What did the Queen know and when did she know it:? A 60-year Retrospective

A recent article in Truthout.com highlights the criminal nature of Tony Blair and his term in office. Writes, John Pilger: "[Gareth] Peirce's book achieves the impossible on Blair: it shocks. In tracing the "unjustifiable theses, unrestrained belligerence, falsification and willful illegality" that led to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, she identifies Blair's assault on Muslims as both criminal and racist."

This criminal nature is not controversial except to mainstream media and apologists for power and war, for whom any means justify the ends.

While the article presents the agreed-upon facts of the matter of Blair, it omits entirely the nature of the British government and its particular fashion of wielding power against growing majorities - often active majorities.

Recall, for example, that the anti-war members of Blair's own Labour Party had to ask his permission to debate the oncoming war against Iraq in the House of Commons. It was up to Blair whether to consent to have this debate or ignore his rank-and-file altogether.

This illustrates a bit about power in Great Britain and should be understood. It must be understood for its own sake - for, it is important to acknowledge the different ways power manifests over us. It must also be understood to allow the broadest discussion possible.

Certain dissenting voices have broadened this discussion, but predictably have been marginalized. Political activists, like Tony Benn and Willie Hamilton, have focused on the root of the British decay: the British Establishment, its antiquated laws and customs, and its undemocratic nature.

I am referring to the monarchy.

During that chapter in British history known as the interregnum, after a civil war and one king had his head cut off to be replaced by a commoner to head a republic, activists were already agitating for a democracy where they'd be ruled by neither a king nor by Parliament. Years of corruption, followed by the execution of a king probably shook what was left of the rose-colored glasses off the faces of the masses.

They also must have realized that killing God's alleged representative on earth did not send them straight to Hell. So energized and enlightened, they were safe to push the issue of throwing off all yokes and chains of their oppression.

Now, these activists wanted more. And this agitation scared some Hell into the ruling classes, whose heads had not been cut off, as a future socialist Ken Livingstone advised newly elected Hugo Chavez to do. 

As historian Christopher Hill details in his work, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution, the English establishment that lingered after the execution trusted neither the army or Parliament to close ranks and save the nation for the upper classes, as these were filled with still too many popular forces.

So, Hill argues, the monarchy was restored. It was the one institution immune from public scrutiny and public pressure - no one votes in or out a king. Widening parts of the electorate could influence Parliament. More and more working-class men could enter the armed forces. These institutions were not entirely trustworthy.

But the monarchy was for a select, insulated few.

Which takes us back to this recent article in Truthout, and other articles like it in progressive circles. These articles correctly go so far as to call Tony Blair a war criminal, demand investigations and trials, but none dare to say the same of the Queen or to implicate her.

That calling the Queen a war criminal, suggesting she be at least subpoenaed, seems beyond the pale is exactly the point. Were this a rogue regime from the Axis of Evil, with a monarch at its head, the Queen - like Germany's kaiser or Japan's emperor - would not be overlooked as a charming relic or a figurehead. There would be interest in her involvement, investigations, and questions of "what she knew and when she knew it."

Even among many Western progressives there is a powerful spell upon them: all that glistens must be gold.

Elizabeth Windsor Mountbatten has held the position of queen of the United Kingdom for 60 years now. Every prime minister has kept their conversations with the monarch secret, but they have at the same time acknowledged, one by one and every one, that she is informed of everything, that all secret papers are funneled through her desk for review, that no law becomes a law until the queen signs it, no Church prelate or Supreme Court jurist is appointed without her.

"The Queen received all Foreign Office telegrams and papers," Labour historian Ben Pimlott quotes an official. "And so in some ways she was better informed in advance of the operation than many members of the Cabinet."

Those infamous Red Boxes, lined with lead and waterproofed, go to her from prime ministers, cabinet ministers, MI5. The highest ranks of the military often meet with her privately.

So what did Tony Blair tell his queen in the lead up to the war in Iraq, about weapons of mass destruction or extraordinary rendition or torture?

These are the sort of questions a trial or truth commission might ferret out. But they would not end with the UK involvement in the war in Iraq.

In her 60 years as unelected head of state, from 1952, a lot of other international crimes have been committed. Britain can ostensibly decide its own form of government, so being an unelected head of state is as much its own business as having unelected institutions in the US control our economy, which should be our cause for alarm and agitation.

The crime is what the UK does outside its borders. The crime is what it does to others. And these crimes have been significant.

Here is a sample, taken from Marxist historian Walter Rodney, Ben Pimlott, J.M. Roberts, and from Intervention and Exploitation: US and UK Government International Actions since 1945:

Kenya: 1952-1956
A liberation campaign is launched by the Mau Mau. The British response is "to close the 149 schools of the Kikuyu Independent Schools Association, 21 schools of the Kikuyu Karinga Education Association, and 14 other independent schools."  "They were," writes historian Walter Rodney, "considered training grounds for rebellion." The British then impose a state of emergency and brutally suppress the Mau Mau. ,British forces conduct human rights atrocities, establish Nazi-style concentration camps and ‘resettle’ hundreds of thousands of people in ‘protected villages’. Around 150,000 Africans die.

Guyana: 1953
October - Britain suspends Guyana's constitution. "The People's Progressive Party," writes Rodney, "was the first mass party in Guyana and it was also a multi-racial party. It was at that time the only pparty in the West Indies which had any pretensions about having a scientific socialist outlook or Marxist outlook or working-class outlook." Predictably, he notes, the PPP came into "conflict" with its British imperial masters, so Britain sends in troops and installs an interim administration after democratic elections for parliament produces a result not to its liking.

Libya: 1953
December 7 - Britain imposes military bases in Libya for a period of 20 years, ostensibly in return for economic subsidies, which never reach the people but prop up an Arab facade.

Egypt: 1956-1957
"The British, French, and Israelis conspire to overthrow [Gamel Abdel Nasser] in the Suez adveture, the last fling of old-style imperialism," according to historian J.M. Roberts. The incident is notable also because in the frenzy to dispatch troops to Egypt, the British prime minister had to get the signed approval of the Queen. According to historian Ben Pimlott, "the hastily prepared Proclamation" was given to her for signature while she was away at a horse race. "Her approval was required before it could be read out in the House of Commons the same afternoon."

In the wake of the failed Suez invasion, MI6 (Britain's spy service) plans and carries out several assassination attempts against Pres. Gamel Abdel Nasser. The US were also involved, recruiting the Saudis and Iraq to help them. Britain had already made plans to assassinate Nasser, even before he nationalized the Suez Canal.

Yemen: 1959
Federation of Arab Amirates of the South created as an autonomous territory under British protection. Britain occupied parts of Yemen in 1837, the year Victoria became queen.

Guyana: 1961
Despite a campaign against the PPP by the Guyanese elites and the churches, PPP organizes gains ground. Guyana is granted internal self governance, with Britain retaining control over external and defense matters; Chetti Jagan of the PPP becomes prime minister.

Kenya: 1961
The British are forced to introduce a new policy which allows Africans to buy and farm the White Highlands. Kenya's first pre-independence general elections are held. The KANU defeat the Kenya African Democratic Union (KADU). The KADU (led by Masinde Muliro, Daniel Arap Moi, and Ronald Ngala) represents smaller and less advantaged ethnic groups of the Great Rift Valley and coastal areas, including the Kalenjin. The KADU advocated Majimboism (regionalism in Swahili) which would create ethnic-based, semi-autonomous regions.

The KADU had been formed with the covert assistance of the British government and British businesses, in an effort to get a more 'moderate' government after independence. The British stopped supporting it when they saw it could not beat the KANU.

By selling at a high price the land previously seized by the white settlers, not only do the settlers make a great deal of money, but it is ensured that the land passes into the hands of a either wealthy individuals who will protect European business interests or people trapped by the debts they incur in borrowing money to buy the land.

Guyana: 1962
The US concludes that Dr. Jagan is a Communist and although all alternatives to Dr. Jagan are terrible, the US backs Jagan's opponent under an independent British [sic] Guyana, which would cause the U.S. fewer problems than a government under Dr. Jagan.

Jagan announces a budget which is widely praised by international commentators, but the opposition condemn it and use it as an excuse to incite violent protests. The opposition is supported by local labor organizations who receive support from certain US union groups funded by the CIA. The British Governor-General initially refuses to send troops to quell the disturbances, but eventually does so after arson, looting and deaths in the capital. Jagan is forced to withdraw the budget.

Yemen: 1962
MI6 begin covertly providing arms, funding, and logistical support to pro-British "rebels" in dirty war against pro-Egyptian republican forces. In this the Briitsh government colludes with Israel's Mossad and the Saudi regime. Around 200,000 die in the war.

Yemen: 1963
Britain rejects a UN call for it to withdraw and permit self-determination.

Australia: 1975

The government of prime minister Gough Whitlam is plagued by resignations and the blocking of its budget by the upper house of the parliament. In an unprecedented move, the UK governor-general, the official representative of the British queen, dismisses the Whitlam and the government. A caretaker administration is installed.

The speaker of the Australian House of Commons writes to the Queen to ask her to restore Whitlam to office, but she declines to intervene, saying it is not proper for her to do so.

It later transpires that the CIA had apparently encouraged Kerr to dismiss Whitlam, because he was raising issues about the the US running a control center for spy satellites in the Australian outback, amongst other things.

The Falkland Islands [The Malvinas]: 1982

Even after the UK claimed sovereignty over the islands in 1833, Argentina contested this. In 1982, the military junta of Argentina seized the island - which lay just off its coast - prompting the British to send in warships and wage a 74-day battle. The British re-took the islands, but to this day Argentina disputes this.

When then-prime minister Margaret Thatcher went to the Queen to send troops, Parliament was only notified afterward.

Ireland. A pope gave Ireland to Henry VII, and tried to take it away when Henry VIII broke from the Roman Catholic church. Nevertheless, the UK has held all or part of the island ever since the 15th century, culminating in the "Troubles" of the 1970's.

What is notable is the steady decline of British mischief, which roughly corresponds to its stature as an imperial power. What has not declined, even in an age of greater indifference to the monarchy, greater press scrutiny of all things official, less deferential treatment of our "betters" is the hands-off treatment the British monarchy is given. The International Criminal Court readily indicts Gaddafi and wants his son for questioning, but nothing of British crimes or wanting answers from its high officials, like the queen.

This is comparable to the hands-off treatment our own US press give our own unelected power brokers and the deferential treatment afforded our financial centers, which is corrupting.

The British prime minister is allowed powers most democratically elected presidents are forbidden. Its actions and its crimes are, like the queen, "above politics" and outside public scrutiny. It is allowed these powers because it is said to act on behalf of the monarch, whose powers are nearly absolute: war, peace, treaties, etc.

This is exactly what those 17th century ruling classes wanted after the interregnum, an unchecked power to act on its behalf and for its profit. It is not only important to understand who rules Britain [or any modern state] but also how power is distributed and to whom it is accountable.

In 1992 the Queen said "No institution: city, monarchy, whatever should expect to be free of the scrutiny of those who give it their loyalty and support, not to mention those who don't."

Passing Briefs ...

MLK the Socialist firebrand * How many slaves do you own? * Cancer Barbie vs AIDS Barbie * Technically colorblind * Purge of left-wing Federal employees? * Ancient civilization before the Hun? * Escaping monkeys * When Mr. Galloway came to Washington


While I do not like the definitive title of this Youtube clip, but the sentiments from King impressed me a long time ago. He was a "socialist" [not a "Socialist!]."

I am not a Christian in any form, but I am impressed by the example of the Jewish rabbinical carpenter who spoke about justice and our only human birthright: each other, who was executed by Rome, as I am impressed by the Baptist preacher who spoke of a just society, who demanded we do in deed and word to act against Our Rome, who was also executed by Rome.

***

HOW MANY SLAVES DO YOU OWN?

I listened to an NPR-radio discussion this morning about the controversies around an infamous Apple Corporation plant/labor camp in China, where workers are committing suicide due to horrific work conditions and treatment.

The moderator asked the audience "how much more would you be willing to pay for you Apple products, and would you pay double" to ensure all the workers in the development were paid well and afforded labor rights?

Can you imagine an abolitionist asking such a morally bankrupt question in 1850? NO! Only a slave trader would pose such a question.

The question to ask our iPhone- and ePad-loving society is Derrick Jenson's: How many slaves do you own?

Further, it is the wrong question posed by our masters: how should we compete with China? The correct question is: Should we?

***

There used to be a lively, radical 'zine in San Francisco put out by activists from ACT UP/SF (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) called DISEASED PARIAH NEWS [DPN], which featured "AIDS Barbie" complete with photos of her swathed in KS lesions and stories about her vomiting from the side effects of those noxious drugs. MATTEL tried to sue.

DPN packed a punch back in those street marching, AIDS-phobic times.

Now I wonder if we're at risk of normalizing a cancer pandemic among women without really solving it. And I wonder what Mattel's contribution - who dropped the lawsuit earlier because these activists weren't dumb enough to incorporate and list their names - is doing with cancer Barbie.

What eats at me is we no longer have a health industry but rather a pharmaceutical economy. We no longer end disease but find expensive, patented treatments to enrich big pharm.

***

"Technically it's not mine"

... aka technically it's not my canal, technically it's not my land, technically it's not my oil, technically it's not my country, ... but we're going to bomb it/steal it/drain it anyway ... funny how lack of values spread like a plague and WHO is permitted to commit the crime and who is presumed guilty prima facie.

Color blind my ass. The undercover video shows who we are in word vs deed.

***

“I think an intelligent conservative wants the right federal employees delivering the right services in a highly efficient way and then wants to get rid of those folks who are in fact wasteful, or those folks who are ideologically so far to the left, or those people who want to frankly dictate to the rest of us,” Gingrich said in response to a question from a federal employee at the forum.

Yeah, I just got a copy of TSA's Office of Human Capital's Management Directive HB Addressing Unacceptable Performance & Conduct ... 15-day suspension, 15-day suspension, Removal from Federal Service, Removal from Federal Service.

Gingrich wants to frighten federal employees into silence and submission. The ground has already been plowed by the current administration!

***

And this BBC story is supposed to be a surprise, that civilization began with the Western religions and Conquest??

Civilization ended with the Western religions and the Conquest. The barbarians - by sheer, brute force forged from whence they came: barren, cold Europe - imposed themselves on the richest, most civilized parts of the world to extract resources to make the wasteland of Europe into an industrial power house.

***

This story from Brazil about some ingenious monkeys is proof that not only are other species smarter than we credit them but also these monkeys are smarter than most of us.

At least they have the sense to try and escape from their prisons while we keep endorsing, collaborating, defending, justifying our failed state, waiting like characters from old Greek drama for the Deus ex machina to come down from stage left to right all wrong.

***

This 43-minute Youtube video is might seem somewhat dated coming from 2005. But in case you missed the original airing and in light of the alleged US troop withdrawal from Iraq - almost 10 years later!! - it's worthy to note how George Galloway undresses and owns our useless US Senate.

Galloway is a firebrand socialist and, at the time, a member of the British Parliament. Then British prime minister, Tony Blair, orchestrated Galloway's removal from the Labour Party for his criticism of the illegal war. Galloway bashed back by forming his own political party, running against a Labour MP, and winning.

Go, George!

Often apologists and revisionists gloss over historical atrocities saying the ancient times weren't thinking as advanced as we [supposedly] are. This is a lie. Fr de las Casas made sermons against the Spanish extermination of the indigenous population in the Americas. He was ignored. The British Anti-War movement, and members of the British Parliament, like Galloway and Glenda Jackson, spoke loudly through the smokescreens of the rationales for war.

There is always someone speaking out.

The Coffee Cure

A recent article touting the benefits of drinking coffee for women has been gnawing at me. The coffee study purported to link treating depression in women with a daily cup of coffee. I know of these studies. Ever since I became an avid coffee drinker in college 20+ years ago, and ever since I quit a few years ago, then resumed on an occasional basis, I have seen these studies: some purport to say coffee is harmful. Others report the opposite. This seems to have been a constant conflict for at least 20 years.

But that is not what bothered me with this recent finding that coffee could treat depression in women. Then it dawned on me:

Why are women depressed? That is the Question.

When you're standing outside History and know it, a certain kind of challenge, a certain kind of consciousness, must always be engaged.

You have to beware and be highly suspicious without lapsing into paranoia at how arguments are framed for you and the parameters set around those arguments. Because, to put it another way, one of the reasons certain judge and cabinet appointments, certain activists, and certain arguments cannot be entertained is the establishment - the victors! - want to control the argument.

In this case, in our contentiousness about caffeine and our pill-popping culture, having a cup of coffee without regret is supposed to be the focus of this so-called study.

That is why determining the reasons for depression in women is not the operative issue, and it should be. Like, "why they hate us," this cannot really be discussed.

Why would they be depressed, making 70 cents on the mighty dollar; less if you are Black or Latina; much, much less if you are a native American woman?

Why would they be depressed if, besides making less wages, despite their population they trend toward lower-skilled, blue collar professions?

Why would they be depressed if they face harassment in the workplace, glass ceilings toward advancement?

Why would they be depressed if they are alone in shouldering the rearing of their children with no affordable child care?

Why would they be depressed if many men and much of society view them as punching bags to vent their frustrations [who needs that cup of coffee?!]?

We are not supposed to ask such questions. We are not supposed to tell the emperor he is naked. The reactionaries I unfortunately know - and too many of them presently - in their role as supporter of the establishment will attack the woman's will power, her character, her inflated sense of entitlement ... because there is nothing otherwise amiss.

I say, if a woman is depressed she might just need to break something, literally. If the system is too big to break at the moment, try some of the machinery at the job that oppresses her (a radical group of contract employees did just this in San Francisco in the 90's). This can have a liberatory effect on the spirit, short of walking out on your wage-slavery, which can have unforeseen consequences. Break up the romantic relationship. Break off the engagement. Break patriarchy. Break some dishes.

I don't know where to start, but a cup of coffee seems a peculiar place. Don't pick a commodity picked by under-waged workers, many of whom are women. But that's the point, isn't it?

Why Tyranny?

Something exciting is happening on Facebook in the last week, where a groundswell of candid photos from Occupy Wall Street and other cities, blog articles, declarations, and personal observations have become the norm and the cascade of banal cuteness has finally abated. It is engaging to see so many people engaged. Social networking has reached a high-water mark.

But the outcomes to these movements is no where guaranteed if we look at the present and at history. Just today, the mainstream news is celebrating the death of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American, killed by a drone in Yemen. On the orders of Pres. Obama, this citizen - without a trial of any kind - was targeted for murder, "on or off a battlefield." Reading the reports carefully you can glean why, like bin Laden, no trial could have been held.

Words like "reportedly," "possibly," "credited," and "linked" would not have withstood a fair and open court hearing. So, true to our Southern Justice roots, the US just goes out and lynches al-Awlaki, thereby adding to its list of war crimes.

Of course, history is a brutal panorama of vicious campaigns against those who seriously challenge the power base, who seriously attempt to dismantle a system celebrated in the founding Federalist Papers that "those who own the country should run it."

Civil Rights activists, labor organizers, socialist, anarchist, communist party insurgents, anti-war militants have all been infiltrated, discombobulated, and targeted for extermination by the state - with great success: witness the pathetic state of our labor-unions, which are more collaborationist than changing the social and economic order, which was their birthright. This reformist tendency in our labor movement is simply because there is "no there there:" the militants were driven out by law or killed.

For the current movement against neoliberalism and globilization to succeed, we must be engaged in whatever capacity with the present, while seeing far into the future. We must anticipate the state may tolerate auditoriums and parks filled with critics bearing home-made signs; the state does not as easily tolerate its destruction - even at the hands of the majority.

We must also anticipate in these broad-based, mass gatherings, which are beautiful to behold, are a range of political ideas, from libertarian socialism to Ron Paul Tea Party activists, all with legitimate gripes against an horrific system.

If these movements grow, expect the Tea Party to want to assume the helm as the rightful leadership. Given their closer proximity to state power structures, the establishment will maneuver to back them, and whatever "revolution" that happens will be on those reactionary lines with some reforms made to neoliberalism only.

A friend asked me the other day why I describe my workplace as a tyranny. The word struck him as something ancient or better suited to a foreign country. Hierarchies are always at great risk at becoming tyrannies, be they in the home or at work, more so when the work imposed is antithetical to human needs.

When so many garments must be produced by a few tired hands, or so many passengers processed through a security checkpoint by a few understaffed officers, or food processed by a time clock by underpaid cooks, you must have someone's boot on the worker's neck at all times. That boot must inflict pain on those who do not produce fast enough.

That is a tyranny.

Fidel asked in his indictment of the US-backed dictatorship: "How can an unpopular regime, inimical to the interests of the people, stay in power unless it is by force?"

The same could be asked not only of our present governments, which increasingly oppose peoples' desires but also equally important, this can be asked of our workplaces, which are tyrannies.

9/11 and our apparent complacency to war: a long-view perspective

The upcoming ten-year anniversary of 9/11 is a cause for mourning on a few fronts. We are reminded of the 3,000 lives lost in the Twin Towers. But our thoughts can never be far from the greater carnage that's come from the aftermath due to the US assault.

Activists from the progressive side may mark this anniversary with a very mixed progress report. Their activism was intense - and predictably ignored - under the Bush junta.

The US government flouted international law, silenced dissent, imprisoned hundreds of unnamed people in secret and not-so-secret prisons from so-called "battlefields", extraordinarily rendered countless more to their torturers in our client regimes, like Mubarak's Egypt - in short, our government was a war criminal.

But for the duration of Obama's first term, the progressive left has been silent and made myriad excuses for Obama, this tool of Wall Street and the right-wing. The Bush crimes are still fully in force, and the current administration has added a war in Libya.

It must seem hypocritical to lament so publicly the needless deaths of 3,000 souls and yet be so mute to the slaughter of 300,000 lives.

Ten years is not a long time, but it is too long to be bombed and menaced by a Super Power. Reagan stupidly imagined the revolutionary government of Sandinistas marching across the border from Nicaragua to invade the US. But imagine if that poor nation had done so, and persisted in its assault for 10 full years of meddling in our politics, bombing soft targets like neighborhoods and hospitals, and imprisoning civil-rights activists in the name of Nicaraguan socialism.

Would you be so complacent?

Just Cause? So since many a Bostonian Irish-American funded the Irish Republican Army in the 70's, I guess Her Majesty's Government would have been justified to send the royal navy to bomb Boston harbor.

9/11 also marks the US-sponsored coups d'etat in Chile. 1973, when it toppled the democratically elected government of Marxist Salvador Allende and installed a dictator/general, Augusto Pinochet. Would a free Chile be justified now in hunting down Henry Kissinger and airing his execution on prime time TV?

But if we can't imagine such things as: the villainy we teach being executed right back on us, how can we see the greater crimes that persist right under our noses?

Our collective responses to the crimes of our times has also been a mixed one.

Here are a few notable examples:

[1] The Hundred Year's war against workers, which roughly began during the Industrial Revolution.

Rural laborers and sharecroppers were driven from the land in the 1800's and into urban ghettos to work in factories. The so-called captains of Industry made wage-slaves out of rural laborers and newly arrived foreign immigrants, with poor working conditions, low wages, and even employing children.

The overseer contingent from the plantation era became the management class, from literal whip to write-ups and reprimands, to watch the workers and punish those who do not perform.

Sure, activists have made gains in labor rights since then - eight-hour work days and minimum-wage rights, for example - but these hard-won gains have always been within the confines of the master's industrial design, within those urban ghettos. Can a Nazi credibly reform a death camp, or must that death camp be abolished?

In other words, we have been content to carve out from within this prison camp a small measure of humanity, not content to destroy it.

This small measure of humanity is minute because it must never impede on the purported rights of corporations to reap profits wherever and however it can.

[2] A 500 Year's War against the global South, also known as the Third World, the colonies.

Many books have been written and careers made on justifying this war.

I remember in college being handed a paper by the late UN ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick, which argued the poor of Central America were not culturally averse to being brutalized by US-backed dictators, because their very lives were already utterly miserable. This shit passed for scholarship at Washington University, my alma mater.

This war on the global South is based on one fact, and one unmentioned fact alone: most of the global North is not fit for human life. To make it fit for human life and to create a palatial estate of golf courses and industrial wealth, the global North needs to pirate the resources and labor of the global South. It's that simple. You won't likely survive a Norwegian winter without oil.

For civilization to thrive, Europe has had to underdevelop the global South, and if certain people of the global South don't like it, they will have to face a dictator armed by the US, France, Spain, the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium ... the usual suspects. If they dare try to organize a union, they will have their heads blown off with rifles made in the USA.

But, as the infomercials say, there's more:

[3] The Ten Thousand year's War on the land base has, as one activist called it, been a wound on the planet.

It was 10,000 years ago the agricultural revolution changed the shape of so much of humanity. We are told this has been for the better, but the ecosystems might say otherwise, if they could speak.

This revolt against nature - demonstrated by Nature's defiance to fight back with every weed - not only began the destruction of the habitat, the destruction of old-growth forests, decimation of rainforests, and millions of exterminated species; it has also poisoned the water and air and threatened humanity.

Land settlement and agriculture meant a dramatic change in human interactions unknown until that time. Archeological excavations show the contrast from before the agri-revolution, where our nomadic communities distributed its resources equitably and lived for tens of thousands of years without menacing the land base.

I repeat: in North America, we had communities living and thriving for tens of thousands of years and did nothing to harm the environment like "civilization" has in just a few hundred.

This is in sharp contrast with post-agriculture, when the implications of land ownership for sustenance changed forever relations between sexes, beginning that wedge between men's wealth [land] and women, who either became subjects of men or turned to abject prostitution, which are the same things.

Class war was born between those who controlled the land and those who came to work the land. Activists have seemed to cede the argument by demanding those who own be taxed more rather than that they should own nothing.

Slave religions were born, to justify the lot of the poor - slaves will always be with us! - the pirating of the rich, and our obedience to hierarchies.

These slave religions obviously metamorphasized into top-down power structures, like mega-Churches, like the Roman Catholics, divine-rights of kings, and the cultural celebration of the titans of industry - the billionaires.

These atrocities have become fixtures on the cultural landscape as accepted as the old redwoods used to be, with some resistance to reform them, make them less pungent to the smell.

So there you have it, a sea of complacency from beginning to end.

If the current US war is no longer talked about but an elephant in the room, our wars on workers, resource-rich regions in the global South, and on Nature has become as much a fixture as wallpaper and not even discussed.

How different are those who are silent different than the Germans during the blight of Naziism? Those Germans followed orders or claimed not to know about the heinous crimes against humanity being committed. How many times have my sheepish coworkers shrugged their shoulders and said, "that's the way it is"?

We have lived so long away from the land, in our urban work prisons, within an artificially designed system that benefits only the Master, that we have mistaken this urban wage-slavery for Nature itself, and - dangerously - our local markets as the source of our food.


Our lifestyles, particularly the last hundred years and less, have been dominated by an increasing power of the state for the obvious purpose to defend the power base. That power base could be the king, a nobility, and old order, the corporation/multinational. But this power base must be protected from us, which is why it is critical that not only we impose failed states on the conquered but endure them our own selves.

Name one democratic institution in the United States of America. I dare you.

If that is not history in a nutshell, I do not know what is. Because, both the corporation and its evil offspring, civilization, have been a menace to society and would not thrive without armies and navies and secret police and court systems to ensure we do not get out of line.

The Stirrings in the workforce our Masters don't want us to talk about

Since Reagan's Revolutionary "recovery" after he and Congress drove the economy into the free market ground worker satisfaction with our "jobs" has diminished across the economy.

No wonder why. The jobs this country has created in every recovery are lower waged, less skilled, and, far worse, without benefits of pension, retirement, or the ability to save for that future when Wall Street dreams of grasping its evil hands on that leaden lock box called Social Security.

The shrinking of union work is suggestive too, but since our unions are increasingly reformist - accommodating corporate structures in exchange for a "cut" in union dues and prestige - unions are a far cry from their militant origins, when its goal was worker control of production, not high wages, no management except self-management.

So late 20th century and 21st century workers find themselves in a predicament. They were driven into the strategic hamlets we call cities over a century ago in the wake of the Industrial Revolution; they were trained to work on a treadmill [viz., factory floor, pushing paper in a cubicle]; and they can now can do little more than survive by keeping the wheel of their own destruction spinning ... spinning the twine to make the noose that hangs them.

When ends don't meet, they spin faster, and have even a generation ago begun to send their teen-aged children to work the treadmill. Because, to blow the mill out of the universe - to destroy it - would leave too many workers with a skill-set barely enabling them to tie a shoe but little else.

We can't farm. We can't build. Many can't even pull apart their car engines and rebuild them. The urbane existence we are supposed to consider a pinnacle of civilization has in reality done what the antebellum slave master could not do: many of those African slaves risked life and limb to read and write and to escape. We are grown, illiterate children.

My Tennessee grandparents talked a lot about this in my youth, when they rued the next Depression. The one they survived in the 1930's they survived because while they were dirt poor, they had food from their land and practical skills to sustain themselves.

We deeply loathe our employment, but the Stockholm Syndrome says we are one with it too. Our jobs do less and less for us, except eek out the barest minimum existence, but this basic we've turned into ..."I am lucky to have a job" and bow and curtsey, tug-at-your-locks obedience.

So we are caught between the proverbial rock of joblessness and no means to feed/house ourselves and the hard place of work.

Two reasons employers are not fretting about this.

One must be their deep-seeded faith that we workers will not seek alternatives beyond what the master provides. Thanks to lessons learned in the factory system of education, we've learned to shut up. Otherwise, I should think an employer who has even 50% of his workforce actively seeking work elsewhere would be alarmed.

Two that where the employer may lose a portion of that job-dependent 50% to another job, there's another job-dependent 70% waiting to step in - if only for a moment.

The wasted costs of training and the signal that your workers' minds are elsewhere is no concern, possibly because the training is so minimal, the work not critical. Ask yourself in whatever job you labor if you'd trust a surgeon or even an dentist to operate on you with the level of training you and your colleagues got. If the answer is No, your training is probably over-blown and over-hyped.

Make no mistake. This is a powder-keg. What will ultimately ignite it is hard to pinpoint; and how that coming disaster will destruct is hard to predict. Because when workers take a page from the stockbroker and stop looking at the picture but at the broader canvass - even into the next economic quarter - all Hell will break loose.

Tottenham

There's a specter haunting the West. It is the specter of the colonials over-running the White Race and its 1,000-year old faux civilization. In the 60's the West was haunted by the specter of the Blacks over-running their cities, so it mobilized the White Race and extended Slave Codes - Jim Crow, Counter-Reconstruction, Red-lining, etc - over the mostly urban population, criminalized a host of behaviors, and put that population through the meat grinder of the criminal-"justice" system.

By West, I do not mean the populations but rather the governments, who are empowered to maximize any thing that brings profits to corporations. In fact, it's difficult to distinguish the government from the corporations. Just look at the current US president's Cabinet.

By White Race, I cannot mean White people, most of whom are working class and victims of this economic system. White Race is a clever guise by which corporations can justify its existence, can pit one set of workers against another.

But the West's actions to mitigate the threat of the colonials - a pre-cursor to the war on "Terror," in fact - could never come to a conclusion. History is literally against the West, and deep in the bowels of its banks, it knows this.

More and more of the US states are passing or contemplating racist laws purportedly to "control" colonials from the global South. This of course pre-supposes the White Race in the Americas is not illegal and is not the creature that should be controlled. Despite such maneuvers as NAFTA and the utter decimation of Mexico's rural life, the theft of water from Peru and India, etc., the criminal behavior of the West's governments is an exoticism left to college seminars and rogue radicals in black masks throwing bottles filled with inflammables. It is not to be discussed among serious people.

So the Tottenhams - site of the recent London "riots" - always, always come as a surprise to the gullible. But the serious people with any sense are scared. Good.

In the UK right now, signs that its government have never really assimilated its former colonials - West Indian and African Blacks and East Asians - are literally burning the streets down in London and reaching up to Liverpool.

While the US has made some pedestrian, window-dressed steps to assimilating its former slaves [see Richard Rodriguez' "Hunger for Memory"], the UK has maintained essentially a 50-year guest-worker program and kept its imports in Old World ghettos.

It isolated these "Black Britons" to bantustans in perpetuity, thrown in some vocational training for jobs that didn't exist, accessorized it with a royal charity [The Prince's Trust], and otherwise ignored these non-people while the "country" pretended it relived some medieval tribal fantasy.

So when the colonials get restless at a lack of a means to support themselves, the weight of the foot of royal police on their necks, or shooting of their children like they were foxes in the pastoral hunt, the hierarchy's press people pretend to wonder why, official community leaders condemn the violence, and the government threatens to bring out the water canons, etc., etc.

These governments - all over Europe - are scared shitless that this series of events might mark their inevitable twilight.

What began in Tottenham did not really begin there, but must be seen as a continuum that stretches to one side in Cairo, to Yemen, to Tunisia, to India. It also extends back to the burning cities of the 60's, Mexico and Paris in 1968, the Pink Tide spreading across Latin America, the riots after the Simi Valley verdict acquitting the LAPD of gross misconduct, the riots after the Oscar Grant slaughter in Oakland, which saw that young man's murderer walk free, and countless other agitations that keep getting explained away as peripheral.

These are not only riots. They are uprisings. The compromised Western media and the bought Western politician will of course condemn the burning, the looting, the trashing because in Britain they must really believe that ancient legal convention that "the Queen can do no wrong."

But whether they believe in Queen and Country or not, they know the score. These governments and their other halves, the corporations, are in a tough spot. Their very existence, their successes, their wealth, have been built directly on the backs of the colonials' labors and the colonials homelands. But the score card pretty clearly shows sooner or later, this specter will in fact overwhelm them.

They know they are a chilled shriveling corpse that must live on the blood, sweat, gold, oil, etc., etc., of persons that must - legally speaking - be deemed as their inferiors, which takes us back to those Slave Codes.

This legal convention can be seen in the racist nature of every single institution on both sides of the swamp.

There is nothing about the modern age that alters basic biology. Although we are in the the 21st century, this has not changed the need of the parasite for its host, any more than modernity makes tiny, inhospitable Europe a terrain fit for human life. It is not. It is cold, damp, and barren, and to sustain any vibrancy it must suck the life-force from the global South.

This is why - at bottom - these degenerate governments have swarmed like locusts into the Arab world, why it begs China, loots Libya, menaces Cuba, and, why, at any cost - believe me - they will put down these colonial upstarts wherever they raise their defiance: in London, in Cairo, in Caracas, in Oakland or in Bensonhurst.

It will not be enough for these uprisings to bring down the Coalition government between the Conservative and Liberal-Democrat Parties. Although that would be a small gain indeed.

Our systems of government, on both sides of the Atlantic and throughout the Western world are less an expression of popular voice and more like the crude, barbarism of the management class. We know our managers at our work places: part drones, part pre-historics, all brute force to keep the rabble in line. They are not coaches; they are coercive.

Coercion is the only way to keep humans from being human and to make them into machines to toil for one purpose and not agitate.

This is the essence of our Western democracies, and this is why we seemingly have no control over our public policies, foreign or domestic, why war crimes we are against continue to be perpetrated in our name, why we cannot get a decent community need met.

But bombs can be dropped on soft targets in the global South. Rogue leaders who do not follow the management directives can be run out or assassinated. And guest workers in the metropolises - London, New York, Los Angeles, Paris - can be set upon like sport.

This is why we must throw the managers to the dogs and burn not only the institutions to the ground but also our addled dependence on them.

The existence of this system obviously makes problematic any "justice" for the colonials from these governments - the Blacks, the Browns, the working-class Whites, the Southasians and East Asians, the Indigenous are not likely to find any reparation or revolution from this system.

Che Guevara's famous admonition was to give birth to 100's more Vietnams, 100's more "slave" rebellions against the global North. Who knows what will finally spark this mass uprising to burn the dead brush from the landscape: will we look back at Tottenham like we who know better look back at the Haymarket riots in Chicago?

Following Orders

Among anarchist circles exists the primitivist contention that civilization is bad and needs dismantling and the anti-primitivist response that were the primitivist reality come to pass, "people will die" without the many benefits modern society has given humanity. I've hear this so many times it's become a TV jingle in my head.

But I don't hear a similar response from aspects of the broader left when it comes to neoliberal policies attacking social programs, and I wish I did. The anarchists debates are real debates between dismantling management structures and replacing them with worker-owned, worker-run job sites or doing away with the agricultural-industrial model altogether to free us.

Liberals don't have real debates, particularly when it comes to neoliberalism. These policies did not begin in the 80's but gained an intensity under Reagan and Thatcher with a selling off of public goods, attacks on the poor, women, minorities; continued under Clinton with Welfare Reform; and just now driven further into the heart of the New Deal under the hammer of Pres. Barack Obama, Wall Street's Boy Toy and menace to society.

The debt-ceiling deal just signed is catastrophic. And while I am more sympathetic than not with the primitivist, anti-civilization arguments, I find myself employing its opposition's "people will die" refrain when it comes to policies clearly being passed.

People will die.

Because, unlike the primitivist arguments, which has little consensus and no legislative support, the neoliberal program is real and in the here and now ... and aside from attacking Head Start, education funding, community health centers, Medicare, health programs for women, like breast cancer screening, food programs it will also eliminate federal jobs and employment programs.

This time, for real, people will die. What do we think happens to a woman who cannot get early breast cancer screening except that she will likely die? What do we think happens to the poor who cannot access food programs except they will get sick and die?

I'm often asked about people's lack of response. Why in the face not only of the mass extermination of Nature, the salmon, the wetlands, the rain forests, 100's of species per hour but also the incremental extermination of human beings, politically driven famines in the global South, like in Ethiopia, Somalia, and Haiti, austerity measures in the North and South cutting off food supports, access to health care, and selling off natural reserves do we not counter-attack?

Why don't the collective masses rise up and cut off the heads of these degenerates and obliterate the system which clearly and empirically oppresses us? All kinds responses - form the so-called passive to the so-called violent - would seem to be on the table, but few are.

Why do we follow orders?

The Factory System imposed on our public education system of model of obedience onto students being prepped to be industrial workers. Indeed, much of public education was motivated to assimilate former rural farm workers and immigrants into the industrial system.

As at your workplace, rewards came by sitting in your chair, not challenging the teacher or the system. Disruption was met with various kinds of progressive discipline up to and including expulsion [firing]. It was a weeding out process of good workers from bad. And the better workers learned the degenerate lessons that you keep your head down, your thoughts to yourself, and obey the manager/master/teacher.

The obvious problem is besides creating a nation of slaves to whatever system is in place is that system can evolve into a NAZI Germany or a 21st century global North [e.g., USA, UK, France, Spain, et al] so dependent on the resources of the global South - this dependence proof of the primitivist argument, by the way - the global North has broken every domestic or international law or human rights convention or basic human civility and commit crimes against humanity, war crimes, and savage act.

And the docile, well-trained, well-schooled "workers" - those who learned the lessons best - will keep their heads down, run the mill, the factory, the workplace, or even drop bombs on innocents and just keep following orders.

So our only hope is from those who refuse to follow orders.

What's left of the labor movement

It's hard to read recent labor news with any optimism. Further it's hard to put any more credibility in a US labor movement as workers get assaulted and trades-unions seem to capitulate.

What it will mean in a few years to have a labor-union is a depressing thought.

The state of Wisconsin has just rammed through a measure which strips its public-employee unions of collective-bargaining rights. Indiana followed suit. Ohio was next in what proves to be, given the neoliberal climate, a very long chain of brutal assaults on workers.

Like a vicious wildfire, this menace to working people moves virtually unchecked.

Yes, some state legislators have gone into hiding to prevent the Wisconsin bill from passing. Yes, there's a lot of wailing at the wall from progressive lawmakers. Yes, the protests have been loud and numerous against this assault.

But my pessimism tells me this will ultimately have as much affect on this neoliberal attack as ... the millions who oppose the US war in the Middle East (this holds true for the populations of Western Europe, who differ sharply from their political masters, so we are approaching a 10 Years' War).

The trades-union movement, if we can call it that anymore, has for so long implicated itself with the neoliberal model its meaning was eroded a long time ago.

Observe to some of these union chiefs:

On the federal level, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) gears up for a union vote of its officers. Bush II denied TSA officers collective-bargaining rights when he established the agency, rights afforded to every other federal agency.

So this vote would seem to be a victory after hard-fought efforts by officers, and the two unions vying for officer support.

But, like recent anti-labor moves, TSA chief, John Pistole, has effectively negotiated the contract unilaterally.

In a recent NPR interview, National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) president, Colleen Kelley, responded to TSA's Pistole Wisconsinesque maneuver to take security issues, wages, discipline policies, testing, qualifications off the bargaining table as non-negotiable.

 Kelley said her union can assist TSA officers with transfers to other airports and work schedules. But the competing union, American Federation of Government Employees [AFGE], can do little more.

Closer to my home, Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) has authorized over 5,000 lay off notices.

According the LA Times, United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) union president, AJ Duffy, responded with "This large number of proposed layoffs shows that LAUSD has clearly abandoned its all-too-frequent, and hollow, promise to 'keep cuts away from the classroom."

Acceding to the promise that jobs cuts be kept away from teachers and, implicitly, other workers is problematic. It really seems to come not from a union leader, who should know better, but rather the rest of the population who are kept ignorant of the vital role of non teaching staff in public schools. So when that non teaching staff disappears, the general public don't notice and are therefore unlikely to agitate.

A union head of teachers should know that the various staff members at a school - counselors, office staff, even maintenance workers and janitors - are extremely vital to the community of a school. And he should also know, as the saying goes: an injury to one really is an injury to all.

But this is exactly what generations of concessions have won trades-unionists: no power, one layoff after another, being taken for granted numerous times by "their friends in Congress".

You can hear a pin drop to their official challenges to an overall corrupt system. The all-things-on-the-table war - to limit it to my life time - should have been declared in the early 1980's.

When Pres. Ronald Reagan (himself a former union chief!) fired the air-traffic controllers: that should have been the next chapter in a class war.

Instead, Reagan's move was a class purge.

[Question: just how many workers have to be laid off and left with no means of support before "you" put all options rhetorically back on the table? - just a thought.]

As modern, collaborating unions concede to neoliberal doctrine, union bosses' best defense for its existence is pedestrian.

We hear how breaking up unions is shrinking the middle class; that it was the union movement that swelled the ranks of good wage-earners, but this defense is also problematic.

On wages.

The fetish for good wages in a corrupted system leads to the very social and economic inequalities we see today and have always seen, notably, in the global South where trades-unionism was not tolerated by Uncle Sam. It seems now Uncle Sam won't tolerate unionism within its own borders.

Making wages a central issue is a co-conspirator defense to essentially partner with a neoliberal system, inherently corrupt, to take a cut of the spoils. It is also not the sum of what it means to be a trades-union activist.

To reduce the union movement to wages not only dismisses a long and militant history that brought us our cherished labor rights - in and outside the union [i.e., the eight-hour workday benefits all workers] but also misses issues around the legitimacy of private ownership, management, and what makes for an ideal society.

In other words, today, a harsh wage[-slave] system is defended, just as chattel slavery was, by putting the very reward central to the argument. The union movement has conceded the argument.

And on management.
A major issue is management. When I state point-blank that we should get rid of management, I am often asked "then who will manage?", which implies laborers, like chattel slaves, as being too untrustworthy to be let loose without the ever-present overseer with his whip.

In most workplaces the workers know and often articulate that they themselves can make better decisions in running affairs than the ones being made by their overseers, but this conflicts with what the ghosts of the Federalist Papers have taught us about democracy: it's not a good thing.

Democratic workplaces, worker self-management will not survive a neoliberal paradigm. Profit is key. Wall Street is key. And the more immediate that profit the better. 

The role of management is to keep the workers from benefiting one another, the workplace, and the community. Their role is to preserve at all costs the central importance of Wall Street [erroneously called "The Economy"].

More importantly management is vital to preserve a governance system which demands, not competence, but rather obedience from workers. It is there to remind us to know "our" place.

This is what traditional trades-unionism resisted. Modern unions may find my thinking from Mars.

By why this refusal to fight back by trades-unions, why this acquiescence to the dominant neoliberal paradigm that welcomes with open arms wage-slavery, why concede an inch to management?

This government waged a vicious hot and cold war against the early labor movement: mass deportations with the Palmer Raids, assassinations, imprisonments, of anti-war activists, leftists, communists, and anarchists. Then to cap it off Congress prohibited the inclusion of anarchists and communists from US labor unions with the 1947 Taft-Hatley Act, which encoded into law attacks against "militants", weakening labor unions, and establishing right-to-work states, where unions are prohibited. The air was sucked right out of a militant movement and it has left us today gasping.

Those who survived that historic assault must have very small lungs and weak voices.

Whose Shopping Therapy?

A hyper-consumer society can only thrive with hyper consumers, rich and poor, not only ready to pull out the checkbook or credit card at the drop of a hat (or point of a GI gun, threat of eviction, cloud of starvation), but also willing to line up at the check-cashing place for a more expensive "loan."

A hyper-consumer society can only thrive if it promises that every wish can be fulfilled, every heart's desire met through that checkbook, credit card, or however much you can squeeze out of the check cashing rock.

A hyper-consumer society will persist only when so-renamed "consumers" [formerly known as "citizens"] can only see their desires met from the array of treasures, trinkets, gadgets, wovens, and concoctions offered in the display case - no more and no less. No imagination required. Imagination is discouraged.

A hyper-consumer society can only exist within a strategic hamlet, where the consumers are made to consume through purchases authorized by the powers-that-be, the state, and never outside or free from that state's authority.

A hyper-consumer society will only exist if said hyper consumers cannot distinguish needs from wants, and so see nothing "hyper" or "schizo", or "pathological" about their consuming patterns. After all, they might argue: what society does not consume? From the Pre-historic (strange, ill-fitting term), Classical (overstated), feudal, or modern: they all consume something, food and air and water.

A hyper-consumer society can only thrive if the consumers feel entitled to the treasures and trinkets in the display case.

A hyper-consumer society can only thrive if the consumers feel someone else is less entitled to those treasures - if they are apt to feel anything at all. Those less entitled will be given a lower step on the ladder and bestowed with various names: but they are ultimately and empirically Slaves.

A hyper-consumer society will always exist in close proximity - by rail, plane, boat, or canal zone - to a slave society, because hyper consumers depend on extracting their treasures from those slaves (and call the relationship "trade," "purchase," "enterprise zones," "treaty rights").

A hyper-consumer society is a society without a soul, not only because the extent of its desires and imagination are limited to those display cases but also because it persists in meeting those desires on the backs of [its] slaves. It must by definition keep the slaves down (e.g, put the n*gger in his place, guard the border, hunt down "illegals," etc), be content that while the slaves may be entitled to little, that is all they can handle because they are deemed "backwards." The hyper consumers are always entitled to more than enough. This pathological dichotomy will be rationalized in academic studies and political white papers.

A hyper-consumer society will persist in trying to fill its soul with treasures from the display case, which means never lifting its boot from the slaves' necks, because hyper consumer's imagination is as limited as the slave's liberty. And consumers are bred to consume: that is all they are taught to know.

A hyper-consumer society, having little developed insight, no real intuition, will be forever puzzled at its own crises, its poverties, its slums, its crime rates, because hyper consumers - who used to be citizens - are so limited in their imagination and intuitiveness they cannot fathom what impoverishes a man, woman, or child as robbing their treasures from them will certainly do, and why that man, woman, and child must be made a slave.

A hyper-consumer society exists on the precipice but must refuse to acknowledge that, like their neighbors, they may be the next easy victim.


[For Jasmine: the student who teaches the teacher]

Signs of the times!

Guy Fawkes

Confirmed: Cuts will hit poorest hardest * Cuts will hit women twice as hard as men, Commons research shows * California jobless rate is stuck at 12.4% *   Spending cuts: Liverpool facing 'worse than the worst-case scenario' * California state, county and city agencies, beset by plunging revenues, make their biggest payroll cuts in decades, and more layoffs are ahead, analysts forecast * US announces $2bn military aid package for Pakistan * Queen asked for poverty grant to heat palaces * French lessons: pension protests * Amid Reforms, Cubans Fret Over Food Rations Fate * Mass protests overshadow Greek prime minister's austerity speech * Councils plan for exodus of poor families from London * U.S. unemployment rate for blacks projected to hit 25-year high * Hispanic unemployment: Latinos hardest hit by recession * Child Poverty Over 30% In Chicago, As Recession Cripples Families

Jesus the Anti-Christ or Octavius the Messiah

Myopia is not natural. It is not genetic. It is rather a construction of a modern, "capitalist" authoritarian liberal government. This government seeks these divisions and to maintain our peculiar ignorance, in order to perpetuate its rule over us by making it easier to manage the various flocks we are put in to. Unrest among the whites, blame the blacks; among the blacks, the immigrants are over-running us. Etc.

One of the persistent places this manipulation and management of the masses occurs is in the area of religion.

As someone born in the West, this religion is bound to be Christianity, which is a peculiarity in itself. It has, as one activist put it, a "possum" in it. Official religion is not about religion at all but rather about the maintenance of state and class power, so just when you think it has spiritual lessons to teach and to actualize, The Good Ship Jesus delivers its human cargo to the new world, steered by Christian merchants and ship captains.

Christianity is but one of the master-class weapons to whip the people into line. Its power may be fading, but it is still relatively strong. So,a few things must be clarified about this peculiar religion, its mascot, and the people who have managed him [and us] for nearly two millennia.

A lot is attributed the man we know as Jesus, and a lot negated. His birth was predicted as the coming of a king of kings. He is quoted as having said some pretty wise, astute things, told some very revealing stories, taught, healed, lead. Born from a virgin, he was resolutely celibate, unmarried, and fatherless. He was crucified, rose from the dead, and growing numbers of gullible people await his return performance. He was born, lived, and died a Jew.

Two thousand years and counting, the Christians wait for this Jewish scholar. I thought Dicken's Miss Havisham had gone off the deep end wearing her molding, smelly wedding gown waiting for the return of the groom who stood her up at the altar in her youth, but this Christian crowd takes the Guinness Book Prize. The Christians wait for someone whose first stop would be the nearest synagogue, not the archdiocese of New York City.

I have dared question the Christian dogma since I was in grade school, fortunate that my mother did not subject me not only to its propaganda - we all, as I said, get that even passively; but also, she denied me its "community." Community is a more reckless thing to throw stones at if one feels a certain dependence on it, which is why so many battered spouses and cult members stay rather than flee even when the Kool-Aid is served, and why Christianity may see dwindling attendance in its churches, its hold on the minds lingers. I did not flee, because I was never there, thank God.

To me, Christianity is only an anthropological fetish that has unfortunately consumed the world. The possible lessons of the young Jew are mostly lost.

But this is what state and power want: anything to justify its human rights crimes and never, ever to put Jesus' communism into practical effect.

My questions took a great leap forward after I watched HBO's "Rome" series. The Christian's mascot-Messiah was not a character in that excellent series ... or was he? As the character Octavius grew in development on screen, I saw parallels to the Christian messiah.

I liked the series so much I do what students do in my day: I did not go to Twitter; I did some reading. First, I read Suetonius' The Twelve Ceasars. I followed that with Anthony Everitt's Augustus. Both fantastic books, by the way. 

History and the management of the masses seem to work at cross-purposes, because as a master class you don't want your proletariat to know too much about what is really going on, or, as one of the 19th century's cronies put it, "not to let too much daylight in on the magic."

This magic includes the design of the public school curriculum, which I as a veteran public school history teacher am a bit familiar with. The 10th grade World History curriculum in California begins not with ancient Greece or Africa but with the French Revolution. This means skipping almost halfway into that thick textbook (US History begins not with the genocide of the indigenous population but with the US Civil War, which only makes sense if you understand our history has been one long race riot].

So, when I read Suetonius's opening chapters about Julius Ceasar and Octavius [aka, Augustus], not only were light bulbs going off, but also fuses were breaking. And a star burned bright in the sky. Suetonius the biographer is as interesting a writer as any People Magazine reporter: facts, hearsay, and gossip galore. Sex, of course. Both Julius and Octavius liked to experiment sexually with other men as well as with their wives, Julius much more so than his successor. Both calculating, ruthless, of course.

The Roman imperial roots of Christianity were apparent in the lives and myths of these Caesars.

Hagiographers were busy making gods of men since Julius Ceasar, and embellishing all sorts of tales to support their scholarship. It continued right up to the Christian myth and Jesus' hagiographers.

If it is true that were God not to exist, we'd have to invent him, the Romans proved this in the ways they elevated Julius Ceasar to godlike status and Octavius his successor to a god of the gods.

It is in the context and timeframe the Jesus myth is constructed.

The official myth-making around these Roman chieftains has striking parallels to the official myth-making around a certain young Jewish boy who would have lived 14 years under the rule of Octavius.

The hagiographers of Roman times knew what to do to wipe the shame of Julius Ceasar's murder off their collective consciences. They took it a few notches up the wrung for Octavius, and it's not a far stretch of the imagination that the same proletariat who ate that popcorn up in the first instances would need it again for a purported Mascot-Messiah.

Almost immediately after Ceasar's murder - perhaps one of the bravest acts in human history, to kill a tyrant - the people agitated and the deification began. The 55-year old tyrant was said - per his dream of the night before - to rise up to Jupiter. A marble monument was erected and people prayed to it, made oaths before it, sacrificed animals to it.

A cult star was born. It might have taken off had his successor not bettered him.

The Octavius hagiography goes further, from his conception in the Temple of Apollo while his virgin mother slept there and was visited by the god himself, to his image being put on altars. Great omens reportedly preceded his birth (and his bedding in what Suetonius describes as a "food pantry," which doubled as his nursery ["Away in the manger, no crib for a bed!"].

The Roman people, like the Jews, were told before Octavius' birth that the gods were set to provide them a king-savior. Obviously, a Jewish savior-messiah was greeted with agitation by the elders of the Roman Senate so much that they decreed that no male child could be reared for a year. A Roman king-savior was milked.

One senator, upon hearing the news of Octavius birth declared "The ruler of the world is now born."

Stories of the newborn Octavius disappearing and being found on rooftops gazing at the sun or silencing the croaking frogs abounded. After his funeral, one witness said he saw Octavius' spirit rise to Heaven, but Suetonius doesn't record if this was the first, second, or seventh day.

Much of the folklore surrounded Octavius parallel Jesus. The rationale building up the Octavius myth is, of course, raw power. People in awe of and made to seem dependent on demi-gods are less likely to see a tyrant: the state can continue unobstructed in its imperial mission. Julius Ceasar took Spain. Octavius took Egypt. Tiberius famously annexed England.

The sun never set on ... oh, but that is a different empire.

It is somewhat better known that our high Christian holidays were preceded by high Roman pagan ones, and the dates of those older pagan ones (coincidentally I'm sure) happen to be the same as our Christian holy days. Some group of Crusading bureaucrats knew how to get the people to swallow this new day, they needed the same wine in the new bottles.

Speaking of pilfering, it's pretty clear from the history that the Roman Catholic Pontiff's office itself - right down the magic ruby slippers - was stolen from pagan Rome: again, to keep those agitated masses from tearing burning embers off funeral pyres and torching the homes of the elites, as they did after Ceasar's murder.

And, so, how to swallow Jesus as mascot, messiah, and justification of so much [further] turmoil?

Whether Jesus the Jew existed or not is immaterial. Octavius is but a figure of Roman imperial power, not to be exaggerated. Jesus' expressed ideas were certainly not novel to anyone studying the historical record before the French Revolution. You find ancient Greek, African, and Asian philosophy laced throughout the pronouncements of this Jewish carpenter.

If he did exist, like Octavius, he would have to have access to teachers and learning, which were not permitted slaves, who like our growing, modern, impoverished working class of today, had no souls.

If he did exist, he not only would have been married but marriage in the Roman world was not the fetish it pretends to be under the modern Christians: people married and divorced all the time as promiscuously as they might have a new robe of clothes designed. Without public ridicule.

Now, this doesn't necessarily mean Jesus the man is not a remarkable person, any more than Barack Obama before he courted the favors of the reactionary Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) is remarkable. He is, and his positions are equally discernible to posterity - Jesus', that is. But so too were Mr. Obama's.

Like his prototype, Octavius, Jesus was claimed to be the son of God, their mothers both visited by angels [well, Apollo, reportedly disguised himself as a snake]. Each have gained remarkable statures in support of state power - Christendom and the massacres of dissidents and Inquisitions to finish off the rest.

Is this Jesus or Octavius?

Irish playwright and pamphleteer, George Bernard Shaw, distills the rebel man we know as Jesus quite well, weeding out the Paulist and Council of Nicea distillation we've come to associate with this imperialist mascot:

"The doctrines in which Jesus is thus confirmed are, roughly, the
following:

1. The kingdom of heaven is within you. You are the son of God; and God
is the son of man. God is a spirit, to be worshipped in spirit and in
truth, and not an elderly gentleman to be bribed and begged from. We are
members one of another; so that you cannot injure or help your neighbor
without injuring or helping yourself. God is your father: you are here
to do God's work; and you and your father are one.

2. Get rid of property by throwing it into the common stock. Dissociate
your work entirely from money payments. If you let a child starve you
are letting God starve. Get rid of all anxiety about tomorrow's dinner
and clothes, because you cannot serve two masters: God and Mammon.

3. Get rid of judges and punishment and revenge. Love your neighbor as
yourself, he being a part of yourself. And love your enemies: they are
your neighbors.

4. Get rid of your family entanglements. Every mother you meet is as
much your mother as the woman who bore you. Every man you meet is as
much your brother as the man she bore after you. Don't waste your time
at family funerals grieving for your relatives: attend to life, not to
death: there are as good fish in the sea as ever came out of it, and
better. In the kingdom of heaven, which, as aforesaid, is within you,
there is no marriage nor giving in marriage, because you cannot devote
your life to two divinities: God and the person you are married to."

Shaw concludes his assessment thus:

"Now these are very interesting propositions; and they become more
interesting every day, as experience and science drive us more and more
to consider them favorably. In considering them, we shall waste our time
unless we give them a reasonable construction. We must assume that the
man who saw his way through such a mass of popular passion and illusion
as stands between us and a sense of the value of such teaching was quite
aware of all the objections that occur to an average stockbroker in
the first five minutes. It is true that the world is governed to a
considerable extent by the considerations that occur to stockbrokers in
the first five minutes; but as the result is that the world is so badly
governed that those who know the truth can hardly bear to live in it,
an objection from an average stockbroker constitutes in itself a prima
facie case for any social reform." [Shaw, "Preface on the Prospects of Christianity", Androcles and the Lion 1913]

But why bother taking a classically educated teacher and making him the foundation of the slave-trading imperial world? Jesus' teachings as distilled not only by Shaw, but also by Christian anarchists, like Tolstoy, Dorothy Day, and the liberation theologists would seem to run counter to the muck we have been treated to by the master-class, who head churches, who bless troops sent to secure oil and spices, who trade in human cargo, and who starve the poor in honor of trade.

This Jewish teacher exemplified popular and dangerous ideas to the master class. Not new ideas and not original ones, but ones that caught and continue to catch popular imaginations. We do not want to be ruled, lorded over, mastered by men, women, or pirates who would sacrifice our community and will to do right to one another.

Historian Peter Marshall suggests why.

"The legacy of Christianity is not moreover merely repressive. On the one hand, there is a conservative, quietist, and authoritarian tendency originating in the Pauline Church in Rome; on the other, a radical, communal and libertarian one which emerged from the Jamesian church in Jerusalem."

Oh, Paul! Essentially what he helped manufacture as surely as Octavius' hagiographers was not Jesus but the anti-Jesus. And all the while the Roman emperors, like Octavius, are messiah's for state and class power. The Jesus that our masters sell us is not a community organizer but the Anti-Christ, set on destroying what is human. And we've been made not only to worship this menace to society but also justify so many communal and national crimes on him.

In a cynical maneuver worthy of Obama's shift to the reactionary DLC, the emperor Constantine did convert to Christianity on his deathbed, in a last attempt to save an empire fraying at the seams probably since Tiberius' reign. This is what happens to beasts who get too big, too slow, and needing to consume more and more resources which means creating more and more slaves and conquer more and more of other people's land.

In doing so, Constantine ultimately did not save the Roman world but he did give a tacit legitimacy to a version of old teachings taught by the young Jew. But with this infamous conversion this cult had a powerful collaborator: the state and establishment, which meant at minimum one could never, ever put those celebrated teachings into practice but keep them hanging up in the air with Jupiter and Octavius' placenta.

State power is always a bad marriage, as witnessed by the joining of the state and academia, or the state and modern journalism. This produces lies and a lot of strange careers.

Jesus unfortunately was not around to stop this marriage, the corruption of these ancient, communist, anti-master class ideas with state power. And as a mere teacher, not a messiah, it would never have crossed his mind.

Emperors are other creatures. According to Suetonius, Octavius was most peeved at "his name [being] vulgarized by its constant occurrence" during his lifetime and put an imperial stop to it. He seemed to resist deification, but he must not have understood the fraud magic the state employs to sucker the people.

Too bad this other "ruler of the world" could not have articulated an opposition to this same vulgarization. It might, one hopes, have stopped Paul, the councilors at Nicea, and the bishops of Rome, kings, and queen-empresses from handing us the anti-Christ as religious fetish.

Discovering US crimes against humanity and the Hepburns

The president of Guatemala couldn't have been more on point when he described recent revelations that the US had intentionally infected Guatemalan women with STDs. He called it a crime against humanity.

There is a parallel history to these crimes, which is just as persistent, that the US is a bastion for all goodness, chosen, global leader, etc. etc.

I was introduced to this parallel universe as an undergraduate, where on the one hand I was studying political science and history of the masters - that is, a narrative that supported the myth of US liberal benevolence. On the other, there is the reality.

I enrolled in a women's studies class. It was somewhat daring at the time - may still be - because I was the only male in the class and knew of only one other male student enrolled in a similar class. I was a political science major who had the list of required courses to complete for my degree. This particular women-in-politics class fit the bill.

My semester passed fairly unremarkably. The female students and the female professor liked to pick on me as the lone guy, but the real drama came when it came time to do my term paper.

I was, and still am, a big old Hollywood movie fan. So I proposed as a topic the political/activist role of women in Hollywood (viz., Bette Davis' landmark but unsuccessful lawsuit against her studio, which chipped away at the stable system, where actors were contracted to big studios and had little control of their careers).

Ok, to the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature [RGPL], an index the younger generation probably know nothing about. There was a certain art to looking through the RGPL: by year, by decade, indices.

What I was to find out when I looked up Bette Davis was one thing. But when I looked up references for Katharine Hepburn I was taken far from Hollywood and to the dark side of our liberal tradition.

If you type Hepburn's name into your Internet search, you will get all listings about the famed and admired actress. But via RGPL, interestingly, you would find another Katharine Hepburn: the actress's mother of the same name. The elder Hepburn was a prominent activist, alleged social reformer, woman's suffragist, and an early birth control advocate. Hepburn the daughter has said she was also a Communist.


While the only sign I could find of overt Hepburn activism was her political support of the Communist Party-backed, democratic socialist Henry Wallace in 1948 in his presidential bid, and against Harry Truman, the elder Hepburn's record was a pretty rich one. And disturbing to behold.


Disturbing because the Hepburn mother was one of the founders, with Margaret Sanger, of Planned Parenthood [first called the Birth Control League]. These crusading women advocated not only legalizing abortions but also sterilizations ... of Black and Asian women.

For whatever the elder Hepburn's true political affiliations, she dared to equate poverty with color and [to her logic] reasonably thought an end to poverty would come when poverty ceased to produce poor babies, ergo, sterilize the poor.

Before Hepburn the actress died, Planned Parenthood honored the elder Hepburn and named a fund after her both women in the 1980's.

Further, Bryn Mawr College, the prestigious women's college that both Hepburns attended, honored mother and daughter for their achievements.

The Hepburn revelation was one of my first introductions into the nasty underbelly of the liberal politics we marginalized are supposed to ignore - those marginalized include people of color, the poor, lgbtq's, women, not to forget men who dare to walk a different path, queer or straight, in spite of public rebuke.

I myself have held Planned Parenthood in particular and the abortion issue in general at a chilly distance ever since.

It has been the recognition of these crimes against humanity, demands for social justice, reparations, regime and system changes that has gotten the reactionaries to mobilize to dismantle social and public services, especially our public schools. In fact, a whole elaborate propaganda system has been fortified, which includes our mass media and increasingly includes our "intellectuals" in the universities. It has certainly impacted public education, note Ronald Reagan's desire to shut down the Dept of Education, Bush I's education presidency, Bush II's No Child Left Behind, and Obama's Race to the Top.

The assault - the crime - continues to infect our rising generations with ignorance and compliance to a brutal system that wants only part-time labor from them, then to throw them away when finished.

The US "medical" crime in Guatemala is interesting. It comes just before our successfully toppling its democratically elected government in 1954, with the direct assistance of the CIA. So the war aims included not only saving United Fruit [precursor to Chiquita Bananas] but also for Nazi medical experiments.

The elder Hepburn was no Nazi, and she did make ample pronouncements which would make her communist sympathies believable and admired, but she also testified to US Congressional committees that Black and Asian women needed to be sterilized, that it was cruel to allow them to produce children they could not care for, etc. She did this rather than offer a radical critique of a capitalist system which had barely ended chattel slavery for Blacks and Asian workers and had made wage slaves of all workers: from this comes poverty, not color.

And what of the actress Hepburn's father? She described Thomas N. Hepburn as a "dyed-in-the-wool socialist." Dr. Hepburn was a physician and, like his wife, an activist in his own right. His concern was around venereal diseases and starting various private organizations to tackle this serious issue.

What was his role or knowledge, if any, in the crimes against Guatemala? Further, the records about that experiment show that the same doctors were involved in the domestic Tuskegee Experiment, where Black men were left untreated for syphilis and told erroneously they were being treated.

Dr. Hepburn was no small, local doctor with a pet interest. He was actively involved in addressing - to his credit - a serious health issue. Certainly someone with his involvement would have known about these things. But can he be as implicated in these experiments with "good" intentions as his wife was to her campaign?

We must no longer be shocked and awed by these revelations. There has always been a strange disconnect between the narrative of our supposed masters and that of the masses of humanity who suffer. Unfortunately, we must assume the worst from our rulers and the least from our collective response.