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Book by John Maxwell
How to Make Our Own News: A Primer for Environmentalist and
Journalists
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Beyond the Law . . .
By John
Maxwell
Some of
the more thoughtful US media are now reflecting on why the United
States is not as popular abroad as they think it should be. For
some of these media, the major worry is France, the oldest ally of
the United States and since the Iraq crisis, one of its most
derided and reviled. According to Thomas Friedman in the New York
Times, France is now the ‘enemy’.
Part of
the problem is that the Americans do not realise that the French
attitude to the United States is part of a much more general
worldwide aversion to modern United States policies and not
simply, as some would have it, a lust for equal billing on the
world stage. It is also not directed at the American people as a
whole.
Another
part of the problem, of course, is that the United States
government makes no bones about the fact that it has no
friends, as Kissinger said, only interests. If you treat others as
simply pawns to be summoned when you are in need, you are likely
to find that they don’t come when called. Few of us relish being
treated like pet dogs.
To move,
as Bush did on Friday, to punish an entire nation – Cuba – to
secure some more votes in Florida, demonstrates just
how unprincipled the present directors of US policy have become.
The Valerie Plame affair is another example
The
Korean War provoked an American psychosis which has persisted to
this day: it is that the US is threatened by any movement which it
does not control and by any nationalism which is not based on the
US pattern. During the Cold War it was communism which was the
great danger, now it is terrorism an abstraction with roots in the
reality of inequity, poverty and squalor. No one appears to
understand that while the US is admired for its wealth and
technological superiority.
Many
peoples believe that they were exploited in the process of the US
achieving its present overlord position. People do not dislike
Americans so much as they resent the US government’s
tendency, mirrored by its press, to treat everyone else as
expendable. The President of Harvard , Lawrence Summers made the
feeling explicit in a notorious memorandum several years ago
in which he recommended the export of toxic wastes and pollutants
to the Third World because the lives of people like us were
so much less valuable than American lives.
This
tendency is explicitly reflected in a document prepared by the
right-wing think-tank which calls itself the Project for the New
American Century – PNAC. Among those associated with this
rat’s nest of reaction are such Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and
dozens of other cronies and advisers to the President and his
administration.
Targeting
Genotypes
In one
of the PNAC seminal documents “Rebuilding America’s Defences,”
the writers explicitly reject the idea of a peaceful, cooperative,
multi-polar world: The document suggests that US military
intervention in many regions of the world will be required for the
foreseeable future. Defense of the homeland is the first aim of
the new policy, intimately connected with the major aims of
the military which are to "fight and decisively win multiple,
simultaneous major theatre wars" wherever required – and to
"perform the 'constabulary' duties associated with shaping
the security environment of critical regions."
The
explicit end of all this is that the United States will not
tolerate the emergence of any power likely to be able to begin to
threaten US dominance at any time in the future and
effectively extends "America’s" boundaries to the very
ends of the earth.
But the
most sinister aspect of this document, and one which has so
far attracted no real attention, is the aim that the US should
dominate all areas of the art of making war, particularly
"the world of microbes . . . advanced forms of biological
warfare that can 'target' specific genotypes [and] may transform
biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically
useful tool"
What
this passage says, quite explicitly, is that at some time, perhaps
quite soon, the United States will not only be waging pre-emptive
war against nations, but against racial sub-types – blacks,
Native Americans, the Chinese, Arabs and so on.
Not to
put too fine a point on it, this is an American version of
Hitler’s Final Solution. It serves notice on any non-chosen
peoples that they are expendable, that they are surplus to
requirements. “The Bell Curve” suggested that soon the
cognitive elite would live in monstrous, affluent, gated
communities surrounded by the suppressed, pullulating lesser
breeds. The Wolfowitz cohort goes further. They simply
intend to exterminate the lesser breeds when the moment is
opportune.
Nuking
Colin Powell
It
should therefore come as no surprise that within the past
few days the leader of the Christian Right, the Rev. Pat
Robertson, ha endorsed the idea of exploding a nuclear
device on the US State Department.
Robertson
was talking on his radio show with writer Joel Mowbray,
whose most recent book accuses the State Department of endangering
the security of the United States by all sorts of sophisticated
treacheries.
This, of
course, is a part of the psychosis left over from Korea, when
Henry Luce, founder of TIME magazine and General McCormick, owner
of the Chicago Tribune, were at war with the Democratic party for
failing to "seize" victory in China (1945) and Korea
(1950). It was all part of a huge betrayal by effete Eastern
Liberal types who have now morphed from being nigger-lovers
to actually being niggers in some cases. What fate Dr
Robertson has in store for Condoleezza Rice, the National Security
Adviser, is anyone’s guess.
The
targeting of genotypes should not surprise us if we remember the
2000 election campaign, when Mr. Bush, the Republican candidate
sought the endorsement of Bob Jones and his University, where
blacks and whites were forbidden to fraternise. That Bush visit
was a signal to the Republican faithful that nothing had really
changed They would talk tolerance but not practice it. Mr.
Cheney’s masochistic pre-occupation with Civil War battlefields
is another symptom of the same tendency..
Underneath
all the talk about compassionate conservatism there has always
been the visceral, subliminal ethnic text of hostility to
non-whites, expressed in Bush senior’s advertisement featuring
Willie Horton and Bush junior’s friend of the court brief
against affirmative action. The transfer of wealth from poor to
rich makes blacks the first casualties of conservative compassion.
Bush’s attitude to the UN Global anti-AIDS campaign is just
another part of the jigsaw.
Beyond
the Law
Scott
McClellan is the White House Press secretary. This week, he was
asked by the press about the criticism by the International Red
Cross of conditions of prisoners at Guantanamo By’s Camp Delta
Here is what he said:
| Let's
remember these individuals are enemy combatants, these
individuals are terrorists or supporters of terrorism and
we are at war on terrorism, and the reasons for detaining
enemy combatants in the first place during a war is to get
our intelligence and make sure these enemy combatants
don't return to help our enemies plot attacks or carry out
attacks on the United States. |
It is
quite clear: "enemy combatants" are not human beings
entitled to justice or any of the basic human rights
supposedly guaranteed by the US Constitution, the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights and the Geneva Conventions.
The
International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) normally does not
go public, does not speak to the press, but on Friday, Christopher
Girod, the top official of the organisation in the USA
told the New York Times that the conditions under which the
US was holding more than 600 detainees in Guantanamo Bay were
unacceptable as it put the detainees “beyond the law.”
The
detainees were being held incommunicado, in indefinite detention
without having been charged with any crime, without having been
tried or brought before any court of law. Twenty-one detainees
have made 32 suicide attempts in the past 18 months and
Girod said the open-endedness of the situation and its impact on
the mental health of the population ha become a major problem.
Girod
said it was intolerable that the centre was being used as an
interrogation centre, where the detainees had no idea what was
going to happen to them.
In
relation to this matter, I believe that the Muslim chaplain
arrested some weeks ago is probably guilty – of compassion.
Meanwhile,
another group of Americans, who I think represent the real
America, filed friends of court briefs in the US Supreme Court
in the cases of 16 detainees who are challenging the unjust and
barbaric system. The brief was filed by 19 former diplomats
including two former assistant Secretaries of State.
“Our
most important diplomatic asset has been this nation’s
values,” they pointed out in their brief. Three retired US flag
officers, two admirals and a general filed another brief pointing
out that ignoring the Geneva Conventions in Guantanamo will give
other nations the excuse to treat captured Americans in the same
way.
The most
salient characteristic of the cabal now in possession
of the White House has been its ignorance of history and the US
constitution. They talk about the role that history has presented
to them, while steadfastly ignoring the Bill of Rights which has
inspired so many other people fighting for freedom over the two
centuries since the US liberated itself from Britain.
What is
so amazing about these supermen-come-lately is their astonishing
arrogance combined with a pervading ignorance not only of
their own history but a total disregard for other cultures,
history and politics.
When
Rumsfeld sneered at “Old Europe” he was expressing the
ignorant rudeness of the nouveau riche, entirely unaware that life
is more complicated than bank accounts and armies. At the
age of 70, he may even now be learning better. When Cheney
arrogantly persisted on Friday, in lying about Saddam Hussein’s
"ties to terror," he appeared confident that in his
version of reality, the press would protect him from the truth and
the consequences of what Jamaicans would call his “buttooism.”
Cheney,
Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and company have all sorts of academic degrees
and large amounts of wealth between them. They imagine that
the world takes them seriously despite their lack of respect for
the rest of us, and that we are afraid of them. After all, they
have nukes and chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction
at their command.
In this,
they are even more prideful and bombastic than Mrs. Thatcher and
her Conservatives.
Remember
them?
Copyright ©2003 John Maxwell
maxinf@cwjamaica.com
photo above:
Mrs.
Glynn Manley waits to have her books autographed by John Maxwell
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Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.
As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
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A Wreath for Emmett Till
By Marilyn Nelson; Illustrated by
Philippe Lardy
This memorial to
the lynched teen is in the Homeric
tradition of poet-as-historian. It is a
heroic crown of sonnets in Petrarchan
rhyme scheme and, as such, is quite
formal not only in form but in language.
There are 15 poems in the cycle, the
last line of one being the first line of
the next, and each of the first lines
makes up the entirety of the 15th. This
chosen formality brings distance and
reflection to readers, but also calls
attention to the horrifically ugly
events. The language is highly
figurative in one sonnet, cruelly
graphic in the next. The illustrations
echo the representative nature of the
poetry, using images from nature and
taking advantage of the emotional
quality of color. There is an
introduction by the author, a page about
Emmett Till, and literary and poetical
footnotes to the sonnets. The artist
also gives detailed reasoning behind his
choices. This underpinning information
makes this a full experience, eminently
teachable from several aspects,
including historical and literary—School
Library Journal |
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The White Masters
of the World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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Negro Digest / Black World
Browse all issues
1950
1960
1965
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____ 2005
Enjoy!
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The
Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding
of Haiti
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