There will always be common people,
as there will always be opportunists to exploit them.
But there will be some who feel outrage,
who will rally for reform and refuse to be beaten down.
More often than not, the idealists are beaten.
(Paintings of historic uprisings usually only depict
rebellion leaders being executed.)
There are other occasions, rare perhaps,
but within grasp enough to offer hope,
when reforms succeed, and the opportunists are beaten
for the dogs that they are.
Ho ho ho. John Edwards declares himself a candidate for aught eight, counting no doubt on the votes of Virginians who haven’t been told about Santa Claus.
John Edwards, half of the Kerry-Edwards day-after concession speech givers will, instead of doing his upmost to get to the bottom of vote tampering, vote fraud, voter intimidation and obstruction in the 2004 election, will instead ask the Barnum and Bailey crowd to throw their votes at him again.
In a carefully stage-managed photo-op in a black-Ammerican’s backyard, in New Orlean’s still neglected Ninth Ward (for whom he did what exactly?), Edward’s voiced the same middle of the road platitudes which -we’re told- endeared him to the American public the first time. “Let me be clear.” “Let there be no misunderstanding.” Ad infinitum, sin explicity. The Republican strategy in Iraq is wrong, no mention of what could be right. But he wants it firmly understood, so there’s no misunderstanding, it’s so clear it doesn’t need saying, know what I mean, nudge, nudge?
This is the straw man technique used by the Republican yellow press. Put a spotlight on the weakest opponent and pretend he’s the best they got.
No John Edwards, if you’re any bit the patriot at all, step aside and let somebody lead the Democrats to reclaim justice for the people. We do not need your poison pill of Benedict Arnoldry. You are a baby-faced son of a bitch God-damned traitor opportunist carpert bagger fraudster’s shill. Confess now or go down with the rest of them. Fall all the harder for the extra effort your treachery presents.
You could have contested the 2004 vote, if nothing else to bring to light the rigging of American elections by the well-placed Republican voting officials and their black-box contractor cohorts. You could have spent some of the Democratic Party funds earmarked for the fight instead of capitulating and forcing appalled Americans throw in even more contributions to aid the likes of Bev Harris and independent party candidates challenge the voting irregularities. Instead you handed George Bush the keys to the hen house, with already thousands burning inside it, and slithered away to surface another day, Christmas 2006, to ask for a chance to do it again. Fat chance Mr. Edwards, no promotion for you, you’ve been very bad elf.
I don’t watch the Sopranos so I don’t know whether this kind of thing happens everyday on television. Authority figure / love interest / recurring character / moral compass on the TV show Weeds gets driven summarily into a garage and killed.
Sitting in his car outside a drug deal gone awry, he is asked by a girl to roll down his window. She releases the locks and two goons slip in beside him from both sides and turn the car into an awaiting garage. The garage door lowers to the soundtrack “time to die.” Did I mention he was a cop?
The other thing the cop character representated was the show’s least morally compromised character. He was a narc who lapsed in a self-interested act, to protect his lady friend pot dealer, with the hope that she then get out of the business. When she does not, and in fact ramps up her activities to become a grower, he rebels at her decision, ultimately forcing estrangement. Then she betrays him and it gets ugly.
And what happened when loverboy died? Our Miss Dealer, in the midst of a multiple gunpoint drug deal standoff, interrupts to wander, to wax, glassy eyed and aimlessly about the kitchen, repeating “he’s dead?”
That scene captured two incongruous aspects of the show: the heroine’s empathetic innocence, walking around in bemused bewilderment at what happens to her, and two, the comic non-violence (dead copper aside) of the suburban drug world.
To its credit, Weeds teaches nothing of the real world of pot growing, distribution, addiction or law enforcement. In the same way that it is too idyllic, it is also thankfully uninstructional. Pickups are mere social calls, a grow house is tended as neighbors coming in to feed the fish while you’re away. There is no question of unreliability that in real life always marks a Keystone Cops constabulary of pot heads. Dealing is never shown. Our heroine is a “natural” at dealing, we’re told, but we never see what that would be actually. Sort of like we never saw interior design practiced in Designing Women.
We see pot fetishism, even an implied popular support for pot smoking by a suburban majority, and addiction is never shown. Unless you count our heroine’s addiction to the business of easy money and notoriety. The series started with a sudden widow facing an insurmountable suburban house payment, who is dropped into pot dealing as a last resort.
I’ve wanted to address the problem of Weeds. Everyone’s quirky. Because we become familiar with them, we do become empathetic. You could say they are all flawed but real human beings. I’ll assert they are not even. All the characters are opportunists and hedonists and worse than a non moral tale. They tell an immoral tale.
Dweebs? Opportunist? Cretins? Inane Fausts, right-wing mini-minds, criminals.
Several recent events have lead me to some dots that need connecting. The dots may seem wildly disparate: the kidnapping of peace workers in Iraq and Palestine, the recent NYT revelations of counter-protest tactics employed be the NYPD, and a French film about heavy-handed manipulation of political prisoners.
Part One: Les Yeux des Oiseaux
I saw a movie two decades ago called EYES OF THE BIRDS. It depicted a prison in Uruguay for enemies of the state. They were making preparations for an inspection by the Red Cross. The story told of repercussions suffered by the political prisoners as a result of the long anticipated visit.
A couple of recent news items made me recall the film. In an early scene the prison warden ordered one of his men to do something irrational. Without provocation the warden ordered a guard to begin shooting at the prisoners who were assembled in the yard. At the same time, the warden filmed how the prisoners reacted.
That night the prison staff studied the footage to determine who among the political prisoners were the troublemakers. They weren’t looking at who was the more provoked, who was the quickest to run for cover, or even who was the most defiant. They weren’t looking for the strongmen or cellblock Kapos, they were looking for the leaders. They noted who shielded the others with their own bodies, who shepherded fellow prisoners to cover, and who sought to defuse the chaos by urging everyone to remain calm.
Those persons were then sequestered from the rest of the population, kept from contact with the Red Cross inspectors, and promptly dispatched with bags over their heads and buried. The film was fictional, but based on many corroborated accounts from Uruguay’s long years of repressive rule and disparados.
Part Two: NYC undercover cops
A recent New York Times article describes how NYPD officers infiltrated a number of peaceful street protests to incite the crowds to react. Tactics like this are nothing new for union-busters. The Pinkerton Security Agency for example got its start by hiring thugs to disrupt early efforts to organize strikes.
But do we expect such behavior from our men in blue? They’ve sworn to protect and serve us “with honor!” It used to be against the law for law enforcement to infiltrate political organizations.
Here’s what the NYPD was doing. Perhaps so as not to risk charges of false arrest, the police would plant, not drugs, but arrestees! The police would confront a crowd of protesters and arrest their own undercover officers. Immediately one of the arrestees would reveal himself as being under cover. This would divert suspicion from the ones still playing the victims and serve to incite the crowd to anger. They were angry for having been infiltrated, and then for seeing several among them arrested without apparent provocation.
With the crowd sufficiently distracted from its non-violent mantras, uniformed officers could move in from the sidelines and make their selective arrests.
From video taken by an IndyMedia reporter.
Number 36 cried out
“I’m under cover.”
The two behind him
pretended to be arrested,
only to be spotted later
at another protest site.
Real arrests followed.
Does this authoritarian maneuver resemble the M. O. used in Uruguay? To work, the perpetrators count on two things. First, that the heat of the moment will wrong-foot even the most defensive strategist. The tactic is after all nothing new.
That the targets feel the heat counts on a second, very cynical, assumption: that peace activists, like political dissidents, like freedom fighters, have a not easily repressed sense of humanity. They’ll betray their own goodness sooner than bear witness to injustice.
Probably you can see where I’m going with this.
Part Three: CPT Peace activists in the Middle East
When we hold vigils for the Christian Peacemaker Team members still held hostage in Iraq, we wonder how can those nasty insurgents threaten the lives of people who are so plainly on the side of the Iraqi people? It does seem particularly godless of those rebels doesn’t it? And absurd. I offer four thoughts.
A. Peace workers held in high regard
A friend of mine went to Iraq before the first Gulf War as a human shield to try to prevent the U.S. bombing campaign against Iraq. He wore a t-shirt which proclaimed his purpose there.
He told me that after a while, his journalist friends were begging to buy his t-shirt from him. So revered were the peace activists, they could walk into the worst areas in the middle of the night, and fear nothing. The few reporters and photographers who remained in Baghdad were so jealous of the access the peace workers had to ordinary Iraqis as a result of the deference shown to them.
B. Iraqi treatment of captured U. S. soldiers
Without exception, American soldiers captured by Iraqi forces have been returned to us safe and sound, neither hooded, tormented, tortured, nor humiliated. The extent of the “interrogation” of the captured supply line crew was to ask them to put truth to a lie: “had they been greeted with flowers and candy?”
Footage banned in the US: Iraqis ask them “were you greeted with flowers and candy?”
Not far from there, Iraqi doctors were already trying to return the captured Jessica Lynch to the American lines, but American soldiers kept shooting at their ambulance, forcing them to turn back. (Later American doctors would accuse the dumb-founded Iraqis of having raped Jessica’s limp body. In fact Lynch had earlier been forceably sodomized by a fellow U.S. soldier.)
Indeed Iraqis have shown a greater sense of compassion and humanity than our feeble representatives have ever shown them. From cluster bombs to DU to acceptable collateral damage to Free-Fire Zones to Kill Boxes to indiscriminate savagery to dehumanizing protocol. Americans have proven to be as barbaric as the Iraqis are cultured and forgiving.
What about the suicide bombers and the beheadings? The Iraqis are a divided people, and they have been driven to desperation. Execution by beheading, so horrifying to us, is more commonplace in their traditions. And then again, all may not be what it appears…
C. The mysterious beheading of Nick Berg
Nick Berg was a young do-gooder who traveled to Iraq on his own dime to try to take part in the reconstruction. He supported the war apparently, but it would be hard to paint him as an opportunist or profiteer. Nick Berg went to Iraq without a contract, nor much prospect for getting one. He went there to help.
The last people to see Nick Berg alive were CIA, a fact they denied at first. Nick was being detained by the U.S. military before his disappearance into the hands of his executioners. Though he was horribly decapitated on a video distributed all over the world, no reporter is quite ready to say who did it. Behind Nick Berg in the video, the figures under the robes did not look quite right.
The U.S. military immediately said the voice on the tape was that of AL-ZARQAWI. Robert Fisk, one of the most respected and senior reporters of Middle East affairs is not prepared to say that he even believes there exists such a person as Al-Zarqawi.
The timing of Nick Berg’s beheading was also very strange. World outrage was at an all time high from the photos just out of Abu Ghraib prison. Nick Berg’s gristly death seemed to provide a counterpoint to Lindy England’s sorry pose.
If I were suggesting that U. S. Forces were behind the Nick Berg execution, the case has been made by many already, I would be going off track. It certainly reflected poorly on the insurgents. But making the other side look bad is no clever trick. We trained Central Americans to do it all the time. Take off your uniform, dress up like rebels, and make it look like they massacred the village and not you.
When the Iraqi police in Basra apprehended two British black-ops this summer and then refused to release to them to British custody, the British forces immediately organized a prison break by driving a tank into the police station. They rescued the captured brits before they would be made to explain why they were dressed up like insurgents and what they were planning to do with a carload of live Improvised Explosive Devices!
It is suggested that those who killed Nick Berg took Abu Ghraib off the front page. I would suggest that the abduction of westerners serves a motive more closely related to the Uruguayan – NYPD gambit.
Why aren’t these hostages taken from the ranks of American soldiers? Some of the hostages have been contractors, and I’m sure many of their abductors have been criminals. Large ransoms are being paid for these hostages, it stands to reason that organized crime wants a piece of it. And whether these abductions are sanctioned or renegade, they achieve the same result, for whomever.
For the most part, the highest visibility hostages have always been people sympathetic to the cause of righteousness. It makes the insurgent/resistance fighters look bad, but more importantly I bet it makes them feel bad. Whichever it is, the Iraqi people probably scramble as desperately as we do to save the lives of the hostages.
D. British aid workers kidnapped in Gaza
Peace workers go to Palestine for one purpose, to save Palestinian lives. Palestinians are being shot left and right by Israeli soldiers, it is only when they are accompanied by western volunteers that the Israelis are deterred from shooting them and that Palestinians have a chance of being permitted through checkpoints so that they can reach medical care, or so that their children can reach school unmolested.
Activists Rachel Corrie and Tom Hurndall died putting themselves between Palestinian civilians and Israeli rifles. Activists brave tough Israeli travel restrictions to get into the occupied territories so that they can try to save innocent lives.
Certainly only the most heartless of Palestinians could be threatening the lives of these altruist activists. Maybe the Israeli military is counting on the fact that most Palestinians will not be heartless enough to sit idly by.
If there are Palestinians who believe the kidnap scenario, perhaps they are trying to contact resistance members whom they believe might have some influence. Perhaps resistance members themselves are hurriedly trying to ferret out possible miscreants in their ranks.
Regardless of who is in possession of the captives, the Israeli military is no doubt studying everyone’s movements very carefully. Normally a resistance network has to communicate between cells very sparingly. But with the clock ticking, with international pressure, and the life of a selfless non-combatant at stake, resistance fighters might eshew the risks of disclosing their activities in their effort to facilitate the search for an unjustly jeopardized fellow human being.
What does Palestine have to do with Iraq?
More on that another time. It is fashionable to argue that the liberation of Iraq was less about democracy and more about oil. What are you now paying for gas? This war is even less about oil than it is about global dominance. In the Middle East our colonial presence is called Zionism.
Could the Americans be orchestrating the kidnapping of sympathetic westerners in an Uruguayan style provocation of the Iraqi resistance? Have our other military actions been any less dastardly?
Let’s pause for a moment of silence for the hostages. May both sides unite to save the lives of the captive Christian Peacemaker Team, and of Kate Burton and her parents in Palestine. And please Lord, may too many Iraqis not jeopardize their own lives trying to help save a handful of ours.
In Hans Christian Andersen’s THE EMPEROR’S NEW CLOTHES, a little boy is finally able to say what no one else would: the emperor had no clothes! The key element which Andersen left out of the fable was this: access!
Everywhere you turn today you can find people frothing at the mouth for the chance to say “the president has no clothes!” But no one can hear it. Television reporters can look at you with a cynical smile, even offer their agreement, but the message goes no further than their camera lens.
People with access to those in power don’t seem up to making a peep. What about their friends? Doesn’t anyone chide whoever is above them on the food chain for not stating the obvious? What do White House minions say to their relatives over the holidays? Do they fear something from speaking out about which we don’t?
Would a danger to their persons or livelihood be relevant? Many of those people are our elected representatives. Wouldn’t it be their job to cry out? And what about our cultural heroes? They owe their popularity to the largess of the people. Where are they to speak out?
Lance Armstrong can beat seven seasons of Frenchmen, he can beat cancer, but he doesn’t dare face off our little emperor in his skivvies?
This president has no clothes! Before we get caught up arguing with those who would take the accusation literally, let’s say that by no clothes we mean no brain, and he absolutely has no heart. Both of these observations are unimpeachable. We see it everyday on TV. The president is a moron. And we see what he is doing. Heartless.
Or do you stand among those in Andersen’s fable who would have said “nonsense, little boy, your heart is simply not pure enough for you to be able to see his clothes.” Any child reading along with you would put you in your place. Unless he was resigned already that you were deceiving him for some reason, he’d call you a fool.
And he’d be right, because this emperor does not have a stitch of anything on!
I have nothing against naked loony psychopaths, but it’s fairly accepted that they are best kept in institutions where they will not harm the rest of us. Those who would prop a rampaging mentally disabled lunatic into the president’s office, declining to comment on his quite visible impairments, instead declaring him “the best man for the job” so they might continue to line their own pockets, those people must be put into prison.
This emperor’s courtiers: the influence peddlers, opportunists, crooks and stooges are the true danger. They maintain the barricade over which the little boy’s voice cannot be heard.
But on our side of the barricade, in the free speech zone, we hear him.
Katrina Relief- What should you do?
Hoist the Federal Governement up on its own petard!
Do not aid and abet the carpetbagger land grab!
Do not aid and abet the displacement and scattering of the Louisiana poor.
The poor are the ones who’ll have to stay and stand up for their rights to their land.
Recovery funds should go to them, not to the reconstruction companies, developers and gaming resorts. I’m sorry but that’s not going to happen if you are helping to ship them out of Louisiana and Mississippi to put them up here.
Immediately after the Katrina disaster, “philanthropists” from Colorado Springs hired buses to go down to the relief shelters. The “philanthropists” plastered the stricken areas with fliers advertizing COME TO SCENIC COLORADO SPRINGS, etc.
The “philanthropists” set up agencies here to allocate the refugees to hotels and then apartments and houses. They helped connect refugees with cars, appliances, furniture and clothing. Those “philanthropists” were also quite visionary, because they foresaw that FEMA would pay for it all!
So what did those “philanthropists” accomplish after all? That FEMA money would flow into Colorado Springs coffers! Apartments and homes that had been empty are now occupied! Colorado Springs goods and services are now getting Federal dollars. And who were those “philanthropists?” Wealthy, well-known, developers! And apartment complex owners! And local business leaders!
Many of the refugees have since returned to the south to be with their families and friends. But it looks like the “philanthropists” foresaw that too, because it didn’t matter, the rents on those now empty apartments are already paid! FEMA paid for a year’s rent on each of them.
That’s taxpayer money, going to those wealthy “philanthropists.” All the less money than can go to help the Katrina victims rebuild their homes and their lives.
What should you do for the Katrina victims? Wish them Godspeed, call your congressman to urge that more support be offered to Katrina’s real victims, then call the U.S. Attorney General and urge him to prosecute the “philanthropists” for profiteering and fraud.
That’s what you can do.
UPDATE
We’ve seen this before in the South. It was called THE RECONSTRUCTION. And the northern opportunists who plagued the Reconstruction? They were called CARPETBAGGERS.
SOMEONE HAS TO ASK IT: Have professional journalists REALLY agreed to climb in bed with their military handlers?! Couldn’t they have negotiated a better label for themselves than EMBEDS?
Doesn’t the term too easily lead one to think that they might be regarded by their cowboy handers as HOARS? SHIYLS? Or CELLOWTS?
The embedded reporters are opportunists certainly. But surely they can be permitted some pride! Was there not one other term more dignified? IN-POCKETS?
I should clarify that in defaming these embedded reporters, I do not intend any offense toward persons of loose sexual morals.
Persons of easy virtue have nothing on those who ride high in tank convoys mispresenting America’s lethal wargame excursion, who sing for their dinner, tonight’s song being our military’s INDIGNANCE that the Iraqi combatant won’t stand still to face our overwhelming firepower.
Apparently we must insist that the enemy stand up like targets at a firing range because we need to expend and requisition more big electronic explosives. Probably fewer weapons manufacturers stand to benefit from the testing of small firearms ordnance in street to street combat.
The following is a public service message for Human Rights Day, received by Resistance in Brooklyn from political prisoner Jaan Laaman.
Human Rights During Wartime
By Jaan Laaman, Ohio 7 anti-imperialist political prisonerThe struggle for Human, civil and legal rights is always so important, but particularly now in this time of war and increasing repression. Even as they expand this ridiculous war in Afghanistan, Bush and his government are laying plans to spread imperialist war to other countries. Iraq, Somalia, Yemen and Sudan have all been singled out. Threats have been made against Liberation movements in Columbia, the Philippines and Nepal, as well as against popular leaders and governments of Cuba, Venezuela, Palestine and Libya. With no sense of shame or even irony, Bush threatens war against countries who may have some weapons of mass destruction. This from a country that without question has the largest stockpile of every form of weapon of mass destruction known to modern civilization, and a long historic record of using them against civilian populations around the world!
Domestically, with this so-called Homeland Defense, creepy and fascist sounding as that is, we’ve seen the corporate media totally cave, becoming the new cheerleaders for each new police state law and measure. The recent quickly passed federal anti-terror legislation, allowing seven-day police detention and other repressive measures, is almost certainly unconstitutional. Even more dangerous are the slew of executive branch orders enacted by Bush, Ashcroft and Ridge. Secret military tribunals, over 1100 people from across the country (including citizens and legal residents, not just overseas visitors), snatched up and detained incommunicado in federal custody, countless roadblocks and searches of vehicles, Muslim men across America being profiled and harassed, government agents and soldiers all over the place, etc., etc. Congress has NOT declared a State of War. There is no state of martial law existing anywhere in the U.S. As powerful as the presidency is, Bush and his executive department people have authority only under the Constitution and federal laws. Secret tribunals, disappearing people, warrentless searches, etc., are gross violations of American law. The corporate press may be silent about all this, but the people should not.
It isn’t overblown rhetoric to say that there is a more massive assault on Human and civil rights happening in the U.S. today than anytime since the founding of Human Rights Day over fifty years ago. Under a blizzard of waving flags, frequent “terror” and anthrax alerts to keep the public panicky, and an expanding war, a real police state apparatus is being laid down in the United States today.
Under the rubric of 9/11 and safety for the American people, rights are being stripped away across the board. For example, here in Massachusetts prisons, a new legal mail policy was just established, “due to recent national events.” Previously and based on court rulings, all legal mail was only opened in front of the prisoner, checked for contraband but not read. Now under the new policy, all legal mail is delivered to us already opened and censored, along with our regular mail. Various government agencies are jumping on the bandwagon to enact measures not even remotely related to 9/11.
As often happens, many political prisoners have been singled out and further victimized since September 11. Just hours after the plane attacks, most political prisoners in the federal system were snatched from their work assignments and thrown into extreme segregation. Many were held incommunicado for weeks and only recently have been able to contact their lawyers. People like Sundiata Acoli, Marilyn Buck, Father Phil Berrigan, Carlos Alberto Torres and Richard Williams; people who have been in captivity since the 70’s and 80’s and who don’t share bin Laden’s politics or have any connections with him, were opportunistically locked down. Some, like my comrade Richard Williams, are still in segregation in Lompoc penitentiary.
The need to powerfully proclaim support for Human Rights for all of us, in and out of prisons here in the U.S., as well as Human Rights for Afghani mothers and children and men, along with all the people of this planet is crucial. Probably most critical is the need to support all those people and nations under physical and verbal attack by the U.S. government. I wholeheartedly join with you in this, as well as salute you and your work. The struggle for Human Rights is never easy, but always so necessary.
For Peace and Justice!
12/10/01
Jaan Laaman (W41514)
Box 100
South Walpole, MA 02071