Innocent gaffe, or an insanely ignorant Vice President of the United States? You be the judge here? The people of Peru deserve better says Dick Cheney in a recent speech in Dallas about Hugo Chavez. Luckily he didn’t have his shotgun with him at the time. The people of Peru wouldn’t have been able to duck in time.
Hundreds of thousands of people a year in the US are injured in some way due to our crumbling and insane health care system’s defects. Thousands upon thousands die.
For-profit medicine just does not work contrary to what the pro business propaganda constantly tells us. We can do much, much better.
First step would be to declare health care a human right for all, and then to seek to make that a reality. Insurance companies have been perfectly happy to not deliver care to so many people that they should now just be totally removed from the equation. There is just absolutely nothing that they give to the delivery of medicine.
Health care for all is easy to bring about. Just remove the insurance companies entirely. The public doesn’t need them interfering with delivery of medical care in the US.
And when that is done, get these companies entirely out of providing retirement income to the elderly, too. The public sector could and would do it better too.
Why the US Lacks Full Health Care is a good article online at the California Nurses Association website.
Many in the Colorado Springs Justice and Peace Commission seem enamored with Eisenhower, and even wear caps with ‘I Like Ike’ on them, and carry banners highlighting his one speech supposedly warning about the Military-Industrial complex.
Far from warning us of the dangers of this beast though, Eisenhower brought the beast home to bite America big. I cannot bring myself to ‘like Ike’ as they seem to do.
One aspect of ‘Ike’ was how he was the master of the witch hunt. Most know that Joe McCarthy rose and fell during Eisenhower’s time in office, but too many believe that it was ‘Ike’ that stopped him, and deny that ‘Ike’ made the McCarthy Era happen. If you read the wikipedia info on McCarthy, one will even discover that Robert Kennedy was an employee of Joe McCarthy. The Kennedy’s were in bed with this sick maniac, and so was Eisenhower.
Eisenhower finally had to make some distance from McCarthy, but in no way did he distance himself from witch hunting, red baiting, and homo baiting. Similarly, he gave one speech supposedly distancing himself from the Military-Industrial complex, but his entire career was based on feeding that machine, and enlarging it. To hold this one speech by him high up as being an important and defining one is insane. Will one day some liberal folk focus on some speech by George Dubya talking about the need for compassionate conservatism and enshrine that speech in myth, too? Let’s hope not.
During ‘Ike”s presidency, the US almost started a nuclear bombing and invasion of China, and these years were the coldest of the Cold War. Put simply, I don’t like Ike and there is little reason for any even moderately liberal person in the US to like him either. It’s time to put in their graves these two mistaken J&P banners quoting Eisenhower on one, and Henry Ford on another. Henry Ford, too, was an American fascist thug of a previous era like Ike. It is sad to see proPeace activists carrying quotes from these two Right Wingers.
These two banners should be thrown in the garbage can and never again be used here in Colorado Springs. If not done soon, I think I will make up some banner quoting Joseph Stalin on the need for Peace (Yes, he certainly spoke to that many a time) and carry it side by side with the ‘Ike’ and Ford ones. Maybe then????? these nice pacifist liberals might get the message about how dismaying their choice of wording on these two banners really appears? Who knows?
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And there she lulled me asleep, And there I dream’d—Ah! woe betide! The latest dream I ever dream’d On the cold hill’s side. I saw pale kings and princes too, Pale warriors, death-pale were they all; They cried—“La Belle Dame sans Merci Hath thee in thrall!” I saw their starved lips in the gloam, With horrid warning gaped wide, And I awoke and found me here, On the cold hill’s side. |
I’ve always been captivated by archetypes of the feminine pariah.
These are the vixens about which cautionary yarns are spun to bridle man’s lust by fomenting a distrust of his opposite sex. They especially served to poison the power of woman, particularly when it was derived from her sexuality.
Can it be coincidence that the promulgators of these literary tales were often gay?
Keats fleshed out a famous Circe of the middle ages, a woman who without mercy would seduce a knight to his death in the woods.
There are sirens of course, and la grande dame Delilah, and all forms of emasculating succubi. Another variant has been haunting me from gothic images in black and white which I remember from my youth, of the film Jane Eyre.
Do you remember poor Rochester? He was not free to love Jane owing to an entanglement kept secret, his wife, become mad, kept for her own safety locked on an upper floor. Her sudden offscreen cackle was one of the most haunting sounds ever.
I remember warning myself to avoid Rochester’s fate, that of caretaker to a self-destructive, utterly irrational woman, in the character of Bertha Mason.
Actually, I believe the mad woman is at the core of every romantic villainess. Why would a mate wish her suitor harm were she not insane? Excepting the entrepreneurial black widow, a woman can be sympathetic and maternal, like your mother, or she can be a femme fatale leading you to self destruction.
Charlotte Bronte humanized the cautionary stereotype, but externalized two malevolent wild cards — multiple personality and drink. I’d forgotten these elements until reacquainting myself with the plot just now. There was a second woman, Grace Poole, charged with looking after the mad wife. Grace however, was prone to drunken bouts. Bertha seized those opportunities to escape and wreak destruction.
Even when Bertha set the castle alight, Rochester fought through the fire to save her, losing his hand and his sight in the attempt. Whether you attributed her actions to insanity, or metaphysically to Rochester’s due for having lived the life of a rake, blame ultimately did not lie with Bertha, nor with careless Grace, herself a victim of a vice.
Would Rochester have been so honor bound to Bertha if her homicidal lunges had been ignited by her own intemperance? I wonder.
I just learned about this book, Pornology, over at alternet where they had an article about it. So I’m wondering whether I should go over to Poor Richard’s and get a copy?
You see, like so many sad individuals of my sex, I have a porn addiction. I wrestle with this devil (sometimes day and night!) for weeks at a time. I am hoping that the female author, named Ayn (wonder if her parents gave her this name due to their studious readings in Ayn Rand Thought?) Carrillo-Gailey, of this work can give me insight to help cure me of this nasty affliction? Wonder if New Life Church could help?
I’m wondering, also, if I could go insane as so many have done through the ages due to their inability to focus on realities while under the curse of obsession with their affliction of onanism? Luckily, District 11 has a middle school course in endocrinology and abstinence that will probably inoculate our children from becoming addicted to this vice. I just wish that they had had this course back in the ’50s and ’60s when I was a kid. Plus, I was altered by not having alternet to alert me to finding fine books on this delicate subject such as Pornology seems to be.
Please Poor Richard have a copy available for me when I get to your store. This definitely looks to be good writing!
A local antiwar activist is in the habit of occasionally sending out to a group of people articles she finds of interest with her own comments about them. When Joe Lieberman announced that he wanted to have the Pentagon start dropping bombs on Iran she sent out the reporting of his comments asking if, ‘Is this man sane, or what?’ I’ve got an answer for that one…
Yes, Joe Lieberman is sane. In fact, he was the Democratic Party’s vice presidential candidate a few years back, running with Al Gore. What is insane, though, are all those people who now want to rehab Al Gore’s image and make him out to be a liberal. It was he who chose ‘insane’ Joe to run on the presidential ticket with him!
The web site ‘Common Dreams’ is one big example of those now fawning over Al Gore. In fact, I was just booted from being allowed to say I thought that a sad thing for them to be doing. Now, they will not allow me to comment on any article they publish there! They are sensitive people, and sensitive people like to ban criticisms of their sensitivities.
What if Al Gore had gotten into office as President of the US? Many Americans feel that that would have made all the difference in the world. They are kidding themselves though. Responsible people do not run alongside the Joe Lieberman’s of the world. They do not run with the Clintons of the world either.
Are we sane if we were to believe that Al Gore, or any of the other Al Gore clones, can make things somehow different than they are while living under King Bush? No, I don’t think so. You would just be another Democratic Party voter, that’s all, and we would still be living with an Alice in Wonderland world.
Reality is really hard to deal with with such insane ‘options’ to choose from.
Everywhere the US and its military goes, ethnic and religious unrest unfolds. Now that the US has torn apart Afghanistan like it has torn apart Iraq, Lebanon, and the Horn of Africa, it is turning its scopes on Syria and Iran, too. The Bush Administration seems addicted to its ethnic & religious divide and conquer policies.
However, this approach to foreign policy and military domination can easily spill out of control in ways not even thought about previously by the US government fat cats. Such seems to be the case with Pakistan, whose leader ‘Busharraf’ rules as military dictator, thoroughly compromised by how the US has turned him into a poodle puppet in its insanely termed ‘War on Terrorism’. In short, just as the US War Against Iraq threatens to spill over into a US attack on Syria and Iran, the failed US occupation of Afghanistan threatens to spill over into Pakistan, a country of 170,000,000 Muslims.
See Pakistan political unrest and this peek by the think tank Council on Foreign Relations entitled Pakistan’s Political Future
Fighting to rob Iraq of control of it’s own oil, the bipartisan Cheneycrats now risk continuing to destabilize a Muslim country with atomic weapons. Even now they are thinking of initiating a war with Iran supposedly designed to keep us safe from a nuclear attack! All this neighboring strife continues to destabilize Pakistan, a country already so destabilized it is hanging by a thread.. What a bunch of pathetic clowns we have leading the US today. Please, God, protect us all from these sad corporate promoted dummies as their corruption spreads itself around the planet disrupting everybody’s’ efforts to sanely govern themselves.
Destabilizing country after country along ethnic and religious lines is hardly any way to bring about any ‘national security’. If we don’t wake up soon and throw this Klan out in D.C. we might soon see much worse than 9/11 was inside our own borders. Destabilizing the Indian sub-continent following what our government has done in the Middle East is a clear recipe for nuclear disaster. And that’s exactly what seems to be happening in slow motion before our very own eyes.
We need to get out of Afghanistan as well as get out of Iraq. And we need to stop murdering, torturing, and allying ourselves in Pakistan with thugs like Musharraf and his dictator controlled Pakistani military. ‘Construction, Not Destruction’ needs to become our new National Security plan. Corporate leaders running our government are not the people that can implement this sort of new direction for the US. They are the people now ‘losing Pakistan’. And even losing America itself.
Antiwar protesters repeatedly get told they are not supporting ‘the troops’. Yesterday, in fact, a woman screaming out “You Bastards!’ at our peace vigil from her car, claimed that we were not supporting her husband who was one of ‘the troops’ in Iraq. Our standard refrain has always been, ‘Support The Troops, Bring Them Back Home Now!’ But I have another reply on my mind, and that is simply to ask the pro-war hecklers when are ‘the troops’ going to support us Americans?’ What do I mean by this?
Simple. You ‘troops’ are part of a war machine that is bankrupting the funding of social programs for the elderly, children, and needy in our society. You are fighting a war that most Americans no longer want, and that will put our children into debt for a long time to come. Yet you and your families continue to want you to be considered heroes, when you sign up and join the war machine and go after the preferential benefits that are yours for joining the government imperialist team. And many of you even have the nerve to get angry at us peace activists that want money spent in better ways than in just killing foreigners for corporate profit! That takes a lotta damn gall!
Yes, when are ‘the troops’ going to start to support the American people themselves? We want you back home alive where you won’t be helping bankrupt us civilians through the love of Halliburton and your own pride. Putting on your damn uniforms does not make you heroes, a class above us tax paying commoners. You went into the military thinking that the military pseudo socialism was the way to help yourselves out, but you bargained with the Devil and he may well take your heart and soul and your very life, too, if you are not very, very careful. Reconsider what you are doing.
Troops, help the rest of us Americans out, and support stopping the Iraqi war and occupation. True patriotism supports less militarism, less imperialism, and less money spent on you the troops, to the detriment of America itself. Troops and families of troops, speak out now against this thuggery you have become part of, and we wish you the best back home alive for those in other folk’s lands.
Stop the bloated war spending to help out the people of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the peoples of Haiti and Colombia, too. And most of all, to help out us, the people of America. America needs less of you ‘troops’ in prison guard, police, and military uniforms, not more. Patriots support more peace in the world, and less war. So do your part as you can. And try not to let the government dehumanize you, through the insane war the government has you fighting in.
Best wishes, from the antiwar community. But there is no way we are going to ‘support’ you by cheerleading the killing the government has you engaged in. Stop the constant wars. Our money for the people, not The Pentagon!
It’s been ages since I saw an article in Time Magazine worth reading, but ‘Are Prisons Driving Prisoners Mad?‘ does ask the right question It even goes so far as to answer the question honestly, and then to conclude that driving prisoners insane is in nobody’s real interests. There is though another question which is, ‘Are the Prisons Deliberately Driving Prisoners Insane?’ I believe that the answer is YES, which in turn leads to yet another question. ‘Why?’
The short article in Time hints that YES, the prisons are deliberately doing what they are doing, and says that it is out of society’s relatively normal urge, which they call ’emotional sense’ to make life harsh for those who have committed brutal acts. They conclude though, that ’emotional sense’ does not make practical sense. That’s because some of these now insane prisoners get eventually released back out into society and there they are even more likely to do harm than before.
What was interesting about this relatively honest Time Magazine commentary, is that nowhere did it ever call what was going on TORTURE. It did say that examining how SuperMax prisons and isolation function to permanently injure people did open up the need for courts to examine these practices and to maybe stop them. That somehow a line had been crossed?
So what amount of torture crosses the line for Time/Life/ AOL and folks like them? Apparently they have some second thoughts about turning people into vegetables and raving psychotics through sensory deprivation? But that is just one tier of torture within America’s Gulags. You get to that tier because other tiers of torture also are in place. SuperMaxes and isolation chambers begin in stages to torture prisoners. Are the earlier stage of solitary confinement deemed normal and appropriate by Time Magazine?
Take for example, the routine separation of prisoners in America from their children and spouses? Is that not a form of torture and prisoner abuse, too. Is that not the first tier towards driving human beings insane by torture? After all, what is a norm in prisoner abuse in American jails is not the norm in many other countries. In other systems of detention, prisoners are not forced into homosexuality, nor separated from the calming effects of holding their babies and hugging their older children. Is it not a form of torture to not allow normal human contact of this type for prisoners that will, in their majority, some day return to society?
Also, is it not torture to physically and emotionally allow some prisoners to torture others. The prison administrators like to charge that this is something that prisoners do to themselves and that they are doing all they can to stop it. Does anybody really believe this? Actually, just like in our foreign wars, the ‘deciders’ in control use one group against another, and afterwards blame them all for being responsible for the mayhem that is presided over. Inside the prison, homosexuals are often used against the others as informants, and heterosexuals are used against the homosexuals. Blacks vs Whites vs Hispanics. Short timers vs lifers, and lifers vs short timers. The prison administrative gang lords it over the prisoner gangs, and the prisoner gangs fight back, but usually against each other. The forms of torture administered within the American prisons are varied and often quite camouflaged. but they are there and constant. The greatest torture in the prisons is arbitrariness. It is used as a constant stick by the legal system.
All this mayhem encouraged amongst the tiers of torture inside American prisons only goes to reinforce the excuse for having so many locked up. ‘See? We got to do it! It’s not that we are cruel, oh hell no! It’s just that they are animals!’ But that’s all really a lie.
The truth is, that America’s tiers of torture inside the prison system were deliberately put into effect because the economically elite ruling class hates the poor, hates the weak, hates the people they rob and abuse, and want to torture them. It’s no mistake at all, and they encourage a mob to support them in their own hatred towards those they despise. The torture is there, because the rulers want to break others down into dysfunctional, mentally and physically destroyed human beings. This is the same nastiness and viciousness of those that burned witches at the stake, lynched innocent Blacks, beat and whipped slaves and prisoners of the past. It’s still going on, though the forms have evolved.
The tiers of torture within the US prison system are twin to the secret rendition centers and Guantanamo where our military abuses POWs held without any due process. So the answer to Time Magazine’s question is…. Yes, US prisons are driving prisoners insane. Thats’ what torture is meant to do, and torture works.
Should we honor the torturers and their work in America, Time? You do in most of your commentaries and ‘news’. We need to stop torturing all prisoners, and not just those held by the military.
This is insane! We are in a global war to secure energy supplies under US control, and all is justified with a mountain of lies. Meanwhile, the price of oil sinks below $2 a gallon! How delusional is all of this?
The US corporate world is completely unable to deal rationally with any social or environmental problems. The same as with energy, so goes our health care. Diseases are exploding forth, more and more with total resistance to antibiotic treatment. And the leading caste of America cannot even arrange minimal coverage for the population! One factor in the proliferation of these resistant diseases is global warming’s effect on the overall environment, and that is in turn caused by the overburning of fossil fuels.
We need conservation and not deadly wars to try to temporarily keep gas below $2 for Americans when its real worth is far, far higher. It’s the healthy thing to do, anyway you look at it to conserve the use of gas. Healthy for the environment, and healthy for your own personal health and that of your family.
This has got to be the most delusional epoch in the history of mankind. Our energy companies should be nationalized and removed from influencing further the absurd political life of our nation. Yes, and a few of those energy executives already deserve to hang for what they have done to America and the world. Pretending that we do not have an energy crisis when in fact we do, is has set us back from dealing with a crisis that can kill us all quite shortly down the road.
If we don’t run out of the oil to keep the world economy moving, the bacteria will get us as they thrive in our overheated world minus much of its ozone. Many of the indigenous tribes predicted that such poor stewards of nature would eventually destroy themselves, even as they themselves got slaughtered off. It appears to be coming to pass as tribal elders once claimed it would,
Capitalism has become exactly like a societal cancer that is now being fed on gas at $2 a gallon. Don’t celebrate this price. Cry.
A lot of what happens there, and in any war, is that the soldiers are literally brainwashed.
Basic Training is designed to be an intensive indoctrination program. The similarity to Cults like the Unification Church and such is literally mind boggling. Every detail, the exact number of people in the Flight or Platoon, the number in each squad, the arbitrarily assigned Peer Leaders, chosen at random the first day, 1 flight leader and 4 squad leaders, a total of 40 men in the flight, shouted orders which you have to shout back or shout Yes Sir or No Sir, while standing in a rigid stance, made to shout again and again, in unison.
Stripped of the individualism. Made the first day to look as much exactly alike as possible. Given inadequate and often interrupted sleep, then sleep but not in a recognizable pattern. Look alike, walk alike, fold your underwear alike, soon you will be thinking alike. It gets scary by the numbers. 4 will develop acute psychoses, 1 will attempt suicide. A total of 6 out of the 40 will not complete the training.
This supposedly helps you maintain discipline, cope with being under fire or other harsh conditions and still think alike.
What it actually does is make you into equipment, for the nonce. You have your conscience sublimated, because you are ordered to not feel guilt for “doing your duty”.
You are suppressed and repressed. Soon you are either obsessed or distressed, and, I confess, depressed. But the effect is temporary, sooner or later, the guilt of what you ordered to do gets to you, unless you are a true psychopath or sociopath. But that too is timed, it usually takes years, sometimes decades, and you are out of the Armed Forces by the time it hits you.
You are not yet insane by definition while you are blowing people to their component particles. You are controlled, but not by yourself. But when the reality comes to you, usually after but not always After you have left the constant reinforcement of this behavior.
That you enter into it voluntary, or not, makes no difference. Once you are indoctrinated any pretense of you being a volunteer drops away.
And you have the constant threat to your life, just from the nature of the “job”, for some odd reason you can’t just go around shooting people without them wanting to do everything they can to prevent you from doing so, and there is a distinctly mind chilling effect piling up, every time somebody points a gun at you, you look down the barrel and see death looking at you with a hideous one eyed stare.
A bullet wound isn’t clean, a little hole and the person looking for all the world like he is merely sleeping, no, sir, that is Hollywood. The kind of movie where somebody gets thrown through a window, picks himself up, dusts himself off and goes back to drinking. Instead of being cut to shreds like really happens. Those movie windows are called Candy Glass. The same when somebody hits you with a bottle. In real life, bottles are thicker and harder than the human skull, you bust somebody’s noggin with a bottle and he might just die right in front of you.
A real bullet might throw your friends’ innards all over you. The blood and guts and the shit, and the horrifying smell and sounds, constantly. But even the intervals of calm, because they are not scheduled, random, interspersed with random acts of violence and pain, nothing stable, nothing safe, eats you just as fast as the active phases.
Add in the idea that there real monsters in with the crowd, people who join for the knowledge that they will get to kill somebody without going to jail for it. And you have to stand day and night with these Socially Retarded Animated Sphincters. You have to remain loyal, even to them, but you know they might shank you when you get careless.
No, it isn’t an excuse. It is a reason.
To take that and make it positive, we really need to expose that for what it really is, and find a way to make it stop, and heal.
One way the heal the Troops is to Heel the Commander. Put a leash on that thar dawg. Make him mind.
If there is one dawg in the world that needs the Ol’ Yeller treatment, it’s him.
There is a book, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? which makes the same point, if we become like them to control them, then we become them, and somebody else will eventually control us the same way.
President Cheney is preparing Guantanamo show trials for this year, reports the New York Times. No hangings will happen, though a frying or two appears to be on the agenda. This ought to play so very well with the rest of the world, for sure. So, isn’t American ‘democracy’ lovely they will say? And of course it is. Condaleeza sez it so. And so it is so.
Let’s see? After being held and tortured without access to either charges or lawyers, legal procedure, or rights of any kind, that is then to be followed by a cluster fuck of show trials, judgement of the POWs by the Pentagon, and then the punishment they evidently have not yet already received. Oh, I”m sorry. I meant judgement of the ‘enemy combatants’. With a title like that, I am sure they will be presumed innocent until proven guilty. Or insane. They call this a jury of one’s peers…. in Alice’s Wonderland, the USA.
Democratic Party exINS police dog, Silvestre Reyes, flunked his IQ test this week. The new head of the House Intelligence Committee was given a series of basic questions about the Middle East by the journal Congressional Quarterly Today, and scored ZERO on their IQ test for him. Yes, truth is stranger than fiction, it seems. But Pelosi’s pick for the spot didn’t seem to even know the difference between the Sunnis and the Shia! Unbelievable! Maybe they should rename it the House Ignorance Committee instead?
Even the CQ interviewer didn’t quite believe what he was hearing when he sat down with Reyes to talk about this newest advance in his career as Democratic Party top hack. Hint hint. Now go and give this test to Obama, too. We want some more fun. This is much better than watching Sasha Cohen play Borat. And even much more fun than a vactaion to Tehran to do a philosophy conference, even! Can we get Cheney tested now? Pleaseeeee….
Doesn’t it boggle the mind to think that this bipartisan DP-RP insane asylum trying to run another culture without a clue to what’s going on, could possibly succeed? Nobody speaks Arabic or Pashto, nobody in the country other than Pat Robertson, Billy Graham Baby, and Glenn Beck know anything about Islam (just kidding), and 99% of the US public that supports this fiasco overseas can’t locate their asses from a hole in the ground on a map! Yes, our leaders are all as stupid as rocks. Good going Democrats with picking Reyes for his post. He might be even stupider than Dubya? No mean feet. duh.
Look, to be fair, the liberal voters even to the Left of the Democratic Party politician hacks try to play Risk with other people’s lives while being totally clueless. How many of these nitwits want to go rushing in with US troops from Djibouti (I guess?) into Sudan, Chad, and the Central African Republic? Give these good hearted fools an IQ test about the region, and they would be out of their Risk game within secs due to brain infarcts.. Most of these liberal wannabe admirals so ready to Trotsky into areas like that, probably have already forgotten their Kosovan Albanian. It is sad, this US desire to control the world. When will it stop?
Two articles today in the news got me thinking about genetically modified food and bioengineering again. In short, I think we have Ag gone mad, medicine gone mad, and Hey!, we just plain got Science gone mad! What drove HighTech crazy? Unfortunately it is the same thing that is driving all of us crazy, the constant insane drive by our ruling class to find new ways to profit and to max all profits out, and to speedup profit making all for themselves. In short, their greed is doing us all in. Let’s look at the story of Mothra vs Nopalzilla first, to see what got me into a tizzy on this one. It would be comical, except it’s really not.
As we can see, the moth that came to threaten Mexico got its start 90 years ago by an attempt of ‘scientists’ to ‘bioengineer’ in Australia. Some 125 years previously, settlers in Australia had imported a dye producing bug to help color their uniforms red. How important was that! They then imported cactus nopales to feed this bug with the red dye inside. But the nopales ran amuck in Australia like the poisonous cane toads later did, and wrecked havock on the natural habitat. That’s when the genius scientists stepped in with the moth that they took from Argentina to kill the nopales. Great success!
But this moth then made its way from Australia to Florida and started heading south towards Mexico, where 1/2 of all the world’s many species of nopal lives. Stopped in Alabama, the moth decided to hit the Isla of Mujeres offshore in southern Mexico, where now it may be blown a few miles to mainland Mexico in a few days, and then go on to destroy the nopal plants that just happen to hold down much of the soil of Mexico! In short, bioengineering scientists can later be proven that they have been about as adept as the Three Stooges.
So speaking of the Stooges, we have Taco Bell and Monsanto genetically modifying corn. But these stooges forgot the scallions it seems. E-coli, served at Taco Bell in the scallions has been killing and injuring folk now in several Eastern States, and Taco Bell and US health officials initially blamed Mexican produce for that. But just today, the actual culprit had been tracked down to California once again, where just a few weeks previous the Spinach had been killing folk that had bought those nice packaged, clean looking bagged specimens we are all tempted to buy while grocery shopping. Should we really trust people like Taco Bell with the GM corn, when they can’t even get the regular old onions right? I rather think not. Plus, we have the example of Mothra and Nopalzilla, too, to also help make us think twice about the supposed benefits that the HIghTech Ag folk say will come our way with mutating corn and other farm products.
Which brings us to medical bioengineering. It’s just the big thing now to be playing with genes, Dr Moreau. Go to the journals Lancet and Scientific American, and all sorts of groovy things are on the way, they say. Not only farm animals and farm plants are going to be modified right and left genetically, but medicines, vaccines, and lab rats. And you and I are the lab rats, it appears. All disease is going to disappear due to these tinkerings! Never mind the trillions being spent to blow the world up, reduce people down to utter squalor and despair, and to make us …. well…. SICK.
We need a lot less techology guiding the world on behalf of rich pirates that own the ag labs where it is being produced, and more common sense from the peasants. So in regards to genetically engineered foods, we should still say Down With the Food Czars! They are interested in making more bucks, and not interested really in our overall health. Don’t believe that? Walk down the grocery aisles some and ponder it a little more then.
And Doctor Moreau? You scare me the most. Your bizarre experiments on us all through your med labs and hospitals are producing a monstrous world ahead. The net result of the last decades’ practice by the corporate docs, is a world of disease we never ever dreamed possible not even in Hell, all flying our way at once. Don’t believe me? Pay a visit to some of the cancer wards perhaps. Try the burn units. Try the ICUs. Then go to the labs where reaserch is done on Dr. Moreau’s creatures. Hell with George Orwell and 1984. It’s more like HG Wells and his famouns book about the mad doc, instead. Todays’s Dr Moreaus promises us vaccines to cure all diseases that taste just like lollypops to lure us aboard his grand experiment. Yes, the bioengineering story has a little of Hansel and Gretel in it, too.
Well it has come to this. Janis Karpinski, ex-US general in charge of the Abu Ghraib prison, is ready to spill the beans about her former commander in chief, Donald Rumsfield. See Rumsfield Okayed Abuses And she says she will do it in Germany, where Rumsfield and other top US governmental authorities are actually being tried for war crimes! If somebody had imagined such a scenario a year ago, they would have been deemed insane.
Let’s fact it, America. We’re being led by a group of bloody torturers, thieves, and asssassins. They all deserve to go to jail for their crimes, while we should save mere impeahment for the Democratic Party heavies who went along with the whole Republican scheme to tear Iraq asunder.
Jail Bush, Cheney, Rumsfield, and the rest of the sorry group of thugs we currently have running our country, and get our troops entirely out of Iraq and Afghanistan. We should be ashamed of having allowed this level of total corruption to have passed in our supposedly ‘Land of the Free’. It’s more than past time to dump US corporate and governmental corruption out of our public life, simply to keep it from destroying not only us, but also the entire world.
In the aftermath of bombings and indiscriminate attacks in Iraq which reached record numbers on Thanksgiving, I read that the combined Iraqi civilian casualties raised the Baghdad death toll to 202. For the day. For Baghdad. The count starts anew each day.
Meanwhile the US soldier death toll is 50 and climbing, for the month. For all of Iraq. Why the differing units of measure? Why not consider weekly totals for both Americans and Iraqis, to facillitate comparison?
I know something’s wrong on the grocery shelf when the price of some items is given per ounce, while a similar commodity is described per pound. Somebody doesn’t want the price comparison weighed, and I haven’t yet taken a calculator with me to discover who.
Why this discrepancy of value for human lives? I’m thankful at least we are new counting the Iraqi lives lost, although the numbers are themselves distorted. US forces are conducting more air attacks where it’s more difficult to measure the casualties. Won’t somebody come out and say it, we care quite a bit less about Iraqi lives compared to American lives? Even though the Iraqis were likely innocents, often children and children.
How can news outlets simply set the standards of measure as if the most important factor was to have the result fall within manageable ranges, figures we can wrap our head around? Or more accurately, figures they can wrap around our head.
What’s going to happen when the daily toll of civilian deaths reaches higher? Will they break the day into parts, a morning Iraqi death toll for example? To compare not too insanely with the US deaths per month? What a ruse.
When Toto pulled aside the curtain to reveal The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy and her friends discovered that The Wizard was in fact a little man. Amplified voice, impressive title, diminutive man. But Oz was an uncomplicated world. Unmasking the wizard did not call into question who built Emerald City. It may well have been the Oompa-Loompas or the Weebles, but under whose leadership?
I’ve been getting a behind-the-green-curtain feeling these days. Let me tell you it began with another paid male escort, Jeff Gannon Guckert.
What a cheesy scenario. Fake journalist Jeff Gannon makes lots of overnight visits to the White House. Whose boyfriend was he? Wouldn’t a high ranking administration official rate a better class of hooker? Really how sordid. Who in the White House was attracted or bemused by this slow-witted bald man?
Of the same feather, evangelist Ted Haggard has been commuting to trysts with a Denver sex worker who knew him as “Art.” Ted even solicited Mike Jones for drugs when he couldn’t bring his own. We have been told that Ted Haggard was one of the most powerful religious leaders in the world. I’m having trouble seeing any kind of powerful man having to drive to Denver for blow jobs and methamphetamine.
I don’t doubt that Haggard pulls down a large salary, and that he commands the attention of tons of congregants, but his power is looking to me to have been a fabrication. America may be full of backward, bigoted hicks, but who was suggesting that Ted Haggard had a rein on them? Behind the green curtain and booming voice of apparent prestige and influence, we’ve found a little man who can’t even score Meth.
Behind the same curtain that holds Haggard up as leader of an army of God-fearers, I’m thinking is the bigger illusion, the looming Silent Majority of believers themselves. Bullshit. Haggard is a prostitute’s john, and Haggard’s flock are individual lonely tales of waylaid sheep. Adding up to nothing.
Media pollsters can convince us that Dubya won an election with the help of a Fundamentalist Right Wing. Even the motive to take war to the Holy Land, however insane, would get begrudging partial credit for being religiously motivated. It’s more palatable than the reality, that maintaining imperial imbalance of global resources is driven by pure greed. Immoral, inhuman, elitist greed. There’s not a spiritual drop of blood in any of the Neocon veins. Any pseudo religious platform is smoke and mirrors.
The Bush morning press conference. The gloves are off.
It’s true Bush is a diminutive pugilist, and he’s wowing no one with his wit. But he’s talking a stand, flat-footed, cornered and he’s got a temper.
Bush is the most powerful man in the world, like the Twilight Zone pre-pubescent who can doom us at will. George Bush is the humanist’s worst nightmare, possessed of neither empathy nor piety nor rationality nor wisdom.
We’re less alarmed to see Bush as a bumbling dim bulb. To see him dictating his insane will should give you goose bumps. I heard George Bush’s emergency morning press conference described as the worse ever. I wondered. Most inane? Funniest? Most repetitive? All/none of the above.
This was George unmasked, no smarter than he seems, rather… more stubbornly so, more determined to have his way, forget the constitution, the balance of power, or our civil rights, his way. This emperor has got no clothes and we’ve forgotten that means no gloves as well.
He makes a good point Mr. President. Damn right he makes a good point and I make a good point, it was my point, congratulations to me happy birthday to me where’s my violin?
A post 9/11 essay by anti-imperialist political prisoner David Gilbert.
9-11-01: The terrorism that terrorism has wrought
by David GilbertLike most people in the U.S., I was horrified by the incineration and collapse of the two towers at the World Trade Center (WTC). Thinking about the thousands of people, mainly civilians, inside, I was completely stunned and anguished. (Even the attack on the Pentagon, certainly a legitimate target of war, felt grim in terms of the loss of so many lives, and of course the sacrifice of civilians on the plane.) In the days and weeks that followed the media, as well they should, made the human faces of the tragedy completely vivid.
At the same time, the affecting pictures of those killed, the poignant interviews with their families, the constant rebroadcast of the moments of destruction all underscore what the media completely fails to present in the host of widescale attacks on civilians perpetrated by the US government. With the pain to 9/11 so palpable, I became almost obsessed with what it must have been like for civilians bombed by the US in Hiroshima & Nagasaki, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, and Yugoslavia – and what it would soon be like for civilians in Afghanistan, already just about the poorest and most devastated country in the world. (While the media very deliberately have downplayed the issue of civilian casualties from the bombings in Afghanistan, they already exceed those at the WTC.)
Terror Incorporated
The US bombing campaigns in Iraq and Yugoslavia not only killed hundreds of thousands of people but also deliberately destroyed civilian survival infrastructure such as electric grids and water supplies. And these are countries that don’t have billions of dollars on hand to pour into relief efforts. The subsequent US economic embargo of Iraq has resulted in, according to UN agencies, over 1 million deaths, more than half of them children.In addition to bombing campaigns, the US is responsible for a multitude of massacres on the ground. 9/11/01 was the 28th anniversary of the ClA-sponsored coup in Chile that overthrew the democratically-elected president; the military then tortured, “disappeared” and killed thousands in order to impose a dictatorship. The US instigated terrorist bands and trained paramilitary death squads that have rampaged throughout Latin America for decades. In little Guatemala alone (population of 12 million) over 150,000 people have been killed in political violence since the U.S.-engineered coup against democracy in 1954.
Listing all the major examples would go way beyond the length of this essay. (See William Blum, Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, 457 pp.) But what’s worse is that these bloody actions are taken to enforce the greatest terrorism of all: a political and economic system that kills millions of human beings worldwide every year. To give just one example, 10 million children under the age of 5 die every year due to malnutrition and easily preventable or curable diseases. Talk about anguish: how would you feel as a parent helplessly watching your baby waste away?
Since the early ’60’s, I actively opposed these U.S. terrorist attacks. But without the videos, the personal interviews, the detailed accounts, I never fully experienced the human dimensions. Now, seeing the pain of 9/11/01 presented so powerfully had me trying to picture and relive the totally intolerable suffering rained down on innocent people in these all too many previous and ongoing atrocities.
A Gift to the Right
What made the immediate grim event all the worse was the political reality that these attacks were an incredible gift to the right-wing in power. George W. Bush entered office with the tainted legitimacy of losing the popular vote by half a million. The report on the detailed recount of votes in pivotal Florida was about to come out. (When it did, the post-9/11 spin was that the recount the Supreme Court stopped would have left Bush in the lead. What got less attention was the finding that with a complete recount of all votes cast Bush was the loser.) The economy had started to tank. The Bush administration was making the US in effect a “rogue state” in the world: pulling out of the treaty on global warming, refusing to sign the treaty against biological warfare, preparing to scuttle the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. And the US and Israel had just exposed themselves, badly, by walking out of the World Conference Against Racism.9/11/01 and its aftermaths became a tidal wave washing away public consideration of the above crucial issues. Not only did the crisis lead people to rally around the president, but it also provided the context and political capital to rush through a host of previously unattainable repressive measures that had long been on the right’s wish list. We’ve also seen an ugly rash of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim hate crimes and a new-found public support for racial profiling.
I won’t attempt here to summarize all the serious setbacks to civil liberties. One measure that struck closest to home for me was not covered in the mainstream media. Within hours of the first attack, the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) moved about 20 of the political prisoners (PPs) – prisoners from the struggles for Black liberation, Puerto Rican independence, Native American and Asian activists, anti-imperialists, and peace advocates – held by the BOP into complete isolation. Most of these PPs weren’t even allowed to communicate with their lawyers – an extremely dangerous precedent. Once established, it clears the way for sensory deprivation and torture to try to break people down.
The BOP’s ability to move so quickly in prisons around the country means this plan had to have been on the drawing boards already – just waiting for the right excuse. What makes the “terrorist” label placed on these PPs all the more galling is that the Dept. of Justice knows full well that 1) while the CIA had past connections to the 9/11/01 suspects, these PPs certainly never have; and 2) while the perpetrators emulated (albeit on a smaller scale) the US’s cavalier attitude about “collateral damage” these PPs have always placed a high priority on avoiding civilian casualties. Indeed, it was precisely the US’s wanton slaughter of civilians – carpet bombings, napalm & Agent Orange in Vietnam; Cointelpro assassinations of scores of Black Panther & American Indian Movement activists at home – that impelled us to fight the system.
In pushing through the host of repressive measures without serious debate, the government has carried out a giant scam: a perverse redefinition of the dreaded term “terrorism.” Instead of the valid, objective definition of indiscriminate or wholesale violence against civilians (by which measure US-led imperialism is the worst terrorist in the world), the political and legal discourse has twisted the word to mean use of force against or to influence the government. If their “newspeak” goes uncontested, the long run implications for dissent are dire.
Global Strategy
More broadly these events have been a tremendous boon to what I believe has been imperialism’s #1 strategic goal since 1973: “Kicking the Vietnam syndrome.” You just can’t maintain a ruthless international extortion racket (to describe the imperial economy bluntly) without a visible ability to fight bloody wars of enforcement. They’ve taken the US public through a series of calibrated steps: from teeny Grenada in 1983, to small Panama in 1989, to mid-sized Iraq in 1991 and Yugoslavia in 1999. But public support for these ventures was only on the basis of short wars with minimal US casualties. Now the real sense of “America under attack” has generated widespread (if still shallow) support for accepting a more protracted war, even with significant US casualties.Other repressive forces around the world have been quick to capitalize on these events. A key example is Israel’s prime minister, Ariel Sharon. Talk about terrorists … as Defense Minister in September, 1982, he was in charge of Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon when local, Israeli-sponsored militias were given free rein for three days of butchery in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. 1,800 Palestinians were murdered. Now as prime minister, he very deliberately encouraged and provoked Islamic militants opposed to the peace process to attack, and then he immediately cried “terrorism!” (the Palestinians are always labeled as the terrorists even though it is Israel who occupies their lands and Israelis have killed 4 times as may Palestinians as vice versa) to discredit and isolate Chairman Yasir Arafat, who’s taken great risks to try for a peace agreement. Sharon’s strategy, as he continues to tighten the occupation and escalate the violence, seems to be to completely finish off the peace process, either by liquidating the Palestinian Authority or by forcing the Palestinians into a heartbreaking civil war that would bleed their nation to death.
Funding and Fostering Terrorists
The US government played a key role in cultivating and empowering the forces charged with the 9/11/01 terror attacks. It’s not just a question of whom the US supported after the December, 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; CIA aid to guerrilla groups preceded that by over a year, while US interference through it’s client regime (until toppled in 1979), the Shah of Iran, went back at least to 1975. The goal was to destabilize a government friendly to the Soviets and sharing a 1,000-mile border. (See Blum’s Killing Hope – relevant chapter available here ) As the US National Security Adviser of the time, Zbigniew Brzezinski, boasted years later, “The secret operation was an excellent idea. Its effect was to draw the Russians into the Afghan trap.” Brzezinski also justified the harmful side effects from this medicine, “What was more important in the world view of history? The Taliban or the fall of the Soviet Empire?” (see here for source )Even though baited, the Soviet’s invasion was inexcusable. The CIA, of course, seized the opportunity with its largest covert action operation ever, aside from Vietnam. It did not, however, simply support existing national resistance forces. Progressive Islamic forces, tolerant of other sects & religions and supportive of education for girls, got no aid and withered. The CIA instead deliberately and directly cultivated the “fundamentalists” who interpreted Islam in the most sectarian and anti-female fashion. (I’m wary of the term “fundamentalist” lest it play into US biases about Islam, although in the same context as the reactionary Christian and Jewish fundamentalisms, it would apply. I prefer Ahmed Rashid’s terminology of “Islamic extremists” for forces who have interpreted, or, as he argues, distorted Islam as hostile to women and generally intolerant.)
One reason for this US preference was apparently the belief that the best way to mobilize people against a pro-Soviet regime that had offered land reform and education for girls was on the basis of religious opposition to such policies. Another reason was that most US aid was channeled through Pakistan’s Interservice Intelligence (ISI), which had close ties with these extremist factions. A prime example is Gulbuddin Hikmetyar who started with virtually no political base but became a major power thanks to US arms and funds. US aid breathed life into numerous reactionary and power-hungry warlords. It’s no wonder, then, that a devastating civil war raged in Afghanistan long after the Soviet’s 1989 withdrawal. In short, the US didn’t have the slightest concern for Afghans’ rights and lives; they were simply canon fodder in the Cold War. When this chaos gave rise to the Taliban, they were backed by the US and Pakistan as a counterweight to neighboring Iran, based on Taliban antipathy for Shia Islam. Also the US made an early bet in 1994 on the Taliban as the force that could bring the unified control and stability needed by the US company Unocal to build its projected multi-billion-dollar oil and gas pipelines through Afghanistan. This hope unraveled by 1998 but now has become quite realizable with the US military victory there. Bush’s new special envoy to Afghanistan, who will spearhead US efforts to put together a post-Taliban government, is Zalmay Khalilzad. This Afghan-born US citizen was, in the late ’90’s, a highly paid consultant to Unocal on how to achieve their Afghan pipeline.
The jihad against the Soviets in the 1980’s attracted Muslim militants from around the world, including Osama bin Laden. In 1986, he helped build the Khost tunnel complex, which the CIA was funding. As he later stated, “I set up my first camp where these volunteers were trained by Pakistani and American officers. The weapons were supplied by the Americans, the money by the Saudis.” From 1982 to 1992, 35,000 Muslim radicals from 43 different countries participated in the war in Afghanistan, many training at ClA-supported camps. Tens of thousands more were involved in education and support work. Now, the US demonizes one individual, but it is very unlikely that one man or one organization controls the range of groups that spun off from that baptism of fire … and therefore very unlikely that “neutralizing” bin Laden will at all contain the current cycle of violence.
The results of 20 years of US-abetted wars – even before the Taliban came to power – were 2 million deaths, 6 million refugees, and millions facing starvation in that nation of 26 million people. Infant mortality is the highest in the world, as 163 babies die out of every 1,000 live births, and a staggering 1,700 out of every 100,000 mothers giving birth die in the process. (Most of the background and data in the above section comes from Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia.) What a bitter irony that the US, which did so much to foster the most anti-female forces and to fuel the ferocious civil war, now justifies bombing that devastated country in part as a defense of women’s rights. (See Naomi Jaffe, “Bush, Recent Convert to Feminism,” in Sojourner: The Women’s Forum, November 2001.)
While the direct aid to the now demonized groups is sordid, the US has had a much more major role in breeding such terrorism. Imperialism’s top priority has been to destroy progressive national liberation movements, which sought to unite the oppressed and end the economic rape of the third world. Since 1989, the US has achieved major strides against national liberation with a counter-revolutionary offensive that uses both relentless brutality (such as sponsoring various terrorist “contra” guerrillas) and sophisticated guile (a key tactic is to divide people by fanning tribal, ethnic, and religious antagonisms). But the conditions of extreme poverty and despair for billions of people have only gotten worse. Thus, the very successes against national liberation have left a giant vacuum.… now being filled by real terrorists indeed.
The Emperor Has No Clothes
The dominant power has discredited as unspeakable some truths essential to an intelligent response to the crisis. 1. The horrible poverty and cruel disenfranchisement of the majority of humankind constitute the most fundamental violence and are also the wellspring for violent responses. 2. The reasons given for the 9/11/01 attacks don’t at all justify the slaughter of civilians, but they do in fact have some substance: US military presence and bolstering of corrupt regimes in Muslim countries (not to mention throughout the third world); the brutal occupation of Palestine; the large-scale, ongoing killing of civilians in Iraq; 3. The Pentagon and the WTC are key headquarters for massive global oppression.The system’s massive terror does not at all mean that anything goes in response. As the Panthers used to say, ‘You don’t fight fire with fire; you fight it with water.’ Ghastly examples from Mussolini to Pol Pot have proven, at great human cost, that articulating real grievances against the system does not automatically equal having a humane direction and program. True revolutionaries spring up out of love for the people, and that’s also expressed by having the highest standards for minimizing civilian casualties. In the wake of 9/11/01 the example of the Vietnamese has become even more inspiring. They suffered the worst bombardment in history but always pushed for a distinction between the US government and the people, who could come to oppose it.
As painful and frustrating as US dominance is, the simplistic thinking that ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’ does not advance the struggle. All-too-many battles in the world are between competing oppressive forces. US embassies may be legitimate targets, but blowing up hundreds of Kenyan and Tanzanian workers and shoppers is unconscionable. And even within the belly of the beast, groups that would cavalierly kill so many civilians and who would hand such potent ammunition to the right-wing are not forces for liberation. At the same time, we can’t let our human commitments be blinded by floodlights that shine solely on this one tragedy. By any objective standard based on concern for human life, US-led imperialism is – by several orders of magnitude – the biggest and bloodiest terrorist in the world. We can not let the immediate horror, which the US did so much to engender, then be used to strengthen its stranglehold on humankind. Our first and foremost human responsibility is to oppose US-led imperialism.
The Challenges Ahead
It was encouraging that the anti-war movement here didn’t just collapse under the deafening roar of jingoism. But with the public’s attention on the US juggernaut in Afghanistan, it’s been hard to maintain the momentum of the anti-war, anti-globalization, and anti-racist movements. In many ways, it feels like a bleak time in the US because of the dramatic lurch to the right and the public support for many “anti-terrorist” measures that can be used in the future against dissenters. Nevertheless, even if the US completes this phase without a hitch, we are likely to be in for a protracted, if irregular, war as US action escalates the cycle of violence. While the situation is scary, it would only be scarier to give up because that would clear the way for continuing this highly dangerous skid into war and repression.Even the most formidable fortresses of domination develop cracks over time. Contradictions in the war on terrorism as well as stresses in the economy and social fabric are likely to develop. Our task is to keep a voice alive for humane alternatives rather than let every setback add fuel to the imperial fire. We are not as isolated as in 1964, when it was completely unheard of to publicly challenge such interventions. However, in other ways our task will be more difficult than the decade-long struggle to end the war in Vietnam. This time, people in the US do feel directly attacked and those now labeled as the “enemy” are not a progressive national liberation movement.
To me, the most apt, if somewhat gloomy, analogy is to the “War on Drugs.” In both cases: 1. the CIA actively fostered some of the worst initial perpetrators. 2. The “war” response only makes the problem worse. (Making drugs illegal makes them much more expensive, which is the main factor promoting crime and violence; waging a “crusade” against Afghanistan and “Muslim fundamentalists” and backing Israel’s suppression of Palestine are likely to result in many more terrorists.) 3. Both wars pit unsavory foes against each other whose respective actions justify and animate the opposing side. 4. While each war is a colossal failure in terms of its stated aim, each is a smashing success in building public support for greater police/ military powers and in diverting people’s attention from the fundamental social issues. 5. Finally, sky high barriers have been erected to challenging these insane wars. You can’t raise the question of decriminalizing drugs or of addressing the roots of terrorism without getting hooted off the public stage. One difference, unfortunately, is that the war on terrorism is likely to become bigger, more violent, and lead to an even worse loss of civil liberties. A difference from facing the McCarthyism of the 1950’s is that, hopefully, recent currents of organizing and activism provide a basis to begin challenging such reaction from its onset.
Building an Anti-War Movement
The starting point is a love for and identification with other people. We don’t have to become callous about the lives lost at the WTC, even though the government has used them so cynically. Instead we have the job of getting those who’ve awakened to this pain to feel the injustice and suffering of the many other atrocities that have been perpetrated by the US. As hard as that may seem, many Americans were asking, “Why do ‘they’ hate us so much?” While the government and media have done their best to shut down public discussion of this pivotal issue, we can offer genuine and substantive responses, which resonate with the widely-held value of fairness. We have to break through the colossal double standard and insist fully on stopping all violence – whether bombings or hunger – against civilians and to be very clear on all the major examples. There’s a related specific need to puncture the dangerous misdefinition of “terrorism.”In the discussion I’ve seen about building an anti-war movement, I wholeheartedly agree with those who insist that it must be anti-racist at its core. White supremacy is the bedrock for all that is reactionary in the US; in addition, the current gallop toward a police state will be used first and foremost against people of color. To be real about this, white activists have to go beyond the necessary process issues for making people of color feel welcomed at meetings and events. We also need to ally with and learn from their organizations and to develop a strong anti-racist program and set of demands.
It also seems crucial to develop strong synergy with the promising “anti-globalization” movement – not only because that’s where many young people have become active but even more importantly because the only long-term alternative to “the War on Terrorism” is to fully address the fundamental issues of global social and economic justice.
We face an extremely difficult period, without much prospect for the exhilaration or quick successes. But we don’t have the luxury of despair and defeatism – that only hands an easy victory to the oppressors. To draw a lesson from the past, we now celebrate the many slave rebellions, going back centuries before abolition became realizable, because they weakened that intolerable institution and kept resistance and future possibilities alive. History, as we’ve seen, goes through many unpredictable twists and turns. Principled resistance not only puts us in touch with our own humanity but also keeps hope and vision alive – like spring sunshine and rain – for when new possibilities sprout through the once frozen ground.