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One Day We’ll All Be Terrorists
Syed Fahad Hashmi can tell you about the dark heart of America. He knows that our First Amendment rights have become a joke, that habeas corpus no longer exists and that we torture, not only in black sites such as those at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan or at Guantánamo Bay, but also at the federal Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in Lower Manhattan. Hashmi is a U.S. citizen of Muslim descent imprisoned on two counts of providing and conspiring to provide material support and two counts of making and conspiring to make a contribution of goods or services to al-Qaida. As his case prepares for trial, his plight illustrates that the gravest threat we face is not from Islamic extremists, but the codification of draconian procedures that deny Americans basic civil liberties and due process. Hashmi would be a better person to tell you this, but he is not allowed to speak.
This corruption of our legal system, if history is any guide, will not be reserved by the state for suspected terrorists, or even Muslim Americans. In the coming turmoil and economic collapse, it will be used to silence all who are branded as disruptive or subversive. Hashmi endures what many others, who are not Muslim, will endure later. Radical activists in the environmental, globalization, anti-nuclear, sustainable agriculture and anarchist movements—who are already being placed by the state in special detention facilities with Muslims charged with terrorism—have discovered that his fate is their fate. Courageous groups have organized protests, including vigils outside the Manhattan detention facility. They can be found at www.educatorsforcivilliberties.org or www.freefahad.com. On Martin Luther King Day, this Jan. 18 at 6 p.m. EST, protesters will hold a large vigil in front of the MCC on 150 Park Row in Lower Manhattan to call for a return of our constitutional rights. Join them if you can.
The case against Hashmi, like most of the terrorist cases launched by the Bush administration, is appallingly weak and built on flimsy circumstantial evidence. This may be the reason the state has set up parallel legal and penal codes to railroad those it charges with links to terrorism. If it were a matter of evidence, activists like Hashmi, who is accused of facilitating the delivery of socks to al-Qaida, would probably never be brought to trial.
Hashmi, who if convicted could face up to 70 years in prison, has been held in solitary confinement for more than 2½ years. Special administrative measures, known as SAMs, have been imposed by the attorney general to prevent or severely restrict communication with other prisoners, attorneys, family, the media and people outside the jail. He also is denied access to the news and other reading material. Hashmi is not allowed to attend group prayer. He is subject to 24-hour electronic monitoring and 23-hour lockdown. He must shower and go to the bathroom on camera. He can write one letter a week to a single member of his family, but he cannot use more than three pieces of paper. He has no access to fresh air and must take his one hour of daily recreation in a cage. His “proclivity for violence” is cited as the reason for these measures although he has never been charged or convicted with committing an act of violence.
“My brother was an activist,” Hashmi’s brother, Faisal, told me by phone from his home in Queens. “He spoke out on Muslim issues, especially those dealing with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. His arrest and torture have nothing to do with providing ponchos and socks to al-Qaida, as has been charged, but the manipulation of the law to suppress activists and scare the Muslim American community. My brother is an example. His treatment is meant to show Muslims what will happen to them if they speak about the plight of Muslims. We have lost every single motion to preserve my brother’s humanity and remove the special administrative measures. These measures are designed solely to break the psyche of prisoners and terrorize the Muslim community. These measures exemplify the malice towards Muslims at home and the malice towards the millions of Muslims who are considered as non-humans in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
The extreme sensory deprivation used on Hashmi is a form of psychological torture, far more effective in breaking and disorienting detainees. It is torture as science. In Germany, the Gestapo broke bones while its successor, the communist East German Stasi, broke souls. We are like the Stasi. We have refined the art of psychological disintegration and drag bewildered suspects into secretive courts when they no longer have the mental and psychological capability to defend themselves.
“Hashmi’s right to a fair trial has been abridged,” said Michael Ratner, the president of the Center for Constitutional Rights. “Much of the evidence in the case has been classified under CIPA, and thus Hashmi has not been allowed to review it. The prosecution only recently turned over a significant portion of evidence to the defense. Hashmi may not communicate with the news media, either directly or through his attorneys. The conditions of his detention have impacted his mental state and ability to participate in his own defense.
“The prosecution’s case against Hashmi, an outspoken activist within the Muslim community, abridges his First Amendment rights and threatens the First Amendment rights of others,” Ratner added. “While Hashmi’s political and religious beliefs, speech and associations are constitutionally protected, the government has been given wide latitude by the court to use them as evidence of his frame of mind and, by extension, intent. The material support charges against him depend on criminalization of association. This could have a chilling effect on the First Amendment rights of others, particularly in activist and Muslim communities.”
Constitutionally protected statements, beliefs and associations can now become a crime. Dissidents, even those who break no laws, can be stripped of their rights and imprisoned without due process. It is the legal equivalent of preemptive war. The state can detain and prosecute people not for what they have done, or even for what they are planning to do, but for holding religious or political beliefs that the state deems seditious. The first of those targeted have been observant Muslims, but they will not be the last.
“Most of the evidence is classified,” Jeanne Theoharis, an associate professor of political science at Brooklyn College who taught Hashmi, told me, “but Hashmi is not allowed to see it. He is an American citizen. But in America you can now go to trial and all the evidence collected against you cannot be reviewed. You can spend 2½ years in solitary confinement before you are convicted of anything. There has been attention paid to extraordinary rendition, Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib with this false idea that if people are tried in the United States things will be fair. But what allowed Guantánamo to happen was the devolution of the rule of law here at home, and this is not only happening to Hashmi.”
Hashmi was, like so many of those arrested during the Bush years, briefly a poster child in the “war on terror.” He was apprehended in Britain on June 6, 2006, on a U.S. warrant. His arrest was the top story on the CBS and NBC nightly news programs, which used graphics that read “Terror Trail” and “Web of Terror.” He was held for 11 months at Belmarsh Prison in London and then became the first U.S. citizen to be extradited by Britain. The year before his arrest, Hashmi, a graduate of Brooklyn College, had completed his master’s degree in international relations at London Metropolitan University. His case has no more substance than the one against the seven men arrested on suspicion of plotting to blow up the Sears Tower, a case where, even though there were five convictions after two mistrials, an FBI deputy director acknowledged that the plan was more “aspirational rather than operational.” And it mirrors the older case of the Palestinian activist Sami Al-Arian, now under house arrest in Virginia, who has been hounded by the Justice Department although he should legally have been freed. Judge Leonie Brinkema, currently handling the Al-Arian case, in early March, questioned the U.S. attorney’s actions in Al-Arian’s plea agreement saying curtly: “I think there’s something more important here, and that’s the integrity of the Justice Department.”
The case against Hashmi revolves around the testimony of Junaid Babar, also an American citizen. Babar, in early 2004, stayed with Hashmi at his London apartment for two weeks. In his luggage, the government alleges, Babar had raincoats, ponchos and waterproof socks, which Babar later delivered to a member of al-Qaida in south Waziristan, Pakistan. It was alleged that Hashmi allowed Babar to use his cell phone to call conspirators in other terror plots.
“Hashmi grew up here, was well known here, was very outspoken, very charismatic and very political,” said Theoharis. “This is really a message being sent to American Muslims about the cost of being politically active. It is not about delivering alleged socks and ponchos and rain gear. Do you think al-Qaida can’t get socks and ponchos in Pakistan? The government is planning to introduce tapes of Hashmi’s political talks while he was at Brooklyn College at the trial. Why are we willing to let this happen? Is it because they are Muslims, and we think it will not affect us? People who care about First Amendment rights should be terrified. This is one of the crucial civil rights issues of our time. We ignore this at our own peril.”
Babar, who was arrested in 2004 and has pleaded guilty to five counts of material support for al-Qaida, also faces up to 70 years in prison. But he has agreed to serve as a government witness and has already testified for the government in terror trials in Britain and Canada. Babar will receive a reduced sentence for his services, and many speculate he will be set free after the Hashmi trial. Since there is very little evidence to link Hashmi to terrorist activity, the government will rely on Babar to prove intent. This intent will revolve around alleged conversations and statements Hashmi made in Babar’s presence. Hashmi, who was a member of the New York political group Al Muhajiroun as a student at Brooklyn College, has made provocative statements, including calling America “the biggest terrorist in the world,” but Al Muhajiroun is not defined by the government as a terrorist organization. Membership in the group is not illegal. And our complicity in acts of state terror is a historical fact.
There will be more Hashmis, and the Justice Department, planning for future detentions, set up in 2006 a segregated facility, the Communication Management Unit, at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Ind. Nearly all the inmates transferred to Terre Haute are Muslims. A second facility has been set up at Marion, Ill., where the inmates again are mostly Muslim but also include a sprinkling of animal rights and environmental activists, among them Daniel McGowan, who was charged with two arsons at logging operations in Oregon. His sentence was given “terrorism enhancements” under the Patriot Act. Amnesty International has called the Marion prison facility “inhumane.” All calls and mail—although communication customarily is off-limits to prison officials—are monitored in these two Communication Management Units. Communication among prisoners is required to be only in English. The highest-level terrorists are housed at the Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility, known as Supermax, in Florence, Colo., where prisoners have almost no human interaction, physical exercise or mental stimulation, replicating the conditions for most of those held at Guantánamo. If detainees are transferred from Guantánamo to the prison in Thomson, Ill., they will find little change. They will endure Guantánamo-like conditions in colder weather.
Our descent is the familiar disease of decaying empires. The tyranny we impose on others we finally impose on ourselves. The influx of non-Muslim American activists into these facilities is another ominous development. It presages the continued dismantling of the rule of law, the widening of a system where prisoners are psychologically broken by sensory deprivation, extreme isolation and secretive kangaroo courts where suspects are sentenced on rumors and innuendo and denied the right to view the evidence against them. Dissent is no longer the duty of the engaged citizen but is becoming an act of terrorism.
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220 Comments so far
Show AllWelcome to AmeriKKKa!!!
Going from memory, aren't the opening words of Kafka's novel, "The Trial:"
"Someone must have traduced Joseph K?"
Welcome to the penal colony.
And if Hashmi described the U.S. as “the biggest terrorist in the world,” then Noam Chomsky could be next for saying more or less the same thing.
First they came for the 'terrorists' and I said nothing because I was not a 'terrorist.'
Then they came for the muslims and I said nothing because I was not a muslim.
Then they came for the few who questioned it all. And many were silent because we didn't want them to come for us.
And then we hade fascism.
It is long past time to actively challenge the Obama admin on these issues. While we still can.
Ah, yes, change you can believe in!
Hats off, as always, to Hedges for plunging straight into the heart of darkness. It could hardly be clearer that the War on Terra is indeed a War on Muslims, for ideological (read: Zionist) and material (read: oil) motives. And all institutional guarantees that might be used to struggle legitimately against this tyranny have been disabled one by one.
More effort, however, must be made to bring actions such as those exposed in this article to the attention of those US allies with at least a figleaf of decency to their worldview and policies (Sweden, Spain, Ireland), so that they can apply diplomatic pressure to our failed state. Worldwide acceptance of American abuses, at home and especially abroad, must stop. Perhaps the time for boycott, divestment, and sanctions has come for Uncle Sam.
I say this knowing such action would hurt me economically. I live abroad but still earn my keep in piddling dollars.
But what other choice is there?
America will turn the corner once these people in the Justice Department face trial for their crimes against humanity. It's time we rid the courts of these Gestapo types as this country descends into a banana republic. The worst part of this tragedy (next to Hashmi's imprisonment of course!)is that most Americans buy into this crap that "Muslims" and "political activists" are the problem. The MSM has been very successful in dumbing down the citizenry and I wish more Americans would heed Chris Hedges warnings that "one day we'll all be terrorists."
"America will turn the corner once these people in the Justice Department face trial for their crimes against humanity. It's time we rid the courts of these Gestapo types as this country descends into a banana republic."
Spot on, Cadet. And we have to begin at the beginning, the Original Sin of the current physical and psychological rampage: 9/11. And if the Americans won't investigate themselves, then an international commission, led, perhaps, by someone like Balthazar Garzon, should pull out all the stops. Get everyone aboard: all the Americans and all the foreigners dying to talk about this and get to the bottom of it -- the former and present military, intelligence, security, scientific, and law-enforcement personnel who know very damning things but are not allowed to talk about it or are afraid to do so. And those who have spoken but have not been listened to. Let all testimony have evidentiary weight in a court of law.
This is the only way we'll really get rid of these "Gestapo types." Every heinous act of theirs must be investigated and exposed. And the odious ideology (and ideologies) underlying their actions must be scorched in the bright light of the sun. An updated version of the postwar "De-Nazification" program is sorely needed. Chomsky once said that the U.S. should have undergone such a program after the Vietnam war. Had that been done, perhaps none of this would be happening now. All the more reason why it is imperative.
You are correct...the crimes of 9/11/01 can and should be used as the tip of a blade to pierce though the lies we have been operating on for 8 years. If we can get people to look at that day's events with a clear eye, without the emotional fog (the actual shock and awe event) which has been deliberately spread from the MSM there's a chance this national nightmare will end.
But I'm old enough to remember the murder of JFK, MLK, RFK and I'm still waiting for the American people to recognize and come to grips with the truth behind those crimes.
The bad guys maintain a steady stream of falsehoods, distractions and ridicule that are extremely difficult to overcome. But where there's life there's hope.
you are right, brother...years and years and years this violent, murderous stuff has been going on, both small scale and large...and all the while, technologies keep improving...not good...I can't see more technology as the answer to technology...but, as you say:
where there's life, there's hope...
Global Start Date: September 22, 2012...all the world's peoples turning the world off...local acoustic, agrarian living...let's get those gardens growing!
we're going to wish we had...
The MIC has turned us into a war-mongering nation - with no intentions whatsoever of reversing that position!!!!
Yemen, Somalia, Nigeria,Darfur.
In this chess game of global war on Terror, he US military are the white pieces, and terrorists and free democracy's are the black.
With the US military the Queen on both sides of the board, the goal is simple, one world order, one world government, one world currency.
The question is, who are the kings. The banks, oil company's, and the world stazi and spy networks.
Terrorists are allowed to move to country's with weak governments or target rich resources, then red flag events follow and so does our war on terror.
Where ever they go , we follow and engage - destroy and conquer, and then let the terrorists leaders go to the next country.
The pawns in this game of global one world order is all the free people in country's with strong constitutions.
With fear mongering , and a war on global criminals,not nations, its easy to go from one country to the next.
As a victim of right wing republican christian gang stalking torture 3 years 24/7 constant surveillance, slander and character assaination , I can tell you without a doubt, the enemy's of the US are here, they are domestic stazi spys, and they are well funded and organized by our government.
They are, Citizen Corp, Infragard, community watch groups and the patriot act and Homeland security.
Prove me wrong, abolish the Patriot act, and make the Constitution the supreme law of the land.
Remember, its a true patriots job to protect the constitution from enemy's Foreign and Domestic.No matter what happens, and what our national threats to security might be.
Anything less, is anti-American and unconstitutional behavior.
You can not trust Christians that organize to ignore American constitutional liberty's.
Bradenton Manatee county Florida, dont move here if you value your freedoms and santiy, this is one huge gang stalking torture freak county.
Sad, but true.
Domestic enemies have crushed the Constitution and american legal principles.
And the bulk of the american people are utterly ignorant of that fact.
There is a storm brewing.
The breakdown of the rule of law is the greatest threat to our country.
The Military Commissions Act, signed in 2006, was the final deadly blow to the Constitution.
By granting war criminals immunity, the Act, to this day unknown to almost all Americans, turned the U.S. into a rogue criminal state.
Ever since then we've been a country led by a Unitary Executive (which is a new word for a King) who has the powers of all three branches of government.
Until the Unitary Executive is overthrown and we're returned to a country ruled by law instead, the devolvement of our country will only accelerate.
A responsible SCOTUS would overturn the portions of the MCA that are in violation of the Consititution. Only problem we have now is getting a responsible SCOTUS.
Cygnus-X1-isaHole
(Is a hole? Maybe you can explain that screen name to me)
Good post. However, just to let you know: "Unitary Executive" is not a new term. It was used in Federal debates in the press, now collectively know as the Federalist Papers and the Anti-Federalist papers. Ben Franklin argued unsuccessfully that a president could start behaving like a King, and that better than a president would be to have a council of members.
Nobody listened to him, and the reign of terror by the bushmonkey proved him right.
wiki:
The phrase "unitary executive" was discussed as early as the Philadelphia Convention in 1787, referring mainly to having a single individual fill the office of President, as proposed in the Virginia Plan. The alternative was to have several executives or an executive council, as proposed in the New Jersey Plan and as promoted by Elbridge Gerry, Edmund Randolph, and George Mason.[6][7]
TJ
"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent." - Thomas Jefferson
"...we have to begin at the beginning, the Original Sin of the current physical and psychological rampage: 9/11."
No truer words were ever spoken! While American democracy (and sanity!) was having a rough time keeping on track before 9/11, that event threw us entirely into the power of the domestic enemies of constitutional government. Only a full investigation by a commission of free citizens, not members of the oligarchy as were most "serving" on the Keane Commission, empowered to subpoena any evidence remaining and to investigate all possibilities, can restore liberty and sanity in this country. However, I view the likelihood of such a commission as remote, being in the thrall of tightly controlled media that ignores and denigrates anyone who challenges the validity of the "orthodox" explanation for 9/11.
An international commission would be the next best thing. Many countries now liable to be attacked by the mad-dog that America has become have a vested interest in establishing the truth about 9/11. All nations must feel the effects of the 100's of billions of dollars wasted on the American military.
Let's get to the bottom of this and stop being so credulous about the Oligarchy's 19-Islamic-radicals-with-boxcutters fable!
while I would love to consider 9/11 the beginning of the madness, I can't...
anymore, I blame the ongoing mass psychological conditioning, started long, long ago, that has reached such a level of power, proficiency and permeation as to allow 9/11 to occur without reprisal...on the perpetrators, that is...
certainly, action has been taken, but not logically appropriate action...premeditated action, and important, but not really related to 9/11 in any other than an ancillary way...
so many murdered on 9/11, so many murdered since...
we must, all the world's citizens, sacrifice the safety, simplicity and security we find in the use of industry and electricity...we must, voluntarily, withdraw from the monied system, based on the stealing, sequestering and reselling of natural resources, and live locally, engaged individuals working within the limits and possibilities of the living environment...
the powers that make life easy, also make it easy for those who would to handle huge numbers of us at a time, physically and psychologically, and horrifically...
Global Start Date: September 22, 2012...let's get those gardens growing!
By coincidence, 'Belmarsh' has the same number of letters as 'Bastille'.
Given the current state of our sloven and ignorant society, these are merely logical conclusions to our bad choices. We have no one to blame but ourselves and we will get our just deserts. It can't happen soon enough.
It would be interesting to say the least, to come back say,500 years or really more like 1,000 and see what kind of myths evolve from our time period. We all know how history gets twisted and then Myths can arise from that- but myth, I think can evolve from stories past orally, also.
I can only imagine the contradictions that may be passed down. But one set would be based on how humans were abusive to mother earth and brought her to the brink of anihilation. The people telling this, would be the ancestors of what ever survivors were left from this horrible culture almost destroyed humanity.
This is the most optimistic post I've ever read. I seriously doubt any human will be around in 500 years. In fact, the planet might be devoid of any life whatsoever. Global warming looms large but when you consider the massive arsenals that now exist in the hands of the corporate fascists, you realize how the future of the planet hangs in balance. What weapon in human history was not used to its fullest extent? Given our arsenals of nuclear weapons, biological weapons, and chemical weapons, one realizes that we are here for a limited time. We would have to defy all of human history and nothing short of the development of a cosmic consciousness would save us. The odds of that happening are slim and none and slim just left town.
Life will still infest the planet--the Microcosmos teems as it has for the past 4 Billion years. Highly complex life-forms like humans may succumb as you posit. But life on this planet is too resiliant and will only die due to a cosmic cause--massive asteroid collision or expansion of the sun to its Red Giant phase.
The challenge before any of us to develop this cosmic consciousness seems so great that we instead say "we" because going it alone seems beyond our individual power even though it is the only power we have as individuals. The first I to develop that cosmic consciousness will be the light we follow into the new era. Who will it be? Our odds are great and even seem unavoidable that at least one of us may do it.
Well, our own Declaration of Independence calls for a revolution of government when it isn't working.
America can not take part in the overthrow of dozens of nations, murder millions across the globe and then expect that others will just lay down like sheep. We deserved 9/11 and will deserver a lot more. 3000 dead compared to millions killed is a drop in the bucket.
9/11 should have been a wake up call - not to increase our terrorism, but to stop it.
Now, it may take domestic terrorism to stop it instead.
Saint Barry of Obama will save us!!!
Or is he just the Pentagrams new Step'n Fetchit?
What gets to me is people thinking America was once a great country with a moral compass? When was that? I must have missed that part of history. From the massacres of Indians, to slavery, to Hiroshima, Vietnam, to its policies in Latin America, to its support for the creation of the terrorist state of Israel, to supporting the Shah of Iran, to supporting Saddam with intelligence and chemical weapons against the Iranian people, to these modern day Middle East massacres, America has by far the worst track record. They just have a very powerful propaganda machine to show they are the land of the free.
"The United States" stole half of Mexico by armed force -- the nice parts with rich deposits of gold and silver (and, as it turned out, oil -- though "we" didn't actually recognize that at the time.)
"We" made sure that "our" influence over Latin America was such that wealth would be steadily transferred from their countries to ours. "We" sent the Marines to Nicaragua, Haiti, & Guatemala often enough to insure that life in those countries would be a permanent living hell for most of the inhabitants. "We" imposed military dictatorships in almost every Central & South American country, stunting the aspirations of their people, & imposing conditions from which some of those countries will never recover. (So if some of the people want to escape from the living conditions in those countries, "we" had very much to do with creating those conditions.)
Interestingly, "we" started doing all this at the same time that "we" were exterminating the indigenous people here, AND using black slaves from Africa. What a loveable, righteous people "we" are, here in the "Land of the Free"!!
"We" came here somewhere in the early 1600s. "We" found this Promised Land, rich beyond imagination with fresh water and fertile earth and abundant game and timber for the felling. And to "our" further delight, it was largely uninhabited--if "we" didn't count the Red Ones.
"We" didn't see too many of them at first; they avoided our noise and the smoke from our fires, which were always too big. But soon enough, "we" were here in such numbers that they couldn't go around us anymore.
"We" were shocked--SHOCKED, I tell ya--that there were Savages in "our" Promised Land! So "we" set about exterminating them. "We" killed them whenever "we" saw them, "we" drove them from their land and their homes, "we" slaughtered their food supply and left the buffalo bodies to rot in the sun by the hundreds of acres. "We" gave them blankets full of smallpox, murdered their children and raped their women before "we" murdered them as well. "We" rounded them up into concentration camps and ate their food while they starved. "We" made them cut their hair, wear britches and beat them to death if they wouldn't speak "our" language.
"We" stole a whole fucking continent from them and paid them in Genocide.
The United States has been a slaughterhouse since day one.
Your comments highlight the absurd, dangerous, yet commonly held myth about America: Its exceptionalism as a beacon of freedom and democracy. This blatant lie is the essential ingredient in a long line of carefully propegated, irrational belief systems designed to not only engineer consent, but also the righteous defense of injustices and tyranny, from a distracted and complacent public.
"These ways of thinking -- cultivated, nurtured, indoctrinated from childhood on -- have been useful to those in power, and deadly for those out of power. Our citizenry has been brought up to see our nation as different from others, an exception in the world, uniquely moral, expanding into other lands in order to bring civilization, liberty, democracy. That self-deception started early."--Howard Zinn, "Put Away the Flags"
And today the Crow Creek Reservation needs our help in retaining the 7,100 acres the IRS recently siezed for back taxes ( dubious).
It is Relocation and it can be stopped today.
Sooooo - which natural resource is coincidentally located under this 7100 acres? Natural gas? Coal? Uranium? but I am sure it is only a coincidence .....
Ranchland along the Missouri River.
Crow Creek Reservation --- Had Windturbine and ranching businesss interests on land.
Great post it is always nice to see someone else gets it.
The treatment of the First Nations Peoples you decribe happened not only in the US but in many other countries as well, Australia and Canada come to mind as being equally vicious.
Here in Canada we snatched their children from their mothers bossoms and placed them in Residential schools where boy and girl alike were raped, tortured and murdered for speaking their own language, practicing their own religous beliefs or running away in an attempt to go home and sometimes just for sport.
Now having been stripped of their sense of family, heritage and of self many of our victims have turned to booze and drugs to numb their pain and we the victimizers deride them as losers and drunks unworthy of our compassion.
Being an avid canoeist and widerness camper I travel the far north alot and have seen first hand the living conditions of our First Nations peoples and now tell any who will listen to come with me if they want to see third world conditions at their own doorsteps of course they always decline.
Many of you may be thinking what does my post have to do with this column.
If you allow the subjugation of anyone in your name you open the door to your own similar maltreatment. The Muslims are the new Indians, who is next.
deleted double post.
mcoyote,
I basically agreed with every word you said. Chris Hedges is one of the better left-wing public intellectuals out there, but he still falls into the liberal paradigm of bemoaning America's fall from grace, from its 'noble ideals'. I think its because of his desire to maintain his mainstream 'credibility' that he does not cross over into a full blown Marxist or anarchist analysis that the issue is the class nature of the United States itself for the last 200 years, not some sort of 'decline' caused by a corporatist/neocon cabal. Hedges still seems to think that there is some sort of benign way that the bourgeois capitalist American state can function. But as you pointed out, there is not much historical evidence for this.
In addition to the long history of colonialism, genocide, and slavery that you have described, there is also a whole history of the suppression of internal dissidents by the U.S. government, which Hedges paints as a new phenomena. This was not hatched in the evil mind of Dick Cheney. What about the entire history of the struggle of American workers for the 8-hour workday, the weekend, worker's health insurance, and an end to child labor, which was met with savage violence on the part of the bosses and their paid lackeys on Capitol Hill? Ludlow massacre? Haymarket martyrs? Pullman strike? Between the 1870's and the 1960's, it is estimated that federal troops intervened in labor disputes 161 times, almost always on the side of management. Hedges is an educated guy, he must know this. He must know about the COINTELPRO program which infiltrated, undermined, blackmailed, and even assassinated Communists, civil rights workers, Black Panthers, American Indian Movement militants and Puerto Rican nationalists in the 1950's, 1960's, and 1970's. In light of these facts, the present day harassment and incarceration of Muslims, environmental activists, antiwar and anti globalization protesters and anarchists is far from a monstrosity, its American as apple pie. And anyone who thinks Obama is going to lift a finger to stop the machinery of the Empire that he represents is dreaming. He won't even shut down Gitmo.
As Ward Chruchill put it bluntly, the American people are 'free to do exactly as their told'.
"there is also a whole history of the suppression of internal dissidents by the U.S. government," -- Marxist Rebel
I have heard Chris Hedges talk about the imprisonment of Eugene Debs, et. al., and therefore, I think he's very aware of the "the suppression of internal dissidents" here in the United States. In addition, I don't think any writer can include everything in a two-page focused essay or journalistic article. That said, I am always grateful to writers who take the time, and continuously add to the facts on CD. The more we know, the more we can do as activists. For instance, many people don't know the story behind all of the Carnegie libraries, the philanthropic gifts, that are scattered across this country. The steel workers of Pittsburgh suffered great injustices so that Andrew Carnegie could accumulate his vast fortune.
Possibly, today, they teach more in school than when I attended public school, but I doubt it. Do they teach labor history in the Chicago schools? Currently, the public school system in Chicago includes five military academies, and Arne Duncan, Obama's Secretary of Education, was the CEO of the Chicago School system prior to his appointment by Obama. CEO Duncan supported the expansion of the military academies even though he has Quaker roots.
I, myself, learned about the blankets, filled with smallpox and given to Native Americans, from a Buffy Sainte-Marie song, "My Country 'Tis of Thy People You're Dying." Even as kid, I was horrified, and I attemtped to learn more, but at the time, in the middle 1960s, our public library didn't include any books on the subject. By now, I have read several accounts of stories like the one included in the song. Ms. Sainte-Marie once wrote -- "My point in the song is that the American people haven't been given a fair share at learning the true history of the American Indian. They know neither the state of poverty that the Indians are in now nor how it got to be that way. I try to tell the side of the story that's left out of the history books, that can only be found in the documents, the archives and in the memories of the Indians themselves."
Not long ago, when I was researching a completely different subject, I ran across an article in a NY newspaper in Mount Vernon, NY -- The Argus. The headline on the front page -- above the fold on May 15, 1912, read, "Emma Goldman Driven Out of Santiago, Cal. -- Written By United Press -- "The free speech fight here took another serious turn today when Emma Goldman, known as 'Queen of the Anarchists,' was escorted to the depot after a near riot, when she tried to hold a meeting and was put on a train bound for Los Angeles. Dr. Ben Reitman, Miss Goldman's manager, was tarred and feathered, forced to kneel down, kiss the American flag, and while bound the intitials 'I.W.W.' were branded on his back."
I have read several books written by Emma Goldman, and other writers, but I hadn't ever read about this specific incident. And, the flag, in this case, and in many other cases as well, does NOT impart the kind of values that the propaganda we are constantly fed supports. More often than not, the idea of patriotism, to me, seems very distorted!
If you live in the NYC area -- there's a rally/protest on behalf of Syed Fahad Hashmi at 6 PM on January 18, 2009 -- on Park Row where the Manhattan detention center is located in lower Manhattan.
Sioux Rose
KAY J & DONNA: Excellent posts!
Great post Kay! Thanks for that. I had never heard of the incident you refer to though it seems standard fare for that time. Now it's done in more technocratic fashion. But we shall keep fighting against the oppressor class. See you there.
"the liberal paradigm of bemoaning America's fall from grace, from its 'noble ideals'"
Perhaps the lament is about the failed promise, of thoughts and words, about the kind of country America was to be, or could have been, or ought to have been, versus the reality of actions contrary to the noble ideals.
There have been graceful individuals in our midst, but they have been overpowered, at least so far.
The trouble with this country from the beginning was tension between the polarized world views. Is this tension not as ancient as humankind? The Constitution was an attempt to prevent the tyranny of one faction over the other, but it's not working for various reasons.
The only solution is surely a spiritual one, with a foundation of principles of love, which would shift basic psychology to sanity.
Imagine if the vast resources were put to good use, and human rights and social justice upheld, what kind of world we could be living in.
The tension we are conscious of in all it's manifestations, be they republican/democrat or left/right are falsified detractors from the original and real tension that is between the ego and the greater spirit. The greater spirit is not a world view, it is a world shadow. When we shine light on that lost part of our humanity the false ego tensions we experience will melt away like darkness to the encroaching light of dawn. Finally we will see our world as we are a part of it rather than apart from it.
"A slaughterhouse since day one"? I assume you do not live in the USA -- I've lived in three countries besides the one in which I now reside, and I have news for you:you are not obliged to live in a slaughterhouse. If your view of this country is so bleak, so despairing, please -- for your own well-being -- find a more congenial home.The world is large -- I have nothing against whining (I indulge in it myself occasionally), but I do resent anyone whose actions don't follow his words. If your view of this country's founding is based on historical knowledge more extensive than that of Jacques Barzun (see From Dawn to Decadence, page 100), feel free to act on it. Until that moment, I and most of my fellow citizens will continue to look upon you as a guilt-ridden, masochistic, type who will never run out of reasons to despise his neighbors. And if you should decide to stay in the slaughterhouse (!), do read Mr. Barzun's book -- it's a good antidote to the cartoonish view of history propagated by Zinn et al. And you may end up actually finding something to admire in this imperfect republic.
Zinn's view of American history, "cartoonish?" Nightmarish, yes. Mournful, yes. Informative and well-documented, yes. Just because people can still enjoy life in the U.S. doesn't mean that the present society wasn't founded on death and domination. I'm sure plenty of Israelis enjoy their swimming pools and beaches, too. It's you, th4377, who have a limited view of history and society. You take your own shortsightedness as objective reality.
Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."
th4377: For occupants of the insular economic bubble you inhabit to proclaim such self-righteous drivel requires that enough of a middle-class exists which can materially profit from the same system from which you profit. America's owners, their political puppets and media elite have ALL turned against and betrayed the middle-class with a sustained vengeance. The tens of millions clinging to that class by their fingernail dirt will soon join the tens of millions in the lower- and under-classes. There was a brief period from 1941 to 1979 when, with the exception of Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, Chile and a few other foreign policy debacles that were not on a theatre war scale, there was good reason for the world's (then) admiration of America. As long as our powers-that-be could keep enough people deluded with false profits from a falsified economy of "financialized" paper speculation to mask three decades of planned erosion of the foundation of the real economy, then plenty of nouveau riche suckers and their hangers-on would buy into inarticulate blurtations like yours.
But with the passage of laws legalizing usury, the corporate collectivization of farmland, the "free trade" regime's offshoring of 20 million of our best paying manufacturing jobs, the deregulation of banking and derivatives, a decade of artificially low interest rates designed to fuel the speculative housing bubble, multiple overt & covert oil/terror wars to make the general population overly-dependent on a too militarized economy and imported fossil fuel--the masquerade is looking a might too tattered for your kind of skunk con job to work anymore. All the little capitalist emperors you worship are too naked for that now. Too many of the civilian police have military grade sound cannons. Habeas corpus and posse comitatus are too long in the dust bin. National warrantless surveillance has been too often abused by the FBI's own repeated admissions. Go hand out at Rush Limbaugh's site. You can backslap each other all day and light up each other's cigars.
Yes, ours is truly a house of sand.
So will you be paying for my airfare and accommodations as well as setting me up with a job in this new place? If so let me know when and where we meet to set this all up.
If not you might consider the absurdity of your American hubris.
Now go gently into the night good citizen.
I also agree with mcoyote. The U.S. may well be what Susan Sontag once called "a doomed nation, founded on a genocide." By calling 9/11 the "Original Sin" of the current mayhem, however, I meant only that until that date, things appeared to have evolved to the point where, despite US capitalism's continued depredations the world over, "we" had attained at least that little scrap of wisdom whereby outright military invasion of foreign lands and pillage of resources had become a no-no. We resorted to subtler means, perhaps, but invasion and prolonged occupation seemed things of the past. Since 9/11 and the bogus War on Terra, that's all been thrown out the window, along with some of the basic premises of procedural law, domestic and international. It's a sorry and dangerous state of affairs, and tearing open, for the world to see, the elaborate pinata of lies around which American foreign and domestic policy revolves would go a long way towards improving the situation.
I reject the Indictment of America by poster mcoyote. Any student of history will tell you the tribes of North America routinely engaged in tribal war, cruel torture, slavery of conquered rivals and their children, human trafficking and incest for hundreds of years before any ship of the European Empires dropped anchor off shore. The fossil record and diaries of spanish priests bear this out. To use your modern atrocity yardstick against historical figures means we were right to abolish those Indian practices and end the migrational marauding Indian Nation. That Seasonal State-Wide migratory model of indigenous people survived on no continent on this world (save maybe Africa) because it required too much land.
mcoyote, you have described instead, what MAN is. Homo sapiens are a bunch of dressed up apes trying to kill each other and get away with it. Thomas Jefferson tried and failed to eliminate slavery and Indian abuse. Those were his two biggest failures since he was born in a Colonial Plantation society and was a nearly lone voice calling for it to end. Compared to most nations before it, the United States was indeed a beacon of Liberty and Freedom for millions of immigrants, religious wackos and landless nobodies.
But it became an Empire and woe be to any group who get caught up in the wheels of an Advancing Empire.
Now American Citizens face a choice: We can get caught in those slave wheels of war and monopoly also, or we can boycott and strike like our forefathers did demanding that as taxpayers and voters, that citizens be accorded the rights of Englishmen as their moneyed brothers on the other side of the Ocean were.
We should sacrifice the Empire, and save the Democracy as the British wisely did.
Who's right?, the Tea Baggers or the Liberals? They both are. The tea baggers are correct that big government is the problem. The Liberals are correct that big monopolies are what's poisoning government. The two groups must coalesce together.
As taxpayers and voters, you have the legal right to demand that government spending be cut down by 90 percent. A third group: The Civil Libertarians hold the keys that will unlock that door.
Become a Civil Libertarian. Once Individual Liberty and Democracy are restored, the people's will can no longer be ignored, the wars will end, and we can come out of these NeoCon dark ages.
TJ
"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent." - Thomas Jefferson
Lefty
Yes, your're right about there probably not being human life or any kind of life left. It was an optimistic post- as optimistic as one can get. I do have more thoughts that we won't survive at all than thoughts that anyone will... but I was just wandering, in case some, afew, humans were left in some remote barely livable area, what they would pass down for future reference about how it all came apart.
I was at the art museum yesterday and was struck by the absence of any significant art. Mostly all was commissioned by elites. Kings and queens, princes and princesses, robber barons and wall street criminals had their artistic will carried out by their quislings and bootlickers. Most paintings depicting the wealthy of any given era.
The same is true of our history. A fable of lies and fabrications. What will remain in print after end times will elaborate on these fantasies. If anyone survives, they would be wise to destroy it all and cut the cord from this hierarchical madness.
Lefty
Yes, your're right about there probably not being human life or any kind of life left. It was an optimistic post- as optimistic as one can get. I do have more thoughts that we won't survive at all than thoughts that anyone will... but I was just wandering, in case some, afew, humans were left in some remote barely livable area, what they would pass down for future reference about how it all came apart.
Even without embedded microprocessors, the police 150 miles from my home met me just after I parked my car in preparation to join a protest march at Macdill AFB in Tampa and asked, "Are you John Dwyer"? They wanted to know if I planned to pour blood on myself in front of the gates and to tell me that I would be immediately arrested if I did. In fact, I had a bottle or two of halloween fake blood ready to douse myself with. How did they know me? How did they know my plan? Why were they threatening to arrest me? I went back home afterward and doused myself in front of our Government Center.
Lots of untoward stuff has happened to people just like me, regular citizens attempting to exercise our free speech in creative ways. One of my friends was run completely out of the country (to Canada) for protesting the attack on Afghanistan with me and later the attack on Iraq. They got him for "unfair grading" in his high school media class and still having only a green card after having lived in the US over 50 years.
I lasted a few more years, but they eventually got me, too, although I wasn't required to leave the country.
We preached against media-inspired fear. In our town that alone was and still is treason. Of course I still do it. I'm just very marginalized.