Happy Fourth of July?

So many of the world's current spectacles remind us of the truth of the words spoken by the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass back in 1852.

"What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States at this very hour."

"The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn."

Watching the racist media follow the George Zimmerman proceedings, wherein the late Trayvon Martin is virtually on trial for being murdered, or the massive government hypocrisy over NSA spying, or President Obama's cluesslessly unselfaware visit to Robben Island in South Africa, or the US act of aggression in forcing down Bolivian President Evo Morales' plane over Europe, it's clear that so much in the world is just not right, so much of the myths about the United States are just so much red-white-and-blue bullshit. Some small amount of observation reveals that the Civil War that was fought to right some of the great wrongs Douglass condemned failed to rectify some of the major flaws in this nation's founding.

From 1845:

“I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.”

“Dark and terrible as is this picture, I hold it to be strictly true of the overwhelming mass of professed Christians in America. They strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel. Could any thing be more true of our churches?”

“They attend with Pharisaical strictness to the outward forms of religion, and at the same time neglect the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith.”

So much work to be done. This fourth of July, time to recommit to a new, real revolution in America.

(You can watch the actor Danny Glover read a portion of the 1852 speech here).
 

“I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.”

“I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.”

“Dark and terrible as is this picture, I hold it to be strictly true of the overwhelming mass of professed Christians in America. They strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel. Could any thing be more true of our churches?”

“They attend with Pharisaical strictness to the outward forms of religion, and at the same time neglect the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith.”

I See Dead People

Dead Metal Toy Sudanese Mahdists from John Jenkins Co.

When I was growing up in Chicago in the mid-1960s my best friend was named Nancy Lee. I don't remember what her father actually did for a living, but I knew he dreamed of returning to his native Kentucky and settling into an academic career and writing about his life's fascination, the American Civil War; which at some point he actually did, ending my friendship with little Nancy Lee. Anyway in Nancy Lee's basement her father Jim had a huge collection of plastic civil war toy soldiers. They were made in pale blue and pale gray colors, thus despite the similarity of uniform and pose casting no doubt about which side they were meant to represent. He had everything spread out on a jumble of tables. There were plastic Southern mansions and plastic trees and plastic bridges and tiny cannons scattered about the clashing plastic armies. It was quite the scene, and I was quite jealous, never being invited to play with what seemed irrationally to my mind an adult man's toy. Nancy Lee, being very young and a girl to boot, was not allowed to do more than look at this awesome display. Her older brother was initiated into the mysteries of these toys, but he was much older than Nancy Lee or I, so I was never invited to watch her father at play either: I don't know if he rearranged the lines of battle by whim of mood, whether he made whooshing, booming, spitting sounds as he moved the figures about, or whether he was aiming merely for the perfect just-so arrangement of some historic moment in time.

Did I mention I was jealous? I developed quite a fascination of my own with little toy historical figures, some of which I have written about here before. In the end I eventually boxed up my own collection of little toy soldiers, giving most of them away. As I entered adulthood I occasionally and wistfully bought myself a little model soldier, evoking some childhood romance with history and adventure and lost innocence no doubt, but I never seriously contemplated becoming one of that rare and undoubtedly dying breed of gentlemen hobbyists, the adult toy soldier collector.


Metal Toy Dead Zulus from Conte Collectibles.

Which is not to say that I am not still fascinated by the idea of toy soldiers: capturing and miniaturizing historical violence without worry over the lives of real men, without the stain of blood or the curse of collateral damage. Over the years with the onset of the internet I was happy to discover that I could pursue that fascination voyeuristically, nostalgically (and economically) by window-shopping hobbyist websites; which I have done now for years.

Although I have not met such a person in my adulthood, there are apparently lots of people, presumably men, who do still engage in this time-honored hobby. Fueled in part by cheap manufacturing in China, toy soldiers aimed at adults seem to be quite a stable niche market. And unlike my youth when toy soldiers were mostly devoted to Cowboys and Indians, Civil War soldiers like my friend Nancy Lee's father had, knights in shining armor, and WWII GIs, today's toy soldiers seem to have reached all level of exotic historical subjects covering thousands of years of human history.


Plastic Toy Dead Sioux from Toy Soldiers of San Diego.

But I have noticed a trend, something that really creeps me out: toy dead people. Your plastic cowboys and plastic Custer and metal Redcoats can now be matched up with dead and dying little toy Indians in a variety of agonizing poses. Your tiny British imperialist highlanders defending your model of South Africa's Rorke's Drift can now be surrounded by "clumps" (not exaggerating, see above) and "piles" of toy dead Zulus. And your Four-Feathers-style British heroes heading off to rescue a tin version of General Charles "Chinese" Gordon in the Sudan can now avenge themselves against crumpling, dying black African Mahdist tribesmen. While as near as I can tell there is the occasional toy white corpse to be had, the overwhelming number of these toy dead people are black and brown. Indeed you can get dying toy white people being scalped by fiendish looking toy Indians, so you will need those piles of dead Indians for your act of proper revenge.


Metal Toy Dead Woodland Indians from Sierra Toy Soldier Co.

Sure, who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men and all that. Gore is a stable part of fantasy: violent movies, violent video games, plastic guns, murder mystery novels. Why shouldn't toys based in the actual violence of history add a little realism? As far as I can tell it's not like these items are aimed at children, as if in today's world one could keep images of violence from kids anyway. I played with these things and I'm a pacifist. But I remain unsettled.

Why in this virtual body count is black and brown "life" so cheap? I suppose it could be argued that an abstract hobby is coming to terms with the real, genocidal costs of the history being reenacted in miniature. For sure to reflect anything like real history you'd need to match up your pile of tin cowboys and redcoats with a mountain of dead tin Indians. But it feels so.... disrespectful.

I mean, can you imagine the outrage at little toy concentration camps with little toy skeletal Jews and miniature gas chambers? "Oh here's my little dead Great Grandmother Esther...look at the fine detail! Doesn't she look real? And see the tiny armband with its precious little star?" It's bad enough that there are indeed little tin Nazis: there is a questionable leap of taste if I've ever seen one. But isn't it damning that there aren't model "clumps" of Holocaust victims to match the molded puddle of imaginary exterminated Africans?

I'm not seeing that same nostalgia here that used to conjure up excitement in what remains of my little boy heart and imagination. It's impossible given the tenor of the times to not wonder if the nostalgia being conjured up by these "toys" isn't nostalgia for a time when white people were happily conquering the world in the name of manifest destiny, Britannia ruling the waves, and that historical favorite of white people, the noble pursuit of civilizing the "savages."

I can't look at these miniatures as toys anymore. I see dead people. Maybe time to put away childish things, eh?

A Lump for Your Gravy

I've referenced this piece before, but it's been reposted on Kasama by its author Mike Ely with an intro that puts it in context of today's #OWS Occupy movement. "Original Occupation: Native Blood & the Myth of Thanksgiving:"

"We are talking widely among ourselves about “occupying” Wall Street — taking the center of an empire back for the people of the world. We are talking about “Occupy Everything” — sharing our dreams of taking all society away from banks, police, and the heartless authority of money. We hope this moment marks a beginning of the end for them.

And yet, just such a moment cannot be understood without remembering that other occupation — the one that marked the beginning of their beginning.

Arrogant invaders occupied a land using the most naked forms of genocide. They invented new forms of slavery, slave trade and profit making. They arrived with their high-tech arms and bibles. They declared all was theirs by divine right, while they took it all with raw force....

Here is the true story of that Thanksgiving — a story of murder and theft, of the first “corporations” invented on North American soil, of religious fundamentalism and relentless mania for money. It is a story of the birth of capitalism.

This piece is intended to be shared at this holiday time.

Pass it on. Serve a little truth with the usual stuffing."

Read the whole article or download it as a podcast. There's nothing wrong with being together with your loved ones enjoying a break from work. But it's important to remember. Context is everything. Peace to you and yours.

Dear Indians, Sorry 'bout That!

Every American child knows the story of the Pilgrims and the first Thanksgiving. Having fled Europe in a quest for religious freedom, thanks to the friendly Indian Squanto and his tribe, the Pilgrims survived their first winter in their new home back in 1620. Squanto already spoke English! It's kind of like in the Bible how Adam and Eve are supposed to be the first people created by God and then all of a sudden other unexplained people start popping up. A wise person might question the general narrative. Well you soon learn that Squanto learned English from...being captured and enslaved by previous English "visitors." So yes, the earliest interactions of the English and the native population of what they called New England was not the sharing of food and farming techniques, but the random enslavement of the locals. What kind of people come to a new land, rip people away from their families, and turn them into forced-labor slaves?

Here's the thing. The land of New England was not empty wilderness. It already had residents; it didn't need new ones. Tribes like the Wampanoag and Pequot lived across the region, farming and hunting. Not gathering berries in the forest, growing crops. Growing crops, agriculture, implies something quite different about native American society and civilization than the simple-minded Thanksgiving myth suggests.

I recommend an article on a leftist blog "Frontlines of Revolutionary Struggle" that details the relationship of the Pilgrims and other English colonialists in early New England. It's called Native Blood: The Myth of Thanksgiving. It recounts the Pequot War in the mid/late 1630s in which the English settlers exterminated the Pequot tribe from Connecticut. It quotes William Bradford, Governor of Plymouth, on the destruction of the Pequot town Misistuck (Mystic): “Those that escaped the fire were slain with the sword; some hewed to pieces, others run through with their rapiers, so that they were quickly dispatched and very few escaped. It was conceived they thus destroyed about 400 at this time. It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire…horrible was the stink and scent thereof, but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave the prayers thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them.” Wikipedia quotes participant in that massacre John Mason, "Thus did the Lord judge among the Heathen, filling [Mystic] with dead Bodies." The Pequots captured by the English were, yes, sold into slavery and shipped to Bermuda.

So in fifteen years the English settlers went from accepting the food aid and survival help of the Indians to repaying this debt by committing genocide against them. The Indians were in the way of the English; the new world was empty wilderness only because the Indians were not considered real people; they were ungodly heathens, little better than wild animals.

It's nice to gather with friends and family and give thanks for the blessings and bounties of life. A traditional or not-so-traditional Thanksgiving meal is a great way to connect with the memory of one's ancestors and mark the rhythms of the turning of the seasons. And hey it's a day off work! But along with the thanks offered up to God, to each other, to life, maybe we should be offering up apologies as well.

The Good War?

I'm slowly reading the late Howard Zinn's epic A People's History of the United States. It's such clear thinking; an amazing book. A loss not to have him around any longer. I'm amazed in chapter after chapter at how clearly he identifies the established historical myths about American history and then harpoons them with a reordering of the facts and a change in perspective from that of the rulers to that of the people.

This couldn't be clearer in his description of World War Two. Even many who think of themselves as radicals and pacifists wind up giving that war some kind of pass. It was the defeat of fascism! It was done to save the Jews from genocide! The U.S. was attacked!

Here are some excerpts from the People's History that put that war in context:

"For the United States to step forward as a defender of helpless countries matched its image in American high school history textbooks, but not its record in world affairs.... What seemed clear at the time was that the United states was a democracy with certain liberties, while Germany was a dictatorship persecuting its Jewish minority, imprisoning dissidents, whatever their religion, while proclaiming the supremacy of the Nordic 'race.' However, blacks, looking at anti-Semitism in Germany might not see their own situation in the U.S. as much different. And the United States had done little about Hitler's policies of persecution.....It was not Hitler's attacks on the Jews that brought the United States into World War II, ant more than the enslavement of 4 million blacks brought Civil War in 1861...It was the Japanese attack on a link in the American Pacific Empire that did it....

"Was the war war being fought to establish that Hitler was wrong in his ideas of white Nordic supremacy over 'inferior' races? The United States armed forces were segregated by race. When troops were jammed on the Queen Mary in early 1945 to go to combat duty in the European theater, the blacks were stowed down in the depths of the ship near the engine room, as far as possible from the fresh air of the deck, in a bizarre reminder of the slave voyages of old. The Red Cross, with government approval, separated the blood donations of black and white....

"The war not only put the United States in a position to dominate much of the world; it created conditions for effective control at home. The unemployment, the economic distress, and the consequent turmoil that had marked the thirties, only partly relieved by New Deal measures, had been pacified, overcome by the greater turmoil of the war."

That's key sentences in something like ten pages. The whole thing is really required reading, especially today as we find ourselves repeating so much that happened in the 1930s, without, thus far, the class struggle.

(Photo of the Nazi extermination camp Auschwitz at Oswiecim, Poland, taken by me in 1976)

The Barbarity of White People, Continued

I found this map while idly following links on eBay. I don't remember what I clicked on to find it, and I didn't buy it, though I don't recall it being expensive. You'll want to click on it above to see it larger, to see what I saw. It's a map of the west coast of Africa, from the 18th century. It's dated 1739 down at the bottom, and is in French. It's mostly a map of the coasts, with the capes and river mouths all noted. Several regions and nations are noted. There's Sierra Leone. There's Guinee. There's Benin and Biafara. Congo. Angola. Maiumbo. Many of these names are still around today.

One other thing is noted. Carefully noted. The exploitable commodity available in each region. There's the "Coste de Grain," the grain coast. There's the "Coste d'Ivoire," the ivory coast. There's the "Coste d'Or," the gold coast. And yes, you know what's next. The "Coste des Esclaves." The slave coast. This is a map of a holocaust. A guidebook to the world's shame.

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.

Collect Dead Indians!

This is from a series of trading cards included with packs of chewing gum back in the 1930s. This series featured notable native Americans: featured here is a "portrait" of King Phillip, the Alonquian chief named Metacom whose claim to memory is King Phillip's War, the bloody late 17th-century conflict that marked the general destruction of independent Indian nations side-by-side with the Puritan/European settlements in southern New England. The reverse of this card reads "Metacomet was the Indian name of this fearless chief of the Wampanoags who inhabited the southeastern part of Rhode Island and Massachusetts. He was the son of Massasoit and was at first a friend of the white colonists. Later, fearing the whites would destroy his people, started the terrible King Phillip war and massacred many colonists."

It's a completely fanciful illustration; and the brief history is the perfect distillation of the conqueror's point of view: the noble savage was first our friend but then betrayed us. What the card omits is that the defeated Algonquins were largely rounded up, enslaved, and shipped to the Caribbean to be sold as so much chattel. Metacom's severed head was put on display in Plymouth. Pilgrim's progress indeed.

For an extraordinary read on King Phillip's War, including a remarkable exposition on "how brutality is justified and how war is remembered," I strongly recommend Jill Lepore's 1998 work "The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Orgins of American Identity."

Blind Injustice

Somehow I've kept this bumper sticker since the presidential election of 1972, which I was too young to vote in. Surrounded by other anti-war family and friends, I was surprised and devastated when President Nixon defeated George McGovern. This "Re-Elect the Dike Bomber?" sticker was put out by Nixon opponents who wanted to cut to the chase: Nixon was a war criminal not a presidential candidate. The "dikes" in question refer, of course, not to butch lesbians but to the civilian agricultural infrastructure of Vietnam that Nixon spent much of his presidency trying to destroy.

I'm reminded of this bumper sticker by the repeated inability of Americans to empathize with the millions of people in foreign countries effected by American interventions, or American policies, or American self-interest, or, as it is best summed up, by American arrogance. Recently Rep. Patrick Kennedy, a liberal Democrat, rightly attacked the American media for its fixation on the bizarre personal scandals of congressmembers rather than on liberal Rep. Kucinich's just defeated bill calling for withdrawl of US forces from Afghanistan. An admirable sentiment. But Rep. Patrick characterizes the Afghan war as having taken "1000 lives," a number that completely erases the thousands of Afghans and Pakistanis, including likely thousands of non-combatants, killed by "NATO" (ie, American) forces, or even those killed by Taliban suicide bombers, all of which deaths might be laid at the feet of the ongoing American effort to do whatever the hell it is trying to do in that part of the world.

It's kind of like how the deaths of nearly 3,000 Americans on September 11, undeniably a horrible horrible crime, is seen by Americans to be somehow worse than the deaths of ten? a hundred? a thousand? times that many people in Iraq in George Bush's unprovoked attack and its unending aftermath. All those innocent civilians killed "accidentally" by US airstrikes; all those Iraqi pedestrians and motorists casually murdered by Blackwater mercenaries, do their relatives not weep for these sudden and senseless deaths just like the relatives of those killed by the 911 hijackers?

"Re-elect the Dike Bomber" was a call to hold Nixon accountable for what he actually did. It was brave, accurate, and a landslide of Americans turned out not to give a crap as they voted for an ugly, corrupt, lying sleazeball; just as they did years later in sweeping Reagan and re-electing Bush. Why are Americans so blind to what is being done in their names?

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.

One Million Iraqis Killed in War

When well-meaning Americans talk about the costs of the war they talk about the thousands--inching up to 4,000--of soldiers who have lost their lives. But according to a new poll done by ORB, Opinion Business Research, the death toll of Iraqis is now one million lives lost violently.

One million.

If the number of US soldiers dead is now slightly higher (than the completely unrelated) number of Americans killed on 9/11, the total number of Iraqis who U.S. President George Bush has caused to be killed is now 333 times that.

Is that even slightly forgivable?