Anti-Americana: You Don't Scare Us

"You Don't Scare Us" reads this Russian-language Soviet poster, vintage 1984. It shows a burly Soviet worker, with hammer and sickle on his hardhat, getting his job done, while a wormy looking American politician threatens to push "the button" while military jets labelled "US" scramble in the background. "Pushing the button" was of course shorthand for launching an apocalyptic nuclear attack against the Soviet Union.

The occasion for this poster was no doubt the disturbing "joke" played by the senile U.S. president at the time. On August 11, 1984, cold warrior Ronald Reagan made this quip during a soundcheck before his weekly radio address: "My fellow Americans I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that would outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes." The audio was subsequently leaked. While it had no apparent effect on his landslide reelection in a few short months, some of us were shocked.

In time-honored tradition, President Reagan joked about committing nuclear genocide. Some of us didn't find it so funny. The poster below (I had a copy) was soon popular on the left. This was the climactic height of the cold war, an era of renewed nuclear terror when the threat of apocalypse seized the popular imagination. Check out the films "Threads" (viewable on Youtube!) and "The Day After" (Youtube link) for a taste of what it was like to live with that terror.

 

The cold war and threat of nuclear destruction were even repeating themes of popular music. There was Nena's "99 Luftballons" (English or original German versions) which speculated about a war being triggered by misunderstanding, or the brutally cynical "Two Tribes" (when two tribes go to war, a point is all that you can score) by Frankie Goes To Hollywood. Different versions of the Frankie song were released, but here's one video version from 1983:

This all seems timely with mildly-renewed tensions between the United States and the now post-Soviet, utterly de-socialized Russian Federation. Authoritarian (elected) strongman Vladimir Putin seems to relish posturing against western imperialism, despite the fact that Russia is now far from the twin superpower it once was. One wonders whether tension over Iran and Syria, or Russia's granting of temporary asylum to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden are markers of a sort of renewed cold-war style tension. Obama and the U.S. are pretty clear that they're holding the stronger hand of cards and so have reacted at least publically temperately, but it's also clear that the U.S. won't suffer real competition for world hegemony.

The bullying foreign policy of the U.S. is one of the reasons I've been slow to make a public stand on the developing Stoli Vodka/Olympics boycott over outrageously repressive anti-gay laws being passed by the Russian government. I'm heartened to see clarity on the part of New Zealand revolutionary queers organizing support for the boycott under the slogan "Neither Washington nor Moscow but international queer liberation." Homonationalism is a real threat in the U.S., especially given the Obama government's pro-gay posture. The Wellington Queer Avengers slogan makes it really clear that cheering on imperialism isn't a road to liberation. I'm sure I'll have more to say on this subject later.

Anyway, cold war 2? Fun times ahead, again?

Anti-Americana is a regular feature of Anti-American art from around the world here at The Cahokian.

Yesterday They Called Him a Terrorist

Nelson Mandela (L) in Robben Island prison.

Slightly expanded from a note I wrote on Facebook. I actually saw Mandela briefly, though an odd moving cage of glass. He visited New York City after his liberation, and was given a ticker-tape parade which I attended with my friend Pat. I still have the felt flag printed with ANC colors that we waved from the sidelines, amazed at the turning wheels of history.

As of this writing South African hero Nelson Mandela is hospitalized, in critical condition. While he is quite possibly near death, he has survived previous bouts of a lung ailment aggravated by his years in a white-supremacist prison.

But in advance of all the pretty, laudatory words sure to come upon his death, it's really important to remember that the biggest backers of the racist system of apartheid in South Africa were the United States, the UK, and the State of Israel. All the world's politicians will be crying crocodile tears for Mandela when he passes, but they all considered him a terrorist virtually up until the moment he was released from his life-stealing 27 years in prison. Much of the radical promise of Mandela's African National Congress was (predictably) set aside upon their assumption of power, but that pales, in the scale of political horrors, in comparison with the whitewashing of decades of racist lies, backed by massive amounts of money and weapons, that propped up the racist white minority regime in South Africa and made life desperate and dangerous for its black majority.

Reagan, Thatcher, and all their ilk believed Mandela deserved to rot in jail. The Israelis understood what Apartheid South Africa meant for them and studied its methods carefully as they exchanged military and financial aid. These are not accidents nor inconsistencies.

Back in the day the divestment movement met the same arguments that today's BDS movement meets. Don't be fooled, the companies and conglomerates and multinational corporations of international capitalism believe oppression is profitable. That's how they want the world organized.

The governments of the world believe they have a right to label freedom fighters terrorists.

The apartheid state in Israel believes that some people are not as human as others. If South Africa teaches us anything about humanity it teaches us about the justness of the struggle of the Palestinian people.

Who are tomorrow's Mandelas? Don't let the Reagans and Thatchers of today off the hook. The struggle continues; it's right to rebel.

Thank you Nelson Mandela for your part in changing history.

Ding dong . . . the “witch” is dead?

Margaret Thatcher died today, and celebration is the order of the day. She was a monster: a partner in crime of Augusto Pinochet and Ronald Reagan; she joined Reagan in calling Nelson Mandela a "terrorist." This is setting aside all the horrible things she did to working people in the U.K. Amid the celebration, I did notice something, and this article by Bay Area revolutionaries Advance the Struggle really caught my eye, so I'm reblogging it here. While I'm still working out my opinion on the works of Marxist-Feminist Sylvia Federici (author of Caliban and the Witch), I know quite a bit about witches and this article gets it exactly right. —ISH

Witch Side Are You On?

I dont intend to attack anyone for their word choice, but would like to raise a little bit of consciousness on this word choice of calling Thatcher a “witch” as a form of insult.
 
Margaret thatcher was the opposite of a witch. By referring to thatcher as a witch, one denigrates the real witches of the late middle ages (and other women whose independence was

slandered by patriarchy as witchcraft) whose genocide (witch hunts) was intimately bound up with the subjugation of the new proletariat and colonizing missions.

The witch hunts culminated in a triumph for the bourgeoisie, in the form of a division of labor at the heart of which was a stark divide between productive labor and reproductive (domestic) labor. Workers outside of the home (predominantly men, but women too) were waged slaves whose productivity was under-valued through the fetishism of commodities (money hiding the unequal exchange of equivalents). Workers inside the home (exclusively women) were not paid at all, the most extreme fetish (illusion) this new capitalist order would produce. At the heart of this illusion that women’s domestic/reproductive work did not merit a wage, was the false belief that women are genetically prone to do this work for free as loving mothers and loyal wives. Male wage earners were given a position, imposed on them and enforced by law, of domestic overseer with all the tools of coercion they might need, from the right to rape to the right to beat “their” wives who regarded as dependents on the man. Thus the male proletariat was coopted by the bourgeoisie in a scheme to keep the total wage bill of that class half of what it should have been. In this sense, all of us male proletarians have a duty to honor our sisters as pillars of the class at every available opportunity. Part of that is learning the history of women as workers inside and outside the home. That history includes the heroic chapter of witches’ resistance to capitalism at the very dawn of its existence. [the book Caliban and the Witch is a good place to start]

Margaret thatcher was a traitor to her gender. Witches were the most loyal members not only of their gender but also of a far reaching pan-european anti-capitalist/anti-patriarchy movement from the 1300s-1700s, that is, during the period of capitalism’s maturation as a world system.

Death to Thatcherism!
Long live women’s liberation and proletarian revolution!

Everything You Need to Know About Tonight's Republican Debate

Tonight's Republican Presidential debate was held at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California. Ronald Reagan is a beloved icon for these Republican candidates. Although their politics are far to the right even of his actual record, they claim to cherish everything he stood for.

This is what he stood for:

"The most memorable Reagan AIDS moment for me was at the 1986 centenary rededication of the Statue of Liberty. The Reagans were there sitting next to French President Francois Mitterand and his wife, Danielle. Bob Hope was on stage entertaining the all-star audience. In the middle of a series of one-liners Hope quipped, "I just heard that the Statue of Liberty has AIDS but she doesn't know if she got it from the mouth of the Hudson or the Staten Island Fairy." As the television camera panned the audience, the Mitterands looked appalled. The Reagans were laughing. By the end of 1989 and the Reagan years, 115,786 women and men had been diagnosed with AIDS in the United States, and more than 70,000 of them had died." — Michael Bronski, The Truth About Reagan, 2003

A Love Letter to Ronald Reagan: Butcher, Murderer, Criminal. Not Dead Enough.

Dear Ronald Reagan:

Tomorrow is your 100th birthday. You know, we thought, back when you were alive, when you were the president, we wouldn't survive you. In fact many of my friends did not actually survive you; and I miss them. I don't miss you. It was a terrible time, those Reagan years, no matter what they pretend now. No, we are not nostalgic for that time. It was a dark time, a painful time, an awful time knowing someone so genuinely evil had so much power.

I remember your disdain for us. In April 1987, you said: "Let's be honest with ourselves, AIDS information can not be what some call 'value neutral.' After all, when it comes to preventing AIDS, don't medicine and morality teach the same lessons." We knew what you meant. You meant we deserved to die. You couldn't even bring yourself to say the word gay in polite conversation. That health crisis you were being so smugly self-righteous about happened on your watch and you did.... nothing.

Some people thought it was funny when you joked about starting a world war. "We begin bombing in five minutes," you said. Your lackeys laughed. I remember the chill down my spine. How dare you joke about obliterating millions of people when your finger is actually on the button.

Ronnie, you were a big fucking fake. You were a terrible actor in bad movies when you worked in Hollywood, and you were a terrible actor in a bad nightmare when you were picked by the military industrial complex to work in Washington. It comes as no surprise to me that your son -- remember him, the GAY one? -- he said you showed signs of senility and dementia in the late 1980s. Trust me, he was being kind. You showed those signs in the early 1980s. But somehow they wanted to believe you so badly, those people who voted for you. They hoped you were a kindly old grampa, miraculously adding one plus one and coming up with three.

I remember the way you tilted your head, the way you laughed at your own jokes, your honed sense of Hollywood timing. Your smugness. Oh I give you credit for remember a few actor's tricks.

A lot of people were burned out by the 1970s, seeing the scabs picked off the open wound that was America. When you lied and said you would make it all better people ate that shit up. All you had to do was keep lying. Oh yes, we remember the lie of "trickle down economics." We remember who got rich. We're still paying for that now.

We remember what you did to the people of Nicaragua. Of Guatemala. Of El Salvador. Of Grenada. Of Libya. We remember who you tried to kill. Who you actually killed. We remember who your friends were. We remember that you thought Nelson Mandela belonged in jail and that you thought apartheid made South Africa a great American ally. We remember how much you loved Ferdinand Marcos. We remember that you gave money to a nascent Islamist movement so it could fight communism for you....no that could never come back to bite the U.S. in the ass, could it? We remember your double dealing, your criminal cronies like Oliver North.

I survived you. I remembering hearing Maya Angelou's poem at Bill Clinton's inaugural in 1993 after 8 years of your rule and 4 more of your CIA crony George Bush the elder. I cried today rereading this poem, like I cried when I heard it the first time, the catharsis of knowing your nightmare was over. She spoke for all of us back in 1993:

"A Rock, A River, A Tree
Hosts to species long since departed,
Marked the mastodon.

The dinosaur, who left dry tokens
Of their sojourn here
On our planet floor,
Any broad alarm of their hastening doom
Is lost in the gloom of dust and ages.

But today, the Rock cries out to us, clearly, forcefully,
Come, you may stand upon my
Back and face your distant destiny,
But seek no haven in my shadow.

I will give you no more hiding place down here.

You, created only a little lower than
The angels, have crouched too long in
The bruising darkness,
Have lain too long
Face down in ignorance.

Your mouths spilling words
Armed for slaughter.

The Rock cries out today, you may stand on me,
But do not hide your face.

Across the wall of the world,
A River sings a beautiful song,
Come rest here by my side.

Each of you a bordered country,
Delicate and strangely made proud,
Yet thrusting perpetually under siege.

Your armed struggles for profit
Have left collars of waste upon
My shore, currents of debris upon my breast.

Yet, today I call you to my riverside,
If you will study war no more. Come,

Clad in peace and I will sing the songs
The Creator gave to me when I and the
Tree and the stone were one.

Before cynicism was a bloody sear across your
Brow and when you yet knew you still
Knew nothing.

The River sings and sings on.

There is a true yearning to respond to
The singing River and the wise Rock.

So say the Asian, the Hispanic, the Jew
The African and Native American, the Sioux,
The Catholic, the Muslim, the French, the Greek
The Irish, the Rabbi, the Priest, the Sheikh,
The Gay, the Straight, the Preacher,
The privileged, the homeless, the Teacher.
They hear. They all hear
The speaking of the Tree.

Today, the first and last of every Tree
Speaks to humankind. Come to me, here beside the River.

Plant yourself beside me, here beside the River.

Each of you, descendant of some passed
On traveller, has been paid for.

You, who gave me my first name, you
Pawnee, Apache and Seneca, you
Cherokee Nation, who rested with me, then
Forced on bloody feet, left me to the employment of
Other seekers--desperate for gain,
Starving for gold.

You, the Turk, the Swede, the German, the Scot ...
You the Ashanti, the Yoruba, the Kru, bought
Sold, stolen, arriving on a nightmare
Praying for a dream.

Here, root yourselves beside me.

I am the Tree planted by the River,
Which will not be moved.

I, the Rock, I the River, I the Tree
I am yours--your Passages have been paid.

Lift up your faces, you have a piercing need
For this bright morning dawning for you.

History, despite its wrenching pain,
Cannot be unlived, and if faced
With courage, need not be lived again.

Lift up your eyes upon
The day breaking for you.

Give birth again
To the dream.

Women, children, men,
Take it into the palms of your hands.

Mold it into the shape of your most
Private need. Sculpt it into
The image of your most public self.
Lift up your hearts
Each new hour holds new chances
For new beginnings.

Do not be wedded forever
To fear, yoked eternally
To brutishness.

The horizon leans forward,
Offering you space to place new steps of change.
Here, on the pulse of this fine day
You may have the courage
To look up and out upon me, the
Rock, the River, the Tree, your country.

No less to Midas than the mendicant.

No less to you now than the mastodon then.

Here on the pulse of this new day
You may have the grace to look up and out
And into your sister's eyes, into
Your brother's face, your country
And say simply
Very simply
With hope
Good morning."

Fuck you Ronald Reagan. Stay dead. Liar. Monster. Burn in hell.

Love,

A Survivor

(Top graphic is a legendary poster from the AIDS activist organization ACT-UP. Maya Angelou's poem is called "On The Pulse of Morning," and seems to be generally reprinted in full on the net but of course it's her copyright.)

Anti-American Art: Collateral Damage

This sheetlet of 16 stamps was issued by Libya -- the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya -- in 1986 to mark the attack earlier that year ordered by U.S. President Reagan against targets in Tripoli and Benghazi. The joined vignettes focus on the toll among Libyan civilians, including, apparently, many children. While dead children are a bonafide propaganda cliche, it is quite remarkable how frequently these tiniest collateral targets get in the way of American (and Israeli) bombs. The presence of enemy tots seems never to have deterred American imperial interests, whether in Libya in 1986 or the Afghan-Pakistan border in 2010. No wonder that world opinion of the U.S. is a complicated matter.

Other gory Libyan stamps marking the U.S. attack of 1986 can be seen here.

Update: I just read the late Howard Zinn's excellent article on the U.S. attack on Libya "Terrorism Over Tripoli." He puts it in excellent perspective: "Even if we assume that Khadafi was behind the discotheque bombing (and there is no evidence for this), and Reagan behind the Tripoli bombing (the evidence for this is absolute), then both are terrorists, but Reagan is capable of killing far more people than Khadafi. And he has.

What if They Gave an International March and Nobody Came?

Today is the 26th anniversary of the International March on the United Nations for Lesbian and Gay Freedom! Wait, the what?

On September 30, 1984, a couple hundred people gathered in Dag Hammarskjold Plaza near the United Nations headquarters in New York City after a march uptown from the village. It was the underwhelming culmination of almost a year of organizing. I was one of the core group of four people who tried to pull off this event, and among the lessons I learned from it was that that movie, "Field of Dreams," you know the one, "If You Build It They Will Come"? That movie was full of shit. At the time we were sort of mortified by our failure to achieve a mega-event on the order of the first Lesbian and Gay March on Washington five years before. Living in a sort of haze of magical wishful thinking we couldn't reconcile our determined vision for doing something important with the poorly constructed house of cards that wound up being the fruit of our labors. In the aftermath of the event our personal friendships were tested and we all underwent a period of personal reevaluation which was to change drastically at least my own life trajectory. Now so many years later though, I find myself less embarrassed and ready to restore this forgotten event to the annals of gay liberation history. Perhaps this is because many of the details of that year of organizing have faded, but perhaps it's because with the benefit of historical hindsight, I can be at least a little proud of how we tried to beat the odds of the Reagan years.

1984 was a terrible year. AIDS was a relatively new phenomenon, and had not yet generated the wave of activism that was to revolutionize the way America--and the world--viewed and treated gay people. Papers like The New York Times still refused to use the word "gay," wielding the dismissive "homosexual" with an air of psychoanalytical superiority. The cold war was at its iciest with Reagan joking about how the bombing -- the nuclear obliteration of the Soviet Union -- would begin in five minutes. Furiously grabbing its metaphorical crotch over its succesful if miniature military adventure in Grenada, the revanchism of Reaganism was happily painting over the last remnants of 1960s/1970s liberationist consciousness.

In 1983 my friend David France went to Europe to attend a conference of the Amsterdam and Stockholm-based International Gay Association. As I wrote in the booklet shown below, "In 1983 the International Gay Association of Lesbians/Gay Women and Gay men proclaimed 1984 to be the International Year of Lesbian and Gay Action. 1984 was to be a year for us as lesbians and gays to get together -- to learn, exchange ideas, to communicate, to unite, to fight, to play and to love: to increase our visibility and determination toward our goal of liberation." The IGA proposed that a march be held on the symbol of world solidarity, the United Nations.

David and I knew each other from the Lavender Left, an independent group of lesbian and gay socialists. I was a member of the Revolutionary Socialist League eager for united-front organizing opportunities, and David was well connected to New York's newer generation of lesbian and gay cultural activists. We had worked together in the Christopher Street Liberation Day Committee, trying to push its agenda leftward. (I think it was in 1983 that CSLDC adopted my proposal for that year's pride activities slogan: "Diversity Is Our Strength, Liberation Is Our Fight," which they then proceeded to do their best to keep off official Pride materials.) So after David got excited about the IGA's proposals in the fall of 1983 we established the Lesbian and Gay Organizing Committee for 1984. Doing our best to combat what we saw as a rightward drift of the mainstream gay community, we hoped to show that the progressive wing of the community could build up as well as criticize. Doing the best to get the word out, we organized a planning conference in March of 1984.

The planning conference felt like a great success. We got many of the leading voices in the left-wing of New York's gay community together to brainstorm about the march, and to lay a political basis for our organizing. It felt like we were building a significant basis of unity around ideas far to the left of where previous gay events had gone. It wasn't as large or dramatic a conference as the meetings that lead up to the 1979 march on Washington (MOW), but it wasn't as divisive either. We strove for gender and racial balance: we were excited that these felt like points of unity rather than points of division. We felt like we had made a solid foundation for a march in the fall. And we were gonna ask for the world! Here's the statement we adopted:

Stand Together -- We Are Everywhere

Lesbians and gay males live in every country, within every culture, and under all economic and political systems. We fight for our freedom knowing that none of us can live openly as lesbians and gay males under any system which supports racism, anti-Semitism, sexism, ageism, economic and religious oppression or other forms of domination. As a diverse community of women and men of every race, age, class, and physical ability, having every life philosophy and religious belief, we demand:
* The freedom to live openly as lesbians and gay males from our youth to our old age
* An end to violence by governments and institutions against lesbians and gay males, including torture or incarceration in prisons or mental institutions.
* An end to anti-gay violence on the streets and in our homes.
* An end to all sexual violence...
* The declassification of homosexuality as a disease by WHO
* Equal rights and equal housing and employment...
* Our right to have and keep our children
* Quality health care...
* An end to discrimination in any form against people with AIDS, and increased funding for research and treatment...
* An end to anti-gay immigration laws...
* The right to speak openly about our lives and the right to meet and organize freely with other lesbians and gay males (slightly edited. --ish)



We made an organizing plan. We began to cast a wide net, sending out a mailing to every national and international lesbian and gay organization and publication we could find. We sought the help and endorsement of numerous left organizations. While eventually the endorsements rolled in -- hundreds of gay groups from the United States and a dozen foreign countries signed up, as did left groups like my own Revolutionary Socialist League, the Freedom Socialist Party, the International Socialists, the International Socialist Organization, the Socialist Party USA, the War Resisters League and others. But shortly after the enthusiasm of the planning conference had died down, we realized that after an initial flurry of interest, all those leading lights of New York's lesbian and gay community were nowhere to be found. People who had dominated the discussion and exercised leadership in crafting what we stood for (Jim Fouratt I'm talking to you) were soon nowhere to be found.

We managed to rent an office space to organize out of: an unrenovated loft between tenants. We sought donations, and got printing help from progressive printers, and free guerrilla typesetting from my job. We bought an answering machine (not as common as you might think back in 1984), although it was a terrible piece of crap that had a precorded message. What we didn't really get was people to help organize or real commitments to participate.

The office turned out to be a sort of travesty. One afternoon after licking some envelopes and making some plans there I found myself napping--on our ragged hand-me-down sofa or single desk and chair I don't recall. I woke up to find our precious new answering machine and small cashbox stolen out from under me. It was far from the vibrant nerve center of an active coalition, it was a temple of wishful thinking and frankly, denial.

As the endorsements rolled in we arranged for speakers at our UN rally. They were an interesting bunch. Sylvia Borren from the IGA. The wonderful Marco Antonio Osorio R., RIP, a dear man from Mexico who became a good friend. Daniel Tsang and Cherrie Moraga. New Alliance Party (in retrospect a creepy cult) political candidate Dennis Serrette. And Sonia Johnson, the radical feminist who burst out of Mormonism to fight for women's equality and run for President that year. We even met with the New York City police department to get our permits and discuss our plans. They asked us how many buses we thought would be arriving. We assured them the answer was many. Looking back I'm sure we revealed our inattention to detail. I remember at the actual march every time a tourist bus drove by I would beckon hopefully to a cop. Of course there were no actual buses to our event. We managed to borrow a flatbed truck with a sound system on it, I think from the NAP if I recall. We made some signs and some banners. David and I, our friend Dean Weeks, and another friend I have somehow blotted out of my mind, sometimes with an occasional other volunteer or two did what we could. I remember us all getting very tense with each other, but we failed to look each other in the eyes and question whether we were actually checking in with reality as we organized.

Shortly before the event another comrade from the Revolutionary Socialist League was delegated to drop in on our organizing activities. Of course our house of cards was plain as day to him. He tried to get the League to back out to avoid the embarrassment he saw coming. I was so integral to the event -- and honestly as deeply responsible for failing to really understand what organizing something like this would take -- I had to fight to stay involved. I told them the RSL just couldn't back out. It was too late.

Honestly I am not sure I have ever seen a photo of this event. Some must exist somewhere. I googled the march, and came up only with our resource booklet preserved carefully in boxes of memorabilia willed to gay archives by dying activists. But the event actually happened. Perhaps that it did was enough for those few people who attended. I wonder if the two guys who actually flew in from Argentina for the event -- Alejandro Kantemiroff I'm so sorry!! -- felt fulfilled or disappointed. It was a truly international event. It was a march and rally. At the UN. But it was very very small. And it slipped out of collective memory and record.

We were very young, in our mid-twenties, optimists with no doubts that we could will our march for freedom into being. I'm not sure how exactly we missed the fact that the MOW we hoped to emulate was built by hundreds and thousands of people across the country working furiously to manifest the brave idea of a national lesbian and gay march. We weren't able to motivate a huge number of people to get excited and attend. But we also didn't spend a lot of money. We didn't get paid, we weren't left with massive debts. If we felt when it was over like we were walking away from a trainwreck, in the end the statement we wanted to make got made. We had sent letters to all the world's UN delegations bearing our demands which ended: "The United Nations Organization was formed toward the purpose of ending war and injustice by uniting the nations of the world in cooperation and communication. Now is the time for your country to renew its commitment to justice and human rights by taking action in support of lesbian and gay civil and human rights. We respectfully urge you to do what you can toward this urgent and necessary end."

In 1984 who dared to tell the nations of the world to do those things? Who was brave enough back at the height of the cold war, the era of global repression and dictators, to stand like little Davids against mighty Goliaths and speak for the rights of those who, in many countries, had never had anyone speak for them before? We did. You, 21st-century gay citizens of the world, you're welcome!

Top graphic is the button design produced by the LGOC for the march; it was designed by Joseph Cavalieri. The second graphic is the cover of the resource book distributed at the march to attendees. It listed all the worldwide endorsing organizations, our documents of unity, our message to the UN, and statements of solidarity.

2019 UPDATE: Some amazing footage of this event has surfaced: filmmaker/archivist Jim Hubbard was there and shot some footage now available at his website. I'm shown briefly as well as my friend David France, the RSL contingent and a number of queer activists from the time. The footage shows a small but not actually embarrassing march. Thank you Jim!

Anti-American Art: Jet Shot Down by Terrorists

1988 stamp from the Islamic Republic of Iran marking the "Disastrous U.S. Missile Attack Against Iranian Air Liner." Iran Air Flight 655, a civilian Airbus jet flying from Tehran to Dubai with 290 people aboard was shot down by the U.S. Navy cruiser Vincennes on July 3 of that year, killing everyone. The Vincennes somehow thought the passenger plane was an attacking Iranian fighter and shot it down. The government of Ronald Reagan paid compensation to the families of the victims but maintained that the Vincennes was acting properly in defending itself from attack. The lives of 66 children were among those cut short.

The stamp shows a stylized American gunboat decked out in the US flag launching a SAM against the Iranian jet, and the Persian Gulf going up in flames.

Is it any wonder with the world's most lethal superpower prowling its waters armed to the teeth with a proven trackrecord of attacking innocent civilians why Iran would want the latest weapons to defend itself?

Don't Forget This Axis of Evil: USA, Israel & Apartheid South Africa

This is an interview from the RT network with Sasha Polakow-Suransky of the Council on Foreign Relations discussing his revelation that Israel tried to sell nuclear weapons to the white racist apartheid regime of South Africa in 1975. Polakow-Suransky details the relationship that began under the Peres-Rabin Labor government in Israel and deepened during the subsequent Likud government. His information is detailed and fairly nuanced; he does not suggest that in the end South Africa purchased the nukes. Of course Israel is denying these reports.

But something needs to be said that seems forgotten these days. At the height of apartheid in the 1970s and 1980s, South Africa had two main allies and defenders, and they were the State of Israel...and the United States of America.

I found this 1986 column from Carl Rowan: "The more President Reagan talks about South Africa, the clearer it becomes that his heart and mind are with the white minority that is holding power through brutal oppressions. During his Tuesday press conference in Chicago, it became obvious that Mr. Reagan could not have been a blinder ally of the Afrikaners if he had been a puppet with Pretoria's President Pier Botha pulling the strings. There was Both Tuesday afternoon telling the congress of his ruling National Party that communism is at the root of all the evils and woes of South Africa. Then came Mr. Reagan that same evening asserting that the Communist Party of South Africa 'joined with and just moved into, the African National Congress...And right now...the ones we're hearing from and that are making the statements, are the members of the African Communist Party." President Reagan tried to veto sanctions against apartheid South Africa; basically called Nelson Mandela a terrorist, and spent millions backing South Africa's proxy wars against Cuban/Soviet backed governments in Mozambique and Angola. Meanwhile South Africa became the star client of Israel's armaments industry, purchasing billions of dollars worth of hightech weapons and fighter jets. In return South Africa supplied uranium to Israel's nuclear power plant.

The United States sacrificed the black majority in South Africa to its cold-war strategy. Ironic, of course, since apartheid was US-style Jim Crow segregationism taken to dramatic new levels. All the separation laws of the American south and its defacto deprivation of rights for black people were made government policy in South Africa. It was racial separation writ large and legal. Eventually the South African regime set up puppet black microstates in tribal areas as showcases of plausible deniability that everything they did was motivated by racism. The truth is that the spirit of Apartheid is kept alive today in one place and that place is Israel. The Arabs in the so-called occupied territories are subject to separation and deprivation of rights...and once again, despite its occasional protestations, the main backer of the new apartheid regime is the USA.

Now thats' what I call money

A republican congressman from North Carolina has called for the replacement of General Ulysses S. Grant's portrait on the US $50 bill with an image of President Ronald Reagan. I'm horrified in general at how Ronald Reagan is treated in popular memory. He was a doddering senile fool, his administration responsible for a sea change in American attitudes toward government that we're still trying to dig our way out of. As far as I'm concerned his support of dictators, of apartheid, of CIA meddling around the world is unforgivable. And his neglect of the AIDS crisis while thousands died was truly criminal.

But I was having hard time in my mind defending Grant's presence on the $50. Sure, he defeated the racist confederacy in the civil war--the real reason this reprobate congressman wants to erase his likeness--but he also presided over the genocide of native Americans in the west.



Which is when I remembered the money from my stay in Nicaragua in the 1980s. On th 10 cordoba note was an image of a stone-throwing revolutionary on the front, and an image of mine workers on the back.



On the fifty cordoba note was an image of the triumph of the revolution in the main plaza of Managua in, and an image of martyred FSLN founder Carlos Fonseca Amador on the front.



On the front of the 1000 cordoba note was an image of Augusto Cesar Sandino, the anti-American revolutionary from the 1930s who was the inspiration for the Sandinista revolution.



So who should be on our money? Here's my modest proposal.

Lincoln can stay on the five. Never forget the civil war and the emancipation. Get rid of that $1 bill, it's not worth anything anyway. On the ten dollar bill let's replace Hamilton with somebody like Rosa Parks. We're gonna need a ten to pay for a bus or subway ride before long so it's fitting. The twenty should go to Sequoyah or Tecumseh, payback for Andrew Jackson. The fifty goes to radical emancipationist John Brown, who would give new meaning to the "In God We Trust" motto. The hundred should go to Martin Luther King: doesn't a bundle of Kings sound better than a bundle of Benjamins? All those bigger bills, well, somebody give me a sample of them and I'll tell you who should go on them.

Anybody got a better proposal? How about for small change?