Anti-American Art: No Place to Land

From Cuba's OSPAAAL comes this 1985 poster: "Alto a la Agresion Yanqui A Nicaragua / Stop Yankee Attacks on Nicaragua." A fairly simple graphic treatment, as the predatory American eagle threatens the armed silhouetted people in Sandinista colors. OSPAAAL continues its international solidarity work today.

Yesterday, July 19, was the 31st anniversary of the triumph of the revolution, the FSLN liberation of Managua in 1979.

The Nicaraguan Revolution Remains an Inspiration

If you're old enough, remember back to 1979. Swaths of Latin America were ruled mostly by corrupt U.S.-backed dictators, by oligarchies deeply indebted to their American sponsors, by Generals and liars. After a decades-long insurgency, the Frente Sandinista por Liberacion Nacional, or FSLN, the Sandinista National Liberation Front, waged its final insurrection and tossed out the Somoza dictatorship. Somoza, whose family had been in power at the whim of American presidents for decades. Somoza, who personally squandered most of the international relief money donated to Nicaragua after its devastating 1972 earthquake. Somoza, whose National Guard shot down children in the streets. He was gone!

The statue above shows a young masked hero in Masaya during the insurrection against the National Guard: the young revolutionaries donned traditional wire and cloth masks to hide their identities from retribution, and met the tanks and armored cars of the Guard with stones.

The FSLN was a Front of several factions ranging from several stripes of socialist to revolutionary nationalist. When it seized the reins of power in its impoverished country, it immediately began literacy campaigns and land reforms. It instituted participatory democracy, building organizations of civilian cooperation and power to rule the country. It wasn't always smooth going. Isolated and embargoed by the United States, Nicaragua relied on aid and assistance from its allies in Cuba and the Soviet Union and its satellites. When the U.S. policy of isolation turned to military aggression and CIA-funded destablization and insurgency, the FSLN pointed its new Sandinista Army and people's militias northward and fought back against the imperialist provocations.


This is a wall stencil from Granada. It reads, "Bajo la bandera de Sandino, Seguimos de Frente con El Frente, "Under the Banner of Sandino, We Stay Out Front With the Front." It was part of the ongoing FSLN campaign to win support of Nicaragua's citizens for its policies.

While there were incidents of repression, Nicaragua remained a multi-party state, with parties of left, center and right free to organize. After the long hard decade of the 1980s the counterrevolutionaries were defeated and the Sandinistas themselves were voted out of power: the economy was in shambles after a decade of embargo. Today the Sandinistas are fractured into the ruling minority government and an opposition party made up of many veterans of the revolution: many of the factional issues remain unresolved. Although the right-wing (closely aided by its US teabagger allies) committed a coup d'etat in Honduras last year, dictatorship is a thing of the past in Latin America, and left-wing governments hold sway in many many countries there.

The Nicaraguan revolution can be thanked for breaking the back of U.S. ability to dictate the affairs of the people of South and Central America, and that's a lasting victory. Today, July 19, is the anniversary of the Triumph of that Revolution in 1979. May the spirit of Sandino live on!

(Photos by me, 1986. click on them to see them larger. For more of my Nicaragua photos from that year, click here).

Anti-American Art: The Burning Path of Maoism

"Desarrollar la guerra popular de resistencia contra el imperialismo yanqui!" "Support the People's War of Resistance Against Yankee Imperialism!" proclaims this fairly recent poster from the Movimiento Popular Peru, one of the external factions of the Partido Comunista de Peru en el Sendero Luminoso de Jose Carlos Mariategui, better known as The Shining Path. The poster is a complicated montage of images: Front and center under the banner of Maoism, a demonstration of indigenous people burn the American flag at their feet. Floating up in the sky is the triumvirate of Marx, Lenin, and Mao, joined by Abimael Guzmán, the Shining Path leader imprisoned by the Peruvian government since 1992.

The Shining Path waged bloody "People's War" in the 1980s and 1990s, controlling portions of Peruvian territory and conducting urban guerrilla warfare. It was accused by the Peruvian government of terrorism and involvement in the drug trade. I read one account of a factional struggle -- that included the Peruvian Maoists -- in the worldwide Maoist movement in the last decade or so over whether to adopt the phrase "Marxism-Leninism-Maoism" or "Marxism-Leninist-Mao Zedong Thought"; the likes of this factional struggle had not been since then-socialist Albania broke from its People's Republic of China sponsors in the late 1970s throwing the Maoist movement into disarray.

(Poster snagged from Esdeladea blog. Thanks! Click on the image to see it much larger.)

The Bluest Eye

(Snagged from humor blog "Failblog.com"; date and location of photo unknown).

Anti-American Art: That's No Guantanamera That's a Prison Camp

"No a la Base Naval de Guantanamo / No to the Guantanamo Naval Base" cries this 1971 poster from Cuba's OSPAAAL. That scary big bird is back, this time sinking its talons in the eastern end of the island of Cuba.

It's one of great ironies that the U.S. has a military base and prison camp on the territory of its greatest local adversary, but Guantanamo was "leased" in perpetuity to the United States after the Spanish-American war in 1903. The current socialist government of Cuba wants the land back, not recognizing the sweetheart lease signed by the earlier pro-U.S. client state. President Obama promised to close the prison camp for "terrorists" that the Bush government opened up there, but after being stymied by bipartisan opposition, Obama doesn't talk too much about the prison any more and his failure to make good on that promise. Apparently both republicans and democrats in Congress like having a blatantly extra-legal place to dump foreigners they've accused of terrorism without having to prove anything. As heinous as Guantanamo is, it's certainly only one of a chain of heinous prisons operated by the United States, its military and its intelligence forces including Abu-Ghraib prison in Iraq, Baghram airforce base in Afghanistan, and various CIA "black sites" across the globe where alleged enemies can be held without anybody actually questioning these allegations. While it's not entirely Obama's fault that Guantanamo prison remains open, he didn't even promise to close the rest of these.

Guantanamo, of course, should be returned to the Cuban people. Ailing former leader Fidel Castro has called for its return recently: "Maintaining a military base in Cuba against the will of the people violates the most elemental principles of international law."

Why Islamophobia IS Racism

I keep running up against people whose vitriol against Muslims transcends the normal rage in our very angry modern society. Every headlined outrage perpetrated by some fringe Al-Qaeda lunatic is cited as evidence that all Muslims harbor in their black hearts the urge to behead us infidels, to leech off "our" societies, to change "our" way of life. I have accused these people of racism. Oh no, they say, Islam is a religion, a choice, not a race! (Ironic how many of the people saying this to me are gay, as in whom the right-wing Christians always say "Being gay is a choice not the same as a race!") Oh no, they assure me, it's the religion of Muslims they are criticizing. It's backward! It's inhumane! Besides, they're entitled! Not to do so is to surrender! To give up! Completely unselfconsciously these Islamophobes then start muttering about how "these people" are sweeping over Europe, ruining it for the rest of us. How "we" are next. It would be laughable if it weren't so tragic. That it is textbook racism is plain to see.

Still, it's easy to get bogged down in a response. That most Muslims are of darker hue than the average white American doesn't entirely explain what's going on. And Edward Said's theory of Orientalism, the complex psychic bleeding wound of European/American colonialist consciousness, is more than a mouthful in simple conversation.

So I was excited to find an example of some extraordinarily clear thinking on the subject of the changing forms of racism. Here's an excerpt of a really insightful and useful talk by British revolutionary socialist Richard Seymour from the Marxism 2010 Conference in the UK this year. It's focused on the situation in Europe and some of the examples are outside of our experience, but it's very apropos of the situation in the U.S. Read the complete text at Lenin's Tomb.

THE CHANGING FACE OF RACISM IN BRITAIN TODAY

I don’t know how many of you use social media service, ‘Twitter’, but those who do may be aware that some months back there was a trending topic called #thingsracistssay. Among these were: “I’m not a racist, but...”; “You can’t say anything these days...”; and, a growing favourite, “Islam ain’t a race, duh!” This talk is about the things that racists say and do, the alibis they use to cover their racism, and the reasons why racism has had to shift in the course of a generation or so, from focusing on biology and colour, to creed and culture....

But in all this, there are some novelties. Racism is changing. It no longer focuses so explicitly on biology and skin colour. The major focus is on culture, and religion. The specific targets are not necessarily black. In fact, many Islamophobes would try to persuade you that they aren’t racist by insisting that they aren’t hostile to black people as such. Now, some people say that Islamophobia is just a cover for ‘Paki’ bashing; that the hostility is not toward Islam itself, which is just a convenient excuse, but toward Asians in general. There are certainly many for whom this is true, but that’s not the end of the story. There is a specificity about Islamophobia, a particular emphasis on Muslims, their purported culture, what is supposedly said and implied by the Quran and hadiths - and the fact that this is so, and that the target appears to be a religious group, doesn’t make it any less racist. Or so I will argue....

...When Martin Amis complained about ‘honour killing’, saying that multiculturalism had meant allowing outrageous forms of behaviour purely on the grounds that it could be traced to someone’s tradition, a form of religious piety or ethnic ritual. He assumed, incorrectly, that honour killing is a particularly Islamic form of behaviour. It is not. It is a form of patriarchal violence that is practised in numerous countries, from Latin America to Europe to south Asia. It is sometimes called dowry killing; sometimes called a ‘crime of passion’; and sometimes it’s just known as murdering your spouse, two cases of which take place every week in the UK. But, again, he repeated this nonsensical claim that multiculturalism means tolerating murder – repeat and underline, it’s not tolerated, it’s against the law.

The confusion which enables people like ...Amis to spout this kind of hysterical racist nonsense, while professing to be anti-racist, partly results from the exaggeration of the role of biology in racist ideology. Historically, cultural tropes have always been built in to racist ideology. Many variants of Enlightenment racism were explicitly culturalist rather than biological, but even those forms of racism that have historically privileged some idea of the biological race have always supplemented it with cultural stereotyping and essentialism – from wily Orientals, to avaricious Jews, to violent African Americans. More to the point, the way in which ‘race’ was constructed as a political category had surprisingly little to do with biological notions of race....

And once this process begins, it doesn’t simply stop and ossify. It transforms in response to new political developments. So, new immigrant groups to America such as European Jews, Italians, the Irish, Poles, Hungarians, etc., would always be initially racialised. But as they consolidated their position in civil society, improved their bargaining power as labourers, and achieved political representation, they became ‘white’. It’s important, when assessing whether a particular speech-act is racist, to consider race as a process rather than a static entity. Racism, like fascism, is a ‘scavenger ideology’ which draws on national, regional, gender, class and cultural stereotypes. As such, it won’t do to say “Islam isn’t a race”, and consider that the end of any discussion about Islamophobia. The question is whether processes are at work separating Muslims out for particular oppression and surveillance, and whether the discursive practises of people like ... Amis, among others, are part of a race-making process....

If I was right in arguing that race is a social construct, a process of political oppression, then it also follows that racism can always adapt, and doesn’t have to respect previously existing boundaries of racial discourse. That means that for as long as there are systems of domination and exploitation, for as long as societies are run on the basis of producing surplus value, profit, for the few, there will always be new ways of dividing people....If we want to put an end to racism in the long-term, we have to challenge the system itself.

I've edited this clumsily with a butcher knife. Go read all of Seymour's talk.

---

Exhibit A: Here's a disgustingly vile Islamophobic video just put out by right-wingers to protest the construction of a mosque in lower Manhattan:

Anti-American Art: Yep, Still Enemies

This North Korean stamp from 2005 celebrating the annual month of joint struggle against U.S. imperialism shows the might of North Korea's military arrayed against a montage of U.S. ignominy in Korea. In the montage are scenes from the capture of the spy ship Pueblo, POWs, military cemetaries, spy planes, and more. It's interesting to contrast the dynamics of this image with some of the other similar North Korean vignettes: it seems to me the posture of the Korean soldier here has changed from righteous outrage to moral superiority.

Everybody draw Muhammad?

"In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful" is what this calligraphy reads; it's the first line of the Holy Qur'an, the sacred book of Islam. It's an invocation, meant to sanctify the words that follow. Now I am not a Muslim, and, secure in my own faith, I've not studied Islam and don't see myself ever walking down that path. But I have tremendous respect for this religion that seeks to recognize the presence of God in all we do in life, and attempts to turn the very act of living into the act of worship. In my own experience of worship, I can see how powerful the act of submission is, of bowing down to God, that Muslims are supposed to commit several times a day in reverent unison as an act of prayer.

I'm writing this post today as it's reported that American-born Yemeni cleric and spokesperson for Al-Qaeda Anwar al-Awlaki has called for the death of the Seattle cartoonist who a few months ago proposed "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day." Liberals have rushed to condemn this cleric's fatwa--as it should be condemned--and people up and down the spectrum have cited this cleric's edict as proof of what a horrible religion Islam is and how they're going to stand firm against the censorial urges of terrorists. Read the comments on any of today's blogs and weep.

"Everybody Draw Mohammad Day" was the brainchild of Seattle cartoonist Molly Norris, and was championed by Seattle blogger, sex-columnist, gay activist, and racist provocateur Dan Savage in reaction to the censorship imposed on an episode of Comedy Central's shock-humor cartoon South Park, and is the latest salvo in the conflict that came to a head after a Danish cartoonist was widely protested by conservative Muslims for drawing an insulting cartoon of the prophet Muhammad.

Let me say that I think censorship is wrong. Let me say that free speech is one of those few blessings we in the U.S. are lucky to have. Let me say that artists have the right to provoke us to thought, to challenge our assumptions and our prejudices; they have the right and indeed the obligation to play with symbols both secular and sacred. I contest none of this.

But I contest the willful campaign to insult Muslims by provocatively, carelessly, and wantonly violating a belief held by many Muslims that the Prophet Muhammad is not to be depicted in graven image. One piece of art, two pieces of art, a cartoon, is something to think about, to debate, maybe to embrace or maybe to protest. All of these things are appropriate (as death sentences and fatwas are inappropriate).

But what's happening with those who embraced "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day" (which was to be last May 10 and seems to have passed more or less forgotten, til today's news headline), is that the ugly side of American arrogance is revealed. As people rush to defend their right to collectively lump all Muslims together with terrorists, with censorship, with fundamentalism, with those dangerous others who we must dehumanize or win to our own, morally superior vision of the world, this is revealed as a something quite different than a free-speech protest. Above all the "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day" movement is a racist movement, which willfully and ignorantly juxtaposes the right of Americans to insult anybody they want to. In the end, "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day" is about inspiring hate, and far from proving the moral superiority of the American way, be it secular or Christian, proves only arrogant self-centeredness.

This is the arrogance that lead George Bush to attack and invade Iraq in revenge for 9/11 despite Iraq having absolutely nothing to do with that day's terrorist attack. This is the arrogance that leads America to meddle -- under Bush's predecessors and his successor Obama -- over and over again in the Middle East to the benefit of American strategic and financial interests and the detriment of the people living there. This is the arrogance that allows the Obama administration to put this heinous Al-Qaeda spokeperson (and American citizen) Al-Awlaki on a list -- not of those to be brought to justice and tried -- of those to be assassinated or executed without right of due process should the opportunity arise. This is the arrogance we must fight against. Just as much as it is terrorists standing in the way of peace in so much of the Middle East, it is American arrogance standing in that same place.

I don't know if my experience of God, of spirit, is the same as what Muslims experience. I know their religion, like so many others, says their duty is to convert me to to their vision, and I disagree with that. My faith is also strong enough to withstand that. My religion has no such moral certainty that it is the only way, and I like it that way. I know I have many theological differences with Islam, as I do with most religions I know a little bit about. But my religious convictions allow me to find common ground with other people trying to make sense of an experience of living life that is mysterious, confusing, often wonderful and sometimes hard, despite those differences, even when they seem fundamental.

So I won't be drawing any pictures of Muhammad. Peace be upon him. I extend my hand in friendship.



Salaam. May peace be upon all of us.

Anti-American Art: OK if the Great Leader Says So

Celebrating the publication of an anti-American missive by its Great Leader Kim Il Sung, this 1974 stamp from the DPRK (North Korea) follows the familiar theme of an American-flag bearing GI cringing in the face of the people's righteous bayonets. Outlined in the background abstract protesters carry banners in English and Russian reading "Let Us Intensify the Anti-Imperialist, Anti-US Struggle!" which, hey, is also the title of Leader Kim's pronouncement.

You can learn all about Kim Il Sung's "Juche Idea," his post-Marxist rationalization for North Korea's international isolation at DPRK Naenara online.

Mercedes Sosa

A little musical interlude: Here's the late Argentine singer Mercedes Sosa singing "Las Manos de Mi Madre," "My Mother's Hands Look Like Birds in the Air." Sosa was a leftist who was exiled by that country's military dictatorship; she died last year.

Anti-American Art: The Demons of Mordor?

Modern mural from the Philippines showing the "Communist Party of the Philippines, the National Democratic Front of the Philippines, and the New People's Army, chasing away the demons of colonialism." It's kind of socialist realism meets cartoon art meets the urban wall mural. Uncle Sam up in the corner is looking quite sinister and Sauron-like.

The Philippines was an actual U.S. colony between its seizure in the Spanish-American war in 1901 -- when U.S. forces defeated both the Spanish and Filipino independence forces -- and its capture by the Japanese in the WWII. The Maoist New People's Army has waged a low-level guerrilla insurgency since the 1960s.

(Photo snagged from Jack Stephens' blog The Mustard Seed / Baliksambayanan. Thanks! Click on the photo to see it larger.)

22, La Bota

I bought a pair of black "engineer" boots once, a little more urbanly masculine and a lot less sleek and gentlemanly than the ones shown above, many long years ago. I thought they would look hot. They were the most uncomfortable fucking things I have ever worn in my life. I didn't feel like an engineer, or a biker, or any kind of stud. My life as a gay leatherman was immediately cut short. Blisters are not sexy.

I've done female drag a handful of times. The first time was probably Halloween, 1981. My friend Steve took me to the Village to the Halloween parade: in a sort of sparkly bluish-silver shift I looked like a seriously frumpy housewife out on the town for the first time in twenty years. Yes, that's me in several photo albums of Japanese businessmen who were visiting at the time. Hi Mrs. Businessman! No, your husband only took a photo of me. But those equivalent-to-men's-size-12 heels...I was hobbling in minutes, neither beautifully nor glamourously. My life as a drag queen was cut short: when I tried it again at an office party in this century I wore sensible flats.

I don't really understand the urge to spend hundreds and hundreds of dollars on shoes. I like shoes, I mean who doesn't. Set me loose in Century 21 and if they fit I can happily leave with two or three boxes under my arm. But that Sex and the City nonsense, the decadently expensive Manolo Blahniks and all, hundreds and hundreds of dollars for a few ounces of dyed leather cut in bizarre shapes. Redonkulous. I guess I'm glad I'm a boy. Or maybe the relatively expensive engineer boots were a lesson. I did see a Manolo Blahnik shoebox artfully arranged for maximum label exposure in a clear plastic garbage bag in the Village a couple weeks ago and briefly fantasized about taking it home. Still not sure what I would have put in it. My cat's old, male, and not likely need a place to drop a litter of kittens.

I learned to tie shoes like most people when I was a kid. I had a lot of Keds, and Converse. I think I only once had a pair of Golden Goose shoes, the ones that came with a toy in a plastic egg; Captain Kangaroo assured me I wanted those. It was a pretty good marketing gimmick. This was when sneakers were made of just canvas and rubber, smelling a little bit like a new car when you bought them. There were no fancy lines, and you pretty much had a choice of red, white, blue or black. Thing is, as an adult I seem to do a terrible job of tying shoes. They always come undone. Is it modern laces? Or did my training lack commitment? It's one of the reasons I've taken to wearing, weather and pride permitting, the world's ugliest shoes, Crocs. Like walking on ugly little plastic clouds. With no laces.

In Santeria it's very important not to wear shoes on the sacred straw mats you use in building shrines, altars and ceremonial thrones. The mat symbolizes the earth itself in an extraordinarily sacred way, and trodding upon it in shoes is like flinging shit on a Bible: it's breaching the sacred symbolism by walking mundanity all over it. Also, if you're not initiated into Santeria and you set foot on the sacred mats of a throne, with or without shoes? You better save your money cause it's commitment and you're gonna need it because that means the Orishas want you to join them on the mat and get initiated. Interestingly enough, some Santeros receive a letter in their lifetime Ita, or sacred divination upon initiation, that they should never go outside barefoot. Thank God, literally, I didn't get that letter.

The truth is I would rather be barefoot than anything else. In winter I hate that my house is cold and drafty and I have to wear slippers, because all summer long I'm flinging off shoes and socks the minute I arrive home and putting them on again at the last minute before I have to go back out to work. I like the feel of warm wood, or cool tile, or soft grass -- less hot sand -- or soft worn carpet, or wet sidewalk after a rain, or sacred straw mats under my feet. My favorite moment of the year is when my Brooklyn block turns on the fire hydrants twice a summer in the morning before a block party so that we can all wet down our stoops. I stand in the once-hot gutter by the curb feeling the cold cold water rush over my bare feet. At those moments I never want to wear shoes again. It's the urban earth beneath my sometimes achy and gnarly tired feet blessed by the lifeblood of the city and I feel hot and glamourous and alive and sacred and clean until my feet are as cold as though I was wading in snow.

Anti-American Art: Captured Invaders

From a series issued by the Democratic Republic of (North) Vietnam in 1966 marking the successes of the National Liberation Front (NLF, the so-called "Viet Cong"), comes this stamp showing NLF fighters leading a line of American prisoners of war into captivity. There's a huge NLF flag, and presumably captured artillery in the background.

There were about 600 American soldiers captured as POWs during the American war against the Vietnamese people, released after the Paris accords in 1973. Since the total number of American invaders missing was larger than the number of live Americans returned, insane and right-wing activists claimed that Vietnam was holding hundreds of Americans still alive in secret camps well after the liberation of the South in 1975. This right-wing paranoia became a highly developed conspiracy theory well-maintained by right-wing demagogues through the present day. That atrocious black "POW/MIA" flag that often flies below the stars and stripes is a stain on the mental health of the country.

Us vs. Them, Them vs. Us

How did it happen that working-class Americans lost their class solidarity? How did it come to be that working people have come to identify with their bosses? The people in government--overwhelmingly entitled, wealthy people--and the bosses of the business world know what their self interests are. How come working people don't? Who's responsible for this lie that what's good for the business world, for capitalism, is good for everybody?

Marxism, not exactly the most popular of ideologies in our post-modern world, got this one exactly right. One of the simplest but seemingly most difficult concepts of Marxism is that different social classes have different self interests. And the self-interest of the ruling class--them--really is to do everthing possible to stay in power and to game the system so it preserves and enforces itself. To "them," we below them exist to make them rich; to give them power. The self-interest of the working class--us--should be mutual solidarity, banding together to protect each other and to organize together to take what is rightfully ours.

It's true that Marxism hasn't aged well. Class-based methodologies like Marxism, heck even like industrial trade unionism, have been particularly prone to a host of corruptions. The truth is that "they" are very strong and "we" are very weak as long as "we" believe that "they" have the right to make the rules. But it doesn't have to be that way. "We" can make different choices, and these choices start at the smallest level of who we identify with, whose side we instinctively jump to.

One of my favorite jokes probably dates me horribly. (And, careful reader, it's even an example of Indianism.) It has the Lone Ranger and his trusty Indian companion Tonto chased into a canyon by hostile Indians. The Indian war cries echo off the walls of the Canyon, loud and fierce. There's guns shooting and arrows flying. Out from every boulder steps another Indian, and finally the Lone Ranger and Tonto are backed against the canyon wall. The Lone Ranger says to Tonto, "Well, Tonto, I think this is it. I don't think we're going to get out of this one. We are surrounded." Tonto turns to the Lone Ranger and says, "What do you mean we, white man?"

So yeah, us versus them: Which side are you on?

Anti-American Art: Don't Tread on Me

Speaking of Cuba's "Symposium on Yankee Genocide in Vietnam," here's the cover of a pamphlet published in Cuba on the occasion of the second one in the late 1960s. The line drawing shows an American GI crushing a rose with his boot; he's covered in psychedelic lettering including "Yankee Go Home" and "Love," although his uniform and helmet also contain elements of stars and stripes. The metaphor seems a little unclear to me: I'm not sure what is irony and what is wishful thinking, cause that gun looks pretty deadly and the rose looks pretty squished. I guess that's avant garde Cuban art for you.

Right-wing American POW veterans claim that Cuban interrogators tortured American POWs in Vietnam to gather information for this symposium. I haven't seen any reputable information on this claim so I won't link to it.

"I believe in living"

This "holiday" weekend I've been reading Assata Shakur's autobiography, "Assata: An Autobiography." It's the story of the African-American freedom fighter who was framed for murder in the 1970s but who wound up miraculously escaping prison and fleeing to Cuba, where she now lives. The book opens with a poem which I wanted to excerpt here:

"I beleve in living.
I believe in the spectrum
of Beta days and Gamma people.
I believe in sunshine.
In windmills and waterfalls,
tricycles and rocking chairs.
And I believe that seeds grow into sprouts.
And sprouts grow into trees.
I believe in the magic of the hands.
And in the wisdom of the eyes.
I believe in rain and tears.
And in the blood of infinity.
I believe in life.
And I have seen the death parade
march through the torso of the earth,
sculpting mud bodies in its path.
I have seen the destruction of the daylight,
and seen the bloodthirsty maggots
prayed to and saluted...
I believe in living.
I believe in birth.
I believe in the sweat of love
and in the fire of truth.
And i believe that a lost ship,
steered by tired, seasick sailors,
can still be guided home
to port."

Check out the book for the whole thing. Powerful, beautiful stuff.

Anti-American Art: Napalm Psychedelia

Here's a Cuban stamp from 1972, part of a series issued to mark the "Third Symposium Against Yankee Genocide in Vietnam and its Extension into Laos and Cambodia." Its hip, Peter-Max-like kaleidoscopic eye-candy illustration becomes completely less sweet when you see that it's a burned out Vietnamese house surrounded by cancerous bomb craters and defoliated trees: it's brilliantly subversive Cuban graphic design.

Cuba rightly saw a natural affinity with Vietnam's struggle to defend itself against the U.S. attack. From Che Guevara's famous speech: "How close we could look into a bright future should two, three or many Vietnams flourish throughout the world with their share of deaths and their immense tragedies, their everyday heroism and their repeated blows against imperialism, impelled to disperse its forces under the sudden attack and the increasing hatred of all peoples of the world! And if we were all capable of uniting to make our blows stronger and infallible and so increase the effectiveness of all kinds of support given to the struggling people — how great and close would that future be!"

The U.S. sprayed millions and millions of gallons of defoliants like Agent Orange over Vietnam during the war to destroy the natural landscape and deprive the Vietnamese of "food and cover." The result was hundreds of thousands of deaths and ongoing health problems including serious birth defects for the Vietnamese themselves and even health problems among the American GIs exposed to these chemical defoliants. Generations of innocents paid a dear price for the American determination to "win" at any cost. Fortunately, the U.S. was defeated in Vietnam.

Che concluded: "Our every action is a battle cry against imperialism, and a battle hymn for the people's unity against the great enemy of mankind: the United States of America. Wherever death may surprise us, let it be welcome, provided that this, our battle cry, may have reached some receptive ear and another hand may be extended to wield our weapons and other men be ready to intone the funeral dirge with the staccato singing of the machine-guns and new battle cries of war and victory."

Also Born on the Fourth of July: License to Kill?

Oh those immortal words of the American Declaration of Independence, every school child learns them by heart: "He [The King of Great Britain] has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions." Yes that's from that long part at the end. The part you never really read, the long list of grievances against King George.

While it's true that the Declaration of Independence contains some inspiring and fiery anti-authoritarian language and some really finely wrought righteous indignation, it's pretty clear that this document's appellation of "merciless Indian Savages" on the residents just across the potential new nation's frontier is the beginning rationalization to treat said "merciless savages" savagely without mercy.

It's been said that the three main colonizers of the Americas all had different attitudes toward the native population: The Spanish wanted to enslave them and convert them to Catholicism, the French wanted to trade with them, and the English wanted to pretend that they weren't there, or if need be push them out of the way. These are oversimplified of course. But one can see in the history of the 18th-century a hardening of colonial attitudes toward Native Americans, especially in the Northeast. The defeat of the French and their Indian allies in the American theater of the Seven Years War (the "French and Indian War") in the 1760s by the English seems to have pushed settler America to greater hostility toward the Indian nations; nations that were it should be said, unifying and modernizing living side by side with the English. Disastrously, the Indian nations wound up generally allied to the English in the American Revolution, and huge numbers emigrated to English-held Canada upon Washington's victory.

I'm not sure of the specific historical reference point that this portion of the Declaration of Independence is referring to, but it's clear that the nascent Americans saw English attempts to build alliances with Native nations as a threat to settler expansion.



Joseph Brant, whose Mohawk name was Thayandanagea, and who looked nothing like this "Indian chewing gum" trading card from the 1930s, was a prosperous landowner in New York State who as the military leader of the Iroquois League allied with the English against the new Americans. ('Brant dressed in "the English mode" wearing "a suit of blue broad cloth.' points out Wikipedia.) While obviously his military alliance against the Americans post-dates the declaration of independence, it's clear that everybody in 1776 knew there was a collision coming between the western frontier of the colonies and the Indian nations abutted against it. While some of the Indian nations remained technologically behind the settlers, in many places north and south, nations like the Cherokee and Iroquois were growing into, pardon the phrase, "civilized" nations that were in direct competition with white settlers for land and resources. While there were nomadic hunter-gatherer Indian societies, along the frontier of the time this was really not the case. Remember that the wild west of the time was western New York State and Ohio.

The English and the French and the Indian nations tried numerous different strategies of alliance and conflict to subvert the others and gain or defend territorial advantage. Clearly the Americans wanted none of that: they wanted one thing, sovereignty. And so in its first, most important document, the Declaration of Independence, signed so long ago on the 4th of July 1776, the United States of America built right in the dehumanization of native peoples, and the implied right to do something about the threat posed by these "merciless savages." Because everybody also knows that when the colonists labelled untold thousands of people "merciless savages" who don't respect human life, they were pretty much preparing themselves for the coming genocide.

Between the victory of the Americans in 1783 and period after the end of the war of 1812, the borders of white settlement were pushed from the East coast states clear to the Mississippi, with the Indian nations in between defeated. The Americans had made good on their founding words.

History is, well, history. It can't be changed (unless you're the Texas schoolboard), and I don't actually believe that we as modern people are responsible for the mistakes and betrayals of our ancestors. July 4, 1776 brought a lot of good into the world also: anti-colonialism and radical republicanism were historically progressive achievements. But I think confronting our national mythology is a good thing, because if we as American individuals living today are hopefully not committing genocide against Native Americans, the surviving institutions we hold dear--and sometimes abhor--are all built on questionable foundations that do color modern American policy and judgment. It should also be pointed out that the "we" of the Declaration didn't even include the hundreds of thousands of African-ancestored Americans who were, at the time, living out back in slave quarters and not even considered in polite discussions of citizens and their inalienable rights.

So I think it's good to ponder exactly who were the "merciless savages" back in 1776 and the years that followed. Enjoy the fireworks, and the grilled processed tubes of mystery meat, I know I will. But say a prayer that one day those inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness endowed by our Creator will apply equally to all the women and men clinging to this pretty boulder spinning through space.

Anti-American Art: Shot Down and Pasted Up

Another example of anti-imperialist clip-art from cultural-revolution era China in the 1960s, showing National Liberation Front of South Vietnam fighters triumphant on the wing of a downed US airplane. This is from one of the hundreds of booklets of approved propaganda images distributed by government publishers for re-use by local (and international) media.

(I colorized and adapted this design and added the famous quote from Che Guevara "Two, Three, Many Vietnams" at my Cafepress propaganda mill. You can get it on a tee-shirt, cloth bag or even a decorative tile from The Scarletmenace.)

New York City Subway, 2010

911-Truther flyer taped to a beer ad on the N train, this year.