"What would ultimately be necessary would be a breakdown of the nation-state system - because I think that's not a viable system. It's not necessarily the natural form of human organization; in fact, it's a European invention pretty much. The modern nation-state system basically developed in Europe since the medieval period, and it was extremely difficult for it to develop: Europe has a very bloody history, and extremely savage and bloody history, with constant massive wars and so on, and that was all part of an effort to establish the nation-state system. It has virtually no relation to the way people live, or to their association, or anything else particularly, so it had to be established by force. And it was established by centuries of bloody warfare. That warfare ended in 1945 - and the only reason it ended is because the next war was going to destroy everything. [1]
"The capitalist or bourgeois class is no longer capable of guiding the uninhibited development of science and technology - again because these objectives now clash with the profit motive. Capitalism has proved incapable of transcending fundamental weaknesses such as under-utilization of productive capacity, the persistence of a permanent sector of unemployed, and periodic economic crises related to the concept of "market" - which is concerned with people's ability to pay rather than their need for commodities. Capitalism has created its own irrationalities, such as vicious white racism, the tremendous waste associated with advertising, and the irrationality of incredible poverty in the midst of wealth and wastage even inside the biggest capitalist economies, such as the United States of America [2]
"The nation-state system was exported to the rest of the world through European colonization. Europeans were barbarians basically, savages: very advanced technologically, and advanced in methods of warfare, but not culturally or anything else particularly. And when they spread over the rest of the world, it was like a plague - they just destroyed everything in front of them. They fought differently, they fought much more brutally, they had better technology - and they essentially wiped everything else out. [1]
"The American continent's a good example. How come everybody around here has a white face, and not a red face? Well, it's because the people with white faces were savages, and they killed the people with red faces. When the British and other colonists came to this continent, they simply destroyed everything - and pretty much the same thing happened everywhere else in the world.
"Because of Columbus's exaggerated report and promises, his second expedition was given seventeen ships and more than twelve hundred men. The aim was clear: slaves and gold. They went from island to island in the Caribbean, taking Indians as captives. But as word spread of the Europeans' intent they found more and more empty villages. On Haiti, they found that the sailors left behind at Fort Navidad had been killed in a battle with the Indians, after they had roamed he island in gangs looking for gold, taking women and children as slaves for sex and labor. [3]
"Now from his base on Haiti, Columbus sent expedition after expedition into the interior. They found no gold, but had to fill up the ships returning to Spain with some kind of dividend. In the year 1495, they went on a great slave raid, rounded up fifteen hundred Arawak men, women, and children, put them in pens guarded by Spaniards and dogs, then picked the five hundred best specimens to load onto ships. Of those five hundred, two hundred died en route. The rest arrived alive in Spain and were put up for sale by the archdeacon of the town, who reported that, although the slaves were "naked as the day they were born," they showed "no more embarrassment than animals."
"So the process of colonization was extraordinarily destructive, and it in turn imposed the European nation-state system on the world, kind of a reflection of internal European society, which of course was extremely hierarchical and unequal and brutal. And if that system continues, I suppose it will continue to be hierarchical and unequal and brutal. [1]
"Europeans used the superiority of their ships and cannons to gain control of all the world's waterways, starting with the western Mediterranean and the Atlantic coast of North Africa. From 1415, when the Portuguese captured Ceuta, near Gibbraltar, they maintained the offensive against the Maghreb. Within the next sixty years, they seized ports such as Arzila, El-Ksar-es-Seghir, and Tangier, and fortified them. By the second half of the fifteenth century, the Portuguse controlled the Atlantic coast of Morocco and used its economic and strategic advantages to prepare for further navigations which eventually carried their ships round the Capeof Good Hope in 1495. After reaching the Indian Ocean, the Portuguese sought with some success to replace Arabs as the merchants who tied East Africa to India and the rest of Asia. I the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Portuguese carried most of the East African ivory which was marketed in India; while Indian cloth and beads were sold in East and West Africa by the Portuguese, Dutch, English, and French. The same applied to cowry shells fro the East Indies. Therefore, by control of the seas, Europe took the first steps towards transforming the several parts of the Africa and Asia into economic satellites." [2]
[All the text in this submission are by the authors listed, not by me. During a recent swim workout I literally conceived this theme and assembled this conversation between these great thinkers - LBD]
[1] Noam Chomsky. Understanding Power. The New Press, 2002
[2] Walter Rodney. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Howard University Press, 1972
[3] Howard Zinn. A People's History of the United States 1492-Present. HarperCollins, 1980
27 May 2010
Why is BP spill being called the biggest environmental disaster? It's not by a long shot
It was announced this morning on NPR radio that the British Petroleum (BP, the corporation formerly known as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company) oil "spill" was the biggest environmental disaster in history, surpassing the Exxon Valdez crack-up of March 1989.
But you have to really be a good, disciplined student of government and corporate propaganda to believe this obvious overstatement. Really, the biggest disaster in history?
Funny, because most moderate apologists are usually more critical of official facts in other matters. Take racism and colonialism. If I mention the unprecedented horrors of the African slave trade, forced migration, a multi-generational holocaust, cultural genocide, many moderate liberals will attempt the balance the historical record with the Jewish holocaust, the Armenian genocide, East Africa, My Lai, Stalin ... Rightly or wrongly, they will bring these other crimes in, unknowingly acknowledging a norm that would disturb keep a child up at night.
With BP's "spill" [spill? this is not an "oops" moment], our mainstream narrative is far less critical, which is surprising.
The narrative waxes articulately about fines against BP, lack of technology, corporate responsibility, criminal charges. Good points, all, but BP (formerly known as the rogue corporation which backed the coup against a democratically elected president in Iran, 1953) is merely a minor symptom of a larger chronic disease.
Because while the world's attention is on the Gulf, the wetlands, the bird refuges, the end of the fishing industry in an area just devastated by Hurricane Katrina, the air continues to be polluted, the climate continues to warm with carbon and methane emissions, the polar ice caps continue melting.
And where is the urgency for global smog alerts? Where is the play by play, up-to-the minute coverage on increased lung-choking particulates in the air? Where are the news agencies who have hired experts to look at the "spill" and confirm it's greater than what BP has suggested (BP, the corporation which with CIA support returned the ogre Shah of Iran to his country to cancel all democratic reforms and make lucrative deals)?
The narrative has been disciplined by the corporate line. The lawyers may also remember what happened to poor Oprah and her hamburger fiasco.
This bigger global catastrophe of what is benignly called Global Warming has become virtual background noise, barely noticed anymore, like the US war crimes in the Middle East, Guantanmo prison, its occupations of Afghanistan, drone bombing of Pakistan, pacification of Iraq, and always, always its utilization of Israel as its mercenary.
The larger threat that is arguably linked to many of our industrial-age ailments is overshadowed by the current militarization of the US/Mexican border, not because Nicaragua has threatened to invade, as Reagan once lied to beef up defense spending; and not because immigrants from Mexico are staging uprisings and pillaging their new homes, but rather because a sad majority of Americans have turned their wrath over or economic chaos on poor, migrant [brown] workers and not on the atrocious capitalist nation-state.
So while dust ups go on here and there, our lungs are slowly starved of oxygen, particulates will fill the air, our major corporations will leech toxins into their products, rain forests felled, honey bees grow extinct, ... and, yes, it IS a spill in the Gulf that has us in a convulsion.
If we could turn the persistent air pollution into an oil slick, it would cover much of the world, but we've been diverted to a horrendous accident in the Gulf but not nearly as catastrophic.
The Gulf is a spill of a microcosm - environmental damages, localities ill affected, wildlife killed, waters poisoned, lack of preparedness, a nation underprepared to deal with the Frankenstein monster of its own making, etc - of what is happening all over the world.
But you have to really be a good, disciplined student of government and corporate propaganda to believe this obvious overstatement. Really, the biggest disaster in history?
Funny, because most moderate apologists are usually more critical of official facts in other matters. Take racism and colonialism. If I mention the unprecedented horrors of the African slave trade, forced migration, a multi-generational holocaust, cultural genocide, many moderate liberals will attempt the balance the historical record with the Jewish holocaust, the Armenian genocide, East Africa, My Lai, Stalin ... Rightly or wrongly, they will bring these other crimes in, unknowingly acknowledging a norm that would disturb keep a child up at night.
With BP's "spill" [spill? this is not an "oops" moment], our mainstream narrative is far less critical, which is surprising.
The narrative waxes articulately about fines against BP, lack of technology, corporate responsibility, criminal charges. Good points, all, but BP (formerly known as the rogue corporation which backed the coup against a democratically elected president in Iran, 1953) is merely a minor symptom of a larger chronic disease.
Because while the world's attention is on the Gulf, the wetlands, the bird refuges, the end of the fishing industry in an area just devastated by Hurricane Katrina, the air continues to be polluted, the climate continues to warm with carbon and methane emissions, the polar ice caps continue melting.
And where is the urgency for global smog alerts? Where is the play by play, up-to-the minute coverage on increased lung-choking particulates in the air? Where are the news agencies who have hired experts to look at the "spill" and confirm it's greater than what BP has suggested (BP, the corporation which with CIA support returned the ogre Shah of Iran to his country to cancel all democratic reforms and make lucrative deals)?
The narrative has been disciplined by the corporate line. The lawyers may also remember what happened to poor Oprah and her hamburger fiasco.
This bigger global catastrophe of what is benignly called Global Warming has become virtual background noise, barely noticed anymore, like the US war crimes in the Middle East, Guantanmo prison, its occupations of Afghanistan, drone bombing of Pakistan, pacification of Iraq, and always, always its utilization of Israel as its mercenary.
The larger threat that is arguably linked to many of our industrial-age ailments is overshadowed by the current militarization of the US/Mexican border, not because Nicaragua has threatened to invade, as Reagan once lied to beef up defense spending; and not because immigrants from Mexico are staging uprisings and pillaging their new homes, but rather because a sad majority of Americans have turned their wrath over or economic chaos on poor, migrant [brown] workers and not on the atrocious capitalist nation-state.
So while dust ups go on here and there, our lungs are slowly starved of oxygen, particulates will fill the air, our major corporations will leech toxins into their products, rain forests felled, honey bees grow extinct, ... and, yes, it IS a spill in the Gulf that has us in a convulsion.
If we could turn the persistent air pollution into an oil slick, it would cover much of the world, but we've been diverted to a horrendous accident in the Gulf but not nearly as catastrophic.
The Gulf is a spill of a microcosm - environmental damages, localities ill affected, wildlife killed, waters poisoned, lack of preparedness, a nation underprepared to deal with the Frankenstein monster of its own making, etc - of what is happening all over the world.
14 May 2010
Radical Communities
Nina Simone was once quoted as lamenting the civil rights movement of the 1960's warped into disco in the 1970's. The quote may be false, the observation is very reasonable. This weekend Long Beach hosts the second in the country's LGBT Pride celebrations, following Las Vegas, and preceding by a few weeks those in Los Angeles and San Francisco, which will mark its 40th.
Has the Stonewall Riot of 1969 warped into a weekend of commercial booths, non-profit outreach, and lots of men and women dancing to Martha Wash?
From one view, we do not in fact have any progressive or radical institutions to turn to. Those the LGBT community does have are fine, middle-of-the-mainstream-road agencies. They seem singularly focused on gaining marriage equality. The Human Rights Campaign, the ACLU, and many local state groups and LGBT centers have doggedly pursued this civil right. And it is a civil right as long as the state makes it available to some and not to others.
But from another point of view, Simone's observation misses the motives of governments who rightly want to diffuse the growing assault against it by large sectors of its populations. These growing assaults persist, in fact, to this hour. Not only in turbulent Greece but also in the UK, where a coalition government seeks to perpetuate itself in power for five fixed years, or in Spain whose socialist prime minister is instituting austerity measures against popular demand. In the US it continues to rebuff the popular will - be it in health care reform or foreign, costly wars - for what the establishment want.
Our rhetoric often confuses the governments' desires, which have become further anti-democratic, against that of the populations, which support social programs and an end to Mideast wars and occupations.
This not-so-new trend against the people became clearest to me when poll after poll in the UK showed its citizens resolute in their opposition to US-led wars in Afghanistan and toppling Iraq and the quagmire that followed: yet, this had little effect on the members of Parliament whose support is directly connected to the government of the day. Tony Blair and his government should have fallen, and he didn't. Gordon Brown should never have succeeded him, but he did.
As the queen herself is accurately quoted saying "there are forces in this country about which you do not know."
Indeed, not only is the ruling class obscured but also our radical histories are hidden to us, and from us. In most Western industrialized countries you can go as close as your local library and discover the radical roots within the LGBT, Black, Latino/Chicano, Asian, Native American, and women's movements. But you will scarcely see evidence of them at Pride celebrations.
Quiz yourself now, and ask what you know of them? Do you know that Harry Hay, the founder of the first gay rights organization modelled the Mattachine Society from his organizing work with the Communist Party USA? Hay was a lifelong communist radical, and when he saw the Simone's proverbial Disco set in, he balked, critiqued, and was ridiculed into silence. So he went off and formed the Radical Faeries.
Did you know that Rosa Parks, despite that horrid mythology of the seamstress who refused to give up her seat was trained as a labor organizer by the communist party at the Highlander School in Tennessee? She then became executive secretary of the NAACP and organized to end segregation on buses.
These labor organizers and their communist, socialist, and anarchist backers were virtually liquidated by the US government. Interestingly, as a young college student, US Supreme Court nominee, Elena Kagan, wrote her senior thesis on the eradication of the socialists from New York City in the 1930's.
Carrots and sticks being what they are, succeeding generations may have felt a natural sense that something is not quite right, but they had few in the community to learn from. The radicals had either been killed, had gone underground, or had been thoroughly house-broken.
The Black community offers two interesting worlds.
On the one hand, we have the narrative of Blacks migrating north, as if this were the most natural thing to do. But a hundred years ago, while the US government condoned Jim Crow brutality in the South, it encouraged strike breaking in the north. Northern labor organizers were winning rights in factory after factory, again with no small help from the US Communist Party. The bosses lured cheap, Southern, Black labor north to break these newly formed unions in the exact same way cheap labor from across the "border" is lured in to lower wages and keep labor organizers firmly in check.
Yet at the same time Blacks were used as scabs, other Blacks like Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Harry Haywood, Paul Robeson, Rosa Parks, Richard Wright, and Angela Davis organized with the Communist Party USA to build broad coalitions and win labor rights for all workers.
If you attend any of the Pride celebrations this spring and summer, you won't see any of the radical history behind that movement. Harry Hay was ostracized until he was near death, and, of course after death he may be listed here and there as an icon. But I remember when this man was vilified by the LGBT press.
While it is progress in itself that gay men and lesbians can come out in the open, dance, cruise, and have fun without the local police rounding them up as they did as recently as the 1970's. That's real, measurable progress that must be appreciated.
But despite the hard organizing work done by our predecessors, I daresay the achievement of being able to dance under the golden sun reflects the limited goal of the Closeted and the Conformist. They would not join Harry Hay and the activists-organizers but remained in the shadows in fear of being exposed. Their limited agenda of simple assimilation, ironically, seems to have won the day: they've become a commodity along with the other commodities our capitalist economy nurtures.
It's about your income, your wealth, your disposable income. So when new ground began to be broken for LGBT's in the early 1990's it was framed as a community with buying power: we were young, we had no children, we had money.
But like any community, this misses the vast majority - as vast as those European populations no longer represented by their governments. That LGBT majority is forced into wage-slavery, low income, no health care, housing issues and sees a leadership advocating marriage equality and not housing rights, the enumerable benefits to marriage and not worker empowerment, stories about partners denied inheritance benefits not guaranteed single-payer, universal health care for all.
No doubt as I write this, there are other radical LGBT writing and organizing, but who has time for that when there's a party?
Has the Stonewall Riot of 1969 warped into a weekend of commercial booths, non-profit outreach, and lots of men and women dancing to Martha Wash?
From one view, we do not in fact have any progressive or radical institutions to turn to. Those the LGBT community does have are fine, middle-of-the-mainstream-road agencies. They seem singularly focused on gaining marriage equality. The Human Rights Campaign, the ACLU, and many local state groups and LGBT centers have doggedly pursued this civil right. And it is a civil right as long as the state makes it available to some and not to others.
But from another point of view, Simone's observation misses the motives of governments who rightly want to diffuse the growing assault against it by large sectors of its populations. These growing assaults persist, in fact, to this hour. Not only in turbulent Greece but also in the UK, where a coalition government seeks to perpetuate itself in power for five fixed years, or in Spain whose socialist prime minister is instituting austerity measures against popular demand. In the US it continues to rebuff the popular will - be it in health care reform or foreign, costly wars - for what the establishment want.
Our rhetoric often confuses the governments' desires, which have become further anti-democratic, against that of the populations, which support social programs and an end to Mideast wars and occupations.
This not-so-new trend against the people became clearest to me when poll after poll in the UK showed its citizens resolute in their opposition to US-led wars in Afghanistan and toppling Iraq and the quagmire that followed: yet, this had little effect on the members of Parliament whose support is directly connected to the government of the day. Tony Blair and his government should have fallen, and he didn't. Gordon Brown should never have succeeded him, but he did.
As the queen herself is accurately quoted saying "there are forces in this country about which you do not know."
Indeed, not only is the ruling class obscured but also our radical histories are hidden to us, and from us. In most Western industrialized countries you can go as close as your local library and discover the radical roots within the LGBT, Black, Latino/Chicano, Asian, Native American, and women's movements. But you will scarcely see evidence of them at Pride celebrations.
Quiz yourself now, and ask what you know of them? Do you know that Harry Hay, the founder of the first gay rights organization modelled the Mattachine Society from his organizing work with the Communist Party USA? Hay was a lifelong communist radical, and when he saw the Simone's proverbial Disco set in, he balked, critiqued, and was ridiculed into silence. So he went off and formed the Radical Faeries.
Did you know that Rosa Parks, despite that horrid mythology of the seamstress who refused to give up her seat was trained as a labor organizer by the communist party at the Highlander School in Tennessee? She then became executive secretary of the NAACP and organized to end segregation on buses.
These labor organizers and their communist, socialist, and anarchist backers were virtually liquidated by the US government. Interestingly, as a young college student, US Supreme Court nominee, Elena Kagan, wrote her senior thesis on the eradication of the socialists from New York City in the 1930's.
Carrots and sticks being what they are, succeeding generations may have felt a natural sense that something is not quite right, but they had few in the community to learn from. The radicals had either been killed, had gone underground, or had been thoroughly house-broken.
The Black community offers two interesting worlds.
On the one hand, we have the narrative of Blacks migrating north, as if this were the most natural thing to do. But a hundred years ago, while the US government condoned Jim Crow brutality in the South, it encouraged strike breaking in the north. Northern labor organizers were winning rights in factory after factory, again with no small help from the US Communist Party. The bosses lured cheap, Southern, Black labor north to break these newly formed unions in the exact same way cheap labor from across the "border" is lured in to lower wages and keep labor organizers firmly in check.
Yet at the same time Blacks were used as scabs, other Blacks like Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Harry Haywood, Paul Robeson, Rosa Parks, Richard Wright, and Angela Davis organized with the Communist Party USA to build broad coalitions and win labor rights for all workers.
If you attend any of the Pride celebrations this spring and summer, you won't see any of the radical history behind that movement. Harry Hay was ostracized until he was near death, and, of course after death he may be listed here and there as an icon. But I remember when this man was vilified by the LGBT press.
While it is progress in itself that gay men and lesbians can come out in the open, dance, cruise, and have fun without the local police rounding them up as they did as recently as the 1970's. That's real, measurable progress that must be appreciated.
But despite the hard organizing work done by our predecessors, I daresay the achievement of being able to dance under the golden sun reflects the limited goal of the Closeted and the Conformist. They would not join Harry Hay and the activists-organizers but remained in the shadows in fear of being exposed. Their limited agenda of simple assimilation, ironically, seems to have won the day: they've become a commodity along with the other commodities our capitalist economy nurtures.
It's about your income, your wealth, your disposable income. So when new ground began to be broken for LGBT's in the early 1990's it was framed as a community with buying power: we were young, we had no children, we had money.
But like any community, this misses the vast majority - as vast as those European populations no longer represented by their governments. That LGBT majority is forced into wage-slavery, low income, no health care, housing issues and sees a leadership advocating marriage equality and not housing rights, the enumerable benefits to marriage and not worker empowerment, stories about partners denied inheritance benefits not guaranteed single-payer, universal health care for all.
No doubt as I write this, there are other radical LGBT writing and organizing, but who has time for that when there's a party?
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