Origins of La Commune
by midtowng | 10/30/2008 05:11:00 PM
A virus broke out in Paris in 1871, and within days most of the city was infected. The French government considered the disease to be so serious that anyone found to be infected was immediately executed.

However, this virus wasn't biological. The virus came in the form of an idea.
That idea had a name: La Commune.





You can't tell the story of the Paris Commune in isolation. The history of The Commune is inseparably connected to the Revolutionary Commune, which is inseparable from medieval France.

Commune Origins

When most people think of a commune they probably think of free love and hippies. The origins of the commune are anything but.

The first communes were formed in Europe in response to the viking invasions. At the heart of the commune was a sworn allegiance of mutual defense. Forming a community government was a natural, but secondary feature.
Nevertheless, forming a commune is a revolutionary act. It's a challenge to any claim of sovereignty from the upper class. A good example of this was the small town of Laon in 1112.

The nobles of Laon had preyed on the peasants for decades, but it was the arrival of Bishop Gaudry that forced the issue. He was a violent and unsavory man that soon earned the antipathy of the community.
While the bishop was out of town in 1109 the peasants bribed the local clergy and knights, as well as the King of France, to grant them a communal charter. When the bishop returned he was furious.

In 1112 the bribe money had been spent and the Bishop longed for this previously unfettered power over the serfs. So he invited the King to Laon under the pretext of celebrating the Holy Week, where he bribed the King. The charter was annulled and the King ordered the magistrates of the commune to cease their functions.
The outrage was so palatable that the King left the very next day, missing much of the Holy Week celebrations. As long as the commune existed the peasants weren't serfs. As long as the commune existed they were free.

"Pooh! I die by the hands of such fellows!"
- Bishop Gaudry, two days before his death

On the fourth day of Easter a mob of hundreds suddenly appeared. Armed with pikes, axes, clubs, and swords, they rushed the bishop's palace where a group of knights had agreed to protect him. The first three knights to appear were quickly killed and the rest lost their heart.
The bishop dressed himself as a servant and hid in the church cellar. It didn't save him. The mob then set the bishop's palace on fire and the flames jumped to the cathedral, both of which burnt down.


rebuilt cathedral in Laon

The following day the people realized what they had done, and that the King's punishment would be severe. The people of Laon went into hiding. When news of the ghost town reached neighboring areas, peasant from all over flocked to Laon to loot it.
Sure enough the King's army did march on Laon and all the residents that took part in the killing of the bishop were executed. No mercy was shown.

On the bright side, Laon got its commune back two decades later and kept it, off and on, for two centuries.

The Second Revolution

By the summer of 1792 the French Revolution was in crisis.
The storming of the Bastille in 1789 had managed to secure a constitutional monarchy for the people similar to Britain's form of government. But it wasn't a republic, and thus the people weren't satisfied. Many feudal laws still remained in place.
To make matters worse, powerful forces, both internal and external, were conspiring to tear down the parliamentary system and bring back the feudal state. The events were approaching a climax and everyone knew it.

On July 25, 1792, Charles William Ferdinand, Duke of Brunswick, commander of the Austrian and Prussian armies about to invade France, issued the Brunswick Manifesto. It was basically a threat that if anyone harmed the royal family then the whole of France would suffer. The manifesto was written by the large number of French noble emigres in the Prussian army. To the people of Paris it was evidence that Louis XVI was collaborating with the invading armies (proof of which was later discovered).
Instead of intimidating the French public, it sealed the King's fate.

The fear was a counter-revolution and the face of that fear was Gilbert du Motier, marquis de Lafayette. In 1790 Layfayette was the Hero of the Revolution, but his star began to fade on July 15, 1791, when a troop of National Guard under his command shot into a mostly unarmed crowd on the Champ de Mars that were protesting the restoration of the King, killing 50.
By June 28, 1792, he was arguing in front of the Legislative Assembly for an outright ban of political clubs, especially the Jacobins. In a private meeting with the King he offered to march his army on Paris. Rumors of a coup d'etat began leaking out to the public.

Meanwhile, the working class sections of Paris were active. After the storming of the Bastille the people of Paris formed a Commune. It was mostly for administrative duties, but it was directly connected to the revolutionary spirit of the community. After the Brunswick Manifesto, the political clubs of Paris decided that the time had come to take the offensive.
Members of the Commune spoke against Lafayette and for a dethronement of the King before the Assembly on August 3, but their petition was rejected. The decision was made for an insurrection by the Paris Commune on August 10.


Storming of the Tuileries

On the night of August 9, generally unknown members of the Paris Commune took possession of the Hôtel de Ville. The moderate members of the Paris Commune were kicked out and a new Insurrectional Commune was set up.
At 7 a.m. the following morning, 18,000 members of the Paris Commune marched on the Tuileries. The King immediately fled to the Assembly for refuge. The National Guard, seeing the King flee, either quit their posts or openly took sides with the Commune. All that was left to defend the Tuileries were 950 members of the Swiss Guards.
No one is certain who fired first, but the results were predetermined. About 600 of the Swiss Guards were killed during the bloody assault. Dozens more were killed afterwards. Several hundred Parisians also died that day.


King Louis's last days

The leaders of the Commune then marched on the Assembly. The mostly bourgeois Assembly pleaded for restraint, but the mob had no intention of showing it. They grabbed the King and Queen and imprison them in the Temple (under the dubious reason of "their own safety"), where they would remain the rest of their short lives. The Assembly was effectively dissolved after calling for a new Constitutional Convention.
Lafayette, when hearing what had happened, ordered his army to march on Paris, but they flat refused. Instead he traveled east with his ministers and surrendered to the Prussian Army just as it was invading France.
The Paris Commune was now the most powerful political force in France.

It took another six weeks before the National Convention was formed to replace the Assembly. During that time the Paris Commune exercised unrestricted authority.
They were very busy.

The September Massacres and The Terror

The Commune obtained an indefinite power of arrest, and used that round up thousands of suspected enemies of the revolution. These included clergy, aristocrats and nobles that hadn't already fled the country, any royalist that could be found, and other suspected political enemies.
The political chaos combined with the approaching armies created a climate of fear and paranoia in Paris.

On September 1st the Commune organized a general mobilization. Tens of thousands of untrained and underequipped, but patriotic and eager men, were to be sent to the front. But before they could leave Paris bad news arrived - the fortress at Verdun fell almost without a fight.
In the climate of paranoia, the aristocratic generals at the front were suspected of cooperating with the enemy. It was the trigger for the first of several horrific episodes.
"A party at the instigation of some one or other declared they would not quit Paris, as long as the prisons were filled with Traitors (for they called those so, that were confined in the different Prisons and Churches), who might in the absence of such a number of Citizens rise and not only effect the release of His Majesty, but make an entire counterrevolution."



No one at the Commune, or anywhere else, gave the order for the massacre. It was a spontaneous decision by a murderous mob of thousands. Simply put, it was humanity at its worst.
Most of the murders were preceded by what the assassins considered a 'trial', better known as 'mob courts'. The supposed judges in these courts were the actual killers themselves. The sight of them was atrocious; their arms were covered in blood, they wore butchers' aprons, and they had swords at their sides. Most of the judges were either drunk or half asleep (Hibbert; 172)
In two days the killing was mostly over. 1,400 prisoners had been butchered.

September 20, 1792, was an important day for two reasons.
One reason was the French victory at the Battle of Valmy. Until this battle the Prussian and Austrian armies had been completely unchecked. The French army, suddenly flush with raw recruits, finally showed some backbone.
The other reason was the new National Convention. The very next day the Convention abolished royalty in France and declared a Republic.

From this point on, the Commune no longer had undisputed power in France, but it did still exercise considerable power behind the scenes. The Commune was behind the huge levee en mass in August of 1793 that turned the tide of war. They were behind the execution of Louis XVI.

They also exerted influence in the Convention. When Jacques Hébert was arrested for using inflammatory rhetoric against the conservatives, it was the Commune who marched down to the Convention and forced them to release him.
Much to the Commune's shame, it was on June 2, 1793, that Commune members helped arrest 32 deputies of the Convention on charges of counter-revolutionary activities. This began the Reign of Terror. The invading armies, the royalist revolt in Vendee, the famines, and the runaway inflation, all combined to reinforce the power of the extremists.


Maximillien Robespierre

The Commune tragically remained joined at the hip to Robespierre during his rise and eventual fall.
The arrest of Robespierre occurred at the Hotel de Ville, his last bastion of support. On the day he was executed so were several leaders of the Commune.

The of fall of the Jacobins and Robespierre ended the Commune's power. The White Terror that followed finished off the Commune. Within months the Commune had been outlawed, and so ended the revolutionary era of France's history.

This is the end of Part 1 of La Commune series.

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In The Tipping Point: Be The Message
by eOz | 10/26/2008 04:41:00 PM
In May, 2006, thereisnospoon posted a definitional diary on the Overton window. The point of the Overton Window methodology is to move public opinion along a continuum of statements which cannot all be true. These common "facts" about our society are arranged so the facts most mutually exclusive are at the ends of the list so we can take the measure of which version of "the facts" We The People believe in this moment.

We do that listening to the stories being told -- from national media to our living rooms. Stories make assumptions which must be shared in order to be understood. No one can unhear a story, nor be untouched by it once heard. Once moved by a story which rings true, our cause cannot be stopped short of tryanny -- and even then tryants must watch their back.

In this final stretch of the campaign, we must make history. Politicians do not do that. We The People do that. Our several histories, told boldly and candidly, will make the difference more than the silliness and machinations of the "professionals". It is time to make our history ourselves.



Stories are a measure and a method rolled up into a thing which has a logic of its own. Songs are written to evoke this nonverbal communication among people in a few minutes. The music of the 60s, from the folk movement through the acid rock "head" bands which continued into the 70s, wove a narrative of our common life. These stories moved the Overton Window, but that movement lost momentum in the 70s after Watergate and the war ended.

Those of us moved by that narrative shared a tangled bundle of common "facts" such as "my conversations and social gatherings are private", which were very strong and rooted. Memes are these "facts-in-context". As the context changes, some narratives shrink to a small network of people while others expand. The Rapture Theory among evangelicals is rooting in the "fact" that "the world will end soon so wasting resources on social justice cuts into my retirement plan earnings" gained the focus of the lens an Overton Window provides -- deliberately so, driven relentlessly to this day by those who brazenly called themselves the "Moral Majority" and now consider themselves the exclusive brokers for God itself.

But throughout this time of their ascendency, millions of us have kept alive a different truth. A truth whose time has come to serve our nation in its hour of greatest need. In this moment, we have the duty to step into the breach and proclaim a message of hope and a sense of the future in which people really want to live. To rise to this duty in this tipping point for our nation and our world, we must rededicate ourselves to becoming the message we hope to convey. We must re-member -- put back together what has been sundered -- as a living meme which others can take and make their own. We must give life to a set of ideas with mythic meaning as never before.

For those ready to answer this duty, the question is how to articulate our message and the challenge is how to exemplify it in our daily lives.

The Progressive Manifesto, In Our Time

Lewis Powell's memo captured the old mythos' strategy, the Heritage Foundation gave its precepts root and strength, the Moral Majority hyjacked it and the neocons drove it to such an extreme the People are now ashamed and aghast they allowed this beast such freedoms with our common weal. Their stories are old. Their myths are now, well, myths. Spent and tired, their energy is exhausting itself in a cynical and half-hearted candidate whose better days have come and gone. Yet they scream their stories at us, in unison. Their message discipline remains, even though the message lost meaning long ago.

We, as a community, are now engaged in a counter narrative through blog sites like this one. Our prism of social justice, economic fairness and fidelity to the spirit of the Constitution -- that the rule of law is our only civic religion -- brings real-world facts into focus other perspectives would ignore or even avoid. One innocient deprived of their liberty is far worse a curse upon our republic than fifty or fifty thousand of those guilty allowed to go free. One. That "fact" is in their Overton mix, in which the lens was moved to "One guilty person missed puts us all in mortal danger".

Joseph Clinton Pearce examined this technology of mind in his book Crack In The Cosmic Egg. He called this context -- this prism through which each of us experiences our social world -- a mythos. Joseph Campbell, following the lead of Carl Jung, has studied the patterns in our stories and our various social narratives around the world and found common threads throughout. While these contexts are alive, enlivened by people living within them, they provide a sense of order and explain the world well enough to empower us. When the mythos morphs into new experiences and insights, the old ideas fossilize into mere mythology. The myths of the 60s were once the organizing principle for everyday life. The mythos of Morning In America is hardening before our eyes. The Overton windows are moving, unbidden, to new sensibilities to open before us a future in which we can believe again.

To move the Overton Window by design requires memes -- stories so well crafted and so widely told in such a narrow window of time that people's own and collective mythos shifts from one archetype to another. Stereotypes are simple manifestations of these ancient and worldwide patterns of common human nature. We all tell stories and hear them. We all avoid stories we don't like and look for stories we do want to hear.

Our memes are now needed, for we are all in the tipping point of our social, economic and political lives. Right. Now. We, as a People, are faced with opposing ideas such as these mutually contradictory viewpoints on our duty to our nation:


  • Peace

    • Peace means success of our governments

    • Peace means we are getting weak, just asking to be attacked.


  • Prosperity

    • The lowest ratio of top incomes to bottom incomes in a nation is the measure of success as a society.

    • The highest ratio of incomes is a measure of our economic dominance of the rest of the world.


  • Privacy

    • My thoughts and gatherings -- and all of my stories -- are private and can only be breached through a public process where the breach itself can be blocked

    • Your thoughts and stories could be a plot to kill the rest of us or to sin in ways which will make God turn His eyes away from our nation.





Which place each of us may find ourselves along the shades of opinion between these endpoints may not be by choice. But where our common resolve to move forward as We The People will lie depends on the place we choose to be in each of these dimensions.

The focus of the Overton Window along the slidepoint between these opposing mythos is now ready to shift. The tipping point brings with it the possibility of movement in a short time. In times of transformation like this, people are doubting their current stories and may not like hearing them as much. Instead, they may be looking for the stories others tell which make more sense of the world and allay our natural fears arising from the sense of change underway. Our stories may seem boring and mundane. The stories gussied up by media hype of people we will never know can seem more real than our own daily life.


Nothing could be further from the truth.




The Sacred In The Profanely Mundane

In this tipping point, telling others about social justice languishing, economic justice being corrupted and the rule of law being abandoned in Our name is a public service. The People must decide the course to take, and soon. That myth, made real by the Constitution of our nation as long as we can keep it so, must be made real once again by the generation in power now, in this time. Our windows must shift so we can see clearly a path ahead and convey to those around us the stories which empower them to see it, too.

In such a time as this, the candidates themselves are driven by the movement of the window.

Economic justice is told in stories about failing health care and closing factories to raise the level of employment in other nations. Small businesses need comprehensive single-payor health care, and now so do the big corporations to be economically competitive. People without insurance need care no matter what the details may be. Globalization has run its course. Now it is time to adapt to a mixed future where we learn what can be done 10,000 miles away, and what cannot -- seeking always to find the optimum balance between our standard of living and that of other nations.

Peace becomes the measure of the success of this mix. Nations raising the standard of living of their people have more at stake if anarchy prevails. Those governments who are aren't interested are constantly on guard against their own citizens, consuming energy and resources to attack other nations. Nations are now being carved into smaller pieces, not expanding to absorb other nations.

Prosperity becomes the measure of how far we are from optimum. Top-to-bottom income ratios measure the success of a government in finding that mix which is optimum. Through carelessness and the Pax Americana mythos, we have drifted away from the optimum mix, exacerbated by globalization, automation and telecommunications advances. Fellow citizens who happen to be of means have taken too much advantage of millions of situations over the past thirty years and have perpetuated myths such as Greed Is Good and the Gospel Of Prosperity.

Privacy is simple. Every secret warrant, hearing and proceding is a mark against the government. Every innocient person forced to plead guilty to avoid the expense and humiliation of a trial, or found guilty by a jury mislead by slick prosecution (or by mistake made in an overheated justice system staffed by overworked fellow citizens), is a mark against the rule of law. Each such error is magnified by the community of people who know the accused so mistreated. This injustice leads to resentment and to stories of injustice which undermine right-minded law enforcement as well as cowboy justice served with a swagger of moral arrogance.

In each of these areas, and these are just a few examples, the Overton Window can be moved. Soon. Quickly. Firmly -- for at least a generation. If we be but bold enough to speak, to sing, to tell, to show, to act. If we be but bold enough to tell the stories which need to be told, and thus to put memes into our social bloodstream from which the narrative measured by those who use such things as windows must notice, things will change. The politicians are watching those indicators now. Their political future depends on reading it right.


While we might look back to the signing of the Magna Charta in 1215 as the beginnings of what are called the Rights of Englishmen, perhaps the most influential document in the history of our law was (I emphasize "was") William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, published between 1765 and 1769. As Roberts and Stratton point out, Blackstone believed that the law should be a "shield for the innocent" and that the purpose of law (and government) was protection of innocent people (and their property) from predators and from the predatory state.

From Blackstone’s vision came the view of "innocent until proven guilty," and the protection of rights for those who were accused. From Blackstone, we are given the famous quote: "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than one innocent suffer." Indeed, the concept Rights of Englishmen has been absolutely vital to the very idea of liberty in this country.

The American Police State
by William L. Anderson


This Overton window, it seems, has been sliding back and forth for a very long time. Blackstone's formulation is at one end. See if you recognize the other end of the slidepoint for this window:


However, there also was a competing vision, one that was drawn up by the "father" of modern government, Jeremy Bentham, a British philosopher of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the one who penned the term, "utilitarianism." Bentham scoffed at the idea of individual rights, and believed that the state needed to be a mechanism by which the largest number of people could be able to experience the greatest pleasure with the least amount of pain.

In Bentham’s view, the state was to accomplish that purpose by being as unrestrained as possible, led by people whose vision was superior to the vision of ordinary people who did not know better. Law, in Bentham’s view, was not to be a "shield" for innocent people, but rather a set of rules that would push people in a certain direction through incentives, both benign and harsh. Even wrongful convictions of innocent people were not harmful, for they empowered the state and sent a message to everyone else.

Ibid.



Speak. Move. Believe. Tell. We don't have our own version of Powell's memo to guide us. We will never be as organized and have as much cash behind us as those who used the windows to ram this mileu of mythos down our collective throat. We don't need to. We have already found this blog site. We are already reading the stories. We must simply be willing to tell our stories, to one another. That, more than all the polling and media campaigns, will make the difference in this breach. Through this transformation each of us goes alone. But we will only make it through to a union more perfected than before if we hold to those who stick with us and join us during the cusp. How we come out on the other side depends on with whom we hold hands and to whom we speak our hearts and reveal our true minds, more than any other thing.



Our Civic Religion: The Patriots' Common Cause

In our civic religion, recognizing only Providence outside ourselves, we are indeed in the Rapture now. Once again, we can sin against this religion by wreaking injustice on those around us in order to obtain short-term gain or power. Or we can return to its purest precepts and worship together in the only way that matters: as equals. As fellow citizens. As proud advocates for the Constitution as written, amended and to be amended in the future.

We will not be taken into heaven to sneer at those left behind in torment -- that is not the kind of story we can stomach. In our Rapture, we take each other by the hand and pull together, rising together to receive the blessings of peace, prosperity and privacy, or nothing at all. We come out on the other side more equal, more just as a nation and more enlightened as a people.

Tell others the stories which lift them up and draw them together. Plant the meme we are the only security against all threats foreign and domestic. No one can provide Us security. We The People secure our nation by being unyielding in seeking its promise for all humankind. Enlist others into this cause once again. Help them let go of the stories to which they cling but from which they gain inner peace no longer.

The Framers found this common ground while writing the Constitution. The Founders tried to carry out its precepts, always imperfectly. This mythos has grown and evolved through our history. Lincoln found solace in it during dark times. Franklin Roosevelt found courage in it during perilous times. Eisenhauer feared for its future. Kennedy attempted to give it voice. Reagan attempted to defeat its populist promise. Clinton attempted to find common ground and succeeded in igniting its passion. The current Bush Administration has attempted to change reality to something else. Now the next President, and We The People of this time, must renew the founding truth of our nation yet again.

In 1968, our movement was dealt a severe blow when two citizens who had come to their common understanding of the truth for which we now stand were taken from us before they could finish the work then that we can finish now.


It really doesn't matter what happens now. I left Atlanta this morning, and as we got started on the plane, there were six of us, the pilot said over the public address system, "We are sorry for the delay, but we have Dr. Martin Luther King on the plane. And to be sure that all of the bags were checked, and to be sure that nothing would be wrong with the plane, we had to check out everything carefully. And we've had the plane protected and guarded all night."

And then I got into Memphis. And some began to say that threats, or talk about the threats that were out. What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers?

Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the promised land. And I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

I See The Promised Land
Martin Luther King
April 3, 1968
Memphis, Tennessee

The day before he was assassinated


Martin Luther King embodied it with nonviolence and relentless determination. On the news of his death, Bobby Kennedy was moved by it to stand on the back of a flatbed truck in the dark of night and grief to calm his fellow citizens.

[I]n the black neighborhood on the north side of Indianapolis that awful April night in 1968, a few hours after hearing that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been killed in Memphis. Standing on a flat-bed truck on a street corner, huddled against the cold in a long black overcoat that seemed two sizes too large, he sought to calm the rage of those listening to him.

"I know in my heart," he said hesitantly, "what you must be feeling. I had a member of my family killed. He was a white man. But we have to make an effort in the United States -- an effort to understand." 'Pain That Cannot Forget'

In Atlantic City he had quoted Shakespeare. Romeo and Juliet. In Indianapolis, chopping the air with his closed right hand in the awkward gesture he used for emphasis, he quoted Aeschylus: "Even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God."

25 Years. The Vision of Robert Kennedy Lives On.
The New York Times
By R. W. APPLE JR.,
Published: June 7, 1993


Robert Kennedy was assassinated a couple months later. The chaos of 1968 and the pain our movement felt is still with us, many decades later. We were in motion then, and we frightened the reactionaries. They used that fear to elect Richard Nixon, helped by the pain and paralysis of the liberal movement after losing two such great lights. But the passion and meaning of their work and the mythos of their vision was raw and powerful. The power of these patriots and their mythos scared the reactionary movement enough to move Lewis Powell to write his famous memo for the U. S. Chamber of Commerce, upon which the political movement we are now facing down in this election organized.


The sources are varied and diffused. They include, not unexpectedly, the Communists, New Leftists and other revolutionaries who would destroy the entire system, both political and economic. These extremists of the left are far more numerous, better financed, and increasingly are more welcomed and encouraged by other elements of society, than ever before in our history. But they remain a small minority, and are not yet the principal cause for concern.

The most disquieting voices joining the chorus of criticism come from perfectly respectable elements of society: from the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians. In most of these groups the movement against the system is participated in only by minorities. Yet, these often are the most articulate, the most vocal, the most prolific in their writing and speaking.

Confidential Memorandum: Attack of American Free Enterprise System
Lewis F. Powell, Jr.
August 23, 1971


Ralph Nader, for one, empowered by the civic religion given life by Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy in giving up their own lives, shook the "system" Powell sought to defend to its foundations. Nader's legal challenges against corporations, along with many others, was forcing one mythos to explain itself to a society ready to transform itself. In that message, the mythos of the benevolent "system" was found wanting. Nader was not alone. Indeed, he was only one of millions so moved to act -- and so scare the "defenders of the system" to their core.

The reactionaries set out to create a mythos to prevent this embryotic understanding of our nation from rising then. Their skill for over thirty years in doing so only makes the power of the re-emergence of our progressive and liberal vision of America, in full flower now in this election, all the more urgent and lends it the power we now see manifested all around us in the Obama campaign. This civic religion of ours is a mythos which has not allowed itself to die. It becomes the message of too many people. Soldiers in the depravity and cruelty of battle. Community organizers in shabby meeting rooms looking for power in the souls of people beaten down by adversity and prejudice. Activists scanning documents hidden by those in power in order to expose that power to the light of public scrutinty and thus dispel its insidious affect. Citizens all, just like us.

Millions have carried this civic religion to us across time and at great cost. Millions hence await to receive it from us. We fail utterly if we fail this most sacred cause.

The Medium Is The Message

In the remaining days of this campaign, the messages which drive media, large and small, are emerging and spinning like never before. People are allowing words and images to spark a reaction, a learned reflex, in the crucible of this information storm. There is no time to pause, consider and contemplate. It is in these times we must counter the emotions of violence and anger and fear now that the people who believed in a party see it shredded by facts they did not expect.

The counterpoint to Lewis Powell's memorandum's efficent plan is the order which arises from the common weal of shared experience. Enough citizens have woken up to the facts of a situation in which, and through which, we must prevail as a nation. Indeed, all such plans eventually are shattered because they are a paradigm -- a mythos. As our society and civilization evolves through history, the mythos of one generation or one "age" as historians may some day see in the tsunami of facts in which the citizenry is immersed in this passage; in this campaign; in this maelstrom of challenges to our courage and our spirit.

Those who believe in the dominionists movement Rapture theory are still fellow citizens. Our common civic religion is not an alternative to individual religions, deeply felt and immensely enriching our common weal. Instead, it is as far as we need to share beliefs, at a minimum, to pull together and compromise and engage our political institutions.

We are the message we need to inject into media. We are the ones who propelled the Obama campaign atop the many streams of campaigns: Clinton, Edwards, Biden, Dodd, Kucinich and many others. Even the independent candidates have furthered the message we now carry. Bob Barr has been blunt and clear on civil liberties -- he has nothing to lose and karma to atone from his vote for the Patriot Act.

Nader is of the message that corporate greed has no limits unless the People are able to watch them in the interest of economic justice. He has preached the civic sermon that legal entities are not citizens. To be a citizen, you must have a soul, a living breath of divinity, a sense of the future and the ability to make artifacts and practice sacriments which future generations will receive and learn. Businesses are not of this character. They are not necessisarily evil -- they have the choice to not practice evil -- but they must make money. They change owners and cultures. They grow to be something different than they were when it was a small band of employees bound together by a common dream.

Gravel growled his message: this whole last forty years has been insanity. It is the message of the movie Network, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not gonna take it any more!".

There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and A T and T and Dupont, Dow, Union Carbide and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state -- Karl Marx?

They pull out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories and minimax solutions and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments just like we do. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable by-laws of business.

The world is a business, Mr. Beale!

It has been since man crawled out of the slime, and our children, Mr. Beale, will live to see that perfect world in which there is no war and famine, oppression and brutality -- one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.

The movie Network
Arthur Jensen to Howard Beale
1976


What a cold world, indeed. A wasteland of the soul with no mythic potential. A vapid and empty comfort in times when those models -- minimax solutions and price-cost probability and all -- fail before the leveling force of history. We stand in this tipping point now. That world glorified by Powell and the inheritors of his empty philosophy has shattered and lays in pieces all around us now. Even the great Greenspan has had to admit "there were flaws in my model" -- the embodiment of that false confidence which has been foisted on the citizenry for too long.

Bentham's vision has captured the Overton window through averice and greed, artificially engineered by consultants who ultimately do not work for mythical remembrance, but for money. This vision has failed, from top to bottom. Every one of us knows it. Each of us must now do something about it.

The Old Center Cannot Hold - The New Center Beckons

Take the floor. Boldly debate on the public square. Care enough about your fellow citizens to give them the benefit of your stories, and the courtesy to hear theirs. In this great congress our nation's power and future lies, not the Congress or Government alone, now so disconnected from the common weal.

McCain's campaign "town hall meetings" allowed messages of fear, of anger and of drastic action to amplify, overcoming a weak center. McCain is struggling to be any one message, balanced between "feeling your pain" and the calamities beyond ken which call for a national leader to speak forth and seize the moment. This center may hold, or it may not. McCain has had to retreat to controlled rallies. Palin's rallies are on the knife's edge of violence. She loves it out there. She may have to be pulled back. Or she may be allowed to go for it, doggone it!

Things could get really crazy. Be the sanity as only people can be. Citizens are not the same as organizations for this simple reason: we can care about each other. People in organizations can care, but it is a constant struggle. The drives to profit, to survive, to empower and to be heard are forces pulling us away from the concerns of others outside that common work. Citizens can care about alternative energy while devoting their time to economic justice. We are sums beyond these parts.


You see, the challenges we face will not be solved with one meeting in one night. Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time.

We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek. We are the hope of those boys who have little; who've been told that they cannot have what they dream; that they cannot be what they imagine.

Yes they can.

We are the hope of the father who goes to work before dawn and lies awake with doubts that tell him he cannot give his children the same opportunities that someone gave him.

Yes he can.

We are the hope of the woman who hears that her city will not be rebuilt; that she cannot reclaim the life that was swept away in a terrible storm.

Yes she can.

We are the hope of the future; the answer to the cynics who tell us our house must stand divided; that we cannot come together; that we cannot remake this world as it should be.

Because we know what we have seen and what we believe - that what began as a whisper has now swelled to a chorus that cannot be ignored; that will not be deterred; that will ring out across this land as a hymn that will heal this nation, repair this world, and make this time different than all the rest - Yes. We. Can.

Speech by Barak Obama
February 5, 2008
Super Tuesday


Be the message. We are here to invite every citizen to find our commonality -- our own civic religion -- again and face this sea of misfortunes we citizens did not deserve, but which we must now face together. We are here to elect a man who has listened to us and that we expect to listen to everyone when he has the opportunity. If he does not, we will raise up another citizen in his place until we are moving forward again. For Obama has invoked the sacred core of our nation, and to those words we bind him in electing him. A mighty pact is being forged in this moment, and we expect it to be honored so that from all of us can honor be expected. Past is prolouge to this challenge, in this time. It brought us here, but it does not proscribe the limits of what we can now become as a nation and as a people.

If some of our fellow citizens cannot believe in Obama or any candidates of the Democratic party right now, maybe they can believe in us. To be worthy of that trust, we must believe in them. When other citizens use language which makes us feel our own reations rising against them, we must pause. We must stop the madness, if only for a moment and say, "C'mon. Politicians don't make change happen. We do. Things have to change. Let's at least agree on that." Let them tell you what they know has to change. Find commonality in their ideas, and redirect the conversation to engage them to listen to our ideas. Heal this rift. Fight habits of dischord forged in our own struggle with feeling powerless to stop the tide of change. Rage against the information storm. Defeat its seductive power, seeking to silence us exactly when we know we should speak.

We are here to join with every one of our fellow citizens to progress, together, into the future. We are progressives, and we are ready for these challenges. We are the scientists, the artists, the activists, the entrepreneurs, the software gurus, the parents, the children, the neighbor. We are every kind of profession and every kind of religion. All we have, in the end, is each other. It will take all of us. It will take every one of us.

Once we took up arms against fellow citizens, against one another. In the depths of that horror, a President was moved by the carnage and the grief of the survivors to say:


The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

The Gettysburg Address
Abraham Lincoln
November 19, 1863


We have to offer our fellow citizens now lost and angry and afraid a simple message. We believe in the future. We can see it, clearly. We can't get there alone. We work for a future in which our common lives are better. Progressives are those of us who have organized politically to advocate for that future. We want to move ahead again after wandering in the Reagan wilderness for thirty years. We are ready to break out of the "way it is". That way is disintegrating around all of us any way. It is gone forever. Those who look at what is being lost are distraught, and honestly so. Those of us who look at the prize we can now seize are enraptured, honestly so. We who are not afraid must reach out our hand to those who are now. We must do it in this moment. We must do it in this time.

We can win now. We must be wary and wise to seal that deal. But the way to victory in this campaign is not to elect only a slate of politicians. It is to elect to take a step, together, into the future. It is to break the spell in which we have been trapped for too many years. Indeed, that mythos is gone now, wiped away by the graph of the stock indices going down without relent. Wiped away by the cruelty we see all around us, now institutionalized. Wiped away by the tragedies we have witnessed, now no longer to be borne in silence.

We are in the tipping point. Every story makes a difference now. Grant your fellow citizens the privilege of hearing yours. The future of our nation, and possibly the human race itself, depends on it. Depends on you. Depends on me. Depends on We The People. So it has always been, and so it must forever be -- or this nation will perish from the the earth. Our civic religion, in this time, springs from the knowledge within us all that in this cause we must not fail. In this one creed we can all find the courage to say what needs saying, and the wisdom to let others do the same.

Let it be so.

Amen

Crossposted at Daily Kos

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RedSKINS & HATE CRIMES
by Winter Rabbit | 10/26/2008 10:30:00 AM

Source

The Indian removals which destroyed one quarter of the Cherokee tribe, were actually conceptualized by Jefferson and then extended and carried out by Jackson. There were great debates about whether the “redskins” were human and whether they had souls.





Crossposted at Native American Netroots


Source

REDSKIN A 500 YEAR HATE CRIME,
is being used in educational presentations throughout the United States to effectively reveal the history of racial and religious hatred behind the term Redskin Indians and clearly shows the harm brought by ridiculing minorities. It is appropriate for adults and children in middle school or older.


Disgustingly so, “Redskin Indians” refers to literally skinning American Indians. “But his (Jackson’s) Indian Fighters had a very peculiar preoccupation, that was skinning the Indians on the battlefield. They used to make pants” it says in the video. Reverend Goat Carson, who is “Internationally recognized for his presentations,” discusses it in “REDSKIN A 500 YEAR HATE CRIME.”


Source

Telling it like it is Reverend Goat cuts through the barriers created by America's history books. "REDSKINS" makes human beings out of the Indian children and elders who were mutilated and skinned for their religious and racial heritage.


Furthermore, if anyone doubts that manifestations of that hate are less than current, I relate the fact that over at Docudharma we got a human scalp off ebay last year.


If someone had told me that someone would be selling a Sioux scalp online on the 143rd Anniversary of the Sand Creek Massacre; I would have hoped, “Surely nobody would be that barbaric and seeped in genocide denial.” Right? Wrong.

Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket


So one last time, "Redskin Indians" refers to literally skinning American Indians. "But his (Jackson's) Indian Fighters had a very peculiar preoccupation, that was skinning the Indians on the battlefield. They used to make pants" it says in the video.

Photobucket

It goes on to say “they’d be able to take an Indian and skin him from the hip down and make themselves a pair of pants.” Next, it talks about how they made reins for their bridle to ride their horses and that “redskins” became a joke. Hence, "the depth and pervasiveness of the racism against Indigenous Peoples so deeply engrained in the history and psyche of the United States and the dominant culture."


(The rest is a repost from here. "Over the break" has been replaced with "here")

Carter Camp gave me his permission to repost his essay entitled “Mass Racial Taunting; America’s Weekend Sport” in the comments of "Stereotypical Elements (that) appear… in Athletic Contests" posted at Native American Netroots. I had mentioned that I wanted to cite the Shadow Report as an introduction, so here’s what the Consolidated Indigenous Shadow Report says about Indian Mascots on page 72.


Although the United States would probably respond that racist mascots and logos are an exercise of free speech that it has reserved under the Convention, they reveal the depth and pervasiveness of the racism against Indigenous Peoples so deeply engrained in the history and psyche of the United States and the dominant culture.


And here is Carter Camp’s essay entitled “Mass Racial Taunting; America’s Weekend Sport,” which he wrote "several years ago when people in Tulsa were protesting the Union High redskins."



MASS RACIAL TAUNTING; AMERICAS WEEKEND SPORT

by Carter Camp, Ponca Nation

For thousands of people in America, Friday nights in the fall are for going to the High School football game. On Saturday, college towns across America swell to double or triple their normal size as fans pour into town to cheer the local college football team. On Sunday, Sunday evening, and Monday night, millions of Americans gather in stadiums, in bars, and in front of their televisions to see a great communal American pastime, professional football. But did you ever stop to think that a great percentage of these same all-American people also will spend some of their time hurling racial epithets at my people? Every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday (and Monday night) millions of Americans will scream and beg for my Indian people to be scalped, chopped, burned, tomahawked and murdered, by the Indians, Savages, Redskins, and Braves across the field. In the winter it moves inside for basketball and in the spring back outside for baseball, but every weekend all year around, one of Americas' favorite things to do is to spend some time ignorantly portraying a stereotypical Indian person or spending a few hours mock-hating and degrading Indian people. And when we Indians dare mention it is offensive, they argue they should keep on doing it because 'they have done it for a long time', longer ago than when they kept slaves or would not let women vote, so long that now it is a tradition! You see, in America even screaming racial epithets can become a cherished tradition that some people are willing to fight a civil war over.*

Not 'racist' epithets, the Americans who are screaming to kill, burn, and scalp us, don't mean us really, they mean those people dressed as caricatures of our ancestors. And they also do not mean to denigrate our religion because most of them do not even know we have religions and they all assume our culture is dead because they have been taught we were a "vanishing race", so it must be ok to insult our Grandfathers dress, speech and hair. They may not be 'racist' people but their 'racial' barbs are just as harmful to our children.

One of the things Americans like to tell us is not to be so sensitive, it is all done in good fun. And perhaps it would be funny to us if the very things they scream to be done to the Indian mascot had not actually been done to our Grandfathers by theirs. I am one generation removed from the atrocity of the genocidal "Ponca removal", my Grandfather and Grandmother survived the Ponca," trail of tears" forced march to Oklahoma Territory in the late 1800's, but one third of my Tribe perished. What is ancient history to most Americans is still fresh in the minds of we Indian people, as close as Hitler's holocaust is to a Jew and much closer than slavery is to a Black person. I think it is too soon to ask us not to be sensitive, I still mourn my Grandparents and my people are still not whole.

When all else fails, mascotteers like to tell Indians they are really "honoring" us. Even those who mean it sincerely must not have considered that there are two sides to every contest and one half of the people in the stadium are in no way seeking to "honor" the "redskins" they are about to "slaughter". There can be no way to honor Indian people by using their Tribe or race as team mascots because mascots become a part of the fray and to half of the people attending they are an enemy to be punished, mocked and defeated. We would like it very much if Americans really did honor us as co-Americans who are worthy of the same respect you give all the other races. Black, White and Yellow people are exempted from the great American weekend custom of mass racial taunting, is it too much to ask of our fellow citizens that we also receive such an exemption?

* Statistics: There are approximately 3,000 schools using Indian people as mascots. Each has four grades with aprox. 6 teams for each grade. Each team plays aprox. 10 games per year. This makes 720,000 games, and if each game has 500 people (stadiums have many thousands while soccer fields have few, 500 is an arbitrary but real number used to make my point), there are 360,000,000 Americans taking part in a given year. If one-half of them are in the opposition, we have the amazing statistic of 180 MILLION! Americans per year taking part in the Great-American-Weekend-Sport of "Mass Racial Taunting"! (MRT) of Indian people. The other 180 million Americans think it is not a big thing. Warning: These statistics do not take into account the hundreds of millions of Americans joining the "MRT" of my people, at home, in front of their kids. CC

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Occasional Open Thread
by Unknown | 10/24/2008 06:47:00 PM
Because I've been busy, only one item from me today:

- Hungarian history: EuroTrib diarist DoDo on the 1552 Siege of Eger.

What's on your mind?

[Update] Actually, one more: University of Houston History Department Chair Robert Buzzanco takes up Ralph Brauer's call for a revival of the Glass-Steagall Act.

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Ethnocide. Master's Commission. Palin (Unedited Version)
by Winter Rabbit | 10/21/2008 01:31:00 PM
Read dogemperor’s "Palin, dominionist intimidation, and *actual* witch-hunters"

Sarah Palin, who has attacked Alaska Native Languages and Alaska Tribal Sovereignty, gave a speech at the Master’s Commission on September 2nd, 2008,


Source

It has only one mission, to throw defeat in the face of the Devil and see God’s people freed.


and the Master’s Commission has a branch that Christianizes Alaskan Natives.



Source

Although the Native Reservations of the lower 48 states may be off the beaten path, these tribes are easily accessible compared to the Native tribes of bush Alaska. Forgotten? Not by God! But the reality is reaching the indigenous people of this state is very difficult and very expensive!


Let’s look at the speech and how she’s attacked Alaska Native Languages and Alaska Tribal Sovereignty after briefly looking at the history of Missionary work in Alaska (edited version of this diary is here).

Crossposted at Native American Netroots

The Master’s Commission that Palin spoke to is continuing the old practice of Christianizing Indigenous People, and more than one denomination has proselytized Alaskan Natives since 1867.


Source

Russian missionaries remained most successful among he Aleuts, although with the sale of Alaska to the United States in 1867, the status of the church suddenly changed. Its missionaries continued to work among the Native people of Alaska even after it became a foreign land, but their influence declined in the late nineteenth century, as other denominations began proselytizing.


Hence, Palin is now a very small part of the timeline of cultural genocide, which in this day, is being perpetrated against Alaskan Natives by the Master’s Commission.


Before proceeding, an even more serious tone must be set. To set the tone, I offer the words of Dr. James Luther Adams, a man who "was not a man to use the word fascist lightly. He was in Germany in 1935 and 1936 and worked with the underground anti-Nazi church, known as The Confessing Church, led by Dietrich Bonhoeffer."


The Christian Right and the Rise of American Fascism

Dr. James Luther Adams, my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, told us that when we were his age, he was then close to 80, we would all be fighting the "Christian fascists."

The warning, given to me 25 years ago, came at the moment Pat Robertson and other radio and televangelists began speaking about a new political religion that would direct its efforts at taking control of all institutions, including mainstream denominations and the government. Its stated goal was to use the United States to create a global, Christian empire. It was hard, at the time, to take such fantastic rhetoric seriously, especially given the buffoonish quality of those who expounded it. But Adams warned us against the blindness caused by intellectual snobbery. The Nazis, he said, were not going to return with swastikas and brown shirts. Their ideological inheritors had found a mask for fascism in the pages of the Bible.

- snip -

He saw in the Christian Right, long before we did, disturbing similarities with the German Christian Church and the Nazi Party, similarities that he said would, in the event of prolonged social instability or a national crisis, see American fascists, under the guise of religion, rise to dismantle the open society.
He despaired of liberals, who he said, as in Nazi Germany, mouthed silly platitudes about dialogue and inclusiveness that made them ineffectual and impotent. Liberals, he said, did not understand the power and allure of evil nor the cold reality of how the world worked...


It is most understandable, given the time in which Dr. James Luther Adams lived, that he would have had that opinion. It is unclear precisely what he meant how American Fascists would “rise to dismantle the open society;” however, arguing from definition, this is the main idea that he was referring to.


The Anatomy of Fascism


''A form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.''


But whatever means Dr. James Luther Adams was referring to for now, this much is true today in terms of the severely under reporting of Indigenous issues, whose very history of annihilation helped to inspire Hitler.


His critique of the prominent research universities, along with the media, was no less withering. These institutions, self-absorbed, compromised by their close relationship with government and corporations, given enough of the pie to be complacent, were unwilling to deal with the fundamental moral questions and inequities of the age. They had no stomach for a battle that might cost them their prestige and comfort.



Truth Commission into Genocide in Canada. p.6

The term “Final Solution” was not coined by the Nazis, but by Indian Affairs Superintendent Duncan Campbell Scott in April of 1910 when he referred to how he envisioned the “Indian Problem” being resolved.



American Holocaust

(It is worth noting also that the Fuhrer from time to time expressed admiration for the "efficiency" of the American genocide campaign against the Indians, viewing it as a forerunner for his own plans and programs.)




I said all that to draw your attention to this.

(bold and underline mine)

It was hard, at the time, to take such fantastic rhetoric seriously, especially given the buffoonish quality of those who expounded it. But Adams warned us against the blindness caused by intellectual snobbery.




Intellectual snobbery has a price attached to it, and what it may cost with the Military Commissions Act as law and a Dominionist Vice President, are the peaceful yet firm measures needed to prevent that rise to power. “In the event of prolonged social instability or a national crisis,” as Dr. James Luther Adams said, “American fascists, under the guise of religion, (will) rise to dismantle the open society.” Bullying and violence are not being openly perpetrated on American citizens by the state and the necessary intent is not with it to be applicable for the use of “American fascists” in the context I assume Adams used. However, the lion of the energy crisis is stalking as the invisible line between natural resources and genocide has been made visible by events across the globe. That line and the implications thereof remain invisible to many Americans in the United States on this soil. So, what is the desired character of the individuals of the two highest offices in the land? Statesmanship is required, not feigned belligerence as the trophy for ignorance.

Palin said in her speech to the Master’s Commission, whose goal is “to throw defeat in the face of the Devil and see God’s people freed,” “your job is to going to be to be out there reaching the people, hurting people throughout Alaska, and we can work together to make sure that God’s will be done here.” In addition, she has attacked Alaska Native Subsistence Hunting, attacked Alaska Native Languages, attacked Alaska Tribal Sovereignty, and attacked Alaska Native Subsistence Fishing while saying an international pipeline is God’s will. Consequently, that pipeline will run through sites that are sacred, but then again it’s “God’s will.” The Master’s Commission has a specific branch that Christianizes Alaskan Natives; we can safely assume that is also under her umbrella of “God’s will.” To summarize, christianizing Indigenous People destroys the identity of that people so that their land can be stolen; and, that's easier on the consciences of the predators.

Those predators need no longer kidnap innocent Indigenous children and force them into Boarding Schools, they need only wait to be the only alternative as their culture fades with climate change since their traditional means of survival have been extinguished, and as their very voting rights have been attempted to be denied. The military isn’t necessary for genocide anymore.


Truth Commission into Genocide in Canada.p.53

Genocide means extermination, by relocating and segregating a whole people into permanent conditions of poverty, disease and death; conditions which require and breed violence, but which more basically are part of a system devised to kill off not just some but all of the condemned people. Simply being placed or born into such conditions is equivalent to a death sentence. And the laws, attitudes, and arrangements of the dominant culture that creates such a system of death are the executioner’s tools, regardless of how legitimate or legal these arrangements are, or how seemingly “removed” they are from the slaughters of yesteryear.



Opinion Palin attacks Native peoples of Alaska

Palin has refused to provide language assistance to Yup'ik voters residing in southwest Alaska.

These Yup'ik Eskimos live on frozen tundra with no road system. They cannot plant gardens but can pick berries. The only way to get staples is by air or barge.

If not allowed to dry and freeze food ahead of long Arctic winters, many people will starve.




The military isn’t necessary for genocide anymore, because the Christian fascists who are attacking the language while Christianizing them after their traditional survival means have been extinguished do just fine without it.

Photobucket

(for justification of my use of the word Christian fascists, see here)


PERMANENT FORUM SPEAKERS SAY VIOLATION OF LANGUAGE RIGHTS ‘CULTURAL GENOCIDE’, CALL FOR CONCRETE PUBLIC POLICY TO PROTECT INDIGENOUS LANGUAGES

Mr. BAER said Governments tended to be highly unaware of the effects had by the loss of language -- indigenous languages were a vessel of traditional knowledge on biological diversity, for example. Many did little to reverse the trend.

- snip –

Some States were indeed promoting the use of indigenous languages, but many programmes were under-funded.

- snip –

He said the international community should begin to view the violation of language rights as a crime against humanity. Many indigenous children were not getting access to education. Most State education policies forced indigenous children to learn in the dominant State language, causing a “language shift”. It encouraged a change in attitude towards indigenous languages, in that those languages were thought to be less “worthy” than dominant language. Losing their language meant children became socially dislocated, ultimately leading to economic and social marginalization. Indigenous children tended to have the lowest level of educational attainment. They also suffered high rates of depression and teen suicide. Violation of language rights was a form of cultural genocide, or “ethnocide”, and amounted to a crime against humanity. The Forum was encouraged to consider appropriate action.


"In the event of prolonged social instability or a national crisis," Dr. James Luther Adams said, "American fascists, under the guise of religion, (will) rise to dismantle the open society." The Christian fascists have had their needed "national crisis" in this instance.


Global warming: The Inuit were the first to highlight Alaska's Aug 19, 2005

The indigenous people of Alaska could become the first global warming refugees as their frozen homeland goes through the quickest defrost since the end of the last Ice Age, some 12,000 years ago.


Much more could be said about that and "prolonged social instability" in other cases as well, of Christian fascists taking advantage of terrible situations to bring the "Good News."


Source

Indigenous peoples from the Arctic have long argued that global warming was having a dramatic effect on their environment. In 2002, villagers in the remote Alaskan island community of Shishmaref voted to relocate to the mainland because rising sea levels threatened to overwhelm their community.





And all the Christian fascists have to do, is what they've always done - commit cultural genocide, so the indigenous people won’t go to hell they can steal their land.


United Nations Commission on Human Rights

General comment related to Article 7


In response to state government comments that the terms “cultural genocide” and “ethnocide” are undefined in international law, the ICC would like to draw the attention of states to the Declaration of San Jose, drafted at a UNESCO Meeting of Experts in 1981. On the matter of cultural genocide, the Declaration states:

“Ethnocide means that an ethnic group is denied the right to enjoy, develop and transmit its own culture and its own language, whether collectively or individually. This involves and extreme form of massive violation of human rights and, in particular, the right of ethnic groups to respect for their cultural identity, as established by numerous declarations, covenants and agreements of the United Nations and its Specialized Agencies, as well as various regional intergovernmental bodies and numerous non-governmental organizations….We declare that ethnocide, that is cultural genocide, is a violation of international law equivalent to genocide, which was condemned by the United Nations Convention on he Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of 1948.”

- snip -

General comment related to Article 8


Identification as indigenous is directly related to choice. Because indigenous institutions are different and function differently, the right to choose and define institutions of indigenous origin is critical. Examples include the work of indigenous justice or judicial systems, like that of Alaska Native tribes or the Navajo Nation. The customs, practices and institutions for social control, justice and judicial systems within indigenous communities are dependent upon the collective values. Likewise, an individual indigenous person must be able to choose to identify himself or herself with an indigenous people and have the ability to choose recourse within the judicial institutions of the peoples concerned.



Missionary Conquest By George E. Tinker. p. 10


Source

Our understanding is certainly deficient if we overlook the relationship between missions and the Euroamerican economic interests. It was the interest of the fur trading companies, for example, to support the missionary enterprise, since the missionaries contributed to the pacification of Indian Nations, thereby aiding and abetting the companies exploitation of Indians, Indian lands, and Indian resources.


Concluding, those “state government(s)” who claim “that the terms "cultural genocide" and "ethnocide" are undefined in international law,” who thus want to sidestep the issue of which this election has provided an opportunity to bring to light have little to worry about. Hate crimes against American Indians, the fact the leading Republican candidate has no respect for sites sacred to Indigenous People, and who has in the past enacted legislation resulting in the forced removal of the Navajo have been ignored in the "main" media.


No hate crime charges for men in 'dirty Indian' attack

Three men who yelled "dirty Indian" and other slurs at an Indian county commissioner won't face additional hate crime charges for the September 20 attack in Great Falls, Montana.




Consent decree signed in Maine hate crime case

AUGUSTA, Maine—Five people accused of threatening and assaulting a group of Native Americans in eastern Maine have been ordered to stay away from the victims as part of a consent decree.

- snip –

The defendants are accused of getting out of their car armed with two-by-fours, sticks and pipes, yelling racial epithets and assaulting some of the Indians.



Men attacked members of Passamaquoddy Tribe

"Come on, let's get the Indians," one of the men said, according to a complaint filed by the state. Other anti-Indian slurs were yelled during the attack.





The McCain Relocation


Now, onto John McCain when he entered politics in 1981 in Arizona in relation to the forced relocation. It was easy for him, for it all was set in place. The gun was loaded and all McCain had to do was keep pulling the trigger with S1973-1 and S.1003.

(underline & emphasis mine)

Source

ACSA has determined that the law in question (25 U.S.C. 640d-11) has been amended many times, since it's introduction by Congressman Wayne Owens, and signed into law by President Gerald Ford in 1974. Among the key amendments introduced by Senator McCain were the organization of a Hopi-Navajo Resettlement Commission (a Commission actually charged with relocating the Dineh-Navaho) and modifying the Settlement allegedly agreed to by the Hopi-Navajo to remove any Dineh who sought sanctuary legally under their membership in the Hopi "parent culture" of all Indians in America. These and other amendments were introduced by Senator McCain as public law in 1996 through 1999, and some were submitted to the Senate and House in 2005 as PL S.1003,
subsequently incorporated into the language of the 2005 amendment of 25 U.S.C. 40d-11, all to rig the situation for the Senator's sponsors, Peabody Western Coal Company (Peabody Group today) and Bechtel, who operates the Mohave Generating Station, so they could more easily remove the coal from the Dineh-Navaho's rightful properties.

Within the legal maneuverings of Senator McCain, the non-existent tribal counsel, called: the "Hopi-Navajo Counsel", made up of Peabody Group proxies of local Kayenta, Arizona area origin, surfaced false claims of prior ownership and eminent domain, and then successfully testified before the Senate (the Dineh were not invited to testify about their own fate before the Senate by Senator McCain, leading to a hue and cry in 1999)
and demanded the removal of the rightful landowners, the Dineh-Navajo, claiming "encroachment on lands granted us by President Chester A. Arthur." They demand completion of the removal of the Dineh-Navaho from the Black Mesa and Big Mountain.






Sturgis students study Bear Butte controversy

The group’s proposal addressed an ongoing controversy surrounding Bear Butte outside Sturgis that has pitted developers against members of several American Indian tribes that consider the landmark a sacred place of worship.





If it bleeds it leads, unless it’s the blood or culture of the American Indian or the Native Alaskan.


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Echoes of Fascist Rhetoric
by Ahistoricality | 10/20/2008 07:55:00 PM
In response to a funny post at Terry's blog, I got serious
Stalin was a low-key, low-charisma party functionary who parlayed administrative responsibility into strategic superiority; he wasn’t as much an ideologue as he was a power-hungry S.O.B. (he ended up adopting large portions of Trotsky’s program after hounding Trotsky out of the country for programatic heresy!)

Palin, on the other hand, reminds me more of a non-military version of Juan Peron or Francisco Franco: someone who plays the demogogue in democratic terms until the game isn’t working for them, then they bring the hammer down, having laid the groundwork for accusing their opponents of subversion, treason, etc.
In response to a Sam Crane comment on Maoist guerrilla tactics as a metaphor for McCain's rural strategy (which has intensified, since), I said
More to the point, it resemble's Mao's use of rural peasants as "authentic" and politically pure, whereas urbanites and educated citizens were suspect and required retraining. This woman really does worry me.
I still wasn't going to make a big deal of it, but this attempt to claim that the recession is just "some regions of the country not doing as well as others" has a direct parallel in the Maoist obfustication of the Great Leap Forward Famine:

At that time, official reports claimed that the Great Leap Forward was going very well, producing record amounts in both agriculture and industry, while the reality was that both agricultural and industrial production were dramatically undercut by the Maoist program. Famine across most of China resulted in roughly thirty million deaths, but the vast majority of the Chinese people believed -- and many still believe -- that the Great Leap Forward was generally successful except in their districts. This propoganda sleight of hand effectively shifted the blame for the famine away from central planners (or planner) to local officials and a "failure of revolutionary zeal" among the population. That gave the regime cover for the Cultural Revolution, a political purge and self-destructive "renewal" that killed millions more and set Chinese intellectual and cultural life back decades.

Blame shifting is a natural human act, not a particularly fascistic or Republican one. But the cumulative effect of the specific tactics is suggesting to me an affinity with extremist politics which is deeply unsettling:
  • shifting blame away from the center
  • blaming minorities (especially for the mortgage crisis; also immigration issues and Islamophobia)
  • calling for a renewal of lost "authenticity"
  • excluding large segments of the population from membership in the "the nation"
It never ceases to amaze me that right-wing radicals can get away with much more than left-wing ones, but there has to be a line somewhere....

[Crossposted]

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On Ayers, Obama and "Terrorism"
by Valtin | 10/20/2008 04:54:00 PM
Meteor Blades has an interesting post up over at Daily Kos. He describes his previous association with David Gilbert, who, like Bill Ayers, was a member of the Weather Underground approximately 40 years ago. MB makes the obvious point:
As others have observed, palling around with terrorists has a long and sordid history in America. Just take the six decades I’ve been alive. Venerated Senators and Representatives made common cause with the Ku Klux Klan and their ilk, whose murders were the ultimate backstop for maintaining American apartheid. That system, you may recall, rested on ruthless white rule over the portion of the United States which allegedly lost the Civil War. It reinstituted slavery in a visible but widely ignored form, and for 90 years it destroyed every civil right of African-Americans, enforcing this with terror, including lynchings and other murders.

Fast forward to Henry Kissinger, the architect of raining terror on Cambodia, a policy that led to tens of thousands of dead civilians and contributed to the ascendance of the previously minuscule Khmer Rouge. Their astounding butchery and terrorism against their own people was not enough to persuade the United States to stop supporting them in their effort to keep control of Cambodia’s U.N. seat after their cross-border aggression was defeated, government overthrown and genocide stopped by Vietnam. Not to mention Kissinger’s role in Indonesia and Chile.




Please note that war criminal and terrorist Kissinger is also an honorary co-chair of McCain's campaign, although because he is a member of the U.S. elite, that connection is not seen as nefarious by the establishment press and its blogger tail.

Meteor Blades goes on to mention other atrocious criminals in American government who better deserve the terrorist label than Bill Ayers, a former WU member involved in some symbolic bombings who later became a local liberal-radical activist along more traditional lines, and hence came into contact with Barack Obama. Ayers never thoroughly renounced his WU past. Why?

To answer that question, I reproduce here my comment over at MB's Daily Kos post, as it is relevant to both the question of "terrorism" in general, and on the meaning of attacking Ayers and linking him to liberal presidential candidate Barack Obama, more specifically. I've added a few links to my comment, for the benefit of my readers:
The modern left begins with the fight among the Russsian social democrats as to whether they should support the terrorist tactics of the Narodniks, who were fighting in the latter 19th century to overthrow the czar.

Although few know it, the faction that would later call themselves the Communists opposed terrorism as a tactic, as it tended to bring strong oppressive reaction while at the same time sending a message to the people at large that they did not have to engage in political struggle, leaving such struggle to a heroic elite. Hence, at a time of greater oppression, the masses of people were disarmed by non-involvement in political struggle.

However, the early left made a distinction between the terror tactics of left -- the actions ostensibly to support an oppressed people, or to oppose imperial power - and the terror tactics of the government or the right, which were meant to silence the left, or to further seal state or right-wing power against the workers, farmers/peasants, and lower middle-classes.

The Weather Underground members had lost faith in a working class, classic-style revolution. They also believed that the bulk of the middle class was bought off by the excess wealth generated by the exploitation of the "third world". Hence, despairing of any other way, they sought terror as a method of "sparking" resistance, which they hoped would begin among the most impoverished sections of U.S. society, e.g., poor black Americans, native Americans, etc. In this, they were supported by agents provocateurs working for the government, as an perusal of the subject of "Cointelpro" or the Church Committee hearings in Congress will demonstrate to anyone so interested.

The attacks against Obama on the Ayers issue represent, in part, a continuing struggle over the meaning of the Southeast Asian colonial wars, in which the United States butchered over a million people, and tortured tens of thousands. As Meteor Blades makes so very clear, the really hardcore terrorists were Kissinger, MacNamara, Johnson, Nixon, and so many more (including Alexander Haig, a McCain supporter).

On one hand, the purported Ayers-Obama link is just plain silly, as there's really nothing to it. But the politics behind it is very real. Ayers and other radical supporters of the antiwar movement were no criminals: they were trying to stop a massive crime being committed. That they sometimes chose self-defeating methods is very regrettable, but the damage they caused was nothing compared to the damage caused by the great evil they opposed.
MB's story of his experience with Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), its internecine splits, the communal left such as it existed in the 1960s-1970s, and the fights over strategy and tactics, and how this all affected the individuals involved, is worth reading in and of itself. I only wish it had been longer, as its evident MB has a lot of experience to relate.

Also posted at Invictus

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The Bush Administration's Greatest (unknown) Crime
by midtowng | 10/20/2008 01:19:00 AM
The disasters in the countries that were Iraq and Afghanistan are well documented. Everyone is fully aware of the humanitarian crisis in the Darfur region of Sudan.

Yet the largest humanitarian crisis in the entire world is hardly even noticed by the world's news media. The topic gets ignored in political circles, both inside the beltway and outside.
It's the elephant in the living room that everyone pretends doesn't exist.

However, a few days ago, one of the largest security companies in the world acknowledged it. The company is Blackwater, and they figured out how to make a profit from the ongoing disaster.



200 years ago, everyone called terrorists by another name: pirates

- Washington Post
"Blackwater Worldwide today announced that its 183-foot ship, the MacArthur, stands ready to assist the shipping industry as it struggles with the increasing problem of piracy in [Somalia's] Gulf of Aden," the firm says in a statement. "As a company founded and run by former Navy SEALs, with a 50,000-person database of former military and law enforcement professionals, Blackwater is uniquely positioned to assist the shipping industry."


SS MacArthur

"The coalition does not have the resources to provide 24-hour protection for the vast number of merchant vessels in the region."
- Combined Maritime Forces commander, U.S. vice admiral Bill Gortney



Piracy is on the rise around the Horn of Africa and the ancient tactic of using mercenaries to fight these mercenaries is being used yet again. Blackwater didn't bother to mention that this strategy has a track record of uninterrupted failure since Roman times.
Right now there is an international fleet of warships sitting off the coast of Somalia. Yet it isn't stopping the piracy. This should sound familiar to historians, because America's attempt at stopping the Barbary Pirates in 1804 ended in a similar failure. The war only ended when we agreed to pay the pirates for the release of their hostages.

Historically the only way that piracy can be stopped is to eliminate their safe harbors. This seems especially true in Somalia, where most of the pirates were recently fishermen. In this case the only way to do that is to bring peace to Somalia, and that's the problem.
Since 2006, the policy of the Bush Administration regarding Somalia has been the exact opposite of bringing peace to Somalia. Instead, the Bush Administration has consistently backed the most ruthless, costly, and destructive policies for the suffering region. The end result has been a humanitarian crisis of biblical proportions.

"Worse than Darfur"

"May God help us cos the world won't."
- Yusaf from Somalia

In Darfur there is a billion-dollar U.N. aid operation and 10,000 workers helping the displaced.
In Somalia, and the neighboring countries, there is a near complete lack of international aid despite the needs from about 3 million starving refugees.

Seven months ago the United Nations declared the crisis in Somalia to be worse than the crisis in Darfur. Since then, the humanitarian disaster has nearly doubled in the degree of death and suffering.
"The scale and the magnitude and the speed at which the humanitarian crisis right now is deteriorating is very alarming and very profound," Holleman said. "Just from the beginning of this year, the number of people in humanitarian crisis has increased 77 percent. That is going from 1.8 million people to more than 3.2 million people.
About 6,000 people leave Somalia and travel to Kenya every day. The Dadaab refugee camp in eastern Kenya is the largest in the world, with 250,000 now living there.
The direct cause of crisis is the ongoing conflict in Somalia between occupying Ethiopian army and the building Islamic insurgency. About ten thousand civilians have been killed in the fighting since the 2006 invasion and the Ethiopian troops have resorted to methods even worse than al-Qaeda terrorists.
NAIROBI, Kenya - Amnesty International has accused Ethiopian troops supporting Somalia’s UN-backed government of killing civilians by slitting people’s throats, gouging out eyes and gang-raping women.
The Ethiopian troops aren't the only ones committing atrocities. The government police force have killed journalists, attacked aid workers, carried out extrajudicial killings, fired into crowds at markets, and raped women.
Despite this brutality, the insurgency is gaining strength, and Ethiopia is beginning to pull its troops out of Somalia. The puppet government of Somalia is on the verge of collapse.

This may all sound very familiar and tragic to the average American. The natural assumption is that it is just another example of Africans killing Africans and America is just a bystander to this conflict.
That assumption would be wrong.

“What you are seeing is a general indifference to a disaster that we played a role in creating.”
- U.S. Representative Howard Wolpe

Following Ethiopia's invasion of Somalia, America poured weapons and military advisers into Somalia as well as tens of millions of dollars into Ethiopia's military. It is this America aid that has allowed Ethiopia's corrupt leader, Meles Zenawi, to stay in power since 1991.

American military officers are still on the ground in Somalia directing AMISOM troops (African Union Mission to Somalia), and are reported to have given orders to fire on civilians. There has also been the more widely reported bombings of militants and civlians by American bombers.

But our crimes in Somalia go far beyond just that.
Here's how George W. Bush treats refugees fleeing from the carnage wrought by his "War on Terror": he has them captured at gunpoint and "rendered" to torturers in his pay, where they are chained, blindfolded, beaten, stuffed into cages then "disappeared" into secret prisons notorious for their vile abuses. These captures of people trying to escape from the terrors of "regime change," from the ravages of foreign armies invading their homes, include women and children, as attested by the story of 17-year-old Safia Benaouda, a pregnant Swedish woman who was grabbed – by American troops – as she fled from the bloodbath following the Bush-backed Ethiopian assault on Somalia, AP reports.
At least 140 men, women and even children as young as seven months old were disappeared to secret, underground prisons. Some of them still remain there to this day.

All this makes America morally culpable in this latest destruction of Somalia, which is bad enough.
However, the Bush Administration's responsibility in causing all this suffering is much more insidious and predates the Ethiopian invasion.

The origin of this crisis can be traced to a tribal dispute over a worthless piece of scrubland on the outskirts of Mogadishu on January 13, 2006.

Making a mountain out of a molehill

Our story begins with two warlords from the Abgal sub-clan. One warlord is named Bashir Raghe. He was a waste contractor with the U.S. military forces in Mogadishu before the United States pulled out in 1994. After 9/11 he became one of America's top allies in Somalia. He was paid handsomely to capture alledged terrorist and turn them over to U.S. officials.
Raghe strode through Mogadishu wearing Ray-Ban sunglasses on his head and a pistol strapped to each hip. And in the months leading up to the fighting in Mogadishu, he was seen using crisp, new $100 bills to buy machine guns and heavily armed pickup trucks.
The rival warlord is named Abukar Omar Adan, a devoutly Islamic and heavily armed clan elder with ties to the Islamic Courts Union (now named Supreme Islamic Courts Council).
The trouble began late last year when Adan paid $30,000 for land that straddled the airport road, intending to build a development including homes and warehouses.
Fearing the loss of control over lucrative airport traffic, Raghe objected, according to Adan's brother and son. After several verbal confrontations, the two sides began fighting in the open Jan. 13, moments after the U.S. intelligence officials -- most accounts put the number at four -- had landed at Esaly.
After a six hour battle Raghe's forces had killed seven of Adan's men and captured the land and four of his gun trucks. The U.S. officials, at the airstrip just three miles away, wrongly concluded that they were under attack by Islamic terrorists and abruptly fled. Adan had no idea the Americans were nearby, but soon learned of it.
Adan travelled to Nairobi to reassure the Americans that the gunfight was about land, and to ask for his trucks back.
But over the next several weeks, in numerous discussions in person and on the phone, U.S. officials accused Abukar and his family of being terrorists, he said. "They said, 'You were ready to kill us.' . . . They said, 'Your file will be put in Washington, and you will be recorded as a terrorist group.' "
A third Somali, speaking on condition of anonymity, recounted a separate but similar conversation with a U.S. intelligence official who said of the officers at the airstrip on Jan. 13: "They were ambushed. This was a terrorist who was trying to kill American officers."
The Bush Administration couldn't let a terrorist attack go by unanswered, and so began funding regional warlords, including Raghe. These were some of the exact same warlords that killed American soldiers in 1993. Anti-Americanism, stoked by the Iraq War, intensified in Mogadishu. Warlords had been raping, robbing and killing for over a decade, and now they were being funded by the Bush Administration. Public opinion swung in favor of the islamic courts, which were originally created as a judicial system by regional businessmen, but gradually became a local police force, and even provided services such as education and health care.

On February 18, Raghe and at least six other warlords created the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism (ARPCT). Four of the warlords were also part of the Somali Transitional Government. American support money flooded into this group. However, the popular reaction was even more swift. Battles between homegrown Islamic militias and a hated U.S. proxy force started the very same day.
Only a few months ago, this would have been impossible for lack of public support, experts said.
But the US support for the warlord Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism -- hated by the population -- sparked a wave of anti-American sentiment that massively boosted support for the Islamists, they said.
Karin von Hippel, a former UN expert on Somalia and member of the US Center for Strategic and International Studies, says that by backing the warlords, Washington encouraged the Islamic courts to take up arms.
A month later the forces of Adan and Raghe met again. This time Adan was backed by the islamic courts, and the ending was very different. Raghe's forces were routed despite the backing of American military aid. It was the start of the blowback against Bush's Somalia policy. On May 7th an outright war began between the U.S. backed warlords and the islamic courts, and by June 5th the warlords had been driven from Mogadishu. A few weeks later Raghe and another warlord fled to a waiting American warship. The fighting had cost about 350 lives.



Peace Comes To Somalia...the wrong kind

Most people are under the impression that Somalia has been in a states of constant anarchy for 17 years now. What many do not know is that there was a 6 month long exception to that rule, and the Bush Administration was determined to end it.
“The ICU was a relatively honest administration, which ended warlord corruption and extortion. Personal safety and property were protected, ending arbitrary seizures and kidnappings by warlords and their armed thugs. The ICU is a broad multi-tendency movement that includes moderates and radical Islamists, civilian politicians and armed fighters, liberals and populists, electoralists and authoritarians. Most important, the Courts succeeded in unifying the country and creating some semblance of nationhood, overcoming clan fragmentation.”
There were 72 functioning hospitals in Mogadishu when the islamists controlled the city. Now there are only two. The Mogadishu airport and harbor were opened up to commercial use for the first time since 1991, and the price of an AK47 had fallen to less than half due to lack of demand.

However, the Bush Administration was convinced that the ICU was full of terrorists and Ethiopia, Somalia's traditional rival, helped that impression along.
The Somalia Transitional Federal Government (TFG) is largely made up of ARPCT warlords, plus a few other warlords from other regions. It had never actually been in Mogadishu until after Ethiopia had invaded.
The Bush Administration never even recognized the TFG (which was formed in neighboring Kenya) until after the ARPCT was defeated. One nickname of the TFG is "Thugs, Farce and Gangs".

On December 21, 2006, the invasion of Somalia began, and the extremely short period of relative security in Somalia ended.

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