointed out that it was not the choices but the lack of choices that made U.S. elections a sham, the vanguard of the non-voting majority stated their fiercely anti-Establishment opinions loud and clear. In a time of massive political demoralization and incoherence, the most down-and-out people in the country changed the complexion and direction of American politics and pointed the way forward for all seekers of real freedom and justice for all.

The ruling-class delusions of grandeur that followed the collapse of the state-capitalist bureaucracies in eastern Europe and the USSR – delusions already interrupted by a steadily worsening recession as well as mounting revulsion against U.S. government corruption and malevolence at home and abroad – burst like a bubble as the unemployed, the homeless and the hip-hoppers of L.A. started reinventing the revolutionary traditions of May Day a couple of days early.

The L.A. rebels showed that a few Black and Latino mayors and police chiefs, a few minority TV shows and token faces of Black and Latino celebrities on billboards are not solving and cannot solve the problems of those who are forced to live in America’s Black ghettoes, barrios and other “bad” neighborhoods. Sons and daughters of the Watts rebels of ‘65, grandsons and granddaughters of the zoot-suiters and beboppers of the ‘40s, the L.A. rebels rapped to one and all that nothing less than a complete transformation of social relations can create a life worth living.

For three full days many tens of thousands of people said “no!” to the slave system known as daily life in America. In the highly educational enthusiasm of mass action, long-established habits and routines of resignation were discarded in favor of improvisation, experiment, and discovery. However briefly, throngs who had been condemned to a living death discovered new reasons for living, new possibilities of life.

Now, almost a year later, the walls of oppression are still shaking.

The bold initiative of L.A.’s daring young rebels has now enabled countless millions to see, hear and feel – as never before – the thoroughgoing crisis of this deadly civilization. In a social order in which the “doors of perception” are systematically blocked, boarded up and covered with barbed wire, the liberation of the senses is an indispensable prerequisite for all other liberation.

“Sending messages” to the people is one of the main functions of business and government. It is an official monopoly of those in power – the rest of us are regarded as mere receivers. When the President of the United States says he is going to send a message, as during the Persian Gulf Massacre and the L.A. rebellion, “message” generally means troops. The L.A. rebels, however, sent strong messages of their own – messages of resistance, revolt and freedom – and these messages were heard by millions, loud and clear.

Revolution is, indeed, first and foremost a question of human expression. Those of us who continue to dream of Revolution –who have not despaired of creating a truly free society – proclaim not only our solidarity with the L.A. rebels and our determination to defend them, but also our conviction that their action has done more to bring fundamental questions to the fore than anything that has happened in years.

Unequivocally we are on the side of the L.A. rebels. Their enemies are ours, as is their scorn for a social order based on inequality and force-propped authority. Ours, too, are their desperation, their rage, their yearning for real life, and their sharp awareness that direct action is the only effective means of social betterment today.

First of all it is important to clear the air of the toxic ideological dust that the government and its news-machines have been scattering everywhere on the L.A. Rebellion and its aftermath. Rejecting the demeaning term “riot,” we recognize the rebellion as a truly revolutionary uprising that has challenged the exploitative foundations of U.S. plutocracy, exposed the fiction of U.S. democracy, and recharged all emancipatory forces in this country and the world. Indeed, far from being an isolated “riot,” the Los Angeles events sparked a wave of rebellion which so surpassed merely local importance that we may ultimately refer to them by date rather than place. Just as there was a May ‘68, there was an April-May ‘92.

In its direct attack on this society’s repressive institutions we recognize a practical critique that is near-total and, as such, a practical refutation of all the ideologists of the Left, Right and Middle whose partial critiques and reformist programs are little more than brand-names of stalemate, defeat and reaction.

Thus we also reject the ruling-class defamation – as set forth by countless politicians and journalists, including Mike Royko in the Chicago Tribune and Stanley “Hanging Judge” Crouch in the New York Times – that the L.A. rebels are merely “gangbangers, thugs, thieves,” “rioting street criminals,” “just another manifestation of barbaric opportunism,” and guilty of “criminal anarchy.” Such abuse reveals the smug hypocrisy of those who salute “pro- Democracy fighters” approved by the State Department, but abhor those who live and fight in the U.S. itself.

People who find themselves in a cop-free environment for the first time, conscious that they are freer than they have ever been in their lives, cannot be expected to be exemplars of free human beings in a free society. For, into their first tentative experience of freedom they bring with them a lifetime’s accumulation of un- freedom. It would be absurd to believe that those who have been bound their whole lives will, at the moment their fetters are suddenly and unexpectedly shaken off, immediately move with a dancer’s grace. No, they will not always do the right thing, and some will inevitably commit terrible wrongs. That excesses are a part of every rising of the oppressed is a truism – the American Revolution of 1776 was full of excesses – and only lickspittles of the status quo could denounce such uprisings because of the excesses of a few.

What is important is not merely to condemn brutality by those who rose up but also, as Sister Souljah observed at the time, to place such excesses in the context of the larger brutalizations which are everyday occurrences in U.S. cities. This alone can help us all to try to avoid them in the future. In any case, let us not lose a sense of proportion. The excesses committed by L.A. rebels were hardly the most remarkable developments in the rebellion there. Hysterical denunciations of violence by those who rule ring especially hollow. America’s CIA President and the news- commentators who followed his orders tried to convince us that four Black men accused of beating a white truck-driver in the first hours of the L.A. uprising are among the most fiendish ogres of all time. To put this in perspective, one has only to consider how many lost their lives in any given hour of “collateral damage” in the 1991 U.S. massacre of the people of Iraq.

False, too, and no less a part and parcel of the oppressors’ apologia, is the “consumerist” view of the rebellion, according to which the “rioters” vied with each other in the accumulation of commodities. The rebels’ principal action, however, was attacking and destroying police stations, government buildings and businesses regarded as symbols of the dominant order. The so- called looting was decidedly a secondary phenomenon for the   “underclass,” moreover, mass-media advertising is a cruel hoax: What you see is what you can’t afford and what you will never get.

We also reject the liberal theory – as advanced by James Ridgeway and others – that Police Chief Gates somehow engineered or managed the Rebellion: that he knew it was coming, refused (for personal as well as political reasons) to mobilize the L.A. police to stop it, and, in the long run, drew the most benefit from it. To thus elevate any of history’s least significant actors – police chiefs, politicians and other parasites – to positions of power they could never attain, is to reduce the masses to the status of history’s mere objects, inevitable victims of omnipotent authority.

The people in the streets of L.A. suffered many casualties, and for the time being have retreated. But surely it was they, not Gates or any other “prominent personality,” who made history during the last two days of April and the first of May 1992.

Finally, it is impossible to agree with those who pretend to see in the L.A. rebellion only a “tragedy.” That it had tragic qualities no one would deny, but it cannot be written off so simply. Had no rebellion occurred after the L.A. police verdict was announced – had the outrageous decision in the Rodney King case been passively accepted: That would have been a tragedy!

Why Los Angeles? Poet Larry Neal wrote that “America is the world’s greatest jailer, and we are all in jail.” It is characteristic of the New World Order that America’s most prison-like city, a veritable hothouse of institutionalized racism and an incubator of some of history’s most insidious innovations in Capital’s war on Labor, also happens to be what Mike Davis calls the “fastest growing metropolis in the advanced industrial world.”1 Nothing is less surprising than the fact that a major rebellion should break out in the city in which post-industrial misery has reached its highest tension. But the April-May ‘92 events cannot be reduced to the status of a “regional” phenomenon. Indeed, the rebellion revealed, in rough outline, contours and patterns that will go a long way in defining the struggle for human emancipation on this continent for years to come.

Los Angeles is the most militarized city in the United States, and its cops have long been notorious as the most fascistic in the land. The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) numbers 8000 officers, and the L.A. Sheriff’s Police adds 8000 more. On the first day of the uprising California Governor Wilson sent in 4000 National Guard troops. President Bush sent in 4500 U.S. Army troops and Marines as well as 1200 Federal law officers from the Border Patrol, Bureau of Prisons, the U.S. Marshal’s Service, U.S Park Police, Customs Service Helicopter Units, F.B.I. SWAT teams, and special teams from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. 1200 officers of the California Highway Patrol were also mobilized. In addition to these 26,900 armed defenders of Capital and the State, several thousand more were “on standby.” Moreover, L.A. has 3500 “private security” firms, all heavily armed.

That it took seventy-two hours for this huge military force to occupy the rebel neighborhoods shows that the uprising expressed the discontent and desire of a large community. Significantly, far more than in the Sixties ghetto uprisings, the L.A. rebellion quickly spread beyond the extensive liberated zones of the ghetto itself, igniting revolts among the oppressed in Hollywood, Long Beach, Pasadena and elsewhere. In all, some 10,000 businesses were destroyed. Damage was estimated at a billion dollars. Some 17,000 “rioters” were arrested. Close to 2000 were deported.

Within an hour or two of the first reports of “trouble” in L.A., police departments all over the United States were put in a state of “readiness.” Reserves were called in, street-patrols increased. And all over the country local police were invited to add their own lies and threats to the non-stop propaganda barrage provided by the obedient media.

Despite this nationwide display of police and military strength, despite an utter disregard for civil liberties by the forces of occupation which reached the proportions of a state of siege in Los Angeles, Las Vegas and elsewhere, and despite the endless half- truths and untruths droned on TV, radio, in the press and from the pulpits, the L.A. rebellion inspired a positive and active response from coast to coast. No matter how slickly the “official” State Department or media commentators – who can tell the difference? – tried to suppress the real news from L.A., or to whitewash it with racist images and innuendo, young recalcitrants throughout the country saw through the smokescreen and took action. Direct- action protests that in some cases turned into full-scale rebellions, sparked by news of the uprising in L.A. and in solidarity with it, occurred in at least forty-four cities in twenty states.2

As is true of the L.A. rebellion itself, few if any of these solidarity rebellions were led, or indeed, in any way affected, by the organized Left. Wholly unprepared for such an uprising, which some “leading theorists” had in fact proved to be impossible in what they like to call this “post-modern” epoch, the Left – with very few exceptions3 – contributed neither to the events themselves nor to their subsequent theoretical clarification. In what passes for a Left press in the U.S., coverage of the L.A. rebellion characteristically oscillated between hand-wringing genuflections on the “tragedy” and cynical self-congratulation derived from the pretense that the uprising, like all events everywhere at all times, once again “vindicated” this or that archaic program. At their best the Left sects lent some support to the post-rebellion demonstrations, on which, however, they too often tried to impose a reformist slant by tying demands for more meaningless jobs to the fortunes of the Democratic Party, whose disgusting presidential campaign addressed the L.A. rebellion by playing the “Sister Souljah card” to reemphasize the obvious fact   that Bill “More Cops on the Street” Clinton is just another white conservative politician behind that saxophone.

Far more interesting and consequential than the flip-flops of the would-be radical intelligentsia was the bold action of the homeless, who went from being on the streets to in the streets with lightning speed, and the revolutionary lucidity and daring of the hip-hop community, and insurgent working-class young people generally, who were of course the heart and soul of the rebellion.

Contrary to those who profess to see nothing but illiteracy and ignorance in the “younger generation,” we argue that America’s poorest teen-agers, most of them high-school dropouts, are in many and fundamental ways far wiser than those who want them kept in school to prepare for (non-existent) jobs. If the best way to learn is by doing, the first thing is to decide what is to be done. There is every reason to believe that in some seventy-two hours of popular, creative destruction, L.A.’s insurgent population learned more than they did in all the years they spent confined in classrooms. Almost in passing, therefore, they proposed the only workable solution to the much-discussed crisis of American education.

That the hip-hoppers and dropouts have much to learn is obvious, but they also have much to teach. It would be wrong to minimize the inevitable confusion and, in some cases, outright misogyny and anti-Korean hysteria, that afflict the hip-hop community and the rappers who are its best-known public expression. It is nonetheless crucial to recognize in this community, and its music, the emergence of a rebellious pride, a conscious rejection of dominant values and the institutions that uphold them, and, above all, a new radical self-awareness rooted in the growing mass consciousness that revolutionary change is possible. The self-organization of these kids in X-caps has helped set the stage for nothing less than the creation of a free society.

In hilarious contrast to the grim Puritanism and “realistic” rhetoric of the Left, L.A.’s new urban guerrillas insisted on having a good time. Queried by reporters as to why they were looting, many replied: “Because it’s fun!” A front-page May 1st Chicago Tribune photo is captioned: “Looters laugh while they carry away all they can.” Ironically, the banner headline above it reads: “A nightmare    of violence in L.A.” One class’s nightmare is another’s pleasant dream.

Coco Fusco has pointed out that “laughing at imposed identity, imposed rules, imposed laws” has long been an element in the struggle against imperialist violence. In April-May ‘92, humor was a major weapon. Those who took what they wanted from unguarded stores could hardly help making jokes about the “free market.” Less than a day after the rebellion began, stickers reading “Support Your Local Police: Beat Yourself Up” turned up on walls, windows and lamp-posts all across the land. Few things are more consciousness- expanding than a good joke at the expense of cops, bosses and bureaucrats. Moreover, as in the movement for women’s reproductive rights and against the Gulf Massacre, humorists – cartoonists, street-pranksters, billboard-revisers and graffiti- comedians – grasped the essential in the L.A. rebellion faster and more consequently than anyone else. Social theory separated from humor can no longer serve the cause of freedom.

The L.A. rebels’ emphasis on humor, and on the pleasure of looting and other forms of rebelling, indicates that their very starting-point was well beyond all reality-principle politics. In one of the most insightful articles on the rebellion, Robin D. G. Kelley called attention to “the joy and sense of empowerment” expressed on the faces of the young Black and Latino poor, “seizing property and destroying what many regarded as symbols of domination.”4 In this joy and sense of empowerment lies the only future worth dreaming about.

The three-day L.A. insurrection of ‘92 was as spontaneous as the workers’ uprising in Hungary in 1956, the Paris rebellion of May ‘68, and the General Strike in Trinidad in 1970, and always will retain its honored place in the company of these and other great leaps toward freedom. Today, when all that’s left of the traditional Left are a few dried-up rinds of long-dead movements, those who have nothing to lose continue to offer us fresh fruit from the Tree of Life.

During the L.A. rebellion it became clear that even the seemingly simplest bits of news were saturated with falsehood. Again and again we were told, for example, that “the violence began shortly after the announcement of the verdict” – as if the racist verdict itself was not an act of violence, and as if the entire King case did not show how thoroughly violence pervaded the LAPD’s daily routine, and the American Way of Life. Another dishonest refrain vented the media’s consternation that the L.A. rebels were “burning down their own neighborhood.” Their own? Does anyone actually believe that people forced to live in these depressed and terrorized communities own or control them?

Indeed, a central lesson of the rebellion was the extent to which the establishment media, and what passes as common sense among racists, encourages white Americans to deny what they see. Thus a juror maintained that King was “directing the action” and “in complete control” as he lay helpless with police raining blow after blow on him. A Chicago Tribune headline, in a rare burst of lucidity, summarized the jury’s (il)logic: “What we thought we saw in the videotape didn’t happen.”

The acquitters of the cops who assaulted Rodney King showed a terrifying ability to construct a white “Semiotext(e)” which enabled them to deny the brutality of those in power, no matter how many times they watched it. Undoubtedly even now a small army of academics is feverishly trying to make the fashions of “deconstruction” fit the realities of Los Angeles. To the extent that such intellectuals fail to see that oppression and freedom (and not just infinitely manipulatable images) are at issue, they will not manage to break from the sorry apologetics characteristic of the Paul de Man(ic) capitulation to fascism by deconstruction’s founder and the craven decision of the Simi Valley jurors.

It was not just the jury’s behavior, but the entire performance of the press and TV commentators which showed how it is possible to be literally blinded by racism. Given the arrest records, and the pictures of the rebellion, there can be no doubt that community reaction to the King verdict was, to use a term that universities have not yet fully emptied of meaning, a multicultural one. 

Latino youth poured into the streets alongside African- Americans and suffered more arrests and deportations than any other group. Many of the rebels had recently come from Central American nations whose recent histories of resistance ensured that the presence of U.S. tanks was not absolutely overawing. Korean- Americans came to Justice for King rallies in great numbers and suffered hundreds of arrests. Whites formed a significant part of rebellious crowds and figured prominently in many of the most striking photographs of the uprising. Police arrested over a thousand whites.

Typically, however, when the New York Times revisited the scenes of the rebellion in November 1992, its writers managed to make this white participation vanish altogether. “The city’s white population,” according to the Times, “while largely untouched by the riot, was shaken by the uprising it witnessed.”

From the moment when a young African-American woman challenged Mayor Bradley at a pre-rebellion protest meeting – “We can’t rely on these people (Bradley et al.) to act. You (the crowd) know what to do” – women played leading roles in the streets. A New York Times photo taken shortly thereafter, but miles away, showed five people shouting, according to the caption, “insults and threats at the police”: four were women. Three of four laughing looters pictured on the front page of May Day’s Chicago Tribune were women. Some young Latina mothers brought babies with them as they looted. A British reporter noticed a Black woman methodically pitching rocks through the windows of the L.A. Times building. In Hollywood, a “mob of little white girls” – as a radio announcer put it – helped themselves to the entire stock of a large lingerie store. An exciting follow-up to the largest women’s demonstration in U.S. history – the march for reproductive rights in Washington D.C. a few weeks earlier – the L.A. rebellion gave real substance to that overworked phrase: “The Year of the Woman.”

Despite all this, far and away the media’s dominant image of the uprising was the beating of the white truck-driver, Reginald Denny, by young Black men. Armed with a small bit of videotape, the press and TV imposed its New World Order on the varied, creative, living activity of the rebellion through an insistent focus on Denny.

Thus the supposedly menacing African-American male, not police brutality, became the media’s central issue. Denny’s victimization, on this view, did not just equal King’s. It explained King’s, and the Simi Valley verdict. Black men, familiarly enough, were the problem. They were, as Quayle’s and Bush’s carefully rehearsed sound bites suggested, the pathological products of the collapse of the Black family and of incendiary hip-hop profiteers. Black women came to be cast, in the television drama of South Central, not as actors in their own behalf, but as seduced spectators, as children bearing uncontrollable children and even as mindless Murphy Brown fans driven to single parenthood by the evil example of a rich, white, forty-something sitcom heroine.

Framing the “riot” as the affair of young Black males, the news could make little sense of the multiracial and multiethnic participation in it. As Mike Davis wrote, “You hear commentators going on and on about Black youth while in fact you’re seeing other ethnicities on the screen.”5 What, for example, were so many white kids doing pouring into the streets, putting themselves in harm’s way? Why were the arrested so largely Latino? These questions were mostly ignored.

Very occasionally, a news magazine briefly quoted an “expert” to the effect that Los Angeles was a “class riot,” with the poor, across color lines, acting out of a common helplessness. This analysis, vastly better than anything else on offer in the popular press, suffers from the tendency of American intellectuals to suppose that if something is about class, it is therefore not about race. The L.A. rebellion’s clear class content ought not to obscure the fact that it came out of a clear demand for racial justice. “Middle-class” African-American youths, including students from the University of Southern California, University of California/Los Angeles and the California State campuses, participated energetically in the rebellion. White youth who joined the action were doing more than just expressing class grievances. They were taking decisive steps toward the abolition of whiteness by joining a “race riot” to attack authority rather than to attack African- Americans. That’s news, but you’d never know it from the newspapers.

When coverage did stray from the “raging Black men versus white society” framework, it usually did so only to emphasize the tensions between African-Americans and Korean storeowners and, more recently, between Blacks and Latinos. Both these areas of tension are of tremendous importance. That the media seems able to locate anti-Asian and anti-Latino (and anti-Arab and anti- Semitic) prejudices only when such attitudes can be alleged to have surfaced in the Black community, must not lead us to ignore real differences among people of color in the United States. But the lesson of the L.A. uprising is anything but the hopeless conclusion that unity is impossible. The outrage at the King verdict was multiracial and the cry “No Justice! No Peace!” went up loudly in several languages.

In the case of Black-Latino relations, there is little evidence that this initial impulse toward unity dramatically gave way to infighting as the rebellion progressed. Jack Miles’ distended exercise in nativism, “Blacks vs. Browns,” which disgraced the pages of the October 1992 issue of The Atlantic, labored mightily to make the events of April-May 1992 fit its title. They don’t, even on Miles’ tortured reading of them. Subheads like “A New Paradigm: Blacks vs. Latinos” are followed jarringly in Miles’ essay by discussions of divisions within the Latino population, and by evidence of the common purpose of Blacks and Central Americans in the rebellion. Clearly there are Black-Latino conflicts in Los Angeles. The recent battles over construction jobs reflect as much. But as in gang rivalries, the experience of urban rebellion did not aggravate Black-Latino divisions so much as it defused them.

The case of Black-Korean conflict raises far more troubling issues. Korean-American merchants suffered disproportionate losses to looters and especially to arsonists. Korean-American ownership of liquor stores, and other eminently lootable enterprises, heightened tensions in the wake of the very light sentence of storeowner Suon Ja Du for the murder of Black teenager Latasha Harlins, and helped account for this pattern. Credit policies, which keep Asian businessmen in the ghettoes (from which white capital has largely fled) and which keep African-Americans from starting businesses, obviously play a role in exacerbating problems between Blacks and Koreans. Day-to-day encounters in stores are virtually programmed to explode with both sides feeling trapped and threatened.

It would be foolish to suppose that in such situations storekeeper-customer problems remain only that, and do not bleed over into larger patterns of Black-Korean relations. It simply is not the case, for example, that anti-Korean hip-hop lyrics are confined to expressing class hatred.

But facing such grim reality is not to fantasize, as the media did, that all reality is inescapably grim where relations among America’s victims are concerned. The larger story of the Los Angeles response, and the national response, and the Korean-American response, to the King verdict refutes such despair-mongering by showing the tremendous pressure that young people can exert to breakthechainswhichholdthesufferingunderthedeath- sentence of race and class oppression.

The long-range significance of the L.A. rebellion cannot be appreciated apart from the global ecological crisis. The fact that the largest urban upheaval in the U.S. in this century has been ignored by the environmental press is one more sign – and a definitive one – that middle-class environmentalism is indissolubly allied to the pollutocratic Establishment it pretends to oppose.

Clearly the rebellion, and the nationwide response it engendered, are seething with ecological implications. An extraordinary example of “acting locally,” inevitably it will affect global thinking for a long time to come.

The rebellion provided, for example, a dramatic eye-opening prelude to the Earth-rapers’ orgy known as the “Earth Summit” in Rio de Janeiro a few weeks later. The delegates (mostly heads of state) straight-facedly resolved that capitalism – an inherently ecocidal social system – is compatible with a healthy planet. But L.A.’s smoldering ruins and overflowing prisons joined the polluted air that always afflicts the city to give these bureaucrats the lie, and showed all the world that the Land of Capitalism par excellence is one of the sickest societies anywhere.

In this era of massive destruction of rainforests and other wild places, the contradiction between city and “countryside” has become central to all struggles for social change. Anyone who knows the ABCs of ecology knows that massive restoration of wilderness is today an urgent priority, second to none – indeed, the precondition for the continuation of life on this planet – and that such restoration requires, in turn, massive dismantling of industrial society’s deadly cities. In this light, the festive community burning of L.A.’s shopping malls can be regarded not only as a sensible response to unlivable ghetto conditions, but also as an ecologically sound step toward doing away with America’s poisonous urban wastelands. Objectively, in the U.S. government’s war against wildlife and wilderness, the L.A. rebels were on the side of the wild.

Subjectively, however, the rebellion’s ecological dimension stands out in even bolder relief. The fact that Black teenagers increasingly recognize themselves as an endangered species – this was in fact the theme of one of the most popular local rap recordings just before and during the rebellion – is surely one of the major revolutions in consciousness of our time. Equally suggestive, in this regard, is the fact that the planting of new trees – to bring beauty to L.A.’s non-white communities – is a major demand in the program put forth by the Bloods and Crips for the reconstruction of the city.

The rebels’ point of departure, moreover, was light-years beyond the phony “jobs versus environment” dichotomy that miserabilist demagogues of all persuasions use to paralyze the unwary. In demanding not jobs but life, and all the freedom and fullness thereof, the L.A. rebels – among whom registered voters were undoubtedly a rarity – revealed strong affinities with the most radical “no-compromise” wing of the environmental movement.

“Mainstream” environmentalism continues to be dominated by racist corporate-minded executives who, by definition, are unwilling to challenge the interests of white supremacy, Capital and the capitalist State. In the past twenty years, the mushroom growth of the National Wildlife Federation, the Audubon Society, the Sierra Club, etc., has coincided with the destruction of more U.S. wilderness than was destroyed in the preceding half-century. These groups, which are run as businesses by bureaucrats who think and act like businessmen, are to the rank-and-file eco- activist what the AFL-CIO bureaucracy is to the working class: a privileged elite whose prime function is to control the fury – i.e., the revolutionary creativity – of those at the bottom.

The L.A. rebels manifested exactly what is needed to turn environmentalism into a real and effective movement: desperation, defiance, energy, a sense of the unbearable boredom and misery of American life today, a readiness to improvise, a willingness to take risks and a beautiful determination to win release from misery. With such outsiders’ perspective to inspire and guide the actions of a new movement, an ecologically healthy planet could become a reality instead of a slogan.

Those who are farthest from the administration of power, no matter how powerless they often feel, retain always the power to disrupt and therefore, potentially, the power to overturn the entire repressive order.

In the solidarity of all those who are outside existing power relations lies our only chance of vanquishing the ecocidal megamachine. Coming at a time when the infrastructures of America’s cities are on the verge of collapse, the L.A. rebellion has opened exciting possibilities for the development of heretofore undreamed-of combat-alliances that could cut across and even destroy the debilitating barriers set up by short-sighted and self- serving “single-issue” groups.

Now is a time of new beginnings, and thus a time to make new connections. There is not an eco-activist anywhere who would not benefit from reading Malcolm X – the favorite author of the L.A. rebels – and radical ecologists and conservation biologists would do well not only to make their knowledge more accessible to those who need it most, but also to find ways of linking their struggles to the struggles of the oppressed people who can really change things for the better. Such links would seem to be particularly feasible –

Outsiders of the world, unite! Freedom Now! Earth First! These three watchwords are for us but one.

- Chicago Surrealist Group, 1992

NOTES:

1 Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Vintage, 1992). This book provides essential background for understanding the L.A. rebellion.

2 Birmingham, Alabama; Arcata, Berkeley, Davis, El Cerrito, Irvine, Marin County, Oakland, Palo Alto, Pinole, Riverside, San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose, San Mateo, and Santa Cruz, California; Boulder and Denver, Colorado; Bridgeport, Connecticut; Miami and Tampa, Florida; Atlanta, Georgia; Peoria, Illinois; Minneapolis, Minnesota; St. Louis and Warrensburg, Missouri; Jersey City, New Jersey; Lincoln and Omaha, Nebraska; Las Vegas, Nevada; New Rochelle and New York, New York; Toledo, Ohio; Eugene, Oregon; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Charleston, South Carolina; Austin and Dallas, Texas; Olympia and Seattle, Washington; Beloit, Madison and Milwaukee, Wisconsin; and Washington, D.C. Solidarity demonstrations also took place in Halifax, Toronto and Vancouver, Canada, as well as in Athens, Berlin, Paris, and Rome.

3 In addition to the writings by Mike Davis and Robin D. G. Kelley cited elsewhere in these notes, important material on the L.A. rebellion also appeared in News & Letters (59 East Van Buren, Chicago, IL 60605) and Against the Current (Center for Changes, 7012 Michigan Avenue, Detroit, MI 48210).

4 Robin D. G. Kelley, “Straight from Underground,” The Nation (June 8, 1992), 793-796.

5 Mike Davis, L.A. Was Just the Beginning: Urban Revolt in the United States: A Thousand Points of Light (Open Pamphlet Magazine Series, PO Box 2726, Westfield, NJ 07091).

Now, if white people want to help, they can help. But they can't join. They can help in the white community, but they can't join. We accept their help. They can form the White Friends of the Organization of Afro-American Unity and work in the white community on white people and change their attitude toward us. They don't ever need to come among us and change our attitude. We've had enough of them working around us trying to change our attitude. That's what got us all messed up. So we don't question their sincerity, we don't question their motives, we don't question their integrity. We just encourage them to use it somewhere else in the white community. If they can use all of this sincerity in the white community to make the white community act better toward us, then we'll say, "Those are good white folks." But they don't have to come around us, smiling at us and showing us all their teeth like white Uncle Toms, to try and make themselves acceptable to us. The White Friends of the Organization of Afro American Unity, let them work in the white community.

Whites who are sincere don’t accomplish anything by joining Negro organizations and making them integrated. Whites who are sincere should organize among themselves and figure out some strategy to break down prejudice that exists in white communities. This is where they can function more intelligently and more effectively, in the white community itself, and this has never been done.

 If a white man wants to be your ally, what does he think of John Brown? You know what John Brown did? He went to war. He was a white man who went to war against white people to help free the slaves.

If we want some white allies, we need the kind John Brown was, or we don't need any.

Everybody in the black community must organize, and then we decide whether we will have alliance with other people or not, but not until we are organized.

You can't resist if you're unconscious. If the person is not resisting there is absolutely no reason for force....

Officer Becky Sotherland, 32, of the Pine Ridge tribal police screams at a man to get into her vehicle as he lay on the ground helpless and handcuffed.

The man, incapacitated, unresponsive, and unable to get into the vehicle, is hit with a stun gun repeatedly as Sotherland yells at him to get in the car threatening that, “It’s gonna get you again,” referring to the 50,000 volts of electrical current delivered by the taser.

Sotherland continually brutalizes the man until finally horrified onlookers begin yelling for the assault to stop, telling the officer they will help get the man into the vehicle themselves, as they are disgusted at the scene taking place before their eyes.

Sotherland obviously wasn’t using the stun gun as a means of defense, as the man is laying helplessly on the ground handcuffed, rather she is using it as a means of sadistic punishment in an attempt to motivate him to get into her police cruiser as she is seemingly too lazy to simply put the suspect into the cruiser herself.

The scene appears to be on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation somewhere in the Wounded Knee District where a dark blue tribal police SUV is parked in the driveway of a HUD home in a housing project. There is a police officer who appears to be a white woman with bleached white hair who is standing on the sidewalk at the end of the driveway near the home. Her name is Officer Sutherland. She is dressed in her blue police uniform and is holding a Stun Taser gun and has just shot a male Native American with it. The male Native American is lying on his side and on the ground between the sidewalk and the Police SUV. He is unable to move and is still hooked up to the Taser’s wiring.

The woman officer is standing upright, looking down on her victim and repeatedly pulls the Taser trigger again and again and again and doesn’t stop pulling the Taser trigger until around the 20th time. There is a crowd of older teen agers yelling at the officer begging her to stop using the Taser on her victim. A by-stander is holding the video camera and providing commentary.

The woman officer can be heard in the background screaming at her victim; "I’m going to hit you again! There it is! Hurry up…get into the car before I hit you again, hurry up…I’m going to hit you again if you don’t get into the car…Get up! Get into the car!” The buzzing sound of the Taser goes off again and again. The victim can be heard moaning but is completely immobilized and is unable to move. The cop keeps screaming…”Get up! Get into the car!

Someone in the crowd says; “This is about the 13th time they used the Taser on him. We’ve been watching for about a half an hour.” The person with the camera scream’s at the officer; “Stop Tasing him! Help him up! One of you boys go over there and help him up! His is just slobbering, they Tased him like 20 times now!”

 It seems like every time I write about the Pine Ridge Police Department some officer comes to arrest me for some dumb reason. This time, it doesn’t matter. I’m going to continue to report it the way I see it because what has happened with the Taser is flat out wrong and is a life threatening situation for the victim. This woman officer needs to be arrested for attempted murder.

They go into detox or a holding cell for 8 hours then get an hour of community service, Sometimes they’re out before your shift is over, causing trouble.

The President of the Oglala Sioux Tribe Bryan Brewer weighed in on Facebook as well. His message reads; “Good morning, this message is to our people who live in the Wounded Knee district and the Pine Ridge reservation. Officer Sutherland has been placed on suspension until further investigation. This investigation will happen very soon. The video camera she carries has yet to be reviewed. I will notify the people when further action is taken. Wopila.

Another post is from Mary H. Young Bear, “Good morning Mr. President. Thank you for the news of Officer Sutherland. That was absolutely police brutality. She abused her power and authority. No one should be above the law. She is very dangerous to the citizens of the reservation. She shouldn’t be allowed to go to another district. Wopila tankan!”

The entire reservation Public Safety system is in shambles and is in dire need of repair. The officers drive through town at neck breaking speeds, totally ignoring the safety of the general public. They harass anyone who they have personal issues with and they disregard the rights of the citizens. Officer Sutherland represents every one of the reservation police departments and their lack of concern, professionalism and sympathy for the very Oyate that they serve is atrocious.

The victim has every right to file a multi-million dollar lawsuit against the Oglala Sioux Tribal Public Safety department and should immediately take this into federal court. Public Safety is a contracted program and it is being contracted from the federal system. Other officers, their supervisors and everyone in between should be reprimanded and even terminated from their positions. The Tribal Law & Order committee should immediately revoke Public Safety’s charter. A full investigation by the Inspector General, not by the tribe itself or by Public Safety, should be done and it should be done immediately.

We have been living under the violent rule of the tribal IRA government for too long and its time for the Oyate to rise up and be heard.

Oglala Sioux Police tasers helpless Lakota man 10 to 20 times

Caught on video

Oglala police officer, non-Indian, repeatedly tasers helpless Lakota man

By Brenda Norrell
Indigenous Resistance

MANDERSON, Pine Ridge, South Dakota -- Oglala Sioux police officer Becky Sotherland, non-Indian, tasered a helpless Lakota man on the ground 10 to 20 times. The abuse was caught on video.

Officer Sotherland claimed she was trying to wake the man up by repeatedly tasering him.
The Lakota man, 32, from Manderson, survived this police attack. However, more than 540 people have died as a result of being tasered.
The repeated tasering by this officer also magnifies the problem with poorly-trained, non-Indian police officers on Indian lands. 

While some non-Indian officers on Indian lands are poorly-trained, or simply lacking in common sense, others are racist and mean, repeatedly carrying out excessive force.
According to MSNBC in a previous article, Sotherland is white and not a tribal member.

    Sotherland, 32, is somewhat of an oddity on the force and the reservation. Unlike most of       her colleagues, she’s not a member of the tribe. She’s a blonde-haired, blue-eyed, former       hair salon-owner, former city coroner who describes herself as a “white mutt.”

The video of the tasering attack is available on Facebook. It has been shared 4,511 times since the police attack occurred on Friday.
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=756477774413582

The Rapid City Journal, known for its bordertown journalism, failed in its coverage of this crucial incident. 

The Rapid City Journal says the man was tasered "several times" by the officer.
Last Real Indians, however, shared Sis Cliff's video of the incident on Facebook, and said the man was actually tasered 10 to 20 times. 

Watch the video and listen. It is not several.

Further, the Rapid City Journal goes from bad to worse with its coverage of this police abuse. The Journal continues the typical media response of covering up for police abuse with a second story on the officer's "good record."

Check back for updates

From the Keystone State to the Golden State: The need for a national movement to liberate political prisoners

by Robert Saleem Holbrook

In Pennsylvania, former Black Panthers and Black Liberation Army members Russell Maroon Shoatz, Joseph JoJo Bowens, Clifford Lumumba Futch and Fred Muhammad Burton enter their 40th year in captivity. Up the road in USP Allenwood, Pennsylvania BLA member Sundiata Acoli is denied parole yet again by the state of New Jersey and given a 15-year parole hit, essentially a terminal hit, as Brother Sundiata is in his mid-70s.

In New York, former Black Panthers and Black Liberation Army members Jalil Muntaqim, Sekou Odinga, Herman Bell, Abdul Majid and Robert Seth Hayes enter their fourth decade in prison as well. Until recently in the federal Admax in Florence, Colorado, now at USP Victorville in Adelanto, Calif., former Black Liberation Army member Dr. Mutulu Shakur, the stepfather of the late Tupac Shakur, enters his third decade in captivity.

In Omaha, Nebraska, former Black Panthers Mondo we Langa and Ed Poindexter enter their 40th year in captivity, while in Angola, Louisiana, former Black Panther Albert Woodfox enters his 40th year in captivity, 36 of them in isolation. In California, the “Golden Gulag,” comrades Hugo Pinell and Ruchell Cinque Magee are on the verge of their 50th year of imprisonment. In the federal system, Puerto Rican Independence political prisoner Oscar Lopez Rivera is entering his 30th year of captivity for fighting for the independence of Puerto Rico.

The names represented in this article are just the “known” political prisoners and no disrespect to any brothas and sistas left off the list. The purpose of the list is to illustrate the current plight of our movement’s political prisoners, who, despite surviving countless hostile encounters with the state’s security forces, are on the verge of succumbing to old age and infirmities behind the walls and gun towers of the empire’s Prison Industrial Complex.

There is no cause celebre movement calling for these men’s release or amnesty because they represent an unrepentant Black-New Afrikan political militancy and drive for self-determination, and their very example is threatening to a United States that currently has the highest disproportion of wealth between the rich and poor than at any time within its history. In addition, in the eyes of the state, these men committed the most deplorable offense an oppressed minority or group can commit and that is to use armed struggle as a political response and expression to state repression and violence.

Our movement’s political prisoners, who, despite surviving countless hostile encounters with the state’s security forces, are on the verge of succumbing to old age and infirmities behind the walls and gun towers of the empire’s Prison Industrial Complex.

The government claims our political prisoners are “terrorists” because they picked up arms in pursuit of political objectives. However, the truth is these groups turned to arms only as a last resort after the government, through COINTELPRO, waged an illegal war against members of the Black Liberation Movement. This illegal war resulted not only in false arrests and imprisonment, but also assassinations and ultimately the destruction of the Black Panther Party as a political representative of the Black underclass within the Black colonies – the hoods and ghettos – of the United States.

Any question of whether our political prisoners were right or wrong in resorting to armed struggle during that turbulent period in Amerikan history should be irrelevant since history has shown their actions were justified by the repressive circumstances of the times. This was a time when state sponsored racial terrorism was practiced extensively in the Southern United States against Afrikan Americans, and unarmed civil rights activists were murdered, disappeared and bombed out of existence by not only white vigilante groups like the KKK and White Citizens Councils (now called Conservative Citizens Councils) but also with the cooperation and tacit support of state actors such as law enforcement, politicians etc.

Meanwhile, up North the Black colonies exploded in riots and rebellion in response to an epidemic of police brutality, mass unemployment and widespread Black disenfranchisement. The period of 1965-1972 has often been described as the second Amerikan civil war and, for members of the Black Liberation Movement, it was a war.

In 2014, however, we are led to believe that the war is long over and the barriers to Afrikan American empowerment have been shattered. Obama is president and Holder is U.S. attorney general.

Yet, if the war is over, why are our political prisoners still detained? Why are they still labeled “terrorists”? The government claims they are terrorists, but our political prisoners never waged war on a defenseless population. Their guns were aimed at armed police or other targets of the government who were also armed. Compare our political prisoners’ conduct with the racist right wing white vigilantes in the South who lynched, shot, raped and bombed unarmed Afrikan American men, women and children to maintain white supremacy while Southern state governments and the federal government looked the other way.

The government also claims amnesty is out of the question because our political prisoners should not be forgiven for targeting and terrorizing law enforcement agencies and government personnel across the empire. Nor for the enduring harm which the government claims was caused to families of fallen police officers. However, why is healing and amnesty always a one-way street? Why are we as Afrikan Americans constantly reminded to forgive and grant amnesty to the perpetrators of the 400 years of terror our ancestors endured in the United States, first during the 300 years of chattel slavery and then during 100 years of Jim Crow-era American apartheid – segregation?

Any question of whether our political prisoners were right or wrong in resorting to armed struggle during that turbulent period in Amerikan history should be irrelevant since history has shown their actions were justified by the repressive circumstances of the times.

The entire soil of the Southern United States is so drenched with the blood and suffering of our ancestors – and of Native Americans – from the eras of colonial expansion, chattel slavery and segregation – crimes against our ancestors’ humanity – that it should not only constitute hallowed ground but should also be identified as one of the largest crime scenes on the planet. This we are asked to pardon?

Even from a more contemporary angle, we are asked to forgive and offer amnesty to the perpetrators who murdered thousands of Afrikan Americans during the struggle to end Jim Crow segregation from 1952 to 1966. “Get over it” or “That was the past” are common rebukes that one encounters when raising this specter of state-sponsored terrorism in America.

Seriously, we are asked to “put this behind us” and move on with our lives as if nothing happened and, even worse, as if it doesn’t matter. At the same time, the government refuses to grant amnesty to an oppressed minority’s freedom fighters who are now imprisoned by the state.

We should not be surprised that the state would be opposed to amnesty for our political prisoners given that in the United States, Black life has historically been and is presently viewed by the state as “worthless” and held in less regard than white life. This is why our freedom fighters are condemned to die in prison while the white perpetrators of Southern terror against Afrikan Americans are rehabilitated into the “New South,” and the federal agents behind COINTELPRO and their law enforcement partners have retired on comfortable government pensions. The government certainly has not put any challenges to it behind it.

We must also understand that the issue of our political prisoners will not be addressed from a compassionate standpoint in the eyes of the government. As Malcolm X said: “That whole thing about appealing to the moral conscience of America – America’s conscience is bankrupt. She lost all conscience a long time ago.” To deal with this issue we must first deal with ourselves.

No conversation about the plight of our political prisoners can be complete without addressing the dismal failure of the majority of our civil rights, cultural and political movements to keep political prisoners at the forefront of their agendas. This failure is a stain on our national character, and when I say national character, I am referring to the descendants of enslaved Afrikans in the United States, who constitute a distinct nation within the United States.

Many of our misleaders tell us that the Civil Rights and Black Liberation Movement struggles are over and obsolete and that enfranchisement and self-determination have been attained. Our misleaders have granted amnesty to the government for its past transgressions, yet apparently the government hasn’t gotten that memo.

In conflict and war, only after the cessation of hostilities is amnesty granted. If widespread racial discrimination and structural racial injustice have been defeated, why are our freedom fighters still imprisoned decades after the supposed attainment of our people’s full rights under the Constitution? Our political prisoners have been left behind.

No conversation about the plight of our political prisoners can be complete without addressing the dismal failure of the majority of our civil rights, cultural and political movements to keep political prisoners at the forefront of their agendas.

Many of our so-called leaders and professors can issue glowing tributes to Mandela on his recent passing that praise his militant opposition to apartheid, yet where are their voices and platform when it comes to our Mandelas in U.S. custody for over four decades?

Even some of our so-called radical and culturally conscious leaders have performed dismally in the struggle to support and liberate our political prisoners. Why do they not travel to Cuba and meet with Assata in a show of solidarity and support? Unfortunately, far too few in number are professors like Georgia State University Akinyele Omowale Umoja, who has produced scholarly work on the political-military history and lessons of Black armed resistance and defense in the United States.

Our so-called leaders and representatives must break free of their fear of consequences for supporting our political prisoners. For if, as many of them tell us, we are free and times have changed, then why do they fear consequences from the government? If they are representatives and/or spokespersons of our people, why are they not speaking out on behalf of our political prisoners who have paid the ultimate sacrifice in our people’s long struggle in the United States?

Herein lies the contradiction: In the United States, we are free only within acceptable boundaries of dissent determined by the state that is responsible for our collective lack of power as a people. To detour from these acceptable boundaries of dissent would invite repercussion from the state.

The sad irony in this is that the repercussions our so-called leaders would face are not mortal consequences nor would they particularly endanger their freedom. That is no longer the primary modus operandi of the government in this so-called post-racial United States.

The repercussions these misleaders would face for siding with the true representatives of our people is ostracism and removal from the corridors of state power and celebrity. They would no longer be invited to grand political photo-op gatherings or power summits; their invitations to speak at conventions and on cable television would dry up.

In short, they would be thrown back to the ‘hood. Tragically, this is what it has come down to: No one wants to be tossed from their comfortable perch in an imperial United States. These are tough and uncomfortable statements but they are also necessary ones in an era of neocolonialism, when the state has us acting against our own interests. We must call out those who claim to represent us and, so long as that criticism is constructive, no one should be immune from it.

Our so-called leaders and representatives must break free of their fear of consequences for supporting our political prisoners. For if, as many of them tell us, we are free and times have changed, then why do they fear consequences from the government?

Presently the plight of our political prisoners is being raised in front of the United Nations Human Rights Committee tasked with studying reports concerning the United States’ compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), a treaty ratified by the United States in 1992. In March of 2014,Efia Nwangaza, a member of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement and the U.S. Human Rights Network, accompanied a delegation of activists to Geneva, Switzerland, to specifically represent political prisoners and report to the committee on the United States’ failure to comply with the ICCPR. Among those failures are the continued use of prolonged solitary confinement on political prisoners and the continued imprisonment of political prisoners in the United States due to their political beliefs.

The delegation was successful in convincing Cuba, Venezuela and South Africa to call for the unconditional release of all U.S. political prisoners. China and Russia also denounced the United States human rights record, pointing out its double standard of condemning smaller countries for human rights abuses while ignoring and perpetuating human rights abuses within its own borders.

The delegation was successful in convincing Cuba, Venezuela and South Africa to call for the unconditional release of all U.S. political prisoners.

Dr. Zonke Zaneke Majodina and Efia Nwangaza both participated in the ICCPR in Geneva March 14-15, 2014, Dr. Majodina as a member of the U.N. Human Rights Commission and Nwangaza to testify on behalf of U.S. political prisoners. Dr. Majodina cited Herman Wallace, who died four days after his release, which was blocked for decades solely because of the warden’s fear of “Black Pantherism.” “Cuba, Venezuela and South Africa called for the unconditional release of all U.S. political prisoners,” Ms. Nwangaza said. Both women called for U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture Juan Mendez to be given unfettered access to all prisons in the U.S.

Sister Nwangaza is preparing another report for submission to the next United Nations Human Rights Committee. If anyone is interested in building support for this delegation and report, please contact Sister Efia Nwangaza atenjericho@gmail.com. Or call Malcolm X Center for Self Determination Executive Director Nwangaza at 864-239-0470 and inquire how you can support her efforts to liberate our political prisoners. The only way we can give these reports muscle is by building a movement behind them.

People can also help by joining your local Jericho Chapter (www.thejerichomovement.com) or starting a chapter of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (www.mxgm.org). Also sign up to say, “Hands Off Assata,” at www. assatashakur.org. Support the Human Rights Coalition (www.hrcoalition.org) and organize to pressure leaders and organizations that claim to represent us socially, politically and culturally to mobilize locally and nationally in support of the freedom of our political prisoners.

Grassroots movements should reach out to our political prisoners and put them on their advisory councils and boards. In Pennsylvania, the Human Rights Coalition has had the privilege of having BLA political prisoner Russell Maroon Shoatz as its co-founder and advisor, and his counsel has charted and expanded HRC’s vision and reach. We recommend other movements do the same.

The vision and experience of these veteran freedom fighters is essential for our collective struggle to roll back the War on Drugs, a war that has ultimately turned into a war against communities and people of color and spawned in its wake the monster of mass imprisonment, which has bled our communities of their youth and future.

If we respect our struggle, we must honor and bring home our freedom fighters who struggled first to forge the way for us. In the words of Assata Shakur, “We have nothing to lose but our chains.”

If we respect our struggle, we must honor and bring home our freedom fighters who struggled first to forge the way for us.

Send our brother some love and light: Robert Saleem Holbrook, BL-5140, SCI Coal Township, 1 Kelley Dr., Coal Township PA 17866, salimmwasi@gmail.com.

DIVERSITY – within – UNITY?

International Insanity

In Afghanistan almost twelve million Afghans live in poverty. Nine million suffer hunger and are in danger of starving.