“What we are seeing is not just a climate , energy , food or financial crisis but the systemic crisis of capitalism itself, which is bringing about the destruction of humanity and nature. If the cause is systemic, then the solution must be systemic as well.”
Bolivian President Evo Morales
As the systemic crisis grows the mental state of its subjects often borders on the totally irrational. This isn’t surprising with conditions showing only cosmetic signs of recovery in America while several European nations are threatened with bankruptcy. And with increasing wars, coal mining and oil drilling tragedies that kill more innocents and threaten greater ecological destruction there is ample reason for people to be upset . But when fearful anger results in the demonizing of individuals, the seeking of minority scapegoats or the belief in what might as well be supernatural causes for our problem , we not only miss its substance but react exactly as authority desires.
Greece is accused of living beyond its means while the continent wallows in debt just as Americans are told that government spends too much on people while massive expenditures for war are unmentioned. Some near psycho-neurotic freak out over the alleged march to socialism under Obama, as others approach hysterical frenzy over the fascism seen imminent in Arizona. People reduced to finding fault with individuals or isolated groups are not likely to demand significant systemic reforms and this is exactly how corporate state power wishes its subjects to react.
Meaningful reform is what we were promised by the rhetorical massage therapist sent to the White House with nearly fifteen million dollars invested in his campaign by Wall Street. His devoted service to capital results in scores believing he is a socialist. And capital’s profit at throwing people off their land to become illegal cheap labor across borders and inflict the loss on the communities they crowd causes reactions labeled racist fascism by graduates of the same schools; those which teach nature by focusing on trees and denying the forest. As long as we’re driven apart as allegedly unique individuals with separate needs or as political minority groups with special needs we strengthen the system driving us all to ruin.
The present crisis began when the massive Ponzi Scheme that is our economy became overloaded with payments due and no funds available to meet them. Finance capital arranged a multi trillion dollar public bailout to save private profit and the market soon rose, but so did unemployment, homelessness and greater stress for many once considered a middle class but who only maintained that status by floating on a vast sea of debt. Is it any wonder they are close to mental as well as physical collapse?
The growing war on foreigners to preserve a crumbling empire is accompanied by attacks on freedom here at home and our environmental problems accelerate in the “ destruction of humanity and nature ”. The oil spill from the latest calamity in profit pursuit could be the worst ever, but just as in the financial area there will be some form of artificial remission in the disease and everything will seem back to normal. All we need are new laws to enforce old laws which weren't being enforced and once we make it illegal to behave illegally the civil rights of capital will be protected. But those of humans wandering in the divisive identity swamp will be driven further into oil slick, coal dust , bloody war and economic deprivation .
Morales represents a rising of those previously kept silent who now send a call for the rest of us to heed or become victims of the system long oppressing them for our alleged benefit. The cost of that system has now become so deadly that humanity needs to unite in transforming it before it destroys all of us. But if we still blame isolated people or groups for what is wrong we guarantee that the problem will get worse.
Capitalists are dragged before congress and berated by representatives of capital while capitalism itself goes unquestioned. This attention to persons at the exclusion of the system which they serve may soon bring a case before the Supreme Court for corporations to legally marry and adopt , whether gay or straight . And if a Latino Transvestite occupies the White House, a White Nationalist is Speaker of the House and a Catholic Zionist heads the Senate, will we be a morally healthier nation ? Not if we haven't dealt with the substance of our production and reproduction system which is leading to breakdowns that get worse the longer we blame them on bad guys or minor flaws of profit and loss economics that can easily be corrected with some new laws. Capitalism is creating greater losses and more devastation daily and no identity group or individual change will matter if the system is not transformed , completely, before it destroys everything , completely.
Suppressed and repressed by colonialism for nearly five hundred years, amid conditions of material hardship the indigenous people of Bolivia affected radical democratic change to elect Morales. If still relatively affluent Americans continue wringing their hands about the impossibility of change or calling for lynching of demons as a form of change, we will deserve the dreadful outcome that results. We are acting like a nation of mentally disabled spoiled brats who demand a scapegoat for every problem and a selfish outcome for every desire. We are more than capable of joining in the shaping of a better more democratic world but we’d better heed the advice of foreign leaders like Morales more than what passes for our own. The system of minority capitalism is the problem and the sooner we acknowledge that fact, the sooner we can create a majority solution .
Friday, May 21, 2010
Friday, May 7, 2010
Headlines From The Garlic
Terrorist Plots Uncovered by Dept. of Really Scary Things to Panic Public and Distract from Collapsing Capitalist System:
Oil Spills and Mining Disasters Caused By Taliban, Financed by Al Quaida and Applauded by Iran
Computer in Afghanistan Cave Causes Market Collapse
Ahmadinejad Behind Tea Parties, Arizona Law , Hezbollah, Hamas, Child Molesting and Puppy and Pussycat Torture
Osama Spits on Star of David, Defaces Crucifix, Threatens to Sodomize Dalai Lama
Terror Plan to Spread Chopped Beef on Veggies at Whole Foods
Late Breaking Bulletin!!!!
The Dept. of Really Really Serious Color Coded Threats at the Center for National Insecurity called for a Rainbow terrorist alert. An extremely very nervous spokesperson said:
“ There are so many threats at one time to so many Americans coming from so many terrorists using so many weapons that we haven't enough colors so we had to blend them together on this one. This is really really big folks. Turn off your tv or keep it on constantly, run your tap water and air conditioners and air purifiers and heating units and start praying even if you’re agnostic or atheist or pagan and prepare for something really devastating. Worse than any threat in the past that didn't happen. If this doesn't happen it will be even worse than the ones that didn’t happen before. Really. We’re not kidding this time. Really.”
stay tuned
Oil Spills and Mining Disasters Caused By Taliban, Financed by Al Quaida and Applauded by Iran
Computer in Afghanistan Cave Causes Market Collapse
Ahmadinejad Behind Tea Parties, Arizona Law , Hezbollah, Hamas, Child Molesting and Puppy and Pussycat Torture
Osama Spits on Star of David, Defaces Crucifix, Threatens to Sodomize Dalai Lama
Terror Plan to Spread Chopped Beef on Veggies at Whole Foods
Late Breaking Bulletin!!!!
The Dept. of Really Really Serious Color Coded Threats at the Center for National Insecurity called for a Rainbow terrorist alert. An extremely very nervous spokesperson said:
“ There are so many threats at one time to so many Americans coming from so many terrorists using so many weapons that we haven't enough colors so we had to blend them together on this one. This is really really big folks. Turn off your tv or keep it on constantly, run your tap water and air conditioners and air purifiers and heating units and start praying even if you’re agnostic or atheist or pagan and prepare for something really devastating. Worse than any threat in the past that didn't happen. If this doesn't happen it will be even worse than the ones that didn’t happen before. Really. We’re not kidding this time. Really.”
stay tuned
Monday, May 3, 2010
Arizona, "Nazism," and Immigration Mythology
by Michael K. Smith
"German Nazi and Russian Communist techniques."
-----Los Angeles Archbishop Roger Mahony on Arizona SB 1070, which criminalizes illegal immigrants in the state
The panic signals are out again about Nazism taking over the United States. Nazism was allegedly on the verge of triumph when George W. Bush launched a frontal attack on the U.S. Constitution, when Arnold Schwarzenegger won the California recall election in 2003, and now again in the wake of Arizona passing a law that elevates illegal immigration from a civil violation to a criminal offense.
In spite of hysterical claims to the contrary, there is nothing racist in the law itself, though illegal immigrants are understandably alarmed that Arizona police are about to make their lives much more difficult. And lawyers will have a field day the first time a Hispanic professional is mistaken for a day laborer without documents. But the text of the law specifically rejects using race or ethnicity as the sole justification for a police contact.
Not that this will satisfy the open borders enthusiasts, who think being born in the U.S. shouldn't mean anything because everyone's ancestors came from somewhere else (even the Indians aren't really indigenous: their ancestors allegedly crossed the Bering Strait from Asia and therefore are immigrants, too). In other words, the U.S. as a "nation of immigrants" is obligated to honor its forebears by throwing open its borders to endless waves of immigrants, legal or not. Failure to do so is (1) racist, because today's immigrants are mostly non-white, and (2) hypocritical, because today's citizens are yesterday's immigrants, and denying to others what we insist on for ourselves is a double standard.
Of course, this is perfect nonsense. Even if Indians came from somewhere else in the remote past, they have been here for ten thousand years at least, and possibly as long as fifty thousand years, which gives them a standing newcomers can't match. Morever, letting the Europeans in unmolested is a policy they have regretted ever since. Finally, those Europeans were not immigrants, but colonists and religious fanatics, who dedicated themselves to settler colonialism, not assimilation to the norms established by North American indigenous nations, which they almost entirely wiped out. As for the "service sector" of that era, they were poor, indentured servants, convicted, criminalized, kidnapped from the working class, many of whom decided to join Indian communities. Finally, there were slaves, who arrived in chains and were not allowed to go back, which is quite a different matter from voluntarily emigrating. (Try telling black Americans today that they have been living the good life long enough and now must make room for tens of millions of illegal immigrants).
Only beginning in the 1840s, with the arrival of millions of Irish Catholics can the story of "immigration" in the U.S. be said to have begun. The Irish were despised cheap labor, not settlers. They were soon followed by millions of other poor workers from Scandinavia, Eastern and Southern Europe, more Irish, and Chinese and Japanese. Immigration laws were not passed until 1875 when the U.S. Supreme Court made immigration a federal responsibility. The Immigration Service came into being in 1891.
The rest is imperial propaganda. The landing of the Pilgrims refers to fanatical evangelicals eager to expand their persecution opportunities in the so-called New World. The spirit of the white settlers was captured well by James Fenimore Cooper's immensely popular "Last of the Mohicans," which asserted "natural rights" to indigenous lands as well as those claimed by rival European powers. The U.S. was not a refuge for humanity, but a division of the vast British empire, dedicated to profit and expansion. Thomas Jefferson called it the "new republic for empire," and his imperial designs required the conquering of what was called the "Northwest Territory," that is, the Ohio Valley and the Great Lakes region, which was then populated by indigenous farming communities.
Thanks to genocidal military campaigns, infectious disease, and settler colonialism, the rightful inhabitants of the land were driven south and north to seek protection in other indigenous communities. Meanwhile, the republic for empire annexed Spanish Florida, where escaped slaves and remnants of indigenous communities that had fled the Ohio butchery fought back for two decades in three major wars. In 1828, one of the generals in those wars, Andrew Jackson, forced (via the Indian Removal Act) all the indigenous farming nations of the Southeast to move to Oklahoma territory that had been gained from the "Louisiana Purchase" from France.
In the South, slaveowners seized the indigenous farmlands for use as plantations. Many moved into the Mexican province of Texas. The U.S. invaded Mexico in 1846, seizing Mexico City and forcing Mexico to surrender its northern half via the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. California, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, and Texas were opened up to "legal" Anglo settlement, while those who had earlier settled illegally were retrospectively legalized. The indigenous and poor Mexican communities resisted colonization for the next four decades, just as they had resisted the Spaniards.
These are the tragic consequences of the indigenous nations' failure to establish firm boundaries. While the present day U.S. is in no danger of being destroyed by illegal immigration, it does have a legitimate interest in legally controlling who comes in and out of the country and on what terms. In Arizona, drug trafficking and the violent crimes associated with it are a serious concern, especially kidnapping. It is understandable that it seeks a policy of tough border security and enforcement of established immigration law.
But getting this across to "globalization" enthusiasts can be a challenge. For example, Jorge Ramos, cheerleader for "the Latino wave" (the title of one of his books) on the Spanish language Univision network, is quick to accuse others of racism if they show the slightest misgiving about mass illegal immigration, even as he evidences palpable contempt for mixed-race Hugo Chavez, President of Venezuela, and Indian Evo Morales, the first indigenous president of Bolivia. These men are dedicated to putting an economic floor beneath the poor that will make it unnecessary for them to migrate thousands of miles from their homes in search of a menial job, but Ramos and other corporate globalization enthusiasts are harshly critical of just such efforts. Hypocrisy? You bet.
Likewise, Ramos and his ilk do not praise Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa, who has declared it a national tragedy that so many Ecuadorians can't find work at home and must migrate to Europe and America. Apparently, socialist presidents are beneath contempt, even though their efforts to create a decent life for all by abolishing poverty would appear to be the ideal solution to mass illegal immigration. After all, who would choose to travel thousands of miles and walk through a scorching desert for days with no food in order to find a job in a foreign land if he had food, housing, and medical care at home? But, as noted, Ramos is dedicated to denouncing Chavez and other advocates of "21st Century socialism" as "demagogues" for seeking to provide their people with precisely such an economic foundation.
In any case, antagonism to mass illegal immigration appears to be universal. Polls taken in Latin America show that negative attitudes about uncontrolled immigration are hardly confined to "racist" or "nativist" North Americans. Mexicans don't like the flood of Guatemalans in their midst, Chileans resent Peruvians sneaking in, and Costa Ricans have long been sick of Nicaraguans fleeing the wreckage the U.S. made of the Sandinista revolution. Just like in the U.S., opponents of unrestrained immigration in these countries are not, by and large, racist, they simply want immigration law to be respected.
Furthermore, in the wake of over three decades of stagnation or decline in average real wages for roughly eighty percent of the U.S. population, it is not really surprising that many Americans react with antagonism to the mass influx of Third World peoples pursuing the American Dream at the very moment the profit system can no longer sustain it. For those who are in a position to avail themselves of the cheap labor this influx provides (often while living in exclusive neighborhoods that leave the social costs of mass migration to fall on other people), this is a good deal. But for those of modest means who have been encouraged to "work hard and play by the rules," it is grating to see the rules set aside in order to accommodate a cheap labor force while their own living standards are in decline.
Having said that, there is no justification for treating illegal immigrants badly. As the government of Nicaragua said four days ago, immigrants are induced to flee to the United States because of "the difficult economic situation that the countries of the South are suffering," which is itself a product of the "prevailing unjust economic model."
Most discussions of immigration overlook this dimension of the problem altogether, saying nothing about how transnational finance capital impacts development and non-development around the world, and how this uproots hundreds of millions of people from their countries of origin.
One of the biggest factors in producing the mass exodus of Central Americans and Mexicans from their native countries are the "free trade" treaties that keep wages low and jobs scarce south of the border. NAFTA alone displaced about 1.4 million rural Mexican workers by undercutting Mexican corn and beans. Thanks in no small measure to much larger agricultural subsidies in the U.S., the American price of corn in 1994 was $95 a ton, whereas in Mexico it was $205 a ton. In the Zapatistas' first Declaration of the Zacandon Jungle they denounced NAFTA as "the death certificate for the ethnic people of Mexico," warning that privatization would destroy communal agriculture, while the flood of heavily subsidized U.S. corn would wipe out Indian farmers. When this prediction turned out to be correct, millions of rural Mexicans made their way to the United States.
Fulfilling the just demands of the Zapatistas could have spared us the last several waves of desperate illegal immigrants: "work, land, shelter, bread, health, education, democracy, liberty, peace, independence, and justice." If we don't strive to make life decent in the countries illegal immigrants are coming from, we shouldn't be too surprised to find ourselves swamped in economic refugees fleeing the neo-liberal disasters promoted by the U.S. government and U.S.-based transnational corporations.
Many illegal immigrants (and even some permanent residents and naturalized U.S. citizens) would return to Mexico and Central America immediately if there were an end to the violence in the region and an investment program to create employment opportunities. Arranging for this to be possible makes a lot more sense than declaring amnesty once a generation, which is not a policy but a capitulation. As a Honduran grandmother pointed out to journalist Sonia Nazario almost a decade ago, the mass exodus from her country is hardly inevitable. Asked what it would take to stop it, she said:
"There would have to be jobs. Jobs that pay okay. That's all."
But that's apparently asking the impossible of capitalism.
Sources:
"Cardinal Mahony Criticizes Arizona Immigration Bill," Los Angeles Times, April 20, 2010
"The Legalization of Racism," Univision Online, April 27, 2010
"Who Left the Door Open?" Time Magazine, May 20, 2006
"Latin America Against SB 1070," Univision Online, April 30, 2010
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, "Comforting Lies of the Colonizers - Stop Saying This Is a Nation of Immigrants!" Counterpunch, May 31, 2006
"Nafta Should Have Stopped Illegal Immigration, Right?" New York Times, February 18, 2007
Henry K. Liu, "Militarism and the War on Drugs," Asia Times, May 18, 2005
Jorge Ramos, "The Latino Wave," (Harper Collins, 2005)
Sonia Nazario, "Enrique's Journey," (Random House, 2006)
--------Michael K. Smith is the author of "The Madness of King George," and "Portraits of Empire," both from Common Courage Press
"German Nazi and Russian Communist techniques."
-----Los Angeles Archbishop Roger Mahony on Arizona SB 1070, which criminalizes illegal immigrants in the state
The panic signals are out again about Nazism taking over the United States. Nazism was allegedly on the verge of triumph when George W. Bush launched a frontal attack on the U.S. Constitution, when Arnold Schwarzenegger won the California recall election in 2003, and now again in the wake of Arizona passing a law that elevates illegal immigration from a civil violation to a criminal offense.
In spite of hysterical claims to the contrary, there is nothing racist in the law itself, though illegal immigrants are understandably alarmed that Arizona police are about to make their lives much more difficult. And lawyers will have a field day the first time a Hispanic professional is mistaken for a day laborer without documents. But the text of the law specifically rejects using race or ethnicity as the sole justification for a police contact.
Not that this will satisfy the open borders enthusiasts, who think being born in the U.S. shouldn't mean anything because everyone's ancestors came from somewhere else (even the Indians aren't really indigenous: their ancestors allegedly crossed the Bering Strait from Asia and therefore are immigrants, too). In other words, the U.S. as a "nation of immigrants" is obligated to honor its forebears by throwing open its borders to endless waves of immigrants, legal or not. Failure to do so is (1) racist, because today's immigrants are mostly non-white, and (2) hypocritical, because today's citizens are yesterday's immigrants, and denying to others what we insist on for ourselves is a double standard.
Of course, this is perfect nonsense. Even if Indians came from somewhere else in the remote past, they have been here for ten thousand years at least, and possibly as long as fifty thousand years, which gives them a standing newcomers can't match. Morever, letting the Europeans in unmolested is a policy they have regretted ever since. Finally, those Europeans were not immigrants, but colonists and religious fanatics, who dedicated themselves to settler colonialism, not assimilation to the norms established by North American indigenous nations, which they almost entirely wiped out. As for the "service sector" of that era, they were poor, indentured servants, convicted, criminalized, kidnapped from the working class, many of whom decided to join Indian communities. Finally, there were slaves, who arrived in chains and were not allowed to go back, which is quite a different matter from voluntarily emigrating. (Try telling black Americans today that they have been living the good life long enough and now must make room for tens of millions of illegal immigrants).
Only beginning in the 1840s, with the arrival of millions of Irish Catholics can the story of "immigration" in the U.S. be said to have begun. The Irish were despised cheap labor, not settlers. They were soon followed by millions of other poor workers from Scandinavia, Eastern and Southern Europe, more Irish, and Chinese and Japanese. Immigration laws were not passed until 1875 when the U.S. Supreme Court made immigration a federal responsibility. The Immigration Service came into being in 1891.
The rest is imperial propaganda. The landing of the Pilgrims refers to fanatical evangelicals eager to expand their persecution opportunities in the so-called New World. The spirit of the white settlers was captured well by James Fenimore Cooper's immensely popular "Last of the Mohicans," which asserted "natural rights" to indigenous lands as well as those claimed by rival European powers. The U.S. was not a refuge for humanity, but a division of the vast British empire, dedicated to profit and expansion. Thomas Jefferson called it the "new republic for empire," and his imperial designs required the conquering of what was called the "Northwest Territory," that is, the Ohio Valley and the Great Lakes region, which was then populated by indigenous farming communities.
Thanks to genocidal military campaigns, infectious disease, and settler colonialism, the rightful inhabitants of the land were driven south and north to seek protection in other indigenous communities. Meanwhile, the republic for empire annexed Spanish Florida, where escaped slaves and remnants of indigenous communities that had fled the Ohio butchery fought back for two decades in three major wars. In 1828, one of the generals in those wars, Andrew Jackson, forced (via the Indian Removal Act) all the indigenous farming nations of the Southeast to move to Oklahoma territory that had been gained from the "Louisiana Purchase" from France.
In the South, slaveowners seized the indigenous farmlands for use as plantations. Many moved into the Mexican province of Texas. The U.S. invaded Mexico in 1846, seizing Mexico City and forcing Mexico to surrender its northern half via the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. California, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, and Texas were opened up to "legal" Anglo settlement, while those who had earlier settled illegally were retrospectively legalized. The indigenous and poor Mexican communities resisted colonization for the next four decades, just as they had resisted the Spaniards.
These are the tragic consequences of the indigenous nations' failure to establish firm boundaries. While the present day U.S. is in no danger of being destroyed by illegal immigration, it does have a legitimate interest in legally controlling who comes in and out of the country and on what terms. In Arizona, drug trafficking and the violent crimes associated with it are a serious concern, especially kidnapping. It is understandable that it seeks a policy of tough border security and enforcement of established immigration law.
But getting this across to "globalization" enthusiasts can be a challenge. For example, Jorge Ramos, cheerleader for "the Latino wave" (the title of one of his books) on the Spanish language Univision network, is quick to accuse others of racism if they show the slightest misgiving about mass illegal immigration, even as he evidences palpable contempt for mixed-race Hugo Chavez, President of Venezuela, and Indian Evo Morales, the first indigenous president of Bolivia. These men are dedicated to putting an economic floor beneath the poor that will make it unnecessary for them to migrate thousands of miles from their homes in search of a menial job, but Ramos and other corporate globalization enthusiasts are harshly critical of just such efforts. Hypocrisy? You bet.
Likewise, Ramos and his ilk do not praise Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa, who has declared it a national tragedy that so many Ecuadorians can't find work at home and must migrate to Europe and America. Apparently, socialist presidents are beneath contempt, even though their efforts to create a decent life for all by abolishing poverty would appear to be the ideal solution to mass illegal immigration. After all, who would choose to travel thousands of miles and walk through a scorching desert for days with no food in order to find a job in a foreign land if he had food, housing, and medical care at home? But, as noted, Ramos is dedicated to denouncing Chavez and other advocates of "21st Century socialism" as "demagogues" for seeking to provide their people with precisely such an economic foundation.
In any case, antagonism to mass illegal immigration appears to be universal. Polls taken in Latin America show that negative attitudes about uncontrolled immigration are hardly confined to "racist" or "nativist" North Americans. Mexicans don't like the flood of Guatemalans in their midst, Chileans resent Peruvians sneaking in, and Costa Ricans have long been sick of Nicaraguans fleeing the wreckage the U.S. made of the Sandinista revolution. Just like in the U.S., opponents of unrestrained immigration in these countries are not, by and large, racist, they simply want immigration law to be respected.
Furthermore, in the wake of over three decades of stagnation or decline in average real wages for roughly eighty percent of the U.S. population, it is not really surprising that many Americans react with antagonism to the mass influx of Third World peoples pursuing the American Dream at the very moment the profit system can no longer sustain it. For those who are in a position to avail themselves of the cheap labor this influx provides (often while living in exclusive neighborhoods that leave the social costs of mass migration to fall on other people), this is a good deal. But for those of modest means who have been encouraged to "work hard and play by the rules," it is grating to see the rules set aside in order to accommodate a cheap labor force while their own living standards are in decline.
Having said that, there is no justification for treating illegal immigrants badly. As the government of Nicaragua said four days ago, immigrants are induced to flee to the United States because of "the difficult economic situation that the countries of the South are suffering," which is itself a product of the "prevailing unjust economic model."
Most discussions of immigration overlook this dimension of the problem altogether, saying nothing about how transnational finance capital impacts development and non-development around the world, and how this uproots hundreds of millions of people from their countries of origin.
One of the biggest factors in producing the mass exodus of Central Americans and Mexicans from their native countries are the "free trade" treaties that keep wages low and jobs scarce south of the border. NAFTA alone displaced about 1.4 million rural Mexican workers by undercutting Mexican corn and beans. Thanks in no small measure to much larger agricultural subsidies in the U.S., the American price of corn in 1994 was $95 a ton, whereas in Mexico it was $205 a ton. In the Zapatistas' first Declaration of the Zacandon Jungle they denounced NAFTA as "the death certificate for the ethnic people of Mexico," warning that privatization would destroy communal agriculture, while the flood of heavily subsidized U.S. corn would wipe out Indian farmers. When this prediction turned out to be correct, millions of rural Mexicans made their way to the United States.
Fulfilling the just demands of the Zapatistas could have spared us the last several waves of desperate illegal immigrants: "work, land, shelter, bread, health, education, democracy, liberty, peace, independence, and justice." If we don't strive to make life decent in the countries illegal immigrants are coming from, we shouldn't be too surprised to find ourselves swamped in economic refugees fleeing the neo-liberal disasters promoted by the U.S. government and U.S.-based transnational corporations.
Many illegal immigrants (and even some permanent residents and naturalized U.S. citizens) would return to Mexico and Central America immediately if there were an end to the violence in the region and an investment program to create employment opportunities. Arranging for this to be possible makes a lot more sense than declaring amnesty once a generation, which is not a policy but a capitulation. As a Honduran grandmother pointed out to journalist Sonia Nazario almost a decade ago, the mass exodus from her country is hardly inevitable. Asked what it would take to stop it, she said:
"There would have to be jobs. Jobs that pay okay. That's all."
But that's apparently asking the impossible of capitalism.
Sources:
"Cardinal Mahony Criticizes Arizona Immigration Bill," Los Angeles Times, April 20, 2010
"The Legalization of Racism," Univision Online, April 27, 2010
"Who Left the Door Open?" Time Magazine, May 20, 2006
"Latin America Against SB 1070," Univision Online, April 30, 2010
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, "Comforting Lies of the Colonizers - Stop Saying This Is a Nation of Immigrants!" Counterpunch, May 31, 2006
"Nafta Should Have Stopped Illegal Immigration, Right?" New York Times, February 18, 2007
Henry K. Liu, "Militarism and the War on Drugs," Asia Times, May 18, 2005
Jorge Ramos, "The Latino Wave," (Harper Collins, 2005)
Sonia Nazario, "Enrique's Journey," (Random House, 2006)
--------Michael K. Smith is the author of "The Madness of King George," and "Portraits of Empire," both from Common Courage Press
Saturday, May 1, 2010
Americans Too Uneducated To Protest Washington's Wars?
"My feets is tired, but my soul is rested."
----- "Uneducated" Mother Pollard, rejecting suggestions that she go back to riding the bus before the end of the Montgomery bus boycott
The idea that Americans are too dumbed down to protest Washington's imperial wars enjoys considerable popularity among the cynical-minded, but there is no reason to regard it as true.
U.S. public support for imperial wars is probably at an all-time low. A mobilization of the country such as occurred in WWII is inconceivable today, and not because the Pentagon wouldn't like to see it.
Formal education and moral intelligence have little to do with one another. In the Vietnam years, the college educated supported the Indochina slaughter much more than did working class Americans without such credentials, with the honorable exception of student protest leaders, a small percentage of the university educated. And it is not hard to understand why: working class Americans disproportionately suffered the consequences of that war (and every war for that matter), so their moral judgment was correspondingly sharper. Intellectuals habitually can't see the moral forest for the trees.
Today, U.S. support for war is extremely shallow. With control of information, short blitzkrieg-like assaults can achieve the "rally around the flag" phenomenon for a while, but extended imperial wars face steady erosion of public support almost as a matter of course.
Protest can still be effective, but not if the underlying assumption is that people reluctant to join anti-war protests are intellectually deficient. Also, we have to face the fact that the 1960s generation - billed as the ultimate protest generation - obviously failed to achieve the cultural revolution it so glibly talked about. We should therefore expect that many people have concluded that protest doesn't work.
In short, the "ignorant" majority is smarter than we take ourselves to be.
----- "Uneducated" Mother Pollard, rejecting suggestions that she go back to riding the bus before the end of the Montgomery bus boycott
The idea that Americans are too dumbed down to protest Washington's imperial wars enjoys considerable popularity among the cynical-minded, but there is no reason to regard it as true.
U.S. public support for imperial wars is probably at an all-time low. A mobilization of the country such as occurred in WWII is inconceivable today, and not because the Pentagon wouldn't like to see it.
Formal education and moral intelligence have little to do with one another. In the Vietnam years, the college educated supported the Indochina slaughter much more than did working class Americans without such credentials, with the honorable exception of student protest leaders, a small percentage of the university educated. And it is not hard to understand why: working class Americans disproportionately suffered the consequences of that war (and every war for that matter), so their moral judgment was correspondingly sharper. Intellectuals habitually can't see the moral forest for the trees.
Today, U.S. support for war is extremely shallow. With control of information, short blitzkrieg-like assaults can achieve the "rally around the flag" phenomenon for a while, but extended imperial wars face steady erosion of public support almost as a matter of course.
Protest can still be effective, but not if the underlying assumption is that people reluctant to join anti-war protests are intellectually deficient. Also, we have to face the fact that the 1960s generation - billed as the ultimate protest generation - obviously failed to achieve the cultural revolution it so glibly talked about. We should therefore expect that many people have concluded that protest doesn't work.
In short, the "ignorant" majority is smarter than we take ourselves to be.
Friday, April 30, 2010
Wake Up and Smell the System
"The main cause of the destruction of the planet Earth is capitalism”
Evo Morales
“Not only is another world possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing”
Arundhati Roy
The president of Bolivia and the writer from India speak for the majority population of earth which has born the brunt of the worst aspects of western culture. They are sending a wake up call to humanity to solve our existential problems as a race, the only one existing despite the propaganda, ignorance and hatred dividing us into competing national and ethnic entities that confuse learned culture with biological difference and jeopardize our future in the process.
Capitalism is not responsible for every problem we face but it is responsible for most of them. When a financial crisis in Europe has nations near bankruptcy begging for help to save themselves from system collapse, finance capitalism is at the root of their problem. When mining disasters kill workers it is not the act of mining but industrial capitalism’s pursuit of profit at the cost of worker safety that is the problem. And when off shore oil facilities sacrifice workers and cause a spill which threatens massive ecological destruction it is not simply extracting petroleum but the pursuit of private profit that puts life second to financial gain that is the problem. When Morales speaks of the threat to planet Earth he means all of these things and more, and by confronting the menace he aims to help create another world materially that Roy speaks of poetically. That world is not only possible but necessary if humanity is to have a future, but that future will not be possible until we deal with the system of our past which weighs heavily on our present and threatens to deny our future as a human race.
As subjects of western culture we need to understand that the age of selfish consumptive competition has passed. Theories that rationalize injustice in an objective reality of squalid poverty of billions for the subjective benefit of minority millions will no longer appease global majorities who suffer the wretched excess of the capitalist organization of life. When present systemic stress has a relatively affluent minority here in the USA acting like subjugated peasants under the rule of cruel royalty, what might the mood be among those who have paid the price of that minority’s affluence?
American activists work to reform health care, military policy , immigration and environmental laws and the civil rights of identity focused groups. These and numerous other single issues are all vital to reforming the system to meet human needs and the ideals of democracy. But none of them do more than help selected minorities or confront problems in isolation , often causing further social divisions in the process. This system cannot be reformed by changing only one aspect of its increasing signs of decline for the same reason that a failing machine cannot be repaired by replacing one component part while neglecting its engine. The engine of our system is capitalism ; the pursuit of private profit through the market under corporate control, free of any public intrusion save for minor reforms that try to keep its most destructive tendencies from all working simultaneously and destroying society in the process. But destruction is what we face if we try to make society healthier by segregating one group or aspect of its illness from the social body without confronting the terminal social disease that escapes notice, is hidden from notice, or is forbidden from being noticed.
Our public bailout of private capital is much greater than the 20th century one that saved the system the last time it was threatened by its internal disfunctions. We are endlessly borrowing fabricated wealth from ourselves to protect a materially crumbling imperial structure that threatens to collapse on our heads . But more immediately, when legalized gambling entities called private banks are given trillions of our dollars to loan them back to us at exorbitant interest rates, Americans are being robbed more blatantly than ever before in the most colossal act of national plunder in our history.
That massive robbery has created a state of near social psychosis , but the public’s irrational reactions have been provoked by the irrational actions of their system’s rulers. When finance capital conducts terror attacks on American workers, homeowners and pensioners, it is only doing what industrial capital did in the past. Creating great profits for some by causing great losses for others is what the system is supposed to do and will continue doing until it is transformed or destroys itself and everyone else in the bargain.
When NAFTA introduces cheaper corn into Mexico , throws farmers off their land and then advertises for them to come to America as cheap labor on its farms and in its mills , it is simply acting for private profit . And when Americans surrender jobs and foot the social bills for the sudden entry of tens of thousands of foreigners , both sides are being used to absorb loss. But all too often the manipulated targets of wrath are either the profit creating illegal immigrants or their loss sustaining critics, not the capitalist system that created the problem.
It’s time for humanity to act on teachings of social justice that are only paid lip service now, if considered at all. The earth belongs to all of us but if we keep treating it as though only some of us own it and are privileged or chosen by some deity to exploit it for our benefit alone, it will collapse under the weight of a burden it has never known before. The sooner we acknowledge and deal with the fact spoken of by global leaders like Evo Morales, the sooner we embark on the path to the future potential for humanity spoken of by Arundhati Roy. Capitalism is the problem we have. Democracy is the solution we need.
Evo Morales
“Not only is another world possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing”
Arundhati Roy
The president of Bolivia and the writer from India speak for the majority population of earth which has born the brunt of the worst aspects of western culture. They are sending a wake up call to humanity to solve our existential problems as a race, the only one existing despite the propaganda, ignorance and hatred dividing us into competing national and ethnic entities that confuse learned culture with biological difference and jeopardize our future in the process.
Capitalism is not responsible for every problem we face but it is responsible for most of them. When a financial crisis in Europe has nations near bankruptcy begging for help to save themselves from system collapse, finance capitalism is at the root of their problem. When mining disasters kill workers it is not the act of mining but industrial capitalism’s pursuit of profit at the cost of worker safety that is the problem. And when off shore oil facilities sacrifice workers and cause a spill which threatens massive ecological destruction it is not simply extracting petroleum but the pursuit of private profit that puts life second to financial gain that is the problem. When Morales speaks of the threat to planet Earth he means all of these things and more, and by confronting the menace he aims to help create another world materially that Roy speaks of poetically. That world is not only possible but necessary if humanity is to have a future, but that future will not be possible until we deal with the system of our past which weighs heavily on our present and threatens to deny our future as a human race.
As subjects of western culture we need to understand that the age of selfish consumptive competition has passed. Theories that rationalize injustice in an objective reality of squalid poverty of billions for the subjective benefit of minority millions will no longer appease global majorities who suffer the wretched excess of the capitalist organization of life. When present systemic stress has a relatively affluent minority here in the USA acting like subjugated peasants under the rule of cruel royalty, what might the mood be among those who have paid the price of that minority’s affluence?
American activists work to reform health care, military policy , immigration and environmental laws and the civil rights of identity focused groups. These and numerous other single issues are all vital to reforming the system to meet human needs and the ideals of democracy. But none of them do more than help selected minorities or confront problems in isolation , often causing further social divisions in the process. This system cannot be reformed by changing only one aspect of its increasing signs of decline for the same reason that a failing machine cannot be repaired by replacing one component part while neglecting its engine. The engine of our system is capitalism ; the pursuit of private profit through the market under corporate control, free of any public intrusion save for minor reforms that try to keep its most destructive tendencies from all working simultaneously and destroying society in the process. But destruction is what we face if we try to make society healthier by segregating one group or aspect of its illness from the social body without confronting the terminal social disease that escapes notice, is hidden from notice, or is forbidden from being noticed.
Our public bailout of private capital is much greater than the 20th century one that saved the system the last time it was threatened by its internal disfunctions. We are endlessly borrowing fabricated wealth from ourselves to protect a materially crumbling imperial structure that threatens to collapse on our heads . But more immediately, when legalized gambling entities called private banks are given trillions of our dollars to loan them back to us at exorbitant interest rates, Americans are being robbed more blatantly than ever before in the most colossal act of national plunder in our history.
That massive robbery has created a state of near social psychosis , but the public’s irrational reactions have been provoked by the irrational actions of their system’s rulers. When finance capital conducts terror attacks on American workers, homeowners and pensioners, it is only doing what industrial capital did in the past. Creating great profits for some by causing great losses for others is what the system is supposed to do and will continue doing until it is transformed or destroys itself and everyone else in the bargain.
When NAFTA introduces cheaper corn into Mexico , throws farmers off their land and then advertises for them to come to America as cheap labor on its farms and in its mills , it is simply acting for private profit . And when Americans surrender jobs and foot the social bills for the sudden entry of tens of thousands of foreigners , both sides are being used to absorb loss. But all too often the manipulated targets of wrath are either the profit creating illegal immigrants or their loss sustaining critics, not the capitalist system that created the problem.
It’s time for humanity to act on teachings of social justice that are only paid lip service now, if considered at all. The earth belongs to all of us but if we keep treating it as though only some of us own it and are privileged or chosen by some deity to exploit it for our benefit alone, it will collapse under the weight of a burden it has never known before. The sooner we acknowledge and deal with the fact spoken of by global leaders like Evo Morales, the sooner we embark on the path to the future potential for humanity spoken of by Arundhati Roy. Capitalism is the problem we have. Democracy is the solution we need.
Thursday, April 1, 2010
Democracy and Treason
How can we react to events thoughtfully when our leaders perform in a manner that makes government seem like a mental health crisis center? After congress saw to it that health care remained under the domain of private profiteers the orgasmic celebration of our ruling party’s liberal caucus was countered by the hysterical freak out of its conservative bloc. We are supposed to either get our guns to prepare for armed communist assault or joyously exult at finally achieving the long awaited “change we can believe in”. That last is if we also accept that a momentary break in the loving embrace of America and Israel - so each side could take a deep breath before the next passionate smooch? - was a radical change in foreign policy.
A Jewish Israeli called President Obama an anti-Semite, but a Jewish American called half-white Obama our first Jewish president and since another hysteric called all-white Clinton our first black president , confusion about more than political economics is truly perplexing our troubled empire. As things get dizzier than ever we ought to stop listening to anything said by our supposed leaders and break through the iron curtain that only allows commercial propaganda to get into our heads .
Those desperately working for change in Palestine can be excused for grasping at any straws but an obvious point made by some American official - that Israel is out of line, out of hand or out of control - should not be taken as any more significant than Obama saying he only supports smart wars, not stupid wars . The obvious must occasionally be mentioned, but what’s less obvious is that essential policy does not change because of a slight modification in style or miniscule identification of material reality. The sudden discovery that water is wet doesn't mean much when we’re drowning .
Israel's recent settlements policy is a factor for some who’ve forgotten or never knew that the real problem was the original settlement back in 1948 . In fact, today’s expansions that throw more Palestinians out to bring more settlers in to have more Jewish babies is only a continuation of what began long before 1948. The plan to take the land from its original inhabitants and transform it into a Jewish state was hatched by Zionists back in the 19th century, long before most Nazis were even born. If we do not learn that history we’ll surely be condemned to suffer its worst consequences in the future, if the present and recent past haven't been bad enough.
The most important issue for Americans isn't the proposed 1600 new units in the Israeli occupied territory in Palestine but the existing old unit at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington DC which remains Israeli occupied territory no matter what president resides there. And when whispered comments are heard from inside that taxpayer financed housing concerning the cost and hazard of our policy towards Israel there is an immediate convocation of worshipers of the Israeli lobby and its money to express undying solidarity, at whatever cost to Americans and without any consideration for Palestinians . The same two sides of the ruling party supposedly in deadly conflict come together in rapturous solidarity of concern for Israel. How much longer can this be tolerated by a population seemingly driven to near derangement by the crumbling of the country’s political economic foundation, all of this attributed to everything but the military madness of our foreign policy and the protection of the Jewish state that is the foundation of that policy in the Middle East?
The American Jewish lobby working on behalf of the Israeli Jewish state is a continuing menace to the people of Palestine and the Middle East, but especially to the people of the United States. When retired - or carefully speaking off the record - establishment voices begin to murmur this previously unspeakable truth, that is not a sign of imminent change . It will mean little unless a majority of Americans heed their relatively subdued call for transforming the policy that has cost America thousands of lives and billions of dollars while devastating nations, destroying governments and killing hundreds of thousands of people in the middle east. And all of that while hiding behind alleged humanitarian values of freedom and democracy. You know, the way the sun rises in the west and sets in the east?
The seven year anniversary of our ravaging of Iraq was barely noticed behind a propaganda barrage telling us democracy was at hand and the Iraqis - under foreign occupation and suffering violent deaths every day directly related to that fact - had somehow found a new life of freedom. We continue to believe such nonsense at our own expense which extends far beyond the salaries we pay our political representatives who then accept campaign money to carry out policy against our own interests.
The lobby buys politicians to follow its directives without regard for what they mean to our nation and our future. When considerations for a foreign country are placed ahead of those for our own by elected officials, calling them treasonous is hardly an overstatement. If that nation were Iran, it would be treated as a scandal beyond moral comprehension . But this behavior is even more acceptable than normal when it comes to Israel. That will continue until we stop reacting to announcements that water is wet as though they mean a breakthrough in logic and begin acting as though our democratic future demands a radical change in our policy towards Israel and Palestine.
Throwing politicians into prison on grounds of treason may not be necessary, but throwing them out of office is absolutely required if we are to have a future, let alone call ourselves a democracy.
frank scott
email: frankscott@comcast.net
A Jewish Israeli called President Obama an anti-Semite, but a Jewish American called half-white Obama our first Jewish president and since another hysteric called all-white Clinton our first black president , confusion about more than political economics is truly perplexing our troubled empire. As things get dizzier than ever we ought to stop listening to anything said by our supposed leaders and break through the iron curtain that only allows commercial propaganda to get into our heads .
Those desperately working for change in Palestine can be excused for grasping at any straws but an obvious point made by some American official - that Israel is out of line, out of hand or out of control - should not be taken as any more significant than Obama saying he only supports smart wars, not stupid wars . The obvious must occasionally be mentioned, but what’s less obvious is that essential policy does not change because of a slight modification in style or miniscule identification of material reality. The sudden discovery that water is wet doesn't mean much when we’re drowning .
Israel's recent settlements policy is a factor for some who’ve forgotten or never knew that the real problem was the original settlement back in 1948 . In fact, today’s expansions that throw more Palestinians out to bring more settlers in to have more Jewish babies is only a continuation of what began long before 1948. The plan to take the land from its original inhabitants and transform it into a Jewish state was hatched by Zionists back in the 19th century, long before most Nazis were even born. If we do not learn that history we’ll surely be condemned to suffer its worst consequences in the future, if the present and recent past haven't been bad enough.
The most important issue for Americans isn't the proposed 1600 new units in the Israeli occupied territory in Palestine but the existing old unit at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington DC which remains Israeli occupied territory no matter what president resides there. And when whispered comments are heard from inside that taxpayer financed housing concerning the cost and hazard of our policy towards Israel there is an immediate convocation of worshipers of the Israeli lobby and its money to express undying solidarity, at whatever cost to Americans and without any consideration for Palestinians . The same two sides of the ruling party supposedly in deadly conflict come together in rapturous solidarity of concern for Israel. How much longer can this be tolerated by a population seemingly driven to near derangement by the crumbling of the country’s political economic foundation, all of this attributed to everything but the military madness of our foreign policy and the protection of the Jewish state that is the foundation of that policy in the Middle East?
The American Jewish lobby working on behalf of the Israeli Jewish state is a continuing menace to the people of Palestine and the Middle East, but especially to the people of the United States. When retired - or carefully speaking off the record - establishment voices begin to murmur this previously unspeakable truth, that is not a sign of imminent change . It will mean little unless a majority of Americans heed their relatively subdued call for transforming the policy that has cost America thousands of lives and billions of dollars while devastating nations, destroying governments and killing hundreds of thousands of people in the middle east. And all of that while hiding behind alleged humanitarian values of freedom and democracy. You know, the way the sun rises in the west and sets in the east?
The seven year anniversary of our ravaging of Iraq was barely noticed behind a propaganda barrage telling us democracy was at hand and the Iraqis - under foreign occupation and suffering violent deaths every day directly related to that fact - had somehow found a new life of freedom. We continue to believe such nonsense at our own expense which extends far beyond the salaries we pay our political representatives who then accept campaign money to carry out policy against our own interests.
The lobby buys politicians to follow its directives without regard for what they mean to our nation and our future. When considerations for a foreign country are placed ahead of those for our own by elected officials, calling them treasonous is hardly an overstatement. If that nation were Iran, it would be treated as a scandal beyond moral comprehension . But this behavior is even more acceptable than normal when it comes to Israel. That will continue until we stop reacting to announcements that water is wet as though they mean a breakthrough in logic and begin acting as though our democratic future demands a radical change in our policy towards Israel and Palestine.
Throwing politicians into prison on grounds of treason may not be necessary, but throwing them out of office is absolutely required if we are to have a future, let alone call ourselves a democracy.
frank scott
email: frankscott@comcast.net
Saturday, March 20, 2010
Archbishop Romero, State Terror, and the Quest for Redemption
"Nowadays an authentic Christian conversion must lead to an unmasking of the social mechanisms that turn the worker and the peasant into marginalized persons. Why do the rural poor become part of society only in the coffee-and-cotton-picking seasons?"
----- Archbishop Oscar Romero
"In concrete terms capitalism is in fact what is most unjust and unchristian about our own society."
-----Archbishop Oscar Romero
The dammed blood burst, a scarlet torrent cascaded through his skull, down into his mouth, then gushed onto his purple-and-white vestments as he slumped to the floor at the foot of the large crucifix behind the altar. Opening his arms to offer the Eucharist, Archbishop Oscar Romero was shot in the heart, the most forgiving heart in San Salvador. The unforgiving bullet scattered fragments through his chest, triggering massive internal hemorrhage.
While friends dashed to his side and flipped him on his back, the killer, escorted to the mass by two police patrols, escaped into the street. Then a photographer shot Romero again with flashes.
Unconscious, gasping, lifeblood ebbing away, Romero was carried from the chapel to a small truck and driven to the hospital, where he was laid out on a table in the emergency room. A nurse probed for a vein in his arm, but all had collapsed.
He strangled to death in his own blood.
Stunned by the news blaring from every radio, Salvadoreans poured into the streets as twilight fell. Sadly chimed the church bells of the Cathedral of San Martin, quickly followed by those of Palmar and San Francisco. In Santa Ana all the bells rang in unison, while back in San Salvador enormous crowds wandered the streets aimlessly, staring in disbelief.
Mourners swarmed into the capital for days, standing in line for hours to catch a glimpse of the man whose belief in their humanity cost him his life. Dozens of foreign bishops and church dignitaries flew in to pay their last respects.
Six days after the assassination, one hundred thousand people jammed the cathedral square for the funeral. A sudden burst of machine-gun fire from the second floor of the National Palace interrupted the proceedings. Bullets ripped into the grieving crowd, killing forty people. The Salvadorean government issued a press release denying troops were in the area.
Few could have guessed that Romero was destined to be a martyr. When he was appointed Archbishop of San Salvador in 1977, he was a conservative who only felt at ease when he was alone with God, a God that stood apart from the people. Distrustful of new ideas and social change reformers, he issued polite sermons that earned him the applause of the powerful.
But living among the poor gradually converted him to the radicalism of the Gospel. Witness to their suffering, he developed an insatiable appetite for justice, and came to see God as the risen Christ of the crucified Salvadorean people. When he began speaking of redemption for them, he was accused of hatred.
By 1979 he openly welcomed the Christian-Marxist revolution in neighboring Nicaragua, its guarantee of human rights, independent judges, freedom of speech, worship, and association, the termination of arbitrary arrest, search, torture, and murder. He applauded its efforts to bring dictator Anastasio Somoza's officials to justice for crimes against the people.
His sole ambition became to intoxicate the world with the Gospel, and he held out hope that even the nuncios and military vicariates might someday be converted. A disciple of Vatican II, he embraced liberation theology's "preferential option for the poor," seeing the Church's mission as establishing community in harmony with Divine law while enlightening the people's legitimate aspirations for a just society by the example of Christian faith and hope. Peace would come, he preached, but could not until justice and love opened the way for it.
He denounced violence as "unchristian," and believed its most acute form was institutionalized violence, the planned injustice of depriving poor majorities of the necessities of life. Encouraged by an emerging culture of resistance, he saw Salvadorean popular organizations struggling for change as "signs of God's presence and purposes," while their violent persecution represented "structural sin embedded in our society." He conceded that Marxism was a useful tool of social analysis, but denied it could substitute for the inner conversion essential to loving community. Private property was legitimate, but he insisted it came with a heavy social mortgage: derived from God, wealth "should reach all in just form, guided by justice and accompanied by charity."
In El Salvador, such an interpretation of the Gospel was guaranteed to be treated as a social cancer requiring immediate radical surgery, and so it was. According to the Human Rights office of the Archdiocese of San Salvador, Archbishop Romero's assassination was one of 8062 cases of "Persons of the popular and progressive sectors killed for political reasons" in 1980, "not in military confrontations, but as a result of military operations by the Army, Security Forces, and paramilitary organizations coordinated by the High Command of the Armed Forces." These were just the murders where information could be "fully checked"; they did not include bombing victims or the more than 600 campesinos butchered in the Rio Sumpul massacre by a joint Honduran-Salvadorean military operation, not to mention killings in the countryside, where "verification was impossible."
United States officials conceded that Salvadorean security forces were responsible for 90 percent of such atrocities, which was the political response to the growth of unions, Christian base communities, and peasant associations seeking to advance the interests of the poor majority against the entrenched Salvadorean oligarchy Washington had long favored. The U.S. never wavered in its support for this oligarchy, and in the years from 1979 to 1994 approximately 70,000 Salvadoreans were massacred by death squads to preserve its privileges. The tactics employed derived from U.S. counterinsurgency training, and included bombing, napalm attacks, razing of villages, rape, torture, crop burning (to create starvation), machine-gunning of patients in hospitals, and public display of mutilated corpses as a form of political education.
Attempts to document the tsunami of violence were savagely repressed. Churches and Human Rights offices were attacked, and the judge investigating Romero's assassination was driven out of the country by death threats and assassination attempts, this in the wake of government interference to make sure no investigation of the assassination could succeed. Meanwhile, Washington and its Salvadorean client government denied the involvement of the military and police in atrocities, whom they knew were responsible.
In such circumstances it would have been impossible for even the greatest faith not to doubt itself. Romero's faith faltered in 1978 when Marianela Garcia Vilas, attorney for tortured and disappeared Salvadoreans, came to him not with the usual request to denounce or investigate a recent atrocity, but to report that she herself had become a victim of the security forces. She told him that the police had kidnapped her, tied her up, beaten and humiliated her, stripped her, and raped her. Romero was stunned into silence, not by the story itself, which was hardly unusual, but by the resonance of hatred in Vilas's voice, that had never been there before. After a prolonged silence, Romero began his standard reply, saying that the Church did not hate or bear grudges against anyone, that all sins and crimes were part of the Divine order, that even criminals were spiritual brothers who should be prayed for, that one had no choice but to accept suffering. But in the midst of his sermon Romero abruptly stopped, lowered his gaze, and put his head in his hands. Shaking his head, he said, "No, I don't want to know," and began to cry. In that instant even he could not believe in a neutral God who loved and protected everyone equally. Instead of preaching, he wept.
The three years that Romero was Archbishop of San Salvador (1977-1980) coincided with the period when Washington became profoundly concerned about (1) the fall of the Somoza dictatorship in neighboring Nicaragua, and (2) the growth of Salvadorean popular forces (animated in no small measure by Bible study), which threatened to turn El Salvador into a real democracy with mass popular participation in the political process. This was intolerable to Salvadorean and U.S. elites, and they responded with unrestrained brutality.
In a public relations gambit designed to give the ruling junta a gentler image, the Carter Administration backed a coup by reformist military officers in October 1979, while simultaneously guaranteeing that the most ferocious military elements retained their dominant position. The reformist facade quickly crumbled amidst rising state terror, and power shifted completely to the murder machine churning out thousands of mutilated corpses a year. While crop dusters sent by plantation owners dropped DDT on the massive procession, sharpshooters and guardsmen opened fire on the largest peaceful march in Salvadorean history, leaving fifty dead on the sidewalk, a hundred wounded, and every sanctuary of Archbishop Romero's diocese overflowing with terrified refugees. Romero announced that "the most repressive sector of the armed forces" was running the country, and called on the opposition Christian Democrats to resign the government. In his weekly homily to the nation, he quoted from a letter he wrote to President Carter, imploring the American president to suspend aid to the blood-drenched junta, which, if sent, could only serve to "intensify injustice and repression" against the people, who were fighting for their "most basic human rights."
A right-wing group blew up the Church radio station. President Carter dispatched the aid.
Eleven days before Romero's death the Salvadorean Human Rights Commission published a list of 689 political killings since the first of the year, nearly 90 percent by government security forces and affiliated death squads. In a reply to Romero's letter, U.S. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance blandly intoned that, "The defense of human rights has been, and continues to be, one of the principal goals of the foreign policy of this administration."
The day before his assassination, in a packed Metropolitan Cathedral, an eerie hush fell over the congregation when Romero appealed directly to the young conscripts ordered to kill in the name of national security: "Brothers, you came from our own people. You are killing your own brothers. Any human order to kill must be subordinate to the law of God, which says, 'Thou shalt not kill'. No soldier is obliged to obey an order contrary to the law of God....In the name of God, in the name of our tormented people whose cries rise up to heaven, I beseech you, I beg you, I command you: stop the repression!"
For preaching this message, he was killed.
Romero once stated that he had been converted to the real meaning of Christ by the Salvadorean people. Once he saw God did not stand apart from them, he abandoned individualistic approaches to religion and began to draw strength from their struggles. Two weeks before he was gunned down he anticipated an untimely death, but also resurrection: "My life has been threatened many times. I have to confess that, as a Christian, I don't believe in death without resurrection. If they kill me, I will rise again in the Salvadorean people." (emphasis added)
Thus, Romero died with his faith in redemptive suffering intact. Two months before his death he had said that "so much bloodshed and so much suffering . . . will not have been shed in vain," but would nourish demands for change: "This blood and this suffering will fertilize a new and increasingly extensive seed, producing Salvadorans who will be conscious of their responsibility to build a more just and human society." The appalling carnage that he witnessed in his final days were the birth pangs of a new society: "This blood and this suffering will bear fruit in the bold, radical structural reforms that our country so urgently needs."
Today there is much speculation about whether Archbishop Romero will be canonized by Rome. It seems likely that he will be, though it should be recalled that when Romero visited Rome in 1979 to ask for help from Pope John Paul II, he was rudely rebuffed by the pontiff, who accused him of exaggerating his description of repression in El Salvador. In any case a more fitting tribute has already been paid by the Salvadorean people, and described as follows by Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano: "In Cuscatlan Park, names on an infinitely long wall commemorate the civilian victims of the war. Thousands upon thousands of names are etched in white on black marble. The letters of Archbishop Romero's name are the only ones that show wear."
"From the touch of so many fingers."
Sources:
Gustavo Gutierrez, We Drink from Our Own Wells - The Spiritual Journey of a People, (Orbis, 2003)
James R. Brockman, Romero: A Life, (Orbis, 1989)
James R. Brockman, Pastoral Teaching of Archbishop Oscar Romero, Spirituality Today, Summer 1988, Vol. 40, No. 2
Ana Carrigan, Salvador Witness: The Life and Calling of Jean Donovan (Simon and Schuster, 1984)
Michael McClintock, The American Connection: State Terror and Popular Resistance in El Salvador, (Zed, 1985)
Noam Chomsky, Turning The Tide - U.S. Intervention in Central America and the Struggle for Peace, (South End, 1985)
Eduardo Galeano, Memory of Fire, Vol. 3, (Pantheon, 1988)
Eduardo Galeano, Mirrors, (Nation Books, 2009)
Michael K. Smith is the author of "The Madness of King George" and "Portraits of Empire," from Common Courage Press. He can be reached at proheresy@yahoo.com
----- Archbishop Oscar Romero
"In concrete terms capitalism is in fact what is most unjust and unchristian about our own society."
-----Archbishop Oscar Romero
The dammed blood burst, a scarlet torrent cascaded through his skull, down into his mouth, then gushed onto his purple-and-white vestments as he slumped to the floor at the foot of the large crucifix behind the altar. Opening his arms to offer the Eucharist, Archbishop Oscar Romero was shot in the heart, the most forgiving heart in San Salvador. The unforgiving bullet scattered fragments through his chest, triggering massive internal hemorrhage.
While friends dashed to his side and flipped him on his back, the killer, escorted to the mass by two police patrols, escaped into the street. Then a photographer shot Romero again with flashes.
Unconscious, gasping, lifeblood ebbing away, Romero was carried from the chapel to a small truck and driven to the hospital, where he was laid out on a table in the emergency room. A nurse probed for a vein in his arm, but all had collapsed.
He strangled to death in his own blood.
Stunned by the news blaring from every radio, Salvadoreans poured into the streets as twilight fell. Sadly chimed the church bells of the Cathedral of San Martin, quickly followed by those of Palmar and San Francisco. In Santa Ana all the bells rang in unison, while back in San Salvador enormous crowds wandered the streets aimlessly, staring in disbelief.
Mourners swarmed into the capital for days, standing in line for hours to catch a glimpse of the man whose belief in their humanity cost him his life. Dozens of foreign bishops and church dignitaries flew in to pay their last respects.
Six days after the assassination, one hundred thousand people jammed the cathedral square for the funeral. A sudden burst of machine-gun fire from the second floor of the National Palace interrupted the proceedings. Bullets ripped into the grieving crowd, killing forty people. The Salvadorean government issued a press release denying troops were in the area.
Few could have guessed that Romero was destined to be a martyr. When he was appointed Archbishop of San Salvador in 1977, he was a conservative who only felt at ease when he was alone with God, a God that stood apart from the people. Distrustful of new ideas and social change reformers, he issued polite sermons that earned him the applause of the powerful.
But living among the poor gradually converted him to the radicalism of the Gospel. Witness to their suffering, he developed an insatiable appetite for justice, and came to see God as the risen Christ of the crucified Salvadorean people. When he began speaking of redemption for them, he was accused of hatred.
By 1979 he openly welcomed the Christian-Marxist revolution in neighboring Nicaragua, its guarantee of human rights, independent judges, freedom of speech, worship, and association, the termination of arbitrary arrest, search, torture, and murder. He applauded its efforts to bring dictator Anastasio Somoza's officials to justice for crimes against the people.
His sole ambition became to intoxicate the world with the Gospel, and he held out hope that even the nuncios and military vicariates might someday be converted. A disciple of Vatican II, he embraced liberation theology's "preferential option for the poor," seeing the Church's mission as establishing community in harmony with Divine law while enlightening the people's legitimate aspirations for a just society by the example of Christian faith and hope. Peace would come, he preached, but could not until justice and love opened the way for it.
He denounced violence as "unchristian," and believed its most acute form was institutionalized violence, the planned injustice of depriving poor majorities of the necessities of life. Encouraged by an emerging culture of resistance, he saw Salvadorean popular organizations struggling for change as "signs of God's presence and purposes," while their violent persecution represented "structural sin embedded in our society." He conceded that Marxism was a useful tool of social analysis, but denied it could substitute for the inner conversion essential to loving community. Private property was legitimate, but he insisted it came with a heavy social mortgage: derived from God, wealth "should reach all in just form, guided by justice and accompanied by charity."
In El Salvador, such an interpretation of the Gospel was guaranteed to be treated as a social cancer requiring immediate radical surgery, and so it was. According to the Human Rights office of the Archdiocese of San Salvador, Archbishop Romero's assassination was one of 8062 cases of "Persons of the popular and progressive sectors killed for political reasons" in 1980, "not in military confrontations, but as a result of military operations by the Army, Security Forces, and paramilitary organizations coordinated by the High Command of the Armed Forces." These were just the murders where information could be "fully checked"; they did not include bombing victims or the more than 600 campesinos butchered in the Rio Sumpul massacre by a joint Honduran-Salvadorean military operation, not to mention killings in the countryside, where "verification was impossible."
United States officials conceded that Salvadorean security forces were responsible for 90 percent of such atrocities, which was the political response to the growth of unions, Christian base communities, and peasant associations seeking to advance the interests of the poor majority against the entrenched Salvadorean oligarchy Washington had long favored. The U.S. never wavered in its support for this oligarchy, and in the years from 1979 to 1994 approximately 70,000 Salvadoreans were massacred by death squads to preserve its privileges. The tactics employed derived from U.S. counterinsurgency training, and included bombing, napalm attacks, razing of villages, rape, torture, crop burning (to create starvation), machine-gunning of patients in hospitals, and public display of mutilated corpses as a form of political education.
Attempts to document the tsunami of violence were savagely repressed. Churches and Human Rights offices were attacked, and the judge investigating Romero's assassination was driven out of the country by death threats and assassination attempts, this in the wake of government interference to make sure no investigation of the assassination could succeed. Meanwhile, Washington and its Salvadorean client government denied the involvement of the military and police in atrocities, whom they knew were responsible.
In such circumstances it would have been impossible for even the greatest faith not to doubt itself. Romero's faith faltered in 1978 when Marianela Garcia Vilas, attorney for tortured and disappeared Salvadoreans, came to him not with the usual request to denounce or investigate a recent atrocity, but to report that she herself had become a victim of the security forces. She told him that the police had kidnapped her, tied her up, beaten and humiliated her, stripped her, and raped her. Romero was stunned into silence, not by the story itself, which was hardly unusual, but by the resonance of hatred in Vilas's voice, that had never been there before. After a prolonged silence, Romero began his standard reply, saying that the Church did not hate or bear grudges against anyone, that all sins and crimes were part of the Divine order, that even criminals were spiritual brothers who should be prayed for, that one had no choice but to accept suffering. But in the midst of his sermon Romero abruptly stopped, lowered his gaze, and put his head in his hands. Shaking his head, he said, "No, I don't want to know," and began to cry. In that instant even he could not believe in a neutral God who loved and protected everyone equally. Instead of preaching, he wept.
The three years that Romero was Archbishop of San Salvador (1977-1980) coincided with the period when Washington became profoundly concerned about (1) the fall of the Somoza dictatorship in neighboring Nicaragua, and (2) the growth of Salvadorean popular forces (animated in no small measure by Bible study), which threatened to turn El Salvador into a real democracy with mass popular participation in the political process. This was intolerable to Salvadorean and U.S. elites, and they responded with unrestrained brutality.
In a public relations gambit designed to give the ruling junta a gentler image, the Carter Administration backed a coup by reformist military officers in October 1979, while simultaneously guaranteeing that the most ferocious military elements retained their dominant position. The reformist facade quickly crumbled amidst rising state terror, and power shifted completely to the murder machine churning out thousands of mutilated corpses a year. While crop dusters sent by plantation owners dropped DDT on the massive procession, sharpshooters and guardsmen opened fire on the largest peaceful march in Salvadorean history, leaving fifty dead on the sidewalk, a hundred wounded, and every sanctuary of Archbishop Romero's diocese overflowing with terrified refugees. Romero announced that "the most repressive sector of the armed forces" was running the country, and called on the opposition Christian Democrats to resign the government. In his weekly homily to the nation, he quoted from a letter he wrote to President Carter, imploring the American president to suspend aid to the blood-drenched junta, which, if sent, could only serve to "intensify injustice and repression" against the people, who were fighting for their "most basic human rights."
A right-wing group blew up the Church radio station. President Carter dispatched the aid.
Eleven days before Romero's death the Salvadorean Human Rights Commission published a list of 689 political killings since the first of the year, nearly 90 percent by government security forces and affiliated death squads. In a reply to Romero's letter, U.S. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance blandly intoned that, "The defense of human rights has been, and continues to be, one of the principal goals of the foreign policy of this administration."
The day before his assassination, in a packed Metropolitan Cathedral, an eerie hush fell over the congregation when Romero appealed directly to the young conscripts ordered to kill in the name of national security: "Brothers, you came from our own people. You are killing your own brothers. Any human order to kill must be subordinate to the law of God, which says, 'Thou shalt not kill'. No soldier is obliged to obey an order contrary to the law of God....In the name of God, in the name of our tormented people whose cries rise up to heaven, I beseech you, I beg you, I command you: stop the repression!"
For preaching this message, he was killed.
Romero once stated that he had been converted to the real meaning of Christ by the Salvadorean people. Once he saw God did not stand apart from them, he abandoned individualistic approaches to religion and began to draw strength from their struggles. Two weeks before he was gunned down he anticipated an untimely death, but also resurrection: "My life has been threatened many times. I have to confess that, as a Christian, I don't believe in death without resurrection. If they kill me, I will rise again in the Salvadorean people." (emphasis added)
Thus, Romero died with his faith in redemptive suffering intact. Two months before his death he had said that "so much bloodshed and so much suffering . . . will not have been shed in vain," but would nourish demands for change: "This blood and this suffering will fertilize a new and increasingly extensive seed, producing Salvadorans who will be conscious of their responsibility to build a more just and human society." The appalling carnage that he witnessed in his final days were the birth pangs of a new society: "This blood and this suffering will bear fruit in the bold, radical structural reforms that our country so urgently needs."
Today there is much speculation about whether Archbishop Romero will be canonized by Rome. It seems likely that he will be, though it should be recalled that when Romero visited Rome in 1979 to ask for help from Pope John Paul II, he was rudely rebuffed by the pontiff, who accused him of exaggerating his description of repression in El Salvador. In any case a more fitting tribute has already been paid by the Salvadorean people, and described as follows by Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano: "In Cuscatlan Park, names on an infinitely long wall commemorate the civilian victims of the war. Thousands upon thousands of names are etched in white on black marble. The letters of Archbishop Romero's name are the only ones that show wear."
"From the touch of so many fingers."
Sources:
Gustavo Gutierrez, We Drink from Our Own Wells - The Spiritual Journey of a People, (Orbis, 2003)
James R. Brockman, Romero: A Life, (Orbis, 1989)
James R. Brockman, Pastoral Teaching of Archbishop Oscar Romero, Spirituality Today, Summer 1988, Vol. 40, No. 2
Ana Carrigan, Salvador Witness: The Life and Calling of Jean Donovan (Simon and Schuster, 1984)
Michael McClintock, The American Connection: State Terror and Popular Resistance in El Salvador, (Zed, 1985)
Noam Chomsky, Turning The Tide - U.S. Intervention in Central America and the Struggle for Peace, (South End, 1985)
Eduardo Galeano, Memory of Fire, Vol. 3, (Pantheon, 1988)
Eduardo Galeano, Mirrors, (Nation Books, 2009)
Michael K. Smith is the author of "The Madness of King George" and "Portraits of Empire," from Common Courage Press. He can be reached at proheresy@yahoo.com
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