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Book by John Maxwell
How to Make Our Own News: A Primer for Environmentalist and Journalists
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Trickle
Down Racism
By John
Maxwell
Nations are supposed to get the Governments they deserve. I am not sure that
any country deserves George Bush; the Americans didn’t elect
him President and the Iraqis, over whom he is attempting to
rule, obviously don’t want him.
In Jamaica there is a saying that “wha’ start bad a mawning, can’t
come good a evenin’ – Oh!”
The American air is filled with protestations about the essential
goodness of the American resolve to bring Freedom™ (Reg. US
Pat. Off.) to the ‘darker parts of the world”, an
unfortunate phrase, which suggests that Mr Bush may have been
thinking of some of the hapless people he
spoke of last week. Then, apropos of nothing, he blurted
some gibberish about his not believing what some people felt –
that dark skinned people are unable to govern themselves.
That this was rubbish is demonstrated by Bush’s own behaviour
and by the US foreign policy establishment which has
directed forcible interference with dozens of darker
skinned peoples over the years, the most recent being Haiti. And
within the last few days the US president has declared his renewed
intention to sabotage and bring down the government of Cuba.
The aim of course is quite simple and humane: to install US Freedom™
wherever the lesser breeds without the law pullulate in
obvious menace to the United States of American and world peace.
Mr Bush at the moment is in the grip of his latest and most severe
crisis, although in typical fashion, he appears not to
understand this fact. Speaking about the torture of Iraqis by US
servicemen he has stated a few elementary truths, which we must
accept: "Their treatment does not reflect the nature of the
American people. That's not the way we do things in America. I
didn't like it one bit." He was unable to say he was
sorry when he tried to explain his position on two Arabic
language television networks. It was only the next day, in a
meeting with the King of Jordan that he told the King –
obviously in reply to a direct question –that he was sorry for
what had happened. King Abdullah, one expects, will dutifully carry
this message back to the Arab and Muslim worlds.
“This is not America, “ Mr. Bush told the Arabic language audiences,
“America is a country of justice and law and freedom and
treating people with respect.”
Unfortunately the Arab world and much of the rest of the world, including
his own countrymen, don't believe him.
After having ‘spanked’ Mr Rumsfeld on Thursday, Mr Bush offered a
pathetic defense of his Defence Secretary. Apparently searching
for words he said of Mr Rumsfeld: “a really good
Secretary of Defence” who had been with him through two wars
and would ‘stay in my Cabinet.”
Rumsfeld too didn’t appear to understand the need for an apology until
some days after the political Krakatoa exploded in the
Administration’s face. Men of character, which is what they
claim they are, don’t need to be told when to apologise.
Al Jazeera used a cricketing metaphor to describe Bush’s dilemma: he
was, the station said, “on the back-foot.”
The Usual Suspects
Watching the Senate Armed Forces Committee interviewing Mr Rumsfeld and
his aides, one got the impression that not all members
really wanted to get at the facts. Among those who did were Senators Lindsey
Graham, John McCain, Teddy Kennedy and Carl Levin. Some others,
including two of the women, Senators Dole and Collins, were
convinced that this was a local difficulty, an outrage
obviously, but perpetrated by one or two (or maybe a dozen or
two) bad apples.
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Others were concerned about whether the rot was systemic, whether the military
was covering up and why it took so long for the investigations
to be communicated to the President and to the Congress.
General Myers, the Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff, was very
comforting. His belief in the US constitution, the effectiveness
of military justice and his desire not to prejudice the trials
of the accused malefactors were the reasons the Congress didn't
get the story. And while the President had been told about the
atrocities toward the end of January no one explained how it
came about that according to him, he didn’t know what was
happening until last week.
It was all, apparently a matter of the pictures of the abuse, and General
Myers had called Dan Rather at CBS to ask that the pictures not
be shown just now because of the outrage they would produce and
the probability that they would have inflamed Arab opinion. Not
to worry, apparently some even more incendiary videos are still
to come
The poor are over-represented in US prisons and in the US military.
One
of the most prominent accused, Lynndie England, is a girl of 20
who joined the army to pay her way through college.
The relatives of Lynndie England, Ivan Frederick and Charles Graner
all profess surprise at the charges against them, although
Graner is a former prison officer with a bad record.
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Clearly, however, the army inquiry is likely to find that the accused
enlisted men and women were guilty of a peculiar and isolated
depravity and when they are found guilty, the whole
miserable affair will be over, they hope.
Unfortunately, the Arab and brown-skinned world, and much of the world,
brown-skinned or not, do not quite see things that way. They
believe that the torture is a predictable expression of American
culture.
The perspective outside of the US is that the United States believes that:
1 It can do what it bloody well likes;
2 It can call on the rest of the world to clean up when it
makes a mess of things.
The first principle is exemplified by the US disdain for treaties and
international conventions like the Kyoto protocol, the ABM
Treaty, the International Criminal Court, the Hague and Geneva
Conventions and others.
The second is exemplified by Iraq and Haiti, most recently. In both of
these, when the US has accomplished its primary objective,
gaining control or the appearance of control, the rest of the
world is invited to repair the damage.
In Iraq that scenario is looking less and less likely.
The Iraqis are tired of being misrepresented by Americans as a bunch of uncouth
savages. It was Rumsfeld, remember, who stood by while organised
gangs stole and destroyed priceless artefacts of
civilisations going back 8,000 years. “Freedom is untidy” he
said then.
The Iraqis are being blamed for the run down state of their country after
ten years of UN sanctions and American and British bombing of
the infrastructure. Senator Dole, and I imagine many Americans,
appears to be under the impression that Iraqi women had no
rights under Saddam People like Dole and Rumsfeld, not to
speak of the ‘Great Non-Intercontinental,’ George Bush, see
the US presence in Iraq as a civilising mission and one that can
be contracted out to mercenaries.
The importance
of Honour
Part of the problem with the American perspective is that they
have objectified everyone but themselves. The French are lazy,
erratic winebibbers, the Germans are a plodding lot addicted to
dictators and the Swedes have a predilection for socialism
and suicide.
In the real world, the hapless Iraqis, lacking freedom, are, along
with the Cubans, and contrary to US perceptions, among the
best educated people in the world, a fact unknown in the North
Atlantic world.
When the US speaks of fanatics and Saddam ‘bitter-enders’, they are
not conscious that they have in just one year, managed to
provoke the enmity of almost the entire population of Iraq ,
radicals and moderates alike, and the people on whom they came
to bestow freedom have an entirely different concept of what
freedom is.
An American serviceman may see no harm in a woman ordering a man to
masturbate in front of her, but one Iraqi said the acts
were so offensive to him that he could not bring himself even to
speak about them.
Mr Rumsfeld, who feels that such acts were “terrible” is, however,
the man who professed no great concern for the way detainees
were treated in the law-free zone of Guantanamo Bay. The
tortures at Abu Ghraib may have happened ‘on his watch’ but
so too did the massacre of more than 2,000 men in
Afghanistan at Shebargan, where people were suffocated
in freight containers and buried by American bulldozers,
while a thousand or so were simply gunned down at the Qala
al Jangi fort outside Mazar al Sharif during the war
against the Taliban. No one has ever been held responsible for
these war crimes. The system does work.
The culture of revenge is now so cold-blooded and depraved that honour
can be satisfied by contract killers.
As one Arab told the Al Arabiya, network, it is true perhaps that
the American atrocities were carried out by 'only a few people',
but that was also true of September 11 and clearly
'only a few' were involved in the desecration of
American bodies in Fallujah. And since the American
punishment of Fallujah was not only illegal but also
disproportionate, it would appear to licence any over-reaction
by anyone to whatever insult he decides must be revenged.
As someone once said, an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind. And
old William Shakespeare, or whoever, said
“O, It is excellent to have a giant’s strength, but it is tyrannous
to use it like a giant.”
That is a thought which has obviously not occurred to the American Press,
who are, in my opinion, responsible for inducing Americans to
view life as a kind of video game. According to my bete
blanc, Wolf Blitzer, “Mr Rumsfeld made a robust
apology.”
That apology and all the others are meant for American consumption, as
far as Arabs and Muslims are concerned.
What was needed is something more profound, but apparently, unattainable
in this age: it is that the United States should be able
to recognise other people – Haitians, Iraqis, Nigerians,
Cubans and the rest of us – as human beings, not perhaps
part of the American dream, but at least, entitled,
inalienably, to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness,
however we choose to define it.
What we want, in a word, is respect.
Copyright©2004 John Maxwell
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The Last Holiday: A Memoir
By Gil Scott Heron
Shortly after we republished The Vulture and The Nigger Factory, Gil started to tell me about The Last Holiday, an account he was writing of a multi-city tour that he ended up doing with Stevie Wonder in late 1980 and early 1981. Originally Bob Marley was meant to be playing the tour that Stevie Wonder had conceived as a way of trying to force legislation to make Martin Luther King's birthday a national holiday. At the time, Marley was dying of cancer, so Gil was asked to do the first six dates. He ended up doing all 41. And Dr King's birthday ended up becoming a national holiday ("The Last Holiday because America can't afford to have another national holiday"), but Gil always felt that Stevie never got the recognition he deserved and that his story needed to be told. The first chapters of this book were given to me in New York when Gil was living in the Chelsea Hotel. Among the pages was a chapter called Deadline that recounts the night they played Oakland, California, 8 December; it was also the night that John Lennon was murdered. Gil uses Lennon's violent end as a brilliant parallel to Dr King's assassination and as a biting commentary on the constraints that sometimes lead to newspapers getting things wrong. —Jamie Byng, Guardian / Gil_reads_"Deadline" (audio) / Gil Scott-Heron
& His Music Gil Scott
Heron Blue Collar
Remember Gil Scott- Heron |
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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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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
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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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