George Hartley's Blog

Acciones de solidaridad en el Otro Estado de México. Campaña Miles de Rabias

2011-03-09T07:06:00.000-08:00

Acciones de Solidaridad en el Otro Estado de México
…que los vientos se unan y la tormenta llegue.

Los colectivos e individuos integrantes de la Coordinadora Valle de Chalco refrendamos nuestro compromiso solidario con las luchas de nuestr@s compañer@s de La Otra y las Bases de Apoyo Zapatistas.
Nos hacemos eco de las iniciativas nacionales e internacionales de solidaridad, en particular de la campaña Miles de Rabias, un corazón:

¡vivan las comunidades zapatistas!

Porque nuestra rabia contra el sistema nos convoca a la acción. Porque la ternura de nuestros pueblos nos conmueve y nos da fortaleza. Porque en la lucha zapatista reconocemos nuestra esperanza de construir Otro
mundo desde Abajo y a la Izquierda. Y porque en verdad creemos en el compañerismo y la hermandad de los de mero abajo. Las acciones que desarrollaremos serán: pintas, volanteos, pegas, mantas, proyecciones, pláticas informativas, festivales, toquines y actos político-culturales.

Esto es lo que ya tenemos articulado.

MARZO: Acto político-Cultural Corazón Combativo de Mujer, sábado 20.
Habrá talleres, proyecciones, teatro, música, graffiti, información sobre la lucha de las mujeres zapatistas y mucha rebeldía.

ABRIL: 4o Festival Chavit@s por la Libertad y la Cultura, sábado 30.
Habrá talleres, teatro, pintura, juegos e información sobre la Educación Autónoma de los pueblos zapatistas.

MAYO: Toquín (fecha por confirmar).

Los volanteos, pintas, pegas y manteos son de carácter permanente, iniciándose el 8 de marzo con un volanteo y pega de carteles exigiendo la Libertad de los compañeros Presos Políticos de San Sebastián
Bachajón, Chiapas.
Las acciones se llevarán a cabo en cuatro municipios de la zona oriente: Valle de Chalco, Chalco, Tlalmanalco e Ixtapaluca.

¡Contra la represión del Estado… el barrio organizado!
¡Presos políticos de San Sebastián Bachajón!
¡Presos Políticos Loxichas!
¡¡¡¡¡LIBERTAD!!!!!

¡SI TOCAN A LAS COMUNIDADES ZAPATISTAS NOS TOCAN A TOD@S!

Con nuestro pueblo siempre:
Coordinadora Valle de Chalco

Informes sobre los lugares y el programa:
coordinadora.libre@gmail.com

http://coordinadoralibre.blogspot.com/

‘I merely belong to them’

2011-02-25T11:45:00.000-08:00

Judith Butler

The Jewish Writings by Hannah Arendt, edited by Jerome Kohn and Ron Feldman
Schocken, 559 pp, $35.00, March 2007, ISBN 978 0 8052 4238 6

‘You know the left think that I am conservative,’ Hannah Arendt once said, ‘and the conservatives think I am left or I am a maverick or God knows what. And I must say that I couldn’t care less. I don’t think the real questions of this century get any kind of illumination by this kind of thing.’ The Jewish Writings make the matter of her political affiliation no less easy to settle. In these editorials, essays and unfinished pieces, she seeks to underscore the political paradoxes of the nation-state. If the nation-state secures the rights of citizens, then surely it is a necessity; but if the nation-state relies on nationalism and invariably produces massive numbers of stateless people, it clearly needs to be opposed. If the nation-state is opposed, then what, if anything, serves as its alternative?

Arendt refers variously to modes of ‘belonging’ and conceptions of the ‘polity’ that are not reducible to the idea of the nation-state. She even formulates, in her early writings, an idea of the ‘nation’ that is uncoupled from both statehood and territory. The nation retains its place for her, though it diminishes between the mid-1930s and early 1960s, but the polity she comes to imagine, however briefly, is something other than the nation-state: a federation that diffuses both claims of national sovereignty and the ontology of individualism. In her critique of Fascism as well as in her scepticism towards Zionism, she clearly opposes those disparate forms of the nation-state that rely on nationalism and create massive statelessness and destitution. Paradoxically, and perhaps shrewdly, the terms in which Arendt criticised Fascism came to inform her criticisms of Zionism, though she did not and would not conflate the two.

She stated the matter quite clearly in The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951. Statelessness was not a Jewish problem, but a recurrent 20th-century predicament of the nation-state. What happened to the Jewish people under Hitler should not be seen as exceptional but as exemplary of a certain way of managing minority populations; hence, the reduction of ‘German Jews to a non-recognised minority in Germany’, the subsequent expulsions of the Jews as ‘stateless people across the borders’, and the gathering of them ‘back from everywhere in order to ship them to extermination camps was an eloquent demonstration to the rest of the world how really to “liquidate” all problems concerning minorities and the stateless’. Thus, she continues,

after the war it turned out that the Jewish question, which was considered the only insoluble one, was indeed solved – namely, by means of a colonised and then conquered territory – but this solved neither the problem of the minorities nor the stateless. On the contrary, like virtually all other events of the 20th century, the solution of the Jewish question merely produced a new category of refugees, the Arabs, thereby increasing the number of stateless and rightless by another 700,000 to 800,000 people. And what happened in Palestine within the smallest territory and in terms of hundreds of thousands was then repeated in India on a large scale involving many millions of people.

It may well have been such views, along with her criticisms of Zionism in 1944 and 1948, that led to Gershom Scholem’s sharp allegations against Arendt in an exchange of letters in 1963, after the publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem. Scholem called her ‘heartless’ for concentrating dispassionately on Eichmann’s understanding of himself as a functionary. Her text was controversial on a number of accounts. There were those who thought she misdescribed the history of the Jewish resistance under Fascism and unfairly foregrounded the collaborative politics of the Jewish Councils, and those who wanted her to name and analyse Eichmann himself as an emblem of evil. Her account of his trial, moreover, tries to debunk speculations as to his psychological motives as irrelevant to the exercise of justice. And though she agrees with the decision of the Israeli court that Eichmann is guilty and deserving of the death penalty, she takes issues with the proceedings and with the grounds on which that judgment is based. Some objected to her public criticism of the court, arguing that it was untimely or unseemly to criticise Israeli political institutions. That she finds Eichmann careerist, confused, and unpredictably ‘elated’ by renditions of his own infamy failed to satisfy those who sought to find in his motivations the culmination of centuries of anti-semitism in the policies of the Final Solution.

Arendt refused all these interpretations (along with other psychological constructs such as ‘collective guilt’) in order to establish, first, that ‘one cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from Eichmann’ and that if he is in this sense ‘banal’, he is not for that reason ‘commonplace’; and, second, that accounts of his action on the basis of ‘deeper explanations’ are debatable, but that ‘what is not debatable is that no judicial procedure would be possible on the basis of them.’

Scholem went on to impugn Arendt’s personal motives: ‘In the Jewish tradition there is a concept, hard to define and yet concrete enough, which we know as Ahabath Israel: “Love of the Jewish people”. In you, dear Hannah, as in so many intellectuals who came from the German left, I find little trace of this.’ Arendt, after disputing that she was from the German left (and, indeed, she was no Marxist), replies:

You are quite right – I am not moved by any ‘love’ of this sort, and for two reasons: I have never in my life ‘loved’ any people or collective – neither the German people, nor the French, nor the American, nor the working class or anything of that sort. I indeed love ‘only’ my friends and the only kind of love I know of and believe in is the love of persons. Secondly, this ‘love of the Jews’ would appear to me, since I am myself Jewish, as something rather suspect. I cannot love myself or anything which I know is part and parcel of my own person. To clarify this, let me tell you of a conversation I had in Israel with a prominent political personality who was defending the – in my opinion disastrous – non-separation of religion and state in Israel. What [she] said – I am not sure of the exact words any more – ran something like this: ‘You will understand that, as a socialist, I, of course, do not believe in God; I believe in the Jewish people.’ I found this a shocking statement and, being too shocked, I did not reply at the time. But I could have answered: the greatness of this people was once that it believed in God, and believed in Him in such a way that its trust and love towards Him was greater than its fear. And now this people believes only in itself? What good can come out of that? Well, in this sense I do not ‘love’ the Jews, nor do I ‘believe’ in them; I merely belong to them as a matter of course, beyond dispute or argument.

Both the tone and substance of Arendt’s argument raise questions about her understanding of Jewish belonging. What did she mean by saying she was a Jew as a matter of course, beyond dispute or argument? Was she saying she was only nominally a Jew, by virtue of genetic inheritance or historical legacy, or a mixture of the two? Was she saying that she was sociologically in the position of the Jew? When Scholem calls her a ‘daughter of our people’, Arendt sidesteps the attribution of kinship but avows her belonging: ‘I have never pretended to be anything else or to be in any way other than I am, and I have never felt even tempted in that direction. It would have been like saying that I was a man and not a woman – that is to say, kind of insane.’ She goes on to say that ‘to be a Jew’ is an ‘indisputable fact of my life’ and adds: ‘There is such a thing as a basic gratitude for everything that is as it is; for what has been given and not made; for what is physei and not nomo¯.’

Being a woman and being a Jew are both referred to as physei and, as such, naturally constituted rather than part of any cultural order. But Arendt’s answer hardly settles the question of whether such categories are given or made; and this equivocation hardly makes her position ‘insane’. Is there not a making of what is given that complicates the apparent distinction between physei and nomo¯? Arendt presents herself as a Jew who can and will take various political stands, whether or not they conform to anyone else’s idea of what views a Jew should hold or what a Jew should be. Whatever this mode of belonging might be for her, it will not involve conforming to nationalist political views. Moreover, it is difficult to read her response to Scholem as anything other than an effort to make sense of, or give a particular construction to, the physei that she is. And since, in the 1930s, she had subscribed to the idea that the Jewish people were a ‘nation’, and had even dismissed those Jews who held themselves aloof from this idea, one has to wonder: what happened to Arendt’s views of the nation and of modes of cultural belonging between the 1930s and the mid-1960s?

Throughout The Jewish Writings, Arendt struggles with what it means to be Jewish without strong religious faith, and why it might be important to distinguish, as she does, between the secular and the assimilated Jew. She does, after all, mark herself as a Jew, which constitutes a failure of assimilation (the task of which is to lose the mark altogether). In an unfinished piece dated around 1939, Arendt argues that Zionism and assimilationism emerge from a common dogmatism. Assimilationists think that Jews belong to the nations that host them (the anti-Zionist philosopher Hermann Cohen wrote at the turn of the 20th century that German Jews were first and foremost German and could thrive and receive protection only within a German state), whereas Zionists think the Jews must have a nation because every other nation is defined independently of its Jewish minorities. Arendt rebukes them both: ‘These are both the same shortcoming, and both arise out of a shared Jewish fear of admitting that there are and always have been divergent interests between Jews and segments of the people among whom they live.’ In other words, living with others who have divergent interests is a condition of politics that one cannot wish away without wishing away politics itself. For Arendt, the persistence of ‘divergent interests’ does not constitute grounds for either the absorption or the separation of national minorities. Both Zionists and assimilationists ‘retain the charge of foreignness’ levelled against the Jews: assimilationists seek to rectify this foreignness by gaining entrance into the host nation as full citizens, while Zionists assume that there can be no permanent foreign host for the Jewish people, that anti-semitism will visit them in any such arrangement, and that only the establishment of a Jewish nation could provide the necessary protection and place.

Moreover, both positions subscribe to a particular logic of the nation that Arendt starts to take apart, first in the 1930s in her investigations into anti-semitism and the history of the Jews in Europe, then throughout the war years in editorials on Palestine and Israel published in Aufbau, the German-Jewish newspaper, and in her trenchant critique of the nation-state and the production of stateless persons in The Origins of Totalitarianism in the early 1950s.

Obviously, it would be an error to read her response to Scholem as an espousal of assimilationism. She was a secular Jew, but secularity did not eclipse her Jewishness so much as define it historically. She lived, as she put it, in the wake of a certain lost faith. Her experience of Fascism, her own forced emigration to France in the 1930s, her escape from the internment camp at Gurs and emigration to the US in 1941 gave her a historically specific perspective on refugees, the stateless and the transfer and displacement of large numbers of peoples. Arendt’s critique of nationalism emerged, in part, from the experience of exile and displacement that especially affected the Jews in the 1930s and 1940s, but for her, dispossession and displacement were not exclusively ‘Jewish’ problems. There was, she believed, a political obligation to analyse and oppose deportations, population transfers and statelessness in ways that refused a nationalist ethos. Hence her critique of both Zionism and assimilationism. Hence, also, the apparent nominalism of her remark to Scholem that she doesn’t ‘love’ the Jews or ‘believe’ in them, but merely ‘belongs’ to them. Here both ‘love’ and ‘believe’ are housed in quotation marks, but is it not also the generality, ‘the Jews’, to which she objects? After all, she has said she can love not a ‘people’, only ‘persons’.

What is wrong with the notion of loving the Jewish people? In the late 1930s, Arendt argued that efforts to ‘emancipate’ the Jews in 19th-century Europe were invested less in their fate than in a certain principle of progress, one that required that the Jews be thought of as an abstraction: ‘Liberation was to be extended not to Jews one might know or not know, not to the humble peddler or to the lender of large sums of money, but to “the Jew in general”.’ Just as there were exceptional Jews, such as Moses Mendelssohn, who came to stand for ‘the Jews in general’, so the ‘Jew’ came to stand for the progress of human rights. The effect, according to Arendt, was to sever the principle from the person: progressive Enlightenment opposition to anti-semitism consistently cast the ordinary Jew as noxious at the same moment as it championed the rights of the Jews in general. So when Arendt refuses to love ‘the Jewish people’, she is refusing to form an attachment to an abstraction that has supplied the premise and the alibi for anti-semitism.

Scholem’s rebuke is especially problematic since he is writing from Israel in 1963 and objecting to Arendt’s merciless account of the Israeli court procedures at the Eichmann trial. He is accusing her not only of not loving the Jewish people, but of questioning whether Israel and its courts – and perhaps also its strategies of demonisation – were working in legitimate ways. Effectively, when he refers to the Jewish people, he excludes the diasporic or non-Zionist Jew, and so rhetorically reproduces the schism within Jewish culture and politics between the self-loving and those who are not.

Arendt is clearly opposed to a Jewish nationalism founded on secular presumptions. But she doesn’t find a polity based on religious grounds any more acceptable. A just polity will extend equality to all citizens and to all nationalities: that is the lesson she learns from opposing Fascism. She worries openly about the devolution of Judaism from a set of religious beliefs into a national political identity. ‘Those Jews who no longer believe in their God in a traditional way but continue to consider themselves “chosen” in some fashion or other,’ she writes, ‘can mean by it nothing other than that by nature they are better or wiser or more rebellious or salt of the earth. And that would be, twist and turn it as you like, nothing other than a version of racist superstition.’ She claims at one point that ‘our national misery’ began when the Jews relinquished religious values: ‘Ever since then we have proclaimed our existence per se – without any national or usually any religious content – as a thing of value.’ Although she understands the struggle to survive as an indispensable aspect of being Jewish in the 20th century, she finds it unacceptable that ‘survival itself’ has trumped ideals of justice, equality or freedom.

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Arendt thought that the Jews might become a nation among nations, part of a federated Europe; she imagined that all the European nations that were struggling against Fascism could ally with one another, and that the Jews might have their own army that would fight against Fascism alongside other European armies. She argued then for a nation without territory, a nation that makes sense only in a federated form, that would be, by definition, a constitutive part of a plurality. Later she would prefer the proposal of a federated Jewish-Arab state to the established notion that the state of Israel should be based on principles of Jewish sovereignty. Indeed, ‘Jewish sovereignty’ would be a dire category mistake, since it allies a single nation with the state in ways that would inevitably produce massive injustice for minorities. ‘Palestine can be saved as the national homeland of Jews only if (like other small countries and nationalities) it is integrated into a federation,’ she wrote in 1943.

Although this is a secular political solution, in 1941 she states the rationale for it by referring to a religious parable. ‘As Jews,’ she writes, ‘we want to fight for the freedom of the Jewish people, because “If I am not for me – who is for me?” As Europeans we want to fight for the freedom of Europe, because “If I am only for me – who am I?”’ This is the famous question of Hillel, the Jewish commentator of the first century ad. Here, and elsewhere, she draws on the Jewish religious tradition to formulate political principles capable of organising the secular field of politics (which is something other than grounding a secular politics on religious principles). Arendt doesn’t quote Hillel when she writes to Scholem 22 years later – there, she refuses to offer a religious formulation of her own identity – but an echo of Hillel can be heard in the words she does use: ‘I cannot love myself or anything which I know is part and parcel of my own person’; and ‘now this people believes only in itself? What good can come out of that?’ She cannot be only for herself, for then who would she be? But if she is not for herself, who will be?

In the 1930s and early 1940s, the non-Jew Arendt has in mind is, of course, the European gentile. Later, she would make some effort to think about what ‘belonging’ might mean for Jews and Arabs who inhabit the same land, but her views throughout this early period are emphatically Eurocentric. ‘We enter this war as a European people,’ she insisted in December 1941, skewing the history of Judaism by marginalising the Sephardim and Mizrachim (mentioned as ‘Oriental Jews’ in Eichmann). A presumption about the cultural superiority of Europe pervades much of her later writings too, and is clearest in her intemperate criticisms of Fanon, her debunking of the teaching of Swahili at Berkeley, and her dismissal of the black power movement in the 1960s. She clearly does not have racial minorities in mind when she thinks about those who suffer statelessness and dispossession. She appears to have separated the nation from the nation-state, but to the degree that the conception of ‘minorities’ is restricted to national minorities, ‘nation’ not only eclipses ‘race’ as a category, but renders race unthinkable. By the same token, if the Jews are a ‘nation’ without a nation-state, does that allow for a racially and geographically dispersed conception of Jewish heritage that would include the Sephardim and the Mizrachim?

In the 1930s, national belonging is an important value for Arendt, but nationalism is noxious. Her views then vacillate during the next ten years. In 1935, she praised Martin Buber and the socialist project of the kibbutzim. In the early 1940s, she supported the Jewish emigration from Europe to Palestine, but only on the condition that Jews also fought for recognition as a ‘nation’ within Europe; at the same time, she published several editorials in which she asked that the idea of nation be separated from that of territory. She defended the proposal for a Jewish army on that basis, and strongly criticised the British government’s ‘equivocal’ relation to the Jews, as evidenced by the famous White Paper of 1939 that limited the number of Jewish refugees permitted to enter Palestine. In the late 1930s, though, she also wrote that ‘the bankruptcy of the Zionist movement caused by the reality of Palestine is at the same time the bankruptcy of the illusion of autonomous, isolated Jewish politics.’ In 1943, she worried that the proposal for a binational state in Palestine could be maintained only by enhancing the reliance of Palestine on Britain and other major powers, including the United States. Sometimes, she worried that binationalism could work only to the advantage of the Arab population and to the disadvantage of the Jews. In ‘Zionism Reconsidered’ (1944), however, she argued forcefully that the risks of founding a state on principles of Jewish sovereignty could only aggravate the problem of statelessness that had become increasingly acute in the wake of the First and Second World Wars. By the early 1950s, Arendt was arguing that Israel was founded through colonial occupation with the assistance of superpowers and on the basis of citizenship requirements that were anti-democratic. In the 1930s she had worried that the Jews were becoming increasingly stateless; in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the displacement of Palestinians made it imperative that she develop a more comprehensive account of statelessness.

In ‘Zionism Reconsidered’, she calls ‘absurd’ the idea of setting up a Jewish state in a ‘sphere of interest’ of the superpowers. Such a state would suffer under the ‘delusion of nationhood’: ‘Only folly could dictate a policy which trusts a distant imperial power for protection, while alienating the goodwill of neighbours.’ On the one hand, she is clearly anxious to find ways for Israel/Palestine to survive; on the other, she predicts that the foundations proposed for the polity will result in ruin. ‘If the Jewish commonwealth is obtained in the near future … it will be due to the political assistance of American Jews,’ she writes. ‘But if the Jewish commonwealth is proclaimed against the will of the Arabs and without the support of the Mediterranean peoples, not only financial help but political support will be necessary for a long time to come. And that may turn out to be very troublesome indeed for Jews in this country, who after all have no power to direct the political destinies of the Near East.’

In 1948, after the UN had sanctioned the state of Israel, Arendt predicted that ‘even if the Jews were to win the war [of independence], its end would find the … achievements of Zionism in Palestine destroyed … The “victorious” Jews would live surrounded by an entirely hostile Arab population, secluded inside ever threatened borders, absorbed with physical self-defence to a degree that would submerge all other interests and activities.’ She stated once again that partition could not work, and that the best solution would be a ‘federated state’. Such a federation, in her view, ‘would have the advantage of preventing the establishment of sovereignty whose only sovereign right would be to commit suicide.’

Arendt’s investment in the idea of federation was based on the hope that it would undercut nationalism and address the problem of statelessness. If the polity that would guarantee rights is not the nation-state, then it would be either a federation, in which sovereignty is undone through a distribution of its power, or a human rights framework that would be binding on those who collectively produced it. Rights do not belong to individuals, in Arendt’s view, but are produced in concert through their exercise. This post-metaphysical view was appropriate to the post-national federation she imagined for the Jews of Europe in the late 1930s, which is why a Jewish army could represent the ‘nation’ of Jews without any presumption of state or territory. It was also what she came to imagine in 1948 for Jews and for Palestinians, in spite of the founding of the state of Israel on nationalist premises and with claims of Jewish sovereignty. She can be faulted for naivety, but not for her prescience in predicting the recurrence of statelessness and the persistence of territorial violence.

Arendt could be said to have embraced a diasporic politics, centred not on a Jewish homeland but on the rights of the stateless. To read her now is to be reminded of the passages in Edward Said’s book Freud and the Non-European where he suggests that Jews and Palestinians might find commonality in their shared history of exile and dispossession, and that diaspora could become the basis of a common polity in the Middle East. Said sees the basis of solidarity, in part, as the ‘irremediably diasporic, unhoused character of Jewish life’, which aligns it ‘in our age of vast population transfers’ with ‘refugees, exiles, expatriates and immigrants’. If Arendt sometimes argues for home and for belonging (though she does this less frequently over time), it is not to call for a polity built on those established ties of fealty. A polity requires the capacity to live with others precisely when there is no obvious mode of belonging. This is the vanquishing of self-love – the movement away from narcissism and nationalism – which forms the basis for a just politics that would oppose both nationalism and those forms of state violence that reproduce statelessness and its sufferings.

Arendt’s opposition to the dispossessions that afflict any and every minority represents a departure for Jewish thinking about justice. Her position does not universalise the Jew, but opposes the sufferings of statelessness regardless of national status. That the ‘nation’ continues to restrict her conception of the dispossessed minority is clear, and she leaves unanswered a set of important questions: is there an ‘outside’ to every federated polity? Must a federation assume ‘sovereignty’ in the context of international relations? Can international relations be organised on the basis of federative politics and, if so, can international federations enforce their laws without recourse to sovereignty?

We have become accustomed over recent years to the argument that modern constitutions retain a sovereign function and that a tacit totalitarianism functions as a limiting principle within constitutional democracies. Giorgio Agamben’s reading of Carl Schmitt pays particular attention to the exercise of sovereign power to create a state of exception that suspends constitutional protections and rights of inclusion for designated populations within established democratic polities. Arendt’s Jewish Writings offer a valuable counter-perspective. Although Agamben is clearly indebted to Arendt’s The Human Condition in his elaboration of ‘bare life’ (the life which, jettisoned from the polis, is exposed to raw power), it is the nation-state rather than sovereignty that is Arendt’s focus in her work on totalitarianism. By insisting that statelessness is the recurrent political disaster of the 20th century (it now takes on new forms in the 21st), Arendt refuses to give a metaphysical cast to ‘bare life’. Indeed, she makes it quite clear in The Origins of Totalitarianism that the ostensible ‘state of nature’ to which displaced and stateless people are reduced is not natural or metaphysical at all, but the name for a specifically political form of destitution.

Adalah, ‘the legal centre for Arab minority rights in Israel’, recently proposed a ‘democratic constitution’ that starts out not with the question, ‘Who is a Jew?’, but with the question, ‘Who is a citizen?’ Although it does not seek to adjudicate on what establishes the legitimate territory of this state, it does propose a systematic separation of nation and state, and so resonates with an Arendtian politics. Arendt’s idea of a federated polity is not the same as prevailing pluralist modes of multiculturalism, but it does posit a political way of life that is not merely a fractious collection of sovereign cultural identities, but disperses sovereignty, nationalism and individualism alike into new forms of social and political co-existence. Hopeful, perhaps naive, but not for that reason something we can permanently do without – at least not without the ceaseless territorial violence that Arendt warned against.

Reagan's 100th and Nuremberg

2011-02-03T10:29:00.000-08:00

From: Boyle, Francis [mailto:FBOYLE@...]
Sent: Wednesday, February 02, 2011 8:21 PM
To: Killeacle
Subject: Reagan's 100th and Nuremberg

WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
WE ALL LOVE BIG BROTHER

REAGAN WAS PRESIDENT IN 1984

Conclusions and Judgment of Brussels Tribunal on Reagan's Foreign Policy (September 30, 1984)

The International Conference on the Reagan administration's foreign policy convened in Brussels from 28-30 September, 1984 under the auspices of the International Progress Organization. Reports were submitted by international jurists and foreign policy specialists on the various aspects of the Reagan administration's foreign policy.

Among the participants of the conference were Sean McBride (Nobel Laureate, Ireland), Prof. George Wald (Nobel Laureate, Harvard University), General Edgardo Mercado Jarrin (Peru), General Nino Pasti (former Deputy Supreme Commander of NATO) and Hortensia Bussi de Allende (Chile). The reports were presented before a panel of jurists consisting of Hon. Farouk Abu-Eissa (Sudan), attorney, former foreign minister, secretary-general of the Arab Lawyers Union; Prof. Francis A. Boyle (U.S.A.), professor of international law from the University of Illinois, Chairman; Dr. Hans Goeran Franck (Sweden), attorney, member of the Swedish Parliament; Hon. Mirza Gholam Hafiz (Bangladesh), former Speaker of the Bangladesh Parliament and currently a senior advocate of the Bangladesh Supreme Court; Hon. Mary M. Kaufman (U.S.A.), attorney-at-law, prosecuting attorney at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial against I.G. Farben; Dr. Jean-Claude Njem (Cameroon), assistant-professor at the Faculty of Law, Uppsala University and a consultant of the government; Prof. Alberto Ruiz-Eldredge (Peru), professor of law, former president of the National Council of Justice; and Dr. Muemlaz Soysal (Turkey), professor of constitutional law, University of Ankara.

An accusation against the international legality of the Reagan Administration's foreign policy was delivered by the Honorable Ramsey Clark, former U.S. Attorney General. The defense was presented by a legal expert of the Reagan Administration.

Based upon all the reports and documents submitted and the arguments by the advocates, the Brussels Panel of Jurists hereby renders the following conclusions concerning the compatibility of the Reagan Administration's foreign policy with the requirements of international law.

A. Introduction

1. General Introduction. The Reagan administration's foreign policy constitutes a gross violation of the fundamental principles of international law enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations Organization, as well as the basic rules of customary international law set forth in the UN General Assembly's Declaration on the Inadmissibility of Intervention in the Domestic Affairs of States and the Protection of Their Independence and Sovereignty (1965), its Declaration on the Principles of International Law Concerning Friendly Relations and Cooperation Among States in Accordance with the Charter of the United Nations (1970), and its Definition of Aggression (1974), among others. In addition, the Reagan administration is responsible for complicity in the commission of crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, war crimes and grave breaches of the Third and Fourth Geneva Conventions of 1949.

B. Western Hemisphere

2. Grenada. The Reagan administration's 1983 invasion of Grenada was a clear-cut violation of the UN Charter articles 2(3), 2(4), and 33 as well as of articles 18, 20, and 21 of the Revised OAS Charter for which there was no valid excuse or justification under international law. As such, it constituted an act of aggression within the meaning of article 39 of the United Nation's Charter.

3. Threat of U.S. Intervention. In direct violation of the basic requirement of international law mandating the peaceful settlement of international disputes, the Reagan administration has implemented a foreign policy towards Central American that constitutes a great danger of escalation in military hostilities to the point of precipitating armed intervention by U.S. troops into combat against both the insurgents in El Salvador and the legitimate government of Nicaragua.

4. El Salvador. The Reagan administration's illegal intervention inot El Salvador's civil war contravenes the international legal right of self-determination of peoples as recognized by article 1(2) of the United Nations Charter. The Reagan administration has provided enormous amounts of military assistance to an oppressive regime that has used it to perpetrate a gross and consistent pattern of violations of the most fundamental human rights of the people of El Salvador.

5. Nicaragua. The Reagan administration's policy of organizing and participating in military operations by opposition contra groups for the purpose of overthrowing the legitimate government of Nicaragua violates the terms of both the UN and OAS. Charters prohibiting the threat or use of force against the political independence of a state. The Reagan administration has flouted its obligation to terminate immediately its support for the opposition contra groups in accordance with the Interim Order of Protection issued by the International Court of Justice on 10 May 1984.

6. The International Court of Justice. The Panel denounces the patently bogus attempt by the Reagan administration to withdraw from the compulsory jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice in the suit brought against it by Nicaragua for the purpose of avoiding a peaceful settlement of this dispute by the World Court in order to pursue instead a policy based upon military intervention, lawless violence and destabilization of the legitimate government of Nicaragua.

7. Mining Nicaraguan Harbors. The Reagan administration's mining of Nicaraguan harbors violates the rules of international law set forth in the 1907 Hague Convention on the laying of Submarine Mines, to which both Nicaragua and the United States are parties.

C. Nuclear Weapons Policies

8. Arms Control Treaties. The Reagan administration has refused to support the ratification of the Threshold Test Ban Treaty of 1974, the Peaceful Nuclear Explosions Treaty of 1976, and the SALT II Treaty of 1979. In addition to renouncing the longstanding objective of the U.S. government to renegotiate a comprehensive test ban treaty. As such the Reagan administration has failed to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament as required by article 6 of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968. Similarly, the Reagan administration's "Strategic Defense Initiative" of 1983 threatens to breach the Anti-Ballistic Missile Systems Treaty of 1972.

9. Pershing 2 Missiles. The deployment of the offensive, first-strike, counterforce strategic nuclear weapons system known as the Pershing 2 missile in the Federal Republic of Germany violates the non-circumvention clause found in article 12 of the SALT II Treaty. The Reagan administration is bound to obey this prohibition pursuant to the rule of customary international law enunciated in article 18 of the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties to the effect that a signatory to a treaty is obliged to refrain from acts that would defeat the object and purpose of a treaty until it has made its intention clear not to become a party.

10. The MX Missile. The MX missile is an offensive, first-strike, counterforce, strategic nuclear weapons system that can serve no legitimate defensive purpose under UN Charter article 51 and the international laws of humanitarian armed conflict.

11. No-First-Use. In accordance with UN General Assembly Resolution 1553 of 24 November 1961, the Panel denounces the refusal by the Reagan administration to adopt a policy mandating the no-first-use of nuclear weapons in the event of a conventional attack as required by the basic rule of international law dictating proportionality in the use of force even for the purposes of legitimate self-defense.

12. ASAT Treaty. The Panel calls upon both the United States and the Soviet Union to negotiate unconditionally over the conclusion of an anti-satellite weapons treaty.

D. Middle East

13. Lebanon. For the part it played in the planning, preparation and initiation of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the Reagan administration has committed a crime against peace as defined by the Nuremberg Principles. Likewise, under the Nuremberg Principles, the Reagan administration becomes an accomplice to the crimes against humanity, war crimes and grave breaches of the Third and Fourth Geneva Conventions of 1949 that have been committed or condoned by Israel and its allied Phalange and Haddad militia forces in Lebanon. Such complicity includes the savage massacre of genocidal character of hundreds of innocent Palestinians and Lebanese civilians by organized unites of the Phalangist militia at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps located in West Beirut that were then subject to control by the occupying Israeli army. The Reagan administration has totally failed to discharge its obligation to obtain Israel's immediate and unconditional withdrawal from all parts of Lebanon as required by UN Security Council Resolutions 508 and 509 (1982), both of which are legally binding in Israel and the United States under UN Charter article 28. This includes Israeli evacuation of southern Lebanon.

14. The Palestinian Question. The Reagan administration's policy toward the Palestinian people as well as the Reagan "Peace Plan" of 1 September 1982 violates the international legal right of the Palestinian people to self-determination as recognized by UN Charter article 1(2). As recognized by numerous General Assembly resolutions, the Palestinian people have an international legal right to create and independent and sovereign state. The Palestinian Liberation Organization has been recognized as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people by both the United Nations General Assembly and the League of Arab States. The Reagan administration's nonrecognition of the PLO and its attempt to brand the PLO a "terrorist" group contravene the Palestinian people's right to liberation. The panel denounces the negative attitude of the Reagan Administration towards the call by the United Nations' Secretary General for the convocation of an international conference under the auspices of the United Nations, with the United States and the Soviet Union as co-chairmen, and with the participation of all parties involved in the conflict including the PLO, for the purpose of obtaining a just and lasting peace in the Middle East.

15. Israeli Settlements. The Reagan administration's declared position that Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories are "not illegal" is a violation of U.S. obligations under article 1 of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 to ensure respect for the terms of the Convention (here article 49) by other High Contracting Parties such as Israel.

16. Libya. The Reagan administration's dispatch of the U.S. Sixth Fleet into the Gulf of Sidra for the purpose of precipitating armed conflict with the Libyan government constitutes a breach fo the peace under Article 39 of the UN Charter. The Reagan administration's policy to attempt to destabilize the government of Libya violates the terms of the United Nations Charter article 2(4) prohibiting the threat or use of force directed against the political independence of a state.

E. Africa, Asia and the Indian Ocean

17. Apartheid. The Panel denounces the Reagan administration's so-called policy of "constructive engagement" toward the apartheid regime in South Africa. This specious policy encourages discrimination and oppression against the majority of the people of South Africa; it hampers effective action by the international community against apartheid and facilitates aggressive conduct by the South African apartheid regime against neighbor states in violation of the UN Charter. As such, the Reagan administration has become an accomplice to the commission of the international crime of apartheid as recognized by the universally accepted International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid of 1973. The Panel also denounces the cooperation between the Reagan administration and South Africa in military and nuclear matters.

18. Namibia. The Reagan administration has refused to carry out its obligations under Security Council Resolution 435 (1978) providing for the independence of Namibia, as required by article 25 of the UN Charter. The right of the Namibian people to self-determination had been firmly established under international law long before the outbreak of the Angolan civil war. The Reagan administration has no right to obstruct the achievement of Namibian independence by conditioning it or "linking" it to the withdrawal of Cuban troops from Angola in any way. Both the UN General Assembly and the Organization of African Unity have recognized SWAPI as the legitimate representative of the Namibian people and the Reagan administration is obligated to negotiate with it as such.

19. Angola. Cuban troops are in Angola at the request of the legitimate government of Angola in order to protect it from overt and covert aggression mounted by the South African apartheid regime from Namibia. There is absolutely no international legal justification for South African aggression against Angola in order to maintain and consolidate its reprehensible occupation of Namibia. The Angolan government has repeatedly stated that when South Africa leaves Namibia it will request the withdrawal of Cuban troops, and Cuba has agreed to withdraw its troops whenever so requested by Angola. According to the relevant rules of international law, that is the proper sequence of events to be followed. The Reagan administration's "linkage" of the presence of the Cuban troops in Angola with the independence of Namibia encourages South African aggression against Angola, and thus it must share in the responsibility for South Africa's genocidal acts against the people of Angola.

20. Indian Ocean. The Reagan administration's continued military occupation of the island of Diego Garcia violates the international right of self-determination of the people of Mauritius as recognized by the United Nations Charter. The Reagan administration has accelerated the rapid militarization of the U.S. naval base on Diego Garcia as part of its plan to create a jumping-off point for intervention by the Rapid Deployment Force into the Persian Gulf. As such the Reagan administration 's foreign policy towards the Indian Ocean has violated the terms of the UN General Assembly's Declaration of the Indian Ocean as a Zone of Peace (1971).

F. Conclusion

21. United Nations Action. From the foregoing, it is clear that the Reagan administration has substituted force for the rule of international law in its conduct of foreign policy around the world. It has thus created a serious threat to the maintenance of international peace and security under article 39 of the United Nations Charter that calls for the imposition of enforcement measures by the UN Security Council under articles 41 and 42. In the event the Reagan administration exercises its veto power against the adoption of such measures by the Security Council, the matter should be turned over the to UN General assembly for action in accordance with the procedures set forth in the Uniting for Peace Resolution of 1950. In this way the Reagan administration's grievous international transgressions could be effectively opposed by all members of the world community in a manner consistent with the requirements of international law.

Both the Security Council and the General Assembly should also take into account the numerous interventionist measures taken by the Reagan Administration, whether direct or indirect, seeking to impose financial and economic policies which are contrary to the sovereign independence of states, especially in the developing world, and which severely damage the quality of life for all peoples.

Farouk Abu-Eissa

Mary Kaufman

Francis A. Boyle, Chairman

Jean-Claude Njem

Hans Goeran Franck

Alberto Ruiz-Eldredge

Mirza Gholam Hafiz

Muemlaz Soysal

Brussels, Belgium
30 September 1984.

Francis A. Boyle
Law Building
504 E. Pennsylvania Ave.
Champaign, IL 61820 USA
217-333-7954 (voice)
217-244-1478 (fax)
fboyle@...
(personal comments only)

Birches

2011-02-02T20:31:00.000-08:00

By Robert Frost

When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy's been swinging them.
But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay.
Ice-storms do that. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.

Soon the sun's warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust--
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.
But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm
(Now am I free to be poetical?)
I should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows--
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.
One by one he subdued his father's trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them,
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer. He learned all there was
To learn about not launching out too soon
And so not carrying the tree away
Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.
So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It's when I'm weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig's having lashed across it open.
I'd like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth's the right place for love:
I don't know where it's likely to go better.
I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

FERN HILL

2011-02-02T20:01:00.000-08:00

By Dylan Thomas

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.

And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams.

All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
And playing, lovely and watery
And fire green as grass.
And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars
Flying with the ricks, and the horses
Flashing into the dark.

And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
The sky gathered again
And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
Out of the whinnying green stable
On to the fields of praise.

And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
In the sun born over and over,
I ran my heedless ways,
My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace,

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

Border Patrol Headquarters Occupation Protesters to Fight Charges

2011-01-31T15:04:00.000-08:00

NEWS RELEASE

DATE: Monday January 31, 2011

Contact: Alex Soto

Phone: 602-881-6027

Email: stopbordermilitarization@gmail.com

Border Patrol Headquarters Occupation Protesters to Fight Charges

Group Calls for Further Action Against Border Militarization

Tucson, AZ -- On February 23, 2011, 2:00 PM at Tucson City Court, five of the six protesters who locked-down and occupied the US Border Patrol (BP) – Tucson Headquarters on May 21, 2010 are going to trial fighting one count each of "criminal trespassing". One of the six has chosen to take a diversion.

The action was taken, in part, to demand that Border Patrol, Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE), their parent entity, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the Obama administration end militarization of the border, end the criminalization of immigrant communities, and end their campaign of terror which rips families apart through increasing numbers of raids and deportations.

Alex Soto, one of the arrestees and member of O'odham Solidarity Across Borders states, "As we did not enter the BP headquarters alone, but with prayers of O'odham elders and community supporters, we are asking for support once again for our continued stand against border militarization. Our message is the reality for everyone that is forced to feel the pain that borders inflict upon us. Border Patrol is not the only agency responsible for the militarization of the border – and its subsequent destruction of Indigenous and migrant communities – or the only benefactors of border militarization." Soto states.

In a previous release, O'odham Solidarity Across Borders and O'odham elders stated, "The development of the border wall has lead to desecration of Tohono O'odham ancestral graves; it has divided communities and prevents O'odham from accessing sacred places.

Troops and paramilitary law enforcement, detention camps, check points, and citizenship verification are not a solution to "issues" of migration. Indigenous Peoples have existed here long before these imposed borders. Elders inform us that we always honored freedom of movement. Why are Indigenous communities and the daily deaths at the border ignored? The impacts of border militarization are made invisible in the media, and in the popular culture of this country. Even the mainstream immigrants rights movement pushes for “reform” that means further militarization of the border, which means increased suffering for Indigenous communities. Border militarization destroys Indigenous communities."

Since the creation of the current U.S./Mexico border, 45 O’odham villages on or near the border have been completely depopulated.

According to the migrant support group No More Deaths, from October 2009 to Sept. 2010 there have been more than 250 deaths on the Arizona border alone.

Actions toward ending border militarization and the decriminalization of our communities:

- Immediately withdraw National Guard Troops from the US/Mexico border

- Immediately halt development of the border wall

- Immediately remove drones and checkpoints

- Decommission all detention camps and release all presently held undocumented migrants

- Immediately honor Indigenous Peoples rights of self-determination

- Fully comply with the recently signed UN Declaration on othe Rights of Indigenous Peoples

- Respect Indigenous People's inherent right of migration

- End NAFTA, FTAA and other trade agreements

- Immediately repeal SB1070 and 287g

- End all racial profiling

- No BP encroachment/sweeps on sovereign Native land

- No raids and deportations

- Immediate and unconditional regularization (“legalization”) of all people

- Uphold human freedom and rights

- Support dignity and respect

- Support and ensure freedom of movement for all people

Put this message in action and help end the attack on Indigenous and migrant communities. Take these messages to the street where you are. If you can, join us inside and outside the court room in Tucson at 2:00pm. on February 23, 2011.

Tucson City Court is located at 103 E. Alameda St. Tucson.

Syringa, the Abyss, and the Beyond

2011-01-31T13:28:00.000-08:00

By George Hartley

In his poem “Syringa,” John Ashbery stages a double writing of loss. The initial loss is Orpheus’ loss of his love, Eurydice. This loss—this irruption of death and disappearance into the fantasy field of love—throws Orpheus out his customary, everyday existence, characterized by the Imaginary fusion of lover and beloved, into the Dionysian abyss of music. Orpheus’ world is rent apart. Curiously, however, it is not the loss as such that rends his world but his own sorrowful lament in response to that loss:

Orpheus liked the glad personal quality

Of the things beneath the sky. Of course, Eurydice was a part

Of this. Then one day, everything changed. He rends

Rocks into fissures with lament. Gullies, hummocks

Can’t withstand it. The sky shudders from one horizon

To the other, almost ready to give up wholeness.

(HD 69, ll. 1-6)

The once comforting, sheltering sky now shudders and threatens to be swallowed up by the abyss opened up by this elegiac voice, the sky ready to give up its wholeness. What the spacing of the poem prepares us for, however, is the fact that this whole was already fragmented, that Eurydice was already “a part/ . . . .” The line break suggests what Apollo, the second voice of the poem, then tells us explicitly:

All other things must change too.

The seasons are no longer what they once were,

But it is the nature of things to be seen only once,

As they happen along, bumping into other things, getting along

Somehow. That’s where Orpheus made his mistake.

Of course Eurydice vanished into the shade;

She would have even if he hadn’t turned around.

(ll. 11-17)

The Orphic song attempts to freeze the moment of loss eternally through its lament; the Apollonian voice of “reality,” on the other hand, continually, even obsessively reminds Orpheus that death and loss are in the nature of things, that nature being one of continuous process and change. The whole is always already a part. What the reader doesn’t yet realize, however, is that Apollo’s own distanced stance on the eternal round of things is itself the unacknowledged attempt to paste over the abyss opened up through his own loss. This loss, lying “frozen and out of touch,” only accidentally comes to consciousness when “an arbitrary chorus/ Speaks of a totally different incident with a similar name/ In whose tale are hidden syllables/ Of what happened so long before that/ In some small town, one indifferent summer” (ll. 84-88).

What the poem ultimately records is the breakdown of representation itself: the Orphic song outdistances the “matter,” the poem streaking by, “its tail afire, a bad/ Comet screaming hate and disaster, but so turned inward/ That the meaning, good or other, can never/ Become known” (ll. 68-71); while the Apollonian vision depends on the repression of the traumatic event which functions in its very repression as the ground for the dispassionate, merely careful, “scholarly setting down of/ Unquestioned facts, a record of pebbles along the way” (ll. 62-63). When we attempt to eternalize the traumatic moment of the loss in time and to memorialize its emotional fury, to render it by rending the world which now embodies its absence, we end up streaking right past it all aflame into utter meaninglessness. But when we attempt to explain this loss, to rationalize it, to submit it to the symbolic structure which is meant to domesticate it, this loss only breaks through under the mask of some other body, some other long forgotten name which, merely in its structural similarity as a forgotten and repressed name, shatters that symbolic structure itself. We go too far, we don’t go far enough. Either way, the irruption of this trauma into our Imaginary stabilized existence (the “glad, personal quality” of the sky) sets representation into its own ultimately self-destroying motion.

At such a moment we are faced with the beyond of representation: the point at which the representational apparatus turns in on itself and collapses in its inability to flesh out some adequate embodiment of the loss. But it is this loss itself which is the constitutive element of representation. The beyond as the mirage erected in the place of the always-already lost object is in this sense internal to representation as its condition of possibility. But there is another crucial sense in which these Orphic and Apollonian attempts to confront the loss present us with the beyond of representation: the beyond as the original Thing behind the surface appearance that representation provides. Or, in other words, the distinction between appearance and its underlying reality, between phenomena and noumena, between image and concept, between the representation and the Thing-in-itself.

At such a moment we are faced with the beyond of representation: the point at which the representational apparatus turns in on itself and collapses in its inability to flesh out some adequate embodiment of the loss. But it is this loss itself which is the constitutive element of representation. The beyond as the mirage erected in the place of the always-already lost object is in this sense internal to representation as its condition of possibility. But there is another crucial sense in which these Orphic and Apollonian attempts to confront the loss present us with the beyond of representation: the beyond as the original Thing behind the surface appearance that representation provides. Or, in other words, the distinction between appearance and its underlying reality, between phenomena and noumena, between image and concept, between the representation and the Thing-in-itself.

I begin with this particular poem because it stages the setting in motion of a metaphor which continues to lie behind contemporary Marxism’s response to the postmodern sublime—the abyss as the figure for the breakdown of representation. Any theory of ideology has to come to terms with the problem of representation, a problem which itself has a figurative history. This is the case with Althusser’s conception of structural causality as well as with his conception of ideological interpellation. This is the case with Fredric Jameson’s conception of the political unconscious. And this is equally so with Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak’s conception of the subaltern. The figure of the abyss in one way or another imposes itself in these and other Marxist formulations of ideology. This book is an attempt, then, to lay out the terms of the history of this figure as it undergoes various transformations from Kant’s theory of the sublime to Hegel’s speculative reversal to Marx’s scientific inversion on up to the Althusserian moment (which I believe we still are coming to terms with despite the forty-years which have passed since Althusser’s writings on the significance of the passage from the young Marx to the mature one).

Another related figure to the abyss is the beyond—the figure which seems to be pointing to a dimension existing on the other side of the abyss. The key point is that the beyond of representation is representation’s own beyond. That is, the beyond is nothing but the effect of the limit internal to representation itself. I stress this in order to avoid the compelling urge to read the “beyond” of representation as that space or operation or adequation which somehow completes or surpasses the limits of representation. It is in this light that the representation/presentation distinction referred to throughout this book (which in German idealism is written as the Vorstellung/Darstellung distinction) should precisely not be seen as that which somehow poses Darstellung as the more adequate mode of doing justice to the concept (Begriff) to be fleshed out. Presentation is not the better mode of developing or elaborating on the concept in the sense of doing something distinct from representation; presentation—at least as Hegel uses the term—is the operative moment at which representation represents its own failure: since no representation, because of its abstract and seemingly immediate nature, can adequately present its concept, representation must mediate itself, must set itself in motion by staging its own failure arising from its own subjection to time. What this means is that, strictly speaking, there is no beyond of representation. Yet the space of incommensurability opened up in the heart of representation—in, for example, the experience of the sublime—projects just such a beyond both as the more adequate operation and as the Thing beyond appearance. This space of incommensurability—the gap or abyss opened up between the figure and the concept—this space of impossibility is at the same time the space of possibility of representation as such. Without such an immanent limitation, representation could not operate at all.

What this means, in effect, is that the beyond is on this side of appearance. The opposition appearance/essence or sensible/supersensible is the constitutive illusion of appearance itself. As Hegel argues in the Phenomenology of Spirit, “The supersensible is the sensuous and the perceived posited as it is in truth; but the truth of the sensuous and the perceived is to be appearance. The supersensible is therefore appearance qua appearance” (Phenomenology 89). The abyss is thus not a problem of the subject—as the result of the subject’s limited capacity for knowledge beyond sensory experience— but the very ground of the subject: this paradox of a grounding abyss means nothing more than that the subject is this space of incommensurability as such, the problem residing rather on the side of substance (the network of unreflective relationships and activities against which we pose ourselves as active subjects—e.g., society). The subject is nothing but the gap, the space of negativity, inherent in substance itself. The problem of the political subject’s relationship to the social-substance, for example, is thus the problem of the impossibility of society itself: society is impossible in the sense that the social can never be reduced to a given organic being but is rather the scene of antagonism, as Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe have suggested. In the words of Slavoj Zizek, “the Hegelian ‘subject’ is ultimately nothing but a name for the externality of the Substance to itself, for the ‘crack’ by way of which the Substance becomes ‘alien’ to itself, (mis)perceiving itself through human eyes as the inaccessible-reified Otherness.”

It is in this sense that the Apollonian commentary on Eurydice should be taken. The point isn’t simply that all things change in time; the point is rather that the Thing which made Eurydice “Eurydice,” that intimate kernel “in Eurydice more than Eurydice” (as Lacan would say), is nothing but a fantasy construct, yet this fantasy is a constitutive one. Orpheus’ entire symbolic field of reference is determined by the placement of this Eurydice-Thing in the gap at the heart of the symbolic. Eurydice is the Thing which gives Orpheus’ symbolic order consistency. This Thing occupying the abyss of representation is Hegel’s transformation of the Kantian sublime (which itself refers to the abyss and its beyond). Once the absolute negativity of death and disappearance intervenes, however, Orpheus’ own identity disintegrates, in the process of which he is desubjectivized. The point is that Orpheus, in his descent into Hades, confronts Eurydice in the space between the two deaths: Eurydice’s actual physical death and her subsequent symbolic death. In such a state of subjective destitution, Orpheus can no longer allow himself the fantasy of representation: no mere image can survive the irruption of the Real, the point at which representation fails. Yet “Syringa” presents this failure as such: once both the Orphic and Apollonian responses to loss either exhaust themselves or are forced to confront their repressed loss, the poem itself rises up as the record of this failure. Here we have the presentation beyond representation. It is only at this point, with the loss of the loss which the poem enacts, that the initial loss no longer functions as the avoidance of the Real. For the initial loss, in both Orpheus and Apollo, functions as the node or kernel around which their symbolizations organize themselves in order to repress, each in its own way, the radical negativity of the Real. Eurydice vanishes into the shade, the beyond of representation, not in the sense of entering another world (Hades) but in the sense that the fantasy construct that was Eurydice from the start can no longer function since it was nothing more than the split internal to the field of representation in the first place. Eurydice and the lost summer love were nothing but the retroactive embodiments of the negative space of desire itself.

The question of representation and its beyond, then, has to do with a complex of themes which grow out of and receive varying inflections from the seemingly differing theoretical practices of a certain Hegelianism, psychoanalysis, and Marxism. These themes work together in different ways in the (re)turn to Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Lacan as exemplified (in distinct ways) in the works of Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Zizek. And for both Jameson and Zizek this return functions as a clarification and extension of questions raised by Louis Althusser and the various Althusserians and post-Althusserians in his wake. The key problem or obsession motivating this return to figures who seemed safely interred in the aftermath of the poststructuralist moment (which was defined in large part as a rejection of “Hegel,” “Freud,” and “Marx”) is that which obsessed the poststructuralisms as well—representation. But as Hamlet still testifies, the dead have a habit of returning from the grave. The figure of Eurydice still had some work to do in the psychic economy of Orpheus before she would (or could) disappear, traumatically, into her second, symbolic death.

[The above is from Chapter One of my Abyss of Representation: Marxism and the Postmodern Sublime, Duke UP, 2003.]

A State of Siege

2011-01-30T12:44:00.000-08:00

Mahmoud Darwish - Ramallah - January 2002

Translated by Ramsis Amun

Here, where the hills slope before the sunset and the chasm of time
near gardens whose shades have been cast aside
we do what prisoners do
we do what the jobless do
we sow hope

In a land where the dawn sears
we have become more doltish
and we stare at the moments of victory
there is no starry night in our nights of explosions
our enemies stay up late, they switch on the lights
in the intense darkness of this tunnel

Here after the poems of Job, we wait no more

This siege will persist until we teach our enemies
models of our finest poetry

the sky is leaden during the day
and a fiery orange at night… but our hearts
are as neutral as the flowery emblems on a shield

here, not “I”
Here, Adam remembers the clay of which he was born

He says, on the verge of death, he says,
“I have no more earth to lose”
Free am I, close to my ultimate freedom, I hold my fortune in my own hands
In a few moments, I will begin my life
born free of father and mother
I will chose letters of sky blue for my name

Under siege, life is the moment between remembrance
of the first moment, and forgetfulness of the last

here, under the mountains of smoke, on the threshold of my home,
time has no measure
We do what those who give up the ghost do…
we forget our pain

Pain is when the housewife forsakes hanging up the clothes to dry and is content
that this flag of Palestine should be without stain

There is no Homeric echo here
Myths come knocking on our door when we need them
There is no Homeric echo here… only a general
looking through the rubble for the awakening state
concealed within the galloping horse from Troy

The soldiers measure the space between being and nothingness
with field-glasses behind a tank’s armoury

We measure the space between our bodies and the coming rockets
with our sixth sense alone

You there, by the threshold of our door
Come in, and sip with us our Arabic coffee
[you may even feel that you are human, just as we are]
you there, by the threshold of our door
take your rockets away from our mornings
we may then feel secure
[and almost human]

We may find time for relaxation and fine art
We may play cards, and read our newspapers
Catching up on the news of our wounded past
and we may look up our star signs in the year
two thousand and two, the camera smiles
to those born under the sign of the siege

Whenever yesterday comes to me, I say to her,
Now’s not the right time. Go
and come tomorrow!

I wrack my head, but uselessly.
What can someone like me think of, there,
on the tip of the hillside, for the past 3 thousand years,
and in this passing moment?
My thoughts slay me
my memory awakens me

When the helicopters disappear the doves fly back
white, very white, marking the cheeks of the horizon
with liberated wings. They revive their radiance and their ownership
of the sky, and of playfulness. Higher and higher they fly,
the doves, very white. ‘O that the sky
was real’ [a man passing between two bombs cried]
A sparkling sky, a vision, lightning!
all very similar….
soon I will know if this is indeed
a revelation
or my close friends will know that the poem
has gone, and yoked its poet

[to a critic]: Don’t interpret my words
as you stir the sugar in your cup, or munch your breast of chicken!
Words put me under siege in my sleep…
the words I did not utter.
They write me, then leave me searching for the remains of my sleep

The evergreen Cypresses behind the soldiers are minarets protecting
the sky from falling. Behind the barbed wire
are soldiers urinating- protected by a tank.
The Autumn day completes its golden stroll on the pavements of
a street as empty as a church after Sunday prayers

Tomorrow we will love life.
When tomorrow comes, life will be something to adore
just as it is, ordinary, or tricky
gray, or colourful…stripped of judgement day and purgatory…
and if joy is a necessity
let it be
light on the heart and the back
Once embittered by joy, twice shy

A satirical writer said to me:
If I knew the end of the story at the very beginning
there would be nothing to laugh about!

[To a killer:] If you reflected upon the face
of the victim you slew, you would have remembered your mother in the room
full of gas. You would have freed yourself
of the bullet’s wisdom,
and changed your mind: ‘I will never find myself thus.’

[To another killer:] If you left the foetus thirty days
in its mother’s womb, things would have been different.
The occupation would be over and this suckling infant
would forget the time of the siege
and grow up a healthy child
reading at school, with one of your daughters
the ancient history of Asia.
They might even fall in love
and give birth to a daughter [she would be Jewish by birth].
What, then, have you done now?
Your daughter is now a widow
and your granddaughter an orphan.
What have you done with your scattered family?
And how have you slain three doves in one story?

This verse was not
really necessary. Forget about the refrain
and forget about being economical with the pain.
It’s all superflous
like so much dross

The mist is darkness- a thick, white darkness
peeled by an orange, and a promising woman

The siege is lying in wait.
It is lying in wait on a tilted stairway
in the midst of a storm.

We are alone. We are alone to the point
of drunkenness with our own aloneness,
with the occasional rainbow visiting.

We have brothers and sisters overseas..
kind sisters, who love us..
who look our way and weep.
And secretly they say
“I wish that siege was here, so that I could…”
But they cannot finish the sentence.
Do not leave us alone. No.
Do not leave us alone.

Our losses are between two and eight a day.
And ten are wounded.
Twenty homes are gone.
Forty olive groves destroyed,
in addition to the structural damage
afflicting the veins of the poem, the play,
and the unfinished painting.

In the alleyway, lit by an exiled lantern,
I see a refugee camp at the crossroads of the winds.
The south rebels against the wind.
The east is a west turned religious.
The west is a murderous truce minting the coinage of peace.
As for the north, the distant north,
it is not a place or a geographical vicinity.
It is the conference of heavenly divinity.

A woman said to a cloud: cover my dear one,
for my clothes are wet with his blood.

If you are not rain, o dear one,
then be a tree,
fertile and verdant. Be a tree.
And if not a tree, o dear one
be a stone
laden with dew. Be a stone.
And if not a stone, o dear one,
be the moon itself
in the dreams of she who loves you. Be the moon itself.
[thus a woman said
to her son, in his funeral]

O you who are sleepless tonight, did you not tire
of following the light in our story
and the red blaze in our blood?
Did you not tire, you who are sleepless tonight?

Standing here. Sitting here. Always here. Eternally here,
we have one aim and one aim only: to continue to be.
Beyond that aim we differ in all.
We differ on the form of the national flag (we would have done well if we had chosen
o living heart of mine, the symbol of a simple mule).
We differ on the words of the new anthem
(we would have done well to choose a song on the marriage of doves).
We differ on the duties of women
(we would have done well to choose a woman to run the security services).
We differ on proportions, public and private.
We differ on everything. We have one aim: to continue to be.
After fulfilling this aim, we will have time for other choices.

He said to me, on his way to jail,
“When I am released I will know that praise of nation
is like pouring scorn on nation-
a trade like any other!

A little of the infinite blue
suffices
to reduce the burden of our times
and cleanse the mud from this place right now

The spirit needs to improvise
and walk upon its silken soles
by my side, as hand in hand, two old friends
we share a crust of bread
and an old flask of wine
walking the path together,
then our days fork off into two separate paths:
I to the unknown, and she
sits squatting upon a high rock

[to a poet] Whenever the sunset eludes you
you are ensnared in the solitude of the gods.
Be ‘the essence’ of your lost subject
and the subject of your lost essence. Be present in your absence

He finds time for sarcasm:
My telephone has stopped ringing.
My doorbell has also stopped ringing.
So how did you know
that I am not here?

He finds time for song:
Waiting for you, I cannot wait
I cannot read Dostoyevsky
nor listen to Umm Kalthum, Maria Callas or another.
Waiting for you, the hands of the watch go from right
to left
to a time without a place.
Waiting for you, I didn’t wait for you.
I waited for eternity.

He asks her, “What kind of flower is your favourite?”
She says, “The carnation. The black carnation.”
He asks her, “And where will you take me, with those black carnations?”
She says, “To the abyss of life within me.”
She says, “Further, further, further.”

This siege will endure until the besiegers feel, like
the besieged
that anger
is an emotion like any other.

“I don’t love you. I don’t hate you,”
The prisoner said to the interrogator. “My heart is full
of that which is of no concern to you. My heart is full of the aroma of sage.
My heart is innocent, radiant, brimming.
There is no time in the heart for tests. No.
I do not love you. Who are you that I may give my love to you?
Are you part of my being? Are you a coffee rendezvous?
Are you the wind of the flute, and a song, that I may love you?
I hate imprisonment. But I do not hate you.”
Thus a prisoner said to the investigator. “My feelings are not your concern.
My emotions are my own private night…
my night which moves from bed to bed free of rhyme
and of double meanings!

We sat far from our destinies, like birds
which build their nests in cracks in statues
or in chimneys, or in tents
erected on the prince’s path at the time of the hunt

On my ruins the shadows grow green
and the wolf sleeps on a hybernating poem,
dreaming, like me, and like a guardian angel,
that life is pure and free of label

Myths refuse to amend their patterns.
Perhaps they were struck by a crack in the hull;
perhaps their ships have been stranded on
a land without a people.
Thus the idealist was overcome by the realist.
But the ships will not change their mould.
Whenever an unpleasant reality crosses their path
they demolish it with a bulldozer.
The colour of their truth dictates the text: she is beautiful,
white, without blemish.

[to a semi-orientalist] Let’s say things are the way you think they are -
that I am stupid, stupid, stupid
and that I cannot play golf
or understand high technology
nor can fly a plane!
Is that why you have ransomed my life to create yours?
If you were another - if I were another
we would have been a couple of friends who confessed our need for folly
But the fool, like Shylock the merchant,
consists of heart, and bread, and two frightened eyes

Under siege, time becomes a location
solidified eternally
Under siege, place becomes a time
abandoned by past and future

This low, high land
this holy harlot…
we do not pay much attention to the magic of these words
a cavity may become a vacuum in space
a contour in geography

The dead besiege me with every new day
and ask me, “Where were you? Give back
to the lexicon all the words
you offered me
and let the sleepers sleep without phantoms in their dreams!
The dead teach me the lesson: there is no aesthetic beyond freedom

The dead point out to me: why search beyond the horizon
for the eternal virgins? We loved life
on earth, between the fig and the pine trees
but we couldn’t find our way even there. We searched
until we gave life all we owned: the purple blood in our veins

The dead besiege me. “Do not walk in the funeral
if you did not know me. I seek no compliments
from man nor beast

The dead warn me. “Do not believe their rejoicing.
Listen instead to my dad as he looks at my photo crying.
“How did you take my place, son, and jump ahead of me?
I should have gone first! I should have gone first!”

The dead besiege me. “I have only changed my place of abode and my furnishings.
The deer now walk on my bedroom’s roof
and the moon warms the ceiling from the pain
thus putting an end to my pain
to put an end to my wailing.”

and the moon warms the ceiling
to put an end to my wailing.”

This siege will endure until we are truly persuaded
into choosing a harmless slavery, but
in total freedom!

To resist: that means to ensure the health
of heart and testicles, and that your ancient disease
is still alive and well in you
a disease called hope

in the remains of the dawn I walk outside of my own body
in the remains of the night I hear the footsteps of my own being

I raise my cup to those who drink with me
to an awakening to the beauty of the butterfly
in the long tunnel of this dark night

I raise my cup to those who drink with me
in the thick darkness of a night overflowing with crippled souls
I raise my cup to the apparition in my being

[to a reader] Don’t trust the poem
She is the absentee daughter. She is neither an intuition
nor a surmise, but a sense of disaster

If love is crippled, I will heal it
with exercise and humour
and with separating the singer from the song

My friends are ever preparing a party for me-
a farewell party, and a comfortable grave in the shadow of the oak
together with a marble witness from the tombstone of time
But I seem to be first in attending their funerals.
Who has died today?

The siege is transforming me from a singer
to a sixth string on a five string violin

The deceased, daughter of
the deceased, who is herself daughter of the deceased, who is the deceased’s sister
The deceased resister’s sister is related by marriage to the mother of the deceased, who is grandaughter of the deceased’s grandfather
and neighbour to the deceased’s uncle (etc. ..etc.)
No news worries the developed world,
for the time of barbarism has passed
and the victim is Joe Bloggs. Nobody knows his name,
and the tragedy, like the truth, is relative (etc. ..etc.)

Quiet, quiet, for the soldiers need
at this hour to listen to the songs
which the dead resisters had listened to, and have remained
like the smell of coffee, in their blood, fresh

Truce, truce. A time to test the teachings: can helicopters be turned into ploughshares?
We said to them: truce, truce, to examine intentions.
The flavour of peace may be absorbed by the soul.
Then we may compete for the love of life using poetic images.
They replied, “Don’t you know that peace begins with oneself,
if you wish to open the door to our citadel of truth?
So we said, “And then?”

Writing is a small ant which bites extinction.
Writing is a bloodless wound.

Our cups of coffee, and the birds, and the green trees
with the blue shade, and the sun leaping from wall
to wall like a doe
and the waters in the skies of infinite shapes, in what is left to us
of sky…and other matters the memory of which has been put on hold
prove that this morning is strong and beautiful
and that we are guests of evermore

The Blasphemy of Mourning

2011-01-30T06:51:00.000-08:00

By George Hartley, January 29, 2011

The Blasphemy of Mourning.

The distinction between mourning and melancholy? It comes down to narratives and their impossibilities. The lost loved object and the twists and turns of trauma.

For it’s the narratives that we lose at the moment we lose all else. There is no story we can tell ourselves in the moment of trauma that can make sense of what’s happened to us. The stories by which we charted our stars and steered our boats no longer make sense, no longer offer us a conceivable order to the terrible universe or give us a sense of our place within that universe. We lose, have lost our moorings.

Melancholy stands with the tragic truth of death in its tearing into and disfiguring our universes. Our songs. Our stories. No story can be true to the darkness, for every story in its illusion of narrative order, its arrangement of character relations in the world, rings hollow and false in the wake of tragedy. Nothing can explain this. Dead children most definitely are not God’s little angels dancing in their new-found heaven, and to suggest as much is to profane the terrible illogic of traumatic truth. Smash the ceramic cherubs on the ground!

But mourning comes along one day—for some—and offers just such a story to domesticate the grief and horror into the “way things are.” The story might give us a happy world and a choir shouting heaven’s glories. Or it might give us reasons for the darkness, and in its dystopic immediacy give us answers to the questions of Why? Who’s responsible? Whom can we celebrate and whom can we hate? Whom can we blame and in whose lap we can bundle up the universe’s unknowns—the lap of our newly beloved enemy?

Society cannot exist without its narratives, and so the hounds of social order badger the melancholic into accepting new testaments. But these stories reek of blood and lies. The charnel houses’ stench cannot be brushed aside so easily. The grit of bone and ashes does not sink so quickly beneath the ocean’s waves. Responsibility, for better or for worse, can only make sense in a world that responds and makes room for our responses in return. They reek, those stories, of blood and lies, and blaspheme against the sacred truths of loss and the evacuations of longing. The sun, radiating all back into itself, sucks life and sense into its own darkness. The blossoming flowers in spring are the greatest of mockeries, for what logic remains that can guide their resurrections?

No, not stories but tragic songs, the poetry of Orpheus’s lamentations sounding their way into the fractures of the cosmos, his howlings of despair, the swirl of melancholy song from out of the sunken heart of sorrow. Songs against the blaspheming crocuses peeking through the snow.

[NOTE: This is part of a larger work in process entitled "Paper Cranes and the Beauty of Disaster." In those terms, it is incomplete. In its own terms, though—the terms of melancholy—it is true to itself and stands on its own. — George]

Book review: From mourning to mobilization

2011-01-29T13:32:00.000-08:00

Raymond Deane, The Electronic Intifada, 26 January 2011

Ronit Lentin is an Israeli-born academic and novelist now based in Ireland, where she teaches sociology at Trinity College, Dublin. She describes her latest book, Co-memory and Melancholia: Israelis Memorialising the Palestinian Nakba, as "a reflection on the contested relations between commemoration and appropriation from the standpoint of a member of the perpetrators' collectivity, whose politics align her with the colonized." Writing it led her "to think of the obsessive preoccupation with Palestine and Palestinians by anti-Zionist Jews ..." as involving "a deep melancholia for the Palestine they/we destroyed and the Palestinians they/we dispossessed" (5), amounting to "unresolved melancholic grief for Zionism's own original sin" (153) -- the 1948 Nakba, when more than 750,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled from Zionist militias when Israel was established.

That these issues are of more than theoretical import for Lentin is evident from her 1989 novel Night Train to Mother, and from this book's autobiographical/biographical (or "ethnobiographical") strand concerning her father who, as a soldier, may or may not have participated in ethnically cleansing Palestinians from Haifa in 1948. Indeed, a sense of personal trauma sometimes seems to cry out from the text, adding a dimension intriguingly at odds with its aspirations to "dry" academic objectivity: "I cannot stop wondering why we do this work" (53).

Following Freud, who "posit[ed] memory as the root cause of trauma but also the source of its resolution," Lentin defines mourning as "a finite reaction to loss" focusing on a specific object in the knowledge that it no longer exists and constituting a step towards healthy acceptance of that loss. Melancholia on the other hand, which "can regress into narcissism," is a pathology that "shifts the mourning from the lost object to the grieving subject" (50-51).

She questions whether "co-memorizing the Nakba in Hebrew shifts the object of commemoration from the colonized Palestinians to the colonizing Israelis who use this commemorative act to construct their own (Israeli Jewish) identity" (129). The "necessary conclusion of commemorating the Nakba must be recognizing the Palestinian right of return" (164), which ultimately entails "calling for the demise of Israel as a Jewish state" (169).

Lentin tells us (128) that "the impetus for writing this book owes a lot to the work of Zochrot" (Hebrew for "remembering"), an Israeli Jewish nongovernmental organization founded in 2002 that aims to raise awareness of the Nakba among Jewish Israelis by, for example, "organizing tours to Palestinian villages destroyed in 1948," and "post[ing] signs that commemorate different sites in the depopulated villages ... and giv[ing] details about each of them through testimonies of refugees" (135).

Her chapter on Zochrot (127-152) begins with an account of her uneasy relationship with the organization and its founder and director Eitan Bronstein. He claimed she had "misrepresented the group's work and intentions" in a 2008 paper, in which she had also mentioned "a former Palestinian Zochrot member" whose words she had quoted without explicit permission, thus herself becoming guilty, in her own terms, of "appropriating the Palestinian voice." "This exchange," she tells us, "made me rethink both my methodological approach and my analysis" of Zochrot's activities, which she had accused with some harshness of "perpetuat[ing] rather than contest[ing] the ongoing colonization of Palestine" (127-8).

Such harshness becomes comprehensible when one reads that Bronstein has described his relationship with the sites of Palestinian dispossession as a "conquest." Lentin quotes Zochrot member Tamar Avraham: "I realized he didn't understand my problem, because ... [f]or me, with my European, anti-colonial background conquering is always negative, whereas for him, out of Zionist tradition and language, it is something positive" (148-9).

Similarly, Jeff Halper of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) is criticized for using the phrase "redeeming Israel" in the subtitle of his book An Israeli in Palestine. Lentin claims that "[t]he Palestinian other and his oppression by the Israeli house demolition policies seems to be subsumed into the anecdotal telling of the self-realization of the hegemonic Israeli 'we'" (97).

Machsom Watch, "a group of women who observe [Israeli army] checkpoints and report their observations online," while "important ... in alerting the Israeli and global publics to the checkpoint regime," nonetheless "arguably enables the military to maintain this draconian regime, and ... inadvertently justifies its excesses" (132).

Surely, however, Halper has made an exemplary journey from unthinking Zionist to oppositional Israeli activist; his lucid analysis of Israel's "matrix of control" is an indispensable reference point. Bronstein and Zochrot have come to advocate the Palestinian right of return after an elaborate and ongoing process of consultation and self-criticism, scrupulously detailed by Lentin, and have indeed taken some of her strictures on board (128). Machsom Watch, as she acknowledges, is split between advocates of resistance versus advocates of protest and hence, like Zochrot, is presumably "an evolving group" (150).

Lentin counterposes the anti-Zionist architect Eyal Weizman's "potent argument" that, as she paraphrases him, "those who oppose the state participate in producing its oppressive policies" (possibly the most demobilizing formulation imaginable), with the ex-Israeli British-based musician Gilad Atzmon's contention that to oppose Zionism "as a Jew" is to accept Zionism. Lentin situates herself somewhere in the middle. She acknowledges that her "own opposition does stem from [her] own Israeli Jewishness" but has led her to a "not merely identitarian but rather political" activism leading to advocacy of the Palestinian right of return (163-4).

The issues raised by Lentin in this dense and often forbidding book are of central importance, and one hopes that her critique of the narcissism often marring the effectiveness of internal Israeli resistance to Zionism will itself contribute to that resistance.

At times, however, I fear that the fierceness of this critique may itself prove demobilizing, convincing Israeli activists that "they can't win." I miss an acknowledgment that there is a younger generation of Israeli activists unhampered by the shackles of memory, indifferent to conquest or redemption, and prepared to risk life and limb alongside their dispossessed Palestinian comrades and international militants in resisting the actions of the Israeli military (for example, Anarchists Against the Wall). I also miss an advocacy of boycott as the most powerful tool to isolate the Zionist regime and convince it that there is a price to pay for its racist and colonial policies. Perhaps melancholia and mourning can only be transcended by mobilization.

Raymond Deane is an Irish composer and political activist.

Fly Me to the Moons

2011-01-29T12:25:00.000-08:00

From Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness, Vintage, 1996.

People go mad in idiosyncratic ways. Perhaps it was not surprising that, as a meteorologist's daughter, I found myself, in that glorious illusion of high summer days, gliding, flying, now and again lurching through cloud banks and ethers, past stars, and across fields of ice crystals. Even now, I can see in my mind's rather peculiar eye an extraordinary shattering and shifting of light; inconstant but ravishing colors laid out across miles of circling rings; and the almost imperceptible, somehow surprisingly pallid, moons of this Catherine wheel of a planet. I remember singing “Fly Me to the Moons” as I swept past those of Saturn, and thinking myself terribly funny. I saw and experienced that which had been only in dreams, or fitful fragments of aspiration.

"Was it real? Well, of course not, not in any meaningful sense of the word real. But did it stay with me? Absolutely. Long after my psychosis cleared, and the medications took hold, it became part of what one remembers forever, surrounded by an almost Proustian melancholy. Long since that extended voyage of my mind and soul, Saturn and its icy rings took on a elegiac beauty, and I don't see Saturn's image now without feeling an acute sadness at its being so far away from me, so unobtainable in so many ways.

Burning Down the House: Laura Ingalls Wilder and American Colonialism

2011-01-28T11:11:00.000-08:00

BURNING DOWN THE HOUSE: LAURA INGALLS WILDER AND AMERICAN COLONIALISM

By Waziyatawin, 2006

[The following essay remains one of the major works challenging the normalization of colonialism in U.S. public education and is, as such, a critical resource for other such decolonizing projects. The version here appeared as Chapter Three in Unlearning the Language of Conquest: Scholars Expose Anti-Indianism in America. Edited by Wahinkpe Topa (Four Arrows) AKA Don Trent Jacobs. Austin: U of Texas P, 2006, pp. 66-80. Thanks to Tracy Navarro for help with editing. — George]

***

[p. 66]

In the previous chapter, Dr. Johansen referred to Rush Limbaugh's contribution to anti-Indian hegemony, placing him on par with a number of academics who work to dismiss the truth about the origins of U.S. democratic ideals. In many instances both radio personalities and academics use the same propaganda strategies to support a colonizing agenda.1 This chapter adds popular literature to the list of harmful and immoral ideologies” that must be “laid to rest, not from the reaches of historical inquiry or discussions of racism, oppression, genocide and colonization, but as values with which we indoctrinate our children."

Waziyatawin narrates both a scholarly study and a personal story that relates to the example of Wilder's famous book, Little House on the Prairie, to show that, “Indeed, anti-Indian educational and ideological hegemony is so firmly established, most Americans cannot recognize it even when it appears before their eyes." The truth of her statement was reinforced just a few minutes ago when a good friend of mine who serves with me in a local Veterans for Peace chapter and who is usually a careful, critical thinker, sent me a recent 60 Minutes commentary of CBS correspondent Andy Rooney, referring to it as a ''great comment” on U.S. policy. Rooney's piece, entitled, “Our Darkest Days Are Here,” did speak eloquently of his sadness about the U.S. torture of prisoners in Iraq, but the anti-Indianism in his opening was not noticed by my activist friend until after I pointed it out: “If you were going to make a list of the great times in American history, you'd start with the day in 1492 when Columbus got here . . . and perhaps beating Hitler and putting a man on the moon would be up near the top as well.”2

Waziyatawin Angela Cavender Wilson is a Wahpetunwan Dakota from the Upper Sioux Reservation in southwestern Minnesota. She received her BA in History and American Indian Studies from the University of Minnesota in 1992 and her PhD in American History from Cornell University in 2000. In 2002 Angela served as co-coordinator for the Dakota Commemorative March, a 150 mile-long, seven-day event to honor the Dakota people, primarily women and children, who were force marched November 7-13, 1862, from the Lower Sioux Agency to a concentration camp at Fort Snelling. She is currently an Assistant [p. 67] Professor of American Indian History in the history department at Arizona State University and is author of Remember This! (De Kiksuyapo!) Dakota Decolonization and the Eli Taylor Narratives.

We have been lied to so many times that we will not believe any words that your agent sends to us.

-SHORT BULL (BRULE' SIOUX), 1890

How do a country and its citizens justify genocide and land theft? How do they transform obviously wrong or immoral actions into something righteous and worthy of celebration? To answer these questions one need only examine the beloved classic Little House on the Prairie 3 to observe how expertly Laura Ingalls Wilder crafted a narrative that transformed the horror of white supremacist genocidal thinking and the stealing of Indigenous lands into something noble, virtuous, and absolutely beneficial to humanity. Unfortunately, rather than recognize the perversion of morality inherent in Wilder's book, the American public celebrates the work as laudable children's literature and the author as an American icon.

This book and the entire Little House series have been best sellers and favorites among the American public since the first book, Little House in the Big Woods, was released in 1932. As First Lady Laura Bush kicked off her campaign to fight illiteracy at the beginning of her husband's presidency, she proudly characterized Little House on the Prairie as a childhood favorite. 4 Similarly, in 2004 the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Library Association selected Little House as one of the fifteen books for their “We the People Bookshelf,” chosen for exemplifying the theme of courage. Five hundred schools throughout the country were awarded the bookshelf of “classic” works. NEH Chairman Bruce Cole announced the program stating, “The We the People Bookshelf enables younger readers to examine the meaning of courage from many perspectives. These books inspire readers with stories of characters, real and fictional, who demonstrated personal courage when faced with difficult situations in uncertain times.” 5 In their 2002 spring/summer issue, “Adventures across America,” Travel and Leisure Family magazine promoted “A Little Drive on the Prairie,” which encouraged readers to relive the fantasy of Wilder's pioneer days: “Pack your bonnet and steer your wagon to America's heartland, where pioneer houses and pageants bring the stories of Laura Ingalls Wilder to life.” 6 From these examples it is clear that the Little House love affair runs through all levels of the American populace, from school children all the way to America's institutions, media, and even First Lady.

The destructiveness of this love affair hit me personally in October 1998 when my eight-year-old daughter, Autumn, returned from school in tears because she had heard “The only good Indian is a dead Indian” in Wilder's Little House on the Prairie, the book her third-grade teacher, Bev Tellefson, was reading aloud to her students. We were living on the Upper Sioux Reservation at the time, but like other reservation children my daughter attended Bert Raney Elementary in the Yellow Medicine East school district (YME), the public school in the town of Granite Falls, Minnesota, bordering our reservation. Very disturbed by the way this reading made her feel, Autumn asked me to speak to her class about “our side of the story.” Autumn's teacher was a fervent Wilder fan and had already commented to us that she loved the books so much she made a point of attending the Laura Ingalls Wilder pageant held in Walnut Grove, Minnesota, every summer. Our close proximity to the Ingalls family homestead sites was certainly a factor in the contestation over the interpretation of this issue. I did speak to the class with the teacher's permission and then wrote a critique of the book. I then presented this to the YME school board at a special meeting called for the purpose of addressing this issue, along with a request that the book be removed from the school curriculum. This began a year-long controversy primarily over the issue of “book banning” that gained local, state, and national attention.

The first reaction to this controversy, particularly by non-Indigenous people, has generally been one of anger and confusion. While there has been frequent outrage that an Indigenous mother would challenge an American canon, there is also a great deal of bewilderment. How could anyone possibly challenge a much-loved classic? The general populace does not understand what could be objectionable, let alone racist or colonialist, about Little House on the Prairie, especially the generation that grew up with the white-washed television series of the same name starring Michael Landon and Melissa Gilbert. Even those who read the books frequently do not understand what might be offensive about them. Indeed, anti-Indian educational and ideological hegemony is so firmly established, most Americans cannot recognize it even when it appears on paper before their eyes.

When I presented my critique before the school board, several of the board members admitted that they loved the Wilder series, had read the books as children, and had read them as adults to their own children. They admitted frankly that they arrived at the meeting prepared to defend the use of the book in the classroom. These members were intimately familiar with the book, yet they were blind to the racism contained in its pages. However, after hearing my appeal and reading the four-page critique of the book I presented to them, all but one of the school board members were persuaded that the book was indeed racist and did not belong in the classroom. They voted to pull the book from the curriculum, at least temporarily, until a committee could be established to review the book more thoroughly. Elmo Volstad, the school board member who voted to keep the book in the classroom, did so on the grounds that he was against censorship. This prompted the article that appeared in the next issue of the Granite Falls newspaper, which reported that I “came before the school board asking for the book to be banned.”7 I had never used the term “ban,” but this was enough to spark a debate over censorship throughout the state of Minnesota.

I argued that this was not a matter of book banning, but rather it was about making good decisions regarding curriculum in the schools. Clearly teachers, curriculum committees, and school boards make decisions all the time about what should be taught in the classroom and they don't call it censorship or book banning when they replace outdated material with more appropriate curricula. However, this is not the perspective of the American Civil Liberties Union, which views removing materials because of objectionable content as a violation of First Amendment rights. Thus after the teachers' union went to the Minnesota Civil Liberties Union (now the ACLU of Minnesota) about the Little House issue, they threatened to file suit against the YME school board unless they immediately rescinded their decision to pull the book temporarily until it could be further reviewed. According to them, “Under clear precedent set by the U.S. Supreme Court, public schools are permitted to take such action only where a work contains extraordinarily offensive material or for sound pedagogical reasons. Little House on the Prairie could not possibly meet these requirements.” 8 As a consequence of the ACLU-Minnesota threat, on December 14, 1998, the school board voted unanimously to reinstate the book. The teacher had won and six books in the Little House series would continue to be taught in the Yellow Medicine East school district, two books per year in the third through fifth grades.

The ACLU, which prides itself on being a champion of rights for American Indians and other groups who have historically been denied those rights, is only committed to racial equality when it doesn't get in the way of First Amendment rights. Equal protection under the law does not seem to include children who face racism in the classroom or in the curriculum. Today the ACLU-Minnesota proudly declares the outcome of this controversy as its victory. However, from an Indigenous perspective, there was no sense of justice in this outcome.9

How is it that such dramatically opposed arguments could be made about a seemingly benign and favored book like Little House on the Prairie? This is the heart of the matter. Most Americans cannot even comprehend the problem because the problem helps them preserve their sense of superiority and entitlement to America's lands and resources. Those who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo guarded every step in this process. Autumn's teacher at Bert Raney Elementary was white (as were the other elementary schoolteachers), the principal was white, the superintendent was white, the librarian was white, and all the school board members were white. Who at any of these levels would be able to recognize that there might be a problem? Which of them had specialized training in recognizing and addressing racism? How many of them grew up reading the Wilder books and watching the popular TV show? How many of them were capable of seeing racism in attitudes that had been normalized in their lives?

Some of the racism and anti-Indianism in the book is quite transparent. For example, we learn by the fourth chapter that Ma hates Indians and two other characters express the sentiment that “the only good Indian is a dead Indian.” Even Jack, the family dog, hates Indians and growls whenever they approach. This hate and disregard for Indigenous life expressed in the book does not exist in a vacuum, separate from the actions of Americans during this era or subsequent eras. Rather it is reflective of the attitudes that attempt to justify America's treatment of its Indigenous inhabitants. This hate, coupled with tremendous greed, was often enough justification to incite the outright slaughtering of Indigenous People as well as the perpetration of gross human rights abuses in the nineteenth century. Just in the period of the 1860s (the decade of the Ingalls foray into Indian Territory), Indigenous People were brutally slaughtered at places like Sand Creek and Washita Creek, and nations such as the Dine, Apache, and Dakota faced forced removal and concentration camp imprisonment. The ideologies of this era supported these actions and resulted in horrific consequences for Indigenous People, and they are well represented in the Wilder text. In fact, this overt racism was the only racism my daughter could clearly identify in her eight-year-old mind, and she stated repeatedly that she felt like everybody must hate her because she is Indian. While she knew she felt violated and personally attacked because of attitudes expressed throughout the book, other than the blatant comments above, she could not pinpoint why.

When the book is given a critical reading, it becomes quite clear why an Indigenous child would walk away with feelings of shame, hurt, and embarrassment. There are literally dozens of derogatory, dehumanizing, and damaging messages-somewhat more subtle than suggesting the outright extermination of an entire race of people, but no less destructive in their outcome. The adjectives used to describe the Indigenous people in the book are revealing. There are at least eighteen references to Indians as “wild,” a handful of references to Indians as “savages,” numerous references to the Indians “throbbing drums” and “wild yipping,” and Pa refers to them as “screeching dev-.” In many other instances Indigenous People are compared with animals or characterized as animals: “Their eyes were black and still and glittering, like snake's eyes.” “The wild, fast yipping yells were worse than wolves.” In another telling passage we learn: “Laura thought [Pal would show her a papoose some day, just as he had shown her fawns, and little bears, and wolves.” In these examples, Wilder effectively dehumanizes Indigenous People by establishing their inferiority to white human beings and by suggesting they share more similarities with animals. On the second page of Wilder's story we are told that Pa wanted to leave their Wisconsin home and move further west because that is where the “wild” animals lived. “There were no settlers. Only Indians lived there.” Even though Indigenous People had long lived and farmed in Kansas, we are taught to distinguish between their settlement of the area and white settlement of the area. One of the most offensive passages is a statement made by Laura as the Osage are moving from their territory. As she is watching the procession she begs, “Pa, get me that little Indian baby ... Oh I want it! I want it! ... Please, Pa, please!” Laura Ingalls wanted a little Indian baby just as she would want a pet.

We learn at one point that Pa does not believe the only good Indian is a dead Indian; his idea of a good Indian is one who will fight his own people to prevent them from attacking the white settlers illegally squatting on Indigenous lands. In this story, the one “good Indian” is Osage leader Soldat du Chene, who is willing to fight his own people as well as other Indigenous nations if they threaten the white settlers. By most standards he would be considered a traitor to his people, but not by the standards in Little House. Instead, he is revered and the “bad Indians” in the book are, of course, those who resented white intrusion in their territory and who posed the most significant threat to the Ingalls family.

The issue of white invasion of Indigenous lands is at the center of the story, but Wilder repeatedly seeks to justify white actions throughout the narrative. While Indigenous People are demonized, the whites in the story are glorified. One of the most dangerous aspects of the book, therefore, is the extent to which the reader develops an affinity with and adoration of the white characters in the story. The humanity of the Ingalls family is so convincing that their righteousness is firmly established. The underlying message embedded in this work is one widely familiar to American audiences; the white settlers are the heroes and the Indians are the villains. In creating such a dichotomy between the goodness of the lngalls family and the badness of the Indians by whom they feel threatened, children reading this book are left to believe that Indians must be really bad if these good, moral, and wonderfully likeable people hate them. Most readers will never question how very “good” white people can hate Indians and still be considered “good.”

The myth of manifest destiny is the pervading underlying theme throughout the work; it is introduced to the reader on the very first page, where we learn that “they were going to Indian country.” Pa, Ma, Mary, Laura, and Baby Carrie are headed west in their covered wagon to make a new life. Rather than depicting this as an incredible act of violence, as invasion always is, it is celebrated and justified. In fact, the reader is encouraged to believe that this is necessary, inevitable, and even righteous. As they settle on the Kansas and Indian Territory border, Wilder writes, “Ma said she didn't know whether this was Indian country or not. She didn't know where the Kansas line was. But whether or not, the Indians would not be here long.” Similarly, Mrs. Scott says, “Treaties or no treaties, the land belongs to folks that'll farm it. That's only common sense and justice.” The fact that Indigenous People continued to be in the way as whites were moving in is apparent in Ma's comments throughout the book. For instance, at one point Ma derisively says, “I declare, Indians are getting so thick around here that I can't look up without seeing one.” She fears Indian influence on her children and works diligently to teach her children to absorb her notions of civility and savagery: “Dear me, Laura, must you yell like an Indian? I declare, if you girls aren't getting to look like Indians! Can I never teach you to keep your sunbonnets on?”

Despite the fact that Wilder has already described the family move into Indian Territory, the Ingalls family is frightened and angry when two Indigenous men go into their house. “Those Indians were dirty and scowling and mean. They acted as if the house belonged to them.” In this example we see the perverted logic of colonialism at work. While the Ingalls family is more than willing to invade Indigenous lands, showing no respect for Indigenous rights, they expect Indigenous People to accept their presence and theft without repercussion. In the world of colonialism created and supported in Wilder's fiction, Indigenous people become the aggressors and the thieves, “stealing” the hard-earned products reaped from land the Ingalls family (unjustly) occupies. At the end of the story, the Ingalls family packs up what they can to head back to Wisconsin because they are informed that the U.S. government is sending over soldiers to “take all us settlers out of Indian Territory.” While they are sad to leave their beautiful home, Pa is not too disappointed because they have profited from their stay, “Anyway, we're taking more out of Indian Territory than we took in.” They have exploited the land as best they could.

In an attempt to argue a more benevolent reading of Little House, some may try to distinguish Laura's fascination with Indians from the racism of other characters in the book. In this argument Wilder is not characterized as racist, but rather her accounts are considered to be accurate depictions of racist nineteenth-century attitudes. Her art is merely a reflection of the times. For example, toward the end of the novel, “Her eyes were full of tears and sobs kept jerking out of her throat,” as Pa told her to look at the long line of Osages finally leaving the area. The fact that she was saddened to see the Indians go (just after her pleading for an Indian baby), some might say, is an indication that she is not racist. Laura is not the only one who is moved at the site of the Osages moving westward; even Ma says she “didn't feel like doing anything, she was so let down.” From an Indigenous perspective, however, this bit of nostalgia is unconvincing evidence of a benevolent attitude. A twinge of remorse in the act of invading provides no grounds for celebration unless it prompts the invaders to leave. If there is no subsequent action, this bit of sadness means little, especially when other thoughts and actions reveal a far more consistent pattern. Thus we learn at the beginning of the next chapter, “After the Indians had gone, a great peace settled on the prairie.” In the end of the volume, it is not Indian removal that caused the Ingalls family to finally leave the area, but rather the threat of U.S. soldiers.

Not only is Wilder's description of Indigenous People in the story consistently derogatory, even when Laura presents something superficially positive, it is also couched in negativity. For example, in one instance, Laura reveals, “She had a naughty wish to be a little Indian girl. Of course she did not really mean it. She only wanted to be bare naked in the wind and the sunshine, and riding one of those gay little ponies.” Thus even here the sense of white superiority is apparent and a desire for anything associated with Indians is considered shameful and “naughty.”

In light of all the derogatory messages embedded within the Little House text, it would be difficult for any child to remain unaffected. Without critical intervention, Indigenous children would likely be hurt and ashamed while non-Indigenous children would further internalize ideologies' of white superiority and manifest destiny because of their reinforcement and validation within the story. In my daughter's classroom, even as the teacher interspersed such comments as “people do not talk that way today” to try to diffuse the racism expressed in the book, she was far from able to offer a critical intervention, since her own love of the stories came through more vividly than anything else. After reading six books in the Little House series by the end of fifth grade, children at Bert Raney Elementary are thoroughly indoctrinated with Wilder's racism, and the children most hurt in the process are the Dakota children from Upper Sioux. One of the other Dakota parents whose daughter was in the same third-grade classroom asked her daughter if she felt bad reading Little House and her daughter said “No.” However, when her mother pressed her, asking, “Doesn't it bother you when they say bad things about Indians in the story?” her daughter answered, “No, I just pretend I'm not Indian.” Realization of this disturbing choice for Indigenous youth, to either allow the feelings of hurt and shame to take hold or to shut off that hurt through dissociation, was one of the most disturbing realizations for all of the Dakota and white parents who felt Little House had no place in the classroom.

When my daughter first told me about her experiences with the Wilder book, I could not even fathom a scenario in which a teacher or school official would want to continue using materials that were hurtful to a child. I thought surely the teacher would apologize, reassure me that she never intended to harm my child, and then make the necessary changes to rectify the situation. In fact, rather than demonstrating any sensitivity to the racism, the teacher dug in her heels on the issue, insisting on her need to continue using the materials for educational purposes. The teacher loved the entire series and no amounts of evidence about the offensiveness of the writings were going to change her mind. In spite of the teacher's extreme position, in 1998 I still wanted to believe that education was the key to ending racism, that when individuals were exposed to an intellectual argument that demonstrated racism their minds would change, even if the change occurred person by person. In my first discussion with the school board, this seemed to hold true. With my careful critique, I changed the opinions of all but one school board member. When the dozens of examples of racism in the book were illuminated and they could begin to view the book through Indigenous eyes, they were surprised and a few were somewhat embarrassed that they hadn't seen it before. Warren Formo, the school board chairman, told a delegation from Upper Sioux that their “eyes had been opened” as a result of this controversy, welcome words in any discussion of racism.10 The educational success experienced in this first meeting, however, was short-lived. I soon realized that wherever racism is prevalent, intellectual arguments frequently hold little sway.

As the local news spread to the state and national levels, I was dumbfounded by the racist assumptions which began to surround the issue. Writers in editorials criticized the “chip on my shoulder,” insisting that Wilder offers an accurate portrayal of the past and therefore should continue to be taught. 11 This perspective always shocked me because Wilder's attitudes were racist in the 1860s, the setting of the Little House story, they were racist in the 1930S when the book was published, and they remain racist today. I agree that there is a difference between a critical discussion about racism in a nineteenth-century context and an uncritical discussion which serves instead to indoctrinate new generations of children in racist ideology. In my daughter's classroom, clearly it was a matter of the latter. Another letter to the editor directed the question to me: “Have you ever read another book besides 'Little House'?” Her argument was that if I had read other books I would realize Little House is not so bad and that it is in fact one of the “most wholesome books you can read.” 12 As a doctoral candidate in American history at Cornell University in 1998, I found the assumption that I was an ignorant and poorly read Indigenous woman both ironic and offensive. A similar comment came from Paul Sellon, Mitchell superintendent of schools, who referred to the Wilder novels as “history.” About the “American Indian mother” who raised the complaint, he stated it was unfortunate that anyone would want to “wipe out history.” 13 In spite of my educational background, I was positioned on the opposite side of “educators” and “historians,” a way to effectively delegitimize my intellectual position and capacity.

Another argument routinely articulated was that all books are offensive to someone, so if all offensive books were removed from the classrooms and libraries there would be nothing left. In fact, when a crew from Nickelodeon came to our reservation and school district to produce an episode on the Little House issue for their children's program Nick News, Linda Ellerbee publicly advanced this argument in the final production.14 This kind of argument disallows degrees of offensiveness and distracts from any acknowledgment of issues of power and control. When then Superintendent Bob Vaadeland repeatedly denied that power was part of the equation, I finally asked him why we didn't have erotica in the elementary school library or in the children's classrooms. He told me I was being ridiculous, that there were no similarities at all because erotica was clearly inappropriate for children. I argued that it was precisely the same thing. Erotica is not allowed in the schools because it violates the general public's sensibilities about what is appropriate for children. While I don't believe erotica should be in the classroom, the question demonstrates that those in power, usually in accordance with the values of the general populace, make determinations about what is appropriate for children. Similarly, though KKK literature is an obvious part of American history, why don't schools promote the incorporation of their writings directed at children such as Kloran (ritual) Junior Order Ku Klux Klan or the booklet for the branch of the Women's Klan established for teenage girls, Ritual of Tri-K Club? They don't because it would again violate the same sensibilities. At issue here, then, is whose sensibilities determine the point of violation and who has the power to enforce those sensibilities.

This reality was confirmed to me in 2001 during a diversity awareness training workshop when I presented the Little House controversy to a group of Phoenix-area teachers and staff. Upon completion of my presentation, a high school librarian came up to me and confided that she continuously exercises her power to decide what should stay and what should go in the school's library collection. She stated that the previous summer she and her staff were horrified to discover some very old books with extremely racist children's jump-rope verses on the shelf, many of which were created during the slavery days in the Old South. The staff quickly discarded the books, thankful that they caught them and disposed of them before someone else discovered them. They immediately recognized the overt racism in the books and as a small group made the decision that they were inappropriate for a school library today. Unfortunately, racism against Indigenous People is not readily recognizable to the various levels of gatekeepers in educational institutions.

If Indigenous People maintained control over the education of our children, literature which helped to justify our extermination and land dispossession would clearly violate our sensibilities. Little House on the Prairie would not need to be pulled today because it would never have made it into the curriculum or the libraries in the first place. However, in the context of colonialism, the people who have the power to make such decisions have directly benefited from Indigenous extermination and land dispossession (indeed, the YME schools sit on land stolen from the Dakota Nation). They have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, in this case that which helps to justify their very presence in our homeland. In this tenuous moral position the monumental racism in a book like Little House must be minimized and placed on the same level as someone from the Christian right, for example, who might find the reference to the color purple in a piece of children's literature offensive because they feel it endorses homosexuality. There is no room for an acknowledgment that advocating genocide moves the issue beyond one of petty offensiveness.

Americans recognize this in other contexts. For example, if a teacher were to uncritically use a Nazi primer in the classroom for educational purposes (the kind typically used as part of Hitler Youth programs in Nazi Germany), there would be outrage from nearly all segments of society. In fact Europe went through a de-Nazification program after World War II, and any literature deemed anti-Semitic was removed. For example, Ich Kampje, the 100-page handbook distributed in the early 194°S to each new person enrolled in the Nazi party, was systematically destroyed by the Allied De-Nazification Commission at the end of the war.15 Along with the banning of the Nazi party and general reforms on German education and culture, textbooks written under the Nazis were withdrawn and were replaced with new ones. Obviously this notion of removing books because of objectionable content would fall under various American definitions of book banning and censorship, but the difference in the equation is power. The Allied forces had the power after World War II to dictate what the Germans should and should not be reading. In that context Americans clearly understood the link between promoting a specific ideology in written literature and the implementation of that ideology in atrocious governmental policies. Furthermore, they recognized the danger in allowing anti-Semitic and racist agendas in the classroom. We see a similar recognition in global politics today. The current Bush administration has supported the de-Baathification of Iraq to eliminate the ideologic residue of Saddam Hussein's political party, the Arab Baath Socialist Party. In the “Report on the Transition to Democracy in Iraq” created in fall 2002, plans for this de-Baathification include new textbooks as part of the educational reform.16

The real issue, then, is not that Americans are opposed to banning literature-or at least replacing problematic existing literature with more appropriate literature. Instead the question is, why does our society today still advocate the indoctrination of American youth in racist and genocidal ideologies regarding Indigenous People? It does so because the United States government is still in power, it still considers the Indigenous population an expendable one, and it is still in the business of exploiting Indigenous lands and resources with the eager help of the corporate world. Even in the late twentieth century, for example, government sterilization policies were aimed at Indigenous women and administered through the Indian Health Service (in direct violation of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide). This aptly demonstrates U.S. disregard for Indigenous life even in recent times. The purposeful targeting of Indigenous communities for toxic and radioactive waste disposal by national and multinational corporations with full governmental sanctioning offers another example of contemporary beliefs in America regarding the expendability of Indigenous People.17 The American government and its citizens cannot seem to recognize the destructive ideologies because they have become essential to the ongoing colonization of Indigenous People and land bases. To question those ideologies would jeopardize America's capacity to further exploit Indigenous People and lands. Yet this is precisely what needs to happen.

As an antidote to current anti-Indianism and colonialism in American educational institutions, Americans must engage in the decolonization of curriculum and literature available to our schoolchildren, similar to the de-Nazification or de-Baathification this country has supported in other contexts. While this is a project in which we must engage at all levels of society and in all contexts, the literature read by our children is an appropriate place to start. This decolonization project will require Indigenous People and our non-Indigenous allies to continue to challenge the hegemonic structures which have justified and advocated our ongoing oppression and colonization. Justice demands that these harmful and immoral ideologies be laid to rest, not from the reaches of historical inquiry or discussions of racism, oppression, genocide, and colonization, but as values with which we indoctrinate our children.

Six years after our experience with the Little House controversy, our family still feels its effects. While writing this article I asked my (now teenaged) daughter Autumn what she thinks about the issue today, and she simply stated that she tries not to think about it too much because when she does it still hurts. Indeed, the anger, frustration, and hurt resulting from our battles have not subsided. Fortunately, despite the school's efforts to instill in her a sense of inferiority, she remains fiercely proud of being Dakota, in part because of our critical intervention in 1998. In recent years I've watched my daughter courageously and consistently fight other issues of racism in her schools on a near daily basis and because of that I am filled with a profound sense of hope. While we lost the fight over Little House on the Prairie in a southern Minnesota school, Autumn reminds me that the spirit of resistance to anti-Indian hegemony is active and preparing for the future struggles. Perhaps next time Americans will not cling as tightly to their oppressive ideologies and there will be sufficient support for more lasting and comprehensive positive change.

NOTES

The epigraph to this chapter is taken from ]ames P. Boyd, Recent Indian Wars under the Lead of Sitting Bull and Other Chiefs (Philadelphia: Publishers Union, 1892), 207.

I. Rush Limbaugh, See I Told You So (New York: Pocket Books, 1993), 68.

2. Andy Rooney, “Our Darkest Days Are Here,” 60 Minutes, CBS, May 23, 2004, http://www.cbsnews.com/storiesl2004/05/20/60minutes/rooney/ main618783.shtml. Accessed December 17, 2004.

3. The main title of this chapter is taken from an excellent editorial written amidst the Little House controversy which erupted in Minnesota in 1998. See W Roger Buffalohead,” Burning Down the House: A Little 'Teaching Moment,'” The Circle 20.2 (February 1999).

4. For example, see Associated Press, “New 1st Lady Set to Fight Illiteracy,” The Arizona Republic, January 20, 2001.

5. See the National Endowment for the Humanities website, www.neh.fed .us/, for further information. For this news story visit www.neh.fed.us/news/ archive/20040316.html.

6. Sunshine Flint, “A Little Drive on the Prairie,” Travel and Leisure Family (spring/summer 2002): 14-18.

7. Faith Kammerdiener, “Little House Pulled from YME Curriculum,” Advocate Tribune, October 29, 1998.

8. Letter to Superintendent Bob Vaadeland from Lucy A. Daglish, Dorsey & Whitney LLP, December 11, 1998.

9·For their statement on this issue visit their website at www.aclu-mn.org and view “Little House on the Prairie (Direct-Won)” under their category for Censorship.

10. Cited in Tom Cherveny, “YME reinstates 'Little House,'” West Central Tribune (Willmar, Minnesota), December 15, 1998, front page.

11. V. G. Haaland, Letter to the Editor, with the headline “Let's Not Continue with Chip on Our Shoulders,” Advocate Tribune (Granite Falls, Minnesota), November 12, 1998.

12. Lea Pederson, Letter to the Editor, “Today's Books, Entertainment More Offensive Than 'Little House,'” West Central Tribune (Willmar, Minnesota), December 8, 1998.

13. Associated Press State and Local Wire, Mitchell, South Dakota, “Historians, Educators Defend Accusations against 'Little House' Series,” December 8, 1998.

14. Nick News #166, “Book Banning,” Lucky Duck Productions, New York.

15. This work is now available in the United States with an English translation, Ray Cowdery, Ich Kampfe (I Fight) (Rapid City, S.D.: U.S.M., 1982).

16. Paul Berman, “Learning Not to Love Saddam,” New York Times, March 31, 2003.

17. For numerous examples of this see Winona LaDuke, All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life (Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 1999), and Ward Churchill and Winona LaDuke, “Native North America: The Political Economy of Radioactive Colonialism,” in The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization, and Resistance, ed. M. Annette Jaimes (Boston: South End Press, 1992),241-266.

Heidegger’s Brilliant 1-Paragraph Summary Critique of the History of Western Aesthetics

2011-01-27T13:12:00.000-08:00

Heidegger’s Brilliant 1-Paragraph Summary Critique of the History of Western Aesthetics (or, Laying Out the Metaphysical Version of the House That Jack Built)

Truth is the unconcealedness of that which is as something that is. Truth is the truth of Being. Beauty does not occur alongside and apart from this truth. When truth sets itself into the work, it appears. Appearance—as this being of truth in the work and as work—is beauty. Thus the beautiful belongs to the advent of truth, truth’s taking of its place. It does not exist merely relative to pleasure and purely as its object. The beautiful does lie in form, but only because forma once took its light from Being as the isness of what is. Being at that time made its advent as eidos. The idea fits itself into the morphe. The sunolon, the unitary whole of morphe and hule, namely the ergon, is in the manner of energeia. This mode of presence becomes the actualitas of the ens actu. The actualitas becomes the reality. Reality becomes objectivity. Objectivity becomes experience. In the way in which, for the world determined by the West, that which is, is as the real, there is concelaed a peculiar confluence of beauty with truth. The history of the nature of Western art corresponds to the change in the nature of truth. This no more intelligible in terms of beauty taken for itself than it is in terms of experience, supposing that the metaphysical concept of art reaches art’s nature. (From “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Poetry, Language, Truth, Albert Hofstadter trans., New York: Harper and Row, 1971, p. 81.)

Die Wahrheit ist die Unverborgenheit des Seienden als des Seienden. Die Wahrheit ist die Wahrheit des Seins. Die Schönheit kommt nicht neben dieser Wahrheit vor. Wenn die Wahrheit sich in das Werk setzt, erscheint sie. Das Erscheinen ist, als dieses Sein der Wahrheit im Werk und als Werk, die Schönheit. So gehört das Schöne in das Sichereignen der Wahrheit. Es ist nicht nur relativ auf das Gefallen und lediglich als dessen Gegenstand. Das Schöne beruht indessen in der Form, aber nur deshalb, weil die forma einst aus dem Sein als der Seiendheit des Seienden sich lichtete. Damals ereignete sich das Sein als eidos. Die idea fügt sich in die morphe. Das súnolon, das einige Ganze von morphe und hule, nämlich das ergon, ist in der Weise der energeia. Diese Weise der Anwesenheit wird zur actualitas des ens actu. Die actualitas wird zur Wirklichkeit. Die Wirklichkeit wird zur Gegenständlichkeit. Die Gegenständlichkeit wird zum Erlebnis. In der Weise, wie für die abendländisch bestimmte Welt das Seiende als das Wirkliche ist, verbirgt sich ein eigentümliches Zusammengehen der Schönheit mit der Wahrheit. Dem Wesenswandel der Wahrheit entspricht die Wesensgeschichte der abendländischen Kunst. Diese ist aus der für sich genommenen Schönheit so wenig zu begreifen wie aus dem Erlebnis, gesetzt, daß der metaphysische Begriff von der Kunst in ihr Wesen reicht. ( «Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes», Holzwege, Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1963, pp. 67-68.)

Reading One Last Book to Dylan

2011-01-26T06:17:00.000-08:00

OM MANI PADME HUM

By George Hartley, Dylan's father

[I have reposted this passage from my 2003 memorial site to Dylan. I am once again teaching The Snow Leopard and having conversations about the Tibetan Book of the Dead, so I thought I should integrate this earlier reflection into this blog. His little brother Jesse's birthday is next week, so I have been thinking about them both and my days of reading to them from the Bardo Thodol. — George]

During the first week of November, 2003 Tibetan monks came to Athens, Ohio to create a sand painting mandala. I had heard of their visit, but being caught up in the details of life, including my frequent trips to Columbus to visit with Dylan and to take him to various medical appointments, I didn't pay much attention to the visiting monks.

While my previous connections with Buddhism have been primarily through Zen literature and practice (minimal really), I was nevertheless vaguely interested in Tibetan Buddhism. During the week after Dylan's initial diagnosis with cancer in July 2002 I had bought a copy of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, having heard of it in one of my favorite books, Peter Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard. I read enough at different times to become acquainted with the notion of the bardo, the condition of existence between death and rebirth. But frankly, the whole idea of Dylan's death frightened me too much to read very far into the Book of the Dead, or, as it is also known, The Liberation Through Hearing in the Bardo.

So as I was sitting in a local coffee house just off campus on that Tuesday afternoon I saw two Tibetan monks, with shaven heads and saffron robes, walk into the coffee shop, order drinks, and sit talking in the window seats. I had a strong urge to jump up and ask them about the bardo and whether they could include Dylan in their thoughts as they continued the sand painting. But to do so would have meant admitting that Dylan might really be that close to death, so I just sat and watched as they left to get back to painting. I later followed them and got my first glimpse of the mandala in process.

My daughter, Katy, a student at Ohio University, told me that night that she had wanted to see the monks and especially their sand painting (Katy is a Fine Arts major). So on Thursday afternoon, almost by accident, I went back to the sand painting at 3:00. They were due to destroy the painting in their closing ceremony at 4:00, so Katy soon met me and we watched their closing ceremony.

I was interested to see the effect of the ceremony on all of us onlookers. People became relatively silent, looking on in awe or reverence or just politeness. I then saw a few people who appeared to be meditating during the monks' chanting, so I eventually began to meditate, even though I was feeling a bit self conscious doing so in a public group where I'm known under different circumstances as a professor there. But I meditated anyway.

I soon began having the most vivid visualizations I've ever experienced. Usually I see flat circles of swirling lights and cartoonish images if any. But now I was seeing in 3-D, feeling like I was spinning along with the visualizations of flesh-like magnifications, undulating mounds and folds that I can't really identify. In the midst of this euphoria, though, I suddenly heard a voice in my head tell me, "He's OK. Let him go."

I panicked. To say yes would mean accepting that after a year-and-a-half struggle Dylan and I would have to admit defeat, admit that our strength and determination might in the end prove not enough to save his life beyond the extra time he already had. So I said no, of course, and continued meditating and watching the final stages of the destruction of the Medicine Buddha mandala—such a fitting coincidence!— as the affirmation of life's ultimate impermanence.

Within half an hour of this auditory hallucination I got a call from Jenny, Dylan's mother, telling me to get to Worthington quickly (it's an hour and a half drive) because Dylan had just started having seizures again and seemed on the verge of dying at any moment. Hardly a week later Dylan died in the arms of his family—Jenny, Katy, Valerie, and me— at which time I gave in and started reading him just one more book, the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

[Afterword: I have also been thinking about this recently because just this week (January 2011) I watched the final episode of Joseph Campbell's Mythos II series, the episode entitled "The Experience of God." Here Campbell provides a brilliant reading of the Bardo Thodol as a series of conversations you have with the dead as they descend back down through the seven chakras and the accompanying illuminations and illusions that each chakra presents to the descending (reincarnating) soul. For further understanding, I highly recommend Francesca Fremantle's Luminous Emptiness: Understanding the Tibetan Book of the Dead (Shambhala 2001).]

[2nd Afterword one hour later: Having a conversation with Tori, my 5-year old daughter who never knew her brothers in the flesh. Her toy friend Skeletie the skeleton has been telling about how he spends his time in the underworld land of the dead. They have parties but miss having hearts and wieners and hair. They like thinking about how their skin rotted and became dirt, which fed new plants which grew fruit which fed birds which foxes ate and then pooped back into the earth for another cycle. She obviously doesn't need to read the Bardo Thodol to know all of this!]

OU Students for Justice in Palestine Letter

2011-01-25T09:14:00.000-08:00

To the Editor:

Across university campuses, Students for Justice in Palestine groups, including the newly formed group at Ohio University, have been organizing to stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people in their struggle for freedom from occupation and brutality. These groups have not provided support to Hamas or any Palestinian political group, whether or not they are categorized as terrorist organizations by the United States government.

We do, however, live in a country that provides 3 billion USD in military aid to Israel, the power occupying Palestinian territory and responsible for the majority of the hardships that Palestinians face today, such as the restriction to medical supplies and care. As would be expected, organizations that oppose U.S. support of Israel, including support of Israel’s violation of international humanitarian law, are facing hardships themselves. These include raids on homes, grand jury subpoenas, confiscations of private property, all without charges being filed or reasons given for this harassment of members of Palestinian solidarity groups.

After coordinated raids on Sept. 24, the FBI has issued at least 23 grand jury subpoenas to those suspected of providing “material support” to terrorist organizations in Palestine. Let us consider what counts as “material support” in these investigations. Checkbooks, cell phones, personal pictures, and even a Palestinian scarf were seized in home raids. Sarah Smith, a Jewish-American woman, traveled to Israel and Palestine the summer before she and her travel companions were investigated by an FBI agent and ordered before the grand jury. What did Ms. Smith do to provide material support for terrorists? She wanted to see what life was like for Jews and Palestinians. As American law professor Bernadine Dohrn said in an October 2010 interview with Al Jazeera’s Chris Arsenault, “If you write articles, is that material support [for terrorists]? If you contribute resources for computers or health-care clinics in occupied territories, or territories resisting government control, is that material support?” Is the possession of a Palestinian scarf “material support”?

With these vague criteria, the U.S. government is able to target opinions that dissent from its foreign policy. The grand jury subpoenas, raids and general harassment of Palestinian solidarity groups all threaten the First Amendment rights of US citizens. The imposition of penalties on these individuals is a clear attempt to curb free speech of those who wish to stand in support of Palestinians’ freedom. Presumably, in a democratic society, groups and individuals are encouraged to think critically and speak their minds, especially when it concerns justice. Even those who disagree with the political views of Students for Justice in Palestine and similar groups must acknowledge that these impositions on their First Amendment rights are unjust and should be opposed.

All persons interested in the maintenance of a free and open society should join Students for Justice in Palestine in calling for the withdrawal of these subpoenas and the end to all future harassment of American citizens for the political views they hold. We stand in opposition to the grand jury proceedings against those working toward international solidarity. We stand in opposition to the repression of political dissent and we demand that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder discontinue these attacks on our civil liberties.

George Hartley, Eden Almasude, Stephen Pearson, Leah Vincent, Alana Dakin, Tiana McKenna, Evan Pence, and the rest of OU Students for Justice in Palestine.
Athens

Networks of Empire and Realignments of World Power

2011-01-24T07:14:00.000-08:00

Imperial states build networks which link economic, military and political activities into a coherent mutually reinforcing system. This task is largely performed by the various institutions of the imperial state.

James Petras 01.02.2011

Thus imperial action is not always directly economic, as military action in one country or region is necessary to open or protect economic zones. Nor are all military actions decided by economic interests if the leading sector of the imperial state is decidedly militarist.

Moreover, the sequence of imperial action may vary according to the particular conditions necessary for empire building. Thus state aid may buy collaborators; military intervention may secure client regimes followed later by private investors. In other circumstances, the entry of private corporations may precede state intervention.

In either private or state economic and/or military led penetration, in furtherance of empire-building, the strategic purpose is to exploit the special economic and geopolitical features of the targeted country to create empire-centered networks. In the post Euro-centric colonial world, the privileged position of the US in its empire-centered policies, treaties, trade and military agreements is disguised and justified by an ideological gloss, which varies with time and circumstances. In the war to break-up Yugoslavia and establish client regimes, as in Kosovo, imperial ideology utilized humanitarian rhetoric. In the genocidal wars in the Middle East, anti-terrorism and anti-Islamic ideology is central. Against China, democratic and human rights rhetoric predominates. In Latin America, receding imperial power relies on democratic and anti-authoritarian rhetoric aimed at the democratically elected Chavez government.

The effectiveness of imperial ideology is in direct relation to the capacity of empire to promote viable and dynamic development alternatives to their targeted countries. By that criteria imperial ideology has had little persuasive power among target populations. The Islamic phobic and anti-terrorist rhetoric has made no impact on the people of the Middle East and alienated the Islamic world. Latin America’s lucrative trade relations with the Chavist government and the decline of the US economy has undermined Washington’s ideological campaign to isolate Venezuela.The US human rights campaign against China has been totally ignored throughout the EU, Africa, Latin America, Oceana and by the 500 biggest US MNC (and even by the US Treasury busy selling treasury bonds to China to finance the ballooning US budget deficit).

The weakening influence of imperial propaganda and the declining economic leverage of Washington, means that the US imperial networks built over the past half century are being eroded or at least subject to centrifugal forces. Former fully integrated networks in Asia are now merely military bases as the economies secure greater autonomy and orient toward China and beyond. In other words the imperial networks are now being transformed into limited operations’ outposts, rather than centers for imperial economic plunder.

Imperial Networks: The Central Role of Collaborators

Empire-building is essentially a process of penetrating a country or region, establishing a privileged position and retaining control in order to secure (1) lucrative resources, markets and cheap labor (2) establish a military platform to expand into adjoining countries and regions (3) military bases to establish a chock-hold over strategic road or waterways to deny or limit access of competitors or adversaries (4) intelligence and clandestine operations against adversaries and competitors.

History has demonstrated that the lowest cost in sustaining long term, long scale imperial domination is by developing local collaborators, whether in the form of political, economic and/or military leaders operating from client regimes. Overt politico-military imperial rule results in costly wars and disruption, especially among a broad array of classes adversely affected by the imperial presence.

Formation of collaborator rulers and classes results from diverse short and long term imperial policies ranging from direct military, electoral and extra-parliamentary activities to middle to long term recruitment, training and orientation of promising young leaders via propaganda and educational programs, cultural-financial inducements, promises of political and economic backing on assuming political office and through substantial clandestine financial backing.

The most basic appeal by imperial policy-makers to the “new ruling class” in emerging client state is the opportunity to participate in an economic system tied to the imperial centers, in which local elites share economic wealth with their imperial benefactors. To secure mass support, the collaborator classes obfuscate the new forms of imperial subservience and economic exploitation by emphasizing political independence, personal freedom, economic opportunity and private consumerism.

The mechanisms for the transfer of power to an emerging client state combine imperial propaganda, financing of mass organizations and electoral parties, as well as violent coups or ‘popular uprisings’. Authoritarian bureaucratically ossified regimes relying on police controls to limit or oppose imperial expansion are “soft targets”. Selective human rights campaigns become the most effective organizational weapon to recruit activists and promote leaders for the imperial-centered new political order. Once the power transfer takes place, the former members of the political, economic and cultural elite are banned, repressed, arrested and jailed. A new homogenous political culture of competing parties embracing the imperial centered world order emerges. The first order of business beyond the political purge is the privatization and handover of the commanding heights of the economy to imperial enterprises. The client regimes proceed to provide soldiers to engage as paid mercenaries in imperial wars and to transfer military bases to imperial forces as platforms of intervention. The entire “independence charade” is accompanied by the massive dismantling of public social welfare programs (pensions, free health and education), labor codes and full employment policies. Promotion of a highly polarized class structure is the ultimate consequence of client rule. The imperial-centered economies of the client regimes, as a replica of any commonplace satrap state, is justified (or legitimated) in the name of an electoral system dubbed democratic – in fact a political system dominated by new capitalist elites and their heavily funded mass media.

Imperial centered regimes run by collaborating elites spanning the Baltic States, Central and Eastern Europe to the Balkans is the most striking example of imperial expansion in the 20th century. The break-up and take-over of the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc and its incorporation into the US led NATO alliance and the European Union resulted in imperial hubris. Washington made premature declarations of a unipolar world while Western Europe proceeded to plunder public resources, ranging from factories to real estate, exploiting cheap labor, overseas and via immigration, drawing on a formidable ‘reserve army’ to undermine living standards of unionized labor in the West.

The unity of purpose of European and US imperial regimes allowed for the peaceful joint takeover of the wealth of the new regions by private monopolies. The imperial states initially subsidized the new client regimes with large scale transfers and loans on condition that they allowed imperial firms to seize resources, real estate, land, factories, service sectors, media outlets etc. Heavily indebted states went from a sharp crises in the initial period to ‘spectacular’ growth to profound and chronic social crises with double digit unemployment in the 20 year period of client building. While worker protests emerged as wages deteriorated, unemployment soared and welfare provisions were cut, destitution spread. However the ‘new middle class’ embedded in the political and media apparatuses and in joint economic ventures are sufficiently funded by imperial financial institutions to protect their dominance.

The dynamic of imperial expansion in East, Central and Southern Europe however did not provide the impetus for strategic advance, because of the ascendancy of highly volatile financial capital and a powerful militarist caste in the Euro-American political centers. In important respects military and political expansion was no longer harnessed to economic conquest. The reverse was true: economic plunder and political dominance served as instruments for projecting military power.

Imperial Sequences: From War for Exploitation to Exploitation for War

The relations between imperial military policies and economic interests are complex and changing over time and historical context. In some circumstances, an imperial regime will invest heavily in military personnel and augment monetary expenditures to overthrow an anti-imperialist ruler and establish a client regime far beyond any state or private economic return. For example, US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, proxy wars in Somalia and Yemen have not resulted in greater profits for US multinational corporations’ nor has it enhanced private exploitation of raw materials, labor or markets. At best, imperial wars have provided profits for mercenary contractors, construction companies and related ‘war industries’ profiting through transfers from the US treasury and the exploitation of US taxpayers, mostly wage and salary earners.

In many cases, especially after the Second World War, the emerging US imperial state lavished a multi-billion dollar loan and aid program for Western Europe. The Marshall Plan forestalled anti-capitalist social upheavals and restored capitalist political dominance. This allowed for the emergence of NATO (a military alliance led and dominated by the US). Subsequently, US multi-national corporations invested in and traded with Western Europe reaping lucrative profits, once the imperial state created favorable political and economic conditions. In other words imperial state politico-military intervention preceded the rise and expansion of US multi-national capital. A myopic short term analysis of the initial post-war activity would downplay the importance of private US economic interests as the driving force of US policy. Extending the time period to the following two decades, the interplay between initial high cost state military and economic expenditures with later private high return gains provides a perfect example of how the process of imperial power operates.

The role of the imperial state as an instrument for opening, protecting and expanding private market, labor and resource exploitation corresponds to a time in which both the state and the dominant classes were primarily motivated by industrial empire building.

US directed military intervention and coups in Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Chile (1973), the Dominican Republic (1965) were linked to specific imperial economic interests and corporations. For example, US and English oil corporations sought to reverse the nationalization of oil in Iran. The US, United Fruit Company opposed the agrarian reform policies in Guatemala. The major US copper and telecommunication companies supported and called for the US backed coup in Chile.

In contrast, current US military interventions and wars in the Middle East, South Asia and the Horn of Africa are not promoted by US multi-nationals. The imperial policies are promoted by militarists and Zionists embedded in the state, mass media and powerful ‘civil’ organizations. The same imperial methods (coups and wars) serve different imperial rulers and interests.

Clients, Allies and Puppet Regimes

Imperial networks involve securing a variety of complementary economic, military and political ‘resource bases’ which are both part of the imperial system and retain varying degrees of political and economic autonomy. In the dynamic earlier stages of US Empire building, from roughly the 1950’s – 1970’s, US multi-national corporations and the economy as a whole dominated the world economy. Its allies in Europe and Asia were highly dependent on US markets, financing and development. US military hegemony was reflected in a series of regional military pacts which secured almost instant support for US regional wars, military coups and the construction of military bases and naval ports on their territory. Countries were divided into ‘specializations’ which served the particular interests of the US Empire. Western Europe was a military outpost, industrial partner and ideological collaborator. Asia, primarily Japan and South Korea served as ‘frontline military outposts’, as well as industrial partners. Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines were essentially client regimes which provided raw materials as well as military bases. Singapore and Hong Kong were financial and commercial entrepots. Pakistan was a client military regime serving as a frontline pressure on China. Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Gulf mini-states, ruled by client authoritarian regimes, provided oil and military bases. Egypt and Jordan and Israel anchored imperial interests in the Middle East. Beirut served as the financial center for US, European and Middle East bankers.

Africa and Latin America including client and nationalist-populist regimes were a source of raw materials as well as markets for finished goods and cheap labor. The prolonged US-Vietnam war and Washington’s subsequent defeat eroded the power of the empire. Western Europe, Japan and South Korea’s industrial expansion challenged US industrial primacy. Latin America’s pursuit of nationalist, import – substitution policies forced US investment toward overseas manufacturing. In the Middle East nationalist movements toppled US clients in Iran and Iraq and undermined military outposts. Revolutions in Angola, Namibia, Mozambique, Algeria, Nicaragua and elsewhere curtailed Euro-American ‘open ended’ access to raw materials, at least temporarily.

The decline of the US Empire was temporarily arrested by the collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and the establishment of client regimes throughout the region. Likewise the upsurge of imperial-centered client regimes in Latin America between the mid 1970’s to the end of the 1990’s gave the appearance of an imperialist recovery. The 1990’s however was not the beginning of a repeat of the early 1950’s imperial take off: it was the “last hurrah” before a long term irreversible decline. The entire imperial political apparatus, so successful in its clandestine operations in subverting the Soviet and Eastern European regimes, played a marginal role when it came to capitalizing on the economic opportunities which ensued. Germany and other EU countries led the way in the takeover of lucrative privatized enterprises. Russian- Israeli oligarchs(seven of the top eight) seized and pillaged privatized strategic industries, banks and natural resources. The principal US beneficiaries were the banks and Wall Street firms which laundered billions of illicit earnings and collected lucrative fees from mergers, acquisitions, stock listings and other less than transparent activities. In other words, the collapse of Soviet collectivism strengthened the parasitical financial sector of the US Empire. Worse still, the assumption of a ‘unipolar world’ fostered by US ideologues, played into the hands of the militarists, who now assumed that former constraints on US military assaults on nationalists and Soviet allies had disappeared. As a result military intervention became the principle driving force in US empire building, leading to the first Iraq war, the Yugoslav and Somali invasion and the expansion of US military bases throughout the former Soviet bloc and Eastern Europe.

At the very pinnacle of US global-political and military power during the 1990’s, with all the major Latin American regimes enveloped in the empire-centered neo-liberal warp, the seeds of decay and decline set in. The economic crises of the late 1990’s, led to major uprisings and electoral defeats of practically all US clients in Latin America, spelling the decline of US imperial domination. China’s extraordinary dynamic and cumulative growth displaced US manufacturing capital and weakened US leverage over rulers in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The vast transfer of US state resources to overseas imperial adventures, military bases and the shoring up of clients and allies led to domestic decline.

The US empire, passively facing economic competitors displacing the US in vital markets and engaged in prolonged and unending wars which drained the treasury, attracted a cohort of mediocre policymakers who lacked a coherent strategy for rectifying policies and reconstructing the state to serve productive activity capable of ‘retaking markets’. Instead the policies of open-ended and unsustainable wars played into the hands of a special sub-group (sui generis) of militarists, American Zionists. They capitalized on their infiltration of strategic positions in the state, enhanced their influence in the mass media and a vast network of organized “pressure groups” to reinforce US subordination to Israel’s drive for Middle East supremacy.

The result was the total “unbalancing” of the US imperial apparatus: military action was unhinged from economic empire building. A highly influential upper caste of Zionist-militarists harnessed US military power to an economically marginal state (Israel), in perpetual hostility toward the 1.5 billion Muslim world. Equally damaging, American Zionist ideologues and policymakers promoted repressive institutions and legislation and Islamophobic ideological propaganda designed to terrorize the US population. Equally important islamophobic ideology served to justify permanent war in South Asia and the Middle East and the exorbitant military budgets, at a time of sharply deteriorating domestic socio-economic conditions. Hundreds of billions of dollars were spent unproductively as “Homeland Security” which strived in every way to recruit, train, frame and arrest Afro-American Muslim men as “terrorists”. Thousands of secret agencies with hundreds of thousands of national, state and local officials spied on US citizens who at some point may have sought to speak or act to rectify or reform the militarist-financial-Zionist centered imperialist policies.

By the end of the first decade of the 21st century, the US empire could only destroy adversaries (Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan) provoke military tensions (Korean peninsula, China Sea) and undermine relations with potentially lucrative trading partners (Iran, Venezuela). Galloping authoritarianism fused with fifth column Zionist militarism to foment islamophobic ideology. The convergence of authoritarian mediocrities, upwardly mobile knaves and fifth column tribal loyalists in the Obama regime precluded any foreseeable reversal of imperial decay.

China’s growing global economic network and dynamic advance in cutting edge applied technology in everything from alternative energy to high speed trains, stands in contrast to the Zionist-militarist infested empire of the US. The US demands on client Pakistan rulers to empty their treasury in support of US Islamic wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, stands in contrast to the $30 billion dollar Chinese investments in infrastructure, energy and electrical power and multi-billion dollar increases in trade.

US $3 billion dollar military subsidies to Israel stand in contrast to China’s multi-billion dollar investments in Iranian oil and trade agreements. US funding of wars against Islamic countries in Central and South Asia stands in contrast to Turkey’s expanding economic trade and investment agreements in the same region. China has replaced the US as the key trading partner in leading South American countries, while the US unequal “free trade” agreement(NAFTA) impoverishes Mexico. Trade between the European Union and China exceeds that with the US.

In Africa, the US subsidizes wars in Somalia and the Horn of Africa, while China signs on to multi-billion dollar investment and trade agreements, building up African infrastructure in exchange for access to raw materials. There is no question that the economic future of Africa is increasingly linked to China.

The US Empire, in contrast, is in a deadly embrace with an insignificant colonial militarist state (Israel), failed states in Yemen and Somalia, corrupt stagnant client regimes in Jordan and Egypt and the decadent rent collecting absolutist petrol-states of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. All form part of an unproductive atavistic coalition bent on retaining power via military supremacy. Yet Empires of the 21st century are built on the bases of productive economies with global networks linked to dynamic trading partners. Recognizing the economic primacy and market opportunities linked to becoming part of the Chinese global network, former or existing US clients and even puppet rulers have begun to edge away from submission to US mandates. Fundamental shifts in economic relations and political alignments have occurred throughout Latin America. Brazil, Venezuela, Bolivia and other countries support Iran’s non-military nuclear program in defiance of Zionist led Washington aggression. Several countries have defied Israel-US policymakers by recognizing Palestine as a state. Trade with China surpasses trade with the US in the biggest countries in the region.

Puppet regimes in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan have signed major economic agreements with China, Iran and Turkey even while the US pours billions to bolster its military position. Turkey an erstwhile military client of the US-NATO command broadens its own quest for capitalist hegemony by expanding economic ties with Iran, Central Asia and the Arab-Muslim world, challenging US-Israeli military hegemony.

The US Empire still retains major clients and nearly a thousand military bases around the world. As client and puppet regimes decline, Washington increases the role and scope of extra-territorial death squad operations from 50 to 80 countries. The growing independence of regimes in the developing world is especially fueled by an economic calculus: China offers greater economic returns and less political-military interference than the US.

Washington’s imperial network is increasingly based on military ties with allies: Australia, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan in the Far East and Oceana; the European Union in the West; and a smattering of Central and South American states in the South. Even here, the military allies are no longer economic dependencies: Australia and New Zealand’s principle export markets are in Asia (China). EU-China trade is growing exponentially. Japan, South Korea and Taiwan are increasingly tied by trade and investment with China … as is Pakistan and India.

Equally important new regional networks which exclude the US are growing in Latin America and Asia, creating the potential for new economic blocs. In other words the US imperial economic network constructed after World War II and amplified by the collapse of the USSR is in the process of decay, even as the military bases and treaties remain as a formidable ‘platform’ for new military interventions.

What is clear is that the military, political and ideological gains in network-building by the US around the world with the collapse of the USSR and the post-Soviet wars are not sustainable. On the contrary the overdevelopment of the ideological-military-security apparatus raised economic expectations and depleted economic resources resulting in the incapacity to exploit economic opportunities or consolidate economic networks. US funded “popular uprisings” in the Ukraine led to client regimes incapable of promoting growth. In the case of Georgia, the regime engaged in an adventurous war with Russia resulting in trade and territorial losses. It is a matter of time before existing client regimes in Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the Philippines and Mexico will face major upheavals, due to the precarious bases of rule by corrupt, stagnant and repressive rulers.

The process of decay of the US Empire is both cause and consequence of the challenge by rising economic powers establishing alternative centers of growth and development. Changes within countries at the periphery of the empire and growing indebtedness and trade deficits at the ‘center’ of the empire are eroding the empire. The existing US governing class, in both its financial and militarist variants show neither will nor interest in confronting the causes of decay. Instead each mutually supports the other: the financial sector lowers taxes deepening the public debt and plunders the treasury. The military caste drains the treasury in pursuit of wars and military outposts and increases the trade deficit by undermining commercial and investment undertakings.

Impact and Encounter

2011-01-23T15:03:00.001-08:00

by George Hartley

Given shank and waterfowl

beasted into heaven’s fine striations

as metal basket slingshots skyward

catches soft and downy frame

skeleton and shatter

smack composition

twisted into purple spray

Salt sweet divination

right place

right moment

arcade fire of coincidence

and now the pumping heart

drifting instinct

mechanical array

gives birth to sun’s red and rocking

blanket over wave-spun water

This encounter

and a sudden pelican darkness

blossoming on the shore.

June 8, 2006

Todtnauberg

2011-01-23T12:49:00.000-08:00

Todtnauberg by Paul Celan

Arnika, Augentrost, der

Trunk aus dem Brunnen mit dem

Sternwurfel drauf,

in der

Hütte,

die in das Buch

—wessen Namen nahms auf

vor dem meinen?—,

die in dies Buch

geschriebene Zeile von

einer Hoffnung, heute,

auf eines Denkenden

kommendes

Wort

im Herzen,

Waldwasen, uneingeebnet,

Orchis and Orchis, einzeln,

Krudes, später, im Fahren,

deutlich,

der uns fährt, der Mensch,

der's mi anhört,

die halb-

beschrittenen Knüppel-

pfade im Hochmoor,

Feuchtes,

viel.

Arnica, eyebright, the

draft from the well with the

star-die on top,

in the

hütte,

written in the book

—whose name did it record

before mine—?

in this book

the line about

a hope, today,

for a thinker's

word

to come

in the heart,

forest sward, unleveled,

orchis and orchis, singly,

crudeness, later, while driving,

clearly,

he who drives us, the man,

he who also hears it,

the half-

trod log-

trails on the highmoor,

humidity,

much.

—Paul Celan (1920-1970)

Translated from the German by Pierre Joris
Copyright Boston Review, 1993–2006. All rights reserved. Please do not reproduce without permission.

On Reading and Forgetting and Then Waking Up

2011-01-23T08:30:00.000-08:00

[READING AND WRITING EXPERIENCE 12-20-2010, 5:00 A.M.]:
Waking up after a dream involving forgetting my dead son Dylan—well, no, the dream was about neglecting Dylan when somehow it was really about contemplating marriage with an unknown woman while on a picnic, eating spinach dip and looking at a map of the mountains of New Mexico (where I had just been last week and where Dylan was born), sitting on the tailgate of a station wagon (I’ve never owned a station wagon)—so a dream NOT about Dylan and somehow in that notness having everything to do with him or my forgetting of him, I was in anguish, could not imagine lying down to try to go back to sleep with such heavy thoughts or bodily remembrances beyond thought. So I got up.

I picked up my copy of James Hillman’s Re-Visioning Psychology, maybe to finish it, maybe to not remember my forgetting and the weight of this elf-imposed guilt (I meant to type “self-imposed,” but maybe “elf-imposed” is better—a typo version of the slip of the tongue?), guilt at having obsessively ignored Dylan in the final summers of all the time I had left with him, had I only known, as I worked out streams of javascript logic, nothing else seemingly in my control or available to such unravelings and logic, now picking up Hillman’s book to finish this part of a chapter-writing process of my new (four-year process so far) book on Anzaldúa and thinking to myself, “How on earth could a book about the human soul written in the wake of the Vietnam War get to page 187 and not yet mention the War once? How could the soul-upheaval, the guilt and weight of history not imprint itself on such pages by this point? What kind of massive historical repression must be at work for an author so obsessed with Renaissance completion and fulfillment not to be able to see the unwritten scream tearing itself from the page? My friend Barrett Watten would surely have mentioned Vietnam by now in a book published in 1975 and concerning the dances and the forgettings of the soul, Vietnam the most recent explosion into barbarity of this tyrannical youth of a nation and its blood-stained mechanisms of forgetting.”

And then I turned the page, turned to page 188 in my still-foggy half-awake consciousness (and self-righteousness?), and saw the word “Vietnam.” Not only Vietnam but Algeria. And concentration camps. The book, its author—a man of Jewish roots who, perhaps stoically, perhaps strategically, perhaps painfully (in a book that so far seemed to soar imperiously above pain), had not yet mentioned Hitler or the Jewish Holocaust in a book written in 1975 (the year I graduated from high school, so a year that always resonates with me and a period of wounding I cannot forget)—a book concerning the human soul finally mentioned Vietnam:

Humanism’s psychology starts off by forgiving and forgetting. Its very use of the word “human” forgets what it means. By making it mean “humane,” the shadow in the word is forgiven. But the human touch is also the hand that holds the flame-thrower and tosses the grenade. Correctly speaking, to humanize means not just loving and forgiving; it means as well torturing and vengeance and every cravenness history will not let us forgive. (Of course the Love Children insist on keeping innocent of history; history, having replaced all former repressions, has become today the primordially repressed. No one wants to look back, except with sentimental nostalgia, for in that mirror we see Vietnam, Algeria, concentration camps—all human phenomena.) Hitler was human, and Stalin too, and the soldiers banging at Christ’s legs were as human as their victim, and they knew what they were doing.

How is it that I became angry at the absence of Hillman’s reference to Vietnam at just the moment that he was about to mention it? I do not believe that I had unconsciously glimpsed at the following page, the verso of page 187 and therefore invisible to me before turning to it. Am I just unexpectedly so attuned to the author’s argument that I can now sense its inner movements and finally-unearthed anguish? At 3:30 A.M. twenty-four hours earlier I was up struggling to make any sense of the book at all. Or perhaps more accurately struggling to accept what I was understanding already, but which didn’t fit into my presumptions about what the book would be and what it would say and how it would say it.

And how is it that, in the midst of weeks of reading Jung and about Jung, about dreams as the field of imaginative archaic ancestral expression, a time when I was realizing I cannot remember my dreams and haven’t really remembered them for years now since the deaths of my sons, I was still in the throes of this dream about Dylan but not about Dylan—he was physically absent from the dream—and now somehow could intuit the very unexpected movement of this whale of a book (I scattered Dylan’s ashes among the whales off the shores of Provincetown, but that’s another story)? A book I’ve been wrestling with, resisting, loving and hating—hating myself for loving, for who could love this smug Renaissance superiority and complacency and exquisite cadence and choice of words, this voluminous resonance of intelligence and grace and horrific certainty in the absence of the name of Vietnam, an absence I had not yet specifically named myself (I had rather been angered at the absence of Wounded Knee).

I don’t know. But I know that I can go back to sleep now. Pieces have unexpectedly fallen together. I do not understand the pattern into which they have fallen. I do not understand the resonance of a book now thirty-five years old, that had struck Gloria Anzaldúa with its soul-making somehow, and which somehow now makes sense to me in a way that makes no sense to me at all. And still I feel good and assured in this very uncertainty that seems to contain an unspeakable certainty and resonance and gesture and soul. I can go back to sleep now, perhaps to dream, and really wake up when it’s really morning, and see what the reverse side of morning’s moment has to offer to the living and the dead. Will I be stepping out of the book? Or more thoroughly into it as it issues forth a new day, a new sun, a new eclipsing moon, as I go about my day with my wife and my living daughters?

Breakthroughs and Connections

2011-01-21T10:48:00.000-08:00

January 21, 2011

Dear Amado,

I decided to address this writing to you to give it an interpersonal brotherly focus and tone that will actually help me to explain myself more directly than if I were either talking to myself or to the anonymous world at large. These are raw unedited notes.

My coalescences started when I visited your grad course on the connections between the rise of both so-called civilization and of patriarchy. Through Ulansey’s explanation of the attention to the precession of the equinoxes, I started seeing the roots of so many different developments in the Near and Middle East that the movie Zeitgeist also points to (although Peter Joseph, the director, does so in a completely dismissive and condescending way that pisses me off). These insights were common among the Gnostics for at least a millenium.

What I started seeing very clearly were the root connections between these patriarchal statist oligarchies and the global suppression of tribal cultures. And this suppression in the name of civilization, literacy, state, official priesthoods, and hierarchies of all kinds, becomes the beginning of the imperialist drive.

My life-long interests and researches are being drawn into this net. I started the Fall quarter with the insight into the ideological continuities between North American Zionism (the Puritan Conquest of New England that transformed into the ideology of Manifest Destiny) and 19th Century European Zionism which led to the establishment of the state of Israel, based on the North American model of extermination and dispossession.

But with your course I started seeing the roots of all of this tied up with the rise of Rome and the transition from Mithraism to Christianity. Then I coincidentally started reading Jung again as part of my Anzaldúa study and realized that he saw himself as being instructed in visions by a Mithraic god (see The Aryan Christ). My interest in European indigenous revival movements suddenly came up in relation to Jung, who participated in revived Pagan solar cults in Germany and Switzerland. In addition, I read Vine Deloria, Jr.'s new book on Jung, C.G. Jung and the Sioux Traditions: Dreams, Visions, Nature and the Primitive, which is fantastic.

Leslie Marmon Silko points to the importance of European indigenism (among other things) in her novel Gardens in the Dunes and Ward Churchill does so in his conversations with German Pagans. Churchill’s point—which I discussed with Silko in December when I visited her in Tucson—is that the European indigenists need to reclaim their ancestral traditions from both the continuing forces of Christian repression and extermination (carried out by Rome through the Catholic Church) and the Fascists, who perverted European indigenous roots into a genocidal racist fantasy of racial ancestral Aryan purity. These Fascists also saw the connections between Christianity and the Near-Eastern mystery cults that Zeitgeist points to, but they used this insight as grounds for arguing that Christ’s teachings and his deification by his followers not only stemmed from such Persian/Aryan roots but also for arguing that Christ was not Jewish. How could good Aryan Christians worship a Jewish Messiah?

This, and the Anzaldúa connection, led me to reread James Hillman’s Re-Visioning Psychology, a post-Jungian argument for overthrowing the tyranny of monotheistic thought and reinstating polytheistic pagan visions (which I briefly responded to here, but plan to do so more thoroughly soon). Then for the past month I spent each night watching another episode of Joseph Campbell’s Mythos series (I and II), in which he makes several extremely profound statements, the impact of which seems to me muted by his staid academic appearance and mode of delivery. He is offering extremely revolutionary insight in these lectures. I will expand on this later.

So at the moment I am feverishly re-reading Heidegger in an attempt to get at the indigenous sources of his re-reading of the “Greeks,” the Presocratics whose notions of nature as a temporal process of emanation or radiance have much in common with various tribal cosmovisions. I am looking into his pagan vision as a different path out of the Fascist neo-pagan legacy, one that offers a potential radical challenge to the technocratic objectification of all being (Machenschaft) which logically led from Socrates to the Nazi death camps and the atom bomb.

So in brief and sketchy form, these are my breakthroughs and connections of the past three months and my head is expoding. Add to this my concurrent research into the connections between Ayurveda, Chinese medicine, and Kundalini yoga (all of which see the cosmos, including the body, as made up of energy fields and cellular intelligence—prana, chi, kundalini), and you can get a glimpse of my cosmic excitement and potential insanity.

With love and respect and enthusiasm,

George

Statement of Teaching Philosophy

2011-01-18T10:26:00.000-08:00

George Hartley • Ohio University • January 18, 2011

Yesterday a former graduate student, while visiting me at my house, confided in me about an issue concerning him. “I have a real dilemma,” he began. “Each month, it seems, I come across some new remarkable book that completely reorients my thinking, my knowledge, my passion, and each book makes me want to leap off into the new direction it lays out for me. But when will this process stop? When will I ever feel ready to make some kind of definitive statement without worrying about the next book or idea that’s then going to change my life all over again?” I told him that this was one of the most exciting dilemmas that the true life of intellectual passion can offer us. Furthermore, despite my having been teaching for over thirty years—or perhaps because of this experience—I frequently find myself in the same situation. But in those thirty years I learned to savor these moments and to see them as an integral part of the learning process, one that takes place in the process of teaching itself for those who have learned to trust the ways in which the world opens itself up to our fascination. And bringing this passion into the classroom itself, modeling this kind of life-long engagement with learning, is crucial to my life as a teacher. I am the professor who teaches through the process of my own learning. In these moments, my passion becomes infectious.

Following John Holt, I trust the student’s innate love of learning. Each one of us lives to learn, although not each of us is presented with the environment in which we might best learn, those situations and communities capable of fostering our unique desires and capabilities. My goal, within the admittedly restrictive context of the standard academic environment where WHEN and WHERE we must learn are dictated by quarter or semester structures of time and classroom structures of place, is to provide as much as possible a range of ways of approaching HOW we learn and WHAT we learn and, most importantly, WHY we learn. “Why, exactly, are you here in this class?” I ask my students. “Why has society at large decided that this particular topic is sufficiently important enough that we should tend to it? What kind of people does such an education prepare us to be? What kind of world is our education making possible (or, simultaneously, impossible)?”

And these questions drive my teaching practices. The world I and many others would like to see is one made up of self-actualized human beings who know why they do what they do, and what the consequences for other beings (human and beyond) might be as a result of those choices and actions. What kind of world have we inherited? What possibilities and limitations appear to have been placed before us? How will we act in response to those opportunities and challenges in order to make a better world? And what critical role do we, in all of our intelligence and passion and splendor, have to play to bring such worlds into being? And what forces, habits, and prejudices must be reckoned with—as well as openings, excitements, and dreams—in order to make such transformations possible?

I therefore attempt to democratize my students’ learning experiences as much as possible. While I choose the materials we work with (primarily because of the time restraints of the quarter system), I provide my students with constant and varied ways of responding to the material. I urge them to come to class prepared with individualized responses to the readings for that day. In small groups they discuss those readings and see if they might come up with some kind of consensus concerning the readings or, if not, theories for why they disagree. After each group’s presentation of their findings to the rest of the class, we see if there is some larger consensus or, again, explanations for the lack of consensus. Only at that moment, when the class has arrived at a set of questions, concerns, and exhilarations, do I then offer my accumulated knowledge, my understanding of the issues with which they have come to identify, and my own love for this ceaseless learning process. In these and other ways I have allowed them to make the material and the learning process their own. Just as I hope they will as a result be better prepared to go forth and shape the world according to their ideals, passions, and compassion—that which Socrates describes as the ceaseless loving proliferation of learning.

Sand and Bone Desert Spark

2010-12-13T08:37:00.000-08:00

By George Hartley
December 10, 2010

Huesos arena spark
combine, conjunto
lost in the desert

burnt and callused feet
walking, hiding, running:

grain by grain the imprint
cry by cry the impact
trade agreement shipment of goods
more precious to the gods (capital)
than flesh (accident)

spark, phosphorescence, glimmer
what remains of lives given up
to the glow of memory—darkness

imprints in air and sand
their last breath
a suck of my own breathing
spin and dizzy the sand
sing and measure the sorrow

of a child at home now motherless
now fatherless
with only grain of bone of sand to testify
to the pull of love’s immediacy
responsibility
and strength

blood and bone and sand
to the rhythm of riches and nations
spilled and spent

left to the spark of memory

[Inspired by student art displayed in the University of Arizona library, December 5, 2010.]

Anzaldúa’s Backpack: Nahuala Inventories of New Mestiza Indigenism

2010-12-10T14:50:00.000-08:00

By George Hartley, November 5, 2010

Presented at El Mundo Zurdo: An International Conference on the Life and Work of Gloria Anzaldúa: Art and Performance, University of Texas-San Antonio.

I. Prologue
I first want to thank Norma Alarcón, AnaLouise Keating, and Deborah Miranda for making this panel possible, and Norma Cantú for her encouragement and acceptance of our panel proposal. The talks today by Laura Pérez and AnaLouise Keating, as well as that by Randy Conner last year, have provided a perfect context for my presentation here.

I should mention that one of my motivations for writing this talk is that not so long ago I myself almost wrote a very similar argument against Anzaldúa’s Indigenism as the one my Maria Josefina Saldaña-Portillo’s, both in terms of what we’ll see as Saldaña-Portillo’s critique of Anzaldúa’s Indigenism as well as in Saldaña-Portillo’s move to Zapatismo as a “corrective” of Chicanismo more generally (which I do not develop in this paper).

As one way of clarifying the potential value of what I elsewhere call Anzaldúa’s Coatlicuean appropriations of Chicana Indigenism (http://georgehartley.blogspot.com/2009/10/my-san-francisco-state-talk.html), I will engage in an extended critique of what has become an influential work for attacks on Chicana appropriations of indigeneity: María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo’s essay “Who’s the Indian in Aztlán? Re-Writing Mestizaje, Indianism, and Chicanismo from the Lacandón” (2001), an essay subsequently worked into her very important book on The Revolutionary Imagination in the Americas.

Her argument does several important things, such as:

critique the ongoing legacy of Mexican state Indigenismo;
highlight the tendency for 20th-Century revolutionary regimes of subjection to adopt the regime of subjection characteristic of modern capitalist developmentalism; and
recognize the need for alliances between the various decolonization practices throughout the Americas.

Saldaña-Portillo’s critical gestures could help in the construction of a strategic solidarity movement on the lines of Leslie Marmon Silko’s network of tribal coalitions (in Almanac of the Dead) by providing guidelines for judging the various mestizajes across the continent. And if Saldaña-Portillo’s charges against Anzaldúa were true, then we should pay attention to avoid such mistakes ourselves. I will argue, however, that Saldaña-Portillo’s critique in the end contributes to the further fragmentation of North American decolonization movements by erasing up front the radical potential of refigurations of mestizaje such as Anzaldúa’s new mestiza.

II. Saldaña-Portillo’s Critique of Mestizaje as Biologism

The immediate framing context for Saldaña-Portillo’s critique of Anzaldúa’s indigenism is the former’s attempts to move the concept and trope of mestizaje beyond the biologism and ultimately anti-Indian nature of Mexican indigenismo. Her overall goal is “to recuperate a more sophisticated concept of mestizaje: one that might possibly extend political enfranchisement or literary representation to the broad range of subject positions implied by a common Mexican heritage” (280). She suggests that Anzaldúa opens with a “moving” metaphor for mestizaje that promises just such a sophisticated recuperation: the border as the open wound that is constantly torn back open before it can heal. This metaphor, in its constant back-and-forth wounding/healing/wounding movement, “unsettles the conventional usage of mestizaje by restaging the brutality of the initial colonial encounter between Spaniard and Indian in the neocolonial encounter between the First World and Third World” (280); in addition, it “unsettles the conventional usage of mestizaje for Chicanos, as well” as for Mexicans, by interrupting “the teleological drive of mestizaje” (280) in the “Raza Cósmica” imagination that sees the mestizo as the prefiguration of humanity’s futuristic product of miscegenation. (I should note here that also Anzaldúa draws from this same teleology elsewhere in Borderlands by turning to José Vasconcelos’s notion of the Raza Cósmica [99].)

The heart of the problem, as Saldaña-Portillo points out, lies in the following:

I would like to refocus our attention on the residual effect of this era of Chicano nationalism: the continued use of mestizaje as a trope for Chicana / o identity and the presumed access to indigenous subjectivity that this biologized trope offers us. Although the deployment of mestizaje in the Southwest is different from its historical deployment in Mexico, when Chicana / o intellectuals and artists appropriate the tropes of mestizaje and indigenismo for the purposes of identity formation, we are nevertheless operating within the racial ideology from which these tropes are borrowed. [. . .] Thus, in our Chicana/o reappropriation of the biologized terms of mestizaje and indigenismo, we are also always recuperating the Indian as an ancestral past rather than recognizing contemporary Indians as coinhabitants not only of this continent abstractly conceived but of the neighborhoods and streets of hundreds of U.S. cities and towns. (279)

The key problems of Chicana/o appropriations of Indigeneity that Saldaña-Portillo identifies here are biologism and erasure. These two procedural traps linger on as “residual effects” from Mexican appropriations of indigeneity in revolutionary mestizaje through Movimiento Chicano appropriations of this mestizaje to “postnational,” “postrevolutionary” reappropriations by Chicana indigenists such as Anzaldúa.

Saldaña-Portillo is certainly right in part by pointing to a residual biologism in Anzaldúa’s statements concerning “the Indian in her.” Anzaldúa at times “proves” her indigenous roots by pointing out her “Indian” physical and personality features: “There is the quiet of the Indian about us” (86); “I am visible—see this Indian face—yet I am invisible. I both blind them with my beak nose and am their blind spot” (108). Yet it is through her distinctive physical features in contrast to her family—her dark skin, earning her the nickname Prieta—that Anzaldúa is first articulated or hailed as an “Indian.” One of the crucial things this phenomenon shows is that identification with one’s indigenous roots is only recently encouraged among Chicanas and Chicanos, precisely through their articulation as Chicanas and Chicanos rather than Mexican-Americans or Hispanics.

III. Anzaldúa’s Backpack

In preparing the reader for her critique of another layer of Anzaldúa’s troubling indigenism, Saldaña-Portillo’s writes the following:

[I]ndigenous identity is not reducible to biology. Any person born an Indian, with all the genetic Indian features, can become Ladinized by refusing to practice his or her indigenous identity in the hopes of accessing the limited amount of power made available to poor mestizos. Indigenous identity, for Menchu and the Zapatistas, depends not simply on biology but on the rigorous practice of the thoroughly modern cultural, linguistic, social, religious, and political forms that constitute one as indigenous. And these are not forms that exist in a kind of pastiche grab bag of Indian spiritual paraphernalia, as they seem to exist for Anzaldúa. (286-87)

Saldaña-Portillo thus transfers us from the realm of biologism—“indigenous identity is not reducible to biology”—to the realm of practice: the “thoroughly modern cultural, linguistic, social, religious, and political” practice that constitutes Indigenous identity can be rejected through Ladinization or rigorously embraced through the performances that confer Indigenous legitimacy upon these practitioners. Anzaldúa’s apparently “pastiche grab bag of Indian spiritual paraphernalia” has not been sanctioned through submission to such legitimating performances. I would suggest here that what Saldaña-Portillo does not make room for is the reverse: the turn from Ladinization to socio-political legitimacy. What is the mechanism whereby those who have been born into Ladinization might instead perform their Indigeneity? In other words, after centuries of genocidal detribalization, how does a people rejoin or reconstitute their tribe? It is precisely in an attempt to answer this question that Anzaldúa turns to her backpack trope, the difference between backpacks and grab bags being constitutive:

[The new mestiza] goes through her backpack, keeps her journal and address book, throws away the muni-bart metromaps. The coins are heavy and they go next, then the greenbacks flutter through the air. She keeps her knife, can opener and eyebrow pencil. She puts bones, pieces of bark, hierbas, eagle feather, snakeskin, tape recorder, the rattle and drum in her pack and she sets out to become the complete tolteca. (1987, 104)

Saldaña-Portillo elaborates on this passage:

Ultimately, Anzaldúa’s model of representation reproduces liberal developmental models of choice that privilege her position as a U.S. Chicana: she goes through her backpack and decides what to keep and what to throw out, choosing to keep signs of indigenous identity as ornamentation and spiritual revival. But what of the living Indian who refuses mestizaje as an avenue to political and literary representation? What of the indigena who demands new representational models that include her among the living?

I want to question various elements of this condemnation before moving on to Anzaldúa’s actual indigenizing practice. To what extent is Anzaldúa’s choice to reclaim her Indigeneity really a sign of her reproduction of “liberal developmental models of choice that privilege her position as a U.S. Chicana”? To what extent is the Coatlicue process—Anzaldúa’s path to her Indigenous self—simply a consumerist collection of signs of Indianness? To what extent is the mestizaje of Anzaldúa’s new mestiza really the same as the mestizaje posited by racist Mexican nationalism? Might the mestizaje that Anzaldúa constructs be desirable by some other “living Indians”? To what extent does Saldaña-Portillo’s distinction between Chicanas and the living indigena reinforce the racist legacies of both the Spanish and the Anglo-American Conquests? What nationalist practices serve to police this rigid and racialized distinction, despite Saldaña-Portillo’s claim to acknowledge indigeneity as a result of social performance rather than of biology?

Saldaña-Portillo positions the passage above as perhaps the greatest sign of Anzaldúa’s apparent complicity in the Mexican nationalist uses of mestizaje (in Saldaña-Portillo’s original essay) as well as her complicity in the developmentalist construction of the revolutionary subject (in the book version). Out of context, the list of items Anzaldúa chooses to keep in her New Mestiza backpack (bark, bone, feathers, drum) could appear to focus on the popular nostalgic images of the paraphernalia that would make one “Indian” and perhaps (but not necessarily) might contribute to the construction of Indianism as a parallel version of Edward Said’s Orientalism—except, perhaps, because of the presence of the tape recorder, a “modern” object that disrupts the stereotyping work of the list of kept items. In her own response to Saldaña-Portillo’s essay, Anzaldúa acknowledges the danger here:

I think it’s important to consider the uses that appropriations serve. The process of marginalizing others has roots in colonialism. I hate that a lot of us Chicanas/os have Eurocentric assumptions about indigenous traditions. We do to Indian cultures what museums do--impose western attitudes, categories, and terms by decontextualizing objects, symbols and isolating them, disconnecting them from their cultural meaning or intentions, and then reclassifying them within western terms and contexts. (SAIL 14)

But as the reader goes on to the paragraph that follows Anzaldúa’s backpack list, the function of this list becomes radically transformed:

Her first step is to take inventory. Despojando, desgranando, quitando paja. [Stripping, shelling, removing straw—“separating the wheat from the chaff.”] Just what did she inherit from her ancestors? This weight on her back—which is the baggage from the Indian mother, which the baggage from the Spanish father, which the baggage from the Anglo?

To return to Said’s notion of Orientalism, we should note the ways Said, following Antonio Gramsci, insists on the need to take inventory in order to come to just such an awareness of the historical roots that make up a person’s identity. Said repeats this injunction, one version of which is as follows:

The starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is “knowing thyself” as a product of the historical processes to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory. The only available translation inexplicably leaves Gramsci’s comment at that, whereas in fact Gramsci’s text concludes by saying, “therefore it is imperative at the outset to compile such an inventory.” (25)

The purpose of Anzaldúa’s backpack, then, is not to serve as the grounding gesture of bourgeois subjectivity—voluntarist choice—but rather as the decolonizing site at which she can take inventory of the traces of the historical impressions on her very being.

I would argue Anzaldúa’s the appropriations of mestizaje and indigenismo are not strictly biologized but rather socialized. Anzaldúa’s primary notion of mestizaje does not refer to a biological given but rather to a socially-imposed existential condition resulting from life in the borderlands. The function of mestizaje in Anzaldúa’s project cannot be reduced to the mestizaje/indigenismo binary that structures the mestizo as citizen of Mexico. This is primarily so because the location of Anzaldúa’s “territory of mestizaje,” so to speak, is not Mexico but the borderlands region of the United States. Whereas in Mexico the mestizo is the privileged figure standing in as the nation-state citizen, in the U.S. the mestizo is never recognized as such.

This becomes even clearer when we go on to read the passage that follows this one:

Pero es dificíl [but it is difficult] differentiating between lo heredado, lo adquirido, lo impuesto [the inherited, the acquired, the imposed]. She puts history through a sieve, winnows out the lies, looks at the forces that we as a race, as women, have been a part of. [. . .] This step is a conscious rupture with all oppressive traditions of all cultures and religions. She communicates that rupture, documents the struggle.

In producing the inventory of her own historical positioning, Anzaldúa documents the struggle and, through such documentation, communicates the rupture that marks the new mestiza’s rejection of all inherited, acquired, and imposed oppressive systems. Rather than “returning” to her Indigenous roots as some “nostalgic” or “romantic” escape to the past, Anzaldúa uses the knowledge she gains from her inventory as she “reinterprets history and, using new symbols, she shapes new myths.” This is the subaltern process of hegemony, the transformative Coatlicuean appropriation (deconstructing followed by constructing) of the new mestiza’s nahual, shape-shifting nature in the molding of a new mode of being:

She strengthens her tolerance (and intolerance) for ambiguity. She is willing to share, to make herself vulnerable to foreign ways of seeing and thinking. She surrenders all notions of safety, of the familiar. Deconstruct, construct. She becomes a nahual, able to transform herself into a tree, a coyote, into another person. She learns to transform the small "I" into the total Self. Se hace moldeadora de su alma. Según la concepción que tiene de si misma, así será. [She becomes the molder of her soul. According to the conception she has of herself, so will she be.] (104-5)

Such is the potential power of her decolonizing appropriations.

Works Cited
Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987.
——. “Speaking Across the Divide: An Email Interview.” SAIL: Studies in American Indian Literatures 15 (Fall 2003–Winter 2004): 7–20.
Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1979.
Saldaña-Portillo, María Josefina. “Reading a Silence: The ‘Indian’ in the Era of Zapatismo.” Nepantla: Views from South 3.2 (2002): 287-314.
——. The Revolutionary Imagination in the Americas and the Age of Development. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2003.
——. “Who’s the Indian in Aztlán? Re-Writing Mestizaje, Indianism, and Chicanismo from the Lacandón.” In The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader, ed. Ileana Rodriguez, 402–23. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2001.
Silko, Leslie Marmon. Almanac of the Dead. New York: Penguin, 1991.

Amoxtli X - The X Codex

2010-12-10T14:13:00.000-08:00

By Roberto Dr. Cintli Rodriguez

[Originally posted on SATURDAY, AUGUST 7, 2010 on Dr. Cintli Blog.]

In Lak Ech, Panche Be & Hunab Ku & The Forgotten 1524 Debate
Eagle Feather Research Institute 2010 Collective Copyright

By Roberto Dr. Cintli Rodriguez, Arnoldo Vento, PhD, Vivian Garcia Lopez, PhD, Mixelle Rascon, Pricila Rodriguez, Norma Gonzalez, Crystal Terriquez, Jo Anna Mixpe Ley, Grecia Ramirez & Luis A Valdez

SAVE ETHNIC/RAZA STUDIES

Why did several communities support a run from Tucson to Phoenix through the Arizona desert in 115-degree heat in the middle of the summer last year? Probably for the same reason 15 of us were arrested for criminal trespass at Tucson’s state building this May: We did it to combat the effort to terminate, via HB 2281, Tucson’s highly successful Raza Studies program. This came on the heels of the anti-immigrant bill, SB 1070. One attacks our bodies; the other, our spirits.

While the bill was dropped in 2009, this year, the know-nothing Republican-dominated state legislature passed both bills, whereas the state’s unelected governor, Jan Brewer, promptly signed both “laws.” HB 2281 is particularly onerous because it is a Dark Ages-era law that attacks the thinking/teaching/learning process. It also creates an Inquisition-style mechanism to approve acceptable books and curriculums. Arizona State Schools Superintendent, Tom Horne, who has never set foot in an Ethnic/Raza Studies classroom, first mounted his campaign in 2006 when Dolores Huerta stated at Tucson HS that Republicans hate Latinos. Since then, he has isolated Rodolfo Acuña’s Occupied America and Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, as examples of books that promote hate, segregation and advocate anti-American views while calling for the violent overthrow of the U.S. government. He is claiming that Raza Studies is out of compliance of the new law and is now calling on TUSD to force Raza Studies to videotape its classes.

Lost in this “debate” is the nature or contents of Raza Studies and its philosophical foundation. As a result, a collaborative mini-book: Amoxtli X – The X Codex, has been written to provide such an answer. The book stresses the concepts of In Lak Ech – tu eres mi otro yo – you are my other self – Panche Be – Buscar la Raiz en la Verdad – To Seek the Root of the Truth – and Hunab Ku – a view of the world that explains the nature of the universe.

These concepts are part of a maiz-based philosophy and curriculum that stress a human rights ethos. Maiz is the only food in history that was created by human beings, and the peoples of this continent – Cemanahuak or Abya Yalla – are the only peoples to have created their own food. Horne insists that Greco-Roman knowledge – as opposed to the maiz-based AmerIndigenous knowledge taught in Raza Studies-TUSD – should be exclusively taught in Arizona schools. For the past several years, these ethos have been in full display as Raza Studies youths have led the protests against both bills. More than protest, they have fully lived their peaceful meaning.

“This philosophy comes direct from the cereal that was created by the ancient settlers of the continent: maiz… yes, the maiz, that creation of the savage beast, and that thanks to them, lies the hope for humanity.” – Maya Linguist, Domingo Martinez Paredez, 1960.

Amoxtli X – The X Codex, in part, was also created to raise funds to combat HB 2281. Aside from forthcoming trials for the 15 of us, a lawsuit against the state is forthcoming. If you would like a signed copy, please make a $10 check per copy to the University of Arizona Foundation. Send to Roberto Rodriguez PO BOX 3812, Tucson, AZ 85722. If you would like to donate more, either add a greater amount to check or buy more books. (Discounted class sets are available. proceeds will go toward the Dec 2-4 Conference on Hate, Censorship & Forbidden Curriculums.

For more info re books: 520-626-0824 XColumn@gmail.com). Panche Be T-Shirts are also available for $20.

An open letter from an artist to a Mexican crime cartel boss

2010-12-10T08:13:00.000-08:00

By Guillermo Gómez-Peña

Señor XXX

Lord of the heavens and the beaches, the highways and the trailers

1. I have never met you face to face and I truly hope I never do.
Despite the fact you don’t know me, your actions affect my daily existence in profound ways. I am one of the hundreds of thousands of post-national Mexicans whose umbilical cord to my homeland has been severed by you. It hurts me to confess it but I don’t look forward to my increasingly less frequent visits to Mexico, because people like you have made it a terrifying place, a war zone. I have lost my country of origin to violence and fear; to the violence you helped create and the fear you continue to perpetrate.

2. I haven’t had the opportunity to cry for Mexico. I haven’t had the time to cry for the 30,000 ‘documented cases’ of people killed by organized crime in the past 3 years; Mexicans killed by other Mexicans like you, not to mention the thousands more who have simply vanished in the Arizona desert, lost in the bi-national sex trade or buried in some mass grave.

It all happened so fast… the delusional war declared by president Felipe Calderon against your kind; your internal ‘cartel wars’ fighting for the control of strategic territories, and the ‘collateral’ civilian casualties. Then there were the wholesale kidnappings and ‘levantones’, your exemplary assassinations including the now world-known beheadings and mutilations followed by the bombings and assaults to police stations, penitentiaries, restaurants and nightclubs and the abominable massacres that resemble those by the Colombian and Central American Death Squads of the past.

It is happening so fast, relentlessly…In less than a decade, Mexico became one of the most violent countries on earth, with monthly murder statistics sometimes higher than those of the Iraq and the Afghan wars. Violence is now our master narrative, daily headline and cultural landscape.

3. -Unfortunately I speak from first-hand experience: My family and friends have been directly touched by your violence. One of my closest cousins was stabbed 22 times by a sicario (hired assassin) who spent less than 2 months in jail for his crime. My 88 year-old mother has been robbed twice at gunpoint. Other relatives and friends of mine have been kidnapped, beaten and robbed by cops on your payroll, pseudo-cops and teen gangsters. And many people I knew were killed in crossfire, simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, meaning anywhere, anytime. And this didn’t happen in Bagdad, Ramallah, Kabul or Kinshasa. It took place in Mexico City, Monterrey, Guadalajara, Chihuahua City, Tijuana, Juarez, Veracruz, Morelia, and many other cities I learned to love while travelling in my ex-country as a young man. Today, these places are all part of the international travel alert websites that contribute to the destruction of Mexico’s tourism.

4. - Due to emotional saturation, I haven’t been able to fully grasp much less digest what exactly went wrong? And who is to blame for this madness? President Calderon for forcing us all into a war we were not prepared to win? The likes of you who carry out the violence or the politicians, military men and policemen who protect you? The US drug consumers and distributors who create the demand, the gringo mercenaries who sell you the high tech weapons or the global media that sensationalizes your cruelty and perpetrates your fear campaign? Everyone seems to play a major role in this 3D movie that has real consequences.

I do understand the problem of inequality and poverty; the immense, ever growing distance between poor and rich and why, when faced with a future of joblessness and despair, people are left with two equally dramatic options: to migrate north to a country that hates them or to join you and work for you, to aspire to be like you. When you have no job, access to education and decent housing for your loved ones, it seems much easier to join organized crime than to remain unemployed or sub-employed, working against all odds for almost nothing. On the day of his apprehension, a young hit man told a journalist: “Hey culeros! What’s the pinche difference between dying from starvation or dying from a bullet in your heart?”.
This is not hard to understand: It’s globalization-gone-wrong; the story of a dysfunctional nation/state on the verge of losing control against the backdrop of a trans-national pop culture that has swept our historical memory and humanity, tearing down even more the already ruptured social fabric and turning the youth into consumers of extreme desires and seekers of instant success.

All this has made it easier for people like you to exist.

5. And then, there is the fear generated by your exhibitionist cruelty. In the map of organized crime that now comprises more than half of Mexico’s territory, the civilian population wakes up everyday to fear; fear of being kidnapped or having a relative kidnapped; fear of going out and becoming a victim of random violence; fear of being robbed, beaten up, shot at, mutilated, raped. The gruesome images that document and (indirectly) perpetrate this fear appear daily in the front pages of the newspapers and comprise half of the national newscasts. Some of your legendary “revenge” YouTube videos became more popular than those showcasing beheadings by Al Caeda. Your sadism is carefully staged but who are you performing for?

6. Your empire of violence does not stop at the border. The young gang members who work for you in Mexico are connected to other gangs on this side of the border. These gangs are comprised of post-national teen Mexicans and Salvadorans, norteños, sureños and Mara salvatruchos, who also kill each other while fighting for the drugs you help to smuggle and the prestige you fight to secure . I know many Mexican parents in the US who have lost their sons and daughters to the very same violence you have helped to instigate collaborating with crime cartels from other countries. I have attended several funerals. And when those who survive the eternal gang warfare in our US Latino barrios get deported they simply rejoin your ranks back home. In this vicious circle, they will lose everything: their relatives and friends, their identity and eventually, their lives. All that remains are some hip hop songs and indie documentaries chronicling their short lives.

7. You should know that the main news that is reported here in the US about Mexico concerns crime cartel violence. Understandably when the Anglo Americans who have no emotional relationship to Mexico watch these news on TV, they get scared of Mexicans and Mexico. And their fear inevitably fuels the current anti-Mexican hysteria and eventually translates into irrational anti-immigration laws (such as Arizona’s’ infamous SB-1070 and HB-2281 laws) making it harder for all of us here in the US to be treated as equals. In the eyes of a racist, a migrant worker, a drug smuggler and a potential terrorist become indistinguishable.

Since you probably have several relatives and friends in the US, I’m sure you think about these matters. But then, I wonder- what purpose does it serve you to know that you are contributing tremendously to the worsening of conditions for the US Latino communities at large and to the empowerment a new xenophobic US far-right? Supongo que esto te vale madres.

8. Today, as I rewrite this letter, I’ve got more questions for you: Do you ever feel sorry and secretly cry? Do you have a hard time falling asleep? Do you sometimes look at yourself in the mirror and feel embarrassed or angry with yourself? Aren’t you afraid for the lives of your loved ones? Do you really think that Malverde, Judas Tadeo and the Holy Death are protecting you well? Are you willing to pay the huge price of putting your relatives and friends at risk for a relatively short life of unrestricted power, sex and glamour? Do the movies, soap operas and corridos that you inspire make the daily risks worthwhile? Don’t you ever wonder that creating a truce with other cartels might actually be beneficial to you and to the whole country? Am I naïve for asking these questions?

9. For the moment all I have is my art and my words to talk back and speak up. Half of the artistic projects and writings I am currently involved in have one central subject matter: the culture of violence on both sides of the border. It occupies a big part of my art and I wish it didn’t. I wish I could go back to making art and writing about other matters with humor and joy. Unfortunately, for the moment, my sadness and my outrage won’t allow it. I truly wish I could go back to Mexico one day and live in my old neighborhood in peace.

10. I am not alone.

Gómez-Peña
Orphan of two nation/states
California, The Other Mexico, 2010

Some contextual information for the foreign reader:

(This year, Mexico celebrates both the 200th anniversary of its Independence and the 100th anniversary of its Revolution. The entire year has been proclaimed by President Felipe Calderón as “Year of the Nation.”

September 15, 1810 was the day when father Miguel Hidalgo called to take up arms against the Spanish colonial government. And the beginning of the Mexican Revolution, the first in the century, was on November 20, 1910, the day when guerilla fighters Francisco Villa and Emiliano Zapata began their first insurrectionist attack against dictator Porfirio Diaz.

President Calderón has called upon Mexico to use both anniversaries “to reflect on where the country has been, where it is right now and to think about what kind of Mexico our descendents will inherit in the future.” It’s like a one-year-long feel-good national psychoanalysis and, the president continues, “no one should speak negatively about Mexico outside of Mexico”. Because of this, not one post-national Mexican intellectual or artist living in the US was invited to partake in the celebrations. This letter is an unsolicited contribution.

In the Zocalo of Mexico City, a large digital clock has been counting down to both, the 15 of September and the 20 of November of this year. Similar countdown clocks were located in all the capital cities of the 31 Mexican states. Paradoxically, every day we count down in 2010, an average of 30 Mexicans are murdered by organized crime)

*I wish to thank Elaine Peña, Gretchen Coombs, Anastasia Herold and Emma Tramposch for helping me to edit the original manuscript.

::: L A P O C H A N O S T R A :::

Notes on the Broken Racist Covenant

2010-12-03T22:40:00.000-08:00

Notes on the Broken Racist Covenant

(What Happens When God No Longer Needs White People)

North American Zionism and the Roots of White Panic and Apartheid in Arizona

By George Hartley, Associate Professor of English at Ohio University
December 2, 2010
Last modified December 18, 2010

The current wave of violence and hatred perpetrated by white people against brown people should not be seen as an aberration but rather as a long-standing North American tradition. While Arizona’s first wave of European invaders framed their conquest in terms made available by Spanish Renaissance Catholicism (complete with expulsions of Jews and Muslims from Spain), the Anglo Conquest of the mid-1800s was framed in terms provided by English Puritanism and its transformations under the concept of Manifest Destiny.

It is important, then, to recognize that proponents of Raza and Ethnic Studies are confronted by an ideology of conquest with a 500-year tradition that has been normalized as “the American Way.” At a time when white people are panicking over the continuing browning of the United States and the construction of new brown enemies after the September 11 attacks on the primary symbols of white ascendency—Twin Tower monuments to capitalism and the Pentagon monument to militarism—Ethnic Studies becomes an easy and welcome target for Anglo-Americans desiring scapegoats.

In my attempts to sort out the motivations behind the current expressions of North American Nativism, I continue to try to construct a genealogy of white supremacist ideology or, more accurately, ideologies in the plural. The common thread behind all of these ideological manifestations of racism is the belief that white people are God’s Chosen People. And it is the duty of God’s people to cleanse and purify God’s earth—or at least that portion of God’s earth which for the past few hundred years has been defined as the Nation.

The key ancestral root of this ideological complex is the Abrahamic Covenant and the subsequent Canaanite Genocide. In Deuteronomy 20 verses 16-18 (King James Version) we read:
16 But of the cities of these people, which the LORD thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth:
17 But thou shalt utterly destroy them; namely, the Hittites, and the Amorites, the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites; as the LORD thy God hath commanded thee:
18 That they teach you not to do after all their abominations, which they have done unto their gods; so should ye sin against the LORD your God.
This Biblical injunction from God to His presumed Chosen People to commit genocide against indigenous peoples in the Promised Land gives rise to the dominant Settler-Colonial model of Apartheid, whether in Nazi Germany, South Africa, Palestine, or the U.S.

Big Outline of Ideological Moments in the Construction of Apartheid

The conversion of the Near-Eastern sun gods into Jesus the son of God.
The establishment of the New Jerusalem or New Israel or New Zion in North America as the conversion of the Abrahamic Covenant into an American Covenant.
The function of the national borders after 1848 as the ideological containment of whiteness.
The 19th-century German indigenous attempts to construct an Aryan Christ in order to separate Christianity from its Jewish roots.
Anti-Catholic Nativism from Northern Europe to the Ku Klux Klan.
The turn by Nazis in Germany and Zionists in Palestine to the Anglo-American model of Ethnic Cleansing.
The continuing war between Spanish and Anglo conquests.

The problem for the white-supremacist imagination today is that God no longer needs white people in order to dominate the globe. Global Capitalism in its neoliberal phase can transcend borders—both national and racial borders—in order to maximize exploitation of labor and resources. But capitalism still needs a grass-roots racist policing of the border in order to maintain a steady supply of surplus super-exploitation of immigrant labor both as a way of continuing to dominate Mexico while using the racist construct of the Mexican to keep white labor in line.

In other words, the less God needs white people for the maintenance of capitalist expansion around the globe, the more God appears—at least in the construction of the beleaguered white-supremacist imagination—to need white people to purify the Nation within and to police its borders from invasion by outsiders. In a time when a Black man sits in the White House carrying out the global designs of capitalism, the current favorite inside outsiders are Muslims and Mexicans. So people like Russell Pearce, Jan Brewer, Joe Arpaio, and J. T. Ready—and their official and unofficial border guards and Minutemen—need to fan the flames of white panic by attacking the structures of Brown Pride and indigenous resurgence.

You can’t have continued tax cuts for the ultra rich and continued wars against brown peoples around the globe without divide-and-conquer strategies like SB 1080 and HB 2281. For when the God of Capitalism no longer needs white people, the God of Nativism needs them all the more.

RESOURCES:

Justin Akers and Mike Davis, No One Is Illegal: Fighting Racism and State Violence on the U.S.-Mexico Border, Haymarket Books, 2006.
Robert J. Miller, Native America, Discovered and Conquered: Thomas Jefferson, Lewis and Clark, and Manifest Destiny, Bison, 2008.
Steven T. Newcomb, Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery, Fulcrum, 2008.
Richard Noll, The Aryan Christ: The Secret Life of Carl Jung, Random House, 1997.
Edward Said, The Question of Palestine, Vintage, 1992 [1979].
Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead, Penguin, 1992 [1991].
David Ulansey, The Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries: Cosmology and Salvation in the Ancient World, Oxford UP, 1991.

Isthmus Fading

2010-11-19T21:22:00.000-08:00

by George Hartley

June 14, 2006 Athens

Vicious sways of staggered border
foam, a hug of the shore’s rim
and the echo roll of silent gulls
whispers
embarking—

speak of flesh
speak of fin
speak of fantastic bridges under fragrant fire
swank and flaunted incantation
etched in glass and stone of words soughed songlike:

redding flame of dawn engorging and supple
catching the twisted reeds glittering red gold aura

hearts may shrivel
eyes may mist and fade away
tongue may lisp of its glory
and all the while the worm makes a smile of the moon.

Bonelike glamour and tin teeth
puff and gone on the wings of fiery moths
from dust to dust from spark to ash
slip down into the covers and covet love.

Who Decides How the Oppressed Should Fight Oppression?

2010-11-17T10:43:00.000-08:00

Sunday 14 November 2010
by: Ramzy Baroud, t r u t h o u t | Op-ed

An American activist once gave me a book she had written that detailed her experiences in Palestine. The largely visual volume documented her journey in the occupied West Bank, a place rife with barbed wire, checkpoints, soldiers and tanks. It also highlighted how Palestinians resisted the occupation peacefully - in contrast to the prevalent media depictions linking Palestinian resistance to violence.

More recently, I received a book glorifying nonviolent resistance and referring to self-proclaimed Palestinian fighters who renounced violence as "converts." The book elaborated on several wondrous examples of how these "conversions" came about. Apparently a key factor was the discovery that not all Israelis supported the military occupation. The fighters realized that an environment that allowed both Israelis and Palestinians to work together would be best for Palestinians seeking other, more effective means of liberation.

An American priest also explained to me the impressive scale on which nonviolent resistance is happening. He showed me brochures he had obtained during a visit to a Bethlehem organization that teaches youth the perils of violence and the wisdom of nonviolence. The organization and its founders run seminars and workshops and invite speakers from Europe and the United States to share their knowledge on the subject with the (mostly refugee) students.

Every so often, an article, video or book surfaces with a similar message: Palestinians are being taught nonviolence; Palestinians are responding positively to the teachings of nonviolence.

As for progressive and Leftist media and audiences, stories praising nonviolence are electrifying, for they ignite a sense of hope that a less violent way is possible, that the teachings of Gandhi are not only relevant to India, in a specific time and space, but throughout the world, anytime.

These depictions repeatedly invite the question: where is the Palestinian Gandhi? Next they invite the answer: a Palestinian Gandhi already exists, in numerous West Bank villages bordering the Israeli Apartheid Wall, where they peacefully confront the carnivorous Israeli bulldozers eating up Palestinian land.

In a statement marking a recent visit by the group Elders to the Middle East, India's Ela Bhatt, a "Gandhian advocate of non-violence," explained her role in The Elders' latest mission: "I will be pleased to return to the Middle East to show the Elders' support for all those engaged in creative, nonviolent resistance to the occupation – both Israelis and Palestinians."

For some, the emphasis on nonviolent resistance is a successful media strategy. You are certainly far more likely to get Charlie Rose's attention by discussing how Palestinians and Israelis organize joint sit-ins than by talking about the armed resistance of militant groups ferociously fighting the Israeli army.

For others, ideological and spiritual convictions are the driving forces behind their involvement in the nonviolence campaign that is reportedly raging in the West Bank. These realizations seem to be largely led by Western advocates.

On the Palestinian side, the nonviolent "brand" is also useful. It has provided an outlet for many who were engaged in armed resistance, especially during the Second Palestinian Intifada. Some fighters, such as those affiliated with the Fatah movement, have become involved in art and theater after hauling automatic rifles and topping Israel's most-wanted list for years.

Politically, the term is used by the West Bank government as a platform that would allow for the continued use of the word moqawama - Arabic for "resistance" - but without committing to a costly armed struggle, which would certainly not go down well if adopted by the non-elected government deemed "moderate" by both Israel and the United States.

Whether in subtle or overt ways, armed resistance in Palestine is always condemned. Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah government repeatedly referred to it as "futile." Some insist it is a counterproductive strategy. Others find it morally indefensible.

The problem with the nonviolence bandwagon is that it is grossly misrepresentative of the reality on the ground. It also takes the focus away from the violence imparted by the Israeli occupation – in its routine and lethal use in the West Bank, and the untold savagery in Gaza - and places it solely on the shoulders of the Palestinians.

As for the gross misrepresentation of reality, Palestinians have used mass nonviolent resistance for generations - as early as the long strike of 1936. Nonviolent resistance has been and continues to be the bread and butter of Palestinian moqawama, from the time of British colonialism to the Israeli occupation. At the same time, some Palestinians fought violently as well, compelled by a great sense of urgency and the extreme violence applied against them by their oppressors. It is similar to the way many Indians fought violently, even during the time that Mahatma Gandhi's ideas were in full bloom.

Those who reduce and simplify India's history of anti-colonial struggle are doing the same to Palestinians.

Misreading history often leads to an erroneous assessment of the present, and, thus, a flawed prescription for the future. For some, Palestinians cannot possibly get it right, whether they respond to oppression nonviolently, violently, with political defiance or with utter submissiveness. The onus will always be on them to come up with solution, and to do so creatively and in ways that suit our Western sensibilities and our often selective interpretations of Gandhi's teachings.

Violence and nonviolence are mostly collective decisions that are shaped and driven by specific political and socioeconomic conditions and contexts. Unfortunately, the violence of the occupier has a tremendous role in creating and manipulating these conditions. It is unsurprising that the Second Palestinian Uprising was much more violent than the first, and that violent resistance in Palestine gained a huge boost after the victory scored by the Lebanese resistance in 2000, and again in 2006.

These factors must be contemplated seriously and with humility, and their complexity should be taken into account before any judgments are made. No oppressed nation should be faced with the demands that Palestinians constantly face. There may well be a thousand Palestinian Gandhis. There may be none. Frankly, it shouldn't matter. Only the unique experience of the Palestinian people and their genuine struggle for freedom could yield what Palestinians as a collective deem appropriate for their own. This is what happened with the people of India, France, Algeria, South Africa, and many other nations that sought and eventually attained their freedom.

Al Rabweh by John Berger

2010-11-16T19:05:00.000-08:00

On Mahmoud Darwish

A few days after our return from what was thought of, until recently, as the future state of Palestine, and which is now the world's largest prison (Gaza) and the world's largest waiting room (the West Bank), I had a dream.

I was alone, standing, stripped to the waist, in a sandstone desert. Eventually somebody else's hand scooped up some dusty soil from the ground and threw it at my chest. It was a considerate rather than an aggressive act. The soil or gravel changed, before it touched me, into torn strips of cloth, probably cotton, which wrapped themselves around my torso. Then these tattered rags changed again and became words, phrases. Written not by me but by the place.

Remembering this dream, the invented word landswept came to my mind. Repeatedly. Landswept describes a place or places where everything, both material and immaterial, has been brushed aside, purloined, swept away, blown down, irrigated off, everything except the touchable earth.

There's a small hill called Al Rabweh on the western outskirts of Ramallah, it's at the end of Tokyo street. Near the top of this hill the poet Mahmoud Darwish is buried. It's not a cemetery.

The street is named Tokyo because it leads to the city's Cultural Centre, which is at the foot of the hill, and was built thanks to Japanese funding.

It was in this Centre that Darwish read some of his poems for the last time—though no one then supposed it would be the last. What does the word last mean in moments of desolation?

We went to visit the grave. There's a headstone. The dug earth is still bare, and mourners have left on it little sheaves of green wheat—as he suggested in one of his poems. There are also red anemones, scraps of paper, photos.

He wanted to be buried in Galilee where he was born and where his mother still lives, but the Israelis forbade it.

At the funeral tens of thousands of people assembled here, at Al Rabweh. His mother, 96 years old, addressed them. "He is the son of you all," she said.

In exactly what arena do we speak when we speak of loved ones who have just died or been killed? Our words seem to us to resonate in a present moment more present than those we normally live. Comparable with moments of making love, of facing imminent danger, of taking an irrevocable decision, of dancing a tango. It's not in the arena of the eternal that our words of mourning resonate, but it could be that they are in some small gallery of that arena.

On the now deserted hill I tried to recall Darwish's voice. He had the calm voice of a beekeeper:

A box of stone
where the living and dead move in the dry clay
like bees captive in a honeycomb in a hive
and each time the siege tightens
they go on a flower hunger strike
and ask the sea to indicate the emergency exit.

Recalling his voice, I felt the need to sit down on the touchable earth, on the green grass. I did so.
Al Rabweh means in Arabic: "the hill with green grass on it". His words have returned to where they came from. And there is nothing else. A nothing shared by 5 million people.

The next hill, 500 metres away, is a refuse dump. Crows are circling it. Some kids are scavenging.
When I sat down in the grass by the edge of his newly dug grave, something unexpected happened. To define it, I have to describe another event.

This was a few days ago. My son, Yves, was driving and we were on our way to the local town of Cluses in the French Alps. It had been snowing. Hillsides, fields and trees were white and the whiteness of the first snow often disorientates birds, disturbing their sense of distance and direction.

Suddenly a bird struck the windscreen. Yves, watching it in the rear-mirror, saw it fall to the roadside. He braked and reversed. It was a small bird, a robin, stunned but still alive, eyes blinking. I picked him up out of the snow, he was warm in my hand, very warm and we drove on.

From time to time J examined him. Within half an hour he had died. I lifted him up to put him on the back seat of the car. Yes, he was a male. What surprised me was his weight. He weighed less than when I had picked him up from the snow. I moved him from hand to hand to check this. It was as if his energy when alive, his struggle to survive, had added to his weight. He was now almost weightless.

After I sat on the grass on the hill of Al Rabweh something comparable happened. Mahmoud's death had lost its weight. What had remained were his words.

Months have passed, each one filled with foreboding and silence. Disasters are flowing together into a delta that has no name, and will only be given one by geographers, who will come later, much later. Nothing to do today but to try to walk on the bitter waters of this nameless delta.

Gaza, the largest prison in the world, is being transformed into an abattoir. The word strip (from Gaza Strip) is being drenched with blood, as happened 65 years ago to the word ghetto.

Day and night bombs, shells, phosphorous arms, mortars, machine-gun rounds are being fired by the Israeli army from air, sea and land against a civilian population of I.5 million. The estimated number of mutilated and dead increases with each news report from international journalists, all of whom are forbidden by Israel to enter the Strip. Yet the crucial constant figure is that for a single Israeli casualty there are one hundred Palestinian casualties, of whom almost half are women and children. This is what constitutes a massacre. Most lodgings have neither water nor electricity; the hospitals lack doctors, medicines and generators. The massacre follows a blockage and siege.

Certain voices across the world are raised in protest. But the governments of the rich, with their world media and their proud possession of nuclear weapons, reassure Israel that a blind eye will be cast on what its soldiers are perpetrating.

"A place weeping enters our sleep," wrote the Kurdish poet Bejan Matur, "a place weeping enters our sleep and never leaves."

Nothing but landswept earth.

I am back, four months ago in Ramallah, in an abandoned underground parking lot, which has been taken over as a working-space by a small group of Palestinian painters and sculptors, amongst whom there's a sculptress named Randa Mdah. I'm looking at an installation conceived and made by her entitled Puppet Theatre.

It consists of a large bas-relief measuring 3metres by 2, which stands upright like a walL In front of it on the floor there are three fully sculptured figures.

The bas-relief of shoulders, faces, hands, is made on an armature of wire, of polyester, fibreglass and clay. Its surfaces are coloured—darkish greens, browns, reds. The depth of its relief is about the same as in one of Ghiberti's bronze doors for the Duomo in Firenze, and the foreshortening and distorted perspectives have been dealt with with almost the same mastery. (I would never have guessed that the artist is so young. She's 26.) The wall of the bas-relief, in its crowdedness and with its ceremonial colours, is like "the hedge" that an audience in a theatre resembles when seen from the stage.

On the floor in front are the life-size figures, two women and one man. They are made of the same materials, but with more faded colours.

One is within touching distance of the audience, another is two metres away and the third twice as far away again. They are wearing their everyday clothes, the ones they chose to put on this morning.
Their bodies are attached to cords hanging from three horizontal sticks which in turn hang from the ceiling. They are the puppets, their sticks the control bars for the absent, or invisible puppeteers.
The multitude of figures on the bas-relief are all looking at what they see in front of their eyes and wringing their hands. Their hands are like flocks of poultry.

They are wringing them because they are powerless to intervene. They are bas-relief, they are not three dimensional, and so they cannot enter or intervene in the solid real world.

Some of them look like commentators, some look like angels, some look like government spokesmen, some look like Presidents, some look like fiends. All express impotency. Together and collectively, despite their wringing hands, they represent silence.

The three solid, palpitating figures attached to the invisible puppeteers' cords, are being hurled to the ground, head first, feet in the air. Again and again until their heads split. Their hands, torsos, faces are convulsed in agony. One that doesn't reach its end. You see it in their feet. Again and again.

I could walk between the impotent spectators of the bas-relief and the sprawling victims on the ground. But I don't. There is a power in this work such as I have rarely seen. It has claimed the very ground on which it is standing. It has made the killing field between the unreal spectators and the agonising victims sacred. It has changed the floor of a parking lot into something landswept.

This unforgettable work prophesied the Gaza Strip.

Mahmoud Darwish's grave on the hill of Al Rabweh has now, following decisions made by the Palestinian Authority, been fenced off, and a glass pyramid has been constructed over it. It's no longer possible to squat beside him. His words, however, are audible to our ears and will remain so and we can repeat them.

I have work to do on the geography of volcanoes
From desolation to ruin
from the time of Lot to Hiroshima
As if I'd never yet lived
with a lust I've still to know
Perhaps Now has gone further away
and yesterday come closer
So I take Now's hand to walk along the hem of history
and avoid cyclic time
with its chaos of mountain goats
How can my tomorrow be saved?
By the velocity of electronic time
or by my desert caravan slowness?
I have work till my end
as if I won't see tomorrow
and I have work for today who isn't here
So I listen
softly softly
to the ant beat of my heart ...

Ramallah and Haute Savoie

Early autumn, 2008

Showalter's North American Zionist Impulse

2010-11-16T11:41:00.000-08:00

George Hartley

I need to unpack the Zionist impulse behind this passage from Elaine Showalter's “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness,” Critical Inquiry 8.2 (Winter1981): 179-205.

The concluding paragraph:

I began by recalling that a few years ago feminist critics thought we were on a pilgrimage to the promised land in which gender would lose its power, in which all texts would be sexless and equal, like angels. But the more precisely we understand the specificity of women's writing not as a transient by-product of sexism but as a fundamental and continually determining reality, the more clearly we realize that we have misperceived our destination. We may never reach the promised land at all; for when feminist critics see our task as the study of women's writing, we realize that the land promised to us is not the serenely undifferentiated universality of texts but the tumultuous and intriguing wilderness of difference itself. (205)

Notes on What Does Justice Look Like?

2010-11-10T07:20:00.000-08:00

Waziyatawin, Ph. D.

What Does Justice Look Like? The Struggle for Liberation in Dakota Homeland

St. Paul Minn.: Living Justice Press, 2008

I plan to add more substantive notes in the near future, but I at least wanted to post the Table of Contents for Waz's amazing book. Even the chapter headings and subheadings provide a major intervention in the colonialist normalization of ongoing conquest on Turtle Island. —George

Contents

Introduction: Envisioning Justice in Minnesota 3-15

Addressing Harms Internationally 4

The Minnesota Context 6

Initiating an Era of Truth Telling 11

Taking Down the Fort 11

Making Reparations 12

Creating an Oppression-Free Society 13

1. How Minnesotans Wrested the Land 17-70

A Story of Dakota Creation 17

White Accounts Regarding the Dakota Past 21

Anishinabe Invasion 23

Wasicu Invasion 28

Legalized Land Theft 29

1851 Treaties 32

International Standards for Genocide 37

Criterion A 38

Criterion B 50

Criterion C 53

Criterion D 57

Criterion E 59

Consequences of Genocide 60

2. A Call for Truth Telling 71-95

Sesquicentennial Discussion 73

Dakota Responses to This Historical Legacy 79

The Power of Truth 80

A Truth-Telling Forum 82

Denial of Genocide as a Crime 90

Wide-Scale Truth Telling 91

3. Taking Down the Fort 97-118

The Plans to Refortify the Fort 98

The Site of Genesis and Genocide 103

Fort Snelling as a Fun-Filled Tourist Destination 105

Paying Homage to Bdote’s Deep History 109

The Importance of Symbols 112

Metaphorically Dismantling the Fort 113

4. Just Short of Breaking Camp 119-65

Options on the Table 120

Rekindling Colonialism’s Factions 121

Disavowal of Dakota identity as a Pathway to Justice 124

A Broader Vision of Justice for Dakota People 127

The Ute Example 129

Land Reparations 131

Minnesota’s Wealth 135

A Need for Change 142

Recovery of Dakota Lifeways 146

Future Land Return 149

Additional Reparations 151

The Kanatsiohareke Model 155

Rebuilding Our Communal Societies 156

The Cost of Reparations is not Prohibitive 160

5. Developing Peaceful Co-Existence 167-76

Assessing Our Values 167

A Message to Dakota People 171

A Message to Wasicu (White) People 173

Final Thoughts 175

Contemplating this [Earth Community] future requires expansive thinking on the part of all of us. For non-Dakota people, it asks that you challenge, re-examine, and reject the racist and colonialist programming to which you have grown accustomed. It also asks that you rethink the values of domination, consumption, and exploitation that have become a part of American society. For Dakota people, it requires that we awaken our consciousness to the potential for liberation. Most importantly, however, it requires all of us to move beyond a simple re-education and acknowledgement of past harms. It requires action that will serve to ensure justice to the original People of this place we call Minisota. (14)

Una década de zapatismo

2010-10-03T06:22:00.000-07:00

 por Carlos Fazio, March 1, 2004 • Voltairenet.org

Ni los indígenas, ni el Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (Ezln) ni México son los mismos de entonces, de enero de 1994. Tampoco el mundo. En el lapso transcurrido desde el alzamiento armado de 1994 el Ezln ha cambiado la lógica, la perspectiva y los plazos de su lucha.

Carlos Fazio

Periodista, Analista internacional del diario La Jornada, de México.

Hace diez años hicieron «política con tiros» para hacerse oír. La desesperada rebelión abrió las puertas del diálogo y la negociación. Pero hoy el conflicto armado sigue vigente; permanece el cerco contrainsurgente del ejército federal, los cuerpos policiales y los grupos paramilitares, que hostiga y aprisiona a las bases civiles zapatistas.

También permanece la pobreza. Sin embargo, la estrategia del Ezln no es ya insurreccional. Hoy el arma principal de los zapatistas es la palabra. Las palabras y los hechos. Las Juntas de Buen Gobierno no son palabras abstractas, son una alternativa concreta. Como ha dicho el subcomandante Marcos, son «un referente político práctico, civil y pacífico alternativo.»

La etapa marca un cambio en la forma de organización: de lo militar a lo civil. Quedó atrás el referente de una organización guerrillera. Aunque el Ezln siga siendo un ejército rebelde y conserve sus armas. En estos diez años, la organización político militar sustentada por una amplia base social se transformó en un movimiento político social, que controla territorios y ejerce autoridad sobre ellos, resguardado por un cuerpo armado.

Sus dirigentes afirman que el Ezln es un ejército para defender, no para la toma del poder. Arguyen que el «delirio zapatista» es no ver el poder como dominación sino como servicio. Lo que no quiere decir que la comandancia del Ezln no impulse la construcción de un poder popular o un doble poder que combine con habilidad elementos sistémicos y antisistémicos según la coyuntura. La estrategia zapatista pasa hoy por acumular fuerzas y tejer alianzas para reconstruir la sociedad desde abajo; a partir de sus bases indígenas civiles, con sus propios métodos y estilos de trabajo, fortaleciendo redes de resistencia, de autogestión socioeconómica y autonomía.

Profundización de la crisis

A una década del estallido insurreccional y de una larga tregua armada salpicada de acciones bélicas y hechos violentos como la matanza de Acteal, asistimos a un conflicto de nuevo tipo, con una lógica distinta a la del período 1994-1998. Chiapas y el Ezln han dejado de ser el epicentro de la política nacional.

La salida política negociada, que sumó cuatro diálogos entre el Ezln y el gobierno en 1995 y 1996, ha sido abandonada por «el gobierno del cambio». La estrategia de Vicente Fox ha sido soslayar el problema y mantener una política de contención contrainsurgente.

Se cerró la lógica de la negociación; no hay condiciones para el diálogo. La salida de monseñor Samuel Ruiz de la diócesis de San Cristóbal debilitó a la Iglesia de la Liberación y menguó la solidaridad con el zapatismo. La disputa no está ahora en la mesa de negociación. No se ubica en el terreno de la legalidad; la legalidad no tiene sustento si carece de legitimidad. Hoy el Ezln disputa legitimidad por la vía de los hechos.

La irrupción zapatista del 94 se dio en un marco de derrotas de la izquierda a escala mundial; a contrasentido de «la historia». La dictadura del pensamiento único neoliberal estaba en su apogeo bajo la hegemonía imperial de Estados Unidos. En México, la contrarreforma agraria del Banco Mundial y Carlos Salinas (modificación al artículo 27 constitucional) puso fin al proceso de redistribución de la tierra y liquidó el sistema ejidal. La eliminación del concepto de «propiedad social» dejó a los pequeños campesinos a merced de las «fuerzas del mercado», aboliendo la principal herencia de la revolución mexicana: la tierra es para quien la trabaje.

Frente a la reconquista de la tierra por los «modernos conquistadores» surgió la insurrección de las comunidades campesinas indígenas de Chiapas; el problema del «¡Ya basta!» y las armas zapatistas vino a sumarse a otras formas de resistencia y movilizaciones por la tierra en Ecuador, Paraguay, Brasil, Bolivia, mojones todos de una nueva etapa de acumulación de fuerzas de un movimiento social anticapitalista y antiimperialista de nuevo tipo.

En México. el Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), que gobernó el país de manera autoritaria durante 70 años, fue derrotado en las urnas en los comicios de 2000. Sin duda, el levantamiento zapatista contribuyó a su caída; a la apertura democrática. Pero el gobierno de Fox no fue capaz de recorrer el camino de la transición a la democracia, acentuó el modelo económico excluyente y la crisis estructural del país se ha agudizado.

La erosión del viejo corporativismo de Estado ha dejado muchos vacíos de poder y exhibe a una presidencia débil. La política y los políticos han fracasado. En el balance de estos diez años, vemos que el Tratado de Libre Comercio destrozó la cadena productiva del agro y «el campo no aguanta más».

Política, social y económicamente, la crisis es más profunda hoy que en 1994. México está polarizado. La violencia se ha diversificado y hoy abarca a todo el país.

Defender el territorio

En ese contexto, a Fox le ha faltado voluntad y sensibilidad políticas para atender el conflicto armado y el tema indígena. O más bien, no ha querido. Fox sacó de su agenda a Chiapas, al indio, a la paz. Los aisló y se dedicó a administrar el conflicto. A coexistir con él, ninguneándolo. Trató de invisibilizar al gobierno federal y al ejército como partes orgánicas y activas del conflicto armado, asimilando al Ezln y a las comunidades en resistencia a actores de un conflicto local, intra e intercomunitario.

Para el Ezln, el incumplimiento de los Acuerdos de San Andrés (1996) y la contrarreforma sobre derechos y cultura indígenas (2001) marcó el fin de una etapa. Pero no llamaron a las armas; se pusieron a reorganizar la resistencia y a reforzar o construir según el caso la autonomía, para defender el territorio y los recursos naturales ante la vocación privatizadora y entreguista del gobierno y los partidos políticos parlamentarios y la voracidad del gran capital, nacional y extranjero, sintetizada en los megaproyectos neocoloniales del Plan Puebla-Panamá.

En otro de sus largos períodos de clandestinidad y silencio expresivo y reflexivo -el decir y hacer callado de los zapatistas-, el Ezln logró abrir un boquete en la estructura de poder del Estado. En enero de 2003, unos 30 mil zapatistas irrumpieron en San Cristóbal de las Casas y dieron inicio a una nueva fase de su lucha, que «aterrizaría» en agosto último con la puesta en marcha de los «caracoles» y las Juntas de Buen Gobierno, que son relaciones intermunicipales entre municipios autónomos. A diferencia de 1994, esta vez la ofensiva fue política, no militar. Y se centró en la reivindicación de las autonomías de las personas y las colectividades indígenas. Aprovecharon su largo silencio para instrumentar de manera disciplinada y progresiva el cumplimiento de los Acuerdos de San Andrés, negados por los tres poderes del Estado.

La propuesta pacífica y constructiva de los zapatistas fue crear autogobiernos en rebeldía, con una estructura de abajo hacia arriba, para poner en práctica el «mandar obedeciendo». De facto, sí. Pero con apego a la Constitución; en ejercicio de la libre determinación de los pueblos indígenas. Una radicalización legítima, aunque no legal, por omisión del gobierno, por incumplimiento de la parte gubernamental. Y con una base jurídica incuestionable: el Convenio 169 de la Organización Internacional del Trabajo, que da prioridad a las formas propias de organización social de los pueblos indios. A la manera de una zona liberada ajena a cualquier intención balcanizadora o separatista, la nueva estructura de control político territorial zapatista abarca un área de unos 30 mil quilómetros cuadrados, que comprenden 35 municipios constitucionales de los Altos, la Selva y el Norte de Chiapas.

Ni modelo ni vanguardia

El caracol, «paradigma del pensamiento simbólico de los pueblos mayas» (según el antropólogo Andrés Aubr), es el ícono del actual proceso colectivo en espiral de los zapatistas, con su dinámica propia, sus tiempos y sus verbos. Los caracoles, como proyecto de pueblos gobierno (Pablo González Casanova) con mandatos controlados desde la base, están marcando el nuevo tiempo político del sureste mexicano a partir de una asociación de caracoles y municipios autónomos en red, coordinados por las Juntas de Buen Gobierno a partir de una nueva propuesta de justicia, educación, salud comunitaria, tierra, vivienda, trabajo, alimentación y comercialización alternativas y como parte de un proceso que ya no está centrado solo en lo comunitario sino también en lo regional y que aspira a articular lo local con lo nacional y lo universal.

Se trata de la construcción de una «nueva cultura del poder» basada en los principios del «pensar hacer» práctico y concreto de las comunidades autónomas zapatistas. De una «resistencia transparente», que hizo a un lado los turbios enjuagues de un poder corruptor, con sus cooptaciones, mediatizaciones e impunidades; ajena al tradicional asistencialismo y paternalismo oficial.

Pero que también busca dejar atrás las limosnas «humanitarias» condicionadas de gobiernos y las ONG, y las trampas semánticas e ideológicas de los compañeros de ruta de la «izquierda».

Es un proceso singular que está en su fase de aprendizaje y no quiere ser modelo ni vanguardia de nada. Un proceso colectivo que se da en el marco de una guerra de baja intensidad; del aislamiento político del régimen derechista y racista de Fox y del hostigamiento militar, policial y paramilitar, que requiere, por tanto, de la autodefensa.

De allí que la comandancia general del Ezln siga teniendo el mando sobre los milicianos e insurgentes, para «proteger a las comunidades de las agresiones del mal gobierno y de los paramilitares (...) pues para eso nacimos y por eso estamos dispuestos a morir» (subcomandante Marcos). Como su nombre lo indica, el Ezln sigue siendo un Ejército de Liberación Nacional, aunque algunos críticos señalan que ha perdido la ele y la ene; que el uso de las armas es meramente simbólico. Las próximas luchas de los mexicanos en contra de las privatizaciones, el Alca y el Plan Puebla-Panamá arrojarán luces sobre esa y otras interrogantes. Hay hoy en México mayor conciencia política y surgieron nuevas alianzas sociales de tipo extraparlamentario. Si Fox persiste en sus políticas y el país se descompone, el Ezln recobrará protagonismo en el ámbito nacional, ahora como parte de un amplio movimiento alterglobalizador que impulsa propuestas de cambio social.

A Dream by William Blake

2010-09-03T05:49:00.000-07:00

Once a dream did weave a shade
O'er my angel-guarded bed,
That an emmet lost its way
Where on grass methought I lay.

Troubled, wildered, and forlorn,
Dark, benighted, travel-worn,
Over many a tangle spray,
All heart-broke, I heard her say:

"Oh my children! do they cry,
Do they hear their father sigh?
Now they look abroad to see,
Now return and weep for me."

Pitying, I dropped a tear:
But I saw a glow-worm near,
Who replied, "What wailing wight
Calls the watchman of the night?

"I am set to light the ground,
While the beetle goes his round:
Follow now the beetle's hum;
Little wanderer, hie thee home!"