Saturday, April 23, 2011

What CNN (the CRAP News Network) won't tell you about What Terrorism Is and Who the Terrorists (and Terrorised) Are--nor will any CRAP-loaded media

image is from here

There's a lot of propaganda in reports that come from corporate racist patriarchal media. CNN is in that group. What CNN cannot and won't tell you is this:

Christian-identified people, regardless of whether or not they are Christian, commit the most acts of religious warfare and terrorism. And the religious groups they target most are Jews and Muslims.

Men commit the most acts of gendered warfare and terrorism. The groups they target most are women and girls.

Whites commit the most acts of raced warfare and terrorism. The ethnic groups they target most are Black, Brown, Asian, and Indigenous. In particular, within the U.S., African Americans, American Indians, and Latina/os are under constant threat, are harassed, are threatened, arrested, imprisoned, deported, and killed, with no accountability for the perpetrators who, disproportionately and predominantly are white Christian het men.

With regard to sexual orientation, het men commit the most terrorism against any and all people determined by het men to not be het enough or manly enough. This includes women and girls, transgender and transsexual people, lesbians and gay men, girly boys, feminine men, and masculine women.

Economically, the wealthy commit acts of class warfare and terrorism unrelentingly against the poor and working people.

Militarily and regionally, the U.S. government and its paid operatives (covert terrorists) are committing the most blatant and unrelenting acts of terrorism against many people, most especially, currently, in Central Asia and the Middle East. According to what follows, however, you're supposed to think the most dangerous place to be is Puerto Rico. (Not.)

U.S. wealthy white men are the leaders involved in systematic racist mass murder and genocide happening on U.S. (stolen) soil and off-shore. Disproportionately, Indigenous and other poor populations are poisoned by radioactive waste from nuclear power plants. It is poor and working people, not the wealthy, who are killed in the extraction processes of getting fossil fuels out of the Earth.

Only the rich are committing acts of global and regional ecocide--of the air, water, and land.

Rarely to never are any of these predatory terrorists are held accountable for their crimes against humanity and non-human life, including the Earth. And if anyone tries to terrify them, or threaten them, the threateners may be and sometimes are swiftly executed. For example, women who stand up to their husbands or who threaten to leave, and then do leave. It is then the woman are most at risk of being hunted down and slaughtered.

The article below relies on FBI statistics and utilises pie-charts to make its points.

What we must note is that Christians, whites, men, and "the U.S government" won't and aren't seen as "terrorists" ever, as such. Why aren't all the acts of men's battery, rape, pimping, trafficking, and enslavement of women and girls considered "terroristic events"? Are these actions not terrifying? For whom, exactly, are they not a noteworthy event? Is it not terrifying to a whole class of people (women and girls)? Does the terrorism and coercive to sadistic control of one half of the world's population become irrelevant to agencies tracking violence and acts of domestic and international aggression and hostility?

What the following report does is focus on Latinos (focus on Puerto Ricans), U.S. Jews, and U.S. Muslims--even if to not they aren't as terroristic as the U.S. media pretends. Is "anti-Muslim terrorism", committed by U.S. Christians, even a category of atrocity according to corporate news media and the U.S. government?

So let's review, shall we? This is who ISN'T terrorised systematically or routinely: whites, het men, the rich, and the U.S. as a nation. This would be obvious if anyone was actually paying attention to who is being terrorised--with it being named as such.

With all of this in mind, please read on. The rest of this post's content may be linked back to by clicking on the title just below.

All Terrorists are Muslims…Except the 94% that Aren’t

Posted on 20 January 2010 by Danios
terrorism_has_no_religion

CNN recently published an article entitled Study: Threat of Muslim-American terrorism in U.S. exaggerated; according to a study released by Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, “the terrorist threat posed by radicalized Muslim-Americans has been exaggerated.”

Yet, Americans continue to live in mortal fear of radical Islam, a fear propagated and inflamed by right wing Islamophobes.  If one follows the cable news networks, it seems as if all terrorists are Muslims.  It has even become axiomatic in some circles to chant: “Not all Muslims are terrorists, but nearly all terrorists are Muslims.” Muslims and their “leftist dhimmi allies” respond feebly, mentioning Waco as the one counter example, unwittingly affirming the belief that “nearly all terrorists are Muslims.”

But perception is not reality.  The data simply does not support such a hasty conclusion.  On the FBI’s official website, there exists a chronological list of all terrorist attacks committed on U.S. soil from the year 1980 all the way to 2005.  That list can be accessed here (scroll down all the way to the bottom).


Terrorist Attacks on U.S. Soil by Group, From 1980 to 2005, 
According to FBI Database
Terrorist Attacks on U.S. Soil by Group, From 1980 to 2005, According to FBI Database

According to this data, there were more Jewish acts of terrorism within the United States than Islamic (7% vs 6%).  These radical Jews committed acts of terrorism in the name of their religion.  These were not terrorists who happened to be Jews; rather, they were extremist Jews who committed acts of terrorism based on their religious passions, just like Al-Qaeda and company.

Yet notice the disparity in media coverage between the two.  It would indeed be very interesting to construct a corresponding pie chart that depicted the level of media coverage of each group.  The reason that Muslim apologists and their “leftist dhimmi allies” cannot recall another non-Islamic act of terrorism other than Waco is due to the fact that the media gives menial (if any) coverage to such events.  If a terrorist attack does not fit the “Islam is the perennial and existential threat of our times” narrative, it is simply not paid much attention to, which in a circuitous manner reinforces and “proves” the preconceived narrative.  It is to such an extent that the average American cannot remember any Jewish or Latino terrorist; why should he when he has never even heard of the Jewish Defense League or the Ejercito Popular Boricua Macheteros?  Surely what he does not know does not exist!

The Islamophobes claim that Islam is intrinsically a terrorist religion.  The proof?  Well, just about every terrorist attack is Islamic, they retort.  Unfortunately for them, that’s not quite true.  More like six percent.  Using their defunct logic, these right wingers ought now to conclude that nearly all acts of terrorism are committed by Latinos (or Jews).  Let them dare say it…they couldn’t; it would be political and social suicide to say such a thing. Most Americans would shut down such talk as bigoted; yet, similar statements continue to be said of Islam, without any repercussions.

The Islamophobes live in a fantasy world where everyone is supposedly too “politically correct” to criticize Islam and Muslims.  Yet, the reality is the exact opposite: you can get away with saying anything against the crescent.  Can you imagine the reaction if I said that Latinos should be profiled because after all they are the ones who commit the most terrorism in the country?  (For the record: I don’t believe in such profiling, because I am–unlike the right wing nutters–a believer in American ideals.)

The moral of the story is that Americans ought to calm down when it comes to Islamic terrorism.  Right wingers always live in mortal fear–or rather, they try to make you feel that way.  In fact, Pamela Geller (the queen of internet Islamophobia) literally said her mission was to “scare the bejeezus outta ya.” Don’t be fooled, and don’t be a wuss.  You don’t live in constant fear of radicalized Latinos (unless you’re Lou Dobbs), even though they commit seven times more acts of terrorism than Muslims in America.  Why then are you wetting yourself over Islamic radicals?  In the words of Cenk Uygur: you’re at a ten when you need to be at a four.  Nobody is saying that Islamic terrorism is not a matter of concern, but it’s grossly exaggerated.

Related Posts:
Europol report: All terrorists are Muslims…Except the 99.6% that aren’t
RAND report: Threat of homegrown jihadism exaggerated, Zero U.S. civilians killed since 9/11
Update:
A reader by the name of Dima added:
The FBI Terrorism Report shows…[that] the highest number of terrorist incidents in the U.S. by region (90) took place in Puerto Rico.
Second Update:
An Islamophobe commented on this article, saying that the statistics are flawed because the FBI included small acts such as “stealing rats from a lab” as an act of terrorism.  Of course, this is patently false.  Here is a breakdown of the terrorist attacks by type (the pie chart is from the FBI’s official website and can be accessed here):
Terrorism by Event, From 1980 to 2005, According to FBI Database
Terrorism by Event, From 1980 to 2005, According to FBI Database

Aboriginal Activism Alert. Assist the Indigenous People of Australia in Stopping Genocide. Two Petitions: please sign by 7 May 2011

image is from here
This was sent to me and I'm eager to pass it along to all my readers and visitors.
Newsletter date: 24 Apr 2011

This newsletter: http://indymedia.org.au/2011/04/24/wgar-news-two-urgent-petitions-on-the-nt-intervention-sign-by-early-may-2011

Contents:
* Jobs with Justice - Petition Lauch & Rally - May 5
* UN Petition to restore Human Rights to NT Aboriginal People
- sign by May 7
* Other Northern Territory (NT) Intervention articles
* Background to the Northern Territory (NT) Intervention
* Australia’s Indigenous languages "Top 10 moments in the sun"
* Help Stop the Muckaty Radioactive Waste Dump - May 7-8
* Background to Muckaty Station nuclear waste dump
* National Congress of Australia's First Peoples
* Background to National Congress of Australia's First Peoples
* Aboriginal Deaths in Custody

JOBS WITH JUSTICE - PETITION LAUNCH & RALLY - MAY 5

Jobs with Justice: Protest May 5
http://jobswithjustice.wordpress.com/2011/04/22/protest-may-5/
22 Apr 11: "Protest: Stop the NT Intervention
- Jobs with Justice now!
Petition launch and rally 12pm Thurs May 5
70 Philip st – Sydney CBD [Outside the offices of
Indigenous employment Minister Mark Arbib]
In May, a petition sponsored Unions NT and the CFMEU
demanding justice for NT Aboriginal workers will be
presented to the Senate. On May 5, the petition will be
launched in Sydney by Greens Senator Rachel Siewert and the
CFMEU.
The petition demands backpay at award rates for Aboriginal
people working for Centrelink payments, half quarantined on
a ‘BasicsCard’, as part of the reformed Community
Development Employment Program (CDEP) introduced alongside
the NT Intervention. ...
The petition has a particular focus on the use of
‘BasicsCard’ workers by the $672 million Intervention
housing program (SIHIP). While contractors like Leighton’s
Holdings have made millions from SIHIP, Aboriginal people
working on housing renovations have been paid as little as
$6 per hour. ...
Organised by: Stop the Intervention Collective Sydney (STICS)
http://stoptheintervention.org/ "

Download the flyer here: http://jobswithjustice.wordpress.com/2011/04/22/protest-may-5/

You can sign the petition online here: http://www.gopetition.com/petition/43996.html

- Background

WGAR News: Online petition about Aboriginal workers exploited under SIHIP housing program (2 Apr 11)
http://indymedia.org.au/2011/04/02/wgar-news-online-petition-about-aboriginal-workers-exploited-under-sihip-housing-program

Jobs With Justice: A union and community campaign for Aboriginal jobs
http://jobswithjustice.wordpress.com/

Crikey: Workers say they’re being ripped off under indigenous housing program
http://www.crikey.com.au/2010/11/12/workers-say-theyre-being-ripped-off-under-indigenous-housing-program/

Crikey: Indigenous workers are getting screwed under the SIHIP program
http://www.crikey.com.au/2010/11/15/indigenous-workers-are-getting-screwed-under-the-sihip-program/

UN PETITION TO RESTORE HUMAN RIGHTS TO NT ABORIGINAL PEOPLE - SIGN BY MAY 7:


[A reminder that your signature is needed by 7 May.]

GoPetition: Restore Human Rights to the Northern Territory
Aboriginal People
Published by 'concerned Australians'
http://www.gopetition.com/petition/44188.html
26 Mar 11: "Target: Navi Pillay UN Human Rights Commissioner ...
Web site: http://www.concernedaustralians.com.au
Background (Preamble):
Navi Pillay, a former South Africa High Court Judge, is the
United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. She will
visit Australia in May.
This follows several years of criticism regarding
Australia’s poor human rights record and last year’s visit
to Geneva by Aboriginal elders who raised the Northern
Territory Intervention with the Committee for the
Elimination of Racial Discrimination.
The Northern Territory Intervention imposed in June 2007,
without consultation or the consent of Aboriginal people,
continues to be a source of grave injustice. It has
overridden the rights of the people, placed their culture
and languages in jeopardy while removing their control
over their land and communities. ... "

You can sign the petition online here: http://www.gopetition.com/petition/44188.html

- Background

WGAR News: Urgent UN petition to restore human rights to NT Aboriginal people (29 Mar 11)
http://indymedia.org.au/2011/03/29/wgar-news-urgent-un-petition-to-restore-human-rights-to-nt-aboriginal-people

'concerned Australians' - Without Justice there can be no Reconciliation
http://www.concernedaustralians.com.au

Friday, April 22, 2011

Vandana Shiva and Maude Marlow on the Rights of the Earth

What follows is from Democracy Now! Please click on the title below the video to link back.

Earth Day Special: Vandana Shiva and Maude Barlow on the Rights of Mother Earth

Vandana_maude_ok

This week the United Nations General Assembly discussed international standards that grant nature equal rights to humans. Similar protocols have been adopted by over a dozen U.S. municipalities, as well as Bolivia and Ecuador. Renowned environmentalists Maude Barlow and Vandana Shiva join us. Says Shiva, "Most civilizations of the world, for most of human history, have seen the world in terms of relatedness and connection,” says Shiva. "And if there’s one thing the rights of Mother Earth is waking us to, is: we are all connected." [includes rush transcript]

Guests:
Vandana Shiva, world-renowned environmental leader, feminist and thinker from India, author of many books, including Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace and Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Development. 
Maude Barlow, head of the Council of Canadians, Canada’s largest public advocacy organization. Barlow is also co-founder of the Blue Planet Project and chair of the board of Food and Water Watch. She is the author of Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water.
  

Related Links

AMY GOODMAN: As the world celebrates Earth Day, Bolivia is about to pass the world’s first law that grants nature equal rights with humans. The Bolivian delegation to the United Nations urged the global body to adopt a similar law during this week’s Harmony with Nature conference.
DAVID CHOQUEHUANCA: [translated] The United Nations is revolutionizing the way we look at our planet. At the moment, various issues are being receded in the United Nations, and we have begun to discuss the idea of declaring an official International Day of Mother Earth. And we will also soon be discussing what are the rights of Mother Earth.
AMY GOODMAN: That was the Bolivian foreign minister speaking in New York City about the Harmony with Nature dialogue at the United Nations.
This week also marks the one-year anniversary of the BP oil spill; next week, the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster. Radiation levels around the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan remain high. As these disasters multiply, Latin American countries such as Bolivia have taken the lead in adopting measures to protect the environment. Ecuador has also adopted a resolution protecting nature.
We speak with two renowned environmental justice activists: Maude Barlow and Vandana Shiva. Maude Barlow is the head of the Council of Canadians, Canada’s largest public advocacy organization. Barlow is also co-founder of the Blue Planet Project and chair of the board of Food and Water Watch. Vandana Shiva, world-renowned environmental leader, feminist and thinker from India, is the author of many books, including Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace and Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Development.
I started our conversation by asking Vandana Shiva about the nuclear catastrophe in Japan and what it has meant for India, where major anti-nuclear protests have been sparked, in which one protester was killed. I asked her to explain what happened.
VANDANA SHIVA: We have a very, very strong anti-nuclear movement in India. And the difference between the Indian movement and any other movement is it’s not just about the stupidity of splitting the atom to boil water, which is what nuclear power ultimately is, creating huge amounts of radiation hazard in the process, but in India it involves the typical violence of land grab. And one of the most fertile parts of India in the Western Ghats, the Ratnagiri district, this planning to set up the biggest-ever nuclear power plant of the world, being built by a French company, AREVA, violating every right of the people, including local democracy, where people have a right to decide what happens. All the local authorities have resigned. And the protests continue. And just two days ago, there was a killing, when the police fired on peaceful protesters. So, in India, the costs are even higher, because the human costs join with the costs of nuclear hazard. And from 23rd to 26th, a march is being organized—and I’m part of the organizing group—from Tarapur, which is the oldest nuclear power plant of India, to Jaitapur, which is where this giant mega nuclear power park is being set up.
AMY GOODMAN: And people live there. They will be displaced?
VANDANA SHIVA: People live there. I mean, typical of such things, they claimed it was barren land and nobody was there. It’s one of the most fertile. That’s where this wonderful Alphonso mango comes from, this amazing, giant-sized, delicious mango. Good fisheries, amazing horticulture, and well-to-do people, because nature is abundant. It’s the Western Ghats, where the monsoon just pours the water. And coastal regions are usually just the more productive, more fertile.
A similar protest is happening around a steel plant called POSCO, a Korean plant, but it’s not owned by the Koreans anymore, it’s owned by Wall Street. It’s owned by the financial institutions of this city, who brought down the world’s economy. And it was very interesting that Warren Buffett was in India about giving, you know, creating the art of giving, and he has huge shares in the steel plant which will displace large numbers of people. And for six years, people have been saying, "No, we will not give our land."
And I think that’s so important, that we need to realize that, first, we don’t give rights to nature. Nature has rights. And more often than not, nature’s rights and people’s rights are allied as one in most places of the world, where, in places like Jaitapur or places like the POSCO area, people are saying, "This land is our mother." This is not an esoteric idea. It’s the most relevant, potent, democratic idea of our times.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you about a man you probably would agree with on a number of issues, George Monbiot. He, we recently had on, debating the issue of nuclear power. This is what he had to say.
GEORGE MONBIOT: Well, obviously, what happened—what’s happening in Fukushima concerns me a lot about the area surrounding Fukushima. It’s a horrible, dangerous, extremely traumatic series of events that we are seeing there.
But I’m very worried that the global response to what’s happening in Fukushima will be to shut down nuclear power stations around the world and to cancel future nuclear power stations, and that what will happen is that they will be replaced by coal. Now, coal is hundreds of times more dangerous than nuclear power, not just because of climate change, though, of course, climate change is a big one, but also because of industrial accidents and because of the impacts of pollution on local people. If we just look at industrial accidents alone, these massively outweigh both the fatalities and the injuries caused by any nuclear accident we’ve ever seen. In China alone, last year, 2,300 people were killed in industrial accidents to do with coal mining; purely by coal mining accidents, 2,300 killed. That’s six people a day. That means that in one week, the official death toll from coal in China is greater than the official death toll from Chernobyl in 25 years. And that’s to say nothing of the hundreds of thousands of people contracting really unpleasant lung diseases, which will cause them a very slow and painful and terrible death.
So, what I’m calling for here is not complacency. I think it’s absolutely appropriate to be very concerned, indeed, about what’s happening in Fukushima. But I’m calling for perspective, and I’m saying that we must not replace a bad technology with a much, much worse one, because, unfortunately, that is what’s likely to happen.
AMY GOODMAN: So that was the well-known British columnist George Monbiot, who is in favor of nuclear power, says it’s simply cleaner than coal, and if we’re talking about climate change, which he’s deeply concerned about, nuclear is the answer.
VANDANA SHIVA: Well, what we really need is a coal-free and nuclear-free future, because the sun’s energy is so abundant, and we’ve not even started to tap it in sensible ways. Alternative renewable energies, if only we would put the investments in that direction, would be affordable, would be decentralized. Nuclear must be a centralized system. And as we are witnessing in Jaitapur with the protests, with the shootings and the killings and the place turned into a total police state where nobody can gather, even the elected officials can’t hold meetings, where democracy has to be sacrificed, that’s not the kind of option we need for energy.
And I think it’s wrong of George Monbiot to rubbish the point of view of millions of people around the world, including governments, like the government of Germany said, "We won’t build any more nuclear power plants," China, which has put everything on hold. Now, these countries aren’t crazy. They aren’t a fringe. And I personally get disappointed when friends like George Monbiot think they are the wisest ones on this planet. And just because they have a column, they can switch everyone’s way of thinking. There is an ancient recognition of the hazards of nuclear. I began my life in the nuclear industry of India, and it’s when my sister woke me up to the damages. I wasn’t ever taught radiation biology. We were just taught physics, fission physics. And I realized it was very partial knowledge.
AMY GOODMAN: You are a physicist.
VANDANA SHIVA: Yes. And then I did theoretical physics, and eventually I did foundations of quantum theory. And what I love about the rights of Mother Earth is we’re overcoming the separation between humans and nature that was built into the Cartesian thinking that nature is out there and we are out here, but also the kind of divisive separatedness that Cormac [Cullinan] pointed out yesterday at the United Nations conference on Harmony with Nature. He said, "I began my life fighting apartheid, and apartheid means separateness—separateness on the basis of color." I think separateness is the disease of the past. It’s the dinosaur in the intellectual frame. Separateness was a very artificial imposition. Most civilizations of the world, for most of human history, have seen the world in terms of relatedness and connection. And if there’s one thing the rights of Mother Earth is waking us to, is we are all connected. And it’s in that connection we can’t have arrogant solutions, like nuclear is clean. Just because you don’t see the radiation doesn’t make it clean. Fukushima has become like Chernobyl, and that, the Japanese government is recognizing.
AMY GOODMAN: And so, Maude Barlow, why are you here in New York at the United Nations on this Earth Day?
MAUDE BARLOW: Well, there’s been the debate this week—an interactive dialogue, it’s called—at the United Nations on a resolution on Harmony with Nature that was introduced by the Bolivian ambassador to the U.N. but was adopted by the General Assembly. So we’re beginning the discussion and dialogue at the United Nations on the concept of the right to water. A number of us were in Cochabamba a year ago, this Mother Earth Day, when we finalized this draft of this Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth. And so, basically, we’re here to introduce it to the U.N. The concept—we eventually want the Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth to be a companion piece to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but we’re not there yet. We understand that. But that’s the goal, both within nation states at the United Nations and then just organizationally. We want people to adopt it and start talking about it. And we have a wonderful new book called The Rights of Nature: The Case for the Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth. So, this is a beginning of a real process to have a larger dialogue on exactly what Vandana’s saying.
AMY GOODMAN: What is the threat to water in the world today?
MAUDE BARLOW: Well, the threat to water, while just speaking about nuclear, is a wonderful example. It was interesting. I just—and it’s a perfect example of what we’re talking about when we say that we have to recognize nature’s rights—and Vandana is right: it’s not giving, it’s recognizing—is a report I saw the other day on the fish, you know, touched by the radiation contamination from the nuclear plant in Japan, and said, "Don’t worry. By the time it gets to humans, it won’t be harmful." And it was like that’s all that mattered. You know, it’s this human-centric notion that we’re all that matters, that other species of the planet doesn’t matter.
The biggest threat to water in our world is that humans, modern humans, quote, "civilized" humans, see water as a huge resource for our pleasure, profit and convenience, and we do what we want with it. We dump whatever we want in it. We grow whatever we want, wherever we want. We move it wherever we want. And we are running out. There’s a brand new report, says by 2030 the demand in our world for water will outstrip supply by 40 percent. And I don’t know if people can get their heads around how a horrific statistic that is and the suffering that that’s going to cause. You know, you can come at this as some—and, you know, people are already joking: "Oh, you’re talking about rights for ticks and rights for rats." That was—you know, this is the right wing mocking what we’re doing. We’re talking about survival here. We’re talking about human and other species’ survival on this planet, if we don’t change the way we see the world, the way we see nature, the way we see water. It is not a big resource for us. It is the essential—these are the essential elements of a living ecosystem that gives us all life, and this is about survival.
AMY GOODMAN: Maude Barlow, head of the Council of Canadians, Canada’s largest advocacy group, and Vandana Shiva, environmental leader from India. Among her books, Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Development. We’ll come back to this Earth Day conversation in a minute.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: We’re on the road in Washington, D.C., on this Earth Day. We rejoin our conversation with Vandana Shiva, the renowned scientist and environmentalist from India, and Maude Barlow. She’s head of the Council of Canadians, and, well, among her books, Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Fight for the Right to Water.
AMY GOODMAN: We saw you in Cochabamba last year when we were covering the conference, the gathering of tens of thousands of people around the rights of Mother Earth, Pachamama, as they said there. Why is Bolivia and Ecuador taking the lead here?
MAUDE BARLOW: Well, partly because they have governments that actually represent a lot of the will of their people. And I can’t imagine what that feels like. We’re going through an election in Canada, and we’re just tearing our hair out, because we’re going to get a bad government again. So I think, partly, you’ve just got a government closer to the needs of the people.
But the Andes are melting. I mean, we have a crisis. A brand new study last week from the Foundation of U.S. Scientists said that La Paz, which is the capital of Bolivia, is in great crisis with a terrible drought threatening the two million inhabitants because of climate crisis. And unless something dramatic changes in a very short period of time, they don’t see any way around this. So it’s affecting their food, it’s affecting their access to water. So it’s very immediate. When you have this kind of immediacy, I think people like the president of Bolivia, Morales, and his ambassador to the United Nations, Pablo Solón, just say, "I don’t care if you like me or not. I’m not particularly here for a popularity contest. I’m here because we’re talking about life and death of the people where we live. And we need to get that urgency out there." And that was—it was Bolivia that led the charge on getting the right to water recognized. And so, similarly, very interesting that it would be the same government—it was Bolivia that said no to the so-called consensus that happened in Cancún, which was based on a market model for the so-called solution to climate. So—
AMY GOODMAN: And what’s wrong with the market model?
MAUDE BARLOW: The market—well, Vandana will have so much to say, too. But basically, the—and the U.N. has just put a huge price tag on nature now. The whole answer, not just to climate crisis, but to the water crisis and the forest crisis, is to put a dollar figure on nature and bring nature into the market system, so that basically all of nature has to compete with other uses for it in order to survive. And it basically—it’s a recipe for disaster. It’s a recipe for the wealthy of the world and the powerful within countries claiming, well, they’re, you know, so much more than others and so much more than nature.
AMY GOODMAN: Vandana Shiva, you’ve been taking on corporations in India and around the world, but talk about the corporatization of nature.
VANDANA SHIVA: I think the consequences of the corporatization of nature is, first and foremost, that at a time where we should be recognizing the integrity of nature, the prior rights of nature, nature’s generosity, the generosity of the earth to provide us life itself, we are going headlong into the path of hallucination, where we’ve assumed we are not just separate, but we are continuing the idea of mastery and conquest over nature, adding to the technological tools, like the idea that we can control nature through nuclear power. Now we want to control nature through market mechanisms and commodification.
Why is that wrong? Firstly, it’s wrong because nature is too rich, too diverse. We know too little about it. So, whatever price we’ll put will be partial. It’ll never catch the whole story. We have not even begun to find out the soil organisms that give us food. We don’t know how different species hang together in a forest to create that amazing biodiversity of the forest. So it will be linear. It will just be just carbon functions, when that’s not the only function of a forest. And it will definitely not take into account the integrity of species. I started Navdanya and saving seeds when I found out that corporations wanted to patent life, when life is not created by them. It is created sui generis. It is part of creation.
But there’s a second problem with the commodification of nature. And that is that it gives a new legitimacy to appropriate and alienate the resources that support people’s lives, especially the resources of the poor. So, what do we see with this new thinking of commodification of nature? We see the biggest land grab that Africa has ever seen, much worse than anything that happened during colonialism. In India, the land grab for mining, for nuclear power plants, for steel plants, is literally becoming a war zone. There’s a green hunt that’s being implemented. Our dear, dear friend, Dr. Binayak Sen, someone like us, was thrown into jail for life imprisonment. Thank goodness the Supreme Court just a few days ago granted him bail, saying that if you carry literature on Marx, it doesn’t make you a Naxalite, just as much as carrying Gandhi’s biography doesn’t make you a Gandhian.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, wait. Stop for a second, because very few people follow this story. And Democracy Now!'s Anjali Kamat went and spent the weekend at the Sens', has been bringing us reports on Dr. Binayak Sen. But in a nutshell, explain his case and the significance of it.
VANDANA SHIVA: Well, Dr. Binayak Sen, as I said, is a dear friend, a medical doctor who has worked to serve the tribals all his life. He was a gold medalist from one of the leading medical colleges of India, but decided instead to go to the villages. He and his wife, Ilina, have worked with the tribals. I’ve worked with them to help set up community seed banks for seed conservation, like we do in Navdanya. Binayak has been working to set up primary healthcare initiatives. And he was also the head of the People’s Union of Civil Liberties.
Now, the commodification and globalization of the resource grab has meant that this area where he worked, which is now called Chhattisgahr, a new state—it’s a very mineral-rich area—that’s where the corporations are going for iron ore. That’s where they’re going for coal mining. And that means they’re violating the rights of the tribals that are institutionalized now in our constitution. We have a Panchayati Raj extension to scheduled areas, which basically means the tribals decide what happens to their land. And when they started to decide—and I was at these public hearings in the early days when, in the '90s, when this law was passed, one after the other, tribals would say, "We don't want money. We want our land. We want our forest. We want our home. We want to live with Mother Earth." That’s when the violence started. And I wouldn’t be surprised if there isn’t a global advising system going on. But now there are private militias in addition to 70,000 paramilitary troops that have been deployed in tribal areas, in the name of controlling the Maoists, but really to flush out the tribals, create an empty land, so the minerals can be grabbed.
Binayak wrote a report for the People’s Union for Civil Liberties, being the vice president, and said this militia was killing innocent tribals. It became the first report. That’s what really got the government very angry with him. And they were targeting him for very long. Eventually they arrested him, planted fake evidence, like putting some letters into someone else’s bag and saying they were handed over by Binayak. It’s a long story; I won’t go into details. But Binayak, who is a medical hero of India, he’s a civil liberties hero of India, he is as good as you can live a life for the people, in service of the people, thrown into prison for life imprisonment. And that’s why his case is so significant, because it’s like, you know, in the Nazi time, you remember that poetry that the priest wrote: "I wasn’t a unionist, so I didn’t speak. And I wasn’t a"—
AMY GOODMAN: "First they came for the unionists; I didn’t speak."
VANDANA SHIVA: Yeah, yeah. And it’s exactly like that. They’ve made a test case of Binayak to say, "Any of you who stand for the rights of Mother Earth, who stand for the rights of people to their resources, watch out. If we can do this to a Binayak, we can do it to you." And that’s why I really believe we are at this watershed. We’ll either go the democratic route, recognizing the rights of Mother Earth, living within the limits of the planet, living a good life with less wastage of resources, or we will go very fast into the path of fascism, militarization. And commodificaton of nature has to be a militarized commodification in today’s time.
AMY GOODMAN: What does "earth democracy" mean, Vandana Shiva?
VANDANA SHIVA: For me, earth democracy means, first, recognizing the fundamental fact that we are part of nature, that human rights and nature’s rights are not separate, because we are just one strand in this amazing mystery and miracle that the earth has created in terms of life. But earth democracy also means democracy in the everyday life of people, exercised daily by ordinary people, not the once in a five-year or four-year election, because everywhere around the world, we are seeing, you can bring someone to power, and they don’t represent your will anymore.
So, democracy under corporate control has mutated from "of the people, by the people, for the people" into "of the corporations, by the corporations, for the corporations." In this country, I watched how Wisconsin suddenly became a playground for destruction of democracy and destruction of the fundamental rights of collective bargaining and public services and public domain, only because there is this corporate pressure on privatizing everything and preventing people from exercising their democratic rights. So, it’s the democratic rights of the people and the earth versus the fictitious corporate rights that corporations have assigned to themselves, and now they’re costing the earth and people too much. They’re bringing nothing in return. It used to be the case that when General Motors put out a car, it gave employment. It even gave salaries so people could buy that car. Today, the corporations give nothing back to society. They just take from nature, take from society, and want to rubbish this planet and rubbish our lives. And I think people are getting fed up. The entire rising in the Arabic world is part of that fed-upness.
AMY GOODMAN: It is also, Maude Barlow, the first anniversary of the BP oil disaster. You come from Canada. There was just a protest around fracking, around BP, around tar sands. Can you talk about what we should understand about where we are headed? In this year, offshore drilling, President Obama said it could resume. People in the United States hardly know what tar sands is, though we get much energy, oil, from Canada.
MAUDE BARLOW: Well, at current rate of growth, the tar sands will become, in the quite soon foreseeable future, the worst site of greenhouse gas emissions in the world. Enormous amounts of water is being destroyed. They’ve taken down a forest, this boreal forest the size of Greece. And there are children in the downstream First Nations communities with bile duct cancer at the age of four. I mean, it is an absolute horror. And what Americans need to know is that it’s coming to a community near you in the form of this dirty oil, the bitumen actually being piped by pipeline over the Ogallala Aquifer to be refined in the Gulf, or there are other pipes now taking it and more to be built to take it to the American side of the Great Lakes. It is corrosive, it’s poison, and it will destroy the water systems if it leaks, which I promise it will.
We also have gas fracking all over North America. This has become just an absolute obsession with people who know about the danger to water, because, of course, what you’re required to do is put massive amounts of chemicals into the water and then steam-blast it into the rock horizontally and to release the gas. And we’re even seeing operations along the Saint Lawrence River, and even the Quebec government has just given operations the OK to explore right within the Saint Lawrence River. And that’s not allowed on the American side, by the way. Usually we say, "Oh, it’s worse on the U.S. side," but it’s not in this case. It’s worse on the Canadian side.
I think the point here, to make the connection to the rights of nature, is that while our governments make noise about caring about the environment and make—on Earth Day, will all make, you know, strong statements about this, all of their actions belie this, from trade agreements, which we continue massively to promote around the world—the bilaterals, there are close to 3,000 of them now—to these big new CETAs, they’re called, Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreements, which are not just national procurement, but sub-national procurement. That’s water systems and roads and mining operations and municipalities and schools. It’s everything. It’s the next level down, where corporations are going to actually be able to dictate the conditions under which local funding is—how you spend your local money and on what values, and be able to stop fair trade bans and that kind of thing. All of that is galloping along. And this is so-called green economy, as it is seen by the powerful in our world, is basically no change, continued unlimited growth, continued unlimited free trade agreements, continued unregulated investment of the type that’s taking place with the land grab in Africa, but with a green technology. So we’ll just substitute that dirty old technology, which of course they’re not, because the tar sands is the dirty old technology, and that’s what they’re building it on. So it’s just language around caring for the earth.
And what we’re trying to say is that if we’re really going to survive as a species, and if the planet is to survive in any condition as we understand it, we have to shift our thinking and stop thinking of ourselves as being above nature and stop thinking of ourselves as having the rights that no other species has or no other form of the earth has. We just have to change. What would the world look like if we could see it differently? Right now, for most environmentalists, the best we ever get is that we negotiate the amount of toxics being dumped into a particular system, or in the tar sands, all we’re—I mean, all we’ve ended up doing is having a series of reports, which just tell us how bad it is, but we haven’t—we have not managed to stop one pipeline. We have not managed to stop one government expansion, one corporate expansion, in the tar sands in all the years we’ve been fighting it. And I don’t see, frankly, Amy, how we’re going to do that, unless we have a mindset change. I really—I think right now it’s just a negotiation about how much of this toxic waste we’re going to allow and dump into our waters and our air and how much genetic damage we’re going to do as—
AMY GOODMAN: And the mind shift would be what? What do you see needs to happen?
MAUDE BARLOW: The mind shift is that we are a species like any other and that we will not survive unless we place our rights in tandem with the rights of the earth, and then we understand that we come from the earth. Everything we have, everything we wear, everything we eat, everything we touch comes from the earth. And if we don’t change our minds, if we don’t change the way we see the world, if we don’t stop thinking of ourselves as superior, we’re not going to survive. And I see it as an evolutionary step, a human—an evolutionary step in our human development, if we could actually come to this.
And I think that there’s a comparison to the 1948 Declaration of Human Rights, because they fought really hard for that. And people will still say, "Well, what did it mean?" because human rights are still being violated. Well, just because a universal value is broken doesn’t mean it’s not a universal value to have. And we have to add to the universal value of the right of humans, these fundamental rights of humans, the right of the earth to survive and for us to survive together.
VANDANA SHIVA: And I think the more key issue, Amy, is, actually, this is a majority perspective. Most of the indigenous cultures of the world, most of the non-industrialized cultures of the world, most of the non-Western cultures of the world live in the consciousness that we are part of nature and the earth is a mother. We are fighting against dams on the Ganges. And it’s a very real discourse that the Ganges is a divine mother. She has her own standing. And the government cannot block her flow. She has a right to flow free. It’s a real serious discussion in India today. That’s the basis of fighting the dams, not only the environmental impact in terms of displacement. All the work we’ve done against patenting of life, bringing back the integrity of species.
And I think if you really start to connect the dots, you realize that we are at the kind of moment where we were when slavery was being abolished, people. There were crazies then who thought it was right to trade in human beings and own them as property. A few people thought it was wrong. It took a while, but we would never today imagine it’s right to own other human beings. Well, property in nature, property in life forms, patents on life, privatizing water, commodity trading of carbon pollution, the emissions treaty, all of that is as insane and as mad as slavery was. And we need to get out of this bondage, which has been created by a very tiny minority, who have lots to gain by raping the earth and destroying the rights of people.
AMY GOODMAN: One last question, and we just have a minute. Your assessment, as we move into the 2012 presidential election in the United States, of President Obama, from Canada, from India? Maude Barlow?
MAUDE BARLOW: I wish he would stand up for what I think is deepest in his heart, and I wish he would stop giving the other side’s line to the world. We don’t need him to describe or promote the compromises that he’s made. We really desperately need leadership. And I just hope that he understands that that’s the most important thing he can do for us all.
AMY GOODMAN: Vandana Shiva?
VANDANA SHIVA: Well, you know, President Obama has often said Gandhi is his big inspiration. And Gandhi had told us the earth has enough for everyone’s needs, but not for a few people’s greed. When Obama came to India, instead of talking Gandhi, instead of building a common world from U.S. to India on that Gandhian vision of everyone living well with less, he came only to seek $50 billion deals for corporations, for fighter jets, for India joining hands for the invasion of Africa for land grab and the so-called green revolution. I do wish that Obama would exercise the policies that have brought him the inspiration that brought him to power.
AMY GOODMAN: Vandana Shiva, Maude Barlow, thanks so much for joining us on Earth Day.
MAUDE BARLOW: Thank you.
VANDANA SHIVA: Happy Earth Day!
AMY GOODMAN: Environmental leader Vandana Shiva, among her books, Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Development. And Maude Barlow, head of the Council of Canadians. Coming up, Van Jones, Tim DeChristopher, Bill McKibben. We’ll be back in 30 seconds.

Also see the following ecocide-related stories:


Earth Day: March or April? And who is truly working to Take Back The Earth?

photograph of Winona LaDuke is from here
Winona LaDuke is an activist, writer, and the founding director of  WELRP. See *here* and below for more:
We work to continue, revive, and protect our native seeds, heritage crops, naturally grown fruits, animals, wild plants, traditions and knowledge of our indigenous and land-based communities; for the purpose of maintaining and continuing our culture and resisting the global, industrialized food system that can corrupt our health, freedom, and culture through inappropriate food production and genetic engineering.
From the WELRP website:
Winona LaDuke is an Anishinaabekwe (Ojibwe) enrolled member of the Mississippi Band Anishinaabeg who lives and works on the White Earth Reservations, and is the mother of three children. She is also the Executive Director of Honor the Earth, where she works on a national level to advocate, raise public support, and create funding for frontline native environmental groups.
In case you haven't noticed, there are patterns and systems at work in the destruction of the Earth. Wealthy white men, corporate capitalists, and government leaders are all key power-brokers working very hard to kill everything on Earth in order to earn profits and gain power for the very short term.

What you are likely to see in corporate media news is how whites do good things to help decrease pollution or trash. What you are not likely to see in the same media is how white men do atrocious things to Indigenous people, women and girls of all colors and nations, and the Earth.

*Here* is a discussion of the history of Earth Day by Adam Monroe, which seeks to keep the idea that it is white men who care about the Earth: a blatant lie if viewed on the collectivist level. On the systemic and collectivist level it has been Indigenous People globally who have always fought for the Earth's survival, and their own; living sustainably with the Earth traditionally, historically, is not a white cultural tradition. The white tradition is to consume everything in and on the Earth, giving back nothing but poisons, toxins, and pollutants.

*Here* is the promotion of a book that also makes the case it is the White Man who can rescue the Earth from white men. Work for the Earth by promoting and supporting the efforts of Indigenous people around the world, including by advocating for land being returned to the Indigenous people from whom it was stolen by European men. Support and remember Indigenous Feminism and Indigenist Feminists in the U.S.

End the myth of the White Male Hero. His time to lead has passed. Promote the Indigenous Woman Hero Reality. Her time has never left.


Co-founder of Earth Day and Anti-War Activist, Ira Einhorn, had a LIGHT-WHITE Side: terrorism and murder of a woman

What follows is from MSNBC, and it's predictably exploitive and graphically violent. Trigger Warning. You may click on the title just below to link back to the source website. Note the racist use of "dark" to pretend it's not a white man's issue--that evil is dark or black, while goodness is light and white. That's CRAP.

Earth Day co-founder killed, composted girlfriend

Ira Einhorn preached against Vietnam War and violence, but had dark [sic] side


Michael J. Maicher / Temple University Libraries
Ira Einhorn was the master of ceremonies at the first Earth Day rally on April 22, 1970.
By Remy Melina
 
LifesLittleMysteries.com
updated 4/21/2011 8:19:26 PM ET 2011-04-22T00:19:26


Ira Einhorn was on stage hosting the first Earth Day event at the Fairmount Park in Philadelphia on April 22, 1970. Seven years later, police raided his closet and found the "composted" body of his ex-girlfriend inside a trunk. 

A self-proclaimed environmental activist, Einhorn made a name for himself among ecological groups during the 1960s and '70s by taking on the role of a tie-dye-wearing ecological guru and Philadelphia’s head hippie. With his long beard and gap-toothed smile, Einhorn — who nicknamed himself "Unicorn" because his German-Jewish last name translates to "one horn"  —advocated flower power, peace and free love to his fellow students at the University of Pennsylvania. He also claimed to have helped found Earth Day.

But the charismatic spokesman who helped bring awareness to environmental issues and preached against the Vietnam War — and any violence — had a secret dark [sic] side. When his girlfriend of five years, Helen "Holly" Maddux, moved to New York and broke up with him, Einhorn threatened that he would throw her left-behind personal belongings onto the street if she didn't come back to pick them up.

And so on Sept. 9, 1977, Maddux went back to the apartment that she and Einhorn had shared in Philadelphia to collect her things, and was never seen again. When Philadelphia police questioned Einhorn about her mysterious disappearance several weeks later, he claimed that she had gone out to the neighborhood co-op to buy some tofu and sprouts and never returned.

It wasn't until 18 months later that investigators searched Einhorn's apartment after one of his neighbors complained that a reddish-brown, foul-smelling liquid was leaking from the ceiling directly below Einhorn's bedroom closet. Inside the closet, police found Maddux's beaten and partially mummified body stuffed into a trunk that had also been packed with Styrofoam, air fresheners and newspapers.

After his arrest, Einhorn jumped bail and spent decades evading authorities by hiding out in Ireland, Sweden, the United Kingdom and France. After 23 years, he was finally extradited to the United States from France and put on trial. Taking the stand in his own defense, Einhorn claimed that his ex-girlfriend had been killed by CIA agents who framed him for the crime because he knew too much about the agency's paranormal military research. He was convicted of murdering Maddux and is currently serving a life sentence.

Although Einhorn was only the master of ceremonies at the first Earth Day event, he maintains that Earth Day was his idea and that he's responsible for launching it. Understandably, Earth Day's organizers have distanced themselves from his name, citing Gaylord Nelson, an environmental activist and former Wisconsin governor and U.S. senator who died in 2005, as Earth Day's official founder and organizer.

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Sen. Gaylord Nelson created Earth Day in the spring of 1970 as a way to bring national awareness to the fact that, at the time, there were no legal or regulatory mechanisms in place to protect the environment. About 20 million participants at various Earth Day events across the U.S. made Earth Day a success, and in December of 1970, Congress authorized the creation of a new federal agency to tackle environmental issues — the EPA.

Follow Remy Melina on Twitter @RemyMelina

Statistics and Action Fighting Sexual Trafficking of Girl Children by Het Men who Rape Them

logo for anti-trafficking organisation is from here
Just reported on CNN:
79% of all trafficking is by het men for rape with children.
1,200,000 million children worldwide are trafficked so het men can rape girl children.
Approximately 300,000 girl children are trafficked in the U.S.
1 in 4 pornographic photographs is of a child

For more on what is being done, please see this newsletter (a PDF document) from the anti-trafficking group Maiti Nepal. For the source website, please see *here*.

Thursday, April 21, 2011

And We're Still Discussing Marx WHY? For those who don't already, practice this: Indigenist Feminism

image of Karl Marx is from here
Various significant philosophers--women all of them--have far more important analyses of men's political economies, social relations, and oppression of the masses than Karl Marx. Here are three of them: Vandana Shiva, Marimba Ani, and Catharine MacKinnon.

My question, as yet unanswered, is: does the author of a new book on Marx deal with what these, and so many other women, have to say about globalised forms of patriarchal, capitalist, and white supremacist class-based oppression?

I don't believe the philosophies of prominent white men can rescue us from the the ravages of those structurally, institutionally empowered savages. I think that anti-savage Indigenous activists, most especially women, can save the planet. Because those are the only philosophies that carry forth traditions of living with the Earth and seeing the Earth as a Living Being. Marx did not. Nor do any white marxists I ever known. They tend to be very pro-urban, pro-civilisation theorists, actually. And if you don't get what's genocidal and ecocidal about being pro-urban and pro-civilisation, get to reading more Indigenous activists work.

It is, in my opinion, women and men across the Americas--well, in South and Central America-- who have made the best use of Marx's theories. And I hope the people--Brown, Indigenous, and Black--in those regions continue to organise to keep CRAP-loaded U.S. economic, cultural, and military policies and practices out.

I offer some other reading suggestions below, in my comment--the lone one--following this book review by Chris Nineham, at Counterfire.org. Please click on the title just below to link back. And please see the post from bermudaradical @ The Speed of Dreams, following my comment.


Chris Nineham reviews Marx at the Margins, which reveals Marx and Engels as pioneers in the struggle against colonialism and racism.

Kevin B. Anderson, Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies (University of Chicago Press 2010), xi, 319pp.

Marx at the Margins very successfully defends Marx and Engels against claims that their analysis of capitalism was economistic and Eurocentric. The charge that the founders of Marxism downplayed politics and reduced history to economic issues is common. It normally comes from the right wing, but has been taken up over the years by various figures on the left, including notably Edward Said. Said argued that Marx ignored the importance of colonialism, race and identity in the making of the modern world.

The connected accusation of Eurocentrism is partly based on a few instances of questionable language used by Marx and Engels. It is sustained however by the argument that Marx saw development through the prism of Western experience, that he predicted the rest of the world would pass through the same stages of development as Europe in what Anderson calls a ‘unilinear’ way. Anderson does not just deal convincingly with these charges, he establishes that the truth is the very opposite. He shows that Marx was a pioneer of anti-imperialism, and a champion of political causes that many on the left ignored. Both their writings and the political record show that Marx and Engels believed the struggle for democracy and national liberation were crucial components in the struggle for human emancipation.

The case for Marx’s Eurocentrism rests partly on a reading of the Communist Manifesto. The first part of the manifesto famously describes some of the achievements of capitalism; the way it overcomes isolation, brings technological advance and generates an historically unparalleled surplus. In a condescending phrase Marx argues capitalism draws ‘even the most barbarian nations in to civilisation’ (p.9). Occasional slips like this show Marx did not always find the language to distance himself from the prejudices that surrounded him, but they tell us nothing of much use about his politics.

The Manifesto has a two-sided take on capitalism. As Anderson notes Marx leaves all his criticisms of capitalism to the second half of the book. It would be absurd to see the Manifesto, calling as it does for the system’s overthrow, as an apology for any aspect of that system. If there is a weakness it is one of omission: Marx does not describe the specific degradations of colonialism.

The second source of criticism is Marx’s early 1850s writing on India. Edward Said has particularly taken Marx to task for his apparent softness on the civilising tendencies of British colonialism in Marx’s essay The British Rule in India. Others like Aijaz Ahmed, however, have criticised Said’s ‘postmodern kind of anti-colonialism’ (p.22), and argued that it ignored the need to challenge caste oppression, something that Marx and other progressive Indians supported. As Marx became more engaged with the question of development, his position quickly became more dialectical. In 1853, the same year he wrote The British Rule in India, Marx wrote in another essay the following:

The Indians will not reap the benefits of the new elements of society scattered amongst them by the British bourgeoisie, till in Great Britain itself the now ruling classes shall have been supplanted by the industrial proletariat, or till the Hindoos themselves have grown strong enough to throw off the English yoke altogether (The Future Results of British Rule in India, cited p.23).

As Irfan Habib argues, these lines show Marx not just setting the emancipation of colonial peoples as an objective for British workers, remarkable enough for the time, but also suggests he thought Indian national liberation might come before the emancipation of the European working classes. ‘Such insight and vision’ argues Habib, ‘could come from Marx and Marx alone’ (p.23).

Marx’s subsequent writing on India shows a growing indignation at the horrors of colonialism but also a sense of the interdependence of anti-colonial and anti-capitalist struggles elsewhere. In 1858, after the great Sepoy Rebellion that shook the colonial administration, Marx wrote in a remarkable letter to letter to Engels in the same year, that ‘India is now our best ally’ (p.41). Anderson documents in great detail the fact that Marx and Engels energetically supported the struggles of oppressed people all around the world. Such support was not just an add-on to an essentially class or economics-based worldview. The liberation of the Polish people and other oppressed nationalities in Russia, for example, was a central part of Marx’s strategic thinking. He saw their defeat in 1864 as a historic blow: ‘The suppression of the Polish insurrection and the annexation of the Caucasus, I regard as the two most important events to have taken place in Europe since 1815’ (p.66).

Similarly, Marx was a fervent supporter of the struggle against slavery in the US and elsewhere, and was particularly excited by resistance amongst slaves themselves. In another letter to Engels he wrote:  ‘In my view, the most momentous thing happening in the world today is, on the one hand, the movement among the slaves in America, started by the death of Brown, and the movement among the slaves in Russia’ (p.85). It was actually under the impact of the American Civil War, the movement in Europe in support of abolition, and the Polish insurrection that the First International was created. In the International’s inaugural address Marx makes the point that it was protests against intervention by the working classes of England that stopped ‘the West of Europe from plunging headlong in to an infamous crusade for the perpetuation of slavery on the other side of the Atlantic’ (p.108).

The charge that Marx imposed Western development models turns out to be a travesty as well. Examining in detail some of Marx’s neglected journalism and notebooks, Anderson shows that Marx spent a huge amount of time and energy studying the specifics of social relations and the particular prospects for development in India and Russia and North Africa. Marx actually suggested the possibility of unique developmental paths from communal agricultural forms to socialism in Russia (in tandem with the struggles of the European working class). He polemicised against other writers who believed feudal relations dominated in Asia. Marx argued for the existence of a different formation, an ‘Asiatic mode’ with no analogue in Western history.
There has been a lot of criticism of this notion, but Anderson explains that Marx’s view of the Asiatic mode and communal relations in India were complex and changing. While in his early essays for example he judged communal forms in the Indian village as the basis for ‘Oriental Despotism’, by the time he wrote the Grundrisse in 1857 he viewed them more sympathetically as a counterpoint to the disempowered and atomized state of the modern working class. Later, he suggested the destruction of communal relations could become a flashpoint of resistance to encroaching capitalism.

Marx’s support for national self-determination and his hopes for path-breaking leaps in the underdeveloped world were not accidental. They flowed from his hostility to capitalism as a whole. His tireless campaigning against the British occupation of Ireland, for example, was linked to the struggle for class unity in Britain. He argued the task of the General Council of the International in London was to ‘awaken the consciousness of the English working-class to the notion that, for them, the national emancipation of Ireland is not a question of abstract justice of humanitarian sentiment, but the first condition of their own social emancipation’ (p.150). It was precisely because he was a revolutionary dedicated to the root and branch overthrow of the system that he welcomed and supported any movement that challenged the power of its main protagonists.

Exactly the opposite of the caricature then, is true. Far from leading him to productivism or a mechanical theory of predetermined stages, Marx’s analysis led him to a deep understanding of the contradictions and destabilising unevenness of capitalist development, and to welcome every rebellion more consistently and enthusiastically than any other western contemporary. Marx and Engels fought battles in the movement at the time for this kind of political, global approach, against those like Proudhon who wanted to reduce the movement to the spontaneous class struggle.

In his inaugural address to the International, Marx argued that the struggle against slavery, the Polish insurrection and the Russian occupation of the Caucasus have ‘taught the working classes the duty to master themselves the mysteries of international politics… the fight for such a foreign policy forms part of the general struggle for the emancipation of the working classes’ (p.67).

Andersons’ book is important not just as a refutation of views hostile to Marx on the right and left. His understanding of Marxism helps us counter economism on the Marxist left itself, and to chart our way forward in a complex global situation. To this day there is a tendency to downplay the importance of struggles against imperialism and struggles for democracy, and to focus on a narrowly defined class struggle. Our world is shaped by democratic revolution and imperialist war. Just as in Marx’s day, for instance, racism and division at home are linked to overseas occupation. Our movement needs a ‘foreign policy’ as part of our own struggle for emancipation.

Comments  

#1 RE: Marx at the Margins: A pioneer of anti-colonialismJulianReal 2011-04-21 03:10
I hope Kevin B. Anderson has contended with the critiques (of the pro-genocidal aspects of marxism-in-practice) from Ward Churchill and of the perspectives of both Marx and Engels put forth by Catharine A. MacKinnon.

A discussion of the first critique is here:

peopleofcolororganize.com/.../...

I don't find anything radically pro-Indigenist in Marx. His worldview and value of "civil" democratic society isn't even consistent with Indigenism. "Civility" as practiced by white men across the dominant political spectrum has been killing Indigeous people for centuries and ends up with a vision of society that is anti-Indigenist, refusing to return humanity to a spiritual state of belonging with the Earth, not on it.

See also, Yurugu, by Marimba Ani:
www.amazon.com/.../0865432481

And few defenders of Marx will take up MacKinnon's analysis of Marx and Engels.

See here for more:
tinyurl.com/mackinnononmarxandengels/

And for much more on Indigenism, Feminism, and Activism, please see this from Speed of Dreams. With thanks to Rowland Túpac Keshena and Jessica Yee. Please click on the title to link back. For some REALLY annoying reason, Blogger won't let me put this blog in my blogroll. Here's the URL: http://bermudaradical.wordpress.com/

A Short Course in Indigenous Feminism

Posted: January 24, 2011 by Rowland Túpac Keshena
Indigenous feminists, like Jessica Yee pictured here, are on the rise and they aren't takin' shit from nobody
For those who don’t know much about me, I am a currently studying for a Masters Degree in Public Issues Anthropology, specializing in an analysis of revolutionary Native nationalist and anti-colonialist movements in North Amerika. I also have really strong interrelated interests in Native revolutionary critical pedagogy, the “reindigenization” of the Chicano-Mexicano community and movement and, the subject of this post, indigenous feminism. Anyway, one of the perks of my program is that I can create my own courses, and I’ve taken such a route this semester by creating my own directed studies course in indigenous feminist theory.
The growth of indigenous feminism is, for me, a huge interest, both personal and academic, not just because of the obvious importance struggling against both white supremacist (neo)colonial capitalism and hetero-patriarchy if we want to achieve meaningful freedom, justice and equality, but also because for a long time the status quo within our movement was that you could not be both a feminist and a native warrior. On the one hand we are not Native enough if we call ourselves and our movement feminist, but on the other we are not feminist enough for the whitestream feminists since we are pointing out that the whitestream movement does not take us, and our unique experiences and struggles into account. I am an indigenous man and I find this to be one of the greatest failings of our movement, and for that reason I wholeheartedly endorse, support and promote the rise of an indigenous feminism.
Anyway, with that in mind and in the spirit of sharing ideas, and radical education I’ve decided to post my reading list, derived from a list created by Jessica Yee for [B*TCH] Magazine, for others to take a look a lot, critique and/or otherwise contribute their thoughts. It’s made up of a mix of books and articles, both academic and non-academic, which are available on line.