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Friday, October 26, 2012

First the EU wins the Noble Peace Prize, and now...

Iranian dissidents win Sakharov Prize - Europe - Al Jazeera English

Mere Atheism ["New" or old] does not equal liberation

Sexism and the New Atheism

Slate recently published an important piece by Rebecca Watson, in which she describes the sexism she's encountered during her career as a 'skeptic': that is, a member of the anti-faith, pro-science community that overlaps with the 'New Atheist' movement. Watson writes:

[W]omen started telling me stories about sexism at skeptic events, experiences that made them uncomfortable enough to never return. At first, I wasn't able to fully understand their feelings as I had never had a problem existing in male-dominated spaces. But after a few years of blogging, podcasting, and speaking at skeptics' conferences, I began to get emails from strangers who detailed their sexual fantasies about me. I was occasionally grabbed and groped without consent at events.  […]

I started checking out the social media profiles of the people sending me these messages, and learned that they were often adults who were active in the skeptic and atheist communities. They were reading the same blogs as I was and attending the same events. These were "my people," and they were the worst.

Then she details an incident already infamous online.

After a panel at an atheist event in Dublin (also attended by Richard Dawkins), Watson was propositioned in a lift by a male conference-goer.

A few days later, I was making a video about the trip and I decided to use that as an example of how not to behave at conferences if you want to make women feel safe and comfortable. After all, it seemed rather obvious to me that if your goal is to get sex or even just companionship, the very worst way to go about attaining that goal is to attend a conference, listen to a woman speak for 12 hours about how uncomfortable she is being sexualized at conferences, wait for her to express a desire to go to sleep, follow her into an isolated space, and then suggest she go back to your hotel room for "coffee," which, by the way, is available at the hotel bar you just left.

What I said in my video, exactly, was, "Guys, don't do that," with a bit of a laugh and a shrug. What legions of angry atheists apparently heard was, "Guys, I won't stop hating men until I get 2 million YouTube comments calling me a 'cunt.' " The skeptics boldly rose to the imagined challenge.

Even Dawkins weighed in. He hadn't said anything while sitting next to me in Dublin as I described the treatment I got, but a month later he left this sarcastic comment on a friend's blog:

"Dear Muslima

Stop whining, will you. Yes, yes, I know you had your genitals mutilated with a razor blade, and … yawn … don't tell me yet again, I know you aren't allowed to drive a car, and you can't leave the house without a male relative, and your husband is allowed to beat you, and you'll be stoned to death if you commit adultery. But stop whining, will you. Think of the suffering your poor American sisters have to put up with.

Only this week I heard of one, she calls herself Skep"chick", and do you know what happened to her? A man in a hotel elevator invited her back to his room for coffee. I am not exaggerating. He really did. He invited her back to his room for coffee. Of course she said no, and of course he didn't lay a finger on her, but even so …

And you, Muslima, think you have misogyny to complain about! For goodness sake grow up, or at least grow a thicker skin.

Richard"

Dawkins' seal of approval only encouraged the haters. My YouTube page and many of my videos were flooded with rape "jokes," threats, objectifying insults, and slurs. A few individuals sent me hundreds of messages, promising to never leave me alone. My Wikipedia page was vandalized. Graphic photos of dead bodies were posted to my Facebook page.

If you Google 'Rebecca Watson', you find a myriad of examples of the abuse she's talking about.

At a general level, the political dynamic of the New Atheism has been pretty obvious for a long time. You don't need to be a rocket scientist to suspect some relationship might exist between the growth of celebrity non-belief and the fundamental reorientation of Western foreign policy to a War on Terror directed against an enemy understood in religious terms. Out (to some extent, at least) with the Christian ministers blessing the crusade against the godless Communists; in with the glib pundits and TV panelists using high school atheism to laud perpetual war against Muslamics.

Though many New Atheists regard themselves as progressive, in the current context, an argument that explains religion not in terms of culture and history but purely and simply as a result of the dangerous ignorance of the faithful leads, fairly inexorably, to certain political conclusions about those particular nations that Uncle Sam and his allies happen to be occupying. Figures like Sam Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens shot to prominence after 9/11 precisely because they offered simplistic explanations for the 'why do they hate us?' queries dominating the media (short answer: cos they're religious fanatics!), and then consolidated their careers with an anti-God shtick in which an essentialised Islamophobia jostled with bloodthirsty warmongering.

Not all the New Atheists are so explicitly enthusiastic about imperialism (indeed, many think of themselves as liberal) but a racialised attitude to Islam has steeped through the movement as a whole, with the attitudes in the comments threads on many atheist blogs often comparable with what you'd find on so-called counter-jihadi sites.

Even so, the vitriol directed at Watson might still seem perplexing, given that the New Atheists often pitch their hostility Islam as a defence of gender equality.

Of course, in the wake of 9/11, the status of women in the Muslim world became, all of sudden, a matter of tremendous concern for Western liberals: you'll remember that the catastrophic invasion of Afghanistan was shilled as much by the so-called 'decent Left' as by the traditional Right, with many supposed progressives the loudest in enthusing about how war would liberate girls from the Taliban.

So why the hating on Watson?

Part of the explanation probably pertains to the demographics of the New Atheism. A movement based upon a pretty crude positivism is likely to find its strongest support within the natural sciences, fields that are still largely dominated by men. Certainly, if you look at most atheist panels, they're pretty much sausage-fests.

But is there more to it than that?

Obviously, much of the 'feminism' associated with the Iraq and Afghan campaigns was entirely bogus: one of the people most ostentatiously shedding crocodile tears about Afghanistan's little girls was Laura Bush, better known for proselytizing her husband's 'family values' than for smashing the patriarchy.

More importantly, even for those who believed their own rhetoric, the ostensible emancipation of the Islamic world rested on a perception of the oppressed as people entirely without agency of their own. Muslim women were depicted as burkha-clad lumps, waiting helplessly to be delivered from bondage, a trope of feminine passivity that had less to do with the women's liberation movement (which, in the seventies at least, was overwhelmingly centred on women as fighters for their own freedom), and more to do with a Victorian notion of the white man saving the lesser races from their own backwardness.

Humanitarian imperialism is not, it should be remembered, an entirely new phenomenon: in the glory days of the British Empire there were no shortage of jingoes lauding the civilizing impact of the Raj, precisely because it rescued Indian maidens from the depredations of their savage culture. If you picture a sloshed London clubman simultaneously harrumphing about suffragettes and decrying how the darkies treated their wives, you've got a pretty good sense of the mentality that allowed Christopher Hitchens to laud the Iraq invasion as a victory for women – and then call the Dixie Chicks 'fucking fat slags' for opposing it.

It's no coincidence that Dawkins belittles Watson by contrasting her with the mythical Muslima, someone he seems to like precisely because she doesn't exist. A hypothetical Islamic victim begging for white men to save her appeals to the self-perception of the imperial atheist; a flesh-and-blood American standing up for her own rights, not so much.

To their credit, some New Atheists have publicly stated their solidarity with Watson. But, clearly, there's an ongoing problem. Right-wing atheists have long argued that Islam needs a reformation. Well, the same thing might be said about their movement. It's high time that the atheist Left asserted itself against the atheist Right – an Occupy Skepticism, if you will.

Certainly, insofar as the New Atheism represents a coherent intellectual trend, one of its central characteristics is an absence of any theory of ideology, which means it struggles to explain oppression other than in the crudest terms. If you can't understand why, say, radical Islam might appeal to intelligent Iraqis – might, in fact, become more attractive rather than less in the context of Western intervention, precisely because it represents a form of resistance – then you'll probably find it difficult to grasp how sexism works in the west.

After all, in formal terms, gender equality exists, more or less, throughout the industrial world: women have the right to vote, equal pay is legally mandated, and so on. Why, then, might a female atheist, free from the influence of priestcraft or sharia, feel intimidated or threatened by a sexual approach that many men find flattering?

It's a dynamic that produces a legion of aggrieved Professor Higginses, eternally wondering:

Why can't a woman be more like a man? 
Men are so honest, so thoroughly square; 

Eternally noble, historic'ly fair; 

Who, when you win, will always give your back a pat. 

Well, why can't a woman be like that? 

That's the context for the appalling response to Watson, a reaction that traverses the slight distance from that verse to this one:

Women are irrational, that's all there is to that! 
Their heads are full of cotton, hay, and rags! 

They're nothing but exasperating, irritating,

vacillating, calculating, agitating, 

Maddening and infuriating hags! 

 Jeff Sparrow is the editor of Overland magazine and the author of "Money Shot: A Journey into Porn and Censorship."


http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/10/26/sexism-and-the-new-atheism/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=sexism-and-the-new-atheism

Death of a bourgeois pessimist: Jacques Barzun

Jacques Barzun Dies at 104; Cultural Critic Saw the Sun Setting on the West
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
 October 25, 2012

Jacques Barzun, the distinguished historian, essayist, cultural gadfly and educator who helped establish the modern discipline of cultural history and came to see the West as sliding toward decadence, died Thursday night in San Antonio, where he lived. He was 104.

His death was announced by Arthur Krystal, Barzun’s friend and the executor of his estate.

Mr. Barzun was a man of boundless curiosity, monumental productivity and manifold interests, encompassing both Berlioz and baseball. It was a life of the mind first cultivated more than a century ago in a childhood home outside Paris that became an avant-garde salon.

Mr. Barzun stood beside Sidney Hook, Daniel Bell and Lionel Trilling as among the mid-20th century’s most wide-ranging scholars, all of whom tried to reconcile the achievements of European culture and philosophy with the demands and tastes of American intellectual and cultural life.

He wrote dozens of books across many decades, demonstrating that old age did not necessarily mean intellectual decline. He published his most ambitious and encyclopedic book at the age of 92 (and credited his productivity in part to chronic insomnia). That work, “From Dawn to Decadence,” is an 877-page survey of 500 years of Western culture in which he argued that Western civilization itself had entered a period of decline.

Mr. Barzun was both of the academy and the public square, a man of letters and — he was proud to say — of the people. In books and in the classroom he championed Romantic literature, 19th-century music and the Western literary canon. He helped design the influential “great books” curriculum at Columbia, where he was one of its most admired figures for half a century, serving as provost, dean of faculty and university professor.

As an educator Mr. Barzun was an important critic of American universities, arguing in 1968 that their curriculums had become an undisciplined “bazaar” of miscellaneous studies.

But he was also a popularizer, believing that the achievements of the arts and scholarship should not be divorced from the wider American culture. Writing for a general audience, he said, was “a responsibility of scholars.”

To that end he served as history consultant to Life magazine and as a critic for Harper’s. His articles appeared in Life magazine and The Saturday Evening Post as well as The Atlantic, The Nation and The New Republic. In 1951, he joined Trilling and W. H. Auden in founding the Readers’ Subscription Book Club, which sought to make serious scholarship and literature widely available.

His fascinations extended to mystery fiction, which he surveyed in the anthology “The Delights of Detection” in 1961. Another was baseball, an American institution he considered with a scholar’s eye. In a 1953 essay, “On Baseball,” he wrote:

“The wonderful purging of the passions that we all experienced in the fall of ’51, the despair groaned out over the fate of the Dodgers, from whom the league pennant was snatched at the last minute, give us some idea of what Greek tragedy was like.”

Unlike many of his colleagues, Professor Barzun showed little interest in taking overtly political positions. This was partly because he became a university administrator and had to stand above the fray, and partly because he approached the world with a detached civility and a sardonic skepticism about intellectual life.

“The intellectuals’ chief cause of anguish,” he wrote in “The House of Intellect” (1959), “are one another’s works.”

If Mr. Barzun kept the political issues of the day at arm’s length, he nonetheless developed a reputation as a cultural conservative after the student protests at Columbia in the late 1960s. He later argued that the “peoples of the West” had “offered the world a set of ideas and institutions not found earlier or elsewhere.”

But at the same time, he said, Western civilization had also cultivated the seeds of its undoing by envying what it renounced and succumbing to the lure of rebellion. Its virtues and failings, he argued, were in some respects identical: the freedom to rebel could turn into sweeping nihilism, resulting in decadence. He saw that happening.

His own stature as a public intellectual was undisputed. He was made a chevalier of the Legion of Honor, France’s highest award, established by Napoleon Bonaparte, and awarded the Medal of Freedom, the United States’ highest civilian honor, by President George W. Bush. His friendships embraced poets and scholars, and he continued often argumentative correspondence with friends into the 21st century. An authorized biography, “Jacques Barzun: Portrait of a Mind,” by Michael Murray, was published in 2011.

In 1996, he also made a seemingly unlikely move from New York to San Antonio, where he lived until his death.

“After being boxed in by man and his constructions in Europe and the East, the release into space is exhilarating,” he wrote in The New York Times in 1982 about his repeated visits to Texas. “The horizon is a huge remote circle, and no hills intervene.”

Jacques Barzun was born on Nov. 30, 1907, in Créteil, a suburb of Paris, the son of Anne-Rose and Henri Martin Barzun. His father was a diplomat and writer with artistic interests. The Barzun home became an avant-garde salon, which Mr. Barzun once called “a seedbed of modernism” and “an open house for hotheads.” Regular visitors included the writer Jean Cocteau and the painter Albert Gleizes. (Gleizes’s portrait of Mr. Barzun’s mother hung in Mr. Barzun’s house.)

“By the time I was 9,” Mr. Barzun said in an interview with The Times in 2000, “I had the conviction that everybody in the world was an artist except plumbers or people who delivered groceries.”

Mr. Barzun studied at the Lycée Janson de Sailly, only to find himself, he said, teaching there at the age of 9. After World War I broke out in 1914, many teachers were drafted into the military, and older students were inducted to teach the younger ones.

With friends and acquaintances killed in the fighting, Mr. Barzun found the war a “shattering experience.” In 1917, his father went to the United States on a diplomatic mission. Then, at age 11, he “experienced a very deep depression,” Mr. Barzun said in the New York Times interview in 2000. He contemplated suicide.

In 1920, with the French university system decimated by the war and young Jacques still in despair, it was decided that he would travel to the United States, accompanied by his mother. To improve his English, he read “Gulliver’s Travels.” Mr. Barzun’s first thoughts about America, he said, were of a people almost as exotic as Gulliver’s Yahoos and Brobdingnagians.

“I had read a lot of books about the Indians,” he explained. “I thought that I would come here and see Indians galloping across the plains.”

Instead he went to Columbia, where he was exposed to the work of the most important critics and historians of the time, including F. J. E. Woodbridge, John Dewey, Mark Van Doren and Mortimer Adler. He became a drama critic for the university newspaper; wrote lyrics for a campus show, “Zuleika, or the Sultan Insulted”; and helped create Ghosts Inc., a tutorial service.

He graduated in 1927 as valedictorian and that summer taught his first course at Columbia in contemporary civilization. He stayed there until his retirement in 1975, having received his master’s degree there in 1928 and his Ph.D. in 1932, with a thesis on Montesquieu, the French Enlightenment political philosopher, in which Mr. Barzun attacked the popular notion of “the French race.” He came to be so closely associated with the university that he redesigned its academic robes.

In 1931 he married Lucretia Mueller; they were divorced in 1936. That year he married Mariana Lowell, a distant cousin of the poet Robert Lowell (and the niece of the poet Amy Lowell), who died in 1979. In 1980 he married Marguerite Davenport, a descendant of a founder of the Jamestown colony and a scholar of American literature. She survives him, as do 3 children from his second marriage: James, Roger and Isabel Barzun; 10 grandchildren; and 8 great-grandchildren.

A turning point in Mr. Barzun’s academic career came when he was exposed to the developing discipline of cultural history, which relates culture, the arts and ideas to historical events unfolding on the larger public stage. At Columbia, Mr. Barzun assisted the historian Carlton J. H. Hayes in preparing the textbook “A Political and Cultural History of Modern Europe.” With the book he was, as he put it, “launched.”

The themes of his first books were related to the political world of the 1930s. (He became a United States citizen in 1933.) His 1937 book, “Race: A Study in Modern Superstition,” grew out of his dissertation. In 1939, on the eve of World War II, he wrote “Of Human Freedom,” attacking absolutism and tracing the intellectual origins of democracy.

These issues reflected a broader concern that preoccupied him throughout his career as he championed 19th-century liberalism, with its ideals of individualism and liberty, and opposed intellectual and political traditions that he felt to be rigid, deterministic or aristocratic.

Mr. Barzun came to associate liberalism with European Romanticism as it was reflected in poets like Wordsworth and Goethe and composers like Berlioz and Beethoven. His two-volume study “Berlioz and the Romantic Century” (1950) was credited with restoring Berlioz’s reputation as a great composer. Romanticism, Mr. Barzun later wrote, “implies not only risk, effort, energy; it implies also creation, diversity and individual genius.” In Time magazine in 1956, Mr. Barzun argued that America was “the land of Romanticism par excellence,” thus linking the nation’s possibilities with the intellectual tradition he most admired.

Against that Romantic vitality, Mr. Barzun pitted anything “systematic” or “absolute,” particularly the “scientism” that he saw as modernity’s unjust revenge against Romanticism. In another seminal book, “Darwin, Marx, Wagner: Critique of a Heritage” (1941),” he argued that 20th-century thought had been skewed by the influence of those three major figures — harmful influence, he concluded. Darwin, Marx and Wagner, he wrote, had each created a variety of “mechanical materialism,” in which all that is human and variable is subjected to domineering systems. Mr. Barzun associated those systems with the scientific worldview, extending its power over religion, society and art.

This was to become a recurring theme; Mr. Barzun even considered science to have had a deleterious effect on university education. While he maintained that modern science was “one of the most stupendous and unexpected triumphs of the human mind,” he attacked, again and again, any hint of “mechanical scientism,” which he said had baleful consequences.

In 1964, in his book “Science: The Glorious Entertainment,” Mr. Barzun offered ironic praise for science’s “all-pervasive energy.”

“It is,” he wrote, “at once a mode of thought, a source of strong emotion and faith as fanatical as any in history.”

This view of science and his attempts to associate its supposed mechanistic qualities with Darwin or Wagner now seem to be among his weakest and most dated speculations. But Mr. Barzun may have been most influential in his arguing for a form of Romantic liberalism in American education. He believed that the mission of the university should have nothing to do with professional training or political advocacy. The university, he wrote, should not be a “public utility”; rather it should be a “city of the mind” devoted to the intellectual currents of Western civilization.

That was the thinking behind his curriculum of classic literary and philosophical texts, still required of all Columbia freshmen. And with Trilling he taught one of Columbia’s most renowned courses, “Studies in European Intellectual History and Culture Since 1750,” familiarly known as “the Barzun-Trilling seminar.”

In books like “The American University: How It Runs, Where It Is Going” (1968), Mr. Barzun raised questions that still roil the academy and intellectual life: What is the purpose of a university education? What should the relationship be between the elite artistic traditions of Europe and the democratic popular culture of the United States?

His positions on many issues inspired controversy. So fervent was his advocacy of Berlioz that Auden, writing in The New York Times Book Review in 1950, said that Mr. Barzun “sometimes seems a fanatic to whom Berlioz is the only composer who ever lived, against whom the slightest criticism is blasphemy.”

In 1945, reviewing his book “Teacher in America,” The New Yorker said that “everybody in the teaching profession ought to read Mr. Barzun, if only to be able to argue with him.”

But his admirers were legion. In 1959, Daniel J. Boorstin wrote in The Times that Mr. Barzun’s book “The House of Intellect” was “the most important critique of American culture in many years.”

In that book, Mr. Barzun argued that egalitarianism, which he celebrated in the political sphere, had no place in the university. He objected to educational “philanthropy,” which he defined as “the liberal doctrine of free and equal opportunity as applied to things of the mind.”

By the 1960s, he wrote in “The American University,” the university was being mistakenly expected to “provide a home for the arts, satisfy divergent tastes in architecture and social mores, cure cancer, recast the penal code and train equally for the professions and for a life of cultural contentment.”

He also objected to attempts to politicize the academy, whether in support of governmental policies or in opposition to them. In the 1968 student demonstrations at Columbia, for example, protesters took over administration buildings and held a dean hostage, objecting not only to the Vietnam War but also to the roles the university played in the defense establishment and in its own Upper Manhattan neighborhood. In his critique of the protests, Mr. Barzun accused the faculty of failing in its educational responsibilities and commitments to students. And the protesters, he wrote, were guilty of “student despotism.”

After Mr. Barzun retired from Columbia, he became an adviser to Charles Scribner’s Sons, the publishing house. Mr. Barzun’s engagement with Western civilization continued into his last years. According to his biographer, Michael Murray, he began a book called “Janus” in 2001, that “was to have been a view of present-day culture by an archaeologist of the thirtieth century.” In 2008, dissatisfied, he put it aside.

In his 2000 book, “From Dawn to Decadence,” he argued that one of the great virtues of the West was its character as a “mongrel civilization”: over the course of its development, it was resiliently constructed out of dozens of national cultures.

He traced periods of rise and fall in the Western saga, and contended that another fall was near — one that could cause “the liquidation of 500 years of civilization.” This time the decline would be caused not by scientism and absolutism, he maintained, but by an internal crisis in the civilization itself, which he believed had come to celebrate nihilism and rebellion.

And yet, in the cycles of history, he believed another renewal would come.

“It is only in the shadows,” he wrote, “when some fresh wave, truly original, truly creative, breaks upon the shore, that there will be a rediscovery of the West.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/26/arts/jacques-barzun-historian-and-scholar-dies-at-104.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=0

Thursday, October 25, 2012

The "the queen mother of the movement" promotes the Democrats

....She challenged the audience to imagine what it would be like following President Obama's election if we had taken to the streets the day after inauguration both to celebrate and to pressure him on the issues that we all care about." She cautioned that "we should never expect to elect a president to lead us to the Promised Land...we have to do it for ourselves."


Angela Davis speaks to 2,000 at Michigan rally
by Mark Walton
October 25 2012

A standing room only crowd of nearly 2,000 people welcomed renowned activist and scholar Angela Davis to Detroit to celebrate the 40th anniversary of her acquittal on trumped up charges of murder, kidnapping and conspiracy. They were black, white, brown, young, old, gay and straight. The event, held last night at Fellowship Baptist Church on the city's northwest side, was a powerful demonstration of the respect and affection Detroiters have for Professor Davis and her history of struggle for economic, racial and gender justice.

The program included a who's who of Detroiters including Fellowship Baptist Pastor and former Detroit NAACP President Wendell Anthony, Congressman John Conyers, Detroit City Councilperson Jo Ann Watson, Metro Detroit AFL-CIO President Chris (Christos) Michalakis, Retired Wayne County Circuit Court Judge and civil rights activist Claudia Morcom, Metro AFL-CIO Civil Rights Committee Chair Michele Artt and UAW Vice-President Cindy Estrada.

In his opening remarks, Rev. Anthony described the outpouring as "an expression of Detroiters' love for activism and historical correctness." Councilperson Watson called Prof. Davis "the queen mother of the movement" and brought a testimonial resolution from the Detroit City Council honoring her.

A common thread running through the remarks of all speakers was the importance of the November 6 election. Alluding to the fact that Prof. Davis had come to Detroit thirteen days before the election, Congressman Conyers said it was a "night where we not only remember history but plan how we're going to make history...Dr. Davis, you're right on time!"

President Michalakis emphasized the importance of the election to the "future of our democracy." He called attention to three statewide ballot proposals. He called for a no vote on Prop. 1 which would allow the governor to impose emergency financial managers on municipalities and school districts that he determines to be in financial difficulty. These financial dictators could usurp the powers of local elected officials and unilaterally void collective bargaining agreements. He called for yes votes on Prop. 2 and 4. Prop. 2 would amend the state constitution to guarantee collective bargaining rights and prevent enactment of "right-to-work" legislation. Prop. 4 would create a home care worker registry for seniors and guarantee collective bargaining rights for home care workers.

Claudia Morcom introduced Prof. Davis. Forty years ago, Judge Morcom was a chairperson of the Detroit Free Angela Committee and recalled helping to organize a celebration of Prof. Davis' acquittal at the state fairgrounds in Detroit which drew 10,000 people. She described Prof. Davis as "one who has never forgotten the idea that unless we're united as a community of people - black, white, brown, yellow, we can never really accomplish anything, but if we do, we can accomplish anything."

Prof. Davis rose to speak to a standing ovation from the audience. She recalled the rally at the fairgrounds and coming to Detroit many times in her role as a co-chairperson of the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression and for events such as the rally to save the Dodge Main plant in 1979. Her address was wide-ranging but emphasized the importance of the upcoming election. "As we go to the polls, she said, "let us recall that no one thought it was possible to elect a black president," and while some are disappointed in the pace of change she cautioned that we should put that disappointment "into context."

She challenged the audience to imagine what it would be like following President Obama's election if we had taken to the streets the day after inauguration both to celebrate and to pressure him on the issues that we all care about." She cautioned that "we should never expect to elect a president to lead us to the Promised Land...we have to do it for ourselves."

Emphasizing the relationship between electoral politics and mass movement politics, Prof. Davis outlined a number of "issues that progressives have to force onto the national political agenda" including an end to all of the union busting strategies, the rights of undocumented workers and students, women's reproductive rights, prisoners' rights, the rights of the LGBT communities, and combating anti-communism and the growing "Islamophobia" brought on by the so-called "war on terror."

As regards, the issue of "Islamophobia," Prof. Davis spoke at length about centrality of the Israeli oppression of the Palestinian people to the discontent in the Muslim world. She challenged the audience to see themselves as "world citizens" and recognize "that Israeli apartheid...is just as bad" as that of South African apartheid. "It's about time we stood up and recognized that an injustice anywhere...is an injustice everywhere." She then concluded her address by saying that "we need peace, justice, equality, and socialism for us all."

Following Prof. Davis' address, Michele Artt spoke on behalf of the committee which organized the event, "Detroit Welcomes Angela Davis," and asked for contributions to help defray expenses.

The last speaker, UAW Vice-President Cindy Estrada spoke of the importance of collective bargaining to Michigan workers and small business people. She related her father's experience as a small businessperson whose success was dependent on the incomes his customers derived from their unions' collective bargaining efforts. She made an impassioned plea for members of the audience to get involved in get-out-the vote activities in support of Prop. 2 and other union backed proposals and candidates.

http://peoplesworld.org/angela-davis-speaks-to-2-000-at-michigan-rally/

Social contradictions of Halloween




No Rest for the Eerie
By STEVEN KURUTZ
October 24, 2012

IT’S surprising that American audiences still get a thrill from seeing a haunted house on screen. Hasn’t the subprime crisis, with its predatory lending and underwater mortgages, caused enough real-life home-related terror in the last few years?

But last weekend, “Paranormal Activity 4,” the latest in the popular movie franchise that mines horror from everyday life in a suburban tract home (a scary enough premise), topped the box office.

Weeks earlier, another horror movie, “House at the End of the Street,” grabbed the top spot. And in April, “The Cabin in the Woods” opened strong, proving that four walls and demonic activity within them are all that is needed to scare the bejesus out of us.

From these recent examples to “House on Haunted Hill” in 1999 and “The Amityville Horror” 20 years before that, the haunted house has been a Hollywood mainstay for decades.

In literature, the genre dates from at least the 18th century, with the publication of “The Castle of Otranto” by Horace Walpole — long before Edith Wharton published her ghost stories or Stephen King transferred the ghoulish action to an isolated hotel in “The Shining.”

What accounts for our continuing fascination with “the old dark house,” as John Tibbetts, a media studies professor at the University of Kansas and the author of “The Gothic Imagination,” calls it? In both literature and film, he said, it endures because it plays on our collective notion of home as a safe space.

“That’s your sanctuary,” Mr. Tibbetts said. “When that barrier is breached, you’ve had it.”

And it doesn’t take much to accomplish that.

Oren Peli, the writer and director who created the “Paranormal” franchise, said one of his favorite moments in the first film is when the bedroom door of the couple being harassed by evil spirits moves a few inches. Audiences always gasp, Mr. Peli said. “Compared to a typical horror movie, where guts spill out, you’d think it would take a lot to shock people,” he said. “But the gasping confirms that any kind of evidence that something is inside your house is a very unsettling feeling.”

In “House of Leaves,” Mark Z. Danielewski’s intricately creepy 1999 novel, a family’s life begins to unravel after the discovery that the dimensions of their historic Virginia home are three-quarters of an inch larger on the inside than on the outside. A carpenter’s nightmare, surely, but a powerful source of terror?

As Mr. Danielewski explained: “House and home go beyond the material architecture. As soon as we question the walls, we start questioning how our family or our larger society is organized.”

Discovering dark energy in a home and being willing to explore it is “a noble goal,” he continued. “You may discover a darkness in your own mind, and it’s not so easy to flee. Are you going to outrace it or are you going to try to deal with it?”

Perhaps the scariest houses aren’t the ones that serve as a mere setting for horror, as in “The Exorcist” or “The Others,” but those that are actively malevolent: houses that seem to possess their own sense of agency. Or, as the trailer voice-over for “The Haunting” put it: “Some houses are born bad.”

“Burnt Offerings,” a 1976 film in which a house renews itself, vampire-like, by injuring and killing its inhabitants, perhaps best taps into our conflicted feelings about homeownership, which represents something of a Faustian pact, Mr. Tibbetts said. “It’s this idea that the dream to own a house gets you in trouble,” he said. “You want the house, but you have to pay the price.”

THERE’S a familiar architecture to a haunted house, creepy Victorian being the preferred style. Dark basements, creaking attics and strangely cold rooms abound. Indian burial grounds seem to be a common building site.

You almost never see a modernist haunted house, no scary movies bearing the title “The Ghosts of Case Study House No. 22.” Perhaps that’s because the starkly furnished rooms and the transparency don’t offer the creepy patina of accumulated history that Mr. Danielewski was referring to, only a kind of existential dread.

Families in these stories are always escaping to the quiet suburbs or the countryside, as they do in “The Changeling” and “House of Leaves,” and scooping up a historic showplace at a bargain price, without ever asking the real estate agent why it’s a steal.

The owners of these cursed homes are astonishingly flinty, too, refusing to pack up and leave long after the oven pukes blood and the kitchen cutlery flies across the room of its own accord. As Ariel Schulman, a director of “Paranormal 4” with Henry Joost, said: “They never get out of the house. I’d call my broker. ‘Put it on the market. I’m moving to Flushing.’ ”

But in recent years, a new kind of haunted house has become increasingly popular, one whose style could be described as suburban banal.

Mark Tonderai, who directed “House at the End of the Street,” which centers on a home where a gruesome family murder has occurred, said the film presents the house as emotionally scarred victim. “You know how you can go into places and feel that bad stuff has happened there?” Mr. Tonderai said. “The residue of that bad event has seeped into the masonry.”

But the director shot the movie in a home in Ottawa that was outwardly unremarkable, although it hadn’t been fully finished. “Because the guy who built it wasn’t a great carpenter, it was just a little off,” Mr. Tonderai said. “It made you feel a slight discomfort.”

Mr. Peli adopted the same approach when designing the set for the first “Paranormal Activity” film, which was shot in his home, a typical tract house in San Diego. “I was never tempted to do anything to make the house look creepy,” he said. “So the audience thinks, ‘If it can happen in a normal house, maybe it can happen in my house.’ ”

In continuing the “Paranormal” franchise, Mr. Schulman has tried to make the domestic settings as contemporary as possible, with laptops, Skype and video-game consoles used in such a way that they take on a terrifying aspect. “The point is to illustrate the fear in everyday household scenarios,” he said.

Indeed, the latest “Paranormal” film takes place in Nevada, a state where property values have dropped over 40 percent since 2008 and nearly two-thirds of all homeowners are stuck in a home worth less than they bought it for.

What could be scarier? 

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/25/garden/a-paean-to-the-haunted-house.html?pagewanted=all

Obama's new death list decision matrix

Plan for hunting terrorists signals U.S. intends to keep adding names to kill lists

Over the past two years, the Obama administration has been secretly developing a new blueprint for pursuing terrorists, a next-generation targeting list called the "disposition matrix."

The matrix contains the names of terrorism suspects arrayed against an accounting of the resources being marshaled to track them down, including sealed indictments and clandestine operations. U.S. officials said the database is designed to go beyond existing kill lists, mapping plans for the "disposition" of suspects beyond the reach of American drones.

Although the matrix is a work in progress, the effort to create it reflects a reality setting in among the nation's counterterrorism ranks: The United States' conventional wars are winding down, but the government expects to continue adding names to kill or capture lists for years.

Among senior Obama administration officials, there is a broad consensus that such operations are likely to be extended at least another decade. Given the way al-Qaeda continues to metastasize, some officials said no clear end is in sight.

"We can't possibly kill everyone who wants to harm us," a senior administration official said. "It's a necessary part of what we do.. . . We're not going to wind up in 10 years in a world of everybody holding hands and saying, 'We love America.' "

That timeline suggests that the United States has reached only the midpoint of what was once known as the global war on terrorism. Targeting lists that were regarded as finite emergency measures after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, are now fixtures of the national security apparatus. The rosters expand and contract with the pace of drone strikes but never go to zero.

Meanwhile, a significant milestone looms: The number of militants and civilians killed in the drone campaign over the past 10 years will soon exceed 3,000 by certain estimates, surpassing the number of people al-Qaeda killed in the Sept. 11 attacks.

The Obama administration has touted its successes against the terrorist network, including the death of Osama bin Laden, as signature achievements that argue for President Obama's reelection. The administration has taken tentative steps toward greater transparency, formally acknowledging for the first time the United States' use of armed drones.

Less visible is the extent to which Obama has institutionalized the highly classified practice of targeted killing, transforming ad-hoc elements into a counterterrorism infrastructure capable of sustaining a seemingly permanent war. Spokesmen for the White House, the National Counterterrorism Center, the CIA and other agencies declined to comment on the matrix or other counterterrorism programs.

Privately, officials acknowledge that the development of the matrix is part of a series of moves, in Washington and overseas, to embed counterterrorism tools into U.S. policy for the long haul.

White House counterterrorism adviser John O. Brennan is seeking to codify the administration's approach to generating capture/kill lists, part of a broader effort to guide future administrations through the counterterrorism processes that Obama has embraced.

CIA Director David H. Petraeus is pushing for an expansion of the agency's fleet of armed drones, U.S. officials said. The proposal, which would need White House approval, reflects the agency's transformation into a paramilitary force, and makes clear that it does not intend to dismantle its drone program and return to its pre-Sept. 11 focus on gathering intelligence.

The U.S. Joint Special Operations Command, which carried out the raid that killed bin Laden, has moved commando teams into suspected terrorist hotbeds in Africa. A rugged U.S. outpost in Djibouti has been transformed into a launching pad for counterterrorism operations across the Horn of Africa and the Middle East.

JSOC also has established a secret targeting center across the Potomac River from Washington, current and former U.S. officials said. The elite command's targeting cells have traditionally been located near the front lines of its missions, including in Iraq and Afghanistan. But JSOC created a "national capital region" task force that is a 15-minute commute from the White House so it could be more directly involved in deliberations about al-Qaeda lists.

The developments were described by current and former officials from the White House and the Pentagon, as well as intelligence and counterterrorism agencies. Most spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.

These counterterrorism components have been affixed to a legal foundation for targeted killing that the Obama administration has discussed more openly over the past year. In a series of speeches, administration officials have cited legal bases, including the congressional authorization to use military force granted after the Sept. 11 attacks, as well as the nation's right to defend itself.

Critics contend that those justifications have become more tenuous as the drone campaign has expanded far beyond the core group of al-Qaeda operatives behind the strikes on New York and Washington. Critics note that the administration still doesn't confirm the CIA's involvement or the identities of those who are killed. Certain strikes are now under legal challenge, including the killings last year in Yemen of U.S.-born al-Qaeda operative Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son.

Counterterrorism experts said the reliance on targeted killing is self-perpetuating, yielding undeniable short-term results that may obscure long-term costs.

"The problem with the drone is it's like your lawn mower," said Bruce Riedel, a former CIA analyst and Obama counterterrorism adviser. "You've got to mow the lawn all the time. The minute you stop mowing, the grass is going to grow back."

An evolving database

The United States now operates multiple drone programs, including acknowledged U.S. military patrols over conflict zones in Afghanistan and Libya, and classified CIA surveillance flights over Iran.

Strikes against al-Qaeda, however, are carried out under secret lethal programs involving the CIA and JSOC. The matrix was developed by the NCTC, under former director Michael Leiter, to augment those organizations' separate but overlapping kill lists, officials said.

The result is a single, continually evolving database in which biographies, locations, known associates and affiliated organizations are all catalogued. So are strategies for taking targets down, including extradition requests, capture operations and drone patrols.

Obama's decision to shutter the CIA's secret prisons ended a program that had become a source of international scorn, but it also complicated the pursuit of terrorists. Unless a suspect surfaced in the sights of a drone in Pakistan or Yemen, the United States had to scramble to figure out what to do.

"We had a disposition problem," said a former U.S. counterterrorism official involved in developing the matrix.

The database is meant to map out contingencies, creating an operational menu that spells out each agency's role in case a suspect surfaces in an unexpected spot. "If he's in Saudi Arabia, pick up with the Saudis," the former official said. "If traveling overseas to al-Shabaab [in Somalia] we can pick him up by ship. If in Yemen, kill or have the Yemenis pick him up."

Officials declined to disclose the identities of suspects on the matrix. They pointed, however, to the capture last year of alleged al-Qaeda operative Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame off the coast of Yemen. Warsame was held for two months aboard a U.S. ship before being transferred to the custody of the Justice Department and charged in federal court in New York.

"Warsame was a classic case of 'What are we going to do with him?' " the former counterterrorism official said. In such cases, the matrix lays out plans, including which U.S. naval vessels are in the vicinity and which charges the Justice Department should prepare.

"Clearly, there were people in Yemen that we had on the matrix," as well as others in Pakistan and Afghanistan, the former counterterrorism official said. The matrix was a way to be ready if they moved. "How do we deal with these guys in transit? You weren't going to fire a drone if they were moving through Turkey or Iran."

Officials described the matrix as a database in development, although its status is unclear. Some said it has not been implemented because it is too cumbersome. Others, including officials from the White House, Congress and intelligence agencies, described it as a blueprint that could help the United States adapt to al-Qaeda's morphing structure and its efforts to exploit turmoil across North Africa and the Middle East.

A year after Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta declared the core of al-Qaeda near strategic defeat, officials see an array of emerging threats beyond Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia — the three countries where almost all U.S. drone strikes have occurred.

The Arab spring has upended U.S. counterterrorism partnerships in countries including Egypt where U.S. officials fear al-Qaeda could establish new roots. The network's affiliate in North Africa, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, has seized territory in northern Mali and acquired weapons that were smuggled out of Libya.

"Egypt worries me to no end," a high-ranking administration official said. "Look at Libya, Algeria and Mali and then across the Sahel. You're talking about such wide expanses of territory, with open borders and military, security and intelligence capabilities that are basically nonexistent."

Streamlining targeted killing

The creation of the matrix and the institutionalization of kill/capture lists reflect a shift that is as psychological as it is strategic.

Before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the United States recoiled at the idea of targeted killing. The Sept. 11 commission recounted how the Clinton administration had passed on a series of opportunities to target bin Laden in the years before the attacks — before armed drones existed. President Bill Clinton approved a set of cruise-missile strikes in 1998 after al-Qaeda bombed embassies in East Africa, but after extensive deliberation, and the group's leader escaped harm.

Targeted killing is now so routine that the Obama administration has spent much of the past year codifying and streamlining the processes that sustain it.

This year, the White House scrapped a system in which the Pentagon and the National Security Council had overlapping roles in scrutinizing the names being added to U.S. target lists.

Now the system functions like a funnel, starting with input from half a dozen agencies and narrowing through layers of review until proposed revisions are laid on Brennan's desk, and subsequently presented to the president.

Video-conference calls that were previously convened by Adm. Mike Mullen, then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have been discontinued. Officials said Brennan thought the process shouldn't be run by those who pull the trigger on strikes.

"What changed is rather than the chairman doing that, John chairs the meeting," said Leiter, the former head of the NCTC.

The administration has also elevated the role of the NCTC, which was conceived as a clearinghouse for threat data and has no operational capability. Under Brennan, who served as its founding director, the center has emerged as a targeting hub.

Other entities have far more resources focused on al-Qaeda. The CIA, JSOC and U.S. Central Command have hundreds of analysts devoted to the terrorist network's franchise in Yemen, while the NCTC has fewer than two dozen. But the center controls a key function.

"It is the keeper of the criteria," a former U.S. counterterrorism official said, meaning that it is in charge of culling names from al-Qaeda databases for targeting lists based on criteria dictated by the White House.

The criteria are classified but center on obvious questions: Who are the operational leaders? Who are the key facilitators? A typical White House request will direct the NCTC to generate a list of al-Qaeda operatives in Yemen involved in carrying out or plotting attacks against U.S. personnel in Sanaa.

The lists are reviewed at regular three-month intervals during meetings at the NCTC headquarters that involve analysts from other organizations, including the CIA, the State Department and JSOC. Officials stress that these sessions don't equate to approval for additions to kill lists, an authority that rests exclusively with the White House.

With no objections — and officials said those have been rare — names are submitted to a panel of National Security Council officials that is chaired by Brennan and includes the deputy directors of the CIA and the FBI, as well as top officials from the State Department, the Pentagon and the NCTC.

Obama approves the criteria for lists and signs off on drone strikes outside Pakistan, where decisions on when to fire are made by the director of the CIA. But aside from Obama's presence at "Terror Tuesday" meetings — which generally are devoted to discussing terrorism threats and trends rather than approving targets — the president's involvement is more indirect.

"The president would never come to a deputies meeting," a senior administration official said, although participants recalled cases in which Brennan stepped out of the situation room to get Obama's direction on questions the group couldn't resolve.

The review process is compressed but not skipped when the CIA or JSOC has compelling intelligence and a narrow window in which to strike, officials said. The approach also applies to the development of criteria for "signature strikes," which allow the CIA and JSOC to hit targets based on patterns of activity — packing a vehicle with explosives, for example — even when the identities of those who would be killed is unclear.

A model approach

For an administration that is the first to embrace targeted killing on a wide scale, officials seem confident that they have devised an approach that is so bureaucratically, legally and morally sound that future administrations will follow suit.

During Monday's presidential debate, Republican nominee Mitt Romney made it clear that he would continue the drone campaign. "We can't kill our way out of this," he said, but added later that Obama was "right to up the usage" of drone strikes and that he would do the same.

As Obama nears the end of his term, officials said the kill list in Pakistan has slipped to fewer than 10 al-Qaeda targets, down from as many as two dozen. The agency now aims many of its Predator strikes at the Haqqani network, which has been blamed for attacks on U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

In Yemen, the number of militants on the list has ranged from 10 to 15, officials said, and is not likely to slip into the single digits anytime soon, even though there have been 36 U.S. airstrikes this year.

The number of targets on the lists isn't fixed, officials said, but fluctuates based on adjustments to criteria. Officials defended the arrangement even while acknowledging an erosion in the caliber of operatives placed in the drones' cross hairs.

"Is the person currently Number 4 as good as the Number 4 seven years ago? Probably not," said a former senior U.S. counterterrorism official involved in the process until earlier this year. "But it doesn't mean he's not dangerous."

In focusing on bureaucratic refinements, the administration has largely avoided confronting more fundamental questions about the lists. Internal doubts about the effectiveness of the drone campaign are almost nonexistent. So are apparent alternatives.

"When you rely on a particular tactic, it starts to become the core of your strategy — you see the puff of smoke, and he's gone," said Paul Pillar, a former deputy director of the CIA's counterterrorism center. "When we institutionalize certain things, including targeted killing, it does cross a threshold that makes it harder to cross back."

For a decade, the dimensions of the drone campaign have been driven by short-term objectives: the degradation of al-Qaeda and the prevention of a follow-on, large-scale attack on American soil.Side effects are more difficult to measure — including the extent to which strikes breed more enemies of the United States — but could be more consequential if the campaign continues for 10 more years."We are looking at something that is potentially indefinite," Pillar said. "We have to pay particular attention, maybe more than we collectively have so far, to the longer-term pros and cons to the methods we use."

Obama administration officials at times have sought to trigger debate over how long the nation might employ the kill lists. But officials said the discussions became dead ends.

In one instance, Mullen, the former Joint Chiefs chairman, returned from Pakistan and recounted a heated confrontation with his counterpart, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani.

Mullen told White House and counterterrorism officials that the Pakistani military chief had demanded an answer to a seemingly reasonable question: After hundreds of drone strikes, how could the United States possibly still be working its way through a "top 20" list?

The issue resurfaced after the U.S. raid that killed bin Laden. Seeking to repair a rift with Pakistan, Panetta, the CIA director, told Kayani and others that the United States had only a handful of targets left and would be able to wind down the drone campaign.

A senior aide to Panetta disputed this account, and said Panetta mentioned the shrinking target list during his trip to Islamabad but didn't raise the prospect that drone strikes would end. Two former U.S. officials said the White House told Panetta to avoid even hinting at commitments the United States was not prepared to keep.

"We didn't want to get into the business of limitless lists," said a former senior U.S. counterterrorism official who spent years overseeing the lists. "There is this apparatus created to deal with counterterrorism. It's still useful. The question is: When will it stop being useful? I don't know."

Source


http://theredphoenixapl.org/2012/10/25/plan-for-hunting-terrorists-signals-u-s-intends-to-keep-adding-names-to-kill-lists/

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

The anti-communist obscurantism of Russell Means

“For America to Live, Europe Must Die”
Russell Means

Reproduced from Black Hawk Productions.

The following speech was given by Russell Means in July 1980, before several thousand people who had assembled from all over the world for the Black Hills International Survival Gathering, in the Black Hills of South Dakota. It is Russell Means’s most famous speech.

“The only possible opening for a statement of this kind is that I detest writing. The process itself epitomizes the European concept of “legitimate” thinking; what is written has an importance that is denied the spoken. My culture, the Lakota culture, has an oral tradition, so I ordinarily reject writing. It is one of the white world’s ways of destroying the cultures of non-European peoples, the imposing of an abstraction over the spoken relationship of a people.

So what you read here is not what I’ve written. It’s what I’ve said and someone else has written down. I will allow this because it seems that the only way to communicate with the white world is through the dead, dry leaves of a book. I don’t really care whether my words reach whites or not. They have already demonstrated through their history that they cannot hear, cannot see; they can only read (of course, there are exceptions, but the exceptions only prove the rule). I’m more concerned with American Indian people, students and others, who have begun to be absorbed into the white world through universities and other institutions. But even then it’s a marginal sort of concern. It’s very possible to grow into a red face with a white mind; and if that’s a person’s individual choice, so be it, but I have no use for them. This is part of the process of cultural genocide being waged by Europeans against American Indian peoples’ today. My concern is with those American Indians who choose to resist this genocide, but who may be confused as to how to proceed.

(You notice I use the term American Indian rather than Native American or Native indigenous people or Amerindian when referring to my people. There has been some controversy about such terms, and frankly, at this point, I find it absurd. Primarily it seems that American Indian is being rejected as European in origin–which is true. But all the above terms are European in origin; the only non-European way is to speak of Lakota–or, more precisely, of Oglala, Brule, etc.–and of the Dineh, the Miccousukee, and all the rest of the several hundred correct tribal names.

(There is also some confusion about the word Indian, a mistaken belief that it refers somehow to the country, India. When Columbus washed up on the beach in the Caribbean, he was not looking for a country called India. Europeans were calling that country Hindustan in 1492. Look it up on the old maps. Columbus called the tribal people he met “Indio,” from the Italian in dio, meaning “in God.”)

It takes a strong effort on the part of each American Indian not to become Europeanized. The strength for this effort can only come from the traditional ways, the traditional values that our elders retain. It must come from the hoop, the four directions, the relations: it cannot come from the pages of a book or a thousand books. No European can ever teach a Lakota to be Lakota, a Hopi to be Hopi. A master’s degree in “Indian Studies” or in “education” or in anything else cannot make a person into a human being or provide knowledge into traditional ways. It can only make you into a mental European, an outsider.

I should be clear about something here, because there seems to be some confusion about it. When I speak of Europeans or mental Europeans, I’m not allowing for false distinctions. I’m not saying that on the one hand there are the by-products of a few thousand years of genocidal, reactionary, European intellectual development which is bad; and on the other hand there is some new revolutionary intellectual development which is good. I’m referring here to the so-called theories of Marxism and anarchism and “leftism” in general. I don’t believe these theories can be separated from the rest of the of the European intellectual tradition. It’s really just the same old song.

The process began much earlier. Newton, for example, “revolutionized” physics and the so-called natural sciences by reducing the physical universe to a linear mathematical equation. Descartes did the same thing with culture. John Locke did it with politics, and Adam Smith did it with economics. Each one of these “thinkers” took a piece of the spirituality of human existence and converted it into code, an abstraction. They picked up where Christianity ended: they “secularized” Christian religion, as the “scholars” like to say–and in doing so they made Europe more able and ready to act as an expansionist culture. Each of these intellectual revolutions served to abstract the European mentality even further, to remove the wonderful complexity and spirituality from the universe and replace it with a logical sequence: one, two, three. Answer!

This is what has come to be termed “efficiency” in the European mind. Whatever is mechanical is perfect; whatever seems to work at the moment–that is, proves the mechanical model to be the right one–is considered correct, even when it is clearly untrue. This is why “truth” changes so fast in the European mind; the answers which result from such a process are only stopgaps, only temporary, and must be continuously discarded in favor of new stopgaps which support the mechanical models and keep them (the models) alive.

Hegel and Marx were heirs to the thinking of Newton, Descartes, Locke and Smith. Hegel finished the process of secularizing theology–and that is put in his own terms–he secularized the religious thinking through which Europe understood the universe. Then Marx put Hegel’s philosophy in terms of “materialism,” which is to say that Marx despiritualized Hegel’s work altogether. Again, this is in Marx’ own terms. And this is now seen as the future revolutionary potential of Europe. Europeans may see this as revolutionary, but American Indians see it simply as still more of that same old European conflict between being and gaining. The intellectual roots of a new Marxist form of European imperialism lie in Marx’–and his followers’–links to the tradition of Newton, Hegel and the others.

Being is a spiritual proposition. Gaining is a material act. Traditionally, American Indians have always attempted to be the best people they could. Part of that spiritual process was and is to give away wealth, to discard wealth in order not to gain. Material gain is an indicator of false status among traditional people, while it is “proof that the system works” to Europeans. Clearly, there are two completely opposing views at issue here, and Marxism is very far over to the other side from the American Indian view. But let’s look at a major implication of this; it is not merely an intellectual debate.

The European materialist tradition of despiritualizing the universe is very similar to the mental process which goes into dehumanizing another person. And who seems most expert at dehumanizing other people? And why? Soldiers who have seen a lot of combat learn to do this to the enemy before going back into combat. Murderers do it before going out to commit murder. Nazi SS guards did it to concentration camp inmates. Cops do it. Corporation leaders do it to the workers they send into uranium mines and steel mills. Politicians do it to everyone in sight. And what the process has in common for each group doing the dehumanizing is that it makes it all right to kill and otherwise destroy other people. One of the Christian commandments says, “Thou shalt not kill,” at least not humans, so the trick is to mentally convert the victims into nonhumans. Then you can proclaim violation of your own commandment as a virtue.

In terms of the despiritualization of the universe, the mental process works so that it becomes virtuous to destroy the planet. Terms like progress and development are used as cover words here, the way victory and freedom are used to justify butchery in the dehumanization process. For example, a real-estate speculator may refer to “developing” a parcel of ground by opening a gravel quarry; development here means total, permanent destruction, with the earth itself removed. But European logic has gained a few tons of gravel with which more land can be “developed” through the construction of road beds. Ultimately, the whole universe is open–in the European view–to this sort of insanity.

Most important here, perhaps, is the fact that Europeans feel no sense of loss in all this. After all, their philosophers have despiritualized reality, so there is no satisfaction (for them) to be gained in simply observing the wonder of a mountain or a lake or a people in being. No, satisfaction is measured in terms of gaining material. So the mountain becomes gravel, and the lake becomes coolant for a factory, and the people are rounded up for processing through the indoctrination mills Europeans like to call schools.

But each new piece of that “progress” ups the ante out in the real world. Take fuel for the industrial machine as an example. Little more than two centuries ago, nearly everyone used wood–a replenishable, natural item–as fuel for the very human needs of cooking and staying warm. Along came the Industrial Revolution and coal became the dominant fuel, as production became the social imperative for Europe. Pollution began to become a problem in the cities, and the earth was ripped open to provide coal whereas wood had always simply been gathered or harvested at no great expense to the environment. Later, oil became the major fuel, as the technology of production was perfected through a series of scientific “revolutions.” Pollution increased dramatically, and nobody yet knows what the environmental costs of pumping all that oil out of the ground will really be in the long run. Now there’s an “energy crisis,” and uranium is becoming the dominant fuel.

Capitalists, at least, can be relied upon to develop uranium as fuel only at the rate which they can show a good profit. That’s their ethic, and maybe they will buy some time. Marxists, on the other hand, can be relied upon to develop uranium fuel as rapidly as possible simply because it’s the most “efficient” production fuel available. That’s their ethic, and I fail to see where it’s preferable. Like I said, Marxism is right smack in the middle of European tradition. It’s the same old song.

There’s a rule of thumb which can be applied here. You cannot judge the real nature of a European revolutionary doctrine on the basis of the changes it proposes to make within the European power structure and society. You can only judge it by the effects it will have on non-European peoples. This is because every revolution in European history has served to reinforce Europe’s tendencies and abilities to export destruction to other peoples, other cultures and the environment itself. I defy anyone to point out an example where this is not true.

So now we, as American Indian people, are asked to believe that a “new” European revolutionary doctrine such as Marxism will reverse the negative effects of European history on us. European power relations are to be adjusted once again, and that’s supposed to make things better for all of us. But what does this really mean?

Right now, today, we who live on the Pine Ridge Reservation are living in what white society has designated a “National Sacrifice Area.” What this means is that we have a lot of uranium deposits here, and white culture (not us) needs this uranium as energy production material. The cheapest, most efficient way for industry to extract and deal with the processing of this uranium is to dump the waste by-products right here at the digging sites. Right here where we live. This waste is radioactive and will make the entire region uninhabitable forever. This is considered by the industry, and by the white society that created this industry, to be an “acceptable” price to pay for energy resource development. Along the way they also plan to drain the water table under this part of South Dakota as part of the industrial process, so the region becomes doubly uninhabitable. The same sort of thing is happening down in the land of the Navajo and Hopi, up in the land of the Northern Cheyenne and Crow, and elsewhere. Thirty percent of the coal in the West and half of the uranium deposits in the United States have been found to lie under reservation land, so there is no way this can be called a minor issue.

We are resisting being turned into a National Sacrifice Area. We are resisting being turned into a national sacrifice people. The costs of this industrial process are not acceptable to us. It is genocide to dig uranium here and drain the water table–no more, no less.

Now let’s suppose that in our resistance to extermination we begin to seek allies (we have). Let’s suppose further that we were to take revolutionary Marxism at its word: that it intends nothing less than the complete overthrow of the European capitalists order which has presented this threat to our very existence. This would seem to be a natural alliance for American Indian people to enter into. After all, as the Marxists say, it is the capitalists who set us up to be a national sacrifice. This is true as far as it goes.

But, as I’ve tried to point out, this “truth” is very deceptive. Revolutionary Marxism is committed to even further perpetuation and perfection of the very industrial process which is destroying us all. It offers only to “redistribute” the results–the money, maybe–of this industrialization to a wider section of the population. It offers to take wealth from the capitalists and pass it around; but in order to do so, Marxism must maintain the industrial system. Once again, the power relations within European society will have to be altered, but once again the effects upon American Indian peoples here and non-Europeans elsewhere will remain the same. This is much the same as when power was redistributed from the church to private business during the so-called bourgeois revolution. European society changed a bit, at least superficially, but its conduct toward non-Europeans continued as before. You can see what the American Revolution of 1776 did for American Indians. It’s the same old song.

Revolutionary Marxism, like industrial society in other forms, seeks to “rationalize” all people in relation to industry–maximum industry, maximum production. It is a doctrine that despises the American Indian spiritual tradition, our cultures, our lifeways. Marx himself called us “precapitalists” and “primitive.” Precapitalist simply means that, in his view, we would eventually discover capitalism and become capitalists; we have always been economically retarded in Marxist terms. The only manner in which American Indian people could participate in a Marxist revolution would be to join the industrial system, to become factory workers, or “proletarians,” as Marx called them. The man was very clear about the fact that his revolution could only occur through the struggle of the proletariat, that the existence of a massive industrial system is a precondition of a successful Marxist society.

I think there’s a problem with language here. Christians, capitalists, Marxists. All of them have been revolutionary in their own minds, but none of them really means revolution. What they really mean is continuation. They do what they do in order that European culture can continue to exist and develop according to its needs. Like germs, European culture goes through occasional convulsions, even divisions within itself, in order to go on living and growing. This isn’t a revolution we’re talking about, but a means to continue what already exists. An amoeba is still an amoeba after it reproduces. But maybe comparing European culture to an amoeba isn’t really fair to the amoeba. Maybe cancer cells are a more accurate comparison because European culture has historically destroyed everything around it; and it will eventually destroy itself.

So, in order for us to really join forces with Marxism, we American Indians would have to accept the national sacrifice of our homeland; we would have to commit cultural suicide and become industrialized and Europeanized.

At this point, I’ve got to stop and ask myself whether I’m being too harsh. Marxism has something of a history. Does this history bear out my observations? I look to the process of industrialization in the Soviet Union since 1920 and I see that these Marxists have done what it took the English Industrial Revolution 300 years to do; and the Marxists did it in 60 years. I see that the territory of the USSR used to contain a number of tribal peoples and that they have been crushed to make way for the factories. The Soviets refer to this as “the National Question,” the question of whether the tribal peoples had the right to exist as peoples; and they decided the tribal peoples were an acceptable sacrifice to the industrial needs. I look to China and I see the same thing. I look to Vietnam and I see Marxists imposing an industrial order and rooting out the indigenous tribal mountain people.

I hear the leading Soviet scientist saying that when uranium is exhausted, then alternatives will be found. I see the Vietnamese taking over a nuclear power plant abandoned by the U.S. military. Have they dismantled and destroyed it? No, they are using it. I see China exploding nuclear bombs, developing uranium reactors, and preparing a space program in order to colonize and exploit the planets the same as the Europeans colonized and exploited this hemisphere. It’s the same old song, but maybe with a faster tempo this time.

The statement of the Soviet scientist is very interesting. Does he know what this alternative energy source will be? No, he simply has faith. Science will find a way. I hear revolutionary Marxists saying that the destruction of the environment, pollution, and radiation will all be controlled. And I see them act upon their words. Do they know how these things will be controlled? No, they simply have faith. Science will find a way. Industrialization is fine and necessary. How do they know this? Faith. Science will find a way. Faith of this sort has always been known in Europe as religion. Science has become the new European religion for both capitalists and Marxists; they are truly inseparable; they are part and parcel of the same culture. So, in both theory and practice, Marxism demands that non-European peoples give up their values, their traditions, their cultural existence altogether. We will all be industrialized science addicts in a Marxist society.

I do not believe that capitalism itself is really responsible for the situation in which American Indians have been declared a national sacrifice. No, it is the European tradition; European culture itself is responsible. Marxism is just the latest continuation of this tradition, not a solution to it. To ally with Marxism is to ally with the very same forces that declare us an acceptable cost.

There is another way. There is the traditional Lakota way and the ways of the American Indian peoples. It is the way that knows that humans do not have the right to degrade Mother Earth, that there are forces beyond anything the European mind has conceived, that humans must be in harmony with all relations or the relations will eventually eliminate the disharmony. A lopsided emphasis on humans by humans–the Europeans’ arrogance of acting as though they were beyond the nature of all related things–can only result in a total disharmony and a readjustment which cuts arrogant humans down to size, gives them a taste of that reality beyond their grasp or control and restores the harmony. There is no need for a revolutionary theory to bring this about; it’s beyond human control. The nature peoples of this planet know this and so they do not theorize about it. Theory is an abstract; our knowledge is real.

Distilled to its basic terms, European faith–including the new faith in science–equals a belief that man is God. Europe has always sought a Messiah, whether that be the man Jesus Christ or the man Karl Marx or the man Albert Einstein. American Indians know this to be totally absurd. Humans are the weakest of all creatures, so weak that other creatures are willing to give up their flesh that we may live. Humans are able to survive only through the exercise of rationality since they lack the abilities of other creatures to gain food through the use of fang and claw.

But rationality is a curse since it can cause humans to forget the natural order of things in ways other creatures do not. A wolf never forgets his or her place in the natural order. American Indians can. Europeans almost always do. We pray our thanks to the deer, our relations, for allowing us their flesh to eat; Europeans simply take the flesh for granted and consider the deer inferior. After all, Europeans consider themselves godlike in their rationalism and science. God is the Supreme Being; all else must be inferior.

All European tradition, Marxism included, has conspired to defy the natural order of all things. Mother Earth has been abused, the powers have been abused, and this cannot go on forever. No theory can alter that simple fact. Mother Earth will retaliate, the whole environment will retaliate, and the abusers will be eliminated. Things come full circle, back to where they started. That’s revolution. And that’s a prophecy of my people, of the Hopi people and of other correct peoples.

American Indians have been trying to explain this to Europeans for centuries. But, as I said earlier, Europeans have proven themselves unable to hear. The natural order will win out, and the offenders will die out, the way deer die when they offend the harmony by over-populating a given region. It’s only a matter of time until what Europeans call “a major catastrophe of global proportions” will occur. It is the role of American Indian peoples, the role of all natural beings, to survive. A part of our survival is to resist. We resist not to overthrow a government or to take political power, but because it is natural to resist extermination, to survive. We don’t want power over white institutions; we want white institutions to disappear. That’s revolution.

American Indians are still in touch with these realities–the prophecies, the traditions of our ancestors. We learn from the elders, from nature, from the powers. And when the catastrophe is over, we American Indian peoples will still be here to inhabit the hemisphere. I don’t care if it’s only a handful living high in the Andes. American Indian people will survive; harmony will be reestablished. That’s revolution.

At this point, perhaps I should be very clear about another matter, one which should already be clear as a result of what I’ve said. But confusion breeds easily these days, so I want to hammer home this point. When I use the term European, I’m not referring to a skin color or a particular genetic structure. What I’m referring to is a mind-set, a worldview that is a product of the development of European culture. People are not genetically encoded to hold this outlook; they are acculturated to hold it. The same is true for American Indians or for the members of any culture.

It is possible for an American Indian to share European values, a European worldview. We have a term for these people; we call them “apples”–red on the outside (genetics) and white on the inside (their values). Other groups have similar terms: Blacks have their “oreos”; Hispanos have “Coconuts” and so on. And, as I said before, there are exceptions to the white norm: people who are white on the outside, but not white inside. I’m not sure what term should be applied to them other than “human beings.”

What I’m putting out here is not a racial proposition but a cultural proposition. Those who ultimately advocate and defend the realities of European culture and its industrialism are my enemies. Those who resist it, who struggle against it, are my allies, the allies of American Indian people. And I don’t give a damn what their skin color happens to be. Caucasian is the white term for the white race: European is an outlook I oppose.

The Vietnamese Communists are not exactly what you might consider genetic Caucasians, but they are now functioning as mental Europeans. The same holds true for Chinese Communists, for Japanese capitalists or Bantu Catholics or Peter “MacDollar” down at the Navajo Reservation or Dickie Wilson up here at Pine Ridge. There is no racism involved in this, just an acknowledgment of the mind and spirit that make up culture.

In Marxist terms I suppose I’m a “cultural nationalist.” I work first with my people, the traditional Lakota people, because we hold a common worldview and share an immediate struggle. Beyond this, I work with other traditional American Indian peoples, again because of a certain commonality in worldview and form of struggle. Beyond that, I work with anyone who has experienced the colonial oppression of Europe and who resists its cultural and industrial totality. Obviously, this includes genetic Caucasians who struggle to resist the dominant norms of European culture. The Irish and the Basques come immediately to mind, but there are many others.

I work primarily with my own people, with my own community. Other people who hold non-European perspectives should do the same. I believe in the slogan, “Trust your brother’s vision,” although I’d like to add sisters into the bargain. I trust the community and the culturally based vision of all the races that naturally resist industrialization and human extinction. Clearly, individual whites can share in this, given only that they have reached the awareness that continuation of the industrial imperatives of Europe is not a vision, but species suicide. White is one of the sacred colors of the Lakota people–red, yellow, white and black. The four directions. The four seasons. The four periods of life and aging. The four races of humanity. Mix red, yellow, white and black together and you get brown, the color of the fifth race. This is a natural ordering of things. It therefore seems natural to me to work with all races, each with its own special meaning, identity and message.

But there is a peculiar behavior among most Caucasians. As soon as I become critical of Europe and its impact on other cultures, they become defensive. They begin to defend themselves. But I’m not attacking them personally; I’m attacking Europe. In personalizing my observations on Europe they are personalizing European culture, identifying themselves with it. By defending themselves in this context, they are ultimately defending the death culture. This is a confusion which must be overcome, and it must be overcome in a hurry. None of us has energy to waste in such false struggles.

Caucasians have a more positive vision to offer humanity than European culture. I believe this. But in order to attain this vision it is necessary for Caucasians to step outside European culture–alongside the rest of humanity–to see Europe for what it is and what it does.

To cling to capitalism and Marxism and all other “isms” is simply to remain within European culture. There is no avoiding this basic fact. As a fact, this constitutes a choice. Understand that the choice is based on culture, not race. Understand that to choose European culture and industrialism is to choose to be my enemy. And understand that the choice is yours, not mine.

This leads me back to address those American Indians who are drifting through the universities, the city slums, and other European institutions. If you are there to resist the oppressor in accordance with your traditional ways, so be it. I don’t know how you manage to combine the two, but perhaps you will succeed. But retain your sense of reality. Beware of coming to believe the white world now offers solutions to the problems it confronts us with. Beware, too, of allowing the words of native people to be twisted to the advantages of our enemies. Europe invented the practice of turning words around on themselves. You need only look to the treaties between American Indian peoples and various European governments to know that this is true. Draw your strength from who you are.

A culture which regularly confuses revolt with resistance, has nothing helpful to teach you and nothing to offer you as a way of life. Europeans have long since lost all touch with reality, if ever they were in touch with who you are as American Indians.

So, I suppose to conclude this, I should state clearly that leading anyone toward Marxism is the last thing on my mind. Marxism is as alien to my culture as capitalism and Christianity are. In fact, I can say I don’t think I’m trying to lead anyone toward anything. To some extent I tried to be a “leader,” in the sense that the white media like to use that term, when the American Indian Movement was a young organization. This was a result of a confusion I no longer have. You cannot be everything to everyone. I do not propose to be used in such a fashion by my enemies. I am not a leader. I am an Oglala Lakota patriot. That is all I want and all I need to be. And I am very comfortable with who I am.”

http://endofcapitalism.com/2010/10/17/revolution-and-american-indians-marxism-is-as-alien-to-my-culture-as-capitalism/