"I don't battle anymore! I uplift motherfuckers!" - GZA
Thursday, February 23, 2006,10:20 PM
Roots of Rising Homicides Found in Forgotten Black History
by Randy Shaw, 2006-02-23
As San Francisco officials try to address the city’s rise in homicides, killings by and of young African-American men have also increased in Richmond and West Oakland across the Bay, and in Newark, Washington D.C. and other black communities across America. The roots of violence in America’s African-American neighborhoods have multiple explanations, but a critical factor was white resistance to ensuring that federal War on Poverty programs and benefits of the 1960’s and 70’s reached black recipients. Much has been written about such resistance in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Boston, but the all-too similar histories of West Oakland, Bayview, and the Western Addition are largely forgotten. Before Black History Month ends, it is worth looking at how the liberal Bay Area denied African-American dreams, setting in motion the problems plaguing black neighborhoods today.
Because the San Francisco Bay Area has long been known for its racial tolerance, those unfamiliar with the past forty years of local history are likely unaware of how Oakland and San Francisco city governments sought to drive African-Americans away. These governments responded to the federal War on Poverty by doing everything in their power to deny jobs and benefits to blacks, and both used anti-democratic Redevelopment Agencies to ultimately achieve their goals.
Despite Oakland’s large African-American population, its white political establishment succeeded through the end of the 1970’s in stifling black economic progress. San Francisco journalist Warren Hinckle, then editor of the national Ramparts magazine, accused Oakland’s white elites in 1966 as “making 99% of the decisions in Oakland.” Hinckle castigated the city’s “power elite” as “frightened oligarchs” afraid to come down from the Oakland hills to face “the people” in a truly democratic process.
The chief problem for Oakland’s black population was that the city’s public resources were diverted away from low-income neighborhoods to either downtown businesses or to white residents living outside the city. Over 50% of Oakland city jobs through the 1960’s went to residents in places like Fremont, San Leandro, and Milpitas---three nearby cities whose homeowners maintained strict racial covenants that prohibited sales to blacks.
The Port of Oakland, 78% of whose employees did not live in Oakland, made money hand over foot but hired few blacks and gave little back to its West Oakland neighborhood.
So during the greatest period of American economic growth, when white workers could afford a single-family home with a picket fence, African-Americans were shut out of the American dream. By the time Oakland’s hiring practices changed and racist real estate practices were illegalized, the price of East Bay homes had dramatically increased. Whites got the benefit of appreciating home values, the African-American workers forced to rent during through the late 1970’s did not.
The ability of whites to divert Oakland’s wealth from the local black population led a broad range of West Oakland activists in the 60’s and 70’s to view the white community’s economic control in colonial terms. Black activists took the War on Poverty’s mantra of “community empowerment” seriously, but were stopped at every turn from implementing any of its plans by an entrenched Oakland establishment---cheered on by the right-wing Oakland Tribune---that resented African-American’s effort to shape city policies.
But Oakland’s black community was organizing, and had a comprehensive economic development strategy for ensuring city revenue returned to the neighborhoods instead of going to downtown businesses and the Port. In 1973 and 1975, the Black Panther Party promoted a strategy for reorienting civic priorities around the rehabilitation and health of low-income neighborhoods that brought a record black voter turnout to the polls in city elections
However, no matter what strategy activists came up with to get the federal funds supposedly targeted for them (and remember, this was the last era in America when federal spending on domestic problems was a top priority), Oakland’s white power structure always had a response. Their absolute line of defense was the city’s system of at-large voting for City Council, which meant that the white voting majority could always ensure the defeat of black candidates seeking to give a voice to West Oakland concerns.
By the time Oakland elected Lionel Wilson as its first Black mayor in 1977, the debate over redirecting federal money to the black community became almost a moot point. The Nixon Administration had abruptly retreated from concern over eradicating poverty in the ghetto, having halted new federal housing construction and greatly reduced spending on community-based economic development programs. Never again has America attempted anything close to a War on Poverty, and the nation’s commitment toward spending sufficient money to solve the problems of the ghetto was over almost as soon as it had begun.
Oakland’s election of a black mayor just as urban America was being starved for money was a pattern repeated across America. Black mayors ascended to office in Newark, Gary, Detroit, Cleveland and other cities after federal money dried up and when it was too late to stem the loss of manufacturing and other blue-collar jobs.
Like Oakland and San Francisco, these cities also suffer from rising homicide rates.
A year after Lionel Wilson became mayor, California voters passed Prop 13, which shifted millions of dollars from older, poorer cities like Oakland for the benefit of large corporations and white suburban homeowners. Combined with the federal cuts, Wilson and subsequent Oakland mayors would have far less resources to address the deepening problems of the city’s long neglected black neighborhoods.
Governor Jerry Brown gave Wilson the oath of office in 1977 as a way to highlight the fruition of the city’s black political aspirations. But Brown has spent his eight years as the city’s Mayor prioritizing upscale condominium development, and declared soon after taking office that West Oakland’s chief problem was not a lack of jobs or community-based development, but rather that the area had too many tenant-occupied housing units.
Should we then be surprised when Oakland’s young African-Americans, who know they have a President, Governor, and Mayor who do not care about them, express their resignation and hopelessness in the form of violence?
San Francisco’s history is more blatant. The sole purpose of the Redevelopment Agency’s destruction of thriving African-American neighborhoods in the Fillmore and Western Addition was to drive blacks out of San Francisco.
How do we know this? Because the rationale for “urban renewal” across America in the 1950’s-70’s was to attract affluent consumers to declining downtown business districts. The Fillmore and Western Addition are nowhere near downtown, so that there is no non-racial rationale for San Francisco’s bulldozing of its historic black neighborhoods.
No wonder thirty years later the Redevelopment Agency was still trying to figure out what to build in the area. Its mission was accomplished once the African-American community was displaced, and we cannot be surprised to see anger and violence burst out when so few of the promises made to the community have been kept.
Displacing African-Americans from Bayview-Hunters Point will not require bulldozers; a rising real estate market will alone get the job done. To expedite the transformation of Bayview away from its African-American roots, the Redevelopment Agency is stimulating the construction of thousands of market rate units that current residents cannot afford to buy.
Bayview-Hunters Point lacks the rich black political organizing history of West Oakland, and time is running out for challenging future plans for the area. The longtime persistence of crime and unemployment in Bayview has broadened support for an “urban renewal” strategy that might have brought massive resistance as recently as a decade ago.
As for West Oakland, former Congressman Ronald V. Dellums has returned to his political roots in an attempt to become Oakand’s next mayor. Dellums’ election could represent the neighborhood’s—and Oakland’s-- last and best hope for economic revival without displacement.
Ron Dellums is a unique historical figure that can convince Oakland’s low-income black residents that their dreams of a better future need no longer be deferred. By replacing resignation with hope, Dellums offers Oakland the most potent homicide prevention strategy.
Unfortunately, neither Gavin Newsom nor any San Francisco local political leader has the history in the black community to play the role Dellums can perform in Oakland. This leaves San Francisco officials to craft anti-violence funding packages while awaiting new national leadership that can revive African-American hopes for the future.
(Those interested in the recent history of urban America are strongly encouraged to read Robert Self’s American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland)
As San Francisco officials try to address the city’s rise in homicides, killings by and of young African-American men have also increased in Richmond and West Oakland across the Bay, and in Newark, Washington D.C. and other black communities across America. The roots of violence in America’s African-American neighborhoods have multiple explanations, but a critical factor was white resistance to ensuring that federal War on Poverty programs and benefits of the 1960’s and 70’s reached black recipients. Much has been written about such resistance in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Boston, but the all-too similar histories of West Oakland, Bayview, and the Western Addition are largely forgotten. Before Black History Month ends, it is worth looking at how the liberal Bay Area denied African-American dreams, setting in motion the problems plaguing black neighborhoods today.
Because the San Francisco Bay Area has long been known for its racial tolerance, those unfamiliar with the past forty years of local history are likely unaware of how Oakland and San Francisco city governments sought to drive African-Americans away. These governments responded to the federal War on Poverty by doing everything in their power to deny jobs and benefits to blacks, and both used anti-democratic Redevelopment Agencies to ultimately achieve their goals.
Despite Oakland’s large African-American population, its white political establishment succeeded through the end of the 1970’s in stifling black economic progress. San Francisco journalist Warren Hinckle, then editor of the national Ramparts magazine, accused Oakland’s white elites in 1966 as “making 99% of the decisions in Oakland.” Hinckle castigated the city’s “power elite” as “frightened oligarchs” afraid to come down from the Oakland hills to face “the people” in a truly democratic process.
The chief problem for Oakland’s black population was that the city’s public resources were diverted away from low-income neighborhoods to either downtown businesses or to white residents living outside the city. Over 50% of Oakland city jobs through the 1960’s went to residents in places like Fremont, San Leandro, and Milpitas---three nearby cities whose homeowners maintained strict racial covenants that prohibited sales to blacks.
The Port of Oakland, 78% of whose employees did not live in Oakland, made money hand over foot but hired few blacks and gave little back to its West Oakland neighborhood.
So during the greatest period of American economic growth, when white workers could afford a single-family home with a picket fence, African-Americans were shut out of the American dream. By the time Oakland’s hiring practices changed and racist real estate practices were illegalized, the price of East Bay homes had dramatically increased. Whites got the benefit of appreciating home values, the African-American workers forced to rent during through the late 1970’s did not.
The ability of whites to divert Oakland’s wealth from the local black population led a broad range of West Oakland activists in the 60’s and 70’s to view the white community’s economic control in colonial terms. Black activists took the War on Poverty’s mantra of “community empowerment” seriously, but were stopped at every turn from implementing any of its plans by an entrenched Oakland establishment---cheered on by the right-wing Oakland Tribune---that resented African-American’s effort to shape city policies.
But Oakland’s black community was organizing, and had a comprehensive economic development strategy for ensuring city revenue returned to the neighborhoods instead of going to downtown businesses and the Port. In 1973 and 1975, the Black Panther Party promoted a strategy for reorienting civic priorities around the rehabilitation and health of low-income neighborhoods that brought a record black voter turnout to the polls in city elections
However, no matter what strategy activists came up with to get the federal funds supposedly targeted for them (and remember, this was the last era in America when federal spending on domestic problems was a top priority), Oakland’s white power structure always had a response. Their absolute line of defense was the city’s system of at-large voting for City Council, which meant that the white voting majority could always ensure the defeat of black candidates seeking to give a voice to West Oakland concerns.
By the time Oakland elected Lionel Wilson as its first Black mayor in 1977, the debate over redirecting federal money to the black community became almost a moot point. The Nixon Administration had abruptly retreated from concern over eradicating poverty in the ghetto, having halted new federal housing construction and greatly reduced spending on community-based economic development programs. Never again has America attempted anything close to a War on Poverty, and the nation’s commitment toward spending sufficient money to solve the problems of the ghetto was over almost as soon as it had begun.
Oakland’s election of a black mayor just as urban America was being starved for money was a pattern repeated across America. Black mayors ascended to office in Newark, Gary, Detroit, Cleveland and other cities after federal money dried up and when it was too late to stem the loss of manufacturing and other blue-collar jobs.
Like Oakland and San Francisco, these cities also suffer from rising homicide rates.
A year after Lionel Wilson became mayor, California voters passed Prop 13, which shifted millions of dollars from older, poorer cities like Oakland for the benefit of large corporations and white suburban homeowners. Combined with the federal cuts, Wilson and subsequent Oakland mayors would have far less resources to address the deepening problems of the city’s long neglected black neighborhoods.
Governor Jerry Brown gave Wilson the oath of office in 1977 as a way to highlight the fruition of the city’s black political aspirations. But Brown has spent his eight years as the city’s Mayor prioritizing upscale condominium development, and declared soon after taking office that West Oakland’s chief problem was not a lack of jobs or community-based development, but rather that the area had too many tenant-occupied housing units.
Should we then be surprised when Oakland’s young African-Americans, who know they have a President, Governor, and Mayor who do not care about them, express their resignation and hopelessness in the form of violence?
San Francisco’s history is more blatant. The sole purpose of the Redevelopment Agency’s destruction of thriving African-American neighborhoods in the Fillmore and Western Addition was to drive blacks out of San Francisco.
How do we know this? Because the rationale for “urban renewal” across America in the 1950’s-70’s was to attract affluent consumers to declining downtown business districts. The Fillmore and Western Addition are nowhere near downtown, so that there is no non-racial rationale for San Francisco’s bulldozing of its historic black neighborhoods.
No wonder thirty years later the Redevelopment Agency was still trying to figure out what to build in the area. Its mission was accomplished once the African-American community was displaced, and we cannot be surprised to see anger and violence burst out when so few of the promises made to the community have been kept.
Displacing African-Americans from Bayview-Hunters Point will not require bulldozers; a rising real estate market will alone get the job done. To expedite the transformation of Bayview away from its African-American roots, the Redevelopment Agency is stimulating the construction of thousands of market rate units that current residents cannot afford to buy.
Bayview-Hunters Point lacks the rich black political organizing history of West Oakland, and time is running out for challenging future plans for the area. The longtime persistence of crime and unemployment in Bayview has broadened support for an “urban renewal” strategy that might have brought massive resistance as recently as a decade ago.
As for West Oakland, former Congressman Ronald V. Dellums has returned to his political roots in an attempt to become Oakand’s next mayor. Dellums’ election could represent the neighborhood’s—and Oakland’s-- last and best hope for economic revival without displacement.
Ron Dellums is a unique historical figure that can convince Oakland’s low-income black residents that their dreams of a better future need no longer be deferred. By replacing resignation with hope, Dellums offers Oakland the most potent homicide prevention strategy.
Unfortunately, neither Gavin Newsom nor any San Francisco local political leader has the history in the black community to play the role Dellums can perform in Oakland. This leaves San Francisco officials to craft anti-violence funding packages while awaiting new national leadership that can revive African-American hopes for the future.
(Those interested in the recent history of urban America are strongly encouraged to read Robert Self’s American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland)
,10:14 PM
Post Hip Hop Generation
M.K. Asante Jr
The "hip-hop generation," a tag customarily attached to blacks born after the civil-rights movement, may have once captured the essence of the rebellious, politically discontent twenty-somethings of the 1980s and '90s, but not today.
With rapper/producer Kanye West recently amassing eight Grammy nominations, there is no doubt that hip-hop is an integral part of global pop culture. Global -- as opposed to American or black -- because, like scores of other innovations and phenomena that emerge from the black community, it has helped to shape the perceptions of people, especially young ones, all over the world. Although contemporary images often reinforce negative stereotypes, hip-hop was able to successfully break through a slew of music-industry barriers and bring many talented voices into the mainstream -- voices that had previously barely been heard and never listened to.
Hip-hop, like the black musical forms that preceded it, cannot, because of its cultural context, be looked at in a vacuum. To observe hip-hop then, is to observe the aesthetics, attitudes and ideologies of its progenitors as well. That understood, and with today's hip-hop boasting problems loud enough to drown out even the most seductive samples, the urgency for redefinition by a new generation couldn't be more evident.
The current crisis isn't just that rap, hip-hop's central asset, has drifted into the shallowest pool of lyrical possibilities, or that the latest version of hip-hop betrays the attitudes and ideals that framed it. It's that many young blacks who allegedly belong to the "hip-hop generation," feel misrepresented by it and have begun to realize the limitations of being defined by a musical genre -- a misogynistic, homophobic and violent one to boot. All of this against the ambivalent backdrop of globalization and the fog of a new war has led us to a generational tipping point, the moment when a dramatic shift is more than a possibility; it's a certainty.
The term "post hip-hop" describes a period of time -- now -- of great transition for a new generation of black youths in search of a deeper understanding of themselves in a context outside of the hip-hop monopoly. Post hip-hop is an assertion that encapsulates my generation's broad range of abilities and ideas and incorporates recent social advances (i.e., the women's movement, gay rights) that hip-hop has refused to acknowledge or respect.
Post hip-hop is not about the death of rap, but rather the birth of a new movement propelled by a paradigm shift that can be felt in the crowded spoken-word joints in North Philadelphia, the krump-dance dance-offs in Compton, and on a tattered stoop on a corner of Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn where Rashard Lloyd, a high school senior grumbles when I ask him, "what does hip-hop mean to you?" After a moment of contemplation, he makes clear, "hip-hop don't speak to or for me."
While Lloyd's attitude may surprise most of us who mistake the ring tones, reality shows and glossy ad campaigns as indicators of hip-hop's dominance, it shouldn't. According to "The U.S. Urban Youth Market: Targeting the Trendsetters," a study conducted by research and analysis firm Packaged Facts, black youths like Lloyd "possess an overriding desire to remain outside of the mainstream." Claire Madden, vice president of marketing for Market Research, parent company of Packaged Facts, says that once "there is a perception from urban youth that these manufacturers [companies and artists] are ignoring their origins ... they are named sell-outs and it is only a matter of time before they fall."
The commercialism of hip-hop, which has resulted in a split from those it's supposed to represent, is not new. In fact, it goes, in part, by the same name: hip. Just as the hip-hop generation was charged by rap, the hip era of the 1950s and '60s was fueled by jazz. In hip's case, and the same is true for hip-hop, Scott Saul, professor of English at UC Berkeley, points out that "it [hip] moved from a form of African-American and bohemian dissent to become the very language of the advertising world, which took hip's promise of authenticity, liberation and rebellion and attached it to the act of enjoying whatever was on sale at the moment."
No one knows what will be next, or if my generation will sell it. However, the post hip-hop ethos allows the necessary space for new ideas and expressions to be born free from the minstrel show that is modern hip-hop.
Post hip-hop is not about music, per se, although the music that is and will be created functions as a kind of soundtrack to a fresh set of attitudes, ideas and perspectives. Art, not just music, is fundamental to the post hip-hop development, as art possesses the remarkable ability to change not only what we see, but how we see.
The late Martinican writer, Frantz Fanon, once said, "each generation, out of relative obscurity, must discover their destiny and either fulfill or betray it." The post hip-hop generation must fully engage in exploration, challenge and discovery -- acts that will result in a revelation of contemporary truths that will help define us, and in turn, the world.
M.K. Asante, Jr. is the author of the books "Beautiful. And Ugly Too" (Africa World Press, 2005) and "Like Water Running Off My Back" (Africa World Press, 2002). He wrote and produced the film "500 Years Later" and is completing his masters of fine arts at UCLA.
The "hip-hop generation," a tag customarily attached to blacks born after the civil-rights movement, may have once captured the essence of the rebellious, politically discontent twenty-somethings of the 1980s and '90s, but not today.
With rapper/producer Kanye West recently amassing eight Grammy nominations, there is no doubt that hip-hop is an integral part of global pop culture. Global -- as opposed to American or black -- because, like scores of other innovations and phenomena that emerge from the black community, it has helped to shape the perceptions of people, especially young ones, all over the world. Although contemporary images often reinforce negative stereotypes, hip-hop was able to successfully break through a slew of music-industry barriers and bring many talented voices into the mainstream -- voices that had previously barely been heard and never listened to.
Hip-hop, like the black musical forms that preceded it, cannot, because of its cultural context, be looked at in a vacuum. To observe hip-hop then, is to observe the aesthetics, attitudes and ideologies of its progenitors as well. That understood, and with today's hip-hop boasting problems loud enough to drown out even the most seductive samples, the urgency for redefinition by a new generation couldn't be more evident.
The current crisis isn't just that rap, hip-hop's central asset, has drifted into the shallowest pool of lyrical possibilities, or that the latest version of hip-hop betrays the attitudes and ideals that framed it. It's that many young blacks who allegedly belong to the "hip-hop generation," feel misrepresented by it and have begun to realize the limitations of being defined by a musical genre -- a misogynistic, homophobic and violent one to boot. All of this against the ambivalent backdrop of globalization and the fog of a new war has led us to a generational tipping point, the moment when a dramatic shift is more than a possibility; it's a certainty.
The term "post hip-hop" describes a period of time -- now -- of great transition for a new generation of black youths in search of a deeper understanding of themselves in a context outside of the hip-hop monopoly. Post hip-hop is an assertion that encapsulates my generation's broad range of abilities and ideas and incorporates recent social advances (i.e., the women's movement, gay rights) that hip-hop has refused to acknowledge or respect.
Post hip-hop is not about the death of rap, but rather the birth of a new movement propelled by a paradigm shift that can be felt in the crowded spoken-word joints in North Philadelphia, the krump-dance dance-offs in Compton, and on a tattered stoop on a corner of Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn where Rashard Lloyd, a high school senior grumbles when I ask him, "what does hip-hop mean to you?" After a moment of contemplation, he makes clear, "hip-hop don't speak to or for me."
While Lloyd's attitude may surprise most of us who mistake the ring tones, reality shows and glossy ad campaigns as indicators of hip-hop's dominance, it shouldn't. According to "The U.S. Urban Youth Market: Targeting the Trendsetters," a study conducted by research and analysis firm Packaged Facts, black youths like Lloyd "possess an overriding desire to remain outside of the mainstream." Claire Madden, vice president of marketing for Market Research, parent company of Packaged Facts, says that once "there is a perception from urban youth that these manufacturers [companies and artists] are ignoring their origins ... they are named sell-outs and it is only a matter of time before they fall."
The commercialism of hip-hop, which has resulted in a split from those it's supposed to represent, is not new. In fact, it goes, in part, by the same name: hip. Just as the hip-hop generation was charged by rap, the hip era of the 1950s and '60s was fueled by jazz. In hip's case, and the same is true for hip-hop, Scott Saul, professor of English at UC Berkeley, points out that "it [hip] moved from a form of African-American and bohemian dissent to become the very language of the advertising world, which took hip's promise of authenticity, liberation and rebellion and attached it to the act of enjoying whatever was on sale at the moment."
No one knows what will be next, or if my generation will sell it. However, the post hip-hop ethos allows the necessary space for new ideas and expressions to be born free from the minstrel show that is modern hip-hop.
Post hip-hop is not about music, per se, although the music that is and will be created functions as a kind of soundtrack to a fresh set of attitudes, ideas and perspectives. Art, not just music, is fundamental to the post hip-hop development, as art possesses the remarkable ability to change not only what we see, but how we see.
The late Martinican writer, Frantz Fanon, once said, "each generation, out of relative obscurity, must discover their destiny and either fulfill or betray it." The post hip-hop generation must fully engage in exploration, challenge and discovery -- acts that will result in a revelation of contemporary truths that will help define us, and in turn, the world.
M.K. Asante, Jr. is the author of the books "Beautiful. And Ugly Too" (Africa World Press, 2005) and "Like Water Running Off My Back" (Africa World Press, 2002). He wrote and produced the film "500 Years Later" and is completing his masters of fine arts at UCLA.
Wednesday, February 22, 2006,8:35 AM
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights
On December 10, 1948 the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted and proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights the full text of which appears in the following pages. Following this historic act the Assembly called upon all Member countries to publicize the text of the Declaration and "to cause it to be disseminated, displayed, read and expounded principally in schools and other educational institutions, without distinction based on the political status of countries or territories."
PREAMBLE
Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,
Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,
Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law,
Whereas it is essential to promote the development of friendly relations between nations,
Whereas the peoples of the United Nations have in the Charter reaffirmed their faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person and in the equal rights of men and women and have determined to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,
Whereas Member States have pledged themselves to achieve, in co-operation with the United Nations, the promotion of universal respect for and observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms,
Whereas a common understanding of these rights and freedoms is of the greatest importance for the full realization of this pledge,
Now, Therefore THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY proclaims THIS UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations, to the end that every individual and every organ of society, keeping this Declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by progressive measures, national and international, to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance, both among the peoples of Member States themselves and among the peoples of territories under their jurisdiction.
Article 1.
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
Article 2.
Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.
Article 3.
Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.
Article 4.
No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.
Article 5.
No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.
Article 6.
Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.
Article 7.
All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination.
Article 8.
Everyone has the right to an effective remedy by the competent national tribunals for acts violating the fundamental rights granted him by the constitution or by law.
Article 9.
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.
Article 10.
Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him.
Article 11.
(1) Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defence.
(2) No one shall be held guilty of any penal offence on account of any act or omission which did not constitute a penal offence, under national or international law, at the time when it was committed. Nor shall a heavier penalty be imposed than the one that was applicable at the time the penal offence was committed.
Article 12.
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
Article 13.
(1) Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.
(2) Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.
Article 14.
(1) Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.
(2) This right may not be invoked in the case of prosecutions genuinely arising from non-political crimes or from acts contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.
Article 15.
(1) Everyone has the right to a nationality.
(2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality.
Article 16.
(1) Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution.
(2) Marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses.
(3) The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.
Article 17.
(1) Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others.
(2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.
Article 18.
Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.
Article 19.
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
Article 20.
(1) Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association.
(2) No one may be compelled to belong to an association.
Article 21.
(1) Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives.
(2) Everyone has the right of equal access to public service in his country.
(3) The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures.
Article 22.
Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realization, through national effort and international co-operation and in accordance with the organization and resources of each State, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality.
Article 23.
(1) Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.
(2) Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.
(3) Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.
(4) Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.
Article 24.
Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.
Article 25.
(1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
(2) Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.
Article 26.
(1) Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.
(2) Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.
(3) Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.
Article 27.
(1) Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.
(2) Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.
Article 28.
Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.
Article 29.
(1) Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible.
(2) In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.
(3) These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.
Article 30.
Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein.
PREAMBLE
Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,
Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,
Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law,
Whereas it is essential to promote the development of friendly relations between nations,
Whereas the peoples of the United Nations have in the Charter reaffirmed their faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person and in the equal rights of men and women and have determined to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,
Whereas Member States have pledged themselves to achieve, in co-operation with the United Nations, the promotion of universal respect for and observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms,
Whereas a common understanding of these rights and freedoms is of the greatest importance for the full realization of this pledge,
Now, Therefore THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY proclaims THIS UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations, to the end that every individual and every organ of society, keeping this Declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by progressive measures, national and international, to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance, both among the peoples of Member States themselves and among the peoples of territories under their jurisdiction.
Article 1.
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
Article 2.
Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.
Article 3.
Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.
Article 4.
No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.
Article 5.
No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.
Article 6.
Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.
Article 7.
All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination.
Article 8.
Everyone has the right to an effective remedy by the competent national tribunals for acts violating the fundamental rights granted him by the constitution or by law.
Article 9.
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.
Article 10.
Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him.
Article 11.
(1) Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defence.
(2) No one shall be held guilty of any penal offence on account of any act or omission which did not constitute a penal offence, under national or international law, at the time when it was committed. Nor shall a heavier penalty be imposed than the one that was applicable at the time the penal offence was committed.
Article 12.
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
Article 13.
(1) Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.
(2) Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.
Article 14.
(1) Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.
(2) This right may not be invoked in the case of prosecutions genuinely arising from non-political crimes or from acts contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.
Article 15.
(1) Everyone has the right to a nationality.
(2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality.
Article 16.
(1) Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution.
(2) Marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses.
(3) The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.
Article 17.
(1) Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others.
(2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.
Article 18.
Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.
Article 19.
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
Article 20.
(1) Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association.
(2) No one may be compelled to belong to an association.
Article 21.
(1) Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives.
(2) Everyone has the right of equal access to public service in his country.
(3) The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures.
Article 22.
Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realization, through national effort and international co-operation and in accordance with the organization and resources of each State, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality.
Article 23.
(1) Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.
(2) Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.
(3) Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.
(4) Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.
Article 24.
Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.
Article 25.
(1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
(2) Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.
Article 26.
(1) Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.
(2) Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.
(3) Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.
Article 27.
(1) Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.
(2) Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.
Article 28.
Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.
Article 29.
(1) Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible.
(2) In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.
(3) These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.
Article 30.
Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein.
Tuesday, February 21, 2006,8:42 PM
Appeal to African Heads of State
By Malcolm X
Your Excellencies:
The Organization of Afro-American Unity has sent me to attend this historic African summit conferences as an observer to represent the interests of 22 million African-American whose human rights are being violated daily by the racism of American imperialists.
The Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU) has been formed by a cross-section of America’s African-American community, and is patterned after the letter and spirit of the Organization of African Unity (OAU).
Just as the Organization of African Unity has called upon all African leaders to submerge their differences and unite on common objectives for the common good of all Africans—in America the Organization of Afro-American Unity has called upon Afro-American leaders to submerge their differences and find areas of agreement wherein we can work in unity for the good of the entire 22 million African-Americans.
Since the 22 million of us were originally Africans, who are now in America, not by choice but only by a cruel accident in our history, we strongly believe that African problems are our problems and our problems are African problems.
Your Excellencies:
We also believe that as heads of the Independent African states you are the shepherd of all African peoples everywhere, whether they are still at home on the mother continent or have been scattered abroad.
Some African leaders at this conference have implied that they have enough problems here on the mother continent without adding the Afro-American problem.
With all due respect to your esteemed positions, I must remind all of you that the good shepherd will leave ninety-nine sheep, who are safe at home, to go to the aid of the one who is lost and has fallen into the clutches of the imperialist wolf.
We, in America, are your long-lost brothers and sisters, and I am here only to remind you that our problems are your problems. As the African-Americans “awaken” today, we find ourselves in a strange land that has rejected us, and, like the prodigal son, we are turning to our elder brothers for help. We pray our pleas will not fall upon deaf ears.
We were taken forcibly in chains from this mother continent and have now spend over 300 years in America, suffering the most inhuman forms of physical and psychological tortures imaginable.
During the past ten years the entire world has witnessed our men, women, and children being attacked and bitten by vicious police dogs, brutally beaten by police clubs, and washed down the sewers by high-pressure water hoses that would rip the clothes from our bodies and the flesh from our limbs.
And all of these inhuman atrocities have been inflicted upon us by the American governmental authorities, the police themselves, for no reason other than we seek the recognition and respect granted our human beings in America.
Your Excellencies:
The American government is either unable or unwilling to protect the lives and property of your 22 million African-American brothers and sisters. We stand defenseless, at the mercy of American racists who murder us at will for no reason other than we are black and of African descent.
Two black bodies were found in the Mississippi River this week; last week an unarmed African-American educator was murdered in cold blood in Georgia; a few days before that three civil-rights workers disappeared completely, perhaps murdered also, only because they were teaching our people in Mississippi how to vote and how to secure their political rights.
Our problems are your problems We have lived for over 300 years in that American den of racist wolves in constant fear of losing life and limb. Recently, three students from Kenya were mistaken for American Negroes and were brutally beaten by New York police. Shortly after that, two diplomats from Uganda were also beaten by the New York City police, who mistook them for American Negroes.
If Africans are brutally beaten while only visiting in America, imagine the physical and psychological suffering received by your brothers and sisters who have lived there for over 300 years.
Our problem is your problem. No matter how much independence Africans get here on the mother continent, unless you wear your national dress at all times, when you visit America, you may be mistaken for one of us and suffer the same psychological humiliation and physical mutilation that is an everyday occurrence in our lives.
Your problems will never be fully solved until and unless ours are solved. You will never be fully respected until and unless we are also respected. You will never be recognized as free human beings until and unless we are also recognized and treated as human beings.
Our problem is your problem. It is not a Negro problem, nor an American problem. This is a world problem; a problem for humanity. It is not a problem of civil rights but a problem of human rights.
If the United States Supreme Court justice, Arthur Goldberg, a few weeks ago, could find legal grounds to threaten to bring Russia before the United Nations and charge her with violating the human rights of less than three million Russian Jews, what makes our African brothers hesitate to bring the Untied States government before the United Nations and charge her with violating the human rights of 22 million African-Americans?
We pray that our African brothers have not freed themselves of European colonialism only to be overcome and held in check now by American dollarism. Don’t let American racism be “legalized” by American dollarism.
America is worse than South Africa, because not only is America racist, but she also is deceitful and hypocritical. South Africa preaches segregation and practices segregation. She, at least, practices what she preaches. American preaches integration and practices segregation. She preaches one thing while deceitfully practicing another.
South Africa is like a vicious wolf, openly hostile towards black humanity. But America is cunning like a fox, friendly and smiling, but even more vicious and deadly than the wolf.
The wolf and the fox are both enemies of humanity; both are canine; both humiliate and mutilate their victims. Both have the same objectives, but differ only in methods.
If South Africa is guilty of violating the human rights of Africans here on the mother continent, then America is guilty of worse violations of 22 million Africans on the American continent. And if South Africa racism is not a domestic issue, then American racism also is not a domestic issue.
Many of you have been led to believe that the much publicized, recently passed civil-rights bill is a sign that America is making a sincere effort to correct the injustices we have suffered there. This propaganda maneuver is part of her deceit and trickery to keep the African nations from condemning her racist practices before the United Nations, as you are now doing as regards the same practices of South Africa.
The United States Supreme Court passed a law ten years ago making America’s segregated school system illegal. But the federal government has yet to enforce this law even in the North. If the federal government cannot enforce the law of the highest court in the land when it comes to nothing but equal rights to education for African Americans, how can anyone be so naïve as to think all the additional laws brought into being by the civil-rights bill will be enforced?
These are nothing but tricks of the century’s leading neo-colonialist power. Surely, our intellectually mature African brothers will not fall for this trickery.
The Organization of Afro-American Unity, in cooperation with a coalition of other Negro leaders and organizations, has decided to elevate our freedom struggle above the domestic level of civil rights. We intend to “internationalize” it by placing it at the level of human rights. Our freedom struggle for human dignity is no longer confined to the domestic jurisdiction of the United States government.
We beseech the independent African states to help us bring our problem before the United Nations, on the grounds that the United States government is morally incapable of protecting the lives and the property of 22 million African-Americans. And on the grounds that our deteriorating plight is definitely becoming a threat to world peace.
Out of frustration and hopelessness our young people have reached the point of no return. We no longer endorse patience and turning-the-other-cheek. We assert the right of self-defense by whatever means necessary, and reserve the right of maximum retaliation against our racist oppressors, no matter what the odds against us are.
From here on in, if we must die anyway, we will die fighting back and we will not die alone. We intend to see that our racist oppressors also get a taste of death.
We are well aware that our future efforts to defend ourselves by retaliating—by meeting violence with violence, eye for eye and tooth for tooth—could create the type of racial conflict in America that could easily escalate into a violent, world-wide, bloody race war.
In the interests of world peace and security, we beseech the heads of the independent African states to recommend an immediate investigation into our problem by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights.
If this humble plea that I am voicing at this conference is not properly worded, then let our elder brothers, who know the legal language, come to our aid and word our plea in the proper language necessary for it to be heard.
One last word, my beloved brothers at this African summit:
“No one knows the master better than his servant.” We have been servants in America for over 300 years. We have a thorough, inside knowledge of this man who calls himself “Uncle Sam.” Therefore, you must heed our warning: Don’t escape from European colonialism only to become even more enslaved by deceitful, “friendly” American dollarism.
May Allah’s blessings of good health and wisdom be upon you all. Salaam Alaikum.
Your Excellencies:
The Organization of Afro-American Unity has sent me to attend this historic African summit conferences as an observer to represent the interests of 22 million African-American whose human rights are being violated daily by the racism of American imperialists.
The Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU) has been formed by a cross-section of America’s African-American community, and is patterned after the letter and spirit of the Organization of African Unity (OAU).
Just as the Organization of African Unity has called upon all African leaders to submerge their differences and unite on common objectives for the common good of all Africans—in America the Organization of Afro-American Unity has called upon Afro-American leaders to submerge their differences and find areas of agreement wherein we can work in unity for the good of the entire 22 million African-Americans.
Since the 22 million of us were originally Africans, who are now in America, not by choice but only by a cruel accident in our history, we strongly believe that African problems are our problems and our problems are African problems.
Your Excellencies:
We also believe that as heads of the Independent African states you are the shepherd of all African peoples everywhere, whether they are still at home on the mother continent or have been scattered abroad.
Some African leaders at this conference have implied that they have enough problems here on the mother continent without adding the Afro-American problem.
With all due respect to your esteemed positions, I must remind all of you that the good shepherd will leave ninety-nine sheep, who are safe at home, to go to the aid of the one who is lost and has fallen into the clutches of the imperialist wolf.
We, in America, are your long-lost brothers and sisters, and I am here only to remind you that our problems are your problems. As the African-Americans “awaken” today, we find ourselves in a strange land that has rejected us, and, like the prodigal son, we are turning to our elder brothers for help. We pray our pleas will not fall upon deaf ears.
We were taken forcibly in chains from this mother continent and have now spend over 300 years in America, suffering the most inhuman forms of physical and psychological tortures imaginable.
During the past ten years the entire world has witnessed our men, women, and children being attacked and bitten by vicious police dogs, brutally beaten by police clubs, and washed down the sewers by high-pressure water hoses that would rip the clothes from our bodies and the flesh from our limbs.
And all of these inhuman atrocities have been inflicted upon us by the American governmental authorities, the police themselves, for no reason other than we seek the recognition and respect granted our human beings in America.
Your Excellencies:
The American government is either unable or unwilling to protect the lives and property of your 22 million African-American brothers and sisters. We stand defenseless, at the mercy of American racists who murder us at will for no reason other than we are black and of African descent.
Two black bodies were found in the Mississippi River this week; last week an unarmed African-American educator was murdered in cold blood in Georgia; a few days before that three civil-rights workers disappeared completely, perhaps murdered also, only because they were teaching our people in Mississippi how to vote and how to secure their political rights.
Our problems are your problems We have lived for over 300 years in that American den of racist wolves in constant fear of losing life and limb. Recently, three students from Kenya were mistaken for American Negroes and were brutally beaten by New York police. Shortly after that, two diplomats from Uganda were also beaten by the New York City police, who mistook them for American Negroes.
If Africans are brutally beaten while only visiting in America, imagine the physical and psychological suffering received by your brothers and sisters who have lived there for over 300 years.
Our problem is your problem. No matter how much independence Africans get here on the mother continent, unless you wear your national dress at all times, when you visit America, you may be mistaken for one of us and suffer the same psychological humiliation and physical mutilation that is an everyday occurrence in our lives.
Your problems will never be fully solved until and unless ours are solved. You will never be fully respected until and unless we are also respected. You will never be recognized as free human beings until and unless we are also recognized and treated as human beings.
Our problem is your problem. It is not a Negro problem, nor an American problem. This is a world problem; a problem for humanity. It is not a problem of civil rights but a problem of human rights.
If the United States Supreme Court justice, Arthur Goldberg, a few weeks ago, could find legal grounds to threaten to bring Russia before the United Nations and charge her with violating the human rights of less than three million Russian Jews, what makes our African brothers hesitate to bring the Untied States government before the United Nations and charge her with violating the human rights of 22 million African-Americans?
We pray that our African brothers have not freed themselves of European colonialism only to be overcome and held in check now by American dollarism. Don’t let American racism be “legalized” by American dollarism.
America is worse than South Africa, because not only is America racist, but she also is deceitful and hypocritical. South Africa preaches segregation and practices segregation. She, at least, practices what she preaches. American preaches integration and practices segregation. She preaches one thing while deceitfully practicing another.
South Africa is like a vicious wolf, openly hostile towards black humanity. But America is cunning like a fox, friendly and smiling, but even more vicious and deadly than the wolf.
The wolf and the fox are both enemies of humanity; both are canine; both humiliate and mutilate their victims. Both have the same objectives, but differ only in methods.
If South Africa is guilty of violating the human rights of Africans here on the mother continent, then America is guilty of worse violations of 22 million Africans on the American continent. And if South Africa racism is not a domestic issue, then American racism also is not a domestic issue.
Many of you have been led to believe that the much publicized, recently passed civil-rights bill is a sign that America is making a sincere effort to correct the injustices we have suffered there. This propaganda maneuver is part of her deceit and trickery to keep the African nations from condemning her racist practices before the United Nations, as you are now doing as regards the same practices of South Africa.
The United States Supreme Court passed a law ten years ago making America’s segregated school system illegal. But the federal government has yet to enforce this law even in the North. If the federal government cannot enforce the law of the highest court in the land when it comes to nothing but equal rights to education for African Americans, how can anyone be so naïve as to think all the additional laws brought into being by the civil-rights bill will be enforced?
These are nothing but tricks of the century’s leading neo-colonialist power. Surely, our intellectually mature African brothers will not fall for this trickery.
The Organization of Afro-American Unity, in cooperation with a coalition of other Negro leaders and organizations, has decided to elevate our freedom struggle above the domestic level of civil rights. We intend to “internationalize” it by placing it at the level of human rights. Our freedom struggle for human dignity is no longer confined to the domestic jurisdiction of the United States government.
We beseech the independent African states to help us bring our problem before the United Nations, on the grounds that the United States government is morally incapable of protecting the lives and the property of 22 million African-Americans. And on the grounds that our deteriorating plight is definitely becoming a threat to world peace.
Out of frustration and hopelessness our young people have reached the point of no return. We no longer endorse patience and turning-the-other-cheek. We assert the right of self-defense by whatever means necessary, and reserve the right of maximum retaliation against our racist oppressors, no matter what the odds against us are.
From here on in, if we must die anyway, we will die fighting back and we will not die alone. We intend to see that our racist oppressors also get a taste of death.
We are well aware that our future efforts to defend ourselves by retaliating—by meeting violence with violence, eye for eye and tooth for tooth—could create the type of racial conflict in America that could easily escalate into a violent, world-wide, bloody race war.
In the interests of world peace and security, we beseech the heads of the independent African states to recommend an immediate investigation into our problem by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights.
If this humble plea that I am voicing at this conference is not properly worded, then let our elder brothers, who know the legal language, come to our aid and word our plea in the proper language necessary for it to be heard.
One last word, my beloved brothers at this African summit:
“No one knows the master better than his servant.” We have been servants in America for over 300 years. We have a thorough, inside knowledge of this man who calls himself “Uncle Sam.” Therefore, you must heed our warning: Don’t escape from European colonialism only to become even more enslaved by deceitful, “friendly” American dollarism.
May Allah’s blessings of good health and wisdom be upon you all. Salaam Alaikum.
,4:02 PM
Rules for Radicals Prologue
by Saul D. Alinsky
A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals
Prologue
The Revolutionary force today has two targets, moral as well as material. Its young protagonists are one moment reminiscent of the idealistic early Christians, yet they also urge violence and cry, "Burn the system down!" They have no illusions about the system, but plenty of illusions about the way to change our world. It is to this point that I have written this book. These words are written in desperation, partly because it is what they do and will do that will give meaning to what I and the radicals of my generation have done with our lives.
They are now the vanguard, and they had to start almost from scratch. Few of us survived the Joe McCarthy holocaust of the early 1950s and of those there were even fewer whose understanding and insights had developed beyond the dialectical materialism of orthodox Marxism. My fellow radicals who were supposed to pass on the torch of experience and insights to a new generation just were not there. As the young looked at the society around them, it was all, in their words, "materialistic, decadent, bourgeois in its values, bankrupt and violent." Is it any wonder that they rejected us in toto.
Today's generation is desperately trying to make some sense out of their lives and out of the world. Most of them are products of the middle class. They have rejected their materialistic backgrounds, the goal of a well-paid job, suburban home, automobile, country club membership, first-class travel, status, security, and everything that meant success to their parents. They have had it. They watched it lead their parents to tranquilizers, alcohol, long-term-endurance marriages, or divorces, high blood pressure, ulcers, frustration and the disillusionment of the "good life," They have seen the almost unbelievable idiocy of our political leadership - in the past political leaders, ranging from the mayors to governors to the White House, were regarded with respect and almost reverence; today they are viewed with contempt. This negativism now extends to all institutions, from the police and the courts to "the system" itself. We are living in a world of mass media which daily exposes society's innate hypocrisy, its contradictions and the apparent failure of almost every facet of our social and political life. The young have seen their "activist" participatory democracy turn into its antithesis - nihilistic bombing and murder. The political panaceas of the past, such as the revolutions in Russia and China, have become the same old stuff under a different name. The search for freedom does not seem to have any road or destination. The young are inundated with a barrage of information and facts so overwhelming that the world has come to seem an utter bedlam, which has them spinning in a frenzy, looking for what man has always looked for from the beginning of time, a way of life that has some meaning or sense. A way of life means a certain degree of order where things have some relationship and can be pieced together into a system that at least provides some clues to what life is about. Men have always yearned for and sought direction by setting up religions, inventing political philosophies, creating scientific systems like Newton's, or formulating ideologies of various kinds. This is what is behind the common cliché, "getting it all together" - despite the realization that all values and factors are relative, fluid, and changing, and that it will be possible to "get it all together" only relatively. The elements will shift and move together just like the changing pattern in a turning kaleidoscope.
In the past, the "world," whether in its physical or intellectual terms, was much smaller, simpler, and more orderly. It inspired credibility. Today everything is so complex as to be incomprehensible. What sense does it make for men to walk on the moon while other men are waiting on welfare lines, or in Vietnam killing and dying for a corrupt dictatorship in the name of freedom? These are the days when man has his hands on the sublime while he is up to his hips in the muck of madness. The establishment in many ways is a suicidal as some of the far left, except that they are infinitely more destructive than the far left can ever be. The outcome of the hopelessness and despair is morbidity. There is a feeling of death hanging over the nation.
Today's generation faces all this and says, "I don't want to spend my life the way my family and their friends have. I want to do something, to create, to be me, to 'do my own thing,' to live. The older generation doesn't understand and worse doesn't want to. I don't want to be just a piece of data to be fed into a computer or a statistic in a public opinion poll, just a voter carrying a credit card." To the young, the world seems insane and falling apart.
On the other side is the older generation, whose members are not less confused. If they are not as vocal or conscious, it may be because they can escape to a past when the world was simpler. They can still cling to the old values in the simple hope that everything will work out somehow, some way. That the younger generation will "straighten out" with the passing of time. Unable to come to grips with the world as it is, they retreat in any confrontation with the younger generation with that infuriating cliché, "when you get older, you will understand." One wonders at their reaction if some youngster were to reply, "When you get younger which will never be then you'll understand, so of course you'll never understand." Those of the older generation who claim a desire to understand say, "When I talk to my kids or their friends I'll say to them, 'Look, I believe what you have to tell me is important and I respect it.' You call me a square and say that 'I'm not with it' or 'I don't know where it's at' or 'I don't know where the scene is' and all of the rest of the words you use. Well I'm going to agree with you. So suppose you tell me. What do you want? What do you mean when you say "I want to do my own thing.' What the hell is your thing? You say you want a better world. Like what? And don't tell me a world of peace and love and all the rest of that stuff because people are people, as you will find out when you get older - I'm sorry, I didn't mean to say anything about 'when you get older.' I really mean to say anything about 'when you get older.' I really do respect what you have to say. Now why don't you answer me? Do you know what you want? Do you know what you're talking about? Why can't we get together?
And that is what we call the generation gap.
What the present generation wants is what all generations have always wanted - a meaning, a sense of what the world and life are - a chance to strive for some sort of order.
If the young were now writing our Declaration of Independence they would begin, "When in the course of inhuman events..." and their bill of particulars would range from Vietnam to our black, Chicano, and Puerto Rican ghettos, to the migrant workers, to Appalachia, to the hate, ignorance, disease and starvation in the world. Such a bill of particulars would emphasize the absurdity of human affairs and the forlornness and emptiness, the fearful loneliness that comes from not knowing if there is any meaning to our lives.
When they talk of values, they're asking for a reason. They are searching for an answer, at least for a time, to man's greatest question, "Why am I here?"
The young react to their chaotic world in different ways. Some panic and run, rationalizing that the system is going to collapse anyway of its own rot and corruption and so they're copping out, going hippie or yippie, taking drugs, trying communes, anything to escape. Others went for pointless sure-loser confrontations so that they could fortify their rationalization and say, "Well, we tried and did our part" and then they copped out too. Others sick with guilt and not knowing where to turn or what to do went berserk. These were the Weathermen and their like: they took the grand cop-out, suicide. To these I have nothing to say or give but pity - and in some cases contempt, for such as those who leave their dead comrades and take off for Algeria or other points.
What I have to say in this book is not the arrogance of unsolicited advice. It is the experience and counsel that so many young people have questioned me about through all-night sessions on hundreds of campuses in America. It is for those young radicals who are committed to the fight, committed to life.
Remember we are talking about revolution, not revelation; you can miss the target by shooting too high as well as too low. First, there are no rules for revolution any more than there are rules for love or rules for happiness, but there are rules for radicals who want to change their world; there are certain central concepts of action in human politics that operate regardless of the scene or the time. To know these is basic to a pragmatic attack on the system. These rules make the difference between being a realistic radical and being a rhetorical one who uses the tired old words and slogans, calls the police "pig" or "white fascist racist" or "futher mukkers” and has so stereotyped himself that others react by saying, "Oh, he's one of those," and then promptly turn off.
This failure of many of your younger activists to understand the art of communication has been disastrous. Even the most elementary grasp of the fundamental idea that one communicates within the experience of his audience - and gives full respect to the other's values - would have ruled out attacks on the American flag. The responsible organizer would have known that it is the establishment that has betrayed the flag while the flag, itself, remains the glorious symbol of America's hopes and aspirations, and he would have conveyed this message to his audience. On another level of communication, humor is essential, for through humor much is accepted that would have been rejected if presented seriously. This is a sad and lonely generation. It laughs too little, and this, too is tragic.
For the real radical, doing "his thing" is to do the social thing, for and with people. In a world where everything is so interrelated that one fells helpless to know where or how to grab hold and act, defeat sets in' for years there have been people who've found society too overwhelming and have withdrawn, concentrated on "doing their own thing." Generally we have put them into mental hospitals and diagnosed them as schizophrenics. If the real radical finds that having long hair sets up psychological barriers to communication and organization, he cuts his hair. If I were organizing in a orthodox Jewish community I would not walk in there eating a ham sandwich, unless I wanted to be rejected so I could have an excuse to cop out. My "thing," if I want to organize, is solid communication with the people in the community. Lacking communication I am in reality silent; throughout history silence has been regarded as assent - in this case assent to the system.
As an organizer I start from where the world is, as it is, not as I would like it to be. That we accept the world as it is does not in any sense weaken our desire to change it into what we believe it should be - it is necessary to begin where the world is if we are going to change it to what we think it should be. That means working in the system.
There's another reason for working inside the system. Dostoevsky said that taking a new step is what people fear most. Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and chance the future. This acceptance is the reformation essential to any revolution. To bring on this reformation requires that the organizer work inside the system, among not only the middle class but the 40 per cent of American families - more than seventy million people - whose income range from $5,000 to $10,000 a year (in 1971). They cannot be dismissed by labeling them blue collar or hard hat. They will not continue to be relatively passive and slightly challenging. If we fail to communicate with them, if we don't encourage them to form alliances with us, they will move to the right. Maybe they will anyway, but let's not let it happen by default.
Our youth are impatient with the preliminaries that are essential to purposeful action. Effective organization is thwarted by the desire for instant and dramatic change, or as I have phrased it elsewhere the demand for revelation rather than revolution. It's the kind of thing we see in play writing; the first act introduces the characters and the plot, in the second act the plot and characters are developed as the play strives to hold the audience's attention. in the final act good and evil have their dramatic confrontation and resolution. The present generation wants to go right into the third act, skipping the first two, in which case there is no play, nothing but confrontation for confrontation's sake - a flare-up and back to darkness. To build a powerful organization takes time. It is tedious, but that's the way the game is played - if you want to play and not just yell, "Kill the umpire."
What is the alternative to working "inside" the system? A mess of rhetorical garbage about "Burn the system down!" Yippie yells of "Do it!" or "Do your thing." What else? Bombs? Sniping? Silence when police are killed and screams of "murdering fascist pigs" when others are killed? Attacking and baiting the police? Police suicide? Power comes out of the barrel of a gun!" is an absurd rallying cry when the other side has all the guns. Lenin was a pragmatist; when he returned to what was then Petrograd from exile, he said that the Bolsheviks stood for getting power through the ballot box but would reconsider after they got the guns! Militant mouthings? Spouting quotes from Mao, Castro, and Che Guevara, which are as germane to our highly technological, computerized, cybernetic, nuclear-powered, mass media society as a stagecoach on a jet runway at Kennedy airport.
Let is in the name of radical pragmatism not forget that in our system with all its repressions we can still speak out and denounce the administration, attack its policies, work to build an opposition political base. True, there is government harassment, but there still is that relative freedom to fight. I can attack my government, try to organize to change it. That's more than I can do in Moscow, Peking, or Havana. Remember the reaction of the Red Guard to the "cultural revolution" and the fate of the Chinese college students. Just a few of the violent episodes of bombings or a courtroom shootout that we have experienced here would have resulted in a sweeping purge and mass executions in Russia, China, or Cuba. Let's keep some perspective.
We will start with the system because there is no other place to start from except political lunacy. It is most important for those of us who want revolutionary change to understand that revolution must be proceeded by reformation. To assume that a political revolution can survive without the supporting base of a popular reformation is to ask for the impossible in politics.
Men don't like to step abruptly out of the security of familiar experience; they need a bridge to cross from their own experience to a new way. A revolutionary organizer must shake up the prevailing patterns of their lives--agitate, create disenchantment and discontent with the current values, to produce, if not a passion for change, at least a passive, affirmative, no-challenging climate.
"The revolution was affected before the war commenced," John Adams wrote. "The revolution was in the hearts and minds of the people...This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments and affections of the people was the real American Revolution." A revolution without a prior reformation would collapse or become a totalitarian tyranny.
A reformation means that masses of our people have reached the point of disillusionment with past ways and values. They don't know what will work but they do know that the prevailing system is self-defeating, frustrating, and hopeless. They won't act for change but won't strongly oppose those who do. The time is then ripe for revolution.
Those who, for whatever combination of reasons, encourage the opposite of reformation, become the unwitting allies of the far political right. Parts of the far left have gone so far in the political circle that they are now all but indistinguishable from the extreme right. It reminds me of the days when Hitler, new on the scene, was excused for his actions by "humanitarians" on the grounds of a paternal rejection and childhood trauma. When there are people who espouse the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy or the Tate murders or the Marin County Courthouse kidnapping and killings or the University of Wisconsin bombing and killing as "revolutionary acts," then we are dealing with people who are merely hiding psychosis behind a political mask. The masses of people recoil with horror and say, Our way is bad and we were willing to let it change, but certainly not for this murderous madness--no matter how bad things are now, they are better than that." So they begin to turn back. They regress into acceptance of a coming massive repression in the name of "law and order."
In the midst of the gassing and violence by the Chicago Police and National Guard during the 1968 Democratic Convention many students asked me, "Do you still believe we should try to work inside our system?"
These were students who had been with Eugene McCarthy in New Hampshire and followed him across the country. Some had been with Robert Kennedy when he was killed in Los Angeles. Many of the tears that were shed in Chicago were not from gas. "Mr. Alinsky, we fought in primary after primary and the people voted no on Vietnam. Look at the convention. They're not paying any attention to the vote. Look at your police and the army. You still want us to work in the system?"
It hurt me to see the American army with drawn bayonets advancing on American boys and girls. But the answer I gave the young radicals seemed to me the only realistic one: "Do one of three things. One, go find a wailing wall and feel sorry for yourselves. Two, go psycho and start bombing--but this will only swing people to the right. Three, learn a lesson. Go home, organize, build power and at the next convention, you be the delegates." Remember: once you organize people around something as commonly agreed upon as pollution, then an organized people is on the move. From there it's a short and natural step to political pollution, to Pentagon pollution.
It is not enough just to elect your candidates. You must keep the pressure on. Radicals should keep in mind Franklin D. Roosevelt's response to a reform delegation, "Okay, you've convinced me. Now go on out and bring pressure on me!" action comes from keeping the heat on. No politician can sit on a hot issue if you make it hot enough.
As for Vietnam, I would like to see our nation be the first in the history of man to publicly say, "We were wrong! What we did was horrible. We got in and kept getting in deeper and deeper and at every step we invented new reasons for staying. We have paid part of the price in 44,000 dead Americans. There is nothing we can ever do to make it up to the people of Indo-China--or to our own people--but we will try. We believe that our world has come of age so that it is no longer a sign of weakness or defeat to abandon a childish pride and vanity, to admit we were wrong." Such an admission would shake up the foreign policy concepts of all nations and open the door to a new international order. This is our alternative to Vietnam--anything else is the old makeshift patchwork. If this were to happen, Vietnam may even have been somewhat worth it.
A final word on our system. The democratic ideal springs from the ideas of liberty, equality, majority rule through free elections, protection of the rights of minorities, and freedom to subscribe to multiple loyalties in matters of religion, economics, and politics rather than to a total loyalty to the state. The spirit of democracy is the idea of importance and worth in the individual, and faith in the kind of world where the individual can achieve as much of his potential as possible.
Great dangers always accompany great opportunities. The possibility of destruction is always implicit in the act of creation. Thus the greatest enemy of individual freedom is the individual himself.
From the beginning the weakness as well as the strength of the democratic ideal has been the people. People cannot be free unless they are willing to sacrifice some of their interests to guarantee the freedom of others. The price of democracy is the ongoing pursuit of the common good by all of the people. One hundred and thirty-five years ago Tocqueville gravely warned that unless individual citizens were regularly involved in the action of governing themselves, self-government would pass from the scene. Citizen participation is the animating spirit and force in a society predicated on voluntarism.
We are not here concerned with people who profess the democratic faith but yearn for the dark security of dependency where they can be spared the burden of decisions. Reluctant to grow up, or incapable of doing so, they want to remain children and be cared for by others. Those who can, should be encouraged to grow; for the others, the fault lies not in the system but in themselves.
Here we are desperately concerned with the vast mass of our people who, thwarted through lack of interest or opportunity, or both, do not participate in the endless responsibilities of citizenship and are resigned to lives determined by others. To lose your "identity" as a citizen of democracy is but a step from losing your identity as a person. People react to this frustration by not acting at all. The separation of the people from the routine daily functions of citizenship is heartbreak in a democracy.
It is a grave situation when a people resign their citizenship or when a resident of a great city, though he may desire to take a hand, lacks the means to participate. That citizen shrinks further into apathy, anonymity, and depersonalization. The result is that he comes to depend on public authority and a state of civil-sclerosis sets in.
From time to time there have been external enemies at our gates; there has always been the enemy within, the hidden and malignant inertia that foreshadows more certain destruction to our life and future than any devastating tragedy than the death of man's faith in himself and in his power to direct his future.
I salute the present generation. Hang on to one of your most precious part of youth, laughter--don't lose it as many of you seem to have done, you need it. Together we may find some of what we're looking for--laughter, beauty, love, and the chance to create.
A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals
Prologue
The Revolutionary force today has two targets, moral as well as material. Its young protagonists are one moment reminiscent of the idealistic early Christians, yet they also urge violence and cry, "Burn the system down!" They have no illusions about the system, but plenty of illusions about the way to change our world. It is to this point that I have written this book. These words are written in desperation, partly because it is what they do and will do that will give meaning to what I and the radicals of my generation have done with our lives.
They are now the vanguard, and they had to start almost from scratch. Few of us survived the Joe McCarthy holocaust of the early 1950s and of those there were even fewer whose understanding and insights had developed beyond the dialectical materialism of orthodox Marxism. My fellow radicals who were supposed to pass on the torch of experience and insights to a new generation just were not there. As the young looked at the society around them, it was all, in their words, "materialistic, decadent, bourgeois in its values, bankrupt and violent." Is it any wonder that they rejected us in toto.
Today's generation is desperately trying to make some sense out of their lives and out of the world. Most of them are products of the middle class. They have rejected their materialistic backgrounds, the goal of a well-paid job, suburban home, automobile, country club membership, first-class travel, status, security, and everything that meant success to their parents. They have had it. They watched it lead their parents to tranquilizers, alcohol, long-term-endurance marriages, or divorces, high blood pressure, ulcers, frustration and the disillusionment of the "good life," They have seen the almost unbelievable idiocy of our political leadership - in the past political leaders, ranging from the mayors to governors to the White House, were regarded with respect and almost reverence; today they are viewed with contempt. This negativism now extends to all institutions, from the police and the courts to "the system" itself. We are living in a world of mass media which daily exposes society's innate hypocrisy, its contradictions and the apparent failure of almost every facet of our social and political life. The young have seen their "activist" participatory democracy turn into its antithesis - nihilistic bombing and murder. The political panaceas of the past, such as the revolutions in Russia and China, have become the same old stuff under a different name. The search for freedom does not seem to have any road or destination. The young are inundated with a barrage of information and facts so overwhelming that the world has come to seem an utter bedlam, which has them spinning in a frenzy, looking for what man has always looked for from the beginning of time, a way of life that has some meaning or sense. A way of life means a certain degree of order where things have some relationship and can be pieced together into a system that at least provides some clues to what life is about. Men have always yearned for and sought direction by setting up religions, inventing political philosophies, creating scientific systems like Newton's, or formulating ideologies of various kinds. This is what is behind the common cliché, "getting it all together" - despite the realization that all values and factors are relative, fluid, and changing, and that it will be possible to "get it all together" only relatively. The elements will shift and move together just like the changing pattern in a turning kaleidoscope.
In the past, the "world," whether in its physical or intellectual terms, was much smaller, simpler, and more orderly. It inspired credibility. Today everything is so complex as to be incomprehensible. What sense does it make for men to walk on the moon while other men are waiting on welfare lines, or in Vietnam killing and dying for a corrupt dictatorship in the name of freedom? These are the days when man has his hands on the sublime while he is up to his hips in the muck of madness. The establishment in many ways is a suicidal as some of the far left, except that they are infinitely more destructive than the far left can ever be. The outcome of the hopelessness and despair is morbidity. There is a feeling of death hanging over the nation.
Today's generation faces all this and says, "I don't want to spend my life the way my family and their friends have. I want to do something, to create, to be me, to 'do my own thing,' to live. The older generation doesn't understand and worse doesn't want to. I don't want to be just a piece of data to be fed into a computer or a statistic in a public opinion poll, just a voter carrying a credit card." To the young, the world seems insane and falling apart.
On the other side is the older generation, whose members are not less confused. If they are not as vocal or conscious, it may be because they can escape to a past when the world was simpler. They can still cling to the old values in the simple hope that everything will work out somehow, some way. That the younger generation will "straighten out" with the passing of time. Unable to come to grips with the world as it is, they retreat in any confrontation with the younger generation with that infuriating cliché, "when you get older, you will understand." One wonders at their reaction if some youngster were to reply, "When you get younger which will never be then you'll understand, so of course you'll never understand." Those of the older generation who claim a desire to understand say, "When I talk to my kids or their friends I'll say to them, 'Look, I believe what you have to tell me is important and I respect it.' You call me a square and say that 'I'm not with it' or 'I don't know where it's at' or 'I don't know where the scene is' and all of the rest of the words you use. Well I'm going to agree with you. So suppose you tell me. What do you want? What do you mean when you say "I want to do my own thing.' What the hell is your thing? You say you want a better world. Like what? And don't tell me a world of peace and love and all the rest of that stuff because people are people, as you will find out when you get older - I'm sorry, I didn't mean to say anything about 'when you get older.' I really mean to say anything about 'when you get older.' I really do respect what you have to say. Now why don't you answer me? Do you know what you want? Do you know what you're talking about? Why can't we get together?
And that is what we call the generation gap.
What the present generation wants is what all generations have always wanted - a meaning, a sense of what the world and life are - a chance to strive for some sort of order.
If the young were now writing our Declaration of Independence they would begin, "When in the course of inhuman events..." and their bill of particulars would range from Vietnam to our black, Chicano, and Puerto Rican ghettos, to the migrant workers, to Appalachia, to the hate, ignorance, disease and starvation in the world. Such a bill of particulars would emphasize the absurdity of human affairs and the forlornness and emptiness, the fearful loneliness that comes from not knowing if there is any meaning to our lives.
When they talk of values, they're asking for a reason. They are searching for an answer, at least for a time, to man's greatest question, "Why am I here?"
The young react to their chaotic world in different ways. Some panic and run, rationalizing that the system is going to collapse anyway of its own rot and corruption and so they're copping out, going hippie or yippie, taking drugs, trying communes, anything to escape. Others went for pointless sure-loser confrontations so that they could fortify their rationalization and say, "Well, we tried and did our part" and then they copped out too. Others sick with guilt and not knowing where to turn or what to do went berserk. These were the Weathermen and their like: they took the grand cop-out, suicide. To these I have nothing to say or give but pity - and in some cases contempt, for such as those who leave their dead comrades and take off for Algeria or other points.
What I have to say in this book is not the arrogance of unsolicited advice. It is the experience and counsel that so many young people have questioned me about through all-night sessions on hundreds of campuses in America. It is for those young radicals who are committed to the fight, committed to life.
Remember we are talking about revolution, not revelation; you can miss the target by shooting too high as well as too low. First, there are no rules for revolution any more than there are rules for love or rules for happiness, but there are rules for radicals who want to change their world; there are certain central concepts of action in human politics that operate regardless of the scene or the time. To know these is basic to a pragmatic attack on the system. These rules make the difference between being a realistic radical and being a rhetorical one who uses the tired old words and slogans, calls the police "pig" or "white fascist racist" or "futher mukkers” and has so stereotyped himself that others react by saying, "Oh, he's one of those," and then promptly turn off.
This failure of many of your younger activists to understand the art of communication has been disastrous. Even the most elementary grasp of the fundamental idea that one communicates within the experience of his audience - and gives full respect to the other's values - would have ruled out attacks on the American flag. The responsible organizer would have known that it is the establishment that has betrayed the flag while the flag, itself, remains the glorious symbol of America's hopes and aspirations, and he would have conveyed this message to his audience. On another level of communication, humor is essential, for through humor much is accepted that would have been rejected if presented seriously. This is a sad and lonely generation. It laughs too little, and this, too is tragic.
For the real radical, doing "his thing" is to do the social thing, for and with people. In a world where everything is so interrelated that one fells helpless to know where or how to grab hold and act, defeat sets in' for years there have been people who've found society too overwhelming and have withdrawn, concentrated on "doing their own thing." Generally we have put them into mental hospitals and diagnosed them as schizophrenics. If the real radical finds that having long hair sets up psychological barriers to communication and organization, he cuts his hair. If I were organizing in a orthodox Jewish community I would not walk in there eating a ham sandwich, unless I wanted to be rejected so I could have an excuse to cop out. My "thing," if I want to organize, is solid communication with the people in the community. Lacking communication I am in reality silent; throughout history silence has been regarded as assent - in this case assent to the system.
As an organizer I start from where the world is, as it is, not as I would like it to be. That we accept the world as it is does not in any sense weaken our desire to change it into what we believe it should be - it is necessary to begin where the world is if we are going to change it to what we think it should be. That means working in the system.
There's another reason for working inside the system. Dostoevsky said that taking a new step is what people fear most. Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and chance the future. This acceptance is the reformation essential to any revolution. To bring on this reformation requires that the organizer work inside the system, among not only the middle class but the 40 per cent of American families - more than seventy million people - whose income range from $5,000 to $10,000 a year (in 1971). They cannot be dismissed by labeling them blue collar or hard hat. They will not continue to be relatively passive and slightly challenging. If we fail to communicate with them, if we don't encourage them to form alliances with us, they will move to the right. Maybe they will anyway, but let's not let it happen by default.
Our youth are impatient with the preliminaries that are essential to purposeful action. Effective organization is thwarted by the desire for instant and dramatic change, or as I have phrased it elsewhere the demand for revelation rather than revolution. It's the kind of thing we see in play writing; the first act introduces the characters and the plot, in the second act the plot and characters are developed as the play strives to hold the audience's attention. in the final act good and evil have their dramatic confrontation and resolution. The present generation wants to go right into the third act, skipping the first two, in which case there is no play, nothing but confrontation for confrontation's sake - a flare-up and back to darkness. To build a powerful organization takes time. It is tedious, but that's the way the game is played - if you want to play and not just yell, "Kill the umpire."
What is the alternative to working "inside" the system? A mess of rhetorical garbage about "Burn the system down!" Yippie yells of "Do it!" or "Do your thing." What else? Bombs? Sniping? Silence when police are killed and screams of "murdering fascist pigs" when others are killed? Attacking and baiting the police? Police suicide? Power comes out of the barrel of a gun!" is an absurd rallying cry when the other side has all the guns. Lenin was a pragmatist; when he returned to what was then Petrograd from exile, he said that the Bolsheviks stood for getting power through the ballot box but would reconsider after they got the guns! Militant mouthings? Spouting quotes from Mao, Castro, and Che Guevara, which are as germane to our highly technological, computerized, cybernetic, nuclear-powered, mass media society as a stagecoach on a jet runway at Kennedy airport.
Let is in the name of radical pragmatism not forget that in our system with all its repressions we can still speak out and denounce the administration, attack its policies, work to build an opposition political base. True, there is government harassment, but there still is that relative freedom to fight. I can attack my government, try to organize to change it. That's more than I can do in Moscow, Peking, or Havana. Remember the reaction of the Red Guard to the "cultural revolution" and the fate of the Chinese college students. Just a few of the violent episodes of bombings or a courtroom shootout that we have experienced here would have resulted in a sweeping purge and mass executions in Russia, China, or Cuba. Let's keep some perspective.
We will start with the system because there is no other place to start from except political lunacy. It is most important for those of us who want revolutionary change to understand that revolution must be proceeded by reformation. To assume that a political revolution can survive without the supporting base of a popular reformation is to ask for the impossible in politics.
Men don't like to step abruptly out of the security of familiar experience; they need a bridge to cross from their own experience to a new way. A revolutionary organizer must shake up the prevailing patterns of their lives--agitate, create disenchantment and discontent with the current values, to produce, if not a passion for change, at least a passive, affirmative, no-challenging climate.
"The revolution was affected before the war commenced," John Adams wrote. "The revolution was in the hearts and minds of the people...This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments and affections of the people was the real American Revolution." A revolution without a prior reformation would collapse or become a totalitarian tyranny.
A reformation means that masses of our people have reached the point of disillusionment with past ways and values. They don't know what will work but they do know that the prevailing system is self-defeating, frustrating, and hopeless. They won't act for change but won't strongly oppose those who do. The time is then ripe for revolution.
Those who, for whatever combination of reasons, encourage the opposite of reformation, become the unwitting allies of the far political right. Parts of the far left have gone so far in the political circle that they are now all but indistinguishable from the extreme right. It reminds me of the days when Hitler, new on the scene, was excused for his actions by "humanitarians" on the grounds of a paternal rejection and childhood trauma. When there are people who espouse the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy or the Tate murders or the Marin County Courthouse kidnapping and killings or the University of Wisconsin bombing and killing as "revolutionary acts," then we are dealing with people who are merely hiding psychosis behind a political mask. The masses of people recoil with horror and say, Our way is bad and we were willing to let it change, but certainly not for this murderous madness--no matter how bad things are now, they are better than that." So they begin to turn back. They regress into acceptance of a coming massive repression in the name of "law and order."
In the midst of the gassing and violence by the Chicago Police and National Guard during the 1968 Democratic Convention many students asked me, "Do you still believe we should try to work inside our system?"
These were students who had been with Eugene McCarthy in New Hampshire and followed him across the country. Some had been with Robert Kennedy when he was killed in Los Angeles. Many of the tears that were shed in Chicago were not from gas. "Mr. Alinsky, we fought in primary after primary and the people voted no on Vietnam. Look at the convention. They're not paying any attention to the vote. Look at your police and the army. You still want us to work in the system?"
It hurt me to see the American army with drawn bayonets advancing on American boys and girls. But the answer I gave the young radicals seemed to me the only realistic one: "Do one of three things. One, go find a wailing wall and feel sorry for yourselves. Two, go psycho and start bombing--but this will only swing people to the right. Three, learn a lesson. Go home, organize, build power and at the next convention, you be the delegates." Remember: once you organize people around something as commonly agreed upon as pollution, then an organized people is on the move. From there it's a short and natural step to political pollution, to Pentagon pollution.
It is not enough just to elect your candidates. You must keep the pressure on. Radicals should keep in mind Franklin D. Roosevelt's response to a reform delegation, "Okay, you've convinced me. Now go on out and bring pressure on me!" action comes from keeping the heat on. No politician can sit on a hot issue if you make it hot enough.
As for Vietnam, I would like to see our nation be the first in the history of man to publicly say, "We were wrong! What we did was horrible. We got in and kept getting in deeper and deeper and at every step we invented new reasons for staying. We have paid part of the price in 44,000 dead Americans. There is nothing we can ever do to make it up to the people of Indo-China--or to our own people--but we will try. We believe that our world has come of age so that it is no longer a sign of weakness or defeat to abandon a childish pride and vanity, to admit we were wrong." Such an admission would shake up the foreign policy concepts of all nations and open the door to a new international order. This is our alternative to Vietnam--anything else is the old makeshift patchwork. If this were to happen, Vietnam may even have been somewhat worth it.
A final word on our system. The democratic ideal springs from the ideas of liberty, equality, majority rule through free elections, protection of the rights of minorities, and freedom to subscribe to multiple loyalties in matters of religion, economics, and politics rather than to a total loyalty to the state. The spirit of democracy is the idea of importance and worth in the individual, and faith in the kind of world where the individual can achieve as much of his potential as possible.
Great dangers always accompany great opportunities. The possibility of destruction is always implicit in the act of creation. Thus the greatest enemy of individual freedom is the individual himself.
From the beginning the weakness as well as the strength of the democratic ideal has been the people. People cannot be free unless they are willing to sacrifice some of their interests to guarantee the freedom of others. The price of democracy is the ongoing pursuit of the common good by all of the people. One hundred and thirty-five years ago Tocqueville gravely warned that unless individual citizens were regularly involved in the action of governing themselves, self-government would pass from the scene. Citizen participation is the animating spirit and force in a society predicated on voluntarism.
We are not here concerned with people who profess the democratic faith but yearn for the dark security of dependency where they can be spared the burden of decisions. Reluctant to grow up, or incapable of doing so, they want to remain children and be cared for by others. Those who can, should be encouraged to grow; for the others, the fault lies not in the system but in themselves.
Here we are desperately concerned with the vast mass of our people who, thwarted through lack of interest or opportunity, or both, do not participate in the endless responsibilities of citizenship and are resigned to lives determined by others. To lose your "identity" as a citizen of democracy is but a step from losing your identity as a person. People react to this frustration by not acting at all. The separation of the people from the routine daily functions of citizenship is heartbreak in a democracy.
It is a grave situation when a people resign their citizenship or when a resident of a great city, though he may desire to take a hand, lacks the means to participate. That citizen shrinks further into apathy, anonymity, and depersonalization. The result is that he comes to depend on public authority and a state of civil-sclerosis sets in.
From time to time there have been external enemies at our gates; there has always been the enemy within, the hidden and malignant inertia that foreshadows more certain destruction to our life and future than any devastating tragedy than the death of man's faith in himself and in his power to direct his future.
I salute the present generation. Hang on to one of your most precious part of youth, laughter--don't lose it as many of you seem to have done, you need it. Together we may find some of what we're looking for--laughter, beauty, love, and the chance to create.
Monday, February 20, 2006,10:35 AM
Modernity and tradition entwined in a complex dialogue
by Leslie Camhi
Royal Portraits
What was it like to step before Seydou Keïta camera in Bamako, Mali, in the 1950s? If you were a woman, you might have donned your best flowered boubou (the wide-sleeved, flowing robe adapted to both sexes) and elaborately bejeweled your hair, thrown ropes of carnelian beads around your neck and gamely tied your headscarf à la Versailles, before setting out, either alone or with family, for the famous photographer's studio, situated at the bustling crossroads of modernity, near the city's train station, market, and cinema.
While you waited (for the lines could be long), you might, if you were a man, consider changing into one of three Western-style suits Keïta kept on hand to burnish his clients' image with a sheen of wealth and sophistication. Man or woman, you might strap on a wristwatch for perhaps the first time in your life and contemplate posing beside a radio or holding an artificial flower.
When your turn came, the slim, elegant photographer, with his intense eyes and lighthearted manner, did his best to banish any lingering suspicions—the rumor, for example, that someone possessing your picture could revive your unwilling spirit after your death. He seemed to know exactly which gestures would put you and your family at ease and make you look your best, lending your mother-in-law's tribal formality a touch of unexpected nonchalance, throwing your fine shoulders and your sister's impossibly slender fingers into high relief. A lacy bedspread or riotously patterned fabric hung in the courtyard against a mud wall; you stood, sat, or reclined before it, and with one click of the shutter, proudly proclaimed your hybrid allegiance to both the complex, colonially inflected traditions of the Sahel and the latest chic.
Royalty is currently residing amid the fumes from the truck repair shops on West 29th Street, where an exhibition of posthumous prints drawn from Keïta's estate is at Sean Kelly Gallery. Keïta who was born in Bamako around 1923, apprenticed in his father's carpentry workshop and discovered photography at age 12, when an uncle returning from a trip to Senegal brought him a small box camera.
He set up his own atelier in 1948, taking pictures outdoors when he couldn't afford lights. Working under French colonial rule, he photographed the notables of his native city—its women, in particular, as if they were queens, their vivid self-fashioning and embrace of modernity at one with the country's growing thirst for autonomy.
Mali joined the great wave of African independence in 1960. Under pressure from the fledgling socialist government, Keïta closed his portrait studio and went to work as an official state photographer. But he carefully preserved some 7,000 negatives from its heyday. In 1992, visitors from the West discovered this trove of images embodying the promise of a newborn society and its dawning self-consciousness—precious documents of a rare humanity.
The art world lapped them up. Promoted by French curator Andre Magnin and collector Jean Pigozzi, new Keïta prints (vastly enlarged from their original, dimensions) were shown internationally. In 2001, Keïta broke with Magnin and Pigozzi, demanding the return of 921 negatives in Magnin's hands and setting up a foundation with Parisian gallerist Jean-Marc Petras to look after his legacy. (Legal proceedings are pending in France for the return of the now possibly endangered negatives, which represent the photographer's best-known and some of his most brilliant images.) Keïta died later that year, two weeks before the opening of a show Petras had organized at Sean Kell.
The current exhibition confirms the remarkable depth of Keïta achievement. It also suggests just how much work is still to be done by scholars. In the extraordinary ornamental details of their dress and in their comportment, his Bamakois send out a wealth of psychological and political signals that, to the unenlightened viewer, remain both opaque and intriguing, hinting at familial relationships (such as "co-wives," the multiple spouses of a Muslim man) that are not part of everyday life in the West.
The portraits show modernity and tradition entwined in a complex dialogue with no beginning or end. The ghost of Marie Antoinette hovers over the pleated bodices and ruffled blouses of these gay and pensive beauties, some made of "Dutch wax" fabrics imitating colonial Indonesian designs, which were printed in Manchester for export to Africa. Their "aeroplane wing sleeves" and "coat hanger braids" (as the Bamakois called them) turn up in the breeze; they bear the marks of scarification and of Western affluence with equal pride.
Above all, they live. "My wish is that my negatives will survive for a very long time," Keïta remarked in a late interview. "It is true, my negatives breathe like you and me."
Friday, February 17, 2006,10:48 AM
Bayard Rustin
A master strategist and tireless activist, Bayard Rustin is best remembered as the organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, one of the largest nonviolent protests ever held in the United States. He brought Gandhi’s protest techniques to the American civil rights movement, and helped mold Martin Luther King, Jr. into an international symbol of peace and nonviolence.
Despite these achievements, Rustin was silenced, threatened, arrested, beaten, imprisoned and fired from important leadership positions, largely because he was an openly gay man in a fiercely homophobic era. Five years in the making and the winner of numerous awards, BROTHER OUTSIDER presents a feature-length documentary portrait, focusing on Rustin’s activism for peace, racial equality, economic justice and human rights.
Today, the United States is still struggling with many of the issues Bayard Rustin sought to change during his long, illustrious career. His focus on civil and economic rights and his belief in peace, human rights and the dignity of all people remain as relevant today as they were in the 1950s and 60s.
Rustin’s biography is particularly important for lesbian and gay Americans, highlighting the major contributions of a gay man to ending official segregation in America. Rustin stands at the confluence of the great struggles for civil, legal and human rights by African-Americans and lesbian and gay Americans. In a nation still torn by racial hatred and violence, bigotry against homosexuals, and extraordinary divides between rich and poor, his eloquent voice is needed today.
In February 1956, when Bayard Rustin arrived in Montgomery to assist with the nascent bus boycott, Martin Luther King, Jr. had not personally embraced nonviolence. In fact, there were guns inside King’s house, and armed guards posted at his doors. Rustin persuaded boycott leaders to adopt complete nonviolence, teaching them Gandhian nonviolent direct protest.
Apart from his career as an activist, Rustin the man was also fun-loving, mischievous, artistic, gifted with a fine singing voice, and known as an art collector who sometimes found museum-quality pieces in New York City trash. Historian John D’Emilio calls Rustin the "lost prophet" of the civil rights movement.
Despite these achievements, Rustin was silenced, threatened, arrested, beaten, imprisoned and fired from important leadership positions, largely because he was an openly gay man in a fiercely homophobic era. Five years in the making and the winner of numerous awards, BROTHER OUTSIDER presents a feature-length documentary portrait, focusing on Rustin’s activism for peace, racial equality, economic justice and human rights.
Today, the United States is still struggling with many of the issues Bayard Rustin sought to change during his long, illustrious career. His focus on civil and economic rights and his belief in peace, human rights and the dignity of all people remain as relevant today as they were in the 1950s and 60s.
Rustin’s biography is particularly important for lesbian and gay Americans, highlighting the major contributions of a gay man to ending official segregation in America. Rustin stands at the confluence of the great struggles for civil, legal and human rights by African-Americans and lesbian and gay Americans. In a nation still torn by racial hatred and violence, bigotry against homosexuals, and extraordinary divides between rich and poor, his eloquent voice is needed today.
In February 1956, when Bayard Rustin arrived in Montgomery to assist with the nascent bus boycott, Martin Luther King, Jr. had not personally embraced nonviolence. In fact, there were guns inside King’s house, and armed guards posted at his doors. Rustin persuaded boycott leaders to adopt complete nonviolence, teaching them Gandhian nonviolent direct protest.
Apart from his career as an activist, Rustin the man was also fun-loving, mischievous, artistic, gifted with a fine singing voice, and known as an art collector who sometimes found museum-quality pieces in New York City trash. Historian John D’Emilio calls Rustin the "lost prophet" of the civil rights movement.
,10:45 AM
National Liberation and Culture
by Amilcar Cabral
This text was originally delivered on February 20, 1970; as part of the Eduardo Mondlane (1) Memorial Lecture Series at Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York, under the auspices of The Program of Eastern African Studies. It was translated from the French by Maureen Webster.
When Goebbels, the brain behind Nazi propaganda, heard culture being discussed, he brought out his revolver. That shows that the Nazis, who were and are the most tragic expression of imperialism and of its thirst for domination--even if they were all degenerates like Hitler, had a clear idea of the value of culture as a factor of resistance to foreign domination.
History teaches us that, in certain circumstances, it is very easy for the foreigner to impose his domination on a people. But it also teaches us that, whatever may be the material aspects of this domination, it can be maintained only by the permanent, organized repression of the cultural life of the people concerned. Implantation of foreign domination can be assured definitively only by physical liquidation of a significant part of the dominated population.
In fact, to take up arms to dominate a people is, above all, to take up arms to destroy, or at least to neutralize, to paralyze, its cultural life. For, with a strong indigenous cultural life, foreign domination cannot be sure of its perpetuation. At any moment, depending on internal and external factors determining the evolution of the society in question, cultural resistance (indestructible) may take on new forms (political, economic, armed) in order fully to contest foreign domination.
The ideal for foreign domination, whether imperialist or not, would be to choose:
either to liquidate practically all the population of the dominated country, thereby eliminating the possibilities for cultural resistance;
or to succeed in imposing itself without damage to the culture of the dominated people--that is, to harmonize economic and political domination of these people with their cultural personality.
The first hypothesis implies genocide of the indigenous population and creates a void which empties foreign domination of its content and its object: the dominated people. The second hypothesis has not, until now, been confirmed by history. The broad experience of mankind allows us to postulate that it has no practical viability: it is not possible to harmonize the economic and political domination of a people, whatever may be the degree of their social development, with the preservation of their cultural personality.
In order to escape this choice--which may be called the dilemma of cultural resistance--imperialist colonial domination has tried to create theories which, in fact, are only gross formulations of racism, and which, in practice, are translated into a permanent state of siege of the indigenous populations on the basis of racist dictatorship (or democracy).
This, for example, is the case with the so-called theory of progressive assimilation of native populations, which turns out to be only a more or less violent attempt to deny the culture of the people in question. The utter failure of this "theory," implemented in practice by several colonial powers, including Portugal, is the most obvious proof of its lack of viability, if not of its inhuman character. It attains the highest degree of absurdity in the Portuguese case, where Salazar affirmed that Africa does not exist.
This is also the case with the so-called theory of apartheid, created, applied and developed on the basis of the economic and political domination of the people of Southern Africa by a racist minority, with all the outrageous crimes against humanity which that involves. The practice of apartheid takes the form of unrestrained exploitation of the labor force of the African masses, incarcerated and repressed in the largest concentration camp mankind has ever known.
These practical examples give a measure of the drama of foreign imperialist domination as it confronts the cultural reality of the dominated people. They also suggest the strong, dependent and reciprocal relationships existing between the cultural situation and the economic (and political) situation in the behavior of human societies. In fact, culture is always in the life of a society (open or closed), the more or less conscious result of the economic and political activities of that society, the more or less dynamic expression of the kinds of relationships which prevail in that society, on the one hand between man (considered individually or collectively) and nature, and, on the other hand, among individuals, groups of individuals, social strata or classes.
The value of culture as an element of resistance to foreign domination lies in the fact that culture is the vigorous manifestation on the ideological or idealist plane of the physical and historical reality of the society that is dominated or to be dominated. Culture is simultaneously the fruit of a people’s history and a determinant of history, by the positive or negative influence which it exerts on the evolution of relationships between man and his environment, among men or groups of men within a society, as well as among different societies. Ignorance of this fact may explain the failure of several attempts at foreign domination--as well as the failure of some international liberation movements.
Let us examine the nature of national liberation. We shall consider this historical phenomenon in its contemporary context, that is, national liberation in opposition to imperialist domination. The latter is, as we know, distinct both in form and in content from preceding types of foreign domination (tribal, military-aristocratic, feudal, and capitalist domination in time free competition era).
The principal characteristic, common to every kind of imperialist domination, is the negation of the historical process of the dominated people by means of violently usurping the free operation of the process of development of the productive forces. Now, in any given society, the level of development of the productive forces and the system for social utilization of these forces (the ownership system) determine the mode of production. In our opinion, the mode of production whose contradictions are manifested with more or less intensity through the class struggle, is the principal factor in the history of any human group, the level of the productive forces being the true and permanent driving power of history.
For every society, for every group of people, considered as an evolving entity, the level of the productive forces indicates the stage of development of the society and of each of its components in relation to nature, its capacity to act or to react consciously in relation to nature. It indicates and conditions the type of material relationships (expressed objectively or subjectively) which exists among the various elements or groups constituting the society in question. Relationships and types of relationships between man and nature, between man and his environment. Relationships and type of relationships among the individual or collective components of a society. To speak of these is to speak of history, but it is also to speak of culture.
Whatever may be the ideological or idealistic characteristics of cultural expression, culture is an essential element of the history of a people. Culture is, perhaps, the product of this history just as the flower is the product of a plant. Like history, or because it is history, culture has as its material base the level of the productive forces and the mode of production. Culture plunges its roots into the physical reality of the environmental humus in which it develops, and it reflects the organic nature of the society, which may be more or less influenced by external factors. History allows us to know the nature and extent of the imbalance and conflicts (economic, political and social) which characterize the evolution of a society; culture allows us to know the dynamic syntheses which have been developed and established by social conscience to resolve these conflicts at each stage of its evolution, in the search for survival and progress.
Just as happens with the flower in a plant, in culture there lies the capacity (or the responsibility) for forming and fertilizing the seedling which will assure the continuity of history, at the same time assuring the prospects for evolution and progress of the society in question. Thus it is understood that imperialist domination by denying the historical development of the dominated people, necessarily also denies their cultural development. It is also understood why imperialist domination, like all other foreign domination for its own security, requires cultural oppression and the attempt at direct or indirect liquidation of the essential elements of the culture of the dominated people.
The study of the history of national liberation struggles shows that generally these struggles are preceded by an increase in expression of culture, consolidated progressively into a successful or unsuccessful attempt to affirm the cultural personality of the dominated people, as a means of negating the oppressor culture. Whatever may be the conditions of a people's political and social factors in practicing this domination, it is generally within the culture that we find the seed of opposition, which leads to the structuring and development of the liberation movement.
In our opinion, the foundation for national liberation rests in the inalienable right of every people to have their own history whatever formulations may be adopted at the level of international law. The objective of national liberation, is therefore, to reclaim the right, usurped by imperialist domination, namely: the liberation of the process of development of national productive forces. Therefore, national liberation takes place when, and only when, national productive forces are completely free of all kinds of foreign domination. The liberation of productive forces and consequently the ability to determine the mode of production most appropriate to the evolution of the liberated people, necessarily opens up new prospects for the cultural development of the society in question, by returning to that society all its capacity to create progress.
A people who free themselves from foreign domination will be free culturally only if, without complexes and without underestimating the importance of positive accretions from the oppressor and other cultures, they return to the upward paths of their own culture, which is nourished by the living reality of its environment, and which negates both harmful influences and any kind of subjection to foreign culture. Thus, it may be seen that if imperialist domination has the vital need to practice culturaloppression, national liberation is necessarily an act of culture.
On the basis of what has just been said, we may consider the national liberation movement as the organized political expression of the culture of the people who are undertaking the struggle. For this reason, those who lead the movement must have a clear idea of the value of the culture in the framework of the struggle and must have a thorough knowledge of the people's culture, whatever may be their level of economic development.
In our time it is common to affirm that all peoples have a culture. The time is past when, in an effort to perpetuate the domination of a people, culture was considered an attribute of privileged peoples or nations, and when, out of either ignorance or malice, culture was confused with technical power, if not with skin color or the shape of one's eyes. The liberation movement, as representative and defender of the culture of the people, must be conscious of the fact that, whatever may be the material conditions of the society it represents, the society is the bearer and creator of culture. The liberation movement must furthermore embody the mass character, the popular character of the culture--which is not and never could be the privilege of one or of some sectors of the society.
In the thorough analysis of social structure which every liberation movement should be capable of making in relation to the imperative of the struggle, the cultural characteristics of each group in society have a place of prime importance. For, while the culture has a mass character, it is not uniform, it is not equally developed in all sectors of society. The attitude of each social group toward the liberation struggle is dictated by its social group toward the liberation struggle is dictated by its economic interests, but is also influenced profoundly by its culture. It may even be admitted that these differences in cultural level explain differences in behavior toward the liberation movement on the part of individuals who belong to the same socio-economic group. It is at the point that culture reaches its full significance for each individual: understanding and integration in to his environment, identification with fundamental problems and aspirations of the society, acceptance of the possibility of change in the direction of progress.
In the specific conditions of our country--and we would say, of Africa--the horizontal and vertical distribution of levels of culture is somewhat complex. In fact, from villages to towns, from one ethnic group to another, from one age group to another, from the peasant to the workman or to the indigenous intellectual who is more or less assimilated, and, as we have said, even from individual to individual within the same social group, the quantitative and qualitative level of culture varies significantly. It is of prime importance for the liberation movement to take these facts into consideration.
In societies with a horizontal social structure, such as the Balante, for example, the distribution of cultural levels is more or less uniform, variations being linked uniquely to characteristics of individuals or of age groups. On the other hand, in societies with a vertical structure, such as the Fula, there are important variations from the top to the bottom of the social pyramid. These differences in social structure illustrate once more the close relationship between culture and economy, and also explain differences in the general or sectoral behavior of these two ethnic groups in relation to the liberation movement.
It is true that the multiplicity of social and ethnic groups complicates the effort to determine the role of culture in the liberation movement. But it is vital not to lose sight of the decisive importance of the liberation struggle, even when class structure is to appear to be in embryonic stages of development.
The experience of colonial domination shows that, in the effort to perpetuate exploitation, the colonizers not only creates a system to repress the cultural life of the colonized people; he also provokes and develops the cultural alienation of a part of the population, either by so-called assimilation of indigenous people, or by creating a social gap between the indigenous elites and the popular masses. As a result of this process of dividing or of deepening the divisions in the society, it happens that a considerable part of the population, notably the urban or peasant petite bourgeoisie, assimilates the colonizer's mentality, considers itself culturally superior to its own people and ignores or looks down upon their cultural values. This situation, characteristic of the majority of colonized intellectuals, is consolidated by increases in the social privileges of the assimilated or alienated group with direct implications for the behavior of individuals in this group in relation to the liberation movement. A reconversion of minds--of mental set--is thus indispensable to the true integration of people into the liberation movement. Such reonversion--re-Africanization, in our case--may take place before the struggle, but it is completed only during the course of the struggle, through daily contact with the popular masses in the communion of sacrifice required by the struggle.
However, we must take into account the fact that, faced with the prospect of political independence, the ambition and opportunism from which the liberation movement generally suffers may bring into the struggle unconverted individuals. The latter, on the basis of their level of schooling, their scientific or technical knowledge, but without losing any of their social class biases, may attain the highest positions in the liberation movement. Vigilance is thus indispensable on the cultural as well as the political plane. For, in the liberation movement as elsewhere, all that glitters is not necessarily gold: political leaders--even the most famous--may be culturally alienated people. But the social class characteristics of the culture are even more discernible in the behavior of privileged groups in rural areas, especially in the case of ethnic groups with a vertical social structure, where, nevertheless, assimilation or cultural alienation influences are non-existent or practically non-existent. This is the case, for example, with the Fula ruling class. Under colonial domination, the political authority of this class (traditional chiefs, noble families, religious leaders) is purely nominal, and the popular masses know that true authority lies with an is acted upon by colonial administrators. However, the ruling class preserves in essence its basic cultural authority over the masses and this has very important political implications.
Recognizing this reality, the colonizer who represses or inhibits significant cultural activity on the part of the masses at the base of the social pyramid, strengthens and protects the prestige and the cultural influence of the ruling class at the summit. The colonizer installs chiefs who support him and who are to some degree accepted by the masses; he gives these chiefs material privileges such as education for their eldest children, creates chiefdoms where they did not exist before, develops cordial relations with religious leaders, builds mosques, organizes journeys to Mecca, etc. And above all, by means of the repressive organs of colonial administration, he guarantees economic and social privileges to the ruling class in their relations with the masses. All this does not make it impossible that, among these ruling classes, there may be individuals or groups of individuals who join the liberation movement, although less frequently than in the case of the assimilated "petite bourgeoisie." Several traditional and religious leaders join the struggle at the very beginning or during its development, making an enthusiastic contribution to the cause of liberation.
But here again vigilance is indispensable: preserving deep down the cultural prejudices of their class, individuals in this category generally see in the liberation movement the only valid means, using the sacrifices of the masses, to eliminate colonial oppression of their own class and to re-establish in this way their complete political and cultural domination of the people.
In the general framework of contesting colonial imperialist domination and in the actual situation to which we refer, among the oppressor's most loyal allies are found some high officials and intellectuals of the liberal professions, assimilated people, and also a significant number of representatives of the ruling class from rural areas. This fact gives some measure of the influence (positive or negative) of culture and cultural prejudices in the problem of political choice when one is confronted with the liberation movement. It also illustrates the limits of this influence and the supremacy of the class factor in the behavior of the different social groups. The high official or the assimilated intellectual, characterized by total cultural alienation, identifies himself by political choice with the traditional or religious leader who has experienced no significant foreign cultural influences.
For these two categories of people place above all principles our demands of a cultural nature--and against the aspirations of the people--their own economic and social privileges, their own class interests. That is a truth which the liberation movement cannot afford to ignore without risking betrayal of the economic, political, social and cultural objectives of the struggle.
Without minimizing the positive contribution which privileged classes may bring to the struggle, the liberation movement must, on the cultural level just as on the political level, base its action in popular culture, whatever may be the diversity of levels of cultures in the country. The cultural combat against colonial domination--the first phase of the liberation movement--can be planned efficiently only on the basis of the culture of the rural and urban working masses, including the nationalist (revolutionary) "petite bourgeoisie" who have been re-Africanized or who are ready for cultural reconversion. Whatever may be the complexity of this basic cultural panorama, the liberation movement must be capable of distinguishing within it the essential from the secondary, the positive from the negative, the progressive from the reactionary in order to characterize the master line which defines progressively a national culture.
In order for culture to play the important role which falls to it in the framework of the liberation movement, the movement must be able to preserve the positive cultural values of every well defined social group, of every category, and to achieve the confluence of these values in the service of the struggle, giving it a new dimension--the national dimension. Confronted with such a necessity, the liberation struggle is, above all, a struggle both for the preservation and survival of the cultural values of the people and for the harmonization and development of these values within a national framework
This text was originally delivered on February 20, 1970; as part of the Eduardo Mondlane (1) Memorial Lecture Series at Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York, under the auspices of The Program of Eastern African Studies. It was translated from the French by Maureen Webster.
When Goebbels, the brain behind Nazi propaganda, heard culture being discussed, he brought out his revolver. That shows that the Nazis, who were and are the most tragic expression of imperialism and of its thirst for domination--even if they were all degenerates like Hitler, had a clear idea of the value of culture as a factor of resistance to foreign domination.
History teaches us that, in certain circumstances, it is very easy for the foreigner to impose his domination on a people. But it also teaches us that, whatever may be the material aspects of this domination, it can be maintained only by the permanent, organized repression of the cultural life of the people concerned. Implantation of foreign domination can be assured definitively only by physical liquidation of a significant part of the dominated population.
In fact, to take up arms to dominate a people is, above all, to take up arms to destroy, or at least to neutralize, to paralyze, its cultural life. For, with a strong indigenous cultural life, foreign domination cannot be sure of its perpetuation. At any moment, depending on internal and external factors determining the evolution of the society in question, cultural resistance (indestructible) may take on new forms (political, economic, armed) in order fully to contest foreign domination.
The ideal for foreign domination, whether imperialist or not, would be to choose:
either to liquidate practically all the population of the dominated country, thereby eliminating the possibilities for cultural resistance;
or to succeed in imposing itself without damage to the culture of the dominated people--that is, to harmonize economic and political domination of these people with their cultural personality.
The first hypothesis implies genocide of the indigenous population and creates a void which empties foreign domination of its content and its object: the dominated people. The second hypothesis has not, until now, been confirmed by history. The broad experience of mankind allows us to postulate that it has no practical viability: it is not possible to harmonize the economic and political domination of a people, whatever may be the degree of their social development, with the preservation of their cultural personality.
In order to escape this choice--which may be called the dilemma of cultural resistance--imperialist colonial domination has tried to create theories which, in fact, are only gross formulations of racism, and which, in practice, are translated into a permanent state of siege of the indigenous populations on the basis of racist dictatorship (or democracy).
This, for example, is the case with the so-called theory of progressive assimilation of native populations, which turns out to be only a more or less violent attempt to deny the culture of the people in question. The utter failure of this "theory," implemented in practice by several colonial powers, including Portugal, is the most obvious proof of its lack of viability, if not of its inhuman character. It attains the highest degree of absurdity in the Portuguese case, where Salazar affirmed that Africa does not exist.
This is also the case with the so-called theory of apartheid, created, applied and developed on the basis of the economic and political domination of the people of Southern Africa by a racist minority, with all the outrageous crimes against humanity which that involves. The practice of apartheid takes the form of unrestrained exploitation of the labor force of the African masses, incarcerated and repressed in the largest concentration camp mankind has ever known.
These practical examples give a measure of the drama of foreign imperialist domination as it confronts the cultural reality of the dominated people. They also suggest the strong, dependent and reciprocal relationships existing between the cultural situation and the economic (and political) situation in the behavior of human societies. In fact, culture is always in the life of a society (open or closed), the more or less conscious result of the economic and political activities of that society, the more or less dynamic expression of the kinds of relationships which prevail in that society, on the one hand between man (considered individually or collectively) and nature, and, on the other hand, among individuals, groups of individuals, social strata or classes.
The value of culture as an element of resistance to foreign domination lies in the fact that culture is the vigorous manifestation on the ideological or idealist plane of the physical and historical reality of the society that is dominated or to be dominated. Culture is simultaneously the fruit of a people’s history and a determinant of history, by the positive or negative influence which it exerts on the evolution of relationships between man and his environment, among men or groups of men within a society, as well as among different societies. Ignorance of this fact may explain the failure of several attempts at foreign domination--as well as the failure of some international liberation movements.
Let us examine the nature of national liberation. We shall consider this historical phenomenon in its contemporary context, that is, national liberation in opposition to imperialist domination. The latter is, as we know, distinct both in form and in content from preceding types of foreign domination (tribal, military-aristocratic, feudal, and capitalist domination in time free competition era).
The principal characteristic, common to every kind of imperialist domination, is the negation of the historical process of the dominated people by means of violently usurping the free operation of the process of development of the productive forces. Now, in any given society, the level of development of the productive forces and the system for social utilization of these forces (the ownership system) determine the mode of production. In our opinion, the mode of production whose contradictions are manifested with more or less intensity through the class struggle, is the principal factor in the history of any human group, the level of the productive forces being the true and permanent driving power of history.
For every society, for every group of people, considered as an evolving entity, the level of the productive forces indicates the stage of development of the society and of each of its components in relation to nature, its capacity to act or to react consciously in relation to nature. It indicates and conditions the type of material relationships (expressed objectively or subjectively) which exists among the various elements or groups constituting the society in question. Relationships and types of relationships between man and nature, between man and his environment. Relationships and type of relationships among the individual or collective components of a society. To speak of these is to speak of history, but it is also to speak of culture.
Whatever may be the ideological or idealistic characteristics of cultural expression, culture is an essential element of the history of a people. Culture is, perhaps, the product of this history just as the flower is the product of a plant. Like history, or because it is history, culture has as its material base the level of the productive forces and the mode of production. Culture plunges its roots into the physical reality of the environmental humus in which it develops, and it reflects the organic nature of the society, which may be more or less influenced by external factors. History allows us to know the nature and extent of the imbalance and conflicts (economic, political and social) which characterize the evolution of a society; culture allows us to know the dynamic syntheses which have been developed and established by social conscience to resolve these conflicts at each stage of its evolution, in the search for survival and progress.
Just as happens with the flower in a plant, in culture there lies the capacity (or the responsibility) for forming and fertilizing the seedling which will assure the continuity of history, at the same time assuring the prospects for evolution and progress of the society in question. Thus it is understood that imperialist domination by denying the historical development of the dominated people, necessarily also denies their cultural development. It is also understood why imperialist domination, like all other foreign domination for its own security, requires cultural oppression and the attempt at direct or indirect liquidation of the essential elements of the culture of the dominated people.
The study of the history of national liberation struggles shows that generally these struggles are preceded by an increase in expression of culture, consolidated progressively into a successful or unsuccessful attempt to affirm the cultural personality of the dominated people, as a means of negating the oppressor culture. Whatever may be the conditions of a people's political and social factors in practicing this domination, it is generally within the culture that we find the seed of opposition, which leads to the structuring and development of the liberation movement.
In our opinion, the foundation for national liberation rests in the inalienable right of every people to have their own history whatever formulations may be adopted at the level of international law. The objective of national liberation, is therefore, to reclaim the right, usurped by imperialist domination, namely: the liberation of the process of development of national productive forces. Therefore, national liberation takes place when, and only when, national productive forces are completely free of all kinds of foreign domination. The liberation of productive forces and consequently the ability to determine the mode of production most appropriate to the evolution of the liberated people, necessarily opens up new prospects for the cultural development of the society in question, by returning to that society all its capacity to create progress.
A people who free themselves from foreign domination will be free culturally only if, without complexes and without underestimating the importance of positive accretions from the oppressor and other cultures, they return to the upward paths of their own culture, which is nourished by the living reality of its environment, and which negates both harmful influences and any kind of subjection to foreign culture. Thus, it may be seen that if imperialist domination has the vital need to practice culturaloppression, national liberation is necessarily an act of culture.
On the basis of what has just been said, we may consider the national liberation movement as the organized political expression of the culture of the people who are undertaking the struggle. For this reason, those who lead the movement must have a clear idea of the value of the culture in the framework of the struggle and must have a thorough knowledge of the people's culture, whatever may be their level of economic development.
In our time it is common to affirm that all peoples have a culture. The time is past when, in an effort to perpetuate the domination of a people, culture was considered an attribute of privileged peoples or nations, and when, out of either ignorance or malice, culture was confused with technical power, if not with skin color or the shape of one's eyes. The liberation movement, as representative and defender of the culture of the people, must be conscious of the fact that, whatever may be the material conditions of the society it represents, the society is the bearer and creator of culture. The liberation movement must furthermore embody the mass character, the popular character of the culture--which is not and never could be the privilege of one or of some sectors of the society.
In the thorough analysis of social structure which every liberation movement should be capable of making in relation to the imperative of the struggle, the cultural characteristics of each group in society have a place of prime importance. For, while the culture has a mass character, it is not uniform, it is not equally developed in all sectors of society. The attitude of each social group toward the liberation struggle is dictated by its social group toward the liberation struggle is dictated by its economic interests, but is also influenced profoundly by its culture. It may even be admitted that these differences in cultural level explain differences in behavior toward the liberation movement on the part of individuals who belong to the same socio-economic group. It is at the point that culture reaches its full significance for each individual: understanding and integration in to his environment, identification with fundamental problems and aspirations of the society, acceptance of the possibility of change in the direction of progress.
In the specific conditions of our country--and we would say, of Africa--the horizontal and vertical distribution of levels of culture is somewhat complex. In fact, from villages to towns, from one ethnic group to another, from one age group to another, from the peasant to the workman or to the indigenous intellectual who is more or less assimilated, and, as we have said, even from individual to individual within the same social group, the quantitative and qualitative level of culture varies significantly. It is of prime importance for the liberation movement to take these facts into consideration.
In societies with a horizontal social structure, such as the Balante, for example, the distribution of cultural levels is more or less uniform, variations being linked uniquely to characteristics of individuals or of age groups. On the other hand, in societies with a vertical structure, such as the Fula, there are important variations from the top to the bottom of the social pyramid. These differences in social structure illustrate once more the close relationship between culture and economy, and also explain differences in the general or sectoral behavior of these two ethnic groups in relation to the liberation movement.
It is true that the multiplicity of social and ethnic groups complicates the effort to determine the role of culture in the liberation movement. But it is vital not to lose sight of the decisive importance of the liberation struggle, even when class structure is to appear to be in embryonic stages of development.
The experience of colonial domination shows that, in the effort to perpetuate exploitation, the colonizers not only creates a system to repress the cultural life of the colonized people; he also provokes and develops the cultural alienation of a part of the population, either by so-called assimilation of indigenous people, or by creating a social gap between the indigenous elites and the popular masses. As a result of this process of dividing or of deepening the divisions in the society, it happens that a considerable part of the population, notably the urban or peasant petite bourgeoisie, assimilates the colonizer's mentality, considers itself culturally superior to its own people and ignores or looks down upon their cultural values. This situation, characteristic of the majority of colonized intellectuals, is consolidated by increases in the social privileges of the assimilated or alienated group with direct implications for the behavior of individuals in this group in relation to the liberation movement. A reconversion of minds--of mental set--is thus indispensable to the true integration of people into the liberation movement. Such reonversion--re-Africanization, in our case--may take place before the struggle, but it is completed only during the course of the struggle, through daily contact with the popular masses in the communion of sacrifice required by the struggle.
However, we must take into account the fact that, faced with the prospect of political independence, the ambition and opportunism from which the liberation movement generally suffers may bring into the struggle unconverted individuals. The latter, on the basis of their level of schooling, their scientific or technical knowledge, but without losing any of their social class biases, may attain the highest positions in the liberation movement. Vigilance is thus indispensable on the cultural as well as the political plane. For, in the liberation movement as elsewhere, all that glitters is not necessarily gold: political leaders--even the most famous--may be culturally alienated people. But the social class characteristics of the culture are even more discernible in the behavior of privileged groups in rural areas, especially in the case of ethnic groups with a vertical social structure, where, nevertheless, assimilation or cultural alienation influences are non-existent or practically non-existent. This is the case, for example, with the Fula ruling class. Under colonial domination, the political authority of this class (traditional chiefs, noble families, religious leaders) is purely nominal, and the popular masses know that true authority lies with an is acted upon by colonial administrators. However, the ruling class preserves in essence its basic cultural authority over the masses and this has very important political implications.
Recognizing this reality, the colonizer who represses or inhibits significant cultural activity on the part of the masses at the base of the social pyramid, strengthens and protects the prestige and the cultural influence of the ruling class at the summit. The colonizer installs chiefs who support him and who are to some degree accepted by the masses; he gives these chiefs material privileges such as education for their eldest children, creates chiefdoms where they did not exist before, develops cordial relations with religious leaders, builds mosques, organizes journeys to Mecca, etc. And above all, by means of the repressive organs of colonial administration, he guarantees economic and social privileges to the ruling class in their relations with the masses. All this does not make it impossible that, among these ruling classes, there may be individuals or groups of individuals who join the liberation movement, although less frequently than in the case of the assimilated "petite bourgeoisie." Several traditional and religious leaders join the struggle at the very beginning or during its development, making an enthusiastic contribution to the cause of liberation.
But here again vigilance is indispensable: preserving deep down the cultural prejudices of their class, individuals in this category generally see in the liberation movement the only valid means, using the sacrifices of the masses, to eliminate colonial oppression of their own class and to re-establish in this way their complete political and cultural domination of the people.
In the general framework of contesting colonial imperialist domination and in the actual situation to which we refer, among the oppressor's most loyal allies are found some high officials and intellectuals of the liberal professions, assimilated people, and also a significant number of representatives of the ruling class from rural areas. This fact gives some measure of the influence (positive or negative) of culture and cultural prejudices in the problem of political choice when one is confronted with the liberation movement. It also illustrates the limits of this influence and the supremacy of the class factor in the behavior of the different social groups. The high official or the assimilated intellectual, characterized by total cultural alienation, identifies himself by political choice with the traditional or religious leader who has experienced no significant foreign cultural influences.
For these two categories of people place above all principles our demands of a cultural nature--and against the aspirations of the people--their own economic and social privileges, their own class interests. That is a truth which the liberation movement cannot afford to ignore without risking betrayal of the economic, political, social and cultural objectives of the struggle.
Without minimizing the positive contribution which privileged classes may bring to the struggle, the liberation movement must, on the cultural level just as on the political level, base its action in popular culture, whatever may be the diversity of levels of cultures in the country. The cultural combat against colonial domination--the first phase of the liberation movement--can be planned efficiently only on the basis of the culture of the rural and urban working masses, including the nationalist (revolutionary) "petite bourgeoisie" who have been re-Africanized or who are ready for cultural reconversion. Whatever may be the complexity of this basic cultural panorama, the liberation movement must be capable of distinguishing within it the essential from the secondary, the positive from the negative, the progressive from the reactionary in order to characterize the master line which defines progressively a national culture.
In order for culture to play the important role which falls to it in the framework of the liberation movement, the movement must be able to preserve the positive cultural values of every well defined social group, of every category, and to achieve the confluence of these values in the service of the struggle, giving it a new dimension--the national dimension. Confronted with such a necessity, the liberation struggle is, above all, a struggle both for the preservation and survival of the cultural values of the people and for the harmonization and development of these values within a national framework
Thursday, February 16, 2006,1:22 PM
Listen to the Donkey
Old Benjamin, the donkey, seemed quite unchanged since the Rebellion. He did his work in the same slow obstinate way as he had done it in Jones's time, never shirking and never volunteering for extra work either. About the Rebellion and its results he would express no opinion. When asked whether he was not happier now that Jones was gone, he would say only "Donkeys live a long time. None of you has ever seen a dead donkey," and the others had to be content with this cryptic answer
- George Orwell
1984
- George Orwell
1984
,1:10 PM
Remains of toxic bullets litter Iraq
By Scott Peterson
BAGHDAD - At a roadside produce stand on the outskirts of Baghdad, business is brisk for Latifa Khalaf Hamid. Iraqi drivers pull up and snap up fresh bunches of parsley, mint leaves, dill, and onion stalks.
But Ms. Hamid's stand is just four paces away from a burnt-out Iraqi tank, destroyed by - and contaminated with - controversial American depleted-uranium (DU) bullets. Local children play "throughout the day" on the tank, Hamid says, and on another one across the road.
No one has warned the vendor in the faded, threadbare black gown to keep the toxic and radioactive dust off her produce. The children haven't been told not to play with the radioactive debris. They gather around as a Geiger counter carried by a visiting reporter starts singing when it nears a DU bullet fragment no bigger than a pencil eraser. It registers nearly 1,000 times normal background radiation levels on the digital readout.
The Monitor visited four sites in the city - including two randomly chosen destroyed Iraqi armored vehicles, a clutch of burned American ammunition trucks, and the downtown planning ministry - and found significant levels of radioactive contamination from the US battle for Baghdad.
In the first partial Pentagon disclosure of the amount of DU used in Iraq, a US Central Command spokesman told the Monitor that A-10 Warthog aircraft - the same planes that shot at the Iraqi planning ministry - fired 300,000 bullets. The normal combat mix for these 30-mm rounds is five DU bullets to 1 - a mix that would have left about 75 tons of DU in Iraq.
The Monitor saw only one site where US troops had put up handwritten warnings in Arabic for Iraqis to stay away. There, a 3-foot-long DU dart from a 120 mm tank shell, was found producing radiation at more than 1,300 times background levels. It made the instrument's staccato bursts turn into a steady whine.
"If you have pieces or even whole [DU] penetrators around, this is not an acute health hazard, but it is for sure above radiation protection dose levels," says Werner Burkart, the German deputy director general for Nuclear Sciences and Applications at the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna. "The important thing in any battlefield - especially in populated urban areas - is somebody has to clean up these sites."
Minimizing the risk
Fresh-from-the-factory DU tank shells are normally handled with gloves, to minimize the health risk, and shielded with a thin coating. The alpha particle radiation emitted by DU travels less than an inch and can be stopped by cloth or even tissue paper. But when the DUmaterial burns (usually on impact; or as a dust, it can spontaneously ignite) protective shields disappear, and dangerous radioactive oxides are created that can be inhaled or ingested.
"[The risk] depends so very much on how you handle it," says Jan Olof Snihs, of Sweden's Radiation Protection Authority in Stockholm. In most cases dangers are low, he says, unless children eat toxic and radioactive soil, or get DU oxides on their hands.
Radioactive particles are a "special risk associated with a war," Mr. Snihs says. "The authorities should be aware of this, and try to decontaminate places like this, just to avoid unnecessary risk."
Pentagon officials say that DU is relatively harmless and a necessary part of modern warfare. They say that pre-Gulf War studies that indicated a risk of cancer and of causing harm to local populations through permanent contamination have been superseded by newer reports.
"There is not really any danger, at least that we know about, for the people of Iraq," said Lt. Col. Michael Sigmon, deputy surgeon for the US Army's V Corps, told journalists in Baghdad last week. He asserted that children playing with expended tank shells would have to eat and then practically suffocate on DU residue to cause harm.
But there is a growing chorus of concern among United Nations and relief officials, along with some Western scientific experts, who are calling for sites contaminated with DU be marked off and made safe.
"The soil around the impact sites of [DU] penetrators may be heavily contaminated, and could be harmful if swallowed by children," says Brian Spratt, chair of the working group on DU at The Royal Society, Britain's premier scientific institution.
Heavy metal toys?
Fragments and penetrators should be removed, since "children find them fascinating objects, and can pocket them," says Professor Spratt. "The science says there is some danger - not perhaps a huge danger - of these objects. ... We certainly do not say that these things are safe; we say that cleanup is important."
The British Ministry of Defense says it will offer screening to soldiers suspected of DU exposure, and will publish details about locations and quantities of DU that British troops used in Iraq - a tiny fraction of that fired by US forces.
The Pentagon has traditionally been tight-lipped about DU: Official figures on the amount used were not released for years after the 1991 Gulf War and Bosnia conflicts, and nearly a year after the 1999 Kosovo campaign. No US official contacted could provide DU use estimates from the latest war in Iraq.
"The first thing we should ask [the US military] is to remove that immediately," says Carel de Rooy, head of the UN Children's Fund in Baghdad, adding that senior UN officials need urgent advice on avoiding exposure.
The UN Environment Program last month called for field tests. DU "is still an issue of great concern for the general public," said UNEP chief Klaus Töpfer. "An early study in Iraq could either lay these fears to rest or confirm that there are indeed potential risks."
US troops avoid wreckage
During the latest Iraq conflict Abrams tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles and A-10 Warthog aircraft, among other military platforms, all fired the DU bullets from desert war zones to the heart of Baghdad. No other armor-piercing round is as effective against enemy tanks. While the Pentagon says there's no risk to Baghdad residents, US soldiers are taking their own precautions in Iraq, and in some cases have handed out warning leaflets and put up signs.
"After we shoot something with DU, we're not supposed to go around it, due to the fact that it could cause cancer," says a sergeant in Baghdad from New York, assigned to a Bradley, who asked not to be further identified.
"We don't know the effects of what it could do," says the sergeant. "If one of our vehicles burnt with a DU round inside, or an ammo truck, we wouldn't go near it, even if it had important documents inside. We play it safe."
Six American vehicles struck with DU "friendly fire" in 1991 were deemed to be too contaminated to take home, and were buried in Saudi Arabia. Of 16 more brought back to a purpose-built facility in South Carolina, six had to be buried in a low-level radioactive waste dump.
Television footage of the war last month showed Iraqi armored vehicles burning as US columns drove by, a common sign of a strike by DU, which burns through armor on impact, and often ignites the ammunition carried by the targeted vehicle.
"We were buttoned up when we drove by that - all our hatches were closed," the US sergeant says. "If we saw anything on fire, we wouldn't stop anywhere near it. We would just keep on driving."
That's an option that produce seller Hamid doesn't have.
She says the US broke its promise not to bomb civilians. She has found US cluster bomblets in her garden; the DU is just another dangerous burden, in a war about which she remains skeptical.
"We were told it was going to be paradise [when Saddam Hussein was toppled], and now they are killing our children," she says voicing a common Iraqi perception about the risk of DU. "The Americans did not bother to warn us that this is a contaminated area."
There is a warning now at the Doura intersection on the southern outskirts of Baghdad. In the days before the capital fell, four US supply trucks clustered near an array of highway off-ramps caught fire, cooking off a number of DU tank rounds.
American troops wearing facemasks for protection arrived a few days later and bulldozed the topsoil around the site to limit the contamination.
The troops taped handwritten warning signs in Arabic to the burned vehicles, which read: "Danger - Get away from this area." These were the only warnings seen by this reporter among dozens of destroyed Iraqi armored vehicles littering the city.
"All of them were wearing masks," says Abbas Mohsin, a teenage cousin of a drink seller 50 yards away, said referring to the US military cleanup crew. "They told the people there were toxic materials ... and advised my cousin not to sell Pepsi and soft drinks in this area. They said they were concerned for our safety."
Despite the troops' bulldozing of contaminated earth away from the burnt vehicles, black piles of pure DU ash and particles are still present at the site. The toxic residue, if inhaled or ingested, is considered by scientists to be the most dangerous form of DU.
One pile of jet-black dust yielded a digital readout of 9,839 radioactive emissions in one minute, more than 300 times average background levels registered by the Geiger counter. Another pile of dust reached 11,585 emissions in a minute.
Western journalists who spent a night nearby on April 10, the day after Baghdad fell, were warned by US soldiers not to cross the road to this site, because bodies and unexploded ordnance remained, along with DU contamination. It was here that the Monitor found the "hot" DU tank round.
This burned dart pushed the radiation meter to the far edge of the "red zone" limit.
A similar DU tank round recovered in Saudi Arabia in 1991, that was found by a US Army radiological team to be emitting 260 to 270 millirads of radiation per hour. Their safety memo noted that the "current [US Nuclear Regulatory Commission] limit for non-radiation workers is 100 millirads per year."
The normal public dose limit in the US, and recognized around much of the world, is 100 millirems per year. Nuclear workers have guidelines 20 to 30 times as high as that.
The depleted-uranium bullets are made of low-level radioactive nuclear-waste material, left over from the making of nuclear fuel and weapons. It is 1.7 times as dense as lead, and burns its way easily through armor. But it is controversial because it leaves a trail of contamination that has half-life of 4.5 billion years - the age of our solar system.
Less DU in this war?
In the first Gulf War, US forces used 320 tons of DU, 80 percent of it fired by A-10 aircraft. Some estimates suggest 1,000 tons or more of DU was used in the current war. But the Pentagon disclosure Wednesday that about 75 tons of A-10 DU bullets were used points to a smaller overall DU tonnage in Iraq this time.
US military guidelines developed after the first Gulf War - which have since been considerably eased - required any soldier coming within 50 yards of a tank struck with DU to wear a gas mask and full protective suit. Today, soldiers say they have been told to steer clear of any DU.
"If a [tank] was taken out by depleted uranium, there may be oxide that you don't want to inhale. We want to minimize any exposure, at least to the lowest level possible," Dr. Michael Kilpatrick, a top Pentagon health official told journalists on March 14, just days before the war began. "If somebody needs to go into a tank that's been hit with depleted uranium, a dust mask, a handkerchief is adequate to protect them - washing their hands afterwards."
Not everyone on the battlefield may be as well versed in handling DU, Dr. Kilpatrick said, noting that his greater concern is DU's chemical toxicity, not its radioactivity: "What we worry about like lead in paint in housing areas - children picking it up and eating it or licking it - getting it on their hands and ingesting it."
In the US, stringent NRC rules govern any handling of DU, which can legally only be disposed of in low-level radioactive waste dumps. The US military holds more than a dozen NRC licenses to work with it.
In Iraq, DU was not just fired at armored targets.
Video footage from the last days of the war shows an A-10 aircraft - a plane purpose-built around a 30-mm Gatling gun - strafing the Iraqi Ministry of Planning in downtown Baghdad.
A visit to site yields dozens of spent radioactive DU rounds, and distinctive aluminum casings with two white bands, that drilled into the tile and concrete rear of the building. DU residue at impact clicked on the Geiger counter at a relatively low level, just 12 times background radiation levels.
Hot bullets
But the finger-sized bullets themselves - littering the ground where looters and former staff are often walking - were the "hottest" items the Monitor measured in Iraq, at nearly 1,900 times background levels.
The site is just 300 yards from where American troops guard the main entrance of the Republican Palace, home to the US and British officials tasked with rebuilding Iraq.
"Radioactive? Oh, really?" asks a former director general of the ministry, when he returned in a jacket and tie for a visit last week, and heard the contamination levels register in bursts on the Geiger counter.
"Yesterday more than 1,000 employees came here, and they didn't know anything about it," the former official says. "We have started to not believe what the American government says. What I know is that the occupiers should clean up and take care of the country they invaded."
US military officials often say that most people are exposed to natural or "background" radiation n daily life. For example, a round-trip flight across the US can yield a 5 millirem dose from increased cosmic radiation; a chest X-ray can yield a 10 millirem dose in a few seconds.
The Pentagon says that, since DU is "depleted" and 40 percent less radioactive than normal uranium, it presents even less of a hazard.
But DU experts say they are most concerned at how DU is transformed on the battlefield, after burning, into a toxic oxide dust that emits alpha particles. While those can be easily stopped by the skin, once inside the body, studies have shown that they can destroy cells in soft tissue. While one study on rats linked DU fragments in muscle tissue to increased cancer risk, health effects on humans remain inconclusive.
As late as five days before the Iraq war began, Pentagon officials said that 90 of those troops most heavily exposed to DU during the 1991 Gulf War have shown no health problems whatsoever, and remain under close medical scrutiny.
Released documents and past admissions from military officials, however, estimate that around 900 Americans were exposed to DU. Only a fraction have been watched, and among those has been one diagnosed case of lymphatic cancer, and one arm tumor. As reported in previous articles, the Monitor has spoken to American veterans who blame their DU exposure for serious health problems.
The politics of DU
But DU health concerns are very often wrapped up in politics. Saddam Hussein's regime blamed DU used in 1991 for causing a spike in the cancer rate and birth defects in southern Iraq.
And the Pentagon often overstates its case - in terms of DU effectiveness on the battlefield, or declaring the absence of health problems, according to Dan Fahey, an American veterans advocate who has monitored the shrill arguments from both sides since the mid-1990s.
"DU munitions are neither the benign wonder weapons promoted by Pentagon propagandists nor the instruments of genocide decried by hyperbolic anti-DU activists," Mr. Fahey writes in a March report, called "Science or Science Fiction: Facts, Myth and Propaganda in the Debate Over DU Weapons."
Nonetheless, Rep. Jim McDermott (D) of Washington, a doctor who visited Baghdad before the war, introduced legislation in Congress last month requiring studies on health and environment studies, and clean up of DU contamination in the US. He says DU may well be associated with increased birth defects.
"While the political effects of using DU munitions are perhaps more apparent than their health and environmental effects," Fahey writes, "science and common sense dictate it is unwise to use a weapon that distributes large quantities of a toxic waste in areas where people live, work, grow food, or draw water."
Because of the publicity the Iraqi government has given to the issue, Iraqis worry about DU.
"It is an important concern.... We know nothing about it. How can I protect my family?" asks Faiz Askar, an Iraqi doctor. "We say the war is finished, but what will the future bring?"
BAGHDAD - At a roadside produce stand on the outskirts of Baghdad, business is brisk for Latifa Khalaf Hamid. Iraqi drivers pull up and snap up fresh bunches of parsley, mint leaves, dill, and onion stalks.
But Ms. Hamid's stand is just four paces away from a burnt-out Iraqi tank, destroyed by - and contaminated with - controversial American depleted-uranium (DU) bullets. Local children play "throughout the day" on the tank, Hamid says, and on another one across the road.
No one has warned the vendor in the faded, threadbare black gown to keep the toxic and radioactive dust off her produce. The children haven't been told not to play with the radioactive debris. They gather around as a Geiger counter carried by a visiting reporter starts singing when it nears a DU bullet fragment no bigger than a pencil eraser. It registers nearly 1,000 times normal background radiation levels on the digital readout.
The Monitor visited four sites in the city - including two randomly chosen destroyed Iraqi armored vehicles, a clutch of burned American ammunition trucks, and the downtown planning ministry - and found significant levels of radioactive contamination from the US battle for Baghdad.
In the first partial Pentagon disclosure of the amount of DU used in Iraq, a US Central Command spokesman told the Monitor that A-10 Warthog aircraft - the same planes that shot at the Iraqi planning ministry - fired 300,000 bullets. The normal combat mix for these 30-mm rounds is five DU bullets to 1 - a mix that would have left about 75 tons of DU in Iraq.
The Monitor saw only one site where US troops had put up handwritten warnings in Arabic for Iraqis to stay away. There, a 3-foot-long DU dart from a 120 mm tank shell, was found producing radiation at more than 1,300 times background levels. It made the instrument's staccato bursts turn into a steady whine.
"If you have pieces or even whole [DU] penetrators around, this is not an acute health hazard, but it is for sure above radiation protection dose levels," says Werner Burkart, the German deputy director general for Nuclear Sciences and Applications at the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna. "The important thing in any battlefield - especially in populated urban areas - is somebody has to clean up these sites."
Minimizing the risk
Fresh-from-the-factory DU tank shells are normally handled with gloves, to minimize the health risk, and shielded with a thin coating. The alpha particle radiation emitted by DU travels less than an inch and can be stopped by cloth or even tissue paper. But when the DUmaterial burns (usually on impact; or as a dust, it can spontaneously ignite) protective shields disappear, and dangerous radioactive oxides are created that can be inhaled or ingested.
"[The risk] depends so very much on how you handle it," says Jan Olof Snihs, of Sweden's Radiation Protection Authority in Stockholm. In most cases dangers are low, he says, unless children eat toxic and radioactive soil, or get DU oxides on their hands.
Radioactive particles are a "special risk associated with a war," Mr. Snihs says. "The authorities should be aware of this, and try to decontaminate places like this, just to avoid unnecessary risk."
Pentagon officials say that DU is relatively harmless and a necessary part of modern warfare. They say that pre-Gulf War studies that indicated a risk of cancer and of causing harm to local populations through permanent contamination have been superseded by newer reports.
"There is not really any danger, at least that we know about, for the people of Iraq," said Lt. Col. Michael Sigmon, deputy surgeon for the US Army's V Corps, told journalists in Baghdad last week. He asserted that children playing with expended tank shells would have to eat and then practically suffocate on DU residue to cause harm.
But there is a growing chorus of concern among United Nations and relief officials, along with some Western scientific experts, who are calling for sites contaminated with DU be marked off and made safe.
"The soil around the impact sites of [DU] penetrators may be heavily contaminated, and could be harmful if swallowed by children," says Brian Spratt, chair of the working group on DU at The Royal Society, Britain's premier scientific institution.
Heavy metal toys?
Fragments and penetrators should be removed, since "children find them fascinating objects, and can pocket them," says Professor Spratt. "The science says there is some danger - not perhaps a huge danger - of these objects. ... We certainly do not say that these things are safe; we say that cleanup is important."
The British Ministry of Defense says it will offer screening to soldiers suspected of DU exposure, and will publish details about locations and quantities of DU that British troops used in Iraq - a tiny fraction of that fired by US forces.
The Pentagon has traditionally been tight-lipped about DU: Official figures on the amount used were not released for years after the 1991 Gulf War and Bosnia conflicts, and nearly a year after the 1999 Kosovo campaign. No US official contacted could provide DU use estimates from the latest war in Iraq.
"The first thing we should ask [the US military] is to remove that immediately," says Carel de Rooy, head of the UN Children's Fund in Baghdad, adding that senior UN officials need urgent advice on avoiding exposure.
The UN Environment Program last month called for field tests. DU "is still an issue of great concern for the general public," said UNEP chief Klaus Töpfer. "An early study in Iraq could either lay these fears to rest or confirm that there are indeed potential risks."
US troops avoid wreckage
During the latest Iraq conflict Abrams tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles and A-10 Warthog aircraft, among other military platforms, all fired the DU bullets from desert war zones to the heart of Baghdad. No other armor-piercing round is as effective against enemy tanks. While the Pentagon says there's no risk to Baghdad residents, US soldiers are taking their own precautions in Iraq, and in some cases have handed out warning leaflets and put up signs.
"After we shoot something with DU, we're not supposed to go around it, due to the fact that it could cause cancer," says a sergeant in Baghdad from New York, assigned to a Bradley, who asked not to be further identified.
"We don't know the effects of what it could do," says the sergeant. "If one of our vehicles burnt with a DU round inside, or an ammo truck, we wouldn't go near it, even if it had important documents inside. We play it safe."
Six American vehicles struck with DU "friendly fire" in 1991 were deemed to be too contaminated to take home, and were buried in Saudi Arabia. Of 16 more brought back to a purpose-built facility in South Carolina, six had to be buried in a low-level radioactive waste dump.
Television footage of the war last month showed Iraqi armored vehicles burning as US columns drove by, a common sign of a strike by DU, which burns through armor on impact, and often ignites the ammunition carried by the targeted vehicle.
"We were buttoned up when we drove by that - all our hatches were closed," the US sergeant says. "If we saw anything on fire, we wouldn't stop anywhere near it. We would just keep on driving."
That's an option that produce seller Hamid doesn't have.
She says the US broke its promise not to bomb civilians. She has found US cluster bomblets in her garden; the DU is just another dangerous burden, in a war about which she remains skeptical.
"We were told it was going to be paradise [when Saddam Hussein was toppled], and now they are killing our children," she says voicing a common Iraqi perception about the risk of DU. "The Americans did not bother to warn us that this is a contaminated area."
There is a warning now at the Doura intersection on the southern outskirts of Baghdad. In the days before the capital fell, four US supply trucks clustered near an array of highway off-ramps caught fire, cooking off a number of DU tank rounds.
American troops wearing facemasks for protection arrived a few days later and bulldozed the topsoil around the site to limit the contamination.
The troops taped handwritten warning signs in Arabic to the burned vehicles, which read: "Danger - Get away from this area." These were the only warnings seen by this reporter among dozens of destroyed Iraqi armored vehicles littering the city.
"All of them were wearing masks," says Abbas Mohsin, a teenage cousin of a drink seller 50 yards away, said referring to the US military cleanup crew. "They told the people there were toxic materials ... and advised my cousin not to sell Pepsi and soft drinks in this area. They said they were concerned for our safety."
Despite the troops' bulldozing of contaminated earth away from the burnt vehicles, black piles of pure DU ash and particles are still present at the site. The toxic residue, if inhaled or ingested, is considered by scientists to be the most dangerous form of DU.
One pile of jet-black dust yielded a digital readout of 9,839 radioactive emissions in one minute, more than 300 times average background levels registered by the Geiger counter. Another pile of dust reached 11,585 emissions in a minute.
Western journalists who spent a night nearby on April 10, the day after Baghdad fell, were warned by US soldiers not to cross the road to this site, because bodies and unexploded ordnance remained, along with DU contamination. It was here that the Monitor found the "hot" DU tank round.
This burned dart pushed the radiation meter to the far edge of the "red zone" limit.
A similar DU tank round recovered in Saudi Arabia in 1991, that was found by a US Army radiological team to be emitting 260 to 270 millirads of radiation per hour. Their safety memo noted that the "current [US Nuclear Regulatory Commission] limit for non-radiation workers is 100 millirads per year."
The normal public dose limit in the US, and recognized around much of the world, is 100 millirems per year. Nuclear workers have guidelines 20 to 30 times as high as that.
The depleted-uranium bullets are made of low-level radioactive nuclear-waste material, left over from the making of nuclear fuel and weapons. It is 1.7 times as dense as lead, and burns its way easily through armor. But it is controversial because it leaves a trail of contamination that has half-life of 4.5 billion years - the age of our solar system.
Less DU in this war?
In the first Gulf War, US forces used 320 tons of DU, 80 percent of it fired by A-10 aircraft. Some estimates suggest 1,000 tons or more of DU was used in the current war. But the Pentagon disclosure Wednesday that about 75 tons of A-10 DU bullets were used points to a smaller overall DU tonnage in Iraq this time.
US military guidelines developed after the first Gulf War - which have since been considerably eased - required any soldier coming within 50 yards of a tank struck with DU to wear a gas mask and full protective suit. Today, soldiers say they have been told to steer clear of any DU.
"If a [tank] was taken out by depleted uranium, there may be oxide that you don't want to inhale. We want to minimize any exposure, at least to the lowest level possible," Dr. Michael Kilpatrick, a top Pentagon health official told journalists on March 14, just days before the war began. "If somebody needs to go into a tank that's been hit with depleted uranium, a dust mask, a handkerchief is adequate to protect them - washing their hands afterwards."
Not everyone on the battlefield may be as well versed in handling DU, Dr. Kilpatrick said, noting that his greater concern is DU's chemical toxicity, not its radioactivity: "What we worry about like lead in paint in housing areas - children picking it up and eating it or licking it - getting it on their hands and ingesting it."
In the US, stringent NRC rules govern any handling of DU, which can legally only be disposed of in low-level radioactive waste dumps. The US military holds more than a dozen NRC licenses to work with it.
In Iraq, DU was not just fired at armored targets.
Video footage from the last days of the war shows an A-10 aircraft - a plane purpose-built around a 30-mm Gatling gun - strafing the Iraqi Ministry of Planning in downtown Baghdad.
A visit to site yields dozens of spent radioactive DU rounds, and distinctive aluminum casings with two white bands, that drilled into the tile and concrete rear of the building. DU residue at impact clicked on the Geiger counter at a relatively low level, just 12 times background radiation levels.
Hot bullets
But the finger-sized bullets themselves - littering the ground where looters and former staff are often walking - were the "hottest" items the Monitor measured in Iraq, at nearly 1,900 times background levels.
The site is just 300 yards from where American troops guard the main entrance of the Republican Palace, home to the US and British officials tasked with rebuilding Iraq.
"Radioactive? Oh, really?" asks a former director general of the ministry, when he returned in a jacket and tie for a visit last week, and heard the contamination levels register in bursts on the Geiger counter.
"Yesterday more than 1,000 employees came here, and they didn't know anything about it," the former official says. "We have started to not believe what the American government says. What I know is that the occupiers should clean up and take care of the country they invaded."
US military officials often say that most people are exposed to natural or "background" radiation n daily life. For example, a round-trip flight across the US can yield a 5 millirem dose from increased cosmic radiation; a chest X-ray can yield a 10 millirem dose in a few seconds.
The Pentagon says that, since DU is "depleted" and 40 percent less radioactive than normal uranium, it presents even less of a hazard.
But DU experts say they are most concerned at how DU is transformed on the battlefield, after burning, into a toxic oxide dust that emits alpha particles. While those can be easily stopped by the skin, once inside the body, studies have shown that they can destroy cells in soft tissue. While one study on rats linked DU fragments in muscle tissue to increased cancer risk, health effects on humans remain inconclusive.
As late as five days before the Iraq war began, Pentagon officials said that 90 of those troops most heavily exposed to DU during the 1991 Gulf War have shown no health problems whatsoever, and remain under close medical scrutiny.
Released documents and past admissions from military officials, however, estimate that around 900 Americans were exposed to DU. Only a fraction have been watched, and among those has been one diagnosed case of lymphatic cancer, and one arm tumor. As reported in previous articles, the Monitor has spoken to American veterans who blame their DU exposure for serious health problems.
The politics of DU
But DU health concerns are very often wrapped up in politics. Saddam Hussein's regime blamed DU used in 1991 for causing a spike in the cancer rate and birth defects in southern Iraq.
And the Pentagon often overstates its case - in terms of DU effectiveness on the battlefield, or declaring the absence of health problems, according to Dan Fahey, an American veterans advocate who has monitored the shrill arguments from both sides since the mid-1990s.
"DU munitions are neither the benign wonder weapons promoted by Pentagon propagandists nor the instruments of genocide decried by hyperbolic anti-DU activists," Mr. Fahey writes in a March report, called "Science or Science Fiction: Facts, Myth and Propaganda in the Debate Over DU Weapons."
Nonetheless, Rep. Jim McDermott (D) of Washington, a doctor who visited Baghdad before the war, introduced legislation in Congress last month requiring studies on health and environment studies, and clean up of DU contamination in the US. He says DU may well be associated with increased birth defects.
"While the political effects of using DU munitions are perhaps more apparent than their health and environmental effects," Fahey writes, "science and common sense dictate it is unwise to use a weapon that distributes large quantities of a toxic waste in areas where people live, work, grow food, or draw water."
Because of the publicity the Iraqi government has given to the issue, Iraqis worry about DU.
"It is an important concern.... We know nothing about it. How can I protect my family?" asks Faiz Askar, an Iraqi doctor. "We say the war is finished, but what will the future bring?"
,1:06 PM
Poisoned?
Shocking report reveals local troops
may be victims of america's high-tech weapons
By JUAN GONZALEZ
Four soldiers from a New York Army National Guard company serving in Iraq are contaminated with radiation likely caused by dust from depleted uranium shells fired by U.S. troops, a Daily News investigation has found.
They are among several members of the same company, the 442nd Military Police, who say they have been battling persistent physical ailments that began last summer in the Iraqi town of Samawah.
"I got sick instantly in June," said Staff Sgt. Ray Ramos, a Brooklyn housing cop. "My health kept going downhill with daily headaches, constant numbness in my hands and rashes on my stomach."
A nuclear medicine expert who examined and tested nine soldiers from the company says that four "almost certainly" inhaled radioactive dust from exploded American shells manufactured with depleted uranium.
Laboratory tests conducted at the request of The News revealed traces of two manmade forms of uranium in urine samples from four of the soldiers.
If so, the men - Sgt. Hector Vega, Sgt. Ray Ramos, Sgt. Agustin Matos and Cpl. Anthony Yonnone - are the first confirmed cases of inhaled depleted uranium exposure from the current Iraq conflict.
The 442nd, made up for the most part of New York cops, firefighters and correction officers, is based in Orangeburg, Rockland County. Dispatched to Iraq last Easter, the unit's members have been providing guard duty for convoys, running jails and training Iraqi police. The entire company is due to return home later this month.
"These are amazing results, especially since these soldiers were military police not exposed to the heat of battle," said Dr. Asaf Duracovic, who examined the G.I.s and performed the testing that was funded by The News.
"Other American soldiers who were in combat must have more depleted uranium exposure," said Duracovic, a colonel in the Army Reserves who served in the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
While working at a military hospital in Delaware, he was one of the first doctors to discover unusual radiation levels in Gulf War veterans. He has since become a leading critic of the use of depleted uranium in warfare.
Depleted uranium, a waste product of the uranium enrichment process, has been used by the U.S. and British military for more than 15 years in some artillery shells and as armor plating for tanks. It is twice as heavy as lead.
Because of its density, "It is the superior heavy metal for armor to protect tanks and to penetrate armor," Pentagon spokesman Michael Kilpatrick said.
The Army and Air Force fired at least 127 tons of depleted uranium shells in Iraq last year, Kilpatrick said. No figures have yet been released for how much the Marines fired.
Kilpatrick said about 1,000 G.I.s back from the war have been tested by the Pentagon for depleted uranium and only three have come up positive - all as a result of shrapnel from DU shells.
But the test results for the New York guardsmen - four of nine positives for DU - suggest the potential for more extensive radiation exposure among coalition troops and Iraqi civilians.
Several Army studies in recent years have concluded that the low-level radiation emitted when shells containing DU explode poses no significant dangers. But some independent scientists and a few of the Army's own reports indicate otherwise.
As a result, depleted uranium weapons have sparked increasing controversy around the world. In January 2003, the European Parliament called for a moratorium on their use after reports of an unusual number of leukemia deaths among Italian soldiers who served in Kosovo, where DU weapons were used.
I keep getting weaker. What is happening to me?
The Army says that only soldiers wounded by depleted uranium shrapnel or who are inside tanks during an explosion face measurable radiation exposure.
But as far back as 1979, Leonard Dietz, a physicist at the Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory upstate, discovered that DU-contaminated dust could travel for long distances.
Dietz, who pioneered the technology to isolate uranium isotopes, accidentally discovered that air filters with which he was experimenting had collected radioactive dust from a National Lead Industries Plant that was producing DU 26 miles away. His discovery led to a shutdown of the plant.
"The contamination was so heavy that they had to remove the topsoil from 52 properties around the plant," Dietz said.
All humans have at least tiny amounts of natural uranium in their bodies because it is found in water and in the food supply, Dietz said. But natural uranium is quickly and harmlessly excreted by the body.
Uranium oxide dust, which lodges in the lungs once inhaled and is not very soluble, can emit radiation to the body for years.
"Anybody, civilian or soldier, who breathes these particles has a permanent dose, and it's not going to decrease very much over time," said Dietz, who retired in 1983 after 33 years as nuclear physicist. "In the long run ... veterans exposed to ceramic uranium oxide have a major problem."
Critics of DU have noted that the Army's view of its dangers has changed over time.
Before the 1991 Persian Gulf War, a 1990 Army report noted that depleted uranium is "linked to cancer when exposures are internal, [and] chemical toxicity causing kidney damage."
It was during the Gulf War that U.S. A-10 Warthog "tank buster" planes and Abrams tanks first used DU artillery on a mass scale. The Pentagon says it fired about 320 tons of DU in that war and that smaller amounts were also used in the Serbian province of Kosovo.
In the Gulf War, Army brass did not warn soldiers about any risks from exploding DU shells. An unknown number of G.I.s were exposed by shrapnel, inhalation or handling battlefield debris.
Some veterans groups blame DU contamination as a factor in Gulf War syndrome, the term for a host of ailments that afflicted thousands of vets from that war.
Under pressure from veterans groups, the Pentagon commissioned several new studies. One of those, published in 2000, concluded that DU, as a heavy metal, "could pose a chemical hazard" but that Gulf War veterans "did not experience intakes high enough to affect their health."
Pentagon spokesman Michael Kilpatrick said Army followup studies of 70 DU-contaminated Gulf War veterans have not shown serious health effects.
"For any heavy metal, there is no such thing as safe," Kilpatrick said. "There is an issue of chemical toxicity, and for DU it is raised as radiological toxicity as well."
But he said "the overwhelming conclusion" from studies of those who work with uranium "show it has not produced any increase in cancers."
Several European studies, however, have linked DU to chromosome damage and birth defects in mice. Many scientists say we still don't know enough about the long-range effects of low-level radiation on the body to say any amount is safe.
Britain's national science academy, the Royal Society, has called for identifying where DU was used and is urging a cleanup of all contaminated areas.
"A large number of American soldiers [in Iraq] may have had significant exposure to uranium oxide dust," said Dr. Thomas Fasey, a pathologist at Mount Sinai Medical Center and an expert on depleted uranium. "And the health impact is worrisome for the future."
As for the soldiers of the 442nd, they're sick, frustrated and confused. They say when they arrived in Iraq no one warned them about depleted uranium and no one gave them dust masks.
Experts behind News probe
As part of the investigation by the Daily News, Dr. Asaf Duracovic, a nuclear medicine expert who has conducted extensive research on depleted uranium, examined the nine soldiers from the 442nd Military Police in late December and collected urine specimens from each.
Another member of his team, Prof. Axel Gerdes, a geologist at Goethe University in Frankfurt who specializes in analyzing uranium isotopes, performed repeated tests on the samples over a week-long period. He used a state-of-the art procedure called multiple collector inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry.
Only about 100 laboratories worldwide have the same capability to identify and measure various uranium isotopes in minute quantities, Gerdes said.
Gerdes concluded that four of the men had depleted uranium in their bodies. Depleted uranium, which does not occur in nature, is created as a waste product of uranium enrichment when some of the highly radioactive isotopes in natural uranium, U-235 and U-234, are extracted.
Several of the men, according to Duracovic, also had minute traces of another uranium isotope, U-236, that is produced only in a nuclear reaction process.
"These men were almost certainly exposed to radioactive weapons on the battlefield," Duracovic said.
He and Gerdes plan to issue a scientific paper on their study of the soldiers at the annual meeting of the European Association of Nuclear Medicine in Finland this year.
When DU shells explode, they permanently contaminate their target and the area immediately around it with low-level radioactivity.
may be victims of america's high-tech weapons
By JUAN GONZALEZ
Four soldiers from a New York Army National Guard company serving in Iraq are contaminated with radiation likely caused by dust from depleted uranium shells fired by U.S. troops, a Daily News investigation has found.
They are among several members of the same company, the 442nd Military Police, who say they have been battling persistent physical ailments that began last summer in the Iraqi town of Samawah.
"I got sick instantly in June," said Staff Sgt. Ray Ramos, a Brooklyn housing cop. "My health kept going downhill with daily headaches, constant numbness in my hands and rashes on my stomach."
A nuclear medicine expert who examined and tested nine soldiers from the company says that four "almost certainly" inhaled radioactive dust from exploded American shells manufactured with depleted uranium.
Laboratory tests conducted at the request of The News revealed traces of two manmade forms of uranium in urine samples from four of the soldiers.
If so, the men - Sgt. Hector Vega, Sgt. Ray Ramos, Sgt. Agustin Matos and Cpl. Anthony Yonnone - are the first confirmed cases of inhaled depleted uranium exposure from the current Iraq conflict.
The 442nd, made up for the most part of New York cops, firefighters and correction officers, is based in Orangeburg, Rockland County. Dispatched to Iraq last Easter, the unit's members have been providing guard duty for convoys, running jails and training Iraqi police. The entire company is due to return home later this month.
"These are amazing results, especially since these soldiers were military police not exposed to the heat of battle," said Dr. Asaf Duracovic, who examined the G.I.s and performed the testing that was funded by The News.
"Other American soldiers who were in combat must have more depleted uranium exposure," said Duracovic, a colonel in the Army Reserves who served in the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
While working at a military hospital in Delaware, he was one of the first doctors to discover unusual radiation levels in Gulf War veterans. He has since become a leading critic of the use of depleted uranium in warfare.
Depleted uranium, a waste product of the uranium enrichment process, has been used by the U.S. and British military for more than 15 years in some artillery shells and as armor plating for tanks. It is twice as heavy as lead.
Because of its density, "It is the superior heavy metal for armor to protect tanks and to penetrate armor," Pentagon spokesman Michael Kilpatrick said.
The Army and Air Force fired at least 127 tons of depleted uranium shells in Iraq last year, Kilpatrick said. No figures have yet been released for how much the Marines fired.
Kilpatrick said about 1,000 G.I.s back from the war have been tested by the Pentagon for depleted uranium and only three have come up positive - all as a result of shrapnel from DU shells.
But the test results for the New York guardsmen - four of nine positives for DU - suggest the potential for more extensive radiation exposure among coalition troops and Iraqi civilians.
Several Army studies in recent years have concluded that the low-level radiation emitted when shells containing DU explode poses no significant dangers. But some independent scientists and a few of the Army's own reports indicate otherwise.
As a result, depleted uranium weapons have sparked increasing controversy around the world. In January 2003, the European Parliament called for a moratorium on their use after reports of an unusual number of leukemia deaths among Italian soldiers who served in Kosovo, where DU weapons were used.
I keep getting weaker. What is happening to me?
The Army says that only soldiers wounded by depleted uranium shrapnel or who are inside tanks during an explosion face measurable radiation exposure.
But as far back as 1979, Leonard Dietz, a physicist at the Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory upstate, discovered that DU-contaminated dust could travel for long distances.
Dietz, who pioneered the technology to isolate uranium isotopes, accidentally discovered that air filters with which he was experimenting had collected radioactive dust from a National Lead Industries Plant that was producing DU 26 miles away. His discovery led to a shutdown of the plant.
"The contamination was so heavy that they had to remove the topsoil from 52 properties around the plant," Dietz said.
All humans have at least tiny amounts of natural uranium in their bodies because it is found in water and in the food supply, Dietz said. But natural uranium is quickly and harmlessly excreted by the body.
Uranium oxide dust, which lodges in the lungs once inhaled and is not very soluble, can emit radiation to the body for years.
"Anybody, civilian or soldier, who breathes these particles has a permanent dose, and it's not going to decrease very much over time," said Dietz, who retired in 1983 after 33 years as nuclear physicist. "In the long run ... veterans exposed to ceramic uranium oxide have a major problem."
Critics of DU have noted that the Army's view of its dangers has changed over time.
Before the 1991 Persian Gulf War, a 1990 Army report noted that depleted uranium is "linked to cancer when exposures are internal, [and] chemical toxicity causing kidney damage."
It was during the Gulf War that U.S. A-10 Warthog "tank buster" planes and Abrams tanks first used DU artillery on a mass scale. The Pentagon says it fired about 320 tons of DU in that war and that smaller amounts were also used in the Serbian province of Kosovo.
In the Gulf War, Army brass did not warn soldiers about any risks from exploding DU shells. An unknown number of G.I.s were exposed by shrapnel, inhalation or handling battlefield debris.
Some veterans groups blame DU contamination as a factor in Gulf War syndrome, the term for a host of ailments that afflicted thousands of vets from that war.
Under pressure from veterans groups, the Pentagon commissioned several new studies. One of those, published in 2000, concluded that DU, as a heavy metal, "could pose a chemical hazard" but that Gulf War veterans "did not experience intakes high enough to affect their health."
Pentagon spokesman Michael Kilpatrick said Army followup studies of 70 DU-contaminated Gulf War veterans have not shown serious health effects.
"For any heavy metal, there is no such thing as safe," Kilpatrick said. "There is an issue of chemical toxicity, and for DU it is raised as radiological toxicity as well."
But he said "the overwhelming conclusion" from studies of those who work with uranium "show it has not produced any increase in cancers."
Several European studies, however, have linked DU to chromosome damage and birth defects in mice. Many scientists say we still don't know enough about the long-range effects of low-level radiation on the body to say any amount is safe.
Britain's national science academy, the Royal Society, has called for identifying where DU was used and is urging a cleanup of all contaminated areas.
"A large number of American soldiers [in Iraq] may have had significant exposure to uranium oxide dust," said Dr. Thomas Fasey, a pathologist at Mount Sinai Medical Center and an expert on depleted uranium. "And the health impact is worrisome for the future."
As for the soldiers of the 442nd, they're sick, frustrated and confused. They say when they arrived in Iraq no one warned them about depleted uranium and no one gave them dust masks.
Experts behind News probe
As part of the investigation by the Daily News, Dr. Asaf Duracovic, a nuclear medicine expert who has conducted extensive research on depleted uranium, examined the nine soldiers from the 442nd Military Police in late December and collected urine specimens from each.
Another member of his team, Prof. Axel Gerdes, a geologist at Goethe University in Frankfurt who specializes in analyzing uranium isotopes, performed repeated tests on the samples over a week-long period. He used a state-of-the art procedure called multiple collector inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry.
Only about 100 laboratories worldwide have the same capability to identify and measure various uranium isotopes in minute quantities, Gerdes said.
Gerdes concluded that four of the men had depleted uranium in their bodies. Depleted uranium, which does not occur in nature, is created as a waste product of uranium enrichment when some of the highly radioactive isotopes in natural uranium, U-235 and U-234, are extracted.
Several of the men, according to Duracovic, also had minute traces of another uranium isotope, U-236, that is produced only in a nuclear reaction process.
"These men were almost certainly exposed to radioactive weapons on the battlefield," Duracovic said.
He and Gerdes plan to issue a scientific paper on their study of the soldiers at the annual meeting of the European Association of Nuclear Medicine in Finland this year.
When DU shells explode, they permanently contaminate their target and the area immediately around it with low-level radioactivity.
,8:01 AM
CHE GUEVARA, PAULO FREIRE, AND THE POLITICS OF HOPE:
RECLAIMING CRITICAL PEDAGOGY
BY PETER MCLAREN
On a recent voyage to the rain forests of Costa Rica, I rode a bus through the beautiful city of Cartago. From my window I noticed a young man with a long ponytail running beside the bus. As the bus passed him, he glanced up and our eyes momentarily met; I noticed that he was wearing a Che T-shirt with the inscription ‘¡Che Vive!’. A fleeting sensation of plaintive connectedness overcame me, and I managed to give him a quick ‘thumbs-up’ gesture of affirmation just in time for him to return a broad smile to the crazy gringo. For a brief moment, I felt that this ponytailed stranger and I were linked by a project larger than both of us. During that instant, I could tangibly sense between us a collective yearning for a world free from the burdens of this one, and I knew that I was not alone. The image of Che that he wore on his breast like a secular Panagia pointed to a realm of revolutionary values held in trust by all those who wish to break the chains of capital and be free. Che has a way of connecting—if only in this whimsical way—people who share a common resolve to fight injustice and to liberate the world from cruelty and exploitation. There was no way of knowing the politics of this young man and how seriously he identified with the life and teachings of El Che. But Che’s image brings out the promise of such a connection and the political fecundity of even this momentary reverie.
The great Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire, also shares with Che the ability to bring people together around an animated common trust in the power of love, a belief in the reciprocal power of dialogue, and a commitment to ‘conscientization’ and political praxis. Few figures among the educational Left are as well known and as universally revered as Paulo Freire. Throughout my travels in Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Europe, I have seen slogans by Freire scribbled on buildings alongside those of Che. Whenever I speak at revolutionary forums or academic conferences about political praxis—whether in Malaysia, Japan, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Costa Rica, Finland, Europe, or elsewhere—the names of Che Guevara and Paulo Freire (and more recently, the Zapatistas) inevitably come up. They not only draw attention to the crisis of the times but also provide the singular hope that is necessary to move the struggle forward, cueste lo que cueste.
No one has done more to move the struggle forward over the role of education as a vehicle for liberatory praxis than Paulo Freire. From the moment he was jailed by the Brazilian military during the early days of the repression in 1964, to his exile and continuing struggle on behalf of peasants and the working class throughout the world (to whom he was dedicated in helping overcome their centuries-old marginalization from society), Paulo Freire has captured the political imagination of educators around the world. In an introduction to my book Life in Schools, the great liberation theologian, Leonardo Boff, affirmed Freire’s pedagogical project as one of action in and on the world:
The pedagogical project is created in order to place . . . lives inside the classroom and to employ knowledge and transformation as weapons to change the world. From the perspective of the social location of the condemned on Earth, it becomes clear that knowledge alone, as intended by the school, does not transform life. Only the conversion of knowledge into action can transform life. This concretely defines the meaning of practice: the dialectic movement between the conversion of transformative action into knowledge and the conversion of knowledge into transformative action. (1997, p. xi)
Although Che is certainly a better known figure than Freire worldwide, one would be hard-pressed to find a more respected and celebrated ‘profe’ in the field of education than Paulo Freire anywhere in the world. His most famous work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, has sold over a half million copies and has been translated into more than twenty languages. His theoretical developments have influenced the scholarly domains of sociology, anthropology, literacy, ecology, medicine, psychotherapy, philosophy, pedagogy, critical social theory, museology, history, journalism, and theater, to name just some of the fields indebted to his work. He is even credited with helping to found a new approach to research known as participatory research (Freire and Macedo, 1998). According to Ana Maria Araújo Freire and Donaldo Macedo, Freire was invited to visit approximately 100 cities throughout the world during his lifetime. They write: "His theory, which constitutes a reflection upon his practice, has served as the foundation for academic work and inspired practices in different parts of the world, from the mocambos of Recife to the barakumin in Brazil and abroad" (1998, p. 27). Even before the death in 1997, numerous schools, student organizations in schools of education, unions, popular libraries, and research scholarships bore his name. A list of his academic awards and honorary degrees would fill several pages.
Though Freire was an advocate of nonviolent insurrection and struggle, he was nevertheless jailed in Brazil as a politically dangerous subversive because of the counter-hegemonic power of his ideas. Che remained convinced that reclamation of one’s land from imperialist settlers by violent means was a form of self-defense, and that violent insurrection was the only way to defeat fascism and Yankee imperialism and reveal to the masses that the colonial god has feet of clay. Despite these divergences, Freire and Che remained brothers of the heart, brothers who never met in prison, in the theater of war, or in the arena of pedagogical struggle, but who shared a fraternal bond that opened up their hearts and minds to a similar vision of the world—a vision of what the world already was, where it was headed, and what it could become. As intellectual and political comrades, their lives represented the best of what the human spirit has to offer.
It is a feeling of kinship with Freire and Che that has served as the primary motivation for this investiagion. In the preface to my book Critical Pedagogy and Predatory Culture, Freire writes:
When such a kinship develops we need to cultivate within ourselves the virtue of tolerance, which "teaches" us to live with that which is different; it is imperative that we learn from and that we teach our "intellectual relative," so that in the end we can unite in our fight against antagonistic forces. Unfortunately, as a group, we academics and politicians alike expend much of our energy on unjustifiable "fights" among ourselves, provoked by adjectival or, even worse, by purely adverbial differences. While we wear ourselves thin in petty "harangues," in which personal vanities are displayed and egos are scratched and bruised, we weaken ourselves for the real battle: the struggle against our antagonists. (1995, p. x)
Paulo Freire was a dear friend and loving mentor. His words about kinship ring true, as do his warnings about the petty jealousies that infect academics, especially the small-minded ones (and the academy is filled to the brim with them) whose opportunism is wrapped in charm, whose narcissistic and vainglorious search for attention and personal gain knows no bounds, and who will stoop to any level to personalize their criticisms and engage in acrimonious intellectual assaults and sell their souls for power or fame. Freire would have none of that; he was a humble man who always put the project of human freedom ahead of his own personal gain. One of the first of his many acts of kindness toward me was helping to arrange an invitation for me to speak at a conference in Cuba in 1987. After that, we would periodically see each other when he came to visit the United States. Once I had the opportunity to visit with him and his wife, Ana Maria (or "Nita"), in their home during a visit to São Paulo. Over the past fifteen years I’ve written a great deal about Paulo and his work. This is not surprising for somebody who, for twenty-five years, has been involved in educational transformation both in the domain of grassroots activism and in the politically quarantined precincts of the academy. And though the political project that guides my work has been influenced no less by the teachings and life of Che Guevara, I have written only several articles about him. Although I never had the opportunity to meet him (I was nineteen when he was executed), his influence on my understanding of social justice and human courage has been inestimable.
It is saddening to witness how the figure of Paulo Freire has been domesticated by liberals, progressives, and pseudo-Freireans who have tried incessantly to claim his legacy and teachings—much as they have done to the figure of John Dewey, whose radical politics have been ominously blunted by his more politically sanguine followers in the academy. Hence, it is necessary to re-possess Freire from those contemporary revisionists who would reduce him to the grand seigneur of classroom dialogue and would antiseptically excise the corporeal force of history from his pedagogical practices. It is much more difficult to appropriate the figure of Che Guevara, given that he was an active guerrillero until the moment he was murdered under the hawkish eye and panoptic gaze of the CIA. At the same time it is much more difficult to argue for the relevance of Che for educators today, given that he remained an active opponent of U.S. imperialism throughout his entire life and called for "Vietnams" to arise on every continent of the globe. But when you consider that Malcolm X now appears on a U.S. postage stamp, it might well be the case that one day Che will be included in the U.S. pantheon of world ‘heroes.’ After all, the United States has a seductive way of incorporating anything that it can’t defeat and transforming that ‘thing’ into a weaker version of itself, much like the process of diluting the strength and efficacy of a virus through the creation of a vaccine. If the United States could find a Che ‘vaccine,’ it is more than likely that a stronger version of the Che ‘virus’ would rise up somewhere in the world where capital was laying waste to human dignity and the survival of the poor and dispossessed, in order to wreak its revenge. As long as Marx and Engels’s homage—"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles"(1952, p. 40)—still captures the imagination due to its increasing relevance in the world today, that much is assured.
When I first began sketching ideas on Che’s pedagogical imperatives and practices, I proposed readmitting into the debates over educational reform the legacy of Che Guevara as a model of moral leadership, political vision, and revolutionary praxis. I soon recognized, without surprise, that Che had never been officially admitted to the court of serious educational debate, most likely for the same reason that provoked Herb Kohl to write:
I am still not convinced that . . . [Che] . . . had a pedagogy that is meaningful for our society at this historical conjuncture. We are not at a revolutionary moment and we are the center of capitalist oppression with no strong social movement committed to changing the situation. In fact I cannot think of any school textbooks that treat Guevara with dignity and complexity. (1999, p. 308)
Kohl argues that because Che is not sympathetically portrayed in school textbooks, and because strong social movements against oppression are woefully lacking in the United States, we therefore should not place too much faith in the relevance of Che’s message for our current condition. I wish Kohl could have been on the marches in which I have been privileged to participate, from Los Angeles to Porto Alegre, where banners of Che are clutched by proud working hands and held high. Kohl’s defeatist comments about Che appear more symptomatic of a growing cynicism among progressive educators than a reasoned and convincing case against Che.
Why should educators bother to engage with the legacies of Che Guevara and Paulo Freire, especially now that the ‘end of history’ has been declared? Especially, too, when broadside condemnations of Marxism abound uncontested? And why now, at a time when the marketplace has transformed itself into a deus ex machina ordained to rescue humankind from economic disaster and when voguish theories imported from France and Germany can abundantly supply North American radicals with veritable plantations of no-risk, no-fault, knock-off rebellion? Why should North American educators take seriously two men who were propelled to international fame for their devotion to the downtrodden of South America and Africa? One reason is that capitalism’s Faustian urge to dominate the globe has generated a global ecological crisis. Another obvious, but no less important, reason is that the economic comfort enjoyed by North Americans is directly linked to the poverty of our South American brothers and sisters. As Elvia Alvarado proclaims in Don’t Be Afraid Gringo, "It’s hard to think of change taking place in Central America without there first being changes in the United States. As we say in Honduras, ‘Sin el perro, no hay rabia’—without the dog, there wouldn’t be rabies’" (1987, p. 144). Still yet another reason is that Che and Freire have given us a pedagogical course of action (not to be confused with a blueprint) for making bold steps to redress locally and globally current asymmetrical relations of power and privilege.
Why Che? Why Freire? Why now? For those who have been following world events, or taking even a cursory look at the conditions in our cities and small towns all across the United States, it is evident that democracy has transmogrified into the negation of its own principles; that there is a counter-tendency growing within it; that a beast is growing in its belly, bloated by capitalist greed; that human beings have made themselves subservient to, and at the very least, accessories of capital accumulation and consumption and the instruments of labor that dominate them through a powerfully cathected social amnesia; and that the international division of labor is widening into a crisis of monopoly capitalism—what Lenin so aptly termed imperialism. Che and Freire have never been needed more than at this current historical moment. It is not necessary to canvas the present political landscape with the discerning gaze of the sociologist or the trained academic eye to see that oppression has not been vanquished by capitalist democracy but continues to emerge unabated in new forms by means of innovative and decentralized production facilities, newly centralized economic power brought about by new media technologies, capitalist warfare against unions and social services, state-sanctioned Latinophobia, and the disproportionate incarceration of Latino/as and African Americans in a rapidly expanding prison industry. Recent events surrounding education professor José Solís Jordán—who taught educational foundations at DePaul University and the University of Puerto Rico, and who was framed by the FBI and found guilty of planting two bombs at military recruitment center—serve as only one of many indications that the U.S. government will stop at nothing short of breaking all peaceful opposition to its imperialist practices in Puerto Rico and elsewhere.1
The United States continues to portray Cuba as a terrorist nation that is a threat to the civilized world when, in fact, it is the United States that employs its vast military might to achieve whatever ends it deems to be in its own strategic interest. Take the recent war in Kosovo, as one example. The United States did not go to war in Kosovo for humanitarian reasons, although we believe many U.S. citizens are convinced that their government did just that. Kosovo did have implications for US national and strategic interest. The US bombed Kosovo not only to create a stable geopolitical power structure in Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc client-states, but also to strengthen its sphere of influence over European global markets. After all, sustaining the ‘abstract system of globalization’ – i.e., the globalization of capital and the hegemony of the United States in this imperialist enterprise - is the overarching priority of US foreign policy. Ellen Meiksins Wood quotes liberal critic (and rabid supporter of NATO’s bombing in Kosovo), Thomas L. Friedman, who writes: "The hidden hand of the market will never work without the hidden fist- McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps" (cited in Wood, 2000, p. 195). Woods quotes Friedman as saying that while Americans "were ready to pay any price and bear any burden in the Cold War," they were unwilling to die for the "abstract globalization system" – which is why "house-to-house fighting is out; cruise missiles are in." (cited in Wood, 2000, p. 95). She goes on to add that Friedman "could just easily have said ‘that’s why ground troops are out and high-tech bombing is in. We don’t want to die ourselves for globalization, but we don’t mind killing others’" (2000, p. 195). What made this imperialist aggression especially difficult to diagnose by rank-and-file US citizens was that it occurred under the guise of what Wood calls "human rights imperialism" in which "the particular interests of the US and its arbitrary actions have effectively displaced the common interests of humanity and the international instruments designed to represent them" (2000, pp. 196-197). In this case, the means used to achieve the "particular interests of the US" included the use of depleted uranium, ecological catastrophe through the bombing of refineries and chemical plants (indirect use of chemical warfare) that will lead to genetic damage for future generations, the immediate killing and maiming of civilians by bombs, and the destruction of the Yugoslavia’s infrastructure (Wood, 2000).
We don’t need to chart current corporate strategies with a moral compass crafted by seminarians to know that the globe is fast becoming raw material for corporate greed and quick profit margins, as the gap between rich and poor is growing so large that the 300 largest corporations in the world now account for 70 percent of foreign direct investment and 25 percent of world capital assets (Bagdikian, 1998). Never before have media technologies been so sophisticated that they could effortlessly accelerate assets from the public to the private sector and consolidate so swiftly and smoothly the power of corporations. Not since the end of World War II has the United States been in the position—in military terms, at least—of being the world’s only superpower and unchallenged. The neoliberal ideology of the free market—mediated through the triad multilateral institutions of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization—is accelerating capital accumulation throughout all parts of the globe. Such an acceleration of capitalist accumulation is occuring in direct proportion to a lack of opposition among world leaders who, at this moment in time, are unbearably burdened by political inertia and ethical quietism. Uneven or unequal development of the world system is devastating the poor and disadvantaged throughout Latin America, Africa, Russia, and elsewhere around the globe, as the world becomes inescapably polarized into peripheral and central economies. Global capitalism is propelling a mass exodus of ‘guest workers’ to the industrialized West, and fueling in its wake a war against the ‘Other.’ The legacy of European colonialism is being played out with a vengeance, this time through a deepening of the disparities within the international division of labor brought about by the circuits and flows of finance and monopoly capital within a globally abstracted transnational network.
As Fidel announced recently at the Group of 77 South Summit:
Gobalization has been held tight by the patterns of neoliberalism; thus, it is not development that goes global but poverty; it is not respect for the national sovereignty of our states but the violation of that respect; it is not solidarity amongst our peoples but sauve qui peut (every man for himself) in he unequal competition prevailing in the marketplace….In the hands of the rich countries, world trade is already an instrument of domination, which under neoliberal globalization will become an increasingly useful element to perpetuate and sharpen inequalities as well as a theater for strong disputes among developed countries for control over the present and future markets….The developed countries – with 15 percent of the world’s population – presently concentrate 88 percent of Internet users. Just in the United States, there are more computers than in the rest of the world put together. These countries control 97 percent of the patents the world over and receive over 90 percent of the international licensing rights, while for many South countries, the ability to exercise the right to intellectual property is nonexistent….The world economic order works for 20 percent of the population, but leaves out, demeans, and degrades the remaining 80 percent. [2000, p. 150, 154, 158, 159]
Never before has capital penetrated the spaces of the lifeworld that were previously off limits (previously restricted to wage labor but now commodifying subjectivity itself) and done so throughout the entire planet. It is not so much that capitalism relentlessly commodifies all forms of social relationships worldwide until there is nothing left outside (Watkins, 1998), as much as the fact that capitalism discards from its pathways anything that is not of value (Dirlik, 1994 ). Dirlik (1994)notes that four-fifths of the global population is treated as fetid wastage to be removed out of the pathways of global capital flow. Neo-liberal policies have become infamous for removing people from capital pathways, and then fixing the blame on those removed (Watkins, 1998). Never before has the Malthussian spirit risen up with such violence in the rampant neo-liberalism that condemns the worker to remain forever uninivited to capital’s mighty feast. As the poor grow in numbers, as the homeless flood the streets of our cities, they are seen more and more as disrupting the ‘natural order’ of capitalism. And facing this unraveling historical matrix we have, in the Western academy, postmodern theory’s avant-garde celebration of cultural hybridity; the incommensurability of discourses; pastiche, indeterminancy, and contingency; the ironic troping of its commodity status; its textual burlesque; and its celebration of cultural detrius such as kitsch, pop iconography, and samizat publications as the apogee of cultural critique. While not all postmodern theory is to be rejected, there is a species of it that remains loyal to capital’s promotional culture where parody can be paraded as dissent and cultural parasitism masqueraded as subversion and where one can avoid putting political commitment to the test. The academy is a place where Marxism is dismissed as innocent of complexity and where Marxist educators are increasingly outflanked by fashionable, motely minded apostates in svelte black suede jackets, black chinos, and black ’50s eyeglass frames with yellow-tint lenses, for whom the metropole has become a riotous mixture of postmodern mestiza narratives and where hubris shadows those who remain even remotely loyal to causal thinking. For these voguish hellions of the seminar room, postmodernism is the toxic intensity of bohemian nights, where the proscribed, the immiserated, and the wretched of the earth simply get in the way of their fun. Poverty, for them, is at the very least a purgative for an indulgent society and at worst a necessary evil—if you want the material trappings of the American Dream, that is. Where Freire was implacably prosocialist, critical pedagogy—his stepchild—has become (at least in classrooms throughout the United States) little more than liberalism refurbished with some lexical help from Freire (as in words like ‘praxis’ and ‘dialogue’) and such progressive nomenclature often is used to camouflage existing capitalist social relations under a plethora of eirenic proclamations and classroom strategies. Real socialist alternatives are nowhere to be found, and if they are, few have las tripas to make them resoundingly heard in the classrooms of the nation.
I don’t want to suggest that there are no important debates that postmodernism has ushered in—especially by some post-Marxists who have begun to refigure the topic of labor. Postmodern Marxists view as productivist and laborist the many articulations of orthodox Marxism; revolution becomes the consummation of the logic of the desiring machine where social actors "are reborn as ‘bodies without organs’ and remade as cyborgs" (Dinerstein and Neary, 1999 p. 1). For orthodox Marxists, postmodern Marxism discards the concrete quality of labor in favor of its more abstract potentialities, where human emancipation becomes an avoidance of reality (Dinerstein and Neary, 1999). Ultimately, one has to approach the relationship between postmodernism and Marxism dialectically. Dialectics is about mediation, not juxtaposition. The issue is not simply either Marxism or postmodernism. In some instances postmodern theories may be more productive for understanding aspects of social life than current Marxist theories admit. In this book my concern is with arguing against some versions of postmodern theory and their lack of attention to global capitalist social relations and attendant human suffering. However, I am even more concerned with what Marxist theory does best: analyzing and challenging the very viability of capitalism in human society.
We live in unhappy times, in the midst of a global hegemony based on fraud, when our feelings of unhappiness do not appear to be connected to the depredations of capitalist exploitation occurring within the external world. Rather, our feelings are attached to the shimmering surface effects of signs and simulations and the dull radiance that illuminates the spectacles of the everyday. Our external and internal worlds seem to have been split apart. Ana Dinerstein and Mike Neary link this disconnection to the process of disutopia, an abstract crisis of theory. Their comments are worth quoting at length:
Disutopia is the most significant project of our time. It is not just the temporary absence of Utopia, but the political celebration of the end of social dreams. Disutopia should not be confused with apathy, since, although it appears in the form of indifference, the postmodern condition entails an active process involving simultaneously the struggle to control contradiction and diversity, and the acclamation of diversity; the repression of the struggles against Disutopia and the celebration of individual self-determination. The result of this is social Schizophrenia. In so far as diversity, struggle and contradiction cannot be eliminated by political or philosophical voluntarism, Disutopia has to be imposed. Its advocates spend a huge amount of time in de-construction, repentance, denial, forgetfulness. Neurotic Realism in Arts, the Third Way in Politics coupled with its academic justifications, the scientific classification of the horrors of our time, as well as the difficulties for personal relations to become meaningful are some examples that illustrate how the project of Disutopia works. The result of all this together is Mediocrity. (1999, p. 3; emphasis in original)
To challenge the current project of Disutopia, it is important that we do not lose sight of the particular in relation to the totality of determinate social relations. It is important that we do are not enticed by the mistaken notion that the intensified competition made possible by the internationalization of capital has rendered the nation state obsolete. The nation state has been partially restructured, but not destroyed. Callinicos writes that "Although the pronounced tendency towards the global integration of capital over the past generation has severely reduced the ability of states to control economic activities within their borders, private capitals continue to rely on the nation state to which they are most closely attached to protect them against the competition of other capitals, the effects of economic crisis, and the resistance of those they exploit" (1994, p. 54). John Rees concurs with Callinicos’s view, arguing that while the state may have retreated from a direct role in production, it still serves to police the working-class and to provide them with welfare (although even this form of relief is under attack). The state also serves to regulate competing capitals, especially in the realm of conflicts between states and trading blocs (1994, p. 104). If the nation state still co-ordinates exploitation, then it can still serve as a site of anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist struggle. Callinicos notes that capitalist development not only gives rise to imperialism but also sub-imperialist conquest, such as that which we have seen between Greece and Turkey, India and Pakistan, Iran and Iraq. As the most powerful imperialist nation in the world, the United States serves as the patron of numerous sub-imperialist powers. While sub-imperialist countries most often serve as the regional Dobermans for their superpower masters, they may also defy the superpowers in certain instances (such as Iraq’s defiance of its superpower sponsor, the US, in its invasion of Kuwait). The collapse of the Soviet Union has left the United States unmatched in its ability flex its politico-military muscles, and project its power on a global level (Callinicos, 1994). Few individuals can show us the expanse of the concrete social forces and relations that both entrap and enthrall us and the consequences of contemporary inter-imperialist rivalry as powerfully as can Che Guevara and Paulo Freire. Few can illustrate as effectively through their lives and their teachings how labor and the laboring class must serve as the agent of the transformation of capitalist social relations and why the subjectivity of the working class must become the starting point for the development of the ‘new man/woman’ of revolutionary social struggle. And what better and more effective way can critical agency be developed than through the educational efforts of Che and Freire? And while we continue to advocate the defeat of imperialism through the overthrow of capitalism, it is important to struggle against those bourgeois regimes that may, in fact, be taking the anti-imperialist side. As Callinicos (1994) notes, following Lenin, the real anti-imperialist force is that of the socialist proletariat. Heightening the revolutionary capabilties of the social proletariat should, in any case, be the prime objective of any revolionary pedagogy.
A major task of critical educators is to begin to tease out ways in which the pedagogy of these two historical figures can be used as the wellspring for creating the type of critical agency necessary to contest and transform current global relations of exploitation and oppression. Of course, many books have already been written about critical pedagogy, revolutionary pedagogy, feminist pedagogy, and the contributions that Freire has made toward their development. To this end, my own project in critical pedagogy has been to rescue critical pedagogical work from the kind of bourgeois humanism that has frequently made it functionally advantageous to existing social relations, the employer class, the high-echelon personnel of the educational establishment, and the international division of labor.
Some critics on the left argue that it is possible to ameliorate the debilitating impact of globalization by forcing capital to become democratically accountable. They have suggested that while there are problems with a competitive market option, we may wish instead to choose a form of market socialism. Before we can approach this question, we need to understand that capital is not simply a thing; rather, it is a social relation – a specific social relation of labor that is indifferent to human needs and aspirations. As the congealment of abstract, undifferentiated labor, capitalism reduces all concrete labor to its opposite (Hudis, 2000). Labor is the source of all value only insofar as we acknowledge that value itself is abstract labor. Only that which is the product of abstract labor has value in capitalism. As Peter Hudis (2000) notes, capital is a social relation of abstract labor that cannot and must not be reduced to its ‘thing-ness’ but should be conceived as a value-relation. Capital acquires value by obtaining ever more surplus value, or unpaid hours of labor, from the worker who produces it. Capital feeds on devouring as many unpaid hours of abstract labor produced by the worker that it can. In this sense, Marx argues that
The aim of capital is not served merely by obtaining more ‘wealth’….but because it wants more value, to command more objectified labor. But indeed….it can command the latter only if wages fall; i.e. if more living work days are exchanged for the same capital with objectified labor, and hence a greater value is created. (1993,p. 353)
Because the purpose of capital is to reproduce itself, any effort to control capital without fundamentally transforming its basis of value production will only serve to strengthen capital. Until value and surplus value are both targeted for elimination by social reformers, capital will continue relentlessly to self-expand. While many socialists have tried over the years to control capital by ameliorating its more destructive capacities through the establishment of state planning or market socialism, these efforts have been limited because they allow value production to persist. Ken Cole provides a cogent explanation as to why market socialism is untenable as an option. Market socialism won’t work because`creating social relations on the basis of exchange value is flawed, in fact, it’s a fundamental contradiction in terms. Value can’t be evaluated in quantitative terms only. This is because value is a social relation – it is both qualitative and quantitative. What is valued is not just labor time but labor power (the abstract value of the concrete labor time that is worked). This, of course, will vary according to the social demand and social supply of the commodity that is produced as well as the laborer’s control of the means of production. With a model of development founded upon commodity exchange, there will be qualitative changes in the value of the quantitative measure of labor time worked by wage labor, a value that varies with the process and practice of exploitation. Labor time is devalued – the same quantitative amount of labor time is qualitatively worth less as exploitation increases and intensifies. Exploitation is a consequence of power, of the control of the means of production. Labor power, for Marx, thus becomes a form of variable capital whereas the means of production is a constant value (i.e., capital). Because value is a social relation, qualitative changes in the social relation of production – i.e., the conflictual relation between capital and labor – bear directly on the quantitative expression of value as exchange, i.e., as price. We notice that within current global capitalist arrangements, the same concrete labor time actually worked is worth substantially less than it was decades ago. This is because the relationship between capital and labor – expressed in the abstract valuation of concrete labor time – reflected in the exchange value of labor power on a world scale, has declined.
Cole emphasizes that the objective of a large-scale investment program must be premised on a strategy independent of imperialism, a strategy, in other words, of sustainable development and "widely distributed benefits for the people as a whole" (1998, p. 149). This implies decentralization and community participation as well as creative, sustainable technologies, respect for a diversity of ecosystems and societies, and an emphasis on social justice. As Cole warns, when commodity-exchange underwrites the economy, power becomes concentrated in rogue international agencies such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, that worship at the altar of accumulation. Here, consumer choice and the universal rule of property replaces the imperative of citizen’s power and social justice. And again, market socialism is not an option, especially, as Cole emphasizes, when nation states are competing more ferociously than ever to attract foreign capital and when the powers of the state to manage the economy are rapidly diminishing as the internationalization of capital grows stronger. An approach to economic development that supports the revolutionary principles of Freire and Che must work to defund and decommission capital, putting the enterprises of the global robber barons into receivership with the larger purpose of decommodifying and destratifying everyday life.
Reclaiming Critical Pedagogy
The roles and functions of critical pedagogy have changed over time in respnse to shifting societal cofigurations and needs and as a result of the conflictual processes of social transformation. What began as a tactical ploy – bringing critical pedagogy into mainstream teacher education programs – has become a defining priority, establishing an education policy and philosophy of classroom practice whose ideological spectrum runs from center-left to left liberal. One of the founding assumptions of critical pedagogy is that human beings, acting on the external world and transforming it, can, at the same time, change their own nature. However, many – if not most – approaches to critical pedagogy are today characterized by what Hegel referred to as ‘bad infinity,’ because they postulate an endless series of causes and effects within the social order, not in a linear fashion but dialectically, critically mediating the parts (schooling practices) and the whole (capitalist relations within the wider social totality). The contemporary constitution of critical pedagogy is governed by a series of contradictions. Lacking is a clear context and frame of reference that can capture these contradictions within global processes that are restructuring social, economic, and political life in profound ways at this present historical juncture. Against this background, it is important to fashion an historical materialist interpretation of critical pedagogy and to formulate concrete proposals for its evolution and advancement as a crucial form of revolutionary praxis. In the dislocation between an educational system that cries out for a renewed political economy of critical pedagogy and the current depoliticization of critical pedagogy, a renewed and reinvigorated model of critical pedagogy can be won. A recognition of such a disjunction affords a unique way of questioning the thematics capitalist pedagogy and may provide a critical flashpoint for a recondieration of important new possibilities for critical pedagogy.
Given the current times we live in, critical pedagogy needs to reflexively engage its own premises, to challenge its own decidability, and to be self-conscious of its own constructed character. Surely critical pedagogy must not only continue to be critical of its own status as a commodity, it must also remain critical of its own presumed role as the metatruth of educational criticism. The language of critical pedagogy, after all, is also a social system that inscribes subjects. Critical pedagogy in this regard will always be Other to itself, will always be at odds with itself.
It’s important to recognize that now is the time to brush hard against the grain of teaching until the full range of revolutionary pedagogical options are made available in the public schools of the nation, realizing that none of these options is panacean and that all of them will require sustained theoretical and political engagement. Part of this task is exegetical: to recognize and research the distinctions among teaching, pedagogy, critical pedagogy, and revolutionary pedagogy. Part of the task is ethical: to make liberation and the abolition of human suffering the goal of the educative enterprise itself. Part of the task is political: to create a democratic socialist society in which democracy will be called upon daily to live up to its promise.
Teaching is a process of organizing and integrating knowledge for the purpose of communicating this knowledge or awareness to students through an exchange of understanding in prespecified contexts and teacher/learner environments. Pedagogy is distinct from teaching in that it situates the teacher/learner encounter in a wider context of historical and sociopolitical forces in which the ‘act of knowing’ recognizes and takes into account the differentiated politics of ‘reception’ surrounding the object of knowledge by the students. Critical pedagogy constitutes a dialectical and dialogical process that instantiates a reciprocal exchange between teachers and students—an exchange that engages in the task of reframing, refunctioning, and reposing the question of understanding itself, bringing into dialectical relief the structural and relational dimensions of knowledge and its hydra-headed power/knowledge dimensions. Revolutionary pedagogy goes further still. It puts power/knowledge relations on a collision course with their own internal contradictions; such a powerful and often unbearable collision gives birth not to an epistemological resolution at a higher level but rather to a provisional glimpse of a new society freed from the bondage of the past, a vision in which the past reverberates in the present, standing at once outside the world and beside the world, in a place of insight where the subject recognizes she is in a world and subject to it, yet moving through it with the power to name it extopically so that hidden meanings can be revealed in the accidental contingencies of the everyday. Revolutionary pedagogy creates a narrative space set against the naturalized flow of the everyday, against the daily poetics of agency, encounter, and conflict, in which subjectivity is constantly dissolved and reconstructed—that is, in which subjectivity turns-back-on-itself, giving rise both to an affirmation of the world through naming it, and an opposition to the world through unmasking and undoing the practices of concealment that are latent in the process of naming itself.
Che and Freire both recognized that categorizing the world is always a violent act in that it inevitably naturalizes dangerous hierarchies. The revolutionary educator always wounds the ordinary so that it can be seen not as something that is permanently sealed but as a space of wild fluids, of shifting boundaries. The revolutionary educator engages the world reflexively, dedicated to the praxis of transforming knowledge through epistemological critique. Epistemological critique involves more than unpacking representations but also exploring the how and why of their historical production. Revolutionary educators do not merely track the hemorrhaging of signifiers into other signifiers but also explore how these signifiers are concealed within larger organizational formations, institutional arrangements, and concrete and contradictory social relations. For revolutionary educators, knowledge exceeds its semiotic end products; it travels intertextually within demarcated systems of intelligibility. Critical knowledge is understood as persistently open, disclosive, incomplete and open-ended. In this way it remains cautious in the presence of reified social relations and epistemological distortions that occlude both the social ontology of knowledge and its processual journey from ‘fact’ to ‘value.’ In other words, critical epistemological practice not only examines the content of knowledge but also its method of production. It seeks to understand how ideological constructions are encoded and administered, how metonymic and synecdochical gestures are performed so as to obscure relations of domination and oppression, how the interpretive and interpellative frameworks by which we organize our sentiments construct ruling stereotypes and how the governing categories of our everyday discourse render invisible and obscure real social relations of exploitation (see Bannerji, 1995).
The struggle, as I see it, from the standpoint of revolutionary pedagogy, is to construct sites—provisional sites—in which new structured mobilities and tendential lines of forces can be made to suture identity to the larger problematic of social justice. In other words, students and cultural workers need to attach themselves to modalities of belonging fashioned out of new economies of subjectivities and difference. This requires breaking the imaginary power of commodified identities within capitalism as well as the forces and relations that both produce and are products of capitalism.
In their best moments, the pedagogies of Freire and Che exemplify the characteristics of revolutionary pedagogy. While both pedagogical approaches place a profound emphasis on critical literacy and are underwritten by an explicit political project, it is not surprising to find that Freire’s project is more systematic, more coherent, more dialogical, and more self-reflexive than that of Che. Che’s pedagogy was more intuitive, but what made Che so remarkable was that this intuition was profoundly counterintuitive. Yet the political project that unites both Che and Freire speaks to mutual concerns.1 It should be emphasized, too, that Che’s pedagogy is most asssuredly dialectical in nature and grounded in the lived experiences of the oppressed becoming transformed into the "new man" through acquiring a revolutionary consciousness while at the same time ‘living the life’ (what we might colloquially refer to as ‘walking the walk’) of the revolutionary. This meant for Che, as it did for Freire, that education needs to take on an extra-ivory-tower, public-sphere role in contemporary revolutionary movements and in politics in general. However, it was not imperative for Che that everyone become a guerrillero or guerrillera. But it was manifestly important that everyone develop a revolutionary consciousness and engage in actions that directly contribute to the furthering of the revolution.
For Che, the "new man" is not merely a zombified agent who has been whisked to critical consciousness by the winds of revolutionary indoctrination and the repeated declamations of ideologues from Politburo to pulpit. The point d’ appui of critical pedagogy for both these figures was the development of a dialectical grasp of history and of the contradictions of human labor under capitalism; for those of us working in education, this means recognizing and transforming those contradictions that create asymmetries of power in the manufacturing of relations of race, gender, class, and sexuality. Clearly, these revolutionaries did not equate political liberation with the exposure of dominative social practices as a trompe-l’oeil, nor did they consider it sufficient to bewail the trials and tribulations of the dispossessed; they were both unwaveringly committed to transforming those social practices that lay at the root of human exploitation and misery.
Che’s project of revolutionary life avoided the repressive desublimation of the totalitarian ‘leader’ who enjoins his followers to transgress everyday moral rules in the name of some higher good; he did not insist that fellow fighters enjoy what they do. The rules that governed guerrilla life produced a psychic economy of privation and sacrifice that was only survivable when it became affectively invested in a profound desire to overcome the systematic abuses of tyranny and exploitation. To be a guerrilla fighter was not to engage in a stylized revolt against the cohesive, seamless, and sanitized bourgeois self. Nor was it an effort to push subversion into the ethereal realm of the sublime. Rather, to be a guerrilla fighter was, for Che, to stalk state-sponsored terror and defeat it at every turn. It was to create the initial momentum for the popular revolution that would follow in its wake.
In the theater of battle, Che did not have time to create the conditions for peasants to achieve conscientization before he tried to conscript them into his guerrilla project. Nevertheless, he never threatened to use force against—or to cajole or insult—those who were unable to or refused to join him. And to his credit, he never tried to entice them with monetary rewards. Rather, he appealed to their sense of justice, and in entering into discussions with them enjoined them to follow his group of fighters for the good of the collectivity of the toilers of the world.
In addressing the General Assembly of the United Nations, Che proclaimed:
The United States intervenes in Latin America invoking the defense of free institutions. The time will come when this assembly will aquire greater maturity and demand of the United States government guarantees for the lives of th Blacks and Latin Americans wholive in that country, most of them U.S. citizens by origin or adoption. Those who kill their own children and discriminate daily against them because of the color of their skin; those who let the murderers of Blacks remain free, protecting them, and furthermore punishing the Black population because they demand their legitimate rights as free men – how can thhose who do this consier themselves guardians of freedom? (cited in Castro and Guevara, 1992, p. 139)
Che was an internationalist warrior. That, and the welanschauung that gave his politics revolutionary ballast, is something that postmodernists would likely decry in an unearned tone of superiority as a totalizing position: universalizing and sanctifying what in essence is a particular position. In his reply to criticisms of the speech that he made in the United Nations General Assembly in 1964 (Adlai Stevenson was among his fiercest critics), shared the following: "I am a patriot of Latin America and of all Latin American countries. Wherever necessary I would be ready to lay down my life for the liberation of any Latin American country, without asking anything from anyone, without demanding anything, without exploiting anyone" (cited in Castro and Guevara, 1992, p. 147). Che followed these words with a quotation by Jose Marti, noted poet and founder of the Cuban Revolutionary Party in 1892: "Every true man must feel on his own cheek every blow struck against the cheek of another" (cited in Castro and Guevara, 1992, p. 147). When Bolivian Lieutenant Colonel Selich was interrogating Che in the mud-walled schoolhouse in La Higuera, shortly before Che was executed, he was reported to have asked:"Are you Cuban or Argentine?" Che is said to have answered: "I am Cuban, Argentine, Bolivian, Peruvian, Ecuadorian, etc….You understand? (Anderson, 1997, p. 734). Post-marxist educators who denounce in unequivocal terms the ‘modernist’ sins of ‘reductionism’, ‘functionalism’, ‘essentialism’, and ‘universalism’ typically find in the ‘rational’ assertions of Che or classical Marxists evidence of unpardonable offenses against the postmodern theory of discourse. The adjudications of the postmodernists caught up in the cosmopolitan reveries of epistemic suspicion and its ineluctable hermeneutical delights have resulted in searing attacks on Marxists for their ‘causal’ thinking (see McLelland, 1996). However, for many contemporary Marxists, it is understood that a certain amount of reductionism is necessary in any scientific explanation. Gregor McLennan (1996) argues for a form of what he calls ‘weak reductionism’ that postulates a broad, causal sense of connection between economic structures and capitalist class interests that does not substantively devalue the level of explained phenomena. Postmodernists often erroneously attack Marxists for believing that they possess a faultless, pristine and metaphysical approach to the truth that hovers in some metaphysical ether outside the process of history or else that the truth can only be understood from the perspective of the concrete immediacy of working class consciousness. First of all, there is no homogeneous working class. Second, there are always perspectives that outbid those associated with the working class and the capitalist class. It is important always to generalize beyond immediate experience since truth is not wholly internal to the language of experience. Any assessment of the truth must consider the fact that all truth claims are mediated by structural constraints, the summation of historical experience, the codification of meaning-systems, and are trapped within practices of commodity fetishism. Any experience, in order to be recounted, must enter into the domain of theory, since no experience is transparently self-evident. All shared experiences are, to certain extent, generalized or codified within some community of discourse. No experience can willingly vacate its existence from the court of social mediation, not even revolutionary experience. This is a position that many astute Marxists hold, despite the chillingly irreverent assertion by postmodernists that they are to be condemned for ‘essentializing’ working class experience. Yet at the same time, many Marxists would agree that the class position of the proletariat can usefully serve as a unique vantage point from which the working-class can contribute to a generalized theory of society. John Rees notes that "it is not that the validity of marxism only flows from the immediate practice of the working class. It is a theoretical generalization based on the historical experience of the working class, and therefore a theory of society as a whole rather than merely the history of the oppressed. Consequently, its validity must be proven by its superior explanatory power – more internally coherent, more widely applicable, capable of greater empirical verification – in comparison with its competitors" (1998, p. 237, italics original). What is important to recognize is that the ultimate ‘proving ground’ or ‘final arbiter’ of a theory about society is its power to affect the world through praxis, that is, through theoretically informed struggle by the working-class against the capitalist system. This is not the same as arguing that the truth about society can be reduced to the immediate consciousness of the working-class. But because the working-class has the strongest potential to see the truth about society as a class (both in itself and for itself), then they offer a powerful and indispensable vantage point to test the validity of revolutionary praxis (Rees, 1998). Of course, such a pronouncement would undoubtedly seem chronically anachronistic and meta-theorically hidebound to the fashionable apostates of postmodernism and the voguish pundits of post-marxism (the two groups often coquette with each other in their rubbishing of modernist sociology) who signally claim that social class is an outmoded – not to mention unfashionable – category. Like the entrails of a corpse, it should be left alone to rot. Of course, classical Marxist theory does not hold the sociological patent on explanatory adequacy. The social context in which social agents struggle has shifted considerably since Marx’s day, and new theories are needed to thicken the descriptive register of sociological analysis as well as provide a necessary epistemological critique that can help to map out contemporay terrains of social struggle and deal with new, ambivalent domains and subdomains of the social. In spite of this, the backdrop assumptions of Marxism still hold and the contributions of historical materialism repay close examination not because of their archival sanctity but because they are still unembarrassingly crucial for pushing forward the boundaries of emancipatory struggle in the current age of new imperialisms throughout the globe. Hence the importance of the work of Che and Freire in current pedagogical theorizing. Che and Freire serve as rearguard activists against contemporary trends within postmodern theory that not only assert the autonomy of theory from its embeddedness in the productive processes of capitalism but also maintain the separation of theory from the concrete materiality of the world. Their appreciation of the revolutionary potential of the working-class to dethrone the reigning notion that the collective subject of history is dead, and to recenter the educational left in challenging the dialectic of capitalist development in all of its capillary detail and tentacular reach, cannot be overestimated.
Freire’s pedagogy was fertilized more in the domain of critical dialogism than was Che’s, and his vision of the new society was decidedly more open ended. The revolutionary character of Freire’s approach is lucidly reflected in Bertell Ollman’s recent description of what constitutes a ‘dialectical understanding’ of everyday life. Because he believes that the current stage of capitalism is characterized by far greater complexity and much faster change and interaction than at any time in human history, Ollman argues that a dialectical understanding of social life is "more indispensable now than ever before" (1998, p. 342). Ollman articulates a dialectical method that he breaks down into six successive moments. The ontological moment has to do with the infinite number of mutually dependent processes that make up the totality or structured whole of social life. The epistemological moment deals with how to organize thinking in order to understand such a world, abstracting out the main patterns of change and interaction. The moment of inquiry appropriates the patterns of these internal relationships in order to further the project of investigation. The moment of intellectual reconstruction or self-clarification puts together the results of such an investigation for oneself. The moment of exposition entails describing to a particular audience the dialectical grasp of the facts by taking into account how others think. Finally, the moment of praxis uses the clarification of the facts of social life to act consciously in and on the world, changing it while simultaneously deepening one’s understanding of it. These dialectical acts, which are traversed repeatedly over time, bear a striking similarity to the pedagogy of Paulo Freire. Adumbrating Freire’s radical theory of knowledge, powered by a process of dialectical thinking, Paula Allman and her colleagues write:
Freire’s dialectical thinking, all dialectical thinking for that matter, treats history as a process. This is a key pre-condition that enabled Freire to convey a radical theory of what it means to be a human being (a radical ontology) and a radical theory of knowledge (a radical epistemology). Whether they recognize it or not, most people have ontological and epistemological theories or at least assumptions. Freire’s ontological theory is radical because it critiques what it has meant thus far to be a human being and also offers the philosophy of what we could become. Therefore it is not only a theory of being but also a theory of becoming. His theory of knowledge is equally radical/dialectical. Accordingly, no person is an ‘empty vessel’ or devoid of knowledge. Many people have valuable experiential knowledge; all of us have opinions and beliefs; others have greater or lesser degrees of extant—i.e. already existing—knowledge and may even hold qualifications that signify their "possession" of that knowledge. However, in Freirean education the affirmation or acquisition of these types of knowledge is not the end objective of learning but rather the beginning of the dialogical/problem-posing approach to learning. (Allman et al. 1998, p. 11)
The concept of dialectics is, of course, an abstraction intended to help explain the messy and sinewy web of concrete social life and to offer a way of overcoming its contradictions. Admittedly, however, it is difficult to overcome the contradictions of lived experience, even for somebody as politically erudite and sensitive as Freire. Schugurensky remarks that
Freire’s analysis is based on Hegelian dialectics, in which unity is understood as a constant tension of theses, antitheses and syntheses, and change is the resolution of the conflict between two opposites. Theoretically, a dialectical approach overcomes dualism and false dichotomies, but to what extent Freire was able to accomplish this is still open to debate. Similarly, Freire’s tendency to use bipolar strategies has led some disciples to advocate a monolithic rejection of banking education, colonialism, capitalist development and so forth. The complexity of the real world makes such a position difficult to sustain, as it was even for Freire himself. (1998, pp. 24–25)
Freirean pedagogy is a story about the struggle for critical consciousness read against the powerful dialectical contradictions of capitalism that exist between productive labor and capital and between production and exchange and their historical linkage and development. Though to a large extent the guiding narratives of critical pedagogy concern the politics of interpreting revolutionary theory, they also constitute an immensely personal story of the journey of teachers toward critical consciousness. Regardless of the personal, epistemological, ontological, and moral paths that we choose to take as educators, at some point we have to come face-to-face with the naked reality of capitalist social relations in both local and global contexts. We cannot ignore these relations, and if we are to engage in a revolutionary educational praxis, we need to do more than rail against the suffering and tribulations of the oppressed and instead seek ways of transforming them.
One of the most important contributions of Che and Freire was the emphasis they placed on praxis. For both Che and Freire, the dialectic must be disencumbered by metaphysics and grounded in the concrete materiality of human struggle. In the process of becoming fully human, everyday life must be informed by a theory and practice relationship that truly alters ideas and experience within a larger revolutionary dialectic. Paraphrasing Marx, this dialectic operates from each according to her abilities, to each according to her needs, within a context in which the free development of each is the precondition for the free development of all. Raya Dunayevskaya captures this relationship:
[W]ithout a philosophy of revolution activism spends itself in mere anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism, without ever revealing what it is for. We have been made to see anew that, just as the movement from practice disclosed a break in the Absolute Idea that required both a new relationship of practice to theory, and a new unity of practice and theory, so that new unity is but a beginning: Absolute Idea as New Beginning. . . . Absolute negativity manifests its pivotal role in the Idea precisely because it is both totality (summation) and new beginning, which each generation must first work out for itself. . . . Only live human beings can recreate the revolutionary dialectic forever anew. And these live human beings must do so in theory as well as in practice. It is not a question only of meeting the challenge from practice, but of being able to meet the challenge from the self-development of the Idea, and of deepening theory to the point where it reaches Marx’s concept of the philosophy of "revolution in permanence." (1982, pp. 194–195; emphasis in original)
As prisoners of global money lenders we confront a seemingly intractable depredation of the lifeworld through the loss of life-means and growing economic insecurity (McMurtry, 1999). Because of the insuperable greed of the capitalist overworlders, money is less available in the economy to serve the basic needs of people. Over two billion workers throughout the world remain chronically unemployed while the unregulated movement of money capital across boundaries through private money cycles of investment and non-productive speculative siezures of social incomes has created a frenzied money-to-more-money-movement that has invaded everything, including the expanding educational business arena, defunding social justice, downsizing hope for a better future, deregulating responsibility and opportunistically rescinding accountability (McMurtry, 1999). The world of Che and Freire offer apertures through which we can perceive possible lines of resistance to these growing trends.
That Che’s life constituted a visible, palpable, and undeniable supercession of the private want-satisfaction that is the organizing principle of exchange under capitalism, and conveyed instead a new way of living that animated unyielding service to the collective needs of th oppressed and that disclaimed self-gratification as a vested bourgeois trait, made Che functionally disabling in the transformation of human beings into organs of the capitalist marketplace. Freire waged a similar war against the embourgeoisement of the human spirit in the battlefields of literacy education, which made him – famously - a liability in the world of educational statecraft. That Che’s message has survived the onslaught of anti-representationalism, anti-foundationalism, and post-empiricism is not so much a testament to its metahistorical character or the dramatic historiographic dimensions of its performativity (his message was bodied forth in his life and death) but to its world-historical significance in the face of the contemporary crisis of global capitalism and the tumult and history of bloody struggles that have followed in its wake. Che’s life was itself a symptomatic reading of the fate of the world. Che revealed to oppressed groups throughout the globe, that there can occur a sea-shift of political transformation on the part of a small but resolute band of fighters. The oppressors in all of their seeming invincibility could be defeated by a much smaller group of dedicated guerrillas. But unless revolutionary struggle is conducted on a permanent basis, with the full backing of the oppressed, defeat is possible, even likely. It was a risk Che was willing to take. In his own way, Freire took a similar risk in the mine-sown fields of pedagogical practice where education functioned – and still does - on the part of the state as a vehicle for social control, for ethnic assimilation and the reproduction of privileging norms, for the defense of intergenerational class-based continuity, and for non-interference with social relations that are functionally advantageous to the ruling class and the dominant knowledge industry.
Freire managed to outlive Che by over thirty years, and the world has been a greater place because of what he was able to accomplish in his long and arduous journey on the road to liberation. Few individuals have been as successful in moving the human spirit forward as these two men. They have taught us that history cannot erase revolutionary struggle based on the heroic aspirations of the uncommon lives of ‘common’ people. They have also revealed to us that the wounds of history cannot be healed without revolutionary love and a warrior’s spirit tempered to do battle in the streets, in the boardrooms, in the classrooms, and in the factories of the capitalist present—and also in the caverns of the human heart.
Why Che? Why Freire? Why now? Why indeed.
Young people searching for "a new way of humanity" have the examples of Freire and Che to ponder, to inspire and to emulate. For United States youth faced with an eviscerated public sphere, an absence of communal forms and relations, and the constriction of an empty self cobbled out of the scraps and debris of a consumer-based economy, Che’s and Freire’s example of collective solidarity offers a striking alternative.
At the moment of our birth we receive a ticket to Death. No reservations are necessary and our destination is assured. What remains open to fortune is what we choose to do along the way. Che and Freire both understood that we can rail against our fate but we cannot injure eternity. They chose not to mourn destiny but to celebrate the journey of life. To celebrate life always demands sacrificing our ontological security because, as Che and Freire both knew, it is impossible to celebrate life under conditions that do not obtain for all, that did not allow all others to enjoy the fruits of their struggle and labor. As long as others suffer, celebration is empty. But when collective struggle triumphs, that is—and continues to be—a cause for joy. Few figures as vivid as Che Guevara and Paulo Freire have ever crossed the stage of human history. It surely is tragic that their generation did not awaken at their call, but more tragic still is the possibility that future generations will choose not to heed their message nor follow their bold example. We will never see the likes of them again.
BY PETER MCLAREN
On a recent voyage to the rain forests of Costa Rica, I rode a bus through the beautiful city of Cartago. From my window I noticed a young man with a long ponytail running beside the bus. As the bus passed him, he glanced up and our eyes momentarily met; I noticed that he was wearing a Che T-shirt with the inscription ‘¡Che Vive!’. A fleeting sensation of plaintive connectedness overcame me, and I managed to give him a quick ‘thumbs-up’ gesture of affirmation just in time for him to return a broad smile to the crazy gringo. For a brief moment, I felt that this ponytailed stranger and I were linked by a project larger than both of us. During that instant, I could tangibly sense between us a collective yearning for a world free from the burdens of this one, and I knew that I was not alone. The image of Che that he wore on his breast like a secular Panagia pointed to a realm of revolutionary values held in trust by all those who wish to break the chains of capital and be free. Che has a way of connecting—if only in this whimsical way—people who share a common resolve to fight injustice and to liberate the world from cruelty and exploitation. There was no way of knowing the politics of this young man and how seriously he identified with the life and teachings of El Che. But Che’s image brings out the promise of such a connection and the political fecundity of even this momentary reverie.
The great Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire, also shares with Che the ability to bring people together around an animated common trust in the power of love, a belief in the reciprocal power of dialogue, and a commitment to ‘conscientization’ and political praxis. Few figures among the educational Left are as well known and as universally revered as Paulo Freire. Throughout my travels in Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Europe, I have seen slogans by Freire scribbled on buildings alongside those of Che. Whenever I speak at revolutionary forums or academic conferences about political praxis—whether in Malaysia, Japan, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Costa Rica, Finland, Europe, or elsewhere—the names of Che Guevara and Paulo Freire (and more recently, the Zapatistas) inevitably come up. They not only draw attention to the crisis of the times but also provide the singular hope that is necessary to move the struggle forward, cueste lo que cueste.
No one has done more to move the struggle forward over the role of education as a vehicle for liberatory praxis than Paulo Freire. From the moment he was jailed by the Brazilian military during the early days of the repression in 1964, to his exile and continuing struggle on behalf of peasants and the working class throughout the world (to whom he was dedicated in helping overcome their centuries-old marginalization from society), Paulo Freire has captured the political imagination of educators around the world. In an introduction to my book Life in Schools, the great liberation theologian, Leonardo Boff, affirmed Freire’s pedagogical project as one of action in and on the world:
The pedagogical project is created in order to place . . . lives inside the classroom and to employ knowledge and transformation as weapons to change the world. From the perspective of the social location of the condemned on Earth, it becomes clear that knowledge alone, as intended by the school, does not transform life. Only the conversion of knowledge into action can transform life. This concretely defines the meaning of practice: the dialectic movement between the conversion of transformative action into knowledge and the conversion of knowledge into transformative action. (1997, p. xi)
Although Che is certainly a better known figure than Freire worldwide, one would be hard-pressed to find a more respected and celebrated ‘profe’ in the field of education than Paulo Freire anywhere in the world. His most famous work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, has sold over a half million copies and has been translated into more than twenty languages. His theoretical developments have influenced the scholarly domains of sociology, anthropology, literacy, ecology, medicine, psychotherapy, philosophy, pedagogy, critical social theory, museology, history, journalism, and theater, to name just some of the fields indebted to his work. He is even credited with helping to found a new approach to research known as participatory research (Freire and Macedo, 1998). According to Ana Maria Araújo Freire and Donaldo Macedo, Freire was invited to visit approximately 100 cities throughout the world during his lifetime. They write: "His theory, which constitutes a reflection upon his practice, has served as the foundation for academic work and inspired practices in different parts of the world, from the mocambos of Recife to the barakumin in Brazil and abroad" (1998, p. 27). Even before the death in 1997, numerous schools, student organizations in schools of education, unions, popular libraries, and research scholarships bore his name. A list of his academic awards and honorary degrees would fill several pages.
Though Freire was an advocate of nonviolent insurrection and struggle, he was nevertheless jailed in Brazil as a politically dangerous subversive because of the counter-hegemonic power of his ideas. Che remained convinced that reclamation of one’s land from imperialist settlers by violent means was a form of self-defense, and that violent insurrection was the only way to defeat fascism and Yankee imperialism and reveal to the masses that the colonial god has feet of clay. Despite these divergences, Freire and Che remained brothers of the heart, brothers who never met in prison, in the theater of war, or in the arena of pedagogical struggle, but who shared a fraternal bond that opened up their hearts and minds to a similar vision of the world—a vision of what the world already was, where it was headed, and what it could become. As intellectual and political comrades, their lives represented the best of what the human spirit has to offer.
It is a feeling of kinship with Freire and Che that has served as the primary motivation for this investiagion. In the preface to my book Critical Pedagogy and Predatory Culture, Freire writes:
When such a kinship develops we need to cultivate within ourselves the virtue of tolerance, which "teaches" us to live with that which is different; it is imperative that we learn from and that we teach our "intellectual relative," so that in the end we can unite in our fight against antagonistic forces. Unfortunately, as a group, we academics and politicians alike expend much of our energy on unjustifiable "fights" among ourselves, provoked by adjectival or, even worse, by purely adverbial differences. While we wear ourselves thin in petty "harangues," in which personal vanities are displayed and egos are scratched and bruised, we weaken ourselves for the real battle: the struggle against our antagonists. (1995, p. x)
Paulo Freire was a dear friend and loving mentor. His words about kinship ring true, as do his warnings about the petty jealousies that infect academics, especially the small-minded ones (and the academy is filled to the brim with them) whose opportunism is wrapped in charm, whose narcissistic and vainglorious search for attention and personal gain knows no bounds, and who will stoop to any level to personalize their criticisms and engage in acrimonious intellectual assaults and sell their souls for power or fame. Freire would have none of that; he was a humble man who always put the project of human freedom ahead of his own personal gain. One of the first of his many acts of kindness toward me was helping to arrange an invitation for me to speak at a conference in Cuba in 1987. After that, we would periodically see each other when he came to visit the United States. Once I had the opportunity to visit with him and his wife, Ana Maria (or "Nita"), in their home during a visit to São Paulo. Over the past fifteen years I’ve written a great deal about Paulo and his work. This is not surprising for somebody who, for twenty-five years, has been involved in educational transformation both in the domain of grassroots activism and in the politically quarantined precincts of the academy. And though the political project that guides my work has been influenced no less by the teachings and life of Che Guevara, I have written only several articles about him. Although I never had the opportunity to meet him (I was nineteen when he was executed), his influence on my understanding of social justice and human courage has been inestimable.
It is saddening to witness how the figure of Paulo Freire has been domesticated by liberals, progressives, and pseudo-Freireans who have tried incessantly to claim his legacy and teachings—much as they have done to the figure of John Dewey, whose radical politics have been ominously blunted by his more politically sanguine followers in the academy. Hence, it is necessary to re-possess Freire from those contemporary revisionists who would reduce him to the grand seigneur of classroom dialogue and would antiseptically excise the corporeal force of history from his pedagogical practices. It is much more difficult to appropriate the figure of Che Guevara, given that he was an active guerrillero until the moment he was murdered under the hawkish eye and panoptic gaze of the CIA. At the same time it is much more difficult to argue for the relevance of Che for educators today, given that he remained an active opponent of U.S. imperialism throughout his entire life and called for "Vietnams" to arise on every continent of the globe. But when you consider that Malcolm X now appears on a U.S. postage stamp, it might well be the case that one day Che will be included in the U.S. pantheon of world ‘heroes.’ After all, the United States has a seductive way of incorporating anything that it can’t defeat and transforming that ‘thing’ into a weaker version of itself, much like the process of diluting the strength and efficacy of a virus through the creation of a vaccine. If the United States could find a Che ‘vaccine,’ it is more than likely that a stronger version of the Che ‘virus’ would rise up somewhere in the world where capital was laying waste to human dignity and the survival of the poor and dispossessed, in order to wreak its revenge. As long as Marx and Engels’s homage—"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles"(1952, p. 40)—still captures the imagination due to its increasing relevance in the world today, that much is assured.
When I first began sketching ideas on Che’s pedagogical imperatives and practices, I proposed readmitting into the debates over educational reform the legacy of Che Guevara as a model of moral leadership, political vision, and revolutionary praxis. I soon recognized, without surprise, that Che had never been officially admitted to the court of serious educational debate, most likely for the same reason that provoked Herb Kohl to write:
I am still not convinced that . . . [Che] . . . had a pedagogy that is meaningful for our society at this historical conjuncture. We are not at a revolutionary moment and we are the center of capitalist oppression with no strong social movement committed to changing the situation. In fact I cannot think of any school textbooks that treat Guevara with dignity and complexity. (1999, p. 308)
Kohl argues that because Che is not sympathetically portrayed in school textbooks, and because strong social movements against oppression are woefully lacking in the United States, we therefore should not place too much faith in the relevance of Che’s message for our current condition. I wish Kohl could have been on the marches in which I have been privileged to participate, from Los Angeles to Porto Alegre, where banners of Che are clutched by proud working hands and held high. Kohl’s defeatist comments about Che appear more symptomatic of a growing cynicism among progressive educators than a reasoned and convincing case against Che.
Why should educators bother to engage with the legacies of Che Guevara and Paulo Freire, especially now that the ‘end of history’ has been declared? Especially, too, when broadside condemnations of Marxism abound uncontested? And why now, at a time when the marketplace has transformed itself into a deus ex machina ordained to rescue humankind from economic disaster and when voguish theories imported from France and Germany can abundantly supply North American radicals with veritable plantations of no-risk, no-fault, knock-off rebellion? Why should North American educators take seriously two men who were propelled to international fame for their devotion to the downtrodden of South America and Africa? One reason is that capitalism’s Faustian urge to dominate the globe has generated a global ecological crisis. Another obvious, but no less important, reason is that the economic comfort enjoyed by North Americans is directly linked to the poverty of our South American brothers and sisters. As Elvia Alvarado proclaims in Don’t Be Afraid Gringo, "It’s hard to think of change taking place in Central America without there first being changes in the United States. As we say in Honduras, ‘Sin el perro, no hay rabia’—without the dog, there wouldn’t be rabies’" (1987, p. 144). Still yet another reason is that Che and Freire have given us a pedagogical course of action (not to be confused with a blueprint) for making bold steps to redress locally and globally current asymmetrical relations of power and privilege.
Why Che? Why Freire? Why now? For those who have been following world events, or taking even a cursory look at the conditions in our cities and small towns all across the United States, it is evident that democracy has transmogrified into the negation of its own principles; that there is a counter-tendency growing within it; that a beast is growing in its belly, bloated by capitalist greed; that human beings have made themselves subservient to, and at the very least, accessories of capital accumulation and consumption and the instruments of labor that dominate them through a powerfully cathected social amnesia; and that the international division of labor is widening into a crisis of monopoly capitalism—what Lenin so aptly termed imperialism. Che and Freire have never been needed more than at this current historical moment. It is not necessary to canvas the present political landscape with the discerning gaze of the sociologist or the trained academic eye to see that oppression has not been vanquished by capitalist democracy but continues to emerge unabated in new forms by means of innovative and decentralized production facilities, newly centralized economic power brought about by new media technologies, capitalist warfare against unions and social services, state-sanctioned Latinophobia, and the disproportionate incarceration of Latino/as and African Americans in a rapidly expanding prison industry. Recent events surrounding education professor José Solís Jordán—who taught educational foundations at DePaul University and the University of Puerto Rico, and who was framed by the FBI and found guilty of planting two bombs at military recruitment center—serve as only one of many indications that the U.S. government will stop at nothing short of breaking all peaceful opposition to its imperialist practices in Puerto Rico and elsewhere.1
The United States continues to portray Cuba as a terrorist nation that is a threat to the civilized world when, in fact, it is the United States that employs its vast military might to achieve whatever ends it deems to be in its own strategic interest. Take the recent war in Kosovo, as one example. The United States did not go to war in Kosovo for humanitarian reasons, although we believe many U.S. citizens are convinced that their government did just that. Kosovo did have implications for US national and strategic interest. The US bombed Kosovo not only to create a stable geopolitical power structure in Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc client-states, but also to strengthen its sphere of influence over European global markets. After all, sustaining the ‘abstract system of globalization’ – i.e., the globalization of capital and the hegemony of the United States in this imperialist enterprise - is the overarching priority of US foreign policy. Ellen Meiksins Wood quotes liberal critic (and rabid supporter of NATO’s bombing in Kosovo), Thomas L. Friedman, who writes: "The hidden hand of the market will never work without the hidden fist- McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps" (cited in Wood, 2000, p. 195). Woods quotes Friedman as saying that while Americans "were ready to pay any price and bear any burden in the Cold War," they were unwilling to die for the "abstract globalization system" – which is why "house-to-house fighting is out; cruise missiles are in." (cited in Wood, 2000, p. 95). She goes on to add that Friedman "could just easily have said ‘that’s why ground troops are out and high-tech bombing is in. We don’t want to die ourselves for globalization, but we don’t mind killing others’" (2000, p. 195). What made this imperialist aggression especially difficult to diagnose by rank-and-file US citizens was that it occurred under the guise of what Wood calls "human rights imperialism" in which "the particular interests of the US and its arbitrary actions have effectively displaced the common interests of humanity and the international instruments designed to represent them" (2000, pp. 196-197). In this case, the means used to achieve the "particular interests of the US" included the use of depleted uranium, ecological catastrophe through the bombing of refineries and chemical plants (indirect use of chemical warfare) that will lead to genetic damage for future generations, the immediate killing and maiming of civilians by bombs, and the destruction of the Yugoslavia’s infrastructure (Wood, 2000).
We don’t need to chart current corporate strategies with a moral compass crafted by seminarians to know that the globe is fast becoming raw material for corporate greed and quick profit margins, as the gap between rich and poor is growing so large that the 300 largest corporations in the world now account for 70 percent of foreign direct investment and 25 percent of world capital assets (Bagdikian, 1998). Never before have media technologies been so sophisticated that they could effortlessly accelerate assets from the public to the private sector and consolidate so swiftly and smoothly the power of corporations. Not since the end of World War II has the United States been in the position—in military terms, at least—of being the world’s only superpower and unchallenged. The neoliberal ideology of the free market—mediated through the triad multilateral institutions of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization—is accelerating capital accumulation throughout all parts of the globe. Such an acceleration of capitalist accumulation is occuring in direct proportion to a lack of opposition among world leaders who, at this moment in time, are unbearably burdened by political inertia and ethical quietism. Uneven or unequal development of the world system is devastating the poor and disadvantaged throughout Latin America, Africa, Russia, and elsewhere around the globe, as the world becomes inescapably polarized into peripheral and central economies. Global capitalism is propelling a mass exodus of ‘guest workers’ to the industrialized West, and fueling in its wake a war against the ‘Other.’ The legacy of European colonialism is being played out with a vengeance, this time through a deepening of the disparities within the international division of labor brought about by the circuits and flows of finance and monopoly capital within a globally abstracted transnational network.
As Fidel announced recently at the Group of 77 South Summit:
Gobalization has been held tight by the patterns of neoliberalism; thus, it is not development that goes global but poverty; it is not respect for the national sovereignty of our states but the violation of that respect; it is not solidarity amongst our peoples but sauve qui peut (every man for himself) in he unequal competition prevailing in the marketplace….In the hands of the rich countries, world trade is already an instrument of domination, which under neoliberal globalization will become an increasingly useful element to perpetuate and sharpen inequalities as well as a theater for strong disputes among developed countries for control over the present and future markets….The developed countries – with 15 percent of the world’s population – presently concentrate 88 percent of Internet users. Just in the United States, there are more computers than in the rest of the world put together. These countries control 97 percent of the patents the world over and receive over 90 percent of the international licensing rights, while for many South countries, the ability to exercise the right to intellectual property is nonexistent….The world economic order works for 20 percent of the population, but leaves out, demeans, and degrades the remaining 80 percent. [2000, p. 150, 154, 158, 159]
Never before has capital penetrated the spaces of the lifeworld that were previously off limits (previously restricted to wage labor but now commodifying subjectivity itself) and done so throughout the entire planet. It is not so much that capitalism relentlessly commodifies all forms of social relationships worldwide until there is nothing left outside (Watkins, 1998), as much as the fact that capitalism discards from its pathways anything that is not of value (Dirlik, 1994 ). Dirlik (1994)notes that four-fifths of the global population is treated as fetid wastage to be removed out of the pathways of global capital flow. Neo-liberal policies have become infamous for removing people from capital pathways, and then fixing the blame on those removed (Watkins, 1998). Never before has the Malthussian spirit risen up with such violence in the rampant neo-liberalism that condemns the worker to remain forever uninivited to capital’s mighty feast. As the poor grow in numbers, as the homeless flood the streets of our cities, they are seen more and more as disrupting the ‘natural order’ of capitalism. And facing this unraveling historical matrix we have, in the Western academy, postmodern theory’s avant-garde celebration of cultural hybridity; the incommensurability of discourses; pastiche, indeterminancy, and contingency; the ironic troping of its commodity status; its textual burlesque; and its celebration of cultural detrius such as kitsch, pop iconography, and samizat publications as the apogee of cultural critique. While not all postmodern theory is to be rejected, there is a species of it that remains loyal to capital’s promotional culture where parody can be paraded as dissent and cultural parasitism masqueraded as subversion and where one can avoid putting political commitment to the test. The academy is a place where Marxism is dismissed as innocent of complexity and where Marxist educators are increasingly outflanked by fashionable, motely minded apostates in svelte black suede jackets, black chinos, and black ’50s eyeglass frames with yellow-tint lenses, for whom the metropole has become a riotous mixture of postmodern mestiza narratives and where hubris shadows those who remain even remotely loyal to causal thinking. For these voguish hellions of the seminar room, postmodernism is the toxic intensity of bohemian nights, where the proscribed, the immiserated, and the wretched of the earth simply get in the way of their fun. Poverty, for them, is at the very least a purgative for an indulgent society and at worst a necessary evil—if you want the material trappings of the American Dream, that is. Where Freire was implacably prosocialist, critical pedagogy—his stepchild—has become (at least in classrooms throughout the United States) little more than liberalism refurbished with some lexical help from Freire (as in words like ‘praxis’ and ‘dialogue’) and such progressive nomenclature often is used to camouflage existing capitalist social relations under a plethora of eirenic proclamations and classroom strategies. Real socialist alternatives are nowhere to be found, and if they are, few have las tripas to make them resoundingly heard in the classrooms of the nation.
I don’t want to suggest that there are no important debates that postmodernism has ushered in—especially by some post-Marxists who have begun to refigure the topic of labor. Postmodern Marxists view as productivist and laborist the many articulations of orthodox Marxism; revolution becomes the consummation of the logic of the desiring machine where social actors "are reborn as ‘bodies without organs’ and remade as cyborgs" (Dinerstein and Neary, 1999 p. 1). For orthodox Marxists, postmodern Marxism discards the concrete quality of labor in favor of its more abstract potentialities, where human emancipation becomes an avoidance of reality (Dinerstein and Neary, 1999). Ultimately, one has to approach the relationship between postmodernism and Marxism dialectically. Dialectics is about mediation, not juxtaposition. The issue is not simply either Marxism or postmodernism. In some instances postmodern theories may be more productive for understanding aspects of social life than current Marxist theories admit. In this book my concern is with arguing against some versions of postmodern theory and their lack of attention to global capitalist social relations and attendant human suffering. However, I am even more concerned with what Marxist theory does best: analyzing and challenging the very viability of capitalism in human society.
We live in unhappy times, in the midst of a global hegemony based on fraud, when our feelings of unhappiness do not appear to be connected to the depredations of capitalist exploitation occurring within the external world. Rather, our feelings are attached to the shimmering surface effects of signs and simulations and the dull radiance that illuminates the spectacles of the everyday. Our external and internal worlds seem to have been split apart. Ana Dinerstein and Mike Neary link this disconnection to the process of disutopia, an abstract crisis of theory. Their comments are worth quoting at length:
Disutopia is the most significant project of our time. It is not just the temporary absence of Utopia, but the political celebration of the end of social dreams. Disutopia should not be confused with apathy, since, although it appears in the form of indifference, the postmodern condition entails an active process involving simultaneously the struggle to control contradiction and diversity, and the acclamation of diversity; the repression of the struggles against Disutopia and the celebration of individual self-determination. The result of this is social Schizophrenia. In so far as diversity, struggle and contradiction cannot be eliminated by political or philosophical voluntarism, Disutopia has to be imposed. Its advocates spend a huge amount of time in de-construction, repentance, denial, forgetfulness. Neurotic Realism in Arts, the Third Way in Politics coupled with its academic justifications, the scientific classification of the horrors of our time, as well as the difficulties for personal relations to become meaningful are some examples that illustrate how the project of Disutopia works. The result of all this together is Mediocrity. (1999, p. 3; emphasis in original)
To challenge the current project of Disutopia, it is important that we do not lose sight of the particular in relation to the totality of determinate social relations. It is important that we do are not enticed by the mistaken notion that the intensified competition made possible by the internationalization of capital has rendered the nation state obsolete. The nation state has been partially restructured, but not destroyed. Callinicos writes that "Although the pronounced tendency towards the global integration of capital over the past generation has severely reduced the ability of states to control economic activities within their borders, private capitals continue to rely on the nation state to which they are most closely attached to protect them against the competition of other capitals, the effects of economic crisis, and the resistance of those they exploit" (1994, p. 54). John Rees concurs with Callinicos’s view, arguing that while the state may have retreated from a direct role in production, it still serves to police the working-class and to provide them with welfare (although even this form of relief is under attack). The state also serves to regulate competing capitals, especially in the realm of conflicts between states and trading blocs (1994, p. 104). If the nation state still co-ordinates exploitation, then it can still serve as a site of anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist struggle. Callinicos notes that capitalist development not only gives rise to imperialism but also sub-imperialist conquest, such as that which we have seen between Greece and Turkey, India and Pakistan, Iran and Iraq. As the most powerful imperialist nation in the world, the United States serves as the patron of numerous sub-imperialist powers. While sub-imperialist countries most often serve as the regional Dobermans for their superpower masters, they may also defy the superpowers in certain instances (such as Iraq’s defiance of its superpower sponsor, the US, in its invasion of Kuwait). The collapse of the Soviet Union has left the United States unmatched in its ability flex its politico-military muscles, and project its power on a global level (Callinicos, 1994). Few individuals can show us the expanse of the concrete social forces and relations that both entrap and enthrall us and the consequences of contemporary inter-imperialist rivalry as powerfully as can Che Guevara and Paulo Freire. Few can illustrate as effectively through their lives and their teachings how labor and the laboring class must serve as the agent of the transformation of capitalist social relations and why the subjectivity of the working class must become the starting point for the development of the ‘new man/woman’ of revolutionary social struggle. And what better and more effective way can critical agency be developed than through the educational efforts of Che and Freire? And while we continue to advocate the defeat of imperialism through the overthrow of capitalism, it is important to struggle against those bourgeois regimes that may, in fact, be taking the anti-imperialist side. As Callinicos (1994) notes, following Lenin, the real anti-imperialist force is that of the socialist proletariat. Heightening the revolutionary capabilties of the social proletariat should, in any case, be the prime objective of any revolionary pedagogy.
A major task of critical educators is to begin to tease out ways in which the pedagogy of these two historical figures can be used as the wellspring for creating the type of critical agency necessary to contest and transform current global relations of exploitation and oppression. Of course, many books have already been written about critical pedagogy, revolutionary pedagogy, feminist pedagogy, and the contributions that Freire has made toward their development. To this end, my own project in critical pedagogy has been to rescue critical pedagogical work from the kind of bourgeois humanism that has frequently made it functionally advantageous to existing social relations, the employer class, the high-echelon personnel of the educational establishment, and the international division of labor.
Some critics on the left argue that it is possible to ameliorate the debilitating impact of globalization by forcing capital to become democratically accountable. They have suggested that while there are problems with a competitive market option, we may wish instead to choose a form of market socialism. Before we can approach this question, we need to understand that capital is not simply a thing; rather, it is a social relation – a specific social relation of labor that is indifferent to human needs and aspirations. As the congealment of abstract, undifferentiated labor, capitalism reduces all concrete labor to its opposite (Hudis, 2000). Labor is the source of all value only insofar as we acknowledge that value itself is abstract labor. Only that which is the product of abstract labor has value in capitalism. As Peter Hudis (2000) notes, capital is a social relation of abstract labor that cannot and must not be reduced to its ‘thing-ness’ but should be conceived as a value-relation. Capital acquires value by obtaining ever more surplus value, or unpaid hours of labor, from the worker who produces it. Capital feeds on devouring as many unpaid hours of abstract labor produced by the worker that it can. In this sense, Marx argues that
The aim of capital is not served merely by obtaining more ‘wealth’….but because it wants more value, to command more objectified labor. But indeed….it can command the latter only if wages fall; i.e. if more living work days are exchanged for the same capital with objectified labor, and hence a greater value is created. (1993,p. 353)
Because the purpose of capital is to reproduce itself, any effort to control capital without fundamentally transforming its basis of value production will only serve to strengthen capital. Until value and surplus value are both targeted for elimination by social reformers, capital will continue relentlessly to self-expand. While many socialists have tried over the years to control capital by ameliorating its more destructive capacities through the establishment of state planning or market socialism, these efforts have been limited because they allow value production to persist. Ken Cole provides a cogent explanation as to why market socialism is untenable as an option. Market socialism won’t work because`creating social relations on the basis of exchange value is flawed, in fact, it’s a fundamental contradiction in terms. Value can’t be evaluated in quantitative terms only. This is because value is a social relation – it is both qualitative and quantitative. What is valued is not just labor time but labor power (the abstract value of the concrete labor time that is worked). This, of course, will vary according to the social demand and social supply of the commodity that is produced as well as the laborer’s control of the means of production. With a model of development founded upon commodity exchange, there will be qualitative changes in the value of the quantitative measure of labor time worked by wage labor, a value that varies with the process and practice of exploitation. Labor time is devalued – the same quantitative amount of labor time is qualitatively worth less as exploitation increases and intensifies. Exploitation is a consequence of power, of the control of the means of production. Labor power, for Marx, thus becomes a form of variable capital whereas the means of production is a constant value (i.e., capital). Because value is a social relation, qualitative changes in the social relation of production – i.e., the conflictual relation between capital and labor – bear directly on the quantitative expression of value as exchange, i.e., as price. We notice that within current global capitalist arrangements, the same concrete labor time actually worked is worth substantially less than it was decades ago. This is because the relationship between capital and labor – expressed in the abstract valuation of concrete labor time – reflected in the exchange value of labor power on a world scale, has declined.
Cole emphasizes that the objective of a large-scale investment program must be premised on a strategy independent of imperialism, a strategy, in other words, of sustainable development and "widely distributed benefits for the people as a whole" (1998, p. 149). This implies decentralization and community participation as well as creative, sustainable technologies, respect for a diversity of ecosystems and societies, and an emphasis on social justice. As Cole warns, when commodity-exchange underwrites the economy, power becomes concentrated in rogue international agencies such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, that worship at the altar of accumulation. Here, consumer choice and the universal rule of property replaces the imperative of citizen’s power and social justice. And again, market socialism is not an option, especially, as Cole emphasizes, when nation states are competing more ferociously than ever to attract foreign capital and when the powers of the state to manage the economy are rapidly diminishing as the internationalization of capital grows stronger. An approach to economic development that supports the revolutionary principles of Freire and Che must work to defund and decommission capital, putting the enterprises of the global robber barons into receivership with the larger purpose of decommodifying and destratifying everyday life.
Reclaiming Critical Pedagogy
The roles and functions of critical pedagogy have changed over time in respnse to shifting societal cofigurations and needs and as a result of the conflictual processes of social transformation. What began as a tactical ploy – bringing critical pedagogy into mainstream teacher education programs – has become a defining priority, establishing an education policy and philosophy of classroom practice whose ideological spectrum runs from center-left to left liberal. One of the founding assumptions of critical pedagogy is that human beings, acting on the external world and transforming it, can, at the same time, change their own nature. However, many – if not most – approaches to critical pedagogy are today characterized by what Hegel referred to as ‘bad infinity,’ because they postulate an endless series of causes and effects within the social order, not in a linear fashion but dialectically, critically mediating the parts (schooling practices) and the whole (capitalist relations within the wider social totality). The contemporary constitution of critical pedagogy is governed by a series of contradictions. Lacking is a clear context and frame of reference that can capture these contradictions within global processes that are restructuring social, economic, and political life in profound ways at this present historical juncture. Against this background, it is important to fashion an historical materialist interpretation of critical pedagogy and to formulate concrete proposals for its evolution and advancement as a crucial form of revolutionary praxis. In the dislocation between an educational system that cries out for a renewed political economy of critical pedagogy and the current depoliticization of critical pedagogy, a renewed and reinvigorated model of critical pedagogy can be won. A recognition of such a disjunction affords a unique way of questioning the thematics capitalist pedagogy and may provide a critical flashpoint for a recondieration of important new possibilities for critical pedagogy.
Given the current times we live in, critical pedagogy needs to reflexively engage its own premises, to challenge its own decidability, and to be self-conscious of its own constructed character. Surely critical pedagogy must not only continue to be critical of its own status as a commodity, it must also remain critical of its own presumed role as the metatruth of educational criticism. The language of critical pedagogy, after all, is also a social system that inscribes subjects. Critical pedagogy in this regard will always be Other to itself, will always be at odds with itself.
It’s important to recognize that now is the time to brush hard against the grain of teaching until the full range of revolutionary pedagogical options are made available in the public schools of the nation, realizing that none of these options is panacean and that all of them will require sustained theoretical and political engagement. Part of this task is exegetical: to recognize and research the distinctions among teaching, pedagogy, critical pedagogy, and revolutionary pedagogy. Part of the task is ethical: to make liberation and the abolition of human suffering the goal of the educative enterprise itself. Part of the task is political: to create a democratic socialist society in which democracy will be called upon daily to live up to its promise.
Teaching is a process of organizing and integrating knowledge for the purpose of communicating this knowledge or awareness to students through an exchange of understanding in prespecified contexts and teacher/learner environments. Pedagogy is distinct from teaching in that it situates the teacher/learner encounter in a wider context of historical and sociopolitical forces in which the ‘act of knowing’ recognizes and takes into account the differentiated politics of ‘reception’ surrounding the object of knowledge by the students. Critical pedagogy constitutes a dialectical and dialogical process that instantiates a reciprocal exchange between teachers and students—an exchange that engages in the task of reframing, refunctioning, and reposing the question of understanding itself, bringing into dialectical relief the structural and relational dimensions of knowledge and its hydra-headed power/knowledge dimensions. Revolutionary pedagogy goes further still. It puts power/knowledge relations on a collision course with their own internal contradictions; such a powerful and often unbearable collision gives birth not to an epistemological resolution at a higher level but rather to a provisional glimpse of a new society freed from the bondage of the past, a vision in which the past reverberates in the present, standing at once outside the world and beside the world, in a place of insight where the subject recognizes she is in a world and subject to it, yet moving through it with the power to name it extopically so that hidden meanings can be revealed in the accidental contingencies of the everyday. Revolutionary pedagogy creates a narrative space set against the naturalized flow of the everyday, against the daily poetics of agency, encounter, and conflict, in which subjectivity is constantly dissolved and reconstructed—that is, in which subjectivity turns-back-on-itself, giving rise both to an affirmation of the world through naming it, and an opposition to the world through unmasking and undoing the practices of concealment that are latent in the process of naming itself.
Che and Freire both recognized that categorizing the world is always a violent act in that it inevitably naturalizes dangerous hierarchies. The revolutionary educator always wounds the ordinary so that it can be seen not as something that is permanently sealed but as a space of wild fluids, of shifting boundaries. The revolutionary educator engages the world reflexively, dedicated to the praxis of transforming knowledge through epistemological critique. Epistemological critique involves more than unpacking representations but also exploring the how and why of their historical production. Revolutionary educators do not merely track the hemorrhaging of signifiers into other signifiers but also explore how these signifiers are concealed within larger organizational formations, institutional arrangements, and concrete and contradictory social relations. For revolutionary educators, knowledge exceeds its semiotic end products; it travels intertextually within demarcated systems of intelligibility. Critical knowledge is understood as persistently open, disclosive, incomplete and open-ended. In this way it remains cautious in the presence of reified social relations and epistemological distortions that occlude both the social ontology of knowledge and its processual journey from ‘fact’ to ‘value.’ In other words, critical epistemological practice not only examines the content of knowledge but also its method of production. It seeks to understand how ideological constructions are encoded and administered, how metonymic and synecdochical gestures are performed so as to obscure relations of domination and oppression, how the interpretive and interpellative frameworks by which we organize our sentiments construct ruling stereotypes and how the governing categories of our everyday discourse render invisible and obscure real social relations of exploitation (see Bannerji, 1995).
The struggle, as I see it, from the standpoint of revolutionary pedagogy, is to construct sites—provisional sites—in which new structured mobilities and tendential lines of forces can be made to suture identity to the larger problematic of social justice. In other words, students and cultural workers need to attach themselves to modalities of belonging fashioned out of new economies of subjectivities and difference. This requires breaking the imaginary power of commodified identities within capitalism as well as the forces and relations that both produce and are products of capitalism.
In their best moments, the pedagogies of Freire and Che exemplify the characteristics of revolutionary pedagogy. While both pedagogical approaches place a profound emphasis on critical literacy and are underwritten by an explicit political project, it is not surprising to find that Freire’s project is more systematic, more coherent, more dialogical, and more self-reflexive than that of Che. Che’s pedagogy was more intuitive, but what made Che so remarkable was that this intuition was profoundly counterintuitive. Yet the political project that unites both Che and Freire speaks to mutual concerns.1 It should be emphasized, too, that Che’s pedagogy is most asssuredly dialectical in nature and grounded in the lived experiences of the oppressed becoming transformed into the "new man" through acquiring a revolutionary consciousness while at the same time ‘living the life’ (what we might colloquially refer to as ‘walking the walk’) of the revolutionary. This meant for Che, as it did for Freire, that education needs to take on an extra-ivory-tower, public-sphere role in contemporary revolutionary movements and in politics in general. However, it was not imperative for Che that everyone become a guerrillero or guerrillera. But it was manifestly important that everyone develop a revolutionary consciousness and engage in actions that directly contribute to the furthering of the revolution.
For Che, the "new man" is not merely a zombified agent who has been whisked to critical consciousness by the winds of revolutionary indoctrination and the repeated declamations of ideologues from Politburo to pulpit. The point d’ appui of critical pedagogy for both these figures was the development of a dialectical grasp of history and of the contradictions of human labor under capitalism; for those of us working in education, this means recognizing and transforming those contradictions that create asymmetries of power in the manufacturing of relations of race, gender, class, and sexuality. Clearly, these revolutionaries did not equate political liberation with the exposure of dominative social practices as a trompe-l’oeil, nor did they consider it sufficient to bewail the trials and tribulations of the dispossessed; they were both unwaveringly committed to transforming those social practices that lay at the root of human exploitation and misery.
Che’s project of revolutionary life avoided the repressive desublimation of the totalitarian ‘leader’ who enjoins his followers to transgress everyday moral rules in the name of some higher good; he did not insist that fellow fighters enjoy what they do. The rules that governed guerrilla life produced a psychic economy of privation and sacrifice that was only survivable when it became affectively invested in a profound desire to overcome the systematic abuses of tyranny and exploitation. To be a guerrilla fighter was not to engage in a stylized revolt against the cohesive, seamless, and sanitized bourgeois self. Nor was it an effort to push subversion into the ethereal realm of the sublime. Rather, to be a guerrilla fighter was, for Che, to stalk state-sponsored terror and defeat it at every turn. It was to create the initial momentum for the popular revolution that would follow in its wake.
In the theater of battle, Che did not have time to create the conditions for peasants to achieve conscientization before he tried to conscript them into his guerrilla project. Nevertheless, he never threatened to use force against—or to cajole or insult—those who were unable to or refused to join him. And to his credit, he never tried to entice them with monetary rewards. Rather, he appealed to their sense of justice, and in entering into discussions with them enjoined them to follow his group of fighters for the good of the collectivity of the toilers of the world.
In addressing the General Assembly of the United Nations, Che proclaimed:
The United States intervenes in Latin America invoking the defense of free institutions. The time will come when this assembly will aquire greater maturity and demand of the United States government guarantees for the lives of th Blacks and Latin Americans wholive in that country, most of them U.S. citizens by origin or adoption. Those who kill their own children and discriminate daily against them because of the color of their skin; those who let the murderers of Blacks remain free, protecting them, and furthermore punishing the Black population because they demand their legitimate rights as free men – how can thhose who do this consier themselves guardians of freedom? (cited in Castro and Guevara, 1992, p. 139)
Che was an internationalist warrior. That, and the welanschauung that gave his politics revolutionary ballast, is something that postmodernists would likely decry in an unearned tone of superiority as a totalizing position: universalizing and sanctifying what in essence is a particular position. In his reply to criticisms of the speech that he made in the United Nations General Assembly in 1964 (Adlai Stevenson was among his fiercest critics), shared the following: "I am a patriot of Latin America and of all Latin American countries. Wherever necessary I would be ready to lay down my life for the liberation of any Latin American country, without asking anything from anyone, without demanding anything, without exploiting anyone" (cited in Castro and Guevara, 1992, p. 147). Che followed these words with a quotation by Jose Marti, noted poet and founder of the Cuban Revolutionary Party in 1892: "Every true man must feel on his own cheek every blow struck against the cheek of another" (cited in Castro and Guevara, 1992, p. 147). When Bolivian Lieutenant Colonel Selich was interrogating Che in the mud-walled schoolhouse in La Higuera, shortly before Che was executed, he was reported to have asked:"Are you Cuban or Argentine?" Che is said to have answered: "I am Cuban, Argentine, Bolivian, Peruvian, Ecuadorian, etc….You understand? (Anderson, 1997, p. 734). Post-marxist educators who denounce in unequivocal terms the ‘modernist’ sins of ‘reductionism’, ‘functionalism’, ‘essentialism’, and ‘universalism’ typically find in the ‘rational’ assertions of Che or classical Marxists evidence of unpardonable offenses against the postmodern theory of discourse. The adjudications of the postmodernists caught up in the cosmopolitan reveries of epistemic suspicion and its ineluctable hermeneutical delights have resulted in searing attacks on Marxists for their ‘causal’ thinking (see McLelland, 1996). However, for many contemporary Marxists, it is understood that a certain amount of reductionism is necessary in any scientific explanation. Gregor McLennan (1996) argues for a form of what he calls ‘weak reductionism’ that postulates a broad, causal sense of connection between economic structures and capitalist class interests that does not substantively devalue the level of explained phenomena. Postmodernists often erroneously attack Marxists for believing that they possess a faultless, pristine and metaphysical approach to the truth that hovers in some metaphysical ether outside the process of history or else that the truth can only be understood from the perspective of the concrete immediacy of working class consciousness. First of all, there is no homogeneous working class. Second, there are always perspectives that outbid those associated with the working class and the capitalist class. It is important always to generalize beyond immediate experience since truth is not wholly internal to the language of experience. Any assessment of the truth must consider the fact that all truth claims are mediated by structural constraints, the summation of historical experience, the codification of meaning-systems, and are trapped within practices of commodity fetishism. Any experience, in order to be recounted, must enter into the domain of theory, since no experience is transparently self-evident. All shared experiences are, to certain extent, generalized or codified within some community of discourse. No experience can willingly vacate its existence from the court of social mediation, not even revolutionary experience. This is a position that many astute Marxists hold, despite the chillingly irreverent assertion by postmodernists that they are to be condemned for ‘essentializing’ working class experience. Yet at the same time, many Marxists would agree that the class position of the proletariat can usefully serve as a unique vantage point from which the working-class can contribute to a generalized theory of society. John Rees notes that "it is not that the validity of marxism only flows from the immediate practice of the working class. It is a theoretical generalization based on the historical experience of the working class, and therefore a theory of society as a whole rather than merely the history of the oppressed. Consequently, its validity must be proven by its superior explanatory power – more internally coherent, more widely applicable, capable of greater empirical verification – in comparison with its competitors" (1998, p. 237, italics original). What is important to recognize is that the ultimate ‘proving ground’ or ‘final arbiter’ of a theory about society is its power to affect the world through praxis, that is, through theoretically informed struggle by the working-class against the capitalist system. This is not the same as arguing that the truth about society can be reduced to the immediate consciousness of the working-class. But because the working-class has the strongest potential to see the truth about society as a class (both in itself and for itself), then they offer a powerful and indispensable vantage point to test the validity of revolutionary praxis (Rees, 1998). Of course, such a pronouncement would undoubtedly seem chronically anachronistic and meta-theorically hidebound to the fashionable apostates of postmodernism and the voguish pundits of post-marxism (the two groups often coquette with each other in their rubbishing of modernist sociology) who signally claim that social class is an outmoded – not to mention unfashionable – category. Like the entrails of a corpse, it should be left alone to rot. Of course, classical Marxist theory does not hold the sociological patent on explanatory adequacy. The social context in which social agents struggle has shifted considerably since Marx’s day, and new theories are needed to thicken the descriptive register of sociological analysis as well as provide a necessary epistemological critique that can help to map out contemporay terrains of social struggle and deal with new, ambivalent domains and subdomains of the social. In spite of this, the backdrop assumptions of Marxism still hold and the contributions of historical materialism repay close examination not because of their archival sanctity but because they are still unembarrassingly crucial for pushing forward the boundaries of emancipatory struggle in the current age of new imperialisms throughout the globe. Hence the importance of the work of Che and Freire in current pedagogical theorizing. Che and Freire serve as rearguard activists against contemporary trends within postmodern theory that not only assert the autonomy of theory from its embeddedness in the productive processes of capitalism but also maintain the separation of theory from the concrete materiality of the world. Their appreciation of the revolutionary potential of the working-class to dethrone the reigning notion that the collective subject of history is dead, and to recenter the educational left in challenging the dialectic of capitalist development in all of its capillary detail and tentacular reach, cannot be overestimated.
Freire’s pedagogy was fertilized more in the domain of critical dialogism than was Che’s, and his vision of the new society was decidedly more open ended. The revolutionary character of Freire’s approach is lucidly reflected in Bertell Ollman’s recent description of what constitutes a ‘dialectical understanding’ of everyday life. Because he believes that the current stage of capitalism is characterized by far greater complexity and much faster change and interaction than at any time in human history, Ollman argues that a dialectical understanding of social life is "more indispensable now than ever before" (1998, p. 342). Ollman articulates a dialectical method that he breaks down into six successive moments. The ontological moment has to do with the infinite number of mutually dependent processes that make up the totality or structured whole of social life. The epistemological moment deals with how to organize thinking in order to understand such a world, abstracting out the main patterns of change and interaction. The moment of inquiry appropriates the patterns of these internal relationships in order to further the project of investigation. The moment of intellectual reconstruction or self-clarification puts together the results of such an investigation for oneself. The moment of exposition entails describing to a particular audience the dialectical grasp of the facts by taking into account how others think. Finally, the moment of praxis uses the clarification of the facts of social life to act consciously in and on the world, changing it while simultaneously deepening one’s understanding of it. These dialectical acts, which are traversed repeatedly over time, bear a striking similarity to the pedagogy of Paulo Freire. Adumbrating Freire’s radical theory of knowledge, powered by a process of dialectical thinking, Paula Allman and her colleagues write:
Freire’s dialectical thinking, all dialectical thinking for that matter, treats history as a process. This is a key pre-condition that enabled Freire to convey a radical theory of what it means to be a human being (a radical ontology) and a radical theory of knowledge (a radical epistemology). Whether they recognize it or not, most people have ontological and epistemological theories or at least assumptions. Freire’s ontological theory is radical because it critiques what it has meant thus far to be a human being and also offers the philosophy of what we could become. Therefore it is not only a theory of being but also a theory of becoming. His theory of knowledge is equally radical/dialectical. Accordingly, no person is an ‘empty vessel’ or devoid of knowledge. Many people have valuable experiential knowledge; all of us have opinions and beliefs; others have greater or lesser degrees of extant—i.e. already existing—knowledge and may even hold qualifications that signify their "possession" of that knowledge. However, in Freirean education the affirmation or acquisition of these types of knowledge is not the end objective of learning but rather the beginning of the dialogical/problem-posing approach to learning. (Allman et al. 1998, p. 11)
The concept of dialectics is, of course, an abstraction intended to help explain the messy and sinewy web of concrete social life and to offer a way of overcoming its contradictions. Admittedly, however, it is difficult to overcome the contradictions of lived experience, even for somebody as politically erudite and sensitive as Freire. Schugurensky remarks that
Freire’s analysis is based on Hegelian dialectics, in which unity is understood as a constant tension of theses, antitheses and syntheses, and change is the resolution of the conflict between two opposites. Theoretically, a dialectical approach overcomes dualism and false dichotomies, but to what extent Freire was able to accomplish this is still open to debate. Similarly, Freire’s tendency to use bipolar strategies has led some disciples to advocate a monolithic rejection of banking education, colonialism, capitalist development and so forth. The complexity of the real world makes such a position difficult to sustain, as it was even for Freire himself. (1998, pp. 24–25)
Freirean pedagogy is a story about the struggle for critical consciousness read against the powerful dialectical contradictions of capitalism that exist between productive labor and capital and between production and exchange and their historical linkage and development. Though to a large extent the guiding narratives of critical pedagogy concern the politics of interpreting revolutionary theory, they also constitute an immensely personal story of the journey of teachers toward critical consciousness. Regardless of the personal, epistemological, ontological, and moral paths that we choose to take as educators, at some point we have to come face-to-face with the naked reality of capitalist social relations in both local and global contexts. We cannot ignore these relations, and if we are to engage in a revolutionary educational praxis, we need to do more than rail against the suffering and tribulations of the oppressed and instead seek ways of transforming them.
One of the most important contributions of Che and Freire was the emphasis they placed on praxis. For both Che and Freire, the dialectic must be disencumbered by metaphysics and grounded in the concrete materiality of human struggle. In the process of becoming fully human, everyday life must be informed by a theory and practice relationship that truly alters ideas and experience within a larger revolutionary dialectic. Paraphrasing Marx, this dialectic operates from each according to her abilities, to each according to her needs, within a context in which the free development of each is the precondition for the free development of all. Raya Dunayevskaya captures this relationship:
[W]ithout a philosophy of revolution activism spends itself in mere anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism, without ever revealing what it is for. We have been made to see anew that, just as the movement from practice disclosed a break in the Absolute Idea that required both a new relationship of practice to theory, and a new unity of practice and theory, so that new unity is but a beginning: Absolute Idea as New Beginning. . . . Absolute negativity manifests its pivotal role in the Idea precisely because it is both totality (summation) and new beginning, which each generation must first work out for itself. . . . Only live human beings can recreate the revolutionary dialectic forever anew. And these live human beings must do so in theory as well as in practice. It is not a question only of meeting the challenge from practice, but of being able to meet the challenge from the self-development of the Idea, and of deepening theory to the point where it reaches Marx’s concept of the philosophy of "revolution in permanence." (1982, pp. 194–195; emphasis in original)
As prisoners of global money lenders we confront a seemingly intractable depredation of the lifeworld through the loss of life-means and growing economic insecurity (McMurtry, 1999). Because of the insuperable greed of the capitalist overworlders, money is less available in the economy to serve the basic needs of people. Over two billion workers throughout the world remain chronically unemployed while the unregulated movement of money capital across boundaries through private money cycles of investment and non-productive speculative siezures of social incomes has created a frenzied money-to-more-money-movement that has invaded everything, including the expanding educational business arena, defunding social justice, downsizing hope for a better future, deregulating responsibility and opportunistically rescinding accountability (McMurtry, 1999). The world of Che and Freire offer apertures through which we can perceive possible lines of resistance to these growing trends.
That Che’s life constituted a visible, palpable, and undeniable supercession of the private want-satisfaction that is the organizing principle of exchange under capitalism, and conveyed instead a new way of living that animated unyielding service to the collective needs of th oppressed and that disclaimed self-gratification as a vested bourgeois trait, made Che functionally disabling in the transformation of human beings into organs of the capitalist marketplace. Freire waged a similar war against the embourgeoisement of the human spirit in the battlefields of literacy education, which made him – famously - a liability in the world of educational statecraft. That Che’s message has survived the onslaught of anti-representationalism, anti-foundationalism, and post-empiricism is not so much a testament to its metahistorical character or the dramatic historiographic dimensions of its performativity (his message was bodied forth in his life and death) but to its world-historical significance in the face of the contemporary crisis of global capitalism and the tumult and history of bloody struggles that have followed in its wake. Che’s life was itself a symptomatic reading of the fate of the world. Che revealed to oppressed groups throughout the globe, that there can occur a sea-shift of political transformation on the part of a small but resolute band of fighters. The oppressors in all of their seeming invincibility could be defeated by a much smaller group of dedicated guerrillas. But unless revolutionary struggle is conducted on a permanent basis, with the full backing of the oppressed, defeat is possible, even likely. It was a risk Che was willing to take. In his own way, Freire took a similar risk in the mine-sown fields of pedagogical practice where education functioned – and still does - on the part of the state as a vehicle for social control, for ethnic assimilation and the reproduction of privileging norms, for the defense of intergenerational class-based continuity, and for non-interference with social relations that are functionally advantageous to the ruling class and the dominant knowledge industry.
Freire managed to outlive Che by over thirty years, and the world has been a greater place because of what he was able to accomplish in his long and arduous journey on the road to liberation. Few individuals have been as successful in moving the human spirit forward as these two men. They have taught us that history cannot erase revolutionary struggle based on the heroic aspirations of the uncommon lives of ‘common’ people. They have also revealed to us that the wounds of history cannot be healed without revolutionary love and a warrior’s spirit tempered to do battle in the streets, in the boardrooms, in the classrooms, and in the factories of the capitalist present—and also in the caverns of the human heart.
Why Che? Why Freire? Why now? Why indeed.
Young people searching for "a new way of humanity" have the examples of Freire and Che to ponder, to inspire and to emulate. For United States youth faced with an eviscerated public sphere, an absence of communal forms and relations, and the constriction of an empty self cobbled out of the scraps and debris of a consumer-based economy, Che’s and Freire’s example of collective solidarity offers a striking alternative.
At the moment of our birth we receive a ticket to Death. No reservations are necessary and our destination is assured. What remains open to fortune is what we choose to do along the way. Che and Freire both understood that we can rail against our fate but we cannot injure eternity. They chose not to mourn destiny but to celebrate the journey of life. To celebrate life always demands sacrificing our ontological security because, as Che and Freire both knew, it is impossible to celebrate life under conditions that do not obtain for all, that did not allow all others to enjoy the fruits of their struggle and labor. As long as others suffer, celebration is empty. But when collective struggle triumphs, that is—and continues to be—a cause for joy. Few figures as vivid as Che Guevara and Paulo Freire have ever crossed the stage of human history. It surely is tragic that their generation did not awaken at their call, but more tragic still is the possibility that future generations will choose not to heed their message nor follow their bold example. We will never see the likes of them again.
,7:42 AM
America's Debt to Journalist Gary Webb
By Robert Parry
In 1996, journalist Gary Webb wrote a series of articles that forced a long-overdue investigation of a very dark chapter of recent U.S. foreign policy – the Reagan-Bush administration’s protection of cocaine traffickers who operated under the cover of the Nicaraguan contra war in the 1980s.
For his brave reporting at the San Jose Mercury News, Webb paid a high price. He was attacked by journalistic colleagues at the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the American Journalism Review and even the Nation magazine. Under this media pressure, his editor Jerry Ceppos sold out the story and demoted Webb, causing him to quit the Mercury News. Even Webb’s marriage broke up.
On Friday, Dec. 10, Gary Webb, 49, was found dead of an apparent suicide, a gunshot wound to the head.
Whatever the details of Webb’s death, American history owes him a huge debt. Though denigrated by much of the national news media, Webb’s contra-cocaine series prompted internal investigations by the Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice Department, probes that confirmed that scores of contra units and contra-connected individuals were implicated in the drug trade. The probes also showed that the Reagan-Bush administration frustrated investigations into those crimes for geopolitical reasons.
Failed Media
Unintentionally, Webb also exposed the cowardice and unprofessional behavior that had become the new trademarks of the major U.S. news media by the mid-1990s. The big news outlets were always hot on the trail of some titillating scandal – the O.J. Simpson case or the Monica Lewinsky scandal – but the major media could no longer grapple with serious crimes of state.
Even after the CIA’s inspector general issued his findings in 1998, the major newspapers could not muster the talent or the courage to explain those extraordinary government admissions to the American people. Nor did the big newspapers apologize for their unfair treatment of Gary Webb. Foreshadowing the media incompetence that would fail to challenge George W. Bush’s case for war with Iraq five years later, the major news organizations effectively hid the CIA’s confession from the American people.
The New York Times and the Washington Post never got much past the CIA’s “executive summary,” which tried to put the best spin on Inspector General Frederick Hitz’s findings. The Los Angeles Times never even wrote a story after the final volume of the CIA’s report was published, though Webb’s initial story had focused on contra-connected cocaine shipments to South-Central Los Angeles.
The Los Angeles Times’ cover-up has now continued after Webb’s death. In a harsh obituary about Webb, the Times reporter, who called to interview me, ignored my comments about the debt the nation owed Webb and the importance of the CIA’s inspector general findings. Instead of using Webb’s death as an opportunity to finally get the story straight, the Times acted as if there never had been an official investigation confirming many of Webb’s allegations. [Los Angeles Times, Dec. 12, 2004.]
By maintaining the contra-cocaine cover-up – even after the CIA’s inspector general had admitted the facts – the big newspapers seemed to have understood that they could avoid any consequences for their egregious behavior in the 1990s or for their negligence toward the contra-cocaine issue when it first surfaced in the 1980s. After all, the conservative news media – the chief competitor to the mainstream press – isn’t going to demand a reexamination of the crimes of the Reagan-Bush years.
That means that only a few minor media outlets, like our own Consortiumnews.com, will go back over the facts now, just as only a few of us addressed the significance of the government admissions in the late 1990s. I compiled and explained the findings of the CIA/Justice investigations in my 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth.’
Contra-Cocaine Case
Lost History, which took its name from a series at this Web site, also describes how the contra-cocaine story first reached the public in a story that Brian Barger and I wrote for the Associated Press in December 1985. Though the big newspapers pooh-poohed our discovery, Sen. John Kerry followed up our story with his own groundbreaking investigation. For his efforts, Kerry also encountered media ridicule. Newsweek dubbed the Massachusetts senator a “randy conspiracy buff.” [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Kerry’s Contra-Cocaine Chapter.”]
So when Gary Webb revived the contra-cocaine issue in August 1996 with a 20,000-word three-part series entitled “Dark Alliance,” editors at major newspapers already had a powerful self-interest to slap down a story that they had disparaged for the past decade.
The challenge to their earlier judgments was doubly painful because the Mercury-News’ sophisticated Web site ensured that Webb’s series made a big splash on the Internet, which was just emerging as a threat to the traditional news media. Also, the African-American community was furious at the possibility that U.S. government policies had contributed to the crack-cocaine epidemic.
In other words, the mostly white, male editors at the major newspapers saw their preeminence in judging news challenged by an upstart regional newspaper, the Internet and common American citizens who also happened to be black. So, even as the CIA was prepared to conduct a relatively thorough and honest investigation, the major newspapers seemed more eager to protect their reputations and their turf.
Without doubt, Webb’s series had its limitations. It primarily tracked one West Coast network of contra-cocaine traffickers from the early-to-mid 1980s. Webb connected that cocaine to an early “crack” production network that supplied Los Angeles street gangs, the Crips and the Bloods, leading to Webb’s conclusion that contra cocaine fueled the early crack epidemic that devastated Los Angeles and other U.S. cities.
Counterattack
When black leaders began demanding a full investigation of these charges, the Washington media joined the political Establishment in circling the wagons. It fell to Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s right-wing Washington Times to begin the counterattack against Webb’s series. The Washington Times turned to some former CIA officials, who participated in the contra war, to refute the drug charges.
But – in a pattern that would repeat itself on other issues in the following years – the Washington Post and other mainstream newspapers quickly lined up behind the conservative news media. On Oct. 4, 1996, the Washington Post published a front-page article knocking down Webb’s story.
The Post’s approach was twofold: first, it presented the contra-cocaine allegations as old news – “even CIA personnel testified to Congress they knew that those covert operations involved drug traffickers,” the Post reported – and second, the Post minimized the importance of the one contra smuggling channel that Webb had highlighted – that it had not “played a major role in the emergence of crack.” A Post side-bar story dismissed African-Americans as prone to “conspiracy fears.”
Soon, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times joined in the piling on of Gary Webb. The big newspapers made much of the CIA’s internal reviews in 1987 and 1988 that supposedly cleared the spy agency of a role in contra-cocaine smuggling.
But the CIA's decade-old cover-up began to crumble on Oct. 24, 1996, when CIA Inspector General Hitz conceded before the Senate Intelligence Committee that the first CIA probe had lasted only 12 days, the second only three days. He promised a more thorough review.
Mocking Webb
Meanwhile, however, Gary Webb became the target of outright media ridicule. Influential Post media critic Howard Kurtz mocked Webb for saying in a book proposal that he would explore the possibility that the contra war was primarily a business to its participants. “Oliver Stone, check your voice mail,” Kurtz chortled. [Washington Post, Oct. 28, 1996]
Webb’s suspicion was not unfounded, however. Indeed, White House aide Oliver North’s emissary Rob Owen had made the same point a decade earlier, in a March 17, 1986, message about the contra leadership. “Few of the so-called leaders of the movement … really care about the boys in the field,” Owen wrote. “THIS WAR HAS BECOME A BUSINESS TO MANY OF THEM.” [Capitalization in the original.]
Nevertheless, the pillorying of Gary Webb was on, in earnest. The ridicule also had a predictable effect on the executives of the Mercury-News. By early 1997, executive editor Jerry Ceppos was in retreat.
On May 11, 1997, Ceppos published a front-page column saying the series “fell short of my standards.” He criticized the stories because they “strongly implied CIA knowledge” of contra connections to U.S. drug dealers who were manufacturing crack-cocaine. “We did not have proof that top CIA officials knew of the relationship.”
The big newspapers celebrated Ceppos’s retreat as vindication of their own dismissal of the contra-cocaine stories. Ceppos next pulled the plug on the Mercury-News’ continuing contra-cocaine investigation and reassigned Webb to a small office in Cupertino, California, far from his family. Webb resigned the paper in disgrace.
For undercutting Webb and the other reporters working on the contra investigation, Ceppos was lauded by the American Journalism Review and was given the 1997 national “Ethics in Journalism Award” by the Society of Professional Journalists. While Ceppos won raves, Webb watched his career collapse and his marriage break up.
Probes Advance
Still, Gary Webb had set in motion internal government investigations that would bring to the surface long-hidden facts about how the Reagan-Bush administration had conducted the contra war. The CIA’s defensive line against the contra-cocaine allegations began to break when the spy agency published Volume One of Hitz’s findings on Jan. 29, 1998.
Despite a largely exculpatory press release, Hitz’s Volume One admitted that not only were many of Webb’s allegations true but that he actually understated the seriousness of the contra-drug crimes and the CIA’s knowledge. Hitz acknowledged that cocaine smugglers played a significant early role in the Nicaraguan contra movement and that the CIA intervened to block an image-threatening 1984 federal investigation into a San Francisco-based drug ring with suspected ties to the contras. [For details, see Robert Parry’s Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth’]
On May 7, 1998, another disclosure from the government investigation shook the CIA’s weakening defenses. Rep. Maxine Waters, a California Democrat, introduced into the Congressional Record a Feb. 11, 1982, letter of understanding between the CIA and the Justice Department. The letter, which had been sought by CIA Director William Casey, freed the CIA from legal requirements that it must report drug smuggling by CIA assets, a provision that covered both the Nicaraguan contras and Afghan rebels who were fighting a Soviet-supported regime in Afghanistan.
Justice Report
Another crack in the defensive wall opened when the Justice Department released a report by its inspector general, Michael Bromwich. Given the hostile climate surrounding Webb’s series, Bromwich’s report opened with criticism of Webb. But, like the CIA’s Volume One, the contents revealed new details about government wrongdoing.
According to evidence cited by the report, the Reagan-Bush administration knew almost from the outset of the contra war that cocaine traffickers permeated the paramilitary operation. The administration also did next to nothing to expose or stop the criminal activities. The report revealed example after example of leads not followed, corroborated witnesses disparaged, official law-enforcement investigations sabotaged, and even the CIA facilitating the work of drug traffickers.
The Bromwich report showed that the contras and their supporters ran several parallel drug-smuggling operations, not just the one at the center of Webb’s series. The report also found that the CIA shared little of its information about contra drugs with law-enforcement agencies and on three occasions disrupted cocaine-trafficking investigations that threatened the contras.
Though depicting a more widespread contra-drug operation than Webb had understood, the Justice report also provided some important corroboration about a Nicaraguan drug smuggler, Norwin Meneses, who was a key figure in Webb’s series. Bromwich cited U.S. government informants who supplied detailed information about Meneses’s operation and his financial assistance to the contras.
For instance, Renato Pena, a money-and-drug courier for Meneses, said that in the early 1980s, the CIA allowed the contras to fly drugs into the United States, sell them and keep the proceeds. Pena, who also was the northern California representative for the CIA-backed FDN contra army, said the drug trafficking was forced on the contras by the inadequate levels of U.S. government assistance.
The Justice report also disclosed repeated examples of the CIA and U.S. embassies in Central America discouraging Drug Enforcement Administration investigations, including one into alleged contra-cocaine shipments moving through the airport in El Salvador. In an understated conclusion, Inspector General Bromwich said secrecy trumped all. “We have no doubt that the CIA and the U.S. Embassy were not anxious for the DEA to pursue its investigation at the airport,” he wrote.
CIA's Volume Two
Despite the remarkable admissions in the body of these reports, the big newspapers showed no inclination to read beyond the press releases and executive summaries. By fall 1998, official Washington was obsessed with the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal, which made it easier to ignore even more stunning contra-cocaine disclosures in the CIA's Volume Two..
In Volume Two, published Oct. 8, 1998, CIA Inspector General Hitz identified more than 50 contras and contra-related entities implicated in the drug trade. He also detailed how the Reagan-Bush administration had protected these drug operations and frustrated federal investigations, which had threatened to expose the crimes in the mid-1980s. Hitz even published evidence that drug trafficking and money laundering tracked into Reagan’s National Security Council where Oliver North oversaw the contra operations.
Hitz revealed, too, that the CIA placed an admitted drug money launderer in charge of the Southern Front contras in Costa Rica. Also, according to Hitz’s evidence, the second-in-command of contra forces on the Northern Front in Honduras had escaped from a Colombian prison where he was serving time for drug trafficking
In Volume Two, the CIA’s defense against Webb’s series had shrunk to a tiny fig leaf: that the CIA did not conspire with the contras to raise money through cocaine trafficking. But Hitz made clear that the contra war took precedence over law enforcement and that the CIA withheld evidence of contra crimes from the Justice Department, the Congress and even the CIA’s own analytical division.
Hitz found in CIA files evidence that the spy agency knew from the first days of the contra war that its new clients were involved in the cocaine trade. According to a September 1981 cable to CIA headquarters, one of the early contra groups, known as ADREN, had decided to use drug trafficking as a financing mechanism. Two ADREN members made the first delivery of drugs to Miami in July 1981, the CIA cable reported.
ADREN’s leaders included Enrique Bermudez, who emerged as the top contra military commander in the 1980s. Webb’s series had identified Bermudez as giving the green light to contra fundraising by drug trafficker Meneses. Hitz’s report added that that the CIA had another Nicaraguan witness who implicated Bermudez in the drug trade in 1988.
Priorities
Besides tracing the evidence of contra-drug trafficking through the decade-long contra war, the inspector general interviewed senior CIA officers who acknowledged that they were aware of the contra-drug problem but didn’t want its exposure to undermine the struggle to overthrow the leftist Sandinista government.
According to Hitz, the CIA had “one overriding priority: to oust the Sandinista government. … [CIA officers] were determined that the various difficulties they encountered not be allowed to prevent effective implementation of the contra program.” One CIA field officer explained, “The focus was to get the job done, get the support and win the war.”
Hitz also recounted complaints from CIA analysts that CIA operations officers handling the contra war hid evidence of contra-drug trafficking even from the CIA’s analytical division. Because of the withheld evidence, the CIA analysts incorrectly concluded in the mid-1980s that “only a handful of contras might have been involved in drug trafficking.” That false assessment was passed on to Congress and the major news organizations – serving as an important basis for denouncing Gary Webb and his series in 1996.
Though Hitz’s report was an extraordinary admission of institutional guilt by the CIA, it passed almost unnoticed by the big newspapers.
Two days after Hitz’s report was posted at the CIA’s Internet site, the New York Times did a brief article that continued to deride Webb’s work, while acknowledging that the contra-drug problem may indeed have been worse than earlier understood. Several weeks later, the Washington Post weighed in with a similarly superficial article. The Los Angeles Times never published a story on the release of the CIA’s Volume Two.
Consequences
To this day, no editor or reporter who missed the contra-drug story has been punished for his or her negligence. Indeed, many of them are now top executives at their news organizations. On the other hand, Gary Webb’s career never recovered.
At Webb’s death, however, it should be noted that his great gift to American history was that he – along with angry African-American citizens – forced the government to admit some of the worst crimes ever condoned by any American administration: the protection of drug smuggling into the United States as part of a covert war against a country, Nicaragua, that represented no real threat to Americans.
The truth was ugly. Certainly the major news organizations would have come under criticism themselves if they had done their job and laid out this troubling story to the American people. Conservative defenders of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush would have been sure to howl in protest.
But the real tragedy of Webb’s historic gift – and of his life cut short – is that because of the major news media’s callowness and cowardice, this dark chapter of the Reagan-Bush era remains largely unknown to the American people.
In 1996, journalist Gary Webb wrote a series of articles that forced a long-overdue investigation of a very dark chapter of recent U.S. foreign policy – the Reagan-Bush administration’s protection of cocaine traffickers who operated under the cover of the Nicaraguan contra war in the 1980s.
For his brave reporting at the San Jose Mercury News, Webb paid a high price. He was attacked by journalistic colleagues at the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the American Journalism Review and even the Nation magazine. Under this media pressure, his editor Jerry Ceppos sold out the story and demoted Webb, causing him to quit the Mercury News. Even Webb’s marriage broke up.
On Friday, Dec. 10, Gary Webb, 49, was found dead of an apparent suicide, a gunshot wound to the head.
Whatever the details of Webb’s death, American history owes him a huge debt. Though denigrated by much of the national news media, Webb’s contra-cocaine series prompted internal investigations by the Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice Department, probes that confirmed that scores of contra units and contra-connected individuals were implicated in the drug trade. The probes also showed that the Reagan-Bush administration frustrated investigations into those crimes for geopolitical reasons.
Failed Media
Unintentionally, Webb also exposed the cowardice and unprofessional behavior that had become the new trademarks of the major U.S. news media by the mid-1990s. The big news outlets were always hot on the trail of some titillating scandal – the O.J. Simpson case or the Monica Lewinsky scandal – but the major media could no longer grapple with serious crimes of state.
Even after the CIA’s inspector general issued his findings in 1998, the major newspapers could not muster the talent or the courage to explain those extraordinary government admissions to the American people. Nor did the big newspapers apologize for their unfair treatment of Gary Webb. Foreshadowing the media incompetence that would fail to challenge George W. Bush’s case for war with Iraq five years later, the major news organizations effectively hid the CIA’s confession from the American people.
The New York Times and the Washington Post never got much past the CIA’s “executive summary,” which tried to put the best spin on Inspector General Frederick Hitz’s findings. The Los Angeles Times never even wrote a story after the final volume of the CIA’s report was published, though Webb’s initial story had focused on contra-connected cocaine shipments to South-Central Los Angeles.
The Los Angeles Times’ cover-up has now continued after Webb’s death. In a harsh obituary about Webb, the Times reporter, who called to interview me, ignored my comments about the debt the nation owed Webb and the importance of the CIA’s inspector general findings. Instead of using Webb’s death as an opportunity to finally get the story straight, the Times acted as if there never had been an official investigation confirming many of Webb’s allegations. [Los Angeles Times, Dec. 12, 2004.]
By maintaining the contra-cocaine cover-up – even after the CIA’s inspector general had admitted the facts – the big newspapers seemed to have understood that they could avoid any consequences for their egregious behavior in the 1990s or for their negligence toward the contra-cocaine issue when it first surfaced in the 1980s. After all, the conservative news media – the chief competitor to the mainstream press – isn’t going to demand a reexamination of the crimes of the Reagan-Bush years.
That means that only a few minor media outlets, like our own Consortiumnews.com, will go back over the facts now, just as only a few of us addressed the significance of the government admissions in the late 1990s. I compiled and explained the findings of the CIA/Justice investigations in my 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth.’
Contra-Cocaine Case
Lost History, which took its name from a series at this Web site, also describes how the contra-cocaine story first reached the public in a story that Brian Barger and I wrote for the Associated Press in December 1985. Though the big newspapers pooh-poohed our discovery, Sen. John Kerry followed up our story with his own groundbreaking investigation. For his efforts, Kerry also encountered media ridicule. Newsweek dubbed the Massachusetts senator a “randy conspiracy buff.” [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Kerry’s Contra-Cocaine Chapter.”]
So when Gary Webb revived the contra-cocaine issue in August 1996 with a 20,000-word three-part series entitled “Dark Alliance,” editors at major newspapers already had a powerful self-interest to slap down a story that they had disparaged for the past decade.
The challenge to their earlier judgments was doubly painful because the Mercury-News’ sophisticated Web site ensured that Webb’s series made a big splash on the Internet, which was just emerging as a threat to the traditional news media. Also, the African-American community was furious at the possibility that U.S. government policies had contributed to the crack-cocaine epidemic.
In other words, the mostly white, male editors at the major newspapers saw their preeminence in judging news challenged by an upstart regional newspaper, the Internet and common American citizens who also happened to be black. So, even as the CIA was prepared to conduct a relatively thorough and honest investigation, the major newspapers seemed more eager to protect their reputations and their turf.
Without doubt, Webb’s series had its limitations. It primarily tracked one West Coast network of contra-cocaine traffickers from the early-to-mid 1980s. Webb connected that cocaine to an early “crack” production network that supplied Los Angeles street gangs, the Crips and the Bloods, leading to Webb’s conclusion that contra cocaine fueled the early crack epidemic that devastated Los Angeles and other U.S. cities.
Counterattack
When black leaders began demanding a full investigation of these charges, the Washington media joined the political Establishment in circling the wagons. It fell to Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s right-wing Washington Times to begin the counterattack against Webb’s series. The Washington Times turned to some former CIA officials, who participated in the contra war, to refute the drug charges.
But – in a pattern that would repeat itself on other issues in the following years – the Washington Post and other mainstream newspapers quickly lined up behind the conservative news media. On Oct. 4, 1996, the Washington Post published a front-page article knocking down Webb’s story.
The Post’s approach was twofold: first, it presented the contra-cocaine allegations as old news – “even CIA personnel testified to Congress they knew that those covert operations involved drug traffickers,” the Post reported – and second, the Post minimized the importance of the one contra smuggling channel that Webb had highlighted – that it had not “played a major role in the emergence of crack.” A Post side-bar story dismissed African-Americans as prone to “conspiracy fears.”
Soon, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times joined in the piling on of Gary Webb. The big newspapers made much of the CIA’s internal reviews in 1987 and 1988 that supposedly cleared the spy agency of a role in contra-cocaine smuggling.
But the CIA's decade-old cover-up began to crumble on Oct. 24, 1996, when CIA Inspector General Hitz conceded before the Senate Intelligence Committee that the first CIA probe had lasted only 12 days, the second only three days. He promised a more thorough review.
Mocking Webb
Meanwhile, however, Gary Webb became the target of outright media ridicule. Influential Post media critic Howard Kurtz mocked Webb for saying in a book proposal that he would explore the possibility that the contra war was primarily a business to its participants. “Oliver Stone, check your voice mail,” Kurtz chortled. [Washington Post, Oct. 28, 1996]
Webb’s suspicion was not unfounded, however. Indeed, White House aide Oliver North’s emissary Rob Owen had made the same point a decade earlier, in a March 17, 1986, message about the contra leadership. “Few of the so-called leaders of the movement … really care about the boys in the field,” Owen wrote. “THIS WAR HAS BECOME A BUSINESS TO MANY OF THEM.” [Capitalization in the original.]
Nevertheless, the pillorying of Gary Webb was on, in earnest. The ridicule also had a predictable effect on the executives of the Mercury-News. By early 1997, executive editor Jerry Ceppos was in retreat.
On May 11, 1997, Ceppos published a front-page column saying the series “fell short of my standards.” He criticized the stories because they “strongly implied CIA knowledge” of contra connections to U.S. drug dealers who were manufacturing crack-cocaine. “We did not have proof that top CIA officials knew of the relationship.”
The big newspapers celebrated Ceppos’s retreat as vindication of their own dismissal of the contra-cocaine stories. Ceppos next pulled the plug on the Mercury-News’ continuing contra-cocaine investigation and reassigned Webb to a small office in Cupertino, California, far from his family. Webb resigned the paper in disgrace.
For undercutting Webb and the other reporters working on the contra investigation, Ceppos was lauded by the American Journalism Review and was given the 1997 national “Ethics in Journalism Award” by the Society of Professional Journalists. While Ceppos won raves, Webb watched his career collapse and his marriage break up.
Probes Advance
Still, Gary Webb had set in motion internal government investigations that would bring to the surface long-hidden facts about how the Reagan-Bush administration had conducted the contra war. The CIA’s defensive line against the contra-cocaine allegations began to break when the spy agency published Volume One of Hitz’s findings on Jan. 29, 1998.
Despite a largely exculpatory press release, Hitz’s Volume One admitted that not only were many of Webb’s allegations true but that he actually understated the seriousness of the contra-drug crimes and the CIA’s knowledge. Hitz acknowledged that cocaine smugglers played a significant early role in the Nicaraguan contra movement and that the CIA intervened to block an image-threatening 1984 federal investigation into a San Francisco-based drug ring with suspected ties to the contras. [For details, see Robert Parry’s Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth’]
On May 7, 1998, another disclosure from the government investigation shook the CIA’s weakening defenses. Rep. Maxine Waters, a California Democrat, introduced into the Congressional Record a Feb. 11, 1982, letter of understanding between the CIA and the Justice Department. The letter, which had been sought by CIA Director William Casey, freed the CIA from legal requirements that it must report drug smuggling by CIA assets, a provision that covered both the Nicaraguan contras and Afghan rebels who were fighting a Soviet-supported regime in Afghanistan.
Justice Report
Another crack in the defensive wall opened when the Justice Department released a report by its inspector general, Michael Bromwich. Given the hostile climate surrounding Webb’s series, Bromwich’s report opened with criticism of Webb. But, like the CIA’s Volume One, the contents revealed new details about government wrongdoing.
According to evidence cited by the report, the Reagan-Bush administration knew almost from the outset of the contra war that cocaine traffickers permeated the paramilitary operation. The administration also did next to nothing to expose or stop the criminal activities. The report revealed example after example of leads not followed, corroborated witnesses disparaged, official law-enforcement investigations sabotaged, and even the CIA facilitating the work of drug traffickers.
The Bromwich report showed that the contras and their supporters ran several parallel drug-smuggling operations, not just the one at the center of Webb’s series. The report also found that the CIA shared little of its information about contra drugs with law-enforcement agencies and on three occasions disrupted cocaine-trafficking investigations that threatened the contras.
Though depicting a more widespread contra-drug operation than Webb had understood, the Justice report also provided some important corroboration about a Nicaraguan drug smuggler, Norwin Meneses, who was a key figure in Webb’s series. Bromwich cited U.S. government informants who supplied detailed information about Meneses’s operation and his financial assistance to the contras.
For instance, Renato Pena, a money-and-drug courier for Meneses, said that in the early 1980s, the CIA allowed the contras to fly drugs into the United States, sell them and keep the proceeds. Pena, who also was the northern California representative for the CIA-backed FDN contra army, said the drug trafficking was forced on the contras by the inadequate levels of U.S. government assistance.
The Justice report also disclosed repeated examples of the CIA and U.S. embassies in Central America discouraging Drug Enforcement Administration investigations, including one into alleged contra-cocaine shipments moving through the airport in El Salvador. In an understated conclusion, Inspector General Bromwich said secrecy trumped all. “We have no doubt that the CIA and the U.S. Embassy were not anxious for the DEA to pursue its investigation at the airport,” he wrote.
CIA's Volume Two
Despite the remarkable admissions in the body of these reports, the big newspapers showed no inclination to read beyond the press releases and executive summaries. By fall 1998, official Washington was obsessed with the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal, which made it easier to ignore even more stunning contra-cocaine disclosures in the CIA's Volume Two..
In Volume Two, published Oct. 8, 1998, CIA Inspector General Hitz identified more than 50 contras and contra-related entities implicated in the drug trade. He also detailed how the Reagan-Bush administration had protected these drug operations and frustrated federal investigations, which had threatened to expose the crimes in the mid-1980s. Hitz even published evidence that drug trafficking and money laundering tracked into Reagan’s National Security Council where Oliver North oversaw the contra operations.
Hitz revealed, too, that the CIA placed an admitted drug money launderer in charge of the Southern Front contras in Costa Rica. Also, according to Hitz’s evidence, the second-in-command of contra forces on the Northern Front in Honduras had escaped from a Colombian prison where he was serving time for drug trafficking
In Volume Two, the CIA’s defense against Webb’s series had shrunk to a tiny fig leaf: that the CIA did not conspire with the contras to raise money through cocaine trafficking. But Hitz made clear that the contra war took precedence over law enforcement and that the CIA withheld evidence of contra crimes from the Justice Department, the Congress and even the CIA’s own analytical division.
Hitz found in CIA files evidence that the spy agency knew from the first days of the contra war that its new clients were involved in the cocaine trade. According to a September 1981 cable to CIA headquarters, one of the early contra groups, known as ADREN, had decided to use drug trafficking as a financing mechanism. Two ADREN members made the first delivery of drugs to Miami in July 1981, the CIA cable reported.
ADREN’s leaders included Enrique Bermudez, who emerged as the top contra military commander in the 1980s. Webb’s series had identified Bermudez as giving the green light to contra fundraising by drug trafficker Meneses. Hitz’s report added that that the CIA had another Nicaraguan witness who implicated Bermudez in the drug trade in 1988.
Priorities
Besides tracing the evidence of contra-drug trafficking through the decade-long contra war, the inspector general interviewed senior CIA officers who acknowledged that they were aware of the contra-drug problem but didn’t want its exposure to undermine the struggle to overthrow the leftist Sandinista government.
According to Hitz, the CIA had “one overriding priority: to oust the Sandinista government. … [CIA officers] were determined that the various difficulties they encountered not be allowed to prevent effective implementation of the contra program.” One CIA field officer explained, “The focus was to get the job done, get the support and win the war.”
Hitz also recounted complaints from CIA analysts that CIA operations officers handling the contra war hid evidence of contra-drug trafficking even from the CIA’s analytical division. Because of the withheld evidence, the CIA analysts incorrectly concluded in the mid-1980s that “only a handful of contras might have been involved in drug trafficking.” That false assessment was passed on to Congress and the major news organizations – serving as an important basis for denouncing Gary Webb and his series in 1996.
Though Hitz’s report was an extraordinary admission of institutional guilt by the CIA, it passed almost unnoticed by the big newspapers.
Two days after Hitz’s report was posted at the CIA’s Internet site, the New York Times did a brief article that continued to deride Webb’s work, while acknowledging that the contra-drug problem may indeed have been worse than earlier understood. Several weeks later, the Washington Post weighed in with a similarly superficial article. The Los Angeles Times never published a story on the release of the CIA’s Volume Two.
Consequences
To this day, no editor or reporter who missed the contra-drug story has been punished for his or her negligence. Indeed, many of them are now top executives at their news organizations. On the other hand, Gary Webb’s career never recovered.
At Webb’s death, however, it should be noted that his great gift to American history was that he – along with angry African-American citizens – forced the government to admit some of the worst crimes ever condoned by any American administration: the protection of drug smuggling into the United States as part of a covert war against a country, Nicaragua, that represented no real threat to Americans.
The truth was ugly. Certainly the major news organizations would have come under criticism themselves if they had done their job and laid out this troubling story to the American people. Conservative defenders of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush would have been sure to howl in protest.
But the real tragedy of Webb’s historic gift – and of his life cut short – is that because of the major news media’s callowness and cowardice, this dark chapter of the Reagan-Bush era remains largely unknown to the American people.
,7:39 AM
Trapped Like a Rat
By William Rivers Pitt
The funeral for civil rights leader Coretta Scott King on Tuesday was quite a sight to see. The depth of sadness in the room could not be overcome by the happiness that came with the celebration of her life and accomplishments. It was the measure of Mrs. King's impact upon our society that four presidents - Carter, Bush, Clinton and Bush - sat before her flower-draped casket and spoke of her life.
And then, of course, the foolishness began. The nattering nabobs of network nonsense blithered into their cable news studios to deplore all the political statements that were served up before the appreciative crowd in that church. It was the Wellstone funeral all over again.
Let's be clear. The life of Coretta Scott King was one that involved politics from every angle. Any lifelong struggle against poverty, racism and war is going to be a life immersed in politics. That is simply the way it is; because so many politicians and political ideologies center around statements and legislation that directly add to the burdens of the poor and minorities, any person choosing to fight poverty and racism is going to wind up dealing in politics.
Gandhi was elected to no office in his entire lifetime, but every action he took involved politics. The same can be said for Martin Luther King Jr., who won no elections but changed politics in America forever. Coretta Scott King held no office, but her work affected the politics of this country in every way. Ask Gold Star mother Cindy Sheehan, who received a warm telephone call from Mrs. King while standing vigil outside George W. Bush's ranch in Crawford last August. If this was not a political act, then political acts do not exist.
Politics belonged in that church on Tuesday. Period.
A good deal of the humbug arising from the political statements at the funeral are based upon the fact that George W. Bush changed his schedule to appear at the event. Because he did this, the thinking goes, he should be above the pointed criticism he absorbed up on that stage. Smart money says he came to the funeral only to avoid the criticism he would have received had he not shown up with those three other presidents. Smart money likewise says he came to try and shore up his poll numbers with African Americans; his support among this constituency stands in the low single digits, well within the margin of error in any poll, suggesting his actual support among this group is zero. This is, however, an issue for another day.
The central tenet of the civil rights movement has, is and will always be one simple truth: one must speak truth to power in order to affect change. This was the maxim by which Coretta Scott King lived her life, and the maxim by which her husband lived and ultimately died by. Had her funeral not involved speaking truth to power, the ceremony would have been incomplete. George W. Bush heard on Tuesday some hard truths that his fanatical insulation has to date spared him from. It may have been the healthiest moment this republic has absorbed in years.
President Jimmy Carter, who has come to be one of the harshest critics of Mr. Bush, hurled fire across the stage over the deplorable administration response to Hurricane Katrina. "This commemorative ceremony this morning and this afternoon is not only to acknowledge the great contributions of Coretta and Martin, but to remind us that the struggle for equal rights is not over," said Carter. "We only have to recall the color of the faces of those in Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi, those who were most devastated by Katrina, to know that there are not yet equal opportunities for all Americans."
Carter also took a moment to drop a brick over the recent revelations that the NSA has been spying on Americans, without court approval or warrants, at the behest of Mr. Bush. "It was difficult for them personally," said Carter, "with the civil liberties of both husband and wife violated as they became the target of secret government wiretapping, other surveillance, and as you know, harassment from the FBI."
By far, the harshest criticism came from Rev. Joseph Lowery, a King protégé, who spoke of Mrs. King's staunch opposition to the occupation of Iraq. "She deplored the terror inflicted by our smart bombs on missions way afar," said Lowery. "We know now there were no weapons of mass destruction over there. But Coretta knew, and we knew, that there are weapons of misdirection right down here. Millions without health insurance. Poverty abounds. For war, billions more, but no more for the poor."
Would Coretta Scott King have approved of this? One can be certain that the woman who said "If American women would increase their voting turnout by ten percent, I think we would see an end to all of the budget cuts in programs benefiting women and children" would have certainly approved.
This was a day for speaking truth to power, but it was more than that. Mr. Bush and his people have worked incredibly hard to keep this president from hearing anything that rubs against what he believes to be true. He speaks before hand-picked crowds of adoring supporters, never once seeing the face of someone who thinks he is running the nation into the ground. Millions upon millions of protesters have followed his every move, and yet it is almost certain he has never laid eyes upon a single one of them.
On Tuesday, by his own design. George W. Bush was trapped like a rat on that stage. He was forced to listen to eloquent denunciations of his politics and his policies, perhaps for the first time since he took office. The effect upon him was clear; during the speeches delivered by Rev. Lowery and president Carter, Bush looked as if he was sucking on a particularly bitter lemon.
When one speaks truth to power, especially arrogant power, that is usually the effect. Coretta Scott King would have approved.
William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of two books: War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know and The Greatest Sedition Is Silence.
The funeral for civil rights leader Coretta Scott King on Tuesday was quite a sight to see. The depth of sadness in the room could not be overcome by the happiness that came with the celebration of her life and accomplishments. It was the measure of Mrs. King's impact upon our society that four presidents - Carter, Bush, Clinton and Bush - sat before her flower-draped casket and spoke of her life.
And then, of course, the foolishness began. The nattering nabobs of network nonsense blithered into their cable news studios to deplore all the political statements that were served up before the appreciative crowd in that church. It was the Wellstone funeral all over again.
Let's be clear. The life of Coretta Scott King was one that involved politics from every angle. Any lifelong struggle against poverty, racism and war is going to be a life immersed in politics. That is simply the way it is; because so many politicians and political ideologies center around statements and legislation that directly add to the burdens of the poor and minorities, any person choosing to fight poverty and racism is going to wind up dealing in politics.
Gandhi was elected to no office in his entire lifetime, but every action he took involved politics. The same can be said for Martin Luther King Jr., who won no elections but changed politics in America forever. Coretta Scott King held no office, but her work affected the politics of this country in every way. Ask Gold Star mother Cindy Sheehan, who received a warm telephone call from Mrs. King while standing vigil outside George W. Bush's ranch in Crawford last August. If this was not a political act, then political acts do not exist.
Politics belonged in that church on Tuesday. Period.
A good deal of the humbug arising from the political statements at the funeral are based upon the fact that George W. Bush changed his schedule to appear at the event. Because he did this, the thinking goes, he should be above the pointed criticism he absorbed up on that stage. Smart money says he came to the funeral only to avoid the criticism he would have received had he not shown up with those three other presidents. Smart money likewise says he came to try and shore up his poll numbers with African Americans; his support among this constituency stands in the low single digits, well within the margin of error in any poll, suggesting his actual support among this group is zero. This is, however, an issue for another day.
The central tenet of the civil rights movement has, is and will always be one simple truth: one must speak truth to power in order to affect change. This was the maxim by which Coretta Scott King lived her life, and the maxim by which her husband lived and ultimately died by. Had her funeral not involved speaking truth to power, the ceremony would have been incomplete. George W. Bush heard on Tuesday some hard truths that his fanatical insulation has to date spared him from. It may have been the healthiest moment this republic has absorbed in years.
President Jimmy Carter, who has come to be one of the harshest critics of Mr. Bush, hurled fire across the stage over the deplorable administration response to Hurricane Katrina. "This commemorative ceremony this morning and this afternoon is not only to acknowledge the great contributions of Coretta and Martin, but to remind us that the struggle for equal rights is not over," said Carter. "We only have to recall the color of the faces of those in Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi, those who were most devastated by Katrina, to know that there are not yet equal opportunities for all Americans."
Carter also took a moment to drop a brick over the recent revelations that the NSA has been spying on Americans, without court approval or warrants, at the behest of Mr. Bush. "It was difficult for them personally," said Carter, "with the civil liberties of both husband and wife violated as they became the target of secret government wiretapping, other surveillance, and as you know, harassment from the FBI."
By far, the harshest criticism came from Rev. Joseph Lowery, a King protégé, who spoke of Mrs. King's staunch opposition to the occupation of Iraq. "She deplored the terror inflicted by our smart bombs on missions way afar," said Lowery. "We know now there were no weapons of mass destruction over there. But Coretta knew, and we knew, that there are weapons of misdirection right down here. Millions without health insurance. Poverty abounds. For war, billions more, but no more for the poor."
Would Coretta Scott King have approved of this? One can be certain that the woman who said "If American women would increase their voting turnout by ten percent, I think we would see an end to all of the budget cuts in programs benefiting women and children" would have certainly approved.
This was a day for speaking truth to power, but it was more than that. Mr. Bush and his people have worked incredibly hard to keep this president from hearing anything that rubs against what he believes to be true. He speaks before hand-picked crowds of adoring supporters, never once seeing the face of someone who thinks he is running the nation into the ground. Millions upon millions of protesters have followed his every move, and yet it is almost certain he has never laid eyes upon a single one of them.
On Tuesday, by his own design. George W. Bush was trapped like a rat on that stage. He was forced to listen to eloquent denunciations of his politics and his policies, perhaps for the first time since he took office. The effect upon him was clear; during the speeches delivered by Rev. Lowery and president Carter, Bush looked as if he was sucking on a particularly bitter lemon.
When one speaks truth to power, especially arrogant power, that is usually the effect. Coretta Scott King would have approved.
William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of two books: War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know and The Greatest Sedition Is Silence.
Sunday, February 12, 2006,1:41 PM
Race and its continuing significance on our campuses
an interview with Dr. Joe R. Feagin
In the fall of 2002, every college president who was a member of the American Council on Education received a copy of THE CONTINUING SIGNIFICANCE OF RACISM: U.S. COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES. This was the first in a series of occasional papers that ACE will be issuing in the coming months. They chose a noted scholar and graduate research professor in sociology at the University of Florida, Dr. Joe R. Feagin, to write the paper.
The Texas native and Harvard Ph.D. has written more than 40 books and 150 scholarly articles that have focused on racism and sexism. He served as president of the American Sociological Association from 1998 to 2001. His book with Harlan Hahn, GHETTO REVOLTS (Macmillan, 1973), was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. And recently his book RACIST AMERICA: ROOTS, CURRENT REALTIES ANS FUTURE REPARATIONS (Routledge, 2000) won a special award for scholarly contributions from the Racial and Ethnic minorities section of the American Sociological Association.
Recently, BLACK ISSUES IN HIGHER EDUCATION spoke with Feagin about the state of race relations, particularly in higher education.
BI: Why do people feel uncomfortable talking about race in this country?
JF: Until the 1960s, many White Americans--and certainly until the 1950s, most White Americans--did not find it painful to be called "prejudiced" or "racist." Most Whites held so many racial stereotypes and prejudices in their heads up until the '50s and '60s that they were comfortable in expressing overt racism, overt racist attitudes and perspectives. With the 1960s came the constant reminder of the egalitarian values and ideals of this society, that came from the Black civil rights movement, and later the Latino civil rights movement, and even later the women's movement. But the movements of the '60s reminded Whites, and especially White men, of the egalitarian values on which this country was founded. Those values have tended to be more rhetoric than reality. I think one of the reasons Whites today get so upset over "racism" and "racist" is that we want to deny that we have these severe problems that we once cherished and relished.
BI: In your American Council on Education essay you talked about terms such as "reverse discrimination." Many of those terms originated in the academy. What does that say about some of the attitudes in the academy?
JF: Well, if you go back to the 1960s, especially after Lyndon Johnson and the Congress started doing some things to end discrimination, conservative scholars and activists, pundits and politicians worked together through a growing number of conservative think tanks and foundations to develop a counterattack to the many new social programs. One of those counterattacks was directed at affirmative action and civil rights, so they came up with this oxymoronic, really quite moronic, idea of reverse discrimination. You have to give them credit for cleverness because they took a concept of discrimination, which had been the center of a progressive civil rights movement, and appropriated the idea in the sense of the White men who were now paying a small price for the several hundred years of discrimination.
BI: Would the same analysis apply to terms such as "political correctness," that if you spoke out you were accused of being against the system of "political correctness," which was some kind of aberration of the fundamental right of speech?
JF: Yes, the trouble with free speech in this country, of course, is that the people with more money get more speech. So these right-wing foundations have been extremely well funded in developing this counterattack and developing concepts, ideas and language. As part of this counterattack to end the progress that has come under affirmative action, to roll back some of these gains, they've come up with language like "reverse discrimination," which of course does not exist. And since most of the mass media are controlled by conservative White men, they have a great deal of power. They have a great deal of power to force these new terms and ways of thinking on the general public.
BI: Would you say, then, that (Sen.) Trent Loll just said what a lot of people were thinking?
JF: I think Trent Lott's point of view is widely shared in large segments of the White population. It's a minority view in White America, this kind of blatant kind of old Confederate viewpoint that he's expressing. It probably represents only a minority opinion in White America, but it's very strong down here in the South. There are large groups of Whites, particularly White men, who agree absolutely with him, and the best evidence of that is he keeps getting re-elected. That's because Whites vote overwhelmingly for him, and they vote overwhelmingly for him because of his point of view.
BI: So he is not an aberration?
JF: No, he represents a significant percentage of White opinion in this country. The good news is that it's a minority opinion. The bad news is that it's a fairly large minority, particularly in the old Confederacy.
BI: Your report has some very interesting statistics and analysis of the demographic imperative. In terms of the national leadership, on a scale of one to 10, with 10 being extremely important and one being not significant at all, how would you score the national leadership on issues of race?
JF: Clearly, judging from members of Congress or the president and his Cabinet, or even from public opinion polls, issues of racial discrimination are very low, probably down around 2 or 3. I've interviewed a lot of Whites in several research studies besides some of the discussion in that ACE report, and the majority of the White population admits that we had a problem with discrimination and racism in the past, that we have largely dealt with that, that racial discrimination is either dead or dying in this country, and that as a result we don't need remedial programs like affirmative action any more, except maybe in a few rare, special circumstances.
Now the conservative segment, that Lott represents, takes an even harsher view. But I think the moderate middle's opinion is that we had a problem with racism, there's still some Ku Klux Klanners out there, and they're bad, but by and large discrimination is declining or nearly dead in this country and Black people need to get over it, quit being paranoid, and we need to move on. That's probably the typical middle-of-the-road White view.
BI: And what does a comment like Lott's do to that middle-of-the-road viewpoint?
JF: Well, clearly it makes them extremely uncomfortable because it reminds them that their view is incorrect, that there is still widespread racism in this country. People that celebrate Jefferson Davis, for example, as an American hero--and that's an incredible point of view when you think about it--this is a man who led an armed rebellion against the United States, celebrating him and his way of thinking. They can't ignore it. But what they will do is they will marginalize it. They will say, "Well, you know, this is just that fringe element out there."
BI: College presidents typically find that getting too far out front on racial issues tends to be risky business.
JF: The reason is that too many presidents pay most attention to powerful alumni, boards of trustees and state legislatures. That is, they are not leaders. They are followers. And it's the rare, courageous individual who will stand up consistently against those three groups. Now, many presidents will stand up occasionally against one of those groups, but it's very hard when those groups, who tend, all of them, to be White men, take a conservative position on these affirmative action, desegregation, diversity kinds of issues for universities. It's very hard for a president to stand up against that, because every president's job is to raise money and keep his or her college or university going. So they have to pay attention to money, and if money comes from the legislature, the alumni and the board of trustees--"who pays the piper calls the tune," is the old saying. So it's a fairly brave and courageous president who can stand up against that pressure.
BI: It seems that many Americans, by and large, have not directly felt the impact of the demographic imperative?
JF: Well, I think the White mind is mainly ducking this issue right now. And to the extent that Whites think about it, they're confused. Again, because the mass media have presented more stereotyped thinking about this than anything else. And, unfortunately, the main public arguments being made and the main research being done on this is being done by right-wing pundits. It's the right wing that seems to be paying most attention to these changes, and the moderate middle and the liberal Whites just don't seem to have focused on this issue yet and it has, of course, tremendous implications for education. How can colleges and universities that actively recruit student bodies of 18-year-old freshmen duck the fact that 50 years from now 65 percent of those 18-year-olds will not be White?
BI: The events that led to Dr. Camel West's departure from Harvard sent shock waves throughout the Black higher education community. Do you see that as a harbinger of increased marginalization of Black faculty and staff?
JF: I think there is an increasing marginalization of Black faculty, but I would say that's always been the case. I've been rereading reading materials on Dr. (W.E.B.) DuBois lately. He is clearly the greatest American of the 20th century in many ways. He lived to be 93, and even at the age of 90 was touring the world giving lectures ... an incredible intellectual force, founder of the NAACP, brilliant historian ... He never was offered a major regular position at one of our leading universities. And he had to be one of the two or three top intellectuals of his era. Leading Black intellectuals have always been on the margins of our great universities. In order to become part of those universities, to whatever degree they are allowed to become part, most of them, if not all of them, have had to assimilate in a one-way direction to those White-normed college and university environments. That is, they have to give up something. The more outspoken they are about racism in this society, or for that matter any of the problems in this society, the more critical, the more progressive they are, the more they become targets for removal from their positions in this White-normed environment. We have a national scandal right now that almost no one is writing about except some of the Black media. That is that young Black faculty have not gotten tenure at many of our universities. There are just large numbers of Black faculty who haven't gotten tenure, or who have gotten it only after a very bloody, painful battle.
If you look at institutions like mine, the University of Florida, what are we now' Departments on my campus generally have no more than one Black faculty member per department and numerous departments have none. Rarely do you see an inline administrator who is African American. Some of the assistant administrators will be African American, some of the staff jobs will be African American, but African Americans are not seriously considered for heads of major colleges or for heads of the university or top, really super-top, administrators. In virtually all institutions in the country, there are just a handful of Blacks who have made it to those highest positions. DuBois faced the same thing. White universities, White intellectuals just don't pay much attention to Black faculty, no matter how distinguished and brilliant they may be. So Black faculty and administrators are often in marginal positions on today's campuses. They're often just hanging in there against everyday racism, doing the best they can. They don't quit because they know they have to be there to protect Black students and to help the Black students as best they can. But I suspect many of them have thought seriously about just quitting and going into another line of work.
BI: Are you optimistic about the ability of the country to figure out a way to deal with the continuing significance of the issue of race?
JF: Well, I sometimes say I'm a pessimistic optimist. Basically, I'm an optimist because I've got this kind of faith in people, and I think ultimately if the mass media and the elite and the leadership would change, the people would change. But I'm pessimistic because the signs right now are bad. We made great progress in the 1960s, and mainly thanks to Blacks, Latinos and women who went into the streets and were willing to put their lives on the line with Blacks leading the charge. The White elite was pushed in the direction, and many White liberals did the right thing. And then we've kind of moved backward over the last 30 years. We need, clearly, another civil rights movement to push this country forward again. It can be done. In that sense, I'm an optimist.
BI: Some people point to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State Colin Powell and other high-profile appointments as being significant signs of progress. What is your take on this?
JF: Well, the current White strategy for holding down protests, I think, is tokenism. Now some of the tokenism becomes a bit more than tokenism. It can become a modest change. Somewhere between modest and token tends to be the White response when we're not under pressure from civil rights movements to take bigger steps. Most people can't name more than three Black Republicans and that says something about how much this is a matter of tokenism. And so one of the ways you try to head off more substantial change is you appoint one Black person to be the visible token that you can point to when somebody accuses you of having a racist system or running a racist university or a racist organization. One would be impressed if 10 percent or 15 percent of all the key top positions in the government were made up of African Americans. Then you would maybe talk about some substantial integration of the decision-making centers of the society. But having one or two tokens up there does not bring meaningful integration of the system.
BI: You live in Florida, which is a very diverse state. How do you read the ability of Blacks and Latinos to build meaningful and progressive coalitions?
JF: The issue of coalitions among people of color in the United States is probably the chief political issue facing progressives and people of color over the next 20 to 50 years in this country. And yet it is one where there has been no major national conference that I know of calling Blacks, Latinos, Asians, Native Americans together to talk about how we build better coalitions. When I give talks on this demographic issue that you raised earlier, I suggest that one way to improve the country is to have some multiracial coalitions against racism and discrimination since it is in the interests of Blacks, Latinos, Asians, Native Americans to work together against White racism. People always ask me tough questions about that. Well, Blacks and Latinos fight each other in the cities we know about. They don't build coalitions. And Asians fight, they don't want to build coalitions. So why are you optimistic about coalitions? And I'd say well, I'm not especially optimistic about coalitions, but I suspect that some of them are coming because of shared interests among these groups. The big issue is: Can Blacks and Latinos, since they're the largest groups, can they build effective political coalitions to improve the terrible conditions that many in both communities face, both in terms of economic conditions and in terms of racial discrimination?
In the fall of 2002, every college president who was a member of the American Council on Education received a copy of THE CONTINUING SIGNIFICANCE OF RACISM: U.S. COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES. This was the first in a series of occasional papers that ACE will be issuing in the coming months. They chose a noted scholar and graduate research professor in sociology at the University of Florida, Dr. Joe R. Feagin, to write the paper.
The Texas native and Harvard Ph.D. has written more than 40 books and 150 scholarly articles that have focused on racism and sexism. He served as president of the American Sociological Association from 1998 to 2001. His book with Harlan Hahn, GHETTO REVOLTS (Macmillan, 1973), was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. And recently his book RACIST AMERICA: ROOTS, CURRENT REALTIES ANS FUTURE REPARATIONS (Routledge, 2000) won a special award for scholarly contributions from the Racial and Ethnic minorities section of the American Sociological Association.
Recently, BLACK ISSUES IN HIGHER EDUCATION spoke with Feagin about the state of race relations, particularly in higher education.
BI: Why do people feel uncomfortable talking about race in this country?
JF: Until the 1960s, many White Americans--and certainly until the 1950s, most White Americans--did not find it painful to be called "prejudiced" or "racist." Most Whites held so many racial stereotypes and prejudices in their heads up until the '50s and '60s that they were comfortable in expressing overt racism, overt racist attitudes and perspectives. With the 1960s came the constant reminder of the egalitarian values and ideals of this society, that came from the Black civil rights movement, and later the Latino civil rights movement, and even later the women's movement. But the movements of the '60s reminded Whites, and especially White men, of the egalitarian values on which this country was founded. Those values have tended to be more rhetoric than reality. I think one of the reasons Whites today get so upset over "racism" and "racist" is that we want to deny that we have these severe problems that we once cherished and relished.
BI: In your American Council on Education essay you talked about terms such as "reverse discrimination." Many of those terms originated in the academy. What does that say about some of the attitudes in the academy?
JF: Well, if you go back to the 1960s, especially after Lyndon Johnson and the Congress started doing some things to end discrimination, conservative scholars and activists, pundits and politicians worked together through a growing number of conservative think tanks and foundations to develop a counterattack to the many new social programs. One of those counterattacks was directed at affirmative action and civil rights, so they came up with this oxymoronic, really quite moronic, idea of reverse discrimination. You have to give them credit for cleverness because they took a concept of discrimination, which had been the center of a progressive civil rights movement, and appropriated the idea in the sense of the White men who were now paying a small price for the several hundred years of discrimination.
BI: Would the same analysis apply to terms such as "political correctness," that if you spoke out you were accused of being against the system of "political correctness," which was some kind of aberration of the fundamental right of speech?
JF: Yes, the trouble with free speech in this country, of course, is that the people with more money get more speech. So these right-wing foundations have been extremely well funded in developing this counterattack and developing concepts, ideas and language. As part of this counterattack to end the progress that has come under affirmative action, to roll back some of these gains, they've come up with language like "reverse discrimination," which of course does not exist. And since most of the mass media are controlled by conservative White men, they have a great deal of power. They have a great deal of power to force these new terms and ways of thinking on the general public.
BI: Would you say, then, that (Sen.) Trent Loll just said what a lot of people were thinking?
JF: I think Trent Lott's point of view is widely shared in large segments of the White population. It's a minority view in White America, this kind of blatant kind of old Confederate viewpoint that he's expressing. It probably represents only a minority opinion in White America, but it's very strong down here in the South. There are large groups of Whites, particularly White men, who agree absolutely with him, and the best evidence of that is he keeps getting re-elected. That's because Whites vote overwhelmingly for him, and they vote overwhelmingly for him because of his point of view.
BI: So he is not an aberration?
JF: No, he represents a significant percentage of White opinion in this country. The good news is that it's a minority opinion. The bad news is that it's a fairly large minority, particularly in the old Confederacy.
BI: Your report has some very interesting statistics and analysis of the demographic imperative. In terms of the national leadership, on a scale of one to 10, with 10 being extremely important and one being not significant at all, how would you score the national leadership on issues of race?
JF: Clearly, judging from members of Congress or the president and his Cabinet, or even from public opinion polls, issues of racial discrimination are very low, probably down around 2 or 3. I've interviewed a lot of Whites in several research studies besides some of the discussion in that ACE report, and the majority of the White population admits that we had a problem with discrimination and racism in the past, that we have largely dealt with that, that racial discrimination is either dead or dying in this country, and that as a result we don't need remedial programs like affirmative action any more, except maybe in a few rare, special circumstances.
Now the conservative segment, that Lott represents, takes an even harsher view. But I think the moderate middle's opinion is that we had a problem with racism, there's still some Ku Klux Klanners out there, and they're bad, but by and large discrimination is declining or nearly dead in this country and Black people need to get over it, quit being paranoid, and we need to move on. That's probably the typical middle-of-the-road White view.
BI: And what does a comment like Lott's do to that middle-of-the-road viewpoint?
JF: Well, clearly it makes them extremely uncomfortable because it reminds them that their view is incorrect, that there is still widespread racism in this country. People that celebrate Jefferson Davis, for example, as an American hero--and that's an incredible point of view when you think about it--this is a man who led an armed rebellion against the United States, celebrating him and his way of thinking. They can't ignore it. But what they will do is they will marginalize it. They will say, "Well, you know, this is just that fringe element out there."
BI: College presidents typically find that getting too far out front on racial issues tends to be risky business.
JF: The reason is that too many presidents pay most attention to powerful alumni, boards of trustees and state legislatures. That is, they are not leaders. They are followers. And it's the rare, courageous individual who will stand up consistently against those three groups. Now, many presidents will stand up occasionally against one of those groups, but it's very hard when those groups, who tend, all of them, to be White men, take a conservative position on these affirmative action, desegregation, diversity kinds of issues for universities. It's very hard for a president to stand up against that, because every president's job is to raise money and keep his or her college or university going. So they have to pay attention to money, and if money comes from the legislature, the alumni and the board of trustees--"who pays the piper calls the tune," is the old saying. So it's a fairly brave and courageous president who can stand up against that pressure.
BI: It seems that many Americans, by and large, have not directly felt the impact of the demographic imperative?
JF: Well, I think the White mind is mainly ducking this issue right now. And to the extent that Whites think about it, they're confused. Again, because the mass media have presented more stereotyped thinking about this than anything else. And, unfortunately, the main public arguments being made and the main research being done on this is being done by right-wing pundits. It's the right wing that seems to be paying most attention to these changes, and the moderate middle and the liberal Whites just don't seem to have focused on this issue yet and it has, of course, tremendous implications for education. How can colleges and universities that actively recruit student bodies of 18-year-old freshmen duck the fact that 50 years from now 65 percent of those 18-year-olds will not be White?
BI: The events that led to Dr. Camel West's departure from Harvard sent shock waves throughout the Black higher education community. Do you see that as a harbinger of increased marginalization of Black faculty and staff?
JF: I think there is an increasing marginalization of Black faculty, but I would say that's always been the case. I've been rereading reading materials on Dr. (W.E.B.) DuBois lately. He is clearly the greatest American of the 20th century in many ways. He lived to be 93, and even at the age of 90 was touring the world giving lectures ... an incredible intellectual force, founder of the NAACP, brilliant historian ... He never was offered a major regular position at one of our leading universities. And he had to be one of the two or three top intellectuals of his era. Leading Black intellectuals have always been on the margins of our great universities. In order to become part of those universities, to whatever degree they are allowed to become part, most of them, if not all of them, have had to assimilate in a one-way direction to those White-normed college and university environments. That is, they have to give up something. The more outspoken they are about racism in this society, or for that matter any of the problems in this society, the more critical, the more progressive they are, the more they become targets for removal from their positions in this White-normed environment. We have a national scandal right now that almost no one is writing about except some of the Black media. That is that young Black faculty have not gotten tenure at many of our universities. There are just large numbers of Black faculty who haven't gotten tenure, or who have gotten it only after a very bloody, painful battle.
If you look at institutions like mine, the University of Florida, what are we now' Departments on my campus generally have no more than one Black faculty member per department and numerous departments have none. Rarely do you see an inline administrator who is African American. Some of the assistant administrators will be African American, some of the staff jobs will be African American, but African Americans are not seriously considered for heads of major colleges or for heads of the university or top, really super-top, administrators. In virtually all institutions in the country, there are just a handful of Blacks who have made it to those highest positions. DuBois faced the same thing. White universities, White intellectuals just don't pay much attention to Black faculty, no matter how distinguished and brilliant they may be. So Black faculty and administrators are often in marginal positions on today's campuses. They're often just hanging in there against everyday racism, doing the best they can. They don't quit because they know they have to be there to protect Black students and to help the Black students as best they can. But I suspect many of them have thought seriously about just quitting and going into another line of work.
BI: Are you optimistic about the ability of the country to figure out a way to deal with the continuing significance of the issue of race?
JF: Well, I sometimes say I'm a pessimistic optimist. Basically, I'm an optimist because I've got this kind of faith in people, and I think ultimately if the mass media and the elite and the leadership would change, the people would change. But I'm pessimistic because the signs right now are bad. We made great progress in the 1960s, and mainly thanks to Blacks, Latinos and women who went into the streets and were willing to put their lives on the line with Blacks leading the charge. The White elite was pushed in the direction, and many White liberals did the right thing. And then we've kind of moved backward over the last 30 years. We need, clearly, another civil rights movement to push this country forward again. It can be done. In that sense, I'm an optimist.
BI: Some people point to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State Colin Powell and other high-profile appointments as being significant signs of progress. What is your take on this?
JF: Well, the current White strategy for holding down protests, I think, is tokenism. Now some of the tokenism becomes a bit more than tokenism. It can become a modest change. Somewhere between modest and token tends to be the White response when we're not under pressure from civil rights movements to take bigger steps. Most people can't name more than three Black Republicans and that says something about how much this is a matter of tokenism. And so one of the ways you try to head off more substantial change is you appoint one Black person to be the visible token that you can point to when somebody accuses you of having a racist system or running a racist university or a racist organization. One would be impressed if 10 percent or 15 percent of all the key top positions in the government were made up of African Americans. Then you would maybe talk about some substantial integration of the decision-making centers of the society. But having one or two tokens up there does not bring meaningful integration of the system.
BI: You live in Florida, which is a very diverse state. How do you read the ability of Blacks and Latinos to build meaningful and progressive coalitions?
JF: The issue of coalitions among people of color in the United States is probably the chief political issue facing progressives and people of color over the next 20 to 50 years in this country. And yet it is one where there has been no major national conference that I know of calling Blacks, Latinos, Asians, Native Americans together to talk about how we build better coalitions. When I give talks on this demographic issue that you raised earlier, I suggest that one way to improve the country is to have some multiracial coalitions against racism and discrimination since it is in the interests of Blacks, Latinos, Asians, Native Americans to work together against White racism. People always ask me tough questions about that. Well, Blacks and Latinos fight each other in the cities we know about. They don't build coalitions. And Asians fight, they don't want to build coalitions. So why are you optimistic about coalitions? And I'd say well, I'm not especially optimistic about coalitions, but I suspect that some of them are coming because of shared interests among these groups. The big issue is: Can Blacks and Latinos, since they're the largest groups, can they build effective political coalitions to improve the terrible conditions that many in both communities face, both in terms of economic conditions and in terms of racial discrimination?
,1:32 PM
Clash of the Uncivilized: Insights on the Cartoon Controversy
By Imam Zaid Shakir
As the crisis that has emerged in the aftermath of the publication of the infamous cartoons that claim to depict the Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings of God upon him, escalates, we would do well by stepping back and attempting to analyze the situation as dispassionately as possible. By doing so, as Muslims, we can hopefully formulate a more productive and meaningful response, and avoid being exploited by either side in the ongoing conflict. Saying this, I do not mean to imply that Muslims are not justifiably angry over the caricatures. However, I would agree with those who argue that responses that involve wild outbreaks of frenzied violence are inappropriate, and they only affirm what the cartoonist is trying to imply. Namely, that Islam is a religion that encourages obscurantist violence and terrorism.
The current crisis shows the extent we Muslims are vulnerable to media manipulation, superficial shows of piety, and counterproductive one-upmanship militancy. If we start with the issue of media manipulation, it is clear that Western and Eastern media outlets played a large role in stirring up Muslim, and now Western sentiments. When the crisis initially broke in September, it was barely a blip on the media radar. Few outside of Denmark even knew of the cartoons. The Danish Muslim community, appropriately, by and large ignored the story. [1] It was only after a campaign undertaken by a delegation of Danish Muslim community activists to stimulate greater interest in the issue that the crisis reached the proportions we are currently witnessing. These activists traveled throughout the Muslim East trying to draw attention to the issue. When the issue was popularized by Iqra and other Arab satellite channels, and the cartoons were reprinted by several European papers, the crisis deepened. In light of that reality, it would be hard to deny the role the media has played in sparking and now perpetuating the crisis.
A question we must ask is if these cartoons, which are an example of hundreds of other anti-Islamic slights occurring daily in Europe and America, were not brought to the attention of Muslims by the media, would we be undergoing the current brouhaha? - Clearly not. That being the case, what does this say about our strategic vision? What does this say about our level of political maturity? And what does it say about our ability to engage in meaningful proactive work? The answers to these questions are obvious. We get angry about Israeli troops breaking the bones of Palestinian children, as long as it is in the media. When it disappears from our television screens, our interest vanishes with it. We raise millions of dollars for those affected by the Tsunami, as long as the images of death and destruction are beamed into our homes by the media. However, when the coverage shifts to other issues, the donations dry up. As for those crises that do not make the news in a big way, such as the ongoing famines in Mali, Niger, and the Horn of Africa, we are hardly stirred to action.
Furthermore, we go on living our lives oblivious to the ongoing abuse of Islam and our Prophet, peace and blessing of God upon him, until it becomes a major media event. At that point based on urgings issued by parties, the origins of their dubious agendas unknown to us, we are expected to drop everything and hastily rush into the fray. In many instances, our ill-conceived actions only make the situation worse.
Sometimes, those actions may constitute superficial shows of piety emanating from the mob hysteria underlying them. In the mob we are empowered, and find it easy to confront our opponents, defy the rule of law, behave with wanton abandon, or engage in other acts which under the proper circumstances we may view as supporting Islam. In terms of more constructive mass actions, such as emerging into the streets by the tens of thousands to protest the brutal, authoritarian regimes that make a mockery of the prophetic ideals of justice, mutual consultation, and service to the oppressed and downtrodden of society, we come up terribly short. Similarly, there are no credible grassroots efforts towards forming effective anti-defamation organizations to bring constructive legal action against transgressing organizations and individuals, on a fulltime, proactive basis. As individuals, we find it difficult to support the Prophet, peace and blessings of God upon him, by adorning ourselves with his lofty character traits, or reviving His Sunnah in our daily lives.
On the other hand, as mentioned above, it is all too easy to get swept up into the mob hysteria generated by the crowd, and then engage in outrageous actions that only affirm the offensive claims of the transgressing cartoonist. It is as if we are saying, “We’ll show the Kafirs our Prophet, peace upon him was no terrorist! We’ll defame the symbols of their religion [2] burn their embassies, murder their unsuspecting innocents, and behead the bloody cartoonist if we get our hands on him.” [3]
This brings us to my third point, that of counterproductive, one-upmanship militancy. It is during these crises that all Muslims are supposed to drop everything and join the latest “Jihad” fad. Those of us who urge restraint are mocked as not being militant enough, or ridiculed as cowards who are afraid to “stand up to the real enemies of Islam.” No differences in understanding, interpretation, or strategy are allowed, because there is only one correct approach, the one stumbled upon with the aid of modern, sensationalizing media.
Such a reactive, haphazard approach is counterproductive for a number of reasons. First of all, it destroys the basis for proactive work based on the existence of a strategic vision. As long as the enemies of Islam know that they can mobilize the Muslims to chase after an unimaginable number of distracting issues, divide our ranks by those issues, and diffuse our energies through their debate and the pursuit of their resolution, they will possess a trump card that will affect our ability to unite and work more effectively towards creating and implementing an agenda capable of effecting meaningful change in our circumstance. It also blinds us to the underlying agenda that reckless spontaneous action might be unwittingly serving.
For example, it is interesting that these events have come to a head in the immediate aftermath of the stunning landslide victory of Hamas in the Palestinian elections. That victory has rekindled, both in the East and the West, the debate around the implications of supporting democratization in the Muslim world when the biggest winners will be Islamic parties and movements. There are secularists in both the West and the Muslim world who advocate ending the democratizing experiment on that basis. However, they know that denying the democratic will of the Muslim peoples cannot be done without the support of the masses of people in Europe and America. These masses, especially in Britain and America, are increasingly wary of their governments’ nefarious agenda for the Middle East. However, the frightening images of crazed crowds rampaging, looting, and burning provides a powerful justification for the extreme, repressive policies being advocated by the far right for dealing with Islam and Muslims, both domestically, and internationally. Democracy in the Muslim world, they argue, will bring the advocates of mob rule to power.
If brutal draconian measures, such as those employed to end the democratization process in Algeria in the early 1990s, are employed elsewhere, the Western public will be psychologically prepared to accept those measures, because of the fear that has been created around the “Islamic” alternative. That fear can not only be used to justify denying the democratic will of the Muslim peoples, it can also be used to justify denying their legitimate strategic ambitions. A recent editorial in the Jerusalem Post links the fanaticism of the cartoon protests to the lawful nuclear ambitions of Iran. It states, “If anyone wants to appreciate why the West views with such suspicion the weapons programs of Muslim states such as Iran, they need look no further than the intolerance Muslim regimes exhibit to these cartoons, and what this portends.”
This crisis has also occurred in the immediate aftermath of the appearance of the latest “Bin Laden” tape, intensified warnings of an imminent major terrorist attack in the West, something "on the scale of 9/11," and it coincides with the escape of the alleged mastermind of the attack on the USS Cole from a Yemeni jail. The fear associated with the latter two events, combined with the images of hysterical protesters, work to create a climate that can support unprecedented measures if another major terrorist attack were to occur in the near future –whoever the perpetrators may be.
In addition to the setbacks on the psychological front, the current crisis indicates just how bad we are losing in the Jihad of ideas. It is not without significance that the ultimate objective of Jihad is linked to ideas. The Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings of God upon him, was asked about a man who fought to display his bravery, another who fought out of fealty to his tribe, and a third who fought to show off. Which had fought in the Way of God? He replied, peace and blessings of God upon him, “The one who fought to make the Word of God uppermost has fought in the Way of God.”[4] Is the nature of the current campaign working to make the Word of God uppermost? Every Muslim needs to ask that question.
As Muslims, we are carrying the Word of God in an increasingly secular, militarized, and alienated world. What it means to carry that word is not an unknowable abstraction. We carry it by following the concrete example of our Noble Messenger Muhammad, peace and blessings of God upon him. In carrying the word, he endured unimaginable abuses and he persevered through them because he was inspired by a grand vision. That vision was to see his people saved by the life-giving, life-affirming message of Islam. No greater illustration of this can be given than the story of his expulsion from the city of Ta’if, after the arrogant leaders of that town unleashed the fools, slaves, and children against him.
In the aftermath of that onslaught, the Prophet, peace and blessings of God upon him, humbly raised his hands towards the sky and prayed:
O, God! Unto you alone do I plead my lack of strength, the paucity of my efforts, and my humiliation before the people. O, the Most Merciful of all! You are the Lord of the oppressed, you are my Lord. Unto who have you dispatched me? To a distant host who receives me repugnantly? Or to an enemy you have authorized over my affair? If you are not angry with me, I care not. It is only your goodness I seek to be covered with. I seek refuge with the Light of your Face, through which the darkness is illuminated and all the affairs of the world and hereafter are rectified, that you do not cast your anger down on me, nor cause your wrath to settle upon me. There is neither strength, nor power but with You. [5]
Two significant events are then related after this prayer was uttered by the Prophet, peace and blessing of God upon him. First of all, when presented with an offer by the Angels that God crush the city of Ta’if, the Prophet, peace and blessings of God upon him, refused saying that perhaps from the offspring of the offending hosts, there would emerge those who would worship God. This incident is well known. A lesser known incident associated with the journey to Ta’if occurred when the Prophet, peace and blessings of God upon him, was preparing to reenter Mecca, in the company of his companion Zaid bin Haritha. Zaid asked, “How can you reenter their presence when they have expelled you?” The Prophet, peace and blessings of God upon him, replied, “O, Zaid! God is bringing about through these events you have witnessed a great opening. God is most capable of assisting His religion, and manifesting the truth of His prophet.”
One of the most disturbing aspects of the current campaign to “Assist the Prophet,” for many converts, like this writer, is the implicit assumption that there is no da’wah work being undertaken here in the West, and no one is currently, or will in the future enter Islam in these lands. Therefore, it does not matter what transpires in the Muslim East. Muslims can behave in the most barbaric fashion, murder, plunder, pillage, brutalize and kidnap civilians, desecrate the symbols of other religions, trample on their honor, discard their values and mores, and massacre their fellow Muslims. If any of that undermines the works of Muslims in these Western lands, it does not matter. If it places a barrier between the Western people and Islam, when many of those people are in the most desperate need of Islam, it does not matter. If our Prophet, peace and blessings of God upon him, had responded to those who abused him in Ta’if with similar disregard, none of the generations of Muslims who have come from the descendants of those transgressors would have seen the light of day.
These campaigns of desperation also implicitly display a lack of confidence in God’s ability to protect his religion and defend the honor of His Prophet, peace and blessings of God upon him. We should do what we can do within lawful limits, and then we depute the affair to God. When we despair of help from God and find ourselves with limited strategic resources, we sometimes press forward with the most desperate tactics imaginable, taking little time to assess the compatibility of those tactics with Islamic teachings, or their long-term implications for the cause of Islam, especially in the West.
There are certainly more constructive and productive ways to defend the honor of the Prophet, peace and blessings of God upon him. Why are we calling for a “Day of Outrage” when our Prophet has instructed us repeatedly not to become angry? There are surely times when we should become angry for the sake of God. However, under the current circumstances, are anger and outrage appropriate responses? Why not a “Day of Familiarization,” where we teach people who the Prophet was and what he really represents, peace and blessings of God upon him? Why not a “Day of Sunnah,” where we all vow to revive a Sunnah we have allowed to slip away from our religious life. Such a day could also include the Sunnah of showing concern for ones neighbors? We could visit them and tell them about Islam and our beloved Prophet, peace and blessings of God upon him.
Whatever we do, as Muslims in the West, we may be approaching the day when we will have to "go it alone." If our coreligionists in the East cannot respect the fact that we are trying to accomplish things here in the West, and that their oftentimes ill-considered actions undermine that work in many instances, then it will be hard for us to consider them allies. How can one be an ally when he fails to consult you concerning actions whose negative consequences you will suffer? No one from the Muslim east consults us before launching these campaigns. No one seeks to find out as to how their actions are going to affect our lives and families. The confused incompetence of the Muslim countries around the issue of moon-sighting, a situation that has painful consequences for Muslims here in America is bad enough, the added pressure generated by these reoccurring crises is becoming unbearable for many.
We have a generation of Muslim children here who have to go to schools where most of them are small minorities facing severe peer pressure. During these crises they do not have the luxury of losing themselves in a frenzied mob. Their faith is challenged and many decide to simply stop identifying with Islam. Is that what they deserve? If they are largely lost to Islam, what is the future of our religion here? We have obedient, pious Hijab wearing women, who out of necessity must work, usually in places where they are the only Muslims. Should their safety, dignity, and honor be jeopardized by the actions of Muslims halfway around the world?
I reiterate that I am not saying these cartoons, and other denigrations of our religion and our Prophet, peace and blessings of God upon him, should be totally ignored. Imam Shafi’i stated that anyone who is angered and does not respond; he is a jackass. However, our responses should be weighed on the basis of a strategic calculus we construct. Their timing should be determined by that calculus, not by media sensationalizing. They should be undertaken in consultation with those who will be directly affected by the responses they generate. And their long-range implications should be deeply considered.
In conclusion, one should not see the ongoing crisis as a clash of civilizations. Phenomena as deep and complex as civilizations cannot be thrown into conflict overnight by media-driven campaigns. A clash of civilizations would also involve the overwhelming majority of people identified by a particular civilizational nexus. The current crisis is the result of a regrettable incident that has been exploited by an uncivilized minority of provocateurs both in the West and the East to advance their conflicting agendas. As long as that exploitation continues, the crisis could aptly be called the clash of the uncivilized.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] We say appropriately because the measured response of the Danish Muslim community killed the story. Certainly part of the defense of the Prophet’s honor is to keep these images out of the media. The initial response of the Danish Muslims did just that.
[2] The Danish flag prominently displays a cross, the symbol of Christianity. Hence, every time a Danish flag is burned or trampled on, the symbol of Christianity is desecrated. A similar transgression against Islam would occur if the Saudi flag, which contains the Name of Allah, and the declaration of Tawhid La ilaha illa Allah were burned or trampled. The question here is has the entirety of Christendom transgressed against the Muslim people in a way to justify an attack on the symbol of their faith?
[3] Protestors in Britain this past Friday threatened suicide bombing attacks in European cities, and the beheading of the offending cartoonists. Insightfully, the British Muslim youth protesting wearing a mock suicide bomber’s vest turned out to be a convicted heroin and crack dealer, out on parole. It is a lot easier to mobilize the Muslim youth for the anti-cartoon Jihad than to deal with the rising rates of incarceration, mental illness, failing schools, dysfunctional homes, and the drug addition and alcoholism that are ravaging the British Muslim community.
[4] Al-Bukhari, no. 7458, and Muslim, no. 1904.
[5] This prayer and the incident precipitating it are related in the various books of Prophetic biography, both ancient and modern. It is quoted here from Dr. Muhammad Sa’id Ramadan al-Buti, Fiqh as-Sirah (Beirut: Dar al-Fikr, 2001/1422), pp. 150-151
As the crisis that has emerged in the aftermath of the publication of the infamous cartoons that claim to depict the Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings of God upon him, escalates, we would do well by stepping back and attempting to analyze the situation as dispassionately as possible. By doing so, as Muslims, we can hopefully formulate a more productive and meaningful response, and avoid being exploited by either side in the ongoing conflict. Saying this, I do not mean to imply that Muslims are not justifiably angry over the caricatures. However, I would agree with those who argue that responses that involve wild outbreaks of frenzied violence are inappropriate, and they only affirm what the cartoonist is trying to imply. Namely, that Islam is a religion that encourages obscurantist violence and terrorism.
The current crisis shows the extent we Muslims are vulnerable to media manipulation, superficial shows of piety, and counterproductive one-upmanship militancy. If we start with the issue of media manipulation, it is clear that Western and Eastern media outlets played a large role in stirring up Muslim, and now Western sentiments. When the crisis initially broke in September, it was barely a blip on the media radar. Few outside of Denmark even knew of the cartoons. The Danish Muslim community, appropriately, by and large ignored the story. [1] It was only after a campaign undertaken by a delegation of Danish Muslim community activists to stimulate greater interest in the issue that the crisis reached the proportions we are currently witnessing. These activists traveled throughout the Muslim East trying to draw attention to the issue. When the issue was popularized by Iqra and other Arab satellite channels, and the cartoons were reprinted by several European papers, the crisis deepened. In light of that reality, it would be hard to deny the role the media has played in sparking and now perpetuating the crisis.
A question we must ask is if these cartoons, which are an example of hundreds of other anti-Islamic slights occurring daily in Europe and America, were not brought to the attention of Muslims by the media, would we be undergoing the current brouhaha? - Clearly not. That being the case, what does this say about our strategic vision? What does this say about our level of political maturity? And what does it say about our ability to engage in meaningful proactive work? The answers to these questions are obvious. We get angry about Israeli troops breaking the bones of Palestinian children, as long as it is in the media. When it disappears from our television screens, our interest vanishes with it. We raise millions of dollars for those affected by the Tsunami, as long as the images of death and destruction are beamed into our homes by the media. However, when the coverage shifts to other issues, the donations dry up. As for those crises that do not make the news in a big way, such as the ongoing famines in Mali, Niger, and the Horn of Africa, we are hardly stirred to action.
Furthermore, we go on living our lives oblivious to the ongoing abuse of Islam and our Prophet, peace and blessing of God upon him, until it becomes a major media event. At that point based on urgings issued by parties, the origins of their dubious agendas unknown to us, we are expected to drop everything and hastily rush into the fray. In many instances, our ill-conceived actions only make the situation worse.
Sometimes, those actions may constitute superficial shows of piety emanating from the mob hysteria underlying them. In the mob we are empowered, and find it easy to confront our opponents, defy the rule of law, behave with wanton abandon, or engage in other acts which under the proper circumstances we may view as supporting Islam. In terms of more constructive mass actions, such as emerging into the streets by the tens of thousands to protest the brutal, authoritarian regimes that make a mockery of the prophetic ideals of justice, mutual consultation, and service to the oppressed and downtrodden of society, we come up terribly short. Similarly, there are no credible grassroots efforts towards forming effective anti-defamation organizations to bring constructive legal action against transgressing organizations and individuals, on a fulltime, proactive basis. As individuals, we find it difficult to support the Prophet, peace and blessings of God upon him, by adorning ourselves with his lofty character traits, or reviving His Sunnah in our daily lives.
On the other hand, as mentioned above, it is all too easy to get swept up into the mob hysteria generated by the crowd, and then engage in outrageous actions that only affirm the offensive claims of the transgressing cartoonist. It is as if we are saying, “We’ll show the Kafirs our Prophet, peace upon him was no terrorist! We’ll defame the symbols of their religion [2] burn their embassies, murder their unsuspecting innocents, and behead the bloody cartoonist if we get our hands on him.” [3]
This brings us to my third point, that of counterproductive, one-upmanship militancy. It is during these crises that all Muslims are supposed to drop everything and join the latest “Jihad” fad. Those of us who urge restraint are mocked as not being militant enough, or ridiculed as cowards who are afraid to “stand up to the real enemies of Islam.” No differences in understanding, interpretation, or strategy are allowed, because there is only one correct approach, the one stumbled upon with the aid of modern, sensationalizing media.
Such a reactive, haphazard approach is counterproductive for a number of reasons. First of all, it destroys the basis for proactive work based on the existence of a strategic vision. As long as the enemies of Islam know that they can mobilize the Muslims to chase after an unimaginable number of distracting issues, divide our ranks by those issues, and diffuse our energies through their debate and the pursuit of their resolution, they will possess a trump card that will affect our ability to unite and work more effectively towards creating and implementing an agenda capable of effecting meaningful change in our circumstance. It also blinds us to the underlying agenda that reckless spontaneous action might be unwittingly serving.
For example, it is interesting that these events have come to a head in the immediate aftermath of the stunning landslide victory of Hamas in the Palestinian elections. That victory has rekindled, both in the East and the West, the debate around the implications of supporting democratization in the Muslim world when the biggest winners will be Islamic parties and movements. There are secularists in both the West and the Muslim world who advocate ending the democratizing experiment on that basis. However, they know that denying the democratic will of the Muslim peoples cannot be done without the support of the masses of people in Europe and America. These masses, especially in Britain and America, are increasingly wary of their governments’ nefarious agenda for the Middle East. However, the frightening images of crazed crowds rampaging, looting, and burning provides a powerful justification for the extreme, repressive policies being advocated by the far right for dealing with Islam and Muslims, both domestically, and internationally. Democracy in the Muslim world, they argue, will bring the advocates of mob rule to power.
If brutal draconian measures, such as those employed to end the democratization process in Algeria in the early 1990s, are employed elsewhere, the Western public will be psychologically prepared to accept those measures, because of the fear that has been created around the “Islamic” alternative. That fear can not only be used to justify denying the democratic will of the Muslim peoples, it can also be used to justify denying their legitimate strategic ambitions. A recent editorial in the Jerusalem Post links the fanaticism of the cartoon protests to the lawful nuclear ambitions of Iran. It states, “If anyone wants to appreciate why the West views with such suspicion the weapons programs of Muslim states such as Iran, they need look no further than the intolerance Muslim regimes exhibit to these cartoons, and what this portends.”
This crisis has also occurred in the immediate aftermath of the appearance of the latest “Bin Laden” tape, intensified warnings of an imminent major terrorist attack in the West, something "on the scale of 9/11," and it coincides with the escape of the alleged mastermind of the attack on the USS Cole from a Yemeni jail. The fear associated with the latter two events, combined with the images of hysterical protesters, work to create a climate that can support unprecedented measures if another major terrorist attack were to occur in the near future –whoever the perpetrators may be.
In addition to the setbacks on the psychological front, the current crisis indicates just how bad we are losing in the Jihad of ideas. It is not without significance that the ultimate objective of Jihad is linked to ideas. The Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings of God upon him, was asked about a man who fought to display his bravery, another who fought out of fealty to his tribe, and a third who fought to show off. Which had fought in the Way of God? He replied, peace and blessings of God upon him, “The one who fought to make the Word of God uppermost has fought in the Way of God.”[4] Is the nature of the current campaign working to make the Word of God uppermost? Every Muslim needs to ask that question.
As Muslims, we are carrying the Word of God in an increasingly secular, militarized, and alienated world. What it means to carry that word is not an unknowable abstraction. We carry it by following the concrete example of our Noble Messenger Muhammad, peace and blessings of God upon him. In carrying the word, he endured unimaginable abuses and he persevered through them because he was inspired by a grand vision. That vision was to see his people saved by the life-giving, life-affirming message of Islam. No greater illustration of this can be given than the story of his expulsion from the city of Ta’if, after the arrogant leaders of that town unleashed the fools, slaves, and children against him.
In the aftermath of that onslaught, the Prophet, peace and blessings of God upon him, humbly raised his hands towards the sky and prayed:
O, God! Unto you alone do I plead my lack of strength, the paucity of my efforts, and my humiliation before the people. O, the Most Merciful of all! You are the Lord of the oppressed, you are my Lord. Unto who have you dispatched me? To a distant host who receives me repugnantly? Or to an enemy you have authorized over my affair? If you are not angry with me, I care not. It is only your goodness I seek to be covered with. I seek refuge with the Light of your Face, through which the darkness is illuminated and all the affairs of the world and hereafter are rectified, that you do not cast your anger down on me, nor cause your wrath to settle upon me. There is neither strength, nor power but with You. [5]
Two significant events are then related after this prayer was uttered by the Prophet, peace and blessing of God upon him. First of all, when presented with an offer by the Angels that God crush the city of Ta’if, the Prophet, peace and blessings of God upon him, refused saying that perhaps from the offspring of the offending hosts, there would emerge those who would worship God. This incident is well known. A lesser known incident associated with the journey to Ta’if occurred when the Prophet, peace and blessings of God upon him, was preparing to reenter Mecca, in the company of his companion Zaid bin Haritha. Zaid asked, “How can you reenter their presence when they have expelled you?” The Prophet, peace and blessings of God upon him, replied, “O, Zaid! God is bringing about through these events you have witnessed a great opening. God is most capable of assisting His religion, and manifesting the truth of His prophet.”
One of the most disturbing aspects of the current campaign to “Assist the Prophet,” for many converts, like this writer, is the implicit assumption that there is no da’wah work being undertaken here in the West, and no one is currently, or will in the future enter Islam in these lands. Therefore, it does not matter what transpires in the Muslim East. Muslims can behave in the most barbaric fashion, murder, plunder, pillage, brutalize and kidnap civilians, desecrate the symbols of other religions, trample on their honor, discard their values and mores, and massacre their fellow Muslims. If any of that undermines the works of Muslims in these Western lands, it does not matter. If it places a barrier between the Western people and Islam, when many of those people are in the most desperate need of Islam, it does not matter. If our Prophet, peace and blessings of God upon him, had responded to those who abused him in Ta’if with similar disregard, none of the generations of Muslims who have come from the descendants of those transgressors would have seen the light of day.
These campaigns of desperation also implicitly display a lack of confidence in God’s ability to protect his religion and defend the honor of His Prophet, peace and blessings of God upon him. We should do what we can do within lawful limits, and then we depute the affair to God. When we despair of help from God and find ourselves with limited strategic resources, we sometimes press forward with the most desperate tactics imaginable, taking little time to assess the compatibility of those tactics with Islamic teachings, or their long-term implications for the cause of Islam, especially in the West.
There are certainly more constructive and productive ways to defend the honor of the Prophet, peace and blessings of God upon him. Why are we calling for a “Day of Outrage” when our Prophet has instructed us repeatedly not to become angry? There are surely times when we should become angry for the sake of God. However, under the current circumstances, are anger and outrage appropriate responses? Why not a “Day of Familiarization,” where we teach people who the Prophet was and what he really represents, peace and blessings of God upon him? Why not a “Day of Sunnah,” where we all vow to revive a Sunnah we have allowed to slip away from our religious life. Such a day could also include the Sunnah of showing concern for ones neighbors? We could visit them and tell them about Islam and our beloved Prophet, peace and blessings of God upon him.
Whatever we do, as Muslims in the West, we may be approaching the day when we will have to "go it alone." If our coreligionists in the East cannot respect the fact that we are trying to accomplish things here in the West, and that their oftentimes ill-considered actions undermine that work in many instances, then it will be hard for us to consider them allies. How can one be an ally when he fails to consult you concerning actions whose negative consequences you will suffer? No one from the Muslim east consults us before launching these campaigns. No one seeks to find out as to how their actions are going to affect our lives and families. The confused incompetence of the Muslim countries around the issue of moon-sighting, a situation that has painful consequences for Muslims here in America is bad enough, the added pressure generated by these reoccurring crises is becoming unbearable for many.
We have a generation of Muslim children here who have to go to schools where most of them are small minorities facing severe peer pressure. During these crises they do not have the luxury of losing themselves in a frenzied mob. Their faith is challenged and many decide to simply stop identifying with Islam. Is that what they deserve? If they are largely lost to Islam, what is the future of our religion here? We have obedient, pious Hijab wearing women, who out of necessity must work, usually in places where they are the only Muslims. Should their safety, dignity, and honor be jeopardized by the actions of Muslims halfway around the world?
I reiterate that I am not saying these cartoons, and other denigrations of our religion and our Prophet, peace and blessings of God upon him, should be totally ignored. Imam Shafi’i stated that anyone who is angered and does not respond; he is a jackass. However, our responses should be weighed on the basis of a strategic calculus we construct. Their timing should be determined by that calculus, not by media sensationalizing. They should be undertaken in consultation with those who will be directly affected by the responses they generate. And their long-range implications should be deeply considered.
In conclusion, one should not see the ongoing crisis as a clash of civilizations. Phenomena as deep and complex as civilizations cannot be thrown into conflict overnight by media-driven campaigns. A clash of civilizations would also involve the overwhelming majority of people identified by a particular civilizational nexus. The current crisis is the result of a regrettable incident that has been exploited by an uncivilized minority of provocateurs both in the West and the East to advance their conflicting agendas. As long as that exploitation continues, the crisis could aptly be called the clash of the uncivilized.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] We say appropriately because the measured response of the Danish Muslim community killed the story. Certainly part of the defense of the Prophet’s honor is to keep these images out of the media. The initial response of the Danish Muslims did just that.
[2] The Danish flag prominently displays a cross, the symbol of Christianity. Hence, every time a Danish flag is burned or trampled on, the symbol of Christianity is desecrated. A similar transgression against Islam would occur if the Saudi flag, which contains the Name of Allah, and the declaration of Tawhid La ilaha illa Allah were burned or trampled. The question here is has the entirety of Christendom transgressed against the Muslim people in a way to justify an attack on the symbol of their faith?
[3] Protestors in Britain this past Friday threatened suicide bombing attacks in European cities, and the beheading of the offending cartoonists. Insightfully, the British Muslim youth protesting wearing a mock suicide bomber’s vest turned out to be a convicted heroin and crack dealer, out on parole. It is a lot easier to mobilize the Muslim youth for the anti-cartoon Jihad than to deal with the rising rates of incarceration, mental illness, failing schools, dysfunctional homes, and the drug addition and alcoholism that are ravaging the British Muslim community.
[4] Al-Bukhari, no. 7458, and Muslim, no. 1904.
[5] This prayer and the incident precipitating it are related in the various books of Prophetic biography, both ancient and modern. It is quoted here from Dr. Muhammad Sa’id Ramadan al-Buti, Fiqh as-Sirah (Beirut: Dar al-Fikr, 2001/1422), pp. 150-151
,1:27 PM
Protests over Mohammad cartoons reach Venezuela
CARACAS, Venezuela, Feb 10 (Reuters) - Around 200 mainly Muslim protesters marched to the Danish Embassy in Caracas on Friday and burnt a Danish and an American flag, as protests over cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad spread to Latin America.
The demonstrators left a prayer session at a Caracas mosque and marched together, chanting in Arabic, to the embassy where they doused a Danish and an American flag with gasoline and set them alight on the building's steps.
It was the first such demonstration in Latin America in a sweeping global protest over the cartoons that has brought tens of thousands of Muslims to the streets from Jakarta to Nairobi, killing at least 11 people so far.
The drawings, considered blasphemous by many Muslims, were first published in a Danish newspaper, but have since appeared in a number of other publications in Europe.
"This is a peaceful march so that people don't keep picking on Muslim people," said Elias Antonio, a young Venezuelan protester sporting a red baseball cap.
"I am a Christian. I am supporting my friends. There has to be respect, whether you're Christian, Muslim or Shi'ite, you have to respect everything," he said.
The protesters marched some 2 miles (3.2 km) to the embassy in the business district of Caracas from the downtown mosque, where one shouted: "We have to do our duty. Let's go on this march and protest calmly for our religion, for our Prophet."
Venezuela has a small but influential Muslim population, many of them citizens of Lebanese and Syrian descent. The Caracas mosque is one of the biggest in Latin America.
The Danish newspaper that first published the cartoons has apologized for offending Muslims, although not for printing the drawings.
The demonstrators left a prayer session at a Caracas mosque and marched together, chanting in Arabic, to the embassy where they doused a Danish and an American flag with gasoline and set them alight on the building's steps.
It was the first such demonstration in Latin America in a sweeping global protest over the cartoons that has brought tens of thousands of Muslims to the streets from Jakarta to Nairobi, killing at least 11 people so far.
The drawings, considered blasphemous by many Muslims, were first published in a Danish newspaper, but have since appeared in a number of other publications in Europe.
"This is a peaceful march so that people don't keep picking on Muslim people," said Elias Antonio, a young Venezuelan protester sporting a red baseball cap.
"I am a Christian. I am supporting my friends. There has to be respect, whether you're Christian, Muslim or Shi'ite, you have to respect everything," he said.
The protesters marched some 2 miles (3.2 km) to the embassy in the business district of Caracas from the downtown mosque, where one shouted: "We have to do our duty. Let's go on this march and protest calmly for our religion, for our Prophet."
Venezuela has a small but influential Muslim population, many of them citizens of Lebanese and Syrian descent. The Caracas mosque is one of the biggest in Latin America.
The Danish newspaper that first published the cartoons has apologized for offending Muslims, although not for printing the drawings.
,8:36 AM
Money Illusion
Money gives power to a secret self, enabling it to pursue its own self-gratification, the ability to acquire things that satisfy the imagination, to fulfill elaborate fantasies of selfhood, a visible statement of who-I-am, and or, who-we-are.
The money illusion is ancient and universal, present in every transaction and absolutely necessary to every exchange. Money is worthless unless everyone believes in it. A buyer could not possibly offer a piece of paper in exchange for real goods, if the seller did not also think the paper was really worth something.
This shared illusion - the power of money illusion - is an old power, universally conferred by every society in history on any object that was regarded as money.
Modern money, requires the same leap of faith, the same "social consent" that primitive societies gave to their money.
Over the centuries, the evolution of money, in human societies, transferred money faith, step by step farther away from real value and closer to pure abstraction.
The money illusion is now refined to a new level of abstract faith, visible only if we consciously pause to consider, how the money process has evolved. At each stage of history we see money retreating from concrete reality, to pure abstraction.
Paper money, originated with the goldsmiths of Europe who held the private gold hoards, deposited by wealthy citizens for safekeeping. The goldsmith issued a receipt for the gold deposit, and over time, it became clear that the receipt itself could be used in commerce, since whoever owned that piece of paper, could go to the goldsmith and claim the gold.
Modern banking originated in the gold smith´s discovery that they could safely write more receipts and lend them to people, exceeding the total gold that was on hand, so long as they always kept a responsible minimum in reserve, to honor withdrawals. This was the origin of fractional-reserve banking and the bank lending that created money.
This private money system endured for centuries and was inherited by the American Republic. Privately owned banks created money by issuing paper bank notes, paper backed by a promise that at any time it could be redeemed in gold.
In nineteenth-century America, the money in use consisted mainly of these privately issued bank notes, backed by gold or silver guarantees. The money´s value was really dependent, on the soundness and probity of each bank that issued notes.
Ambitious bankers, eager to make loans for new enterprises, sometimes printed paper money that had no gold behind it. Governments imposed regulations to keep banks honest. When banks failed, their money failed with them.
The money illusion was transferred to a new object with the rise of demand deposits, better known as checking accounts. Instead of currency, the paper money created by banks, people hesitantly came to accept that money also existed simply as an account in the bank´s ledger, redeemable by personal drafts or checks.
It took generations for the public to overcome its natural distrust of checks, but by 1900 most people were persuaded. Personal checks, written by the buyers themselves, were accepted as just as valuable as dollar bills. Currency remained in use, but demand deposits were by now the bulk of the money supply. The nationalization of currency issuance completed this arrangement, with the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913.
The last money illusion was kicked away in this century: the gold standard was abandoned. Demand deposits had been backed by the same promise that applied to currency - any private citizen could, in theory, go to the bank and redeem his money in a quantity of gold. Without the gold guarantee, money is only money - "legal tender for all debts, public and private," as it says on every Federal Reserve Note.
The United States suspended the right of gold convertibility in the financial crisis of 1933. Until then, citizens could turn in their Federal Reserve Notes for an appropriate quantity of gold. After 1933, the Fed´s paper money would be redeemed only with more paper money.
Without the gold standard, money must be managed. Its true value ultimately determined by governments, and monetary policies of central banks like the Federal Reserve.
Now the paper itself disappears. Money becomes truly invisible. Americans are now in the midst of this great transition - transferring their money faith again. Commerce relies increasingly now on transactions in which the social trust is conferred upon plastic cards. The plastic cards will, displace, both check and currency as the medium of exchange. The pieces of paper will all but disappear, no longer needed to represent real value.
When money is no longer represented even by paper, it becomes a pure abstraction. Money has been reduced to nothing more tangible than "electronic impulses."
~~From the book: "Secrets Of The Temple How The Federal Reserve Runs The Country
The money illusion is ancient and universal, present in every transaction and absolutely necessary to every exchange. Money is worthless unless everyone believes in it. A buyer could not possibly offer a piece of paper in exchange for real goods, if the seller did not also think the paper was really worth something.
This shared illusion - the power of money illusion - is an old power, universally conferred by every society in history on any object that was regarded as money.
Modern money, requires the same leap of faith, the same "social consent" that primitive societies gave to their money.
Over the centuries, the evolution of money, in human societies, transferred money faith, step by step farther away from real value and closer to pure abstraction.
The money illusion is now refined to a new level of abstract faith, visible only if we consciously pause to consider, how the money process has evolved. At each stage of history we see money retreating from concrete reality, to pure abstraction.
Paper money, originated with the goldsmiths of Europe who held the private gold hoards, deposited by wealthy citizens for safekeeping. The goldsmith issued a receipt for the gold deposit, and over time, it became clear that the receipt itself could be used in commerce, since whoever owned that piece of paper, could go to the goldsmith and claim the gold.
Modern banking originated in the gold smith´s discovery that they could safely write more receipts and lend them to people, exceeding the total gold that was on hand, so long as they always kept a responsible minimum in reserve, to honor withdrawals. This was the origin of fractional-reserve banking and the bank lending that created money.
This private money system endured for centuries and was inherited by the American Republic. Privately owned banks created money by issuing paper bank notes, paper backed by a promise that at any time it could be redeemed in gold.
In nineteenth-century America, the money in use consisted mainly of these privately issued bank notes, backed by gold or silver guarantees. The money´s value was really dependent, on the soundness and probity of each bank that issued notes.
Ambitious bankers, eager to make loans for new enterprises, sometimes printed paper money that had no gold behind it. Governments imposed regulations to keep banks honest. When banks failed, their money failed with them.
The money illusion was transferred to a new object with the rise of demand deposits, better known as checking accounts. Instead of currency, the paper money created by banks, people hesitantly came to accept that money also existed simply as an account in the bank´s ledger, redeemable by personal drafts or checks.
It took generations for the public to overcome its natural distrust of checks, but by 1900 most people were persuaded. Personal checks, written by the buyers themselves, were accepted as just as valuable as dollar bills. Currency remained in use, but demand deposits were by now the bulk of the money supply. The nationalization of currency issuance completed this arrangement, with the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913.
The last money illusion was kicked away in this century: the gold standard was abandoned. Demand deposits had been backed by the same promise that applied to currency - any private citizen could, in theory, go to the bank and redeem his money in a quantity of gold. Without the gold guarantee, money is only money - "legal tender for all debts, public and private," as it says on every Federal Reserve Note.
The United States suspended the right of gold convertibility in the financial crisis of 1933. Until then, citizens could turn in their Federal Reserve Notes for an appropriate quantity of gold. After 1933, the Fed´s paper money would be redeemed only with more paper money.
Without the gold standard, money must be managed. Its true value ultimately determined by governments, and monetary policies of central banks like the Federal Reserve.
Now the paper itself disappears. Money becomes truly invisible. Americans are now in the midst of this great transition - transferring their money faith again. Commerce relies increasingly now on transactions in which the social trust is conferred upon plastic cards. The plastic cards will, displace, both check and currency as the medium of exchange. The pieces of paper will all but disappear, no longer needed to represent real value.
When money is no longer represented even by paper, it becomes a pure abstraction. Money has been reduced to nothing more tangible than "electronic impulses."
~~From the book: "Secrets Of The Temple How The Federal Reserve Runs The Country
,8:35 AM
When the census does not work
BUENOS AIRES -- Their disappearance is one of Argentina's most enduring mysteries. In 1810, black residents accounted for about 30 percent of the population of Buenos Aires. By 1887, however, their numbers had plummeted to 1.8 percent.
So where did they go? The answer, it turns out, is nowhere.
Popular myth has offered two historical hypotheses: a yellow fever epidemic in 1871 that devastated black urban neighborhoods, and a brutal war with Paraguay in the 1860s that put many black Argentines on the front lines.
But two new studies are challenging those old notions, using distinct methods: a door-to-door census to determine how many Argentines consider themselves black, and an analysis of DNA samples to detect traces of African ancestry in those who consider themselves white.
The results are only partially compiled, but they suggest that many of the black Argentines did not vanish; they just faded into the mixed-race populace and became lost to demography. According to some researchers, as many as 10 percent of Buenos Aires residents are partly descended from black Argentines but have no idea.
"People for years have accepted the idea that there are no black people in Argentina," said Miriam Gomes, a professor of literature at the University of Buenos Aires who is part black and considers herself Afro-Argentine. "Even the schoolbooks here accepted this as a fact. But where did that leave me?"
It left her as part of a practically invisible fringe, a group whose very existence had been snubbed by the country's early statesmen. The nation aggressively courted "the reviving spirit of European civilization" -- in the words of 19th-century Argentine social architect Juan Bautista Alberdi -- and promoted an image of a European country transplanted on South American soil.
"Argentina was interested in presenting itself as a white country," said George Reid Andrews, a history professor at the University of Pittsburgh who has specialized in black history in Latin America. "Its ideologues and writers put a great emphasis on the yellow fever epidemic and the war, and it was feasible to pretend that the black population had simply disappeared as immigration exploded."
Estimates of the current population of blacks in Buenos Aires are essentially wild guesses, partly because the Argentine government has not reflected African racial ancestry in its census counts in well over a century.
But Gomes is among the group of scholars and scientists who want to take a closer look at today's black culture in Argentina, which they believe will help them form a clearer picture of what happened in the past.
Funded in part by the World Bank and assisted by Argentina's census bureau, the group launched a limited census of various neighborhoods in the capital last month.
First, they asked whether any people in the house considered themselves Afro-Argentine, then they asked whether anyone in the house had any black ancestors. In neighborhoods with historically high concentrations of black residents, they conducted more detailed surveys of religious practice, diet and social organization -- an attempt to measure the influence of African culture there.
The results won't be analyzed until later this year. Diego Masello, a professor with the National University of the Third of February, said the thorniest challenge of the census has been eliciting honest answers -- or any answers at all.
"In some cases, the census-takers reported that residents who visibly had some African traits, even some who appeared completely black, absolutely refused to participate," said Masello, who is helping direct the census.
Gomes said such responses have been frustrating, but illustrative.
"Without a doubt, racial prejudice is great in this society, and people want to believe that they are white," Gomes said. "Here, if someone has one drop of white blood, they call themselves white."
But personal definitions do not count when analyzing DNA, which is what a group of scientists from the University of Buenos Aires and Oxford University in England did earlier this year. After collecting blood samples at a local hospital, they searched for genetic markers that indicate African ancestry. The results, to be published this year in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, suggested that 10 percent of those who identified themselves as white were, in part, descendants of black Argentines.
"A lot of people were very surprised by this," said Francisco R. Carnese, a geneticist at the University of Buenos Aires and co-author of the study. "When you walk around Buenos Aires, you don't see signs of African ancestry. But you see it in the genes."
Carnese said there was also a growing desire among Argentines to figure out their heritage -- one reason that multiple studies are trying to shed light on the same thing, he said. For most Argentines, that means delving into the cultures of Italy, England and Germany, but Africa also deserves consideration, he said.
The near-invisibility of black culture and roots in Argentina has been a striking contrast with neighboring Brazil, which once imported millions of African slaves and has a large, high-profile Afro-Brazilian community.
Africans had a strong hand in shaping Brazilian culture: samba music, the Lenten festival of carnival and African religions that have melded with Roman Catholicism to form hybrid systems of faith. Even the national dish, a black bean staple called feijoada , is popularly credited to 16th-century slaves.
In Argentina, partly in response to the new research, black interest groups have started promoting what they say is a strong African influence on some of the traditions most closely associated with Argentina. There was little slave trade with Argentina; many Africans who ended up there had originally been imported to Brazil.
"The first paintings of people dancing the tango are of people of African descent," Gomes said.
The asado -- the traditional Argentine barbecue that includes glands, livers and other organs from cows -- also was influenced by blacks who collected the parts that the Argentine cowboys, or gauchos, threw away, according to Masello.
The census-takers hope their work will inspire the government to include African ancestry in its next census in 2011 -- a decision that Gomes said she believed would go a long way in acknowledging the role of Africa in today's Argentina.
"If we're not counted," she said, "there's no way to really convince people that we actually exist."
So where did they go? The answer, it turns out, is nowhere.
Popular myth has offered two historical hypotheses: a yellow fever epidemic in 1871 that devastated black urban neighborhoods, and a brutal war with Paraguay in the 1860s that put many black Argentines on the front lines.
But two new studies are challenging those old notions, using distinct methods: a door-to-door census to determine how many Argentines consider themselves black, and an analysis of DNA samples to detect traces of African ancestry in those who consider themselves white.
The results are only partially compiled, but they suggest that many of the black Argentines did not vanish; they just faded into the mixed-race populace and became lost to demography. According to some researchers, as many as 10 percent of Buenos Aires residents are partly descended from black Argentines but have no idea.
"People for years have accepted the idea that there are no black people in Argentina," said Miriam Gomes, a professor of literature at the University of Buenos Aires who is part black and considers herself Afro-Argentine. "Even the schoolbooks here accepted this as a fact. But where did that leave me?"
It left her as part of a practically invisible fringe, a group whose very existence had been snubbed by the country's early statesmen. The nation aggressively courted "the reviving spirit of European civilization" -- in the words of 19th-century Argentine social architect Juan Bautista Alberdi -- and promoted an image of a European country transplanted on South American soil.
"Argentina was interested in presenting itself as a white country," said George Reid Andrews, a history professor at the University of Pittsburgh who has specialized in black history in Latin America. "Its ideologues and writers put a great emphasis on the yellow fever epidemic and the war, and it was feasible to pretend that the black population had simply disappeared as immigration exploded."
Estimates of the current population of blacks in Buenos Aires are essentially wild guesses, partly because the Argentine government has not reflected African racial ancestry in its census counts in well over a century.
But Gomes is among the group of scholars and scientists who want to take a closer look at today's black culture in Argentina, which they believe will help them form a clearer picture of what happened in the past.
Funded in part by the World Bank and assisted by Argentina's census bureau, the group launched a limited census of various neighborhoods in the capital last month.
First, they asked whether any people in the house considered themselves Afro-Argentine, then they asked whether anyone in the house had any black ancestors. In neighborhoods with historically high concentrations of black residents, they conducted more detailed surveys of religious practice, diet and social organization -- an attempt to measure the influence of African culture there.
The results won't be analyzed until later this year. Diego Masello, a professor with the National University of the Third of February, said the thorniest challenge of the census has been eliciting honest answers -- or any answers at all.
"In some cases, the census-takers reported that residents who visibly had some African traits, even some who appeared completely black, absolutely refused to participate," said Masello, who is helping direct the census.
Gomes said such responses have been frustrating, but illustrative.
"Without a doubt, racial prejudice is great in this society, and people want to believe that they are white," Gomes said. "Here, if someone has one drop of white blood, they call themselves white."
But personal definitions do not count when analyzing DNA, which is what a group of scientists from the University of Buenos Aires and Oxford University in England did earlier this year. After collecting blood samples at a local hospital, they searched for genetic markers that indicate African ancestry. The results, to be published this year in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, suggested that 10 percent of those who identified themselves as white were, in part, descendants of black Argentines.
"A lot of people were very surprised by this," said Francisco R. Carnese, a geneticist at the University of Buenos Aires and co-author of the study. "When you walk around Buenos Aires, you don't see signs of African ancestry. But you see it in the genes."
Carnese said there was also a growing desire among Argentines to figure out their heritage -- one reason that multiple studies are trying to shed light on the same thing, he said. For most Argentines, that means delving into the cultures of Italy, England and Germany, but Africa also deserves consideration, he said.
The near-invisibility of black culture and roots in Argentina has been a striking contrast with neighboring Brazil, which once imported millions of African slaves and has a large, high-profile Afro-Brazilian community.
Africans had a strong hand in shaping Brazilian culture: samba music, the Lenten festival of carnival and African religions that have melded with Roman Catholicism to form hybrid systems of faith. Even the national dish, a black bean staple called feijoada , is popularly credited to 16th-century slaves.
In Argentina, partly in response to the new research, black interest groups have started promoting what they say is a strong African influence on some of the traditions most closely associated with Argentina. There was little slave trade with Argentina; many Africans who ended up there had originally been imported to Brazil.
"The first paintings of people dancing the tango are of people of African descent," Gomes said.
The asado -- the traditional Argentine barbecue that includes glands, livers and other organs from cows -- also was influenced by blacks who collected the parts that the Argentine cowboys, or gauchos, threw away, according to Masello.
The census-takers hope their work will inspire the government to include African ancestry in its next census in 2011 -- a decision that Gomes said she believed would go a long way in acknowledging the role of Africa in today's Argentina.
"If we're not counted," she said, "there's no way to really convince people that we actually exist."
Wednesday, February 08, 2006,8:47 AM
Rob Williams
The first African American civil rights leader to advocate armed resistance to racial oppression and violence, Robert F. Williams was born on February 26, 1925 in Monroe, North Carolina. The fourth of five children born to Emma Carter Williams and John Williams, Williams quickly learned to navigate the dangers of being black in the Deep South. The Ku Klux Klan was a powerful and feared force in Monroe, and the community where Williams grew up experienced regular brutalization at the hands of whites.
Williams’ grandmother, a well-read and proud woman who was born a slave in Union County in 1858, taught Williams to cherish his heritage and to stand up for himself. Before she died, she presented her young grandson with his first gun, a rifle that had belonged to his grandfather, as a symbol of their family’s resistance against racial oppression.
After high school Williams joined the Marines in hopes of being assigned to information services, where he could pursue journalism. Instead, he received a typical assignment given to African American Marines at that time: supply sergeant. Williams’ resistance to the Marine Corps’ racial discrimination earned him an “undesirable” discharge and he returned to Monroe.
In 1956, Williams took over leadership of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which was close to disbanding due to a relentless backlash by the Ku Klux Klan. Williams canvassed for new members and eventually expanded the branch from only six to more than 200 members.
Williams also filed for a charter from the National Rifle Association (NRA) and formed the Black Guard, an armed group committed to the protection of Monroe’s black population. Members received weapons and physical training from Williams to prepare them to keep the peace and come to the aid of black citizens, whose calls to law enforcement often went unanswered.
With his fellow NAACP members, Williams waged local civil rights campaigns and brought the conditions of the Jim Crow South to the attention of the national and international media. Williams led an ongoing fight to integrate the local public swimming pool and opposed the condemnation of two young African American boys for the “crime” of kissing a white girl during a harmless child’s game—a cause that had been deemed too controversial for the national NAACP.
In 1959, after a jury in Monroe acquitted a white man for the attempted rape of a black woman, Williams made a historic statement on the courthouse steps.
He said of his courthouse proclamation at a later press conference: “I made a statement that if the law, if the United States Constitution cannot be enforced in this social jungle called Dixie, it is time that Negroes must defend themselves even if it is necessary to resort to violence.
“That there is no law here, there is no need to take the white attackers to the courts because they will go free and that the federal government is not coming to the aid of people who are oppressed, and it is time for Negro men to stand up and be men and if it is necessary for us to die we must be willing to die. If it is necessary for us to kill we must be willing to kill.”
The NAACP suspended Williams for advocating violence. In 1961, the Freedom Riders came to Monroe to demonstrate the efficacy of passive resistance—the hallmark of the mainstream Civil Rights Movement led by Martin Luther King, Jr. An angry mob of Klansmen and Klan supporters overwhelmed the Riders, who called upon Williams and his Black Guard for help. Amid the chaos, Williams sheltered a white couple from an African American mob, only to be accused later of kidnapping them.
With state and local authorities pursuing Williams for “kidnapping,” and frenzied Klansmen calling for his death, Robert and Mabel Williams and their two small children fled Monroe. Fidel Castro granted Williams political asylum in Cuba, and the family spent the next five years in Havana. Robert and Mabel Williams continued to fight for human rights from Havana through their news and music radio program, “Radio Free Dixie,” and the publication of Williams’ pamphlet, The Crusader, which reached an influential underground audience. In 1962, he wrote the book Negroes With Guns.
In 1966, Williams moved his family to China during the height of the Cultural Revolution. There, as in Cuba, he enjoyed celebrity status and fraternized with Mao Zedong and Chou En Lai.
In 1969, Williams returned to the U.S. aboard a TWA flight chartered by the federal government. All charges against Williams were dropped, and he went on to advise the State Department on normalizing relations with China. Williams did not, however, assume leadership of what had become a divided and beleaguered Black Power Movement. Instead, Williams accepted a position as a research associate at the Institute for Chinese Studies at University of Michigan, and he and Mabel moved to Baldwin, near the university. Williams died of cancer in 1996 and was buried in Monroe.
Williams’ grandmother, a well-read and proud woman who was born a slave in Union County in 1858, taught Williams to cherish his heritage and to stand up for himself. Before she died, she presented her young grandson with his first gun, a rifle that had belonged to his grandfather, as a symbol of their family’s resistance against racial oppression.
After high school Williams joined the Marines in hopes of being assigned to information services, where he could pursue journalism. Instead, he received a typical assignment given to African American Marines at that time: supply sergeant. Williams’ resistance to the Marine Corps’ racial discrimination earned him an “undesirable” discharge and he returned to Monroe.
In 1956, Williams took over leadership of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which was close to disbanding due to a relentless backlash by the Ku Klux Klan. Williams canvassed for new members and eventually expanded the branch from only six to more than 200 members.
Williams also filed for a charter from the National Rifle Association (NRA) and formed the Black Guard, an armed group committed to the protection of Monroe’s black population. Members received weapons and physical training from Williams to prepare them to keep the peace and come to the aid of black citizens, whose calls to law enforcement often went unanswered.
With his fellow NAACP members, Williams waged local civil rights campaigns and brought the conditions of the Jim Crow South to the attention of the national and international media. Williams led an ongoing fight to integrate the local public swimming pool and opposed the condemnation of two young African American boys for the “crime” of kissing a white girl during a harmless child’s game—a cause that had been deemed too controversial for the national NAACP.
In 1959, after a jury in Monroe acquitted a white man for the attempted rape of a black woman, Williams made a historic statement on the courthouse steps.
He said of his courthouse proclamation at a later press conference: “I made a statement that if the law, if the United States Constitution cannot be enforced in this social jungle called Dixie, it is time that Negroes must defend themselves even if it is necessary to resort to violence.
“That there is no law here, there is no need to take the white attackers to the courts because they will go free and that the federal government is not coming to the aid of people who are oppressed, and it is time for Negro men to stand up and be men and if it is necessary for us to die we must be willing to die. If it is necessary for us to kill we must be willing to kill.”
The NAACP suspended Williams for advocating violence. In 1961, the Freedom Riders came to Monroe to demonstrate the efficacy of passive resistance—the hallmark of the mainstream Civil Rights Movement led by Martin Luther King, Jr. An angry mob of Klansmen and Klan supporters overwhelmed the Riders, who called upon Williams and his Black Guard for help. Amid the chaos, Williams sheltered a white couple from an African American mob, only to be accused later of kidnapping them.
With state and local authorities pursuing Williams for “kidnapping,” and frenzied Klansmen calling for his death, Robert and Mabel Williams and their two small children fled Monroe. Fidel Castro granted Williams political asylum in Cuba, and the family spent the next five years in Havana. Robert and Mabel Williams continued to fight for human rights from Havana through their news and music radio program, “Radio Free Dixie,” and the publication of Williams’ pamphlet, The Crusader, which reached an influential underground audience. In 1962, he wrote the book Negroes With Guns.
In 1966, Williams moved his family to China during the height of the Cultural Revolution. There, as in Cuba, he enjoyed celebrity status and fraternized with Mao Zedong and Chou En Lai.
In 1969, Williams returned to the U.S. aboard a TWA flight chartered by the federal government. All charges against Williams were dropped, and he went on to advise the State Department on normalizing relations with China. Williams did not, however, assume leadership of what had become a divided and beleaguered Black Power Movement. Instead, Williams accepted a position as a research associate at the Institute for Chinese Studies at University of Michigan, and he and Mabel moved to Baldwin, near the university. Williams died of cancer in 1996 and was buried in Monroe.
Monday, February 06, 2006,1:48 PM
Negroes with Guns
Negroes With Guns, the old philosophy and new film about legendary Black leader Robert F. Williams
Listen and Learn
Listen and Learn
,1:32 PM
"Terrorism is as American as Apple Pie"
WHITE RACE RIOTS IN AMERICA
By Dr. Gregory E. Brown, Director
Between 1824 and 1951 there were over 300 events classified as “White Race Riots” in which entire white communities turned on Black Americans and destroyed entire Black communities and murdered Blacks in mass. There were 26 such major events in major cities across the US during the summer of 1919 alone. This period has been tagged by historians as “The Red Summer of 1919”, because the events all happened from May to October of that year and the blood of their victims literally painted the
streets of America.
That year, tens of hundreds of Black Americans were killed, maimed and made refugees for economic, social, political and other reasons both real and imaginary. They even killed Blacks for recreation activities in rural areas in events called "Friday Night Boot Burnings" (the burning of a Black man at a stake or bonfire) or " Picnic" (a slang term for pick a nigger for lynching} Lynching became a common weekly event to kill the monotony of rural life. It was not uncommon for whites to eat, drink, dance and sing as they created a sadistic festive atmosphere, while their victims suffered from torture. White men, women and children all participated in what was best described as " orgies of murder and mayhem."
Many times whites massacred based on perceived notions, such as in Helena and Phillips, Arkansas in 1919. They envisioned Black union meetings were an organized uprising and Negros were planning to kill whites in mass. Black farmers and farm workers simply held a meeting after forming a union and began to demand a fair accounting from the whites on their sharecropper accounts.
The whites who were cheating them for years, were paranoid and feeling depraved because they feared the great financial loss, hunted Blacks like dogs through the woods and killed 25 to 50 Blacks early in the manhunt. They wounded many and caused every Black citizen in every surrounding county to flee for their lives. Today, Blacks in Helena and Phillips County are now planning to seek reparations for their ordeal. If you had a Black skin, you had two choices. You were either dead, or moving.
During the Red Summer Riots of 1919, a common characteristic in every case was the Black American was alone when it came to protecting or defending himself and his community. Many had assumed then, as we do now, that our government is supposed to protect us from invaders from within our borders and from foreign nations. THEY WERE DEADLY WRONG! After studying White Race Riots for 9 years, collecting relecs, investigating reports, newspaper reports and first hand testimonials, I have determined based on the circumstances that Black Americans must protect and defend themselves from invaders within these United States. This assumption is based on the following findings:
1. No government military branches where there to protect them. The National Guardsmen would join the rioters and shoot Blacks too. Many just looked the other way because they hated "niggers" too. Or they came in time to put out fires, mostly in the white sections of town, or white owned rental properties in the Black neighborhood only.
2. The local Police joined or aided the white rioters. Policemen burned out women and children and took target practice for sport and wager, as the killed Blacks and threw them back into the flames that they attempted to escape. They disarmed Blacks and stud back to let the white rioters do what they wanted without fear of justice or the law. In the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, police flew airplanes and dropped nitroglycerin and dynamite on 600 Black businesses, burned 1500 homes and destroyed a 35 square block area of the Black community of Tulsa also known as the Greenwood District. It was so prosperous it was nationally known as Black Wall Street. The riot was intended to put Blacks back in their place.
3. The American Legion and the KKK were also used against the Blacks. These whites were made up of white military veterans and fraternal organizations that offered their services in tracking down and killing Blacks. They often lead in mobs and initiated the riddling of many of their Black victims. Even ROTC cadets assisted in hunting, dragging, burning, killing and maiming during post war times.
4. In all cases, not one white person was ever convicted of murdering a Black person regardless of how horrible their crimes. In some cases, the KKK had nothing to do with this attitude. It was in the fabric of white American society that they protect their status at all cost. Blacks had no value and no souls. Blacks had no rights. Blacks weren't people. To whites, ALL Blacks were niggers. Blacks were de-humanized so whites could commit any heinous act without guilt and with impunity. It's hard to kill one human being, but easy to kill a thousand niggers.
5. In Detroit 1943, 4300 Federal Troops wounded 2500 Blacks after the last of the great white race riots. Police, local whites, National Guard and Federal troops turned on Black Detroit. Blacks were beaten openly in public by literally thousands of whites chasing and beating blacks while police searched and disarmed Blacks, to make them easy prey. The Detroit Police Department participated in many murders and freely participated in mayhem towards Black American. Every Black person in sight was searched and even their pocket knives were removed. Then they were left to the white rioters who in turn, maimed or murdered a totally defenseless victim. Police were rerouting Blacks in motor vehicles to dead ends where white rioters where waiting to beat and murder them. Many Blacks had placed their faith in the hands of Police for protection, only to have that trust betrayed.
6. The forms of murder in white race riots were also similar in each case, which included but not limited to: Lynching, burning, castration, stoned to death, riddled, just plain shot, dragged in the street, drowned, beat, punched, hit with blunt objects, heads split with an axe and more than can imagined only by a ungodly person. It was common for a single Black victim to incur all of the above forms of punishment from his fellow American. Bodies have been subjected to this type of treatment with as many as 100 plus individual whites to 1 Black victim. Many bodies were reported to be punished for hours after the victim was already dead.
7. They cut up the victims bodies into parts for resale as, souvenirs, mementos, and mantle pieces. Black victims had hearts, lips, ears, fingers, spleen, liver, lungs, intestines, penis, hands, heads, scrotum and all other body parts and even the Black fetus was not spared. A poor Black pregnant woman had her unborn child cut from her womb as she burned at the stake. While she was inflamed a white man stepped from the crowd, slit her stomach with his pocket knife, and when the fetus fell to the ground, he stomped it and said "One less nigger". Thousands of curbside spectators slapped their knees and laughed in amusement. The Black woman's crime: She had disputed the word of a white man that accused her husband of raping a white woman. For her protest after they lynched her husband before her eyes, they tied her to a tree, poured gas on her, oil and set her on fire.
In the terms of property damage. Whole city blocks in Black communities have been burned to the ground and many Black property owners had to abandon their homes while running for dear life, with only the cloths on their backs, if they were lucky enough to live through home invasions, hails of bullets, and fire bombs during the initial attack. Many of the aftermaths resemble ground zero of a nuclear blast. In the Tulsa riot, you could see from one end of the Black business district, and see clear to the opposite side without the obstruction of your view by any physical objects. The land was totally leveled for 3 miles through Black Tulsa.
Wilmington Massacre
Rosewood Massacre
By Dr. Gregory E. Brown, Director
Between 1824 and 1951 there were over 300 events classified as “White Race Riots” in which entire white communities turned on Black Americans and destroyed entire Black communities and murdered Blacks in mass. There were 26 such major events in major cities across the US during the summer of 1919 alone. This period has been tagged by historians as “The Red Summer of 1919”, because the events all happened from May to October of that year and the blood of their victims literally painted the
streets of America.
That year, tens of hundreds of Black Americans were killed, maimed and made refugees for economic, social, political and other reasons both real and imaginary. They even killed Blacks for recreation activities in rural areas in events called "Friday Night Boot Burnings" (the burning of a Black man at a stake or bonfire) or " Picnic" (a slang term for pick a nigger for lynching} Lynching became a common weekly event to kill the monotony of rural life. It was not uncommon for whites to eat, drink, dance and sing as they created a sadistic festive atmosphere, while their victims suffered from torture. White men, women and children all participated in what was best described as " orgies of murder and mayhem."
Many times whites massacred based on perceived notions, such as in Helena and Phillips, Arkansas in 1919. They envisioned Black union meetings were an organized uprising and Negros were planning to kill whites in mass. Black farmers and farm workers simply held a meeting after forming a union and began to demand a fair accounting from the whites on their sharecropper accounts.
The whites who were cheating them for years, were paranoid and feeling depraved because they feared the great financial loss, hunted Blacks like dogs through the woods and killed 25 to 50 Blacks early in the manhunt. They wounded many and caused every Black citizen in every surrounding county to flee for their lives. Today, Blacks in Helena and Phillips County are now planning to seek reparations for their ordeal. If you had a Black skin, you had two choices. You were either dead, or moving.
During the Red Summer Riots of 1919, a common characteristic in every case was the Black American was alone when it came to protecting or defending himself and his community. Many had assumed then, as we do now, that our government is supposed to protect us from invaders from within our borders and from foreign nations. THEY WERE DEADLY WRONG! After studying White Race Riots for 9 years, collecting relecs, investigating reports, newspaper reports and first hand testimonials, I have determined based on the circumstances that Black Americans must protect and defend themselves from invaders within these United States. This assumption is based on the following findings:
1. No government military branches where there to protect them. The National Guardsmen would join the rioters and shoot Blacks too. Many just looked the other way because they hated "niggers" too. Or they came in time to put out fires, mostly in the white sections of town, or white owned rental properties in the Black neighborhood only.
2. The local Police joined or aided the white rioters. Policemen burned out women and children and took target practice for sport and wager, as the killed Blacks and threw them back into the flames that they attempted to escape. They disarmed Blacks and stud back to let the white rioters do what they wanted without fear of justice or the law. In the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, police flew airplanes and dropped nitroglycerin and dynamite on 600 Black businesses, burned 1500 homes and destroyed a 35 square block area of the Black community of Tulsa also known as the Greenwood District. It was so prosperous it was nationally known as Black Wall Street. The riot was intended to put Blacks back in their place.
3. The American Legion and the KKK were also used against the Blacks. These whites were made up of white military veterans and fraternal organizations that offered their services in tracking down and killing Blacks. They often lead in mobs and initiated the riddling of many of their Black victims. Even ROTC cadets assisted in hunting, dragging, burning, killing and maiming during post war times.
4. In all cases, not one white person was ever convicted of murdering a Black person regardless of how horrible their crimes. In some cases, the KKK had nothing to do with this attitude. It was in the fabric of white American society that they protect their status at all cost. Blacks had no value and no souls. Blacks had no rights. Blacks weren't people. To whites, ALL Blacks were niggers. Blacks were de-humanized so whites could commit any heinous act without guilt and with impunity. It's hard to kill one human being, but easy to kill a thousand niggers.
5. In Detroit 1943, 4300 Federal Troops wounded 2500 Blacks after the last of the great white race riots. Police, local whites, National Guard and Federal troops turned on Black Detroit. Blacks were beaten openly in public by literally thousands of whites chasing and beating blacks while police searched and disarmed Blacks, to make them easy prey. The Detroit Police Department participated in many murders and freely participated in mayhem towards Black American. Every Black person in sight was searched and even their pocket knives were removed. Then they were left to the white rioters who in turn, maimed or murdered a totally defenseless victim. Police were rerouting Blacks in motor vehicles to dead ends where white rioters where waiting to beat and murder them. Many Blacks had placed their faith in the hands of Police for protection, only to have that trust betrayed.
6. The forms of murder in white race riots were also similar in each case, which included but not limited to: Lynching, burning, castration, stoned to death, riddled, just plain shot, dragged in the street, drowned, beat, punched, hit with blunt objects, heads split with an axe and more than can imagined only by a ungodly person. It was common for a single Black victim to incur all of the above forms of punishment from his fellow American. Bodies have been subjected to this type of treatment with as many as 100 plus individual whites to 1 Black victim. Many bodies were reported to be punished for hours after the victim was already dead.
7. They cut up the victims bodies into parts for resale as, souvenirs, mementos, and mantle pieces. Black victims had hearts, lips, ears, fingers, spleen, liver, lungs, intestines, penis, hands, heads, scrotum and all other body parts and even the Black fetus was not spared. A poor Black pregnant woman had her unborn child cut from her womb as she burned at the stake. While she was inflamed a white man stepped from the crowd, slit her stomach with his pocket knife, and when the fetus fell to the ground, he stomped it and said "One less nigger". Thousands of curbside spectators slapped their knees and laughed in amusement. The Black woman's crime: She had disputed the word of a white man that accused her husband of raping a white woman. For her protest after they lynched her husband before her eyes, they tied her to a tree, poured gas on her, oil and set her on fire.
In the terms of property damage. Whole city blocks in Black communities have been burned to the ground and many Black property owners had to abandon their homes while running for dear life, with only the cloths on their backs, if they were lucky enough to live through home invasions, hails of bullets, and fire bombs during the initial attack. Many of the aftermaths resemble ground zero of a nuclear blast. In the Tulsa riot, you could see from one end of the Black business district, and see clear to the opposite side without the obstruction of your view by any physical objects. The land was totally leveled for 3 miles through Black Tulsa.
Wilmington Massacre
Rosewood Massacre
Wednesday, February 01, 2006,7:53 AM
America Kidnapped Me
by Khaled El-Masri
The US policy of "extraordinary rendition" has a human face, and it is mine.
I am still recovering from an experience that was completely beyond the pale, outside the bounds of any legal framework and unacceptable in any civilized society. Because I believe in the American system of justice, I sued George Tenet, the former CIA director, last week. What happened to me should never be allowed to happen again.
I was born in Kuwait and raised in Lebanon. In 1985, when Lebanon was being torn apart by civil war, I fled to Germany in search of a better life. There I became a citizen and started my own family. I have five children.
On Dec. 31, 2003, I took a bus from Germany to Macedonia. When we arrived, my nightmare began. Macedonian agents confiscated my passport and detained me for 23 days. I was not allowed to contact anyone, including my wife.
At the end of that time, I was forced to record a video saying I had been treated well. Then I was handcuffed, blindfolded and taken to a building where I was severely beaten. My clothes were sliced from my body with a knife or scissors, and my underwear was forcibly removed. I was thrown to the floor, my hands pulled behind me, a boot placed on my back. I was humiliated.
Eventually my blindfold was removed, and I saw men dressed in black, wearing black ski masks. I did not know their nationality. I was put in a diaper, a belt with chains to my wrists and ankles, earmuffs, eye pads, a blindfold and a hood. I was thrown into a plane, and my legs and arms were spread-eagled and secured to the floor. I felt two injections and became nearly unconscious. I felt the plane take off, land and take off. I learned later that I had been taken to Afghanistan.
There, I was beaten again and left in a small, dirty, cold concrete cell. I was extremely thirsty, but there was only a bottle of putrid water in the cell. I was refused fresh water.
That first night I was taken to an interrogation room where I saw men dressed in the same black clothing and ski masks as before. They stripped and photographed me, and took blood and urine samples. I was returned to the cell, where I would remain in solitary confinement for more than four months.
The following night my interrogations began. They asked me if I knew why I had been detained. I said I did not. They told me that I was now in a country with no laws, and did I understand what that meant?
They asked me many times whether I knew the men who were responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks, if I had traveled to Afghanistan to train in camps and if I associated with certain people in my town of Ulm, Germany. I told the truth: that I had no connection to any terrorists, had never been in Afghanistan and had never been involved in any extremism. I asked repeatedly to meet with a representative of the German government, or a lawyer, or to be brought before a court. Always, my requests were ignored.
In desperation, I began a hunger strike. After 27 days without food, I was taken to meet with two Americans — the prison director and another man, referred to as "the Boss." I pleaded with them to release me or bring me before a court, but the prison director replied that he could not release me without permission from Washington. He also said that he believed I should not be detained in the prison.
After 37 days without food, I was dragged to the interrogation room, where a feeding tube was forced through my nose into my stomach. I became extremely ill, suffering the worst pain of my life.
After three months, I was taken to meet an American who said he had traveled from Washington, D.C., and who promised I would soon be released. I was also visited by a German-speaking man who explained that I would be allowed to return home but warned that I was never to mention what had happened because the Americans were determined to keep the affair a secret.
On May 28, 2004, almost five months after I was first kidnapped, I was blindfolded, handcuffed and chained to an airplane seat. I was told we would land in a country other than Germany, because the Americans did not want to leave traces of their involvement, but that I would eventually get to Germany.
After we landed I was driven into the mountains, still blindfolded. My captors removed my handcuffs and blindfold and told me to walk down a dark, deserted path and not to look back. I was afraid I would be shot in the back.
I turned a bend and encountered three men who asked why I was illegally in Albania. They took me to the airport, where I bought a ticket home (my wallet had been returned to me). Only after the plane took off did I believe I was actually going home. I had long hair, a beard and had lost 60 pounds. My wife and children had gone to Lebanon, believing I had abandoned them. Thankfully, now we are together again in Germany.
I still do not know why this happened to me. I have been told that the American secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, confirmed in a meeting with the German chancellor that my case was a "mistake" — and that American officials later denied that she said this. I was not present at this meeting. No one from the American government has ever contacted me or offered me any explanation or apology for the pain they caused me.
Secretary Rice has stated publicly, during a discussion of my case, that "any policy will sometimes result in errors." But that is exactly why extraordinary rendition is so dangerous. As my interrogators made clear when they told me I was being held in a country with no laws, the very purpose of extraordinary rendition is to deny a person the protection of the law.
I begged my captors many times to bring me before a court, where I could explain to a judge that a mistake had been made. Every time, they refused. In this way, a "mistake" that could have been quickly corrected led to several months of cruel treatment and meaningless suffering, for me and my entire family.
My captors would not bring me to court, so last week I brought them to court. Helped by the American Civil Liberties Union, I sued the U.S. government because I believe what happened to me was illegal and should not be done to others. And I believe the American people, when they hear my story, will agree.
The US policy of "extraordinary rendition" has a human face, and it is mine.
I am still recovering from an experience that was completely beyond the pale, outside the bounds of any legal framework and unacceptable in any civilized society. Because I believe in the American system of justice, I sued George Tenet, the former CIA director, last week. What happened to me should never be allowed to happen again.
I was born in Kuwait and raised in Lebanon. In 1985, when Lebanon was being torn apart by civil war, I fled to Germany in search of a better life. There I became a citizen and started my own family. I have five children.
On Dec. 31, 2003, I took a bus from Germany to Macedonia. When we arrived, my nightmare began. Macedonian agents confiscated my passport and detained me for 23 days. I was not allowed to contact anyone, including my wife.
At the end of that time, I was forced to record a video saying I had been treated well. Then I was handcuffed, blindfolded and taken to a building where I was severely beaten. My clothes were sliced from my body with a knife or scissors, and my underwear was forcibly removed. I was thrown to the floor, my hands pulled behind me, a boot placed on my back. I was humiliated.
Eventually my blindfold was removed, and I saw men dressed in black, wearing black ski masks. I did not know their nationality. I was put in a diaper, a belt with chains to my wrists and ankles, earmuffs, eye pads, a blindfold and a hood. I was thrown into a plane, and my legs and arms were spread-eagled and secured to the floor. I felt two injections and became nearly unconscious. I felt the plane take off, land and take off. I learned later that I had been taken to Afghanistan.
There, I was beaten again and left in a small, dirty, cold concrete cell. I was extremely thirsty, but there was only a bottle of putrid water in the cell. I was refused fresh water.
That first night I was taken to an interrogation room where I saw men dressed in the same black clothing and ski masks as before. They stripped and photographed me, and took blood and urine samples. I was returned to the cell, where I would remain in solitary confinement for more than four months.
The following night my interrogations began. They asked me if I knew why I had been detained. I said I did not. They told me that I was now in a country with no laws, and did I understand what that meant?
They asked me many times whether I knew the men who were responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks, if I had traveled to Afghanistan to train in camps and if I associated with certain people in my town of Ulm, Germany. I told the truth: that I had no connection to any terrorists, had never been in Afghanistan and had never been involved in any extremism. I asked repeatedly to meet with a representative of the German government, or a lawyer, or to be brought before a court. Always, my requests were ignored.
In desperation, I began a hunger strike. After 27 days without food, I was taken to meet with two Americans — the prison director and another man, referred to as "the Boss." I pleaded with them to release me or bring me before a court, but the prison director replied that he could not release me without permission from Washington. He also said that he believed I should not be detained in the prison.
After 37 days without food, I was dragged to the interrogation room, where a feeding tube was forced through my nose into my stomach. I became extremely ill, suffering the worst pain of my life.
After three months, I was taken to meet an American who said he had traveled from Washington, D.C., and who promised I would soon be released. I was also visited by a German-speaking man who explained that I would be allowed to return home but warned that I was never to mention what had happened because the Americans were determined to keep the affair a secret.
On May 28, 2004, almost five months after I was first kidnapped, I was blindfolded, handcuffed and chained to an airplane seat. I was told we would land in a country other than Germany, because the Americans did not want to leave traces of their involvement, but that I would eventually get to Germany.
After we landed I was driven into the mountains, still blindfolded. My captors removed my handcuffs and blindfold and told me to walk down a dark, deserted path and not to look back. I was afraid I would be shot in the back.
I turned a bend and encountered three men who asked why I was illegally in Albania. They took me to the airport, where I bought a ticket home (my wallet had been returned to me). Only after the plane took off did I believe I was actually going home. I had long hair, a beard and had lost 60 pounds. My wife and children had gone to Lebanon, believing I had abandoned them. Thankfully, now we are together again in Germany.
I still do not know why this happened to me. I have been told that the American secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, confirmed in a meeting with the German chancellor that my case was a "mistake" — and that American officials later denied that she said this. I was not present at this meeting. No one from the American government has ever contacted me or offered me any explanation or apology for the pain they caused me.
Secretary Rice has stated publicly, during a discussion of my case, that "any policy will sometimes result in errors." But that is exactly why extraordinary rendition is so dangerous. As my interrogators made clear when they told me I was being held in a country with no laws, the very purpose of extraordinary rendition is to deny a person the protection of the law.
I begged my captors many times to bring me before a court, where I could explain to a judge that a mistake had been made. Every time, they refused. In this way, a "mistake" that could have been quickly corrected led to several months of cruel treatment and meaningless suffering, for me and my entire family.
My captors would not bring me to court, so last week I brought them to court. Helped by the American Civil Liberties Union, I sued the U.S. government because I believe what happened to me was illegal and should not be done to others. And I believe the American people, when they hear my story, will agree.