The brutality of the Oakland Police against #OccupyOakland and Iraq vet Scott Olsen is prompting many to measure their eminent victory with ol’ Gandhi’s hopeful adage: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” Apparently we’ve reached the fight stage. Yeah no. Sorry folks but teargas and nonlethal measures while dressed in riot gear is still the LAUGH AT YOU stage. You’ll recognize FIGHTING. It’s what America does to everywhere.

From Pie Any Means Necessary by the Bionic Baking Brigade:
 
“…our weapons of choice hurt nothing more than the image and ego of our targets. Although we don’t claim to be nonviolent in the proactive Gandhian sense, we do claim to be not violent.”

Give praise to Allah where praise is due
 
As the Freedom Flotilla made its slow approach last week, a popular Huffpo article pronounced the convoy a testament to the awesome power of nonviolence. That sentiment went about as viral as activist-geeks can get. But the blockade running denouement proved something of the opposite, didn’t it? I hope the sanctimonious pacifist will be brave enough to admit it. The Muslim Brotherhood bravely charging the Israeli navy was surely the definition of martyr, if anyone has ever earned it. Without pushing the IDF to bare its authoritarian fangs, there would have been no story, no outrage, the end. An entirely compliant convoy would have been led by the nose to Ashdod and diplomatic compromise. Neither Gandhi nor King nor Mandela gained without a massacre they didn’t provoke. It’s a slander to their legacy that nonviolent movements have been co-opted by religious purists who subordinate social justice to self-fulfilment, generally in the guise of your post-earthly reward. Labor organizers used to curse the industrialists’ first line of union busters, the churches which practiced appeasement and promised “pie in the sky when you die, by and by.”

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Over US objections, the Organization of American States (OAS, OEA) voted to invite Cuba back into the fold, from which it had been expelled in 1962 for hanging with Communists. Cuba’s reply? No thanks! Although Cuba’s acceptance by fellow nations was hailed a victory, Fidel Castro wrote: “It is naive to think that the good intentions of one president justifies the existence of a body that… supported… neoliberalism, drug trafficking, military bases and economic crises.”

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Do you hear the people sing, singing a song of angry men?
It is the music of a people who will not be slaves again.
When the beating of your heart echoes the beating of the drums,
There is a life about to start when tomorrow comes.

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The iconic personal possessions of Mahatma Gandhi were auctioned this week, and will remain in India. Gandhi’s poverty may have been largely symbolic, but his bowl and sandals remain unimpeachable representations of his ideals.
If there’s an upside to the banking collapse, it’s that some Wall Street or London financier was not able to purchase Mohandas’ bowl for the sole purpose of taking a shit in it.

Israel plans propaganda offensive, to convince the world that they were the victims of the Gaza genocide!

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OK, this is a gratuitous commentary but don’t blame me for it, since I’ve merely overdosed on the religion from the Colorado Springs Justice and Peace Commission, a group supposedly dedicated to fighting US war making and not just for going to some sort of New Age Church on off days of the week. Wild elephants kill 3 in northeast India

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Joseph Biden is a long time proponent of creating 3 separate ethnic enclaves in Iraq so that the Pentagon can better dictate Iraq’s future. Essentially, Joe Biden is the actual architect of current Bush Administration strategy in Iraq, which is based on ethnic cleansing and separation. See the report US Senate votes to divide Iraq for a peek into the background information about this.

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Why are Americans so uninterested in what their government does in their name in Somalia? We certainly have shit loads of good liberal folk running around in circles demanding that the US government intervene militarily in Sudan, do we not? But we have a virtually total silence about what the US is doing to the Somali people. More blowback from the war on terror Why is that?

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Two PPJPC board members, Genie Durland and Dorothy Schlaeger, wrote to The Colorado Springs Independent trying to explain why the group’s officers locked some of its membership out of the PPJPC building where we had tried to hold a meeting.

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America’s Christian liberal pacifists have canonized Gandhi into being one of their Holy Trinity of Christian pacifist Gods. #1 Jesus, #2 Gandhi, #3 Martin Luther King… Almost all of these American pacifists, though, know little to nothing about Gandhi, the Indian subcontinent, or the history of the British Empire that Gandhi supposedly liberated ‘his’ people from, and these Christian-oriented liberals have an entirely idolized view of the man Gandhi and his life. So as a counter to their hero-God worship, we ask them, Why Do India’s ‘Untouchables’ Hate Gandhi?

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French imperialist troops in Chad, backed by the US and UN, are helping regionalize and spread the Darfur fighting, rather than helping stop it. Since the entrance of these troops into the region, we have seen attacks on both the capital of Chad, and also on the capital of Sudan. See CHAD: STATE OF REBELLION section of BBC’s reporting.

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I have this sign that I pull out at times when we have our little protests, and it always seems to cause consternation among some ‘Peace’ people! Their faces get all grim and often times they ask me to put it away. Who are these people that feel this way? Are they really for peace, or are they really merely just trying to love up to the Patriot Missile crowd? Personally, I think they just have a plain bad attitude.

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“Rosa Parks did so act on her own!” I’m faced with this repudiation yet again, as J’s high school class revisits the civil rights movement. Their reading list includes Howard Zinn, but still the lesson plan is determined to press home the Parks as lone rider theory.

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Most liberals are naive to other thinking or to the insightful speeches of the socialist black activists of the 60′s. Stokely Carmichael saw the powerlessness of the liberal that other moderate Negro leaders wouldn’t attempt or couldn’t see.

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Aww, it’s positively time to tune out the radio. Fidel Castro is stepping down and the Cuban malcontents, the would be scouts for capitalism, the agents of our banks and special interests, the progeny of corrupt Batistas run out in 1959, who cloak themselves as dissidents or oppressed civil rights activists, are jockeying to get in their last digs.

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I’m learning of a vulnerable schism among pacifists. There are pacifists like Gandhi and MLK, known as pragmatic pacifists, and principled pacifists emerged from the socialist school.
 
Pacifists up against the usual suspects need to ally, but their ideological differences are easily exploited by agents who would divide their efforts. One side has Jesus and a belief somewhat parallel to the one which dictates that none can be right except through Him. The other carries the baggage that religion has always messed up common man’s self determination, but beggars can’t be choosers.

It turns out that the Air Force Academy here in Colorado Springs was not chosen to bring ‘PEACE’ to the Middle East, nor was the Army Academy at West Point. The site for The Cheney Empire to force more of a mess on the Middle East is to be the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. Welcome, Palestinians! It’s a festive occasion this week!

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All Pikes Peak Reads has chosen this year’s library recommendation: ZORRO! Did you know that was a work of literature? Dumas, you think? R.L.S.? This choice follows To Kill a Mockingbird, Frankenstein, Treasure Island, and Alice in Wonderland. All accessible to younger readers to be sure, and literary to boot. I have no argument with Isabel Allende’s Zorro [prequel], to entice the participation of Pikes Peak area adults, but what for the children? Charles Lamb? Harold Lamb? Did Zorro capture their prolific imagination? No, the kids get to read not the Legend of Zorro, but ABOUT the legend of Zorro. Great, so it’s not literature, at least it’s history. Is it?

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Bush counts on the Democrats to toe the line. He counts on the peace movement to take his actions lying down.
 
They’re passivists but won’t admit it. And the smirking chimp rolls on. Into Iran, Africa, Asia. While the peace-talking pacifiers quiet your outrage. Be Gandhi, be Jesus, be lambs to the slaughter, the non-violence disciples cry. You’ll die in good conscience. Don’t rock the boat, you’ll disturb our meditation. I call it slumber.
 
In Colorado Springs we live in the belly of the beast. Don’t upset it. Pass the cookies.

Somebody’s written a new biography of Che Guevara, painting him as the father of modern terrorism. How silly. Did Boeing father 9/11? It seems a perverse sacrilege I don’t want to abide. Shall we say Gandhi was the father of couch potatoes? George H.W. Bush fathered a bastard.

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Hamas and Fatah. Do you know which is which? I try to keep abreast of the people’s struggle, so I find it strange and disappointing that in the news I so often cannot differentiate the two. I blame a slanderous media intent on confusing us about which are the Honest representatives of Palestine, and which are the Fake.

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Two weeks ago I wrote about a CIA funded Otpor spokesperson in town talking to local pacifists of Gandhi and nonviolence and how supposedly that had overthrown Milosevic in Yugoslavia instead of the US and NATO bombs rained down on his country. Then last week I wrote about a NM Department of Tourism run ‘peace’ festival in Albuquerque funded to the tune of $450,000. Sappy ‘peace’ rhetoric run by the Chamber of Commerce basically. This week I guess the focus has to be on the Australian ‘Sidney Peace Prize‘.

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Half a million can buy some PEACE for you in Albuquerque next week. You get Rigoberta Menchu, the Dalai Lama, and some Gandhi, too…. all for just $65/person, price of hotel room and organic vegetarian nourishment not included. I feel like flying there in a hot air balloon! New Mexico Peace Conference