Compañero Hugo Chavez: ¡Presente!

Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías, 1954-2013, Rest In Power!

Via a friend on facebook:

POEM FOR HUGO CHAVEZ

Because you know
That pain is not
Our motherland

That suffering
Is not our
Divine right
That heaven is
What we make
On earth

Like houses
Love
And bread

Because you come
From the heart
Of the soil

And do not sprinkle us
With holy water
Pie-in-the-sky lies and
Ashes to ashes dust to dust

Because you know
That your big mouth
And your curly hair

Is African
And your brown skin
And dark eyes is Indian

Because you don’t point
To Europe for
Beauty or salvation

Because you know
As Che and Fidel and
Maurice Bishop and Roque Dalton
And Walter Rodney
And Neruda and Allende
And Patrice Lamumba

That life is what
We make with our
Hands

Because you know as Jesus
That it is not difficult to
Multiply bread and fish

That oil is not
The lifeblood
Of the earth

That it should not
Run through our veins
Like fear

Because you are David
In the shadow
Of Goliath

And know that
The price of freedom
Is love

—Tony Medina::

Design celebrating the "Perfect Victory" of Chavez in the recent presidential election

Comandante Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela and master instigator of the Bolivarian revolution, died today. I read the news sitting at my computer at work: I was caught by surprise at the tears that welled up in my eyes.

There is surely much to be said about the inadequacies of Chavez's revolution. I'm a person who believes in the need for the people themselves to create vehicles of people's power that can challenge state power: I'm for broad, mass, horizontal organizing not condescending saviors. I'm for revolutions that are unequivocal when it comes to tossing out old regimes and corporate structures and state powers. But somehow, despite all that, I came to love and admire Hugo Chavez.

I read the paper. I follow the news. I remember when the CIA tried to overthrow him, nearly successfully, and it's been impossible to miss how much every institution of capitalist power from the government to the liberal media have despised him for dodging that bullet ever since. But I regretfully confess I haven't studied the Bolivarian revolution, and I'm only peripherally aware of how deep the institutions of popular power run; how integral the Venezuelan people are to their revolution.

But I remember when Chavez visited the United Nations in 2006. Alone among the leaders of the world he told the truth about George Bush and the American reign of terror across the globe. With wit, humor, and gentle bravado he won my heart when he told the truth about the reek of sulfur left over from the U.S. delegation.

This world is mad. This carnivorous monster of neoliberalism and imperialism, the United States of America, steals from the entire planet so that its corporations can acquire obscene quantities of cash. Armed to the teeth with obscene invisible weapons that deal random death from the skies abroad, and lined wall to wall with prisons that beat its poor black and brown citizens into fine filaments of submission; this so-called free world is the great beast that Chavez dared challenge. Obscenely, the liberal echo chamber in this country yells "Dictator!" at Chavez while tightly closing their memory to the thousands of people arrested during the mass coordinated repression of the Occupy movement. While pretending not to wonder where all those African-American men might be since they know there are no jobs for them. While averting their eyes to the pictures, not so hard to find, of dead children killed by American drones in an ever lengthening list of countries. (Yes, there's drone base in Africa, in Niger, now. shutupidon'twanttohearabout that). ICBMs tucked safely out of sight at their backs, the liberals rattle off the list, larger now than George Bush's axis of evil, of all the little countries bullying the poor United States. It begins to sound desperate. Chavez....dictator. ...terrorists....Hezbollah is active in Venezuela! A mantra for all occasions requiring neocolonial reassurance. Paranoid fantasism from the most powerful, dangerously aggressive nation on earth.

Calmly, coolly, Chavez faced that beast down. "Like Allende, we're pacifists and democrats. Unlike Allende, we're armed," he said.

I hate that we have lost him now. It's our duty to prove him right, that the world doesn't have to be this way, that people have the power to right the wrongs of this world. I don't know what would have happened in Venezuela had he stayed in power. And I don't know what will happen in the whole world, or even here in Brooklyn, now that he's gone. Whatever the faults of who he was, the limitations of what he tried to do, the realpolitik that all too often clouded his message, his loss to the world revolutionary struggle is immense. But the struggle is not lost, and what inspires us about him will continue to do so. All we have to do is...the right thing. As Assata says. "It is our duty to fight, it is our duty to win."

If you've not seen it, watch this absolutely incredible film about the rightwing/CIA coup that Chavez defeated in 2002. It's more exciting than any fictional political thriller. Watch this film and know right from wrong.

One final thought: Under Chavez' leadership, this statue of Christopher Columbus, architect of genocide, was pulled down in Caracas as Columbus Day was renamed "Day of Indigenous Resistance." Pretty much says it all.

Celebrate the Insatiable Hunger of White People for Gold!

Here are some excerpts from the journal of Christopher Columbus, 1492:

"At daybreak great multitudes of men came to the shore, all young and of fine shapes, very handsome; their hair not curled but straight and coarse like horse-hair, and all with foreheads and heads much broader than any people I had hitherto seen...They came loaded with balls of cotton, parrots, javelins, and other things too numerous to mention; these they exchanged for whatever we chose to give them. I was very attentive to them, and strove to learn if they had any gold....I gathered from them by signs that by going southward or steering round the island in that direction, there would be found a king who possessed large vessels of gold, and in great quantities.

"About sunset we anchored near the cape which terminates the island towards the west to enquire for gold, for the natives we had taken from San Salvador told me that the people here wore golden bracelets upon their arms and legs. I believed pretty confidently that they had invented this story in order to find means to escape from us...

"We set sail about ten o'clock, with the wind southeast and stood southerly for the island I mentioned above, which is a very large one, and where according to the account of the natives on board, there is much gold...

"[These islands] are all extremely verdant and fertile, with the air agreeable, and probably contain many things of which I am ignorant, not inclining to stay here, but visit other islands in search of gold.

"Now, writing this, I set sail with a southerly wind to circumnavigate the island, and search till we can find Samoet, which is the island or city where the gold is, according to the account of those who come on board the ship.

"The wind being favorable, I came to the Cape, which I named Hermoso, where I anchored today. This is so beautiful a place, as well as the neighboring regions...Tomorrow morning before we depart, I intend to land and see what can be found in the neighborhood. Here is no village, but farther within the island is one, where our Indians inform us we shall find the king, and that he has much gold. I shall penetrate so far as to reach the village and see or speak with the king, who, as they tell us, governs all these islands, and goes dressed, with a great deal of gold about him.

"Presently we saw several of the natives advancing towards our party, and one of them came up to us, to whom we gave some hawk's bells and glass beads, with which he was delighted....I shall depart immediately, if the weather serve, and sail round the island, till I succeed in meeting with the king, in order to see if I can acquire any of the gold."

Finding little gold among the Arawak-Taino population, by 1496 Columbus was writing back to Spain: "In the name of the Holy Trinity, we can send from here all the slaves and brazil-wood which could be sold." Which is what he did!

And continuing in Columbus' tradition, here's FoxNews' Glenn Beck on gold: "I've been spending a lot of time with the founding fathers lately...they talked about what the future of America was going to be like... There would be troubled times, and then it would reset self....I'd like a little bit of insurance. That's why I want to talk to you about Goldline."

Happy Columbus Day!

Read more about the Taino people of Boriken (Puerto Rico) here. An excellent essay by Howard Zinn on Columbus and the Indians is excerpted here. Art snagged from "Columbus Day: American Holocaust."

Rethinking America Before Columbus

Of all that could be said of the erased cultures of the indigenous first Americans, perhaps the greatest lamentation is that most of them did not, or could not, leave behind a written record of the days before the European explorers and immigrants, leaving their stories to be endlessly mangled and distorted, the subject of both endless fantasy and speculation. Of course there are modern Native writers like the late Vine Deloria attempting to add a sense of perspective, and the historical record of nations captured in their moment of confrontation with the new, second Americans, but outside Central America and Mexico the voices of the pre-Columbian Americans can only be interpolated from relics and ruins not from written testaments.

Much writing on Native history suffers from twin distortions: on the one hand those anxious to ultimately excuse the genocide of the Indians as an act of historical progress, or those looking to objectify Indians as dreamily lost environmentalist naifs, too spiritual and too innocent to survive the confrontation with Europeans. That image of the weeping Indian from that 1970s TV pollution ad twins so perfectly with the whooping, scalping savages of a thousand Westerns.

One of the best books I have read recently on American Indians avoids these pitfalls. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, by Charles C. Mann discusses the state of North and South America before the arrival of the Europeans. Based on archeological, geological, anthropological and historical evidence, Mann radically reinterprets the clues left behind to come up with a fairly revolutionary, and apparently controversial, comprehensive view of Native American civilization at odds with most of the myths of popular imagination.

One of the most exciting of Mann's arguments is his debunking of the notion that the America the early European explorers arrived at was some kind of pristine, near-empty natural paradise. Mann sees the massive herds of buffalo, the incredible overabundance of animal life as evidence not of ecological balance, but of a sudden ecological imbalance brought on by the collapse of local human population. He shows how Indians shaped their environment through well-developed agricultural practices including forestry management using controlled burnoffs. He suggests that North America was filled with vibrant permanent settlements--cities like Cahokia!--home to millions of people at a much higher level of development than that of nomadic hunter gatherers. He suggests that a sudden die-off of native populations happened out of sight of Europeans due to the spread of disease from the early limited 15th- and 16th-century incursions long before the 17th-century wave of European immigration and settlement. Thus the "pristine" forests and huge animal populations were the boomerang of human catastrophe as the human population suddenly plummeted.

Mann also similarly argues that the vast Amazon forests are the legacy of previous civilization. He looks at the ground itself and sees evidence not of mere human subsistence agriculture but of radical terracing and irrigation practices that reshaped the landscape and harnessed its fertility.

Again and again he reinterprets the evidence in North, Central and South America and challenges convential history. The resulting view of Indian cultures, of American Indian civilization, is far more nuanced, far more complex, and far more respectful of its achievements. Ultimately it humanizes the original Native Americans by de-mythologizing them, turning them into people of historical achievement rather than people of myth.

Happy Columbus Day!

Today is the day for celebrating the brave voyager to the new world...who cut off the hands of the indigenous Arawak tribes for not giving the Spanish enough gold.