by Mike Pirsch
It is impossible to separate racism and the development of fascism in the United States: they go hand in hand. “The radical social change we need today will not happen without the leadership of young Blacks and Indigenous persons.”
America is Fascist Because it is Racist – Part II
by Mike Pirsch
Part One of this article appeared in BAR on October 18, 2011.
“The political education of the masses proposes not to treat the masses as children, but to make adults of children.” – Franz Fanon (1925-1961): “The Wretched of the Earth” l963 edition; page 181.
“People tend to ascribe the responsibility for war to those who wield power. But the responsibility for wars falls directly UPON THE CITIZENRY (emphasis mine) for they possess all the necessary means to avert war. To place guilt on ordinary people-to hold then solely responsible-means to take them seriously, whereas to view them as victims means to treat them as small helpless children.” – Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957). Paraphrased from “The Mass Psychology of Fascism”
“Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery: none but ourselves can free our minds.” – Bob Marley “Redemption Song”
“The greatest contributor to the success of fascism in America is racism.”
On November 6 we will have another opportunity to ratify the choice of candidates selected for our benefit by our financial industry dictatorship. Yes, the financial industry has consolidated its death grip on “democracy” and fascism is now our condition. The Declaration of Independence uses the words despots and despotism to describe dictators and dictatorship respectively. It instructs us we have the duty to overthrow the government when our condition is reduced to despotism and we are controlled by despots. We are there right now and the greatest contributor to the success of fascism in America is racism.
Racism prevents us from uniting to tear out the tree of fascism. We have had three periods in our short history when the rest of us successfully challenged the wealthy elite’s never ending greed for more and more. The Populist period in the 1890’’s was agrarian in nature and while parts of the movement were totally integrated other parts refused to integrate and essentially prevented the movement’s success. Before, during, and after the Great Depression in the 1930’s, Black Americans emerged as vital leaders in the Unemployed Councils, in the organizing of the CIO, and were strong supporters of radical progressive candidates. From the 1940’s through the 1970’s Black Americans were on the front lines fighting Jim Crow everywhere. It was the early 60’s when many young White Americans joined the fight and we were able to make great progress only to find those gains as well as the gains from the 1930’s disappearing because we seem to be indifferent to other people’s problems; we are interested only in our own problems.
“Racism prevents us from uniting to tear out the tree of fascism.”
It might be a good idea to examine some of the reasons we support a fascist dictatorship rather than opposing it as we have done at least three times in the last 120 plus years. How have we gone from being engaged in the fight for peace and justice to being engaged in the fight for more wars and no justice? We have been very silent about the number of wars currently being conducted and we are equally silent about the violent assault on our civil liberties over the past 42 years. As citizens in a democracy we are ultimately responsible for the actions or inactions of our government. Democracy demands the involvement of all of us. It is up to each one of us to go beyond passively receiving information from the corporate media. Never before in history have we been able to access as much vital information as we can now with the internet. We need to engage in analysis, questioning, critical thinking, and finally discussing what we have discovered with our neighbors and friends. In that manner we are able to go beyond the lies, of which there are many, and find the truth. It is our job to seek the truth. Daniel Ellsberg once remarked, “…it is so easy to lie to the American people….” Ellsberg, you may recall, released the Pentagon Papers which exposed the lies about why we were fighting in Viet Nam.
It should be obvious to us by now that there is an official history and a real history. History doesn’t mean yesterday or last month. History is a long story about our development as human beings and how we have tried to organize ourselves for survival. We are still being organized for survival but it is for the survival of fascism that we are being organized. Unfortunately that organizing is going well for the despots.
The history of modern America is a very short story as it begins only 520 years ago when Columbus arrived at what he called Hispaniola; today it is called Haiti and the Dominican Republic. But there is also the history of those people who lived in the “New World” more than 100,000 years before Columbus, the European, arrived. Our schools and our textbooks have ignored more than 99,000 years of history in this hemisphere, because we are brainwashed to think the only experience that matters is the European experience. We are indoctrinated educationally, culturally, and religiously only from the European experience. Other people’s stories are unimportant. Everything we learn about the Indigenous people is from the European point of view. Everything we are taught about Black history in America is only about their encounter with the first European slave traders and then slave owners in America and only if they survived the trip across the ocean stuffed together below the deck with no ventilation.
“There is an official history and a real history.”
So where did this European behavior towards Black Africans and then Indigenous Americans come from? It came from a papal bull written by Pope Nicholas V on 18 June 1452 (40 years before Columbus). Bulla is the Latin word for seal, thus a papal bull is a document written by the pope authenticated by the seal (bulla). Nicholas V in the papal bull “Dom Diversas” ordered the Portuguese King Alfonso V to reduce any ”Saracens [derogatory term describing Muslims in the 1400’s] and pagans and any other unbelievers” to perpetual slavery. Pagans and other unbelievers refer to the dark-skinned inhabitants of Africa. This document made legal – and even a good Christian act – the Portuguese invasion of Africa and marked the beginning of the slave trading industry from West Africa to Europe and shortly thereafter to the “New World.” Three years later the same Pope Nicholas V wrote the papal bull “Romanus Pontifex” which gave Catholic nations of Europe the right “to invade, search out, capture, vanquish and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed, and the kingdoms, dukedoms, principalities, dominions, possessions and all moveable and immoveable goods whatsoever held and possessed by them and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery…”. It also granted the King the right to seize all “lands, islands, harbors and seas” in the name of the King. [1] A short while later Pope Alexander VI wrote the papal bull “Inter Caetera” which stated that one Christian nation did not have the right to establish dominion over lands previously dominated by another Christian nation. This is a legal basis of the Law of Nations and marked the beginning of the Age of Imperialism which still exists today in the form of the American Empire.[1]
“The papal bulls are as effective today as they were on June 18, 1452.”
These three documents define the relationship between the American Empire and the modern day “Saracens and pagans.” The first bull is referred to as the Doctrine of Discovery and is still being used to justify and legitimate the theft of land and life from Blacks and Indigenous people in America today. Since the 1800’s the United States Supreme Court has identified the Doctrine of Discovery as the proof of ownership of all land in USA and Canada by the English king. Thus, when America achieved independence from England we “inherited” the rights pronounced in the Doctrine of Discovery. In the 2005 Supreme Court decision “City of Sherrill v Oneida Nation the majority decision was written by Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She wrote, “Under the ‘Doctrine of Discovery,’ fee title to the lands occupied by the Indians when the colonists arrived became vested in the Sovereign – first the discovering European nation and later the original States and the United States.” [2] Ginsburg is regarded as a liberal member of the court and was appointed by Bill Clinton. The papal bulls are as effective today as they were on June 18, 1452. This blasphemous claim is the legal justification to kill Indigenous people and steal their land for use by corporate giants who extract poisonous materials from the Earth to generate huge profits for themselves and the financial industry despots. Who cares about the tens of millions of Indigenous people killed since the Europeans came waving this document in the face of those who greeted them? Who cares about those Indigenous people still suffering the effects from the poisonous materials? Who realizes land and life is still being taken today from Indigenous people especially in America and Africa for the benefit of our financial industry despots?
From the moment the Europeans left their kingdoms with the papal bulls in hand, the people in Africa, Asia, Oceana, North America and South America have had hell to pay. To further strengthen and to apply a deeper spiritual meaning to the Doctrine of Discovery, the Spanish began using a document called the “Requirement” which stated that God has declared the pope rules all people as well as the land they occupy. The Spanish explorers were required to read the document, in Spanish, to all non-Christian people they encountered, never mind those people did not speak or understand Spanish. The representatives of the pope and king invited the natives to convert to Catholicism or “with the help of God we shall use force against you, declaring war upon you from all sides and with all the possible means, and we shall bind you to the yoke of the Church and Their Highnesses; we shall enslave your persons, wives, and sons; sell you or dispose of you as the King sees fit; we shall seize your possessions and harm you as much we can as disobedient and resisting vassals.”[3]
“We have been at war with or sponsoring a war against sovereign nations every year since the start of the Revolutionary War.”
If we change the words “yoke of the Church and Their Highnesses” to the “yoke of Capitalism and the American Empire” it accurately describes our Empire’s relationship with countries such as Viet Nam, Philippines, Laos, Cambodia, Indonesia, Panama, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Chile, Argentina, Venezuela, Bolivia, Peru, Paraguay, Cuba, Iraq, Iran, Palestine, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Somalia. Eritrea, Congo, Zimbabwe, Mali, Ivory Coast, Indigenous People of U.S., Canada and Mexico and the descendents of the kidnapped Africans. If I left any one out I apologize. We have been at war with or sponsoring a war against sovereign nations every year since the start of the Revolutionary War. No other country in the history of the planet can make such a claim. When I first read the “Requirement” the tone was exactly what we have heard from all the Presidents in our history including the current president. Today we condone and reward extreme torture and repression of their citizens by regimes which are obedient and do not resist the demands of Empire. When our despots decide a country qualifies as “disobedient and resisting vassals,” we invoke the “Requirement.”
Notable is the fact that the no pope has ever denounced these 3 papal bulls, they remain part of the theology of the Catholic and the Protestant religions. It seems the European Jews liked the documents so much they copied the behavior of their European ancestors by their theft of land and life in Palestine. The Palestinians are Saracens after all. Today the 3 papal bulls define the relationship between the financial industry dictatorship and Black and Indigenous people in America. The liberal Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg made sure of that in her ruling against the Oneida Nation.
We have lost the ability to feel empathy. Empathy is a trait every person has the capacity to develop. Empathy is the capacity to recognize and feel physical and emotional feelings being experienced by another person or other sentient being. Empathy is not limited to feelings for humans only, empathic feelings extend to all living things, including our planet. Empathy is about putting ourselves in the shoes of another person, it is about feeling the joy or suffering of another person. A person with the capacity of empathy is not indifferent to racism, war, injustice, and inequality. If we were a nation of people with the capacity of empathy, we would be demanding action to greatly reduce the burning of fuels that are fueling human-caused catastrophic climate change, but we don’t. We would have as much concern about the millions of children we have killed in wars and conflicts we started since the 1960’s but we cannot be bothered to demand the end of the American Empire which is carrying out these atrocities on our watch.
“We are a nation that loves killing as much as pigs love rolling in slop.”
If we were empathic people we would be as alarmed about the inequality of wealth between Whites and Blacks and Indigenous people as we were about the inequality of earnings between men and women in the 1970’-1980’s – but we aren’t. If we were empathic we would have been in the streets with pitchforks and torches when Madeline Albright, Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State, declared that killing more than 500,000 Iraqi children during Clinton’s sanctions was worth the price. We fail to see that these children were first tortured and then killed. They were sick and injured children who were not allowed access to medicines which could have helped their illnesses or injuries. When a person deprives another person of badly needed medicines, he is engaging in torture which only ends when the sick person dies.
Today we are repeating the same thing in Iran. We are a nation that loves killing as much as pigs love rolling in slop. We are so in love with killing it is not enough to simply kill. We have to develop munitions that are capable of killing or deforming the target population for generations. That is what depleted uranium does. We are using depleted uranium everywhere. In its wake are thousands of severely deformed babies. In its wake are cancer clusters which will continue to kill and maim for generations. [4] The number of miscarriages increases and we are silent. Here in America the despots have arranged a debate about the sanctity of fetuses. The Catholic Church and the politicians owned by our despots have made ending the right to abort as its leading issue. Neither the Catholic Church nor the despot-controlled politicians care about the number of miscarriages or deformities or deaths due to our use of depleted uranium. We have to ask ourselves just what sort of monsters uses such weapons that kill or deform for generations and what do we call the people who fail to oppose it.
It is difficult developing empathy when we are so pre-occupied with self. The despots know their rule is easier with a population of self-centered people. They despise dissent, cooperation, empathy, anything which begins to break the chains of racism. We have been led to self-centeredness beginning with the gospel according to Edward Bernays, the original guru of propaganda. The gospel is a shill for capitalism, consumption and obedience. We are taught the self is all that matters. In a country of more than 350 million people self is celebrated more than cooperation. Humans are naturally cooperative and communal people; if we weren’t the human race would not have survived since we emerged in Africa. 350 million self-centered people is a recipe for disaster and that is exactly where we are headed.
It is we who are solely responsible for the state of our collective lives today. It is we who decided in 1978 to start the anti-tax rebellion in California. Proposition 13 froze property taxes at current levels and required future increases in property taxes be enacted with a 2/3 majority. From that point onward the “we hate taxes” movement spread across the country like wildfire. Ronald Reagan was anointed as the leader of the “we hate taxes” movement. The subtext, that taxes subsidized people with darker skin than whites, was and is not true. Credit Bernays and his disciples with another victory. This movement supervised the destruction of public education, public libraries, public recreation areas, public transportation, public health and, of course, the general welfare. It seems to me college students who are overwhelmed with debt from over- priced tuition should be demonstrating against their parents and neighbors for refusing to fund education, choosing instead to fund prisons. Hate and fear win again.
“The gospel is a shill for capitalism, consumption and obedience.”
The “me first” mindset prevents us from making any demands regarding human caused catastrophic climate change. We know the next 3-4 generations will go through climate hell, severely affecting their ability to survive. We are not entirely certain that we humans will still be viable in four generations. Our thinking about climate change has been effectively influenced by the energy corporations’ use of modern propaganda methods, always appealing to the selfish in us. We remain silent as the same corporations, backed by financial industry despots, drill for oil and gas in areas that are accessible only because of climate change. A little like fighting fire with gasoline. We even forget the fact that some of the fuel is burned for our convenience and to meet our consumption desires. Therefore we have the ability to stop consuming or consuming smartly, demanding more and better public transportation as we park our cars and, most important, refusing to support politicians and corporations who continue to refuse to address this catastrophe. It is indeed a matter of life or death, but the lives are those of the next 3-4 generations. We cannot continue to live the lie that “I got mine now you get yours.”
For more than 40 years we have been unable to mount a serious opposition to the financial industry dictatorship and its enforcer, the American military machine. We have been unable to mount any serious opposition, in part, because much of the Black population has been politically neutered by New Jim Crow system of slavery present in our prison system and, more recently, by blind allegiance to President Barack Obama. We have even endorsed the profiteering of imprisoning people, much like the original Jim Crow era. The election of Obama and subsequent inability to call him out on his broken promises is due only to his skin color. If we are able to look beyond the color of a person’s skin we are able to see the character of the person, which is a better measure of the person than skin color. Obama has done nothing to alleviate the suffering of Black or Indigenous people because he says he is the president of all Americans and does not want to appear to favor one over the other. Yet he has done so much to protect his masters in the financial industry, he has guaranteed huge profits in perpetuity to the insurance and pharmaceutical industries, he has done so much to increase the profits of the killing and surveillance industries. His character should be clear to us by now. Sheldon Wolin, in his exceptional book, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism, provides the link between the election of Obama and the scandal of our prison system. He wrote, “The significance of the African American prison population is political. What is notable about the African American population is that it is highly sophisticated politically and by far the one group that throughout the 20th Century kept alive a spirit of resistance and rebelliousness. In that context criminal justice is as much a strategy of political neutralization as it is a channel of instinctive racism. [5]
“Obama has done nothing to alleviate the suffering of Black or Indigenous people.”
The radical social change we need today will not happen without the leadership of young Blacks and Indigenous persons. It is they who know the ways and means of the oppressor much better than any White person, simply because Blacks and Indigenous have experienced the ways and means of the oppressor for over 500 years. White Americans have never been in the same social or political position. Our last demotic moment began in the 1940’s and extended to the 1970’s when it came to a screeching halt due to the war on drugs and COINTELPRO, both designed to literally “kill off” Black and Indigenous leaders. The war on drugs acts in a similar fashion to depleted uranium: it will kill and maim for generations. Without the leadership of Blacks and Indigenous Americans the anti-war movement would not have developed.
Today our potential leaders are locked into a prison system which relies on uneven enforcement of drug laws. In America, Blacks comprise a majority of the prison population despite being only about 14% of the whole population. Most of those inmates are in prison for drug offenses. More Whites use and sell drugs than Blacks simply because there are so many more Whites in America. Young Blacks are targeted to remove them from taking any role in highlighting the multitude of problems we face. Just as Whites are unable to lead the movement for radical social change, Blacks and Indigenous leaders would have no movement to lead without White participation. Simply put, we need each other more than we are ready to acknowledge.
The war on drugs is a front for the war on Black and Indigenous civil rights and civil liberties. How is it possible to spend as much as we have fighting drugs only to see the import and use increase over the years? I believe the answer is simple when you consider our despots have been involved in assisting the import of drugs since WWII. Reagan funded the Contras through the sale of cocaine in the inner cities mostly Black neighborhoods. Southeastern Asia processed heroin flooded the market when the U.S. was at war with Vietnamese peasants. Today both Afghanistan heroin and Columbian cocaine are abundant. Both countries have a large U.S. military presence in their countries. U.S. financial industry despots reap huge profits from laundering billions on behalf of U.S. approved drug cartels. All of this is common knowledge and we fail to see through the lies. Today we have only one-fourth of the population of China, yet we have more prisoners than China and not a word is spoken about this during our “electoral extravaganza.” This is a sin and a shame. However we do have the stirrings of a multi-state fight back by prisoners challenging the common use of torture, slave labor, and no skill training in the prisons. This movement is not without significance, for those who are the most oppressed are fighting back at great risk to themselves and their families. Those of us who are the least oppressed would do well to educate ourselves and join this struggle for humanity and dignity. This is another case where we could be more empathic because empathy can lead to an understanding of the methods of our dictators and allow us to lend our unconditional support to end the New Jim Crow prison slavery system. The racist “Doctrine of Discovery” promised the kings of Europe and their successors access to pagans to put into perpetual slavery. Slavery has never gone away and in America it is institutionalized as evidenced by the Supreme Court’s embrace of the “Doctrine of Discovery.”
“The war on drugs is a front for the war on Black and Indigenous civil rights and civil liberties.”
The “Doctrine of Discovery” is re-emerging in Africa with America leading the effort to re-colonize Africa for the benefit of our financial industry dictatorship. It began in Libya and we were reduced to cheerleading the Al-Qaeda-NATO alliance as it killed tens of thousands of Libyans, including many children. It was apparent we knew little or nothing about Libya except we had been told that Gaddafi is bad. We were fed the same lies as Iraq and Afghanistan and we swallowed the lies. The lies were based on fabrications of atrocities supposedly committed by the Libyan military. The United Nations swallowed the lie, authorized a no-fly zone and America-NATO started bombing. The UN did not investigate the claims, which were later proven to be false by Amnesty International. Libya’s own Central Bank was looted by the terrorists in the amount of over 500 million dollars. This happened three months after American-NATO bombing started. [6]
The propaganda was that Gaddafi was evil and ruled through harsh repression. He was evil because he supported struggles for freedom in Ireland and apartheid South Africa. He established the Gaddafi Peace Prize which was awarded to, among others, the ANC led by Nelson Mandela, the International Indian Treaty Council established by the American Indian Movement and the Nation of Islam presently led by Minister Louis Farrakhan. The peace prize included a cash award of about 3 million dollars, but the American Empire refused to allow the ANC, the IITC and the Nation of Islam to receive the award. He sent armies and military aid to prevent the apartheid South Africans from seizing Angola. When he and other officers of the Libyan Army overthrew the European-American supported King Idris Libya’s literacy rate was less than 15%. When Gaddafi was murdered the rate was over 80%. Before Gaddafi all profits from oil went to western oil corporations and the monarchy. Gaddafi began an oil revenue sharing program which provide Libyans with free healthcare, free education along with subsidies so students could attend universities overseas, free electric and water, free training and rehabilitation, housing assistance, disability and old-age benefits, interest-free state loans, subsidies for buying a new car, cash grants to newlyweds, practically free gasoline and more. [7] Would we overthrow our government if we had the same benefits as the Libyans? Opposition to Gaddafi came mostly from Islam fundamentalist in the eastern region of Libya. The fundamentalists hated the secular nature of the regime. Many of Gaddafi’s enemies from that region went to Afghanistan to join Al Qaeda and help America fight the secular regime backed by Russia. Some were later captured by America after Al Qaeda supposedly turned on America and were sent to Libya for torture under the Bush regime. The Libyan Al Qaeda fighters formed the core group of rebels who started the trouble in Libya which blew up into an American-NATO bombardment which killed tens of thousands and exposed all to the devastating effects of depleted uranium. Now Libya has no law and is ruled by many tribal militias but oil and dollars are flowing to Europe and America.
“The Doctrine of Discovery is still in play no matter its age.”
In addition Gaddafi was the elected the leader of the African Union and was a force driving the effort to create a United States of Africa with its own World Bank, its own IMF, an African Central Bank, a unified African military, and its own currency based on the abundant amount of gold in Africa. It would have been Africa for Africans, an Africa not under the yoke of Europe, America, or the Doctrine of Discovery.
Stop and think about the benefits that resulted from sharing oil revenue as well as the fact Libya had the highest standard of living in Africa. Why would the people want to throw all that away in order to kill the person responsible for those benefits? It doesn’t matter what Americans or Europeans think about Gaddafi, we are not Libyans. It is up to Libyans to decide their future unless of course the American Empire has other ideas. Perhaps the most important reason for the American-NATO war against the Libyan people was the desire by the financial industry dictatorship to establish a unified military command which covers all of Africa. [8] Many American citizens don’t know our taxes are covering the costs of eight such commands which cover the entire globe, all the heavens, and cyberspace. The Unified Combatant Commands are USEUCOM (Europe), USCENTCOM (Central Asia which includes Arabia), AFRICOM (Africa), USPACCOM (the entire Pacific Ocean and all of Asia from India to China and Australia-New Zealand), USSOUTHCOM (all Central and South America), USNORTHCOM (Mexico, Canada, and USA), STRATCOM (heavens) and cyber space command ensure the Empire’s military dominance of the planet and the universe. The AFRICOM is vital to ensuring those firms sponsored by our despots have unhindered access and control of all of Africa’s resources including people and nature. The other goal is to keep China from developing relations with African countries. [9] Since Gaddafi was murdered the Empire has steadily increased its presence in Africa. The Doctrine of Discovery is still in play no matter its age. Kill the Saracens (Muslims) and the pagans, steal everything they have, and place them under perpetual slavery. Works pretty well in America too.
Today we are repeating the same actions in an effort to destroy Syria and Syria’s secular government. Chaos and everlasting war is our goal. We have spent more than 4-5 trillion dollars supposedly fighting Al Qaeda and now they are our allies and seem to be forming new Al Qaeda’s all over Africa. The endless wars also claim most of our national treasury. We are in deficit because of our military and all its wars. The despot-controlled Congress has created a phony and unconstitutional debt ceiling. The 14th Amendment 4th Article reads, in its entirety: “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payments of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of the insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for loss of compensation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.” The first sentence obligates the U.S. to pay all debts authorized by Congress; a “debt ceiling” is unconstitutional. Yet the phony debt ceiling debate provides political cover for Obama and Congress to further diminish what few benefits we have left. [10] Because we have established AFRICOM it will not lack for opportunities with the help of our old friend, Al Qaeda in Africa. Again we are silent.
“The real drug dealers reside in our government’s intelligence agencies, in our State Department and most importantly in the huge banks.”
It would be good to consider developing empathic feelings for the “Saracens and pagans” as we threaten every country on the planet which is not obedient to the Empire. In America and Europe, the rest of us face an increasing vicious attack on our living standard from the financial industry dictatorship.
The threat to the living and the future generations is real and it is not pretty. I have tried to present a glance of some of the serious problems we are causing with the hope we are willing to come together and take the necessary steps to throw out the financial industry despots and their military machine. One thing more than any other that keeps us from acting is our racist beliefs which were first defined by the Catholic Church and reinforced by various governments through all these years. We learn racism in school from a young age. The media reinforces the racist thoughts as do the elected leaders. When asked to conjure an image of a legitimate target of the war on drugs our image is a young Black man, said image reinforced nightly on the local evening news, reinforced by Hollywood movies, reinforced by the recording which favors rappers who glorify the “scene” over rappers who rap about social issues. The real drug dealers reside in our government’s intelligence agencies, in our State Department and most importantly in the huge banks.
Fortunately a model is developing in Venezuela where the Bolivarian Revolution is working with people at the local level to assist learning how people rule in a democracy. They have established local ruling councils which are charged with directing local and regional development projects, whether it is education, health care, jobs, housing, farming, etc. It will be a long process to learn democracy in Venezuela since they never have experienced democracy. We will be more fortunate because we, in the past, had the opportunity to study democracy and apply what we learned in our unions. That is gone, so we have to start over at the neighborhood level, establishing mutually beneficial programs created and operated in the true democratic method. We will need patience because it is a long haul effort and there are no short cuts.
We constitute the greatest threat to all life on this planet because we have failed to organize a grass roots opposition to the madness that afflicts us all. On the other hand we are the only people on the planet who can begin to take apart the financial industry dictatorship and its military enforcer which inflicts physical and economic violence everywhere on the planet. No one else has our potential power.
Do we begin to acknowledge the need to develop collective interest over self-interest or do we continue to defend the status quo which will surely leave future generation in serious jeopardy. That is why I recommend voting for the progressive parties’ platform you like the best. This can deliver a strong message which says, “Enough already. We won’t take it any longer.” The more people who choose this vote, the stronger our message becomes. Of course the progressive parties’ candidates have no chance of winning but a vote for Obama or Romney also assures we won’t win. It is about standing up for our collective rights.
My good friend H.P. Levingston used to say, “Something in the milk ain’t cream.” It is our duty to investigate what exactly “ain’t cream.”
Mike Pirsch lives and works Bangkok, Thailand. He can be contacted at hihomikon(at)yahoo.com.
Notes:
[1]. The United Nations Economic and Social Council. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. Preliminary study of the impact on Indigenous peoples of the international legal construct known as the Doctrine of Discovery.
9th session, New York, 19-30 April 2010
[2]. 2005 United States Supreme Court, “City of Sherrill v Oneida Nation”. Ginsburg for the majority.
[3]. Native American Netroots: “Christian Doctrine and Dehumanization” by Ojibwa. May 9, 2010.
http://www.nativeamericannetroots.net/diary/491/christian-doctrine-and-dehumanization
[4]. RT>com: “Horrors of War: US, UK munitions ‘cause birth defects in Iraq’”. October 14, 2012
http://www.rt.com/news/birth-defects-iraq-report
[5]. Sheldon S. Wolin: “Democracy Inc.-Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism” p. 58. 2008 by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540
[6]. Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya, “ The Big Lie and Libya” pp. 127-155. “The Illegal War on Libya”, ed. Cynthia Mckinney. A Dignity Project. Clarity Press, Inc. http://www.claritypress.com
[7]. Stephan Lendman, “Why Libya was Attacked”. Ibid. pp 99-106
[8] Wayne Madsen, “Dispatches From Tripoli, Libya During the NATO Bombing Campaign of 2011”. Ibid. pp. 31-37
[9]. Tom Englehardt, Overwrought Empire: The Discrediting of US Military Power”, October 12, 2012
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/10/201210101043
[10]. Vice Admiral Robert T. Moeller at an AFRICOM Conference, February 18, 2008 declared the guiding principle of AFRICOM is to protect “the free flow of national resources from Africa to the global market. He also cited China’s increasing business collaborations as challenging to American interests.
Julie Levesque, “America’s Secret War In Africa” October 13, 2012
http://www.globalresearch.ca/america’s-secret-war-in-Africa/3307958
[11]. Englehardt IBID. Englehardt points out we are investing 1.45 trillion dollars (1.5 million million dollars) to produce and operate a single future aircraft, the F-35. This 1.5 trillion dollars is more than America and all other countries spend annually on national defense. This has been authorized by Congress and the president.
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