The exhibition will be held at The Islamic Central Mosque Regent’s park, London, from August 11th-15th, 2008.

Alhamdullilah, I am very honoured to know sister Sultana, and I can’t wait to meet her finally in London, Isha’Allah. May Allah(SWT) Reward her with good in the Dunya and Akhirah, ameen.

Mandela

Thousands of people were killed by the forces of Apartheid. Mandela was just one of them who was picked up and imprisoned. Unlike Steve Biko and many others Mandela was not killed while imprisoned. Maybe the Apartheid boys saw something in him they could use if and when necessary. And they were right.

Mandela was much more angry with his wife for not being completely faithful during 27 years of imprisonment than he ever was with those who imprisoned him and robbed him of his freedom. And that’s exactly what they saw in him: a man who deep down adored his oppressors and only wanted to be their equal and live with them despite their inhuman criminality and wickedness. And that’s why he is liked by whites–because they see a man who feels so inferior that he would excuse anything an European does.

Why the big birthday party in London and not in South Africa? And why hardly any African faces in the big crowd watching some black and white faces sing and dance for him?

Mugabe

Mugabe himself was imprisoned for many years by the white settlers in Zimbabwe but I think that the years spent in Ghana during the days of Nkrumah helped him retain a portion of his African self-consciousness. Mugabe also nurses a serious grudge against the British for the callous way he was treated at the death of his very young son.

Sure, under normal circumstances Mugabe has overstayed his time as President of Zimbabwe, but circumstances were/are not normal. He is the only one I see who could have handled the tricks played by the British government as it maneuvered to ensure that the settlers did not give up their stolen lands–as in Nambibia, South Africa and Kenya. Another leader would just have sold out–after all that massaging by the British: knighthood, honorary doctorates, state dinner at Buckingham Palace, etc.

All that Mugabe had to do was to be a craven negro stooge and he would have been home safe. Who would have heard of Mugabe if he had just let the whites stay with their stolen booty–lording it over Africans treated like slaves on their own lands, working for just slave wages on those white farms?

Zimbabwe was offered independence in 1980 and the land issue dragged on until 2002 when Mugabe and the war veterans said “enough is enough” then proceeded to seize back the stolen lands. And ever since that time the whole world-wide white kith and kin collective has been going ballistic over Mugabe. All I can say is that given the amount of rage and anger it has to be a very special experience to be a person of European extraction in this world. I just cannot understand their rage and anger. To say it’s just racism, doesn’t really answer the question. It must be a special kind of racism having to do with a very complex set of issues.

The People of Zimbabwe

There is something strange about the people those parts of Africa where the Europeans first killed thousands of people then seized their lands. One thing that is noteworthy is that they never seem to wear African clothing–African parlimentarians who attempted to wear Africa clothing were chided and there was a law in Kenya forbidding African clothing to be worn in Parliament– and they seem to be completely taken in by Christianity.

I write the above to say that the massive sanctions placed on the economy of Zimbabwe had the desired effect. Unlike the Iraqis who experienced death dealing sanctions from the West and the Palestinians a large section of the people of urban Zimbabwe just fell for the white-led and financed MDC. It’s as if they didn’t understand the implications of what they were doing. Sure, if you want to oppose ZANU then form political parties by all means, but why choose to support the party funded and promoted by the settlers and their backers in the West? And that’s why I think that the hard-core ZANU supporters saw that voting for Tsvangirai was pure treachery.

– Words by a respected anonymous

["There is nothing like this book. At once a magnificent work of social and cultural history, an anthropology of race, and a political economy of racial capitalism and Empire, this is the most original examination of the American film industry ever published. But like all of Robinson's work, Forgeries of Memory and Meaningthe works of Shakespeare, scientific discourse, and early minstrelsy. And his prodigious research has does much more, extending over three centuries to reconstruct the roots of modern black representation in uncovered celluloid gems and theater works I never knew existed."--Robin D. G. Kelley, University of Southern California, link]

There he is, on the frontispiece, and there he is again, on the contents page, and in his other antic guises, scattered throughout the pages of Robinson’s magisterial history – the original, endlessly repeated Jim Crow, the comedic deformity and defamation of a people; a sell, a fraud.

Selling is part of what it’s about – or what it came to be about. But there is much more to it than that … And it all began much earlier, centuries before, in fact. For Forgeries is much more than a scholarly exegesis of the treatment of race in fi lm and performance, though it does that brilliantly, excavating a wealth of obscure, scarcely known material, as well as re- evaluating the great landmarks obscured as much, in their way, by unreckoning critical acclamation. Its fundamental achievement is to lay bare the cultural wellsprings of modern American society, the weight and meaning of its rootedness in slavery and the ingenious rapacity with which that fraudulent inheritance was invested; the dividends it paid; the costs it incurred.

Robinson’s narrative – though that word does not adequately convey the reconstructive nature of his enterprise – begins with nineteenthcentury ‘race’ science, reaching back to the images and understandings of ‘blackamores’ forged under pressure of slavery in a Europe that had long engaged in such practices and the consequent inferiorisation of their subjects. ‘Race is mercurial – deadly and slick … By the time the moving picture camera arrived on the scene, the Negro was in full costume. But before then, that costume would undergo extraordinary changes in the seventeenth century and then again at the end of the nineteenth century.’

As Robinson demonstrates, many of those extraordinary changes were wrought by the salvoes fi red, campaigns fought, territory grappled over, in the battle over slavery:

the sheer audacity and apparently undeterrable stream of antislavery propaganda and the frequent occurrence of actual slave revolts compelled a proslavery counterattack. It was at this moment in the struggle over slavery that many of the caricatures of Blacks which would dominate American fi lm came into existence.

The first target to come under the attack of white caricaturists was the free black middle class – its growth, despite all the forces ranged against it, a testimony to black resilience and enterprise. Its representatives were the most egregious in not knowing or respecting their allotted place, in daring to organise their own social lives, their own institutions, their own media, and were consequently pilloried for this through a sustained grossness of imagery and ridicule that permeated national cultural life.

It is no small part of Robinson’s achievement that, in giving us a history of ‘race’ in American fi lm, he gives us a history of black America for that period. And, in giving us a history of fi lm itself, he gives us a dynamic portrait of the growth of the industrial and fi nancial development with which the fi lm business was inextricably linked and out of which it grew. It is a concrete demonstration of the way in which the representations blazoned on the screen and absorbed by millions of people, multitudes of them new immigrant Americans, were only the fi nal flowering of a growth that was rooted deep in the economic and political structures of the nation. With painstaking subtlety, Robinson elucidates the links between, for example, the banking and finance houses, the indebted railroad companies (their infrastructure constructed by black convict labour) transporting the raw materials for industry across the continent and transporting
mass populations to the thriving world fairs and exhibitions where ethnographic images (in keeping with the latest race science) of blacks as savages, or blacks as slavery-nostalgia were purveyed – to advertise and sell anything from porridge and pancake mix to washing powder, tobacco and shoe polish. Images that were then used as source and substance for the new wonders of the moving picture industry, that then fed back into advertising and other media in a continuous loop.

The career of one such black icon is instructive – ‘Aunt Jemima’. Originally a fi gure from lyrics in the repertoire of the black minstrel Billy Kersands, ‘Jemima’ was then incorporated into blackface minstrelsy, and subsequently became the smiling ‘mammy’ face of a multi-million dollar food industry. The demeaning ‘mammy’ fi gure, with her fat jollity, knotted headscarf, devotion to the white family and total asexuality, bears, as Robinson demonstrates, no relation to any reality of southern black life for enslaved women. But this did not prevent her becoming the comforting face of race in popular culture. Aunt Jemima, launched

as a walking, talking fi gure at the massive Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, was performed by a black actress and a former slave, Nancy Green, who sang songs, told stories – and cooked pancakes; a front for bulk selling of this cheap, mass-produced commodity. Fictional Jemima took over real-life Green:

Though complemented by regional surrogates, Green would dominate the performance of Aunt Jemima till her death in 1923. By then her own biography and the fi ction of Jemima had long been merged by the corporate and historical reconstructions of the origins of Jemima. But hers was merely a particle of the fi ctionalizations of race, blackness and American history whose appearances would come to dominate American popular culture.

D.W. Griffi th’s 1915 Birth of a Nation is seen as crucial in what Robinson calls ‘the rewhitening of the nation’. He frames his discussion of Birth not only in terms of prior film historiography but also Griffith’s earlier work (‘paternalist, sentimental’); the source novel from which Birth is drawn; and the poisonous racial politics of the time. It was a time when the brilliant black boxer Jack Johnson (his mastery captured on fight films) so utterly refused to know his (blacks’ only) place that he was threatened by lynch mobs and public death threats and when a compound of anti- Semitism, racial and class hatred led to the railroading of a black man, Jim Conley, and a Jewish man, Frank Phagan, over the murder of a poor white woman; Phagan was eventually abducted from the prison farm where he had been sent and lynched. As Robinson laconically puts it, ‘class animosity and anti-Semitism superseded Negrophobia’; in Griffith’s fi lm elements from the murder case together with elements from the novel combined to

recast the American Civil War as a violent fratricidal confrontation between whites … Griffi th then reimagined the Reconstruction as a temporary moment of mulatto political ascendancy and Black triumph, rape, and anarchy … ‘Lincoln’s dream’ was to return Blacks to Africa, and only his assassination had frustrated his act of cleansing.

The film had opened in March 1915; Thanksgiving night that same year saw the formation in Georgia of the new Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. When is added to the wealth of this telling detail and close argument yet more contextual interconnection, between America’s subsequent ( arguably business-driven) involvement in the first world war and its growing expansionism, the formidable richness of Robinson’s research and the multi-layered complexity of his analysis become apparent.

That the weight of the racism, expressed in mass-manufactured cultural products, that Robinson documents is almost overwhelming is not surprising for:

At the onset of mass movie production, apartheid was the structural instrument of American capital, and American film makers supplied a galaxy of imagery and story lines which naturalized and popularized white hegemony.

Many of those story-lines, much of that imagery would, indeed, be surprisingly familiar to any student of English eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury drama. A 1911 Pathé fi lm For Massa’s Sake appears to lift its
main plot device from Thomas Morton’s 1816 The Revolt of Surinam, in which a freed slave sells himself back into slavery to clear his former master’s debt. Over and over, as in nineteenth-century English drama (with the towering exception of Ira Aldridge), blacks were represented by white actors in burnt cork make-up; while the evil mulatta/o, a staple of American motion pictures and an exemplar of the perils of race- mixing or ‘amalgamation’ had, also in the nineteenth century, crossed the Atlantic in the other direction, from a race-science obsessed America to England, that earlier home of racial science.

Yet it would be wrong to leave the story there. For in myriad ways black artists, actors, film makers, entertainers sought to challenge, subvert or broaden the humanity of those restricted images within which the major film industry attempted to confi ne them; from the black, independent and radical fi lmmaker Oscar Micheaux, whose best work was self- and community fi nanced on a shoestring budget; to the militant black actress Fredi Washington; the lesser known Theresa Harris; and the brilliant comedic presence of Mantan Moreland, with his capacity for ironic inversion of his role even as he played it. Even Stepin Fetchit on occasion neatly sidestepped his accustomed function. Not to mention those musicians and performers who, as blacks in minstrelsy, challenged the grotesquery of blackface minstrelsy, to deepen the humanity of the image of the black-skinned entertainer. At the end of the nineteenth century, one such entertainer, Bob Cole, actually performed in whiteface – an unprecedented cocking of the snook at America’s Jim Crow segregationist culture. Or there was the glamorous Aida Overton Walker, who from a singer and dancer became a choreographer – and the initiator of the dance craze, the cakewalk, which she taught to ‘English aristocrats and the cream of white American society’.

That is Robinson’s history for you – built, piece upon piece, from the ground up into a fascinating multi-storied structure, displaying a historical sweep that encompasses both the seemingly insignifi cant detail and the overarching grand design. Forgeries of Memory and Meaning in its breadth of vision, its originality of scholarship and its supple clarity of analysis is, quite simply, a tour de force.

By Hazel Waters, Race & Class 50: 98-101

This is an excellent article from Ismael Hossein-zadeh ( Are They Really Oil Wars? Another article he wrote at CounterPunch: Worried About the Price of Gas? End the Wars ) and shatters once and for all the myth of Oil Wars and the Chomskean propaganda. I am going to post excerpts from here:

[Start of excerpts ] It is true that for a long time, from the beginning of Middle Eastern oil exploration and discovery in the early twentieth century until the mid-1970s, colonial and/or imperial powers controlled oil either directly or through control of oil producing countries - at times, even by military force. But that pattern of colonial or imperialist exploitation of global markets and resources has changed now. Most of the current theories of imperialism and hegemony that continue invoking that old pattern of Big Oil behavior tend to suffer from an ahistorical perspective. Today, as discussed earlier, even physically occupying and controlling another country’s oil fields will not necessarily be beneficial to oil interests. Not only will military adventures place the operations of current energy projects at jeopardy, but they will also make the future plans precarious and unpredictable. Big Oil interests, of course, know this; and that’s why they did not countenance the war on Iraq: ‘The big oil companies were not enthusiastic about the Iraqi war,’ says Fareed Mohamedi of PFC Energy, an energy consultancy firm based in Washington D.C. that advises petroleum firms. ‘Corporations like Exxon-Mobil and Chevron-Texaco want stability, and this is not what Bush is providing in Iraq and the Gulf region,’ adds Mohamedi.

Big Oil interests also know that not only is war no longer the way to gain access to oil, it is in fact an obstacle to gaining that access. Exclusion of U.S. oil companies from vast oil resources in countries such as Russia, Iran, Venezuela, and a number of central Asian countries due to militaristic U.S. foreign policy is a clear testament to this fact. Many of these countries (including, yes, Iran) would be glad to have major U.S. oil companies invest, explore and extract oil from their rich reserves. Needless to say that U.S. oil companies would be delighted to have access to those oil resources. But U.S. champions of war and militarism have successfully torpedoed such opportunities through their unilateral wars of aggression and their penchant for a Cold War-like international atmosphere.

….

During the past few decades, major oil companies have consistently opposed U.S. policies and military threats against countries like Iran, Iraq, and Libya. They have, indeed, time and again, lobbied U.S. foreign policy makers for the establishment of peaceful relations and diplomatic rapprochement with those countries. The Iran-Libya Sanction Act of 1996 (ILSA) is a strong testament to the fact that oil companies nowadays view wars, economic sanctions, and international political tensions as harmful to their long-term business interests and, accordingly, strive for peace, not war, in international relations.

On March 15, 1995 President Clinton issued Executive Order 12957 which banned all U.S. contributions to the development of Iran’s petroleum resources, a crushing blow to the oil industry, especially to the Conoco oil company that had just signed a $1 billion contract to develop fields in Iran. The deal marked a strong indication that Iran was willing to improve its relationship with the United States, only to have President Clinton effectively nullify it. Two months later, sighting “an extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy and economy of the U.S.,” President Clinton issued another order, 1259, that expanded the sanctions to become a total trade and investment embargo against Iran. Then a year later came ILSA which extended the sanctions imposed on Iran to Libya as well.

It is no secret that the major force behind the Iran-Libya Sanction Act was the America Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the main Zionist lobby in Washington. The success of AIPAC in passing ILSA through both the Congress and the White House over the opposition of the major U.S. oil companies is testament to the fact that, in the context of U.S. policy in the Middle East, even the influence of the oil industry pales vis-à-vis the influence of the Zionist lobby.

ILSA was originally to be imposed on both U.S. and foreign companies. However, in the end it was the U.S. companies that suffered the most due to waivers that were given to European companies after pressure from the European Union. In 1996 the EU pursued its distaste of ILSA by lodging complaints with the World Trade Organization (WTO) against the U.S. and through adopting ‘blocking legislation’ that would prevent EU companies from complying with ILSA. Meanwhile, the contract that Iran had originally signed with Conoco was awarded to TotalFinaElf of France for $760 million; the deal also left the door open for Total to sign an additional contract with Iran for $2 billion in 1997 with their partners Gazprom and Petronas.

In May of 1997 major U.S. oil companies such as Conoco, Exxon, Atlantic Richfield, and Occidental Petroleum joined other (non-military) U.S. companies to create an anti-sanction coalition. Earlier that same year Conoco’s Chief Executive Archie Dunham publicly took a stance against unilateral U.S. sanctions by stating that “U.S. companies, not rogue regimes, are the ones that suffer when the United States imposes economic sanctions.” Texaco officials have also argued that the U.S. can be more effective in bringing about change in other countries by allowing U.S. companies to do business with those countries instead of imposing economic sanctions that tend to be counterproductive.

Alas, Washington’s perverse, misguided and ineffectual policy of economic sanctions for political purposes - often in compliance with the wishes of some powerful special interests - continues unabated. ‘Even with the increased pro-trade lobbying efforts of the oil industry and groups like USAEngage, whose membership ranges from farmers and small business owners to Wall Street executives and oilmen, the lack of support from Washington and the Bush administration could not allow them [major oil companies and other non-military transnational companies] to overtake or counteract the already rolling momentum of AIPAC’s influence on Middle East policy or the renewal of ISLA.’

…

and (note how Noamian analysis follows the wishes of the real perpetrators by hiding their real motives):

The widely-shared but erroneous view that recent U.S. wars of choice are driven by oil concerns is partly due to precedence: the fact that for a long time military force was key to colonial or imperialist control and exploitation of foreign markets and resources, including oil. It is also partly due to perception: the exaggerated notion that both President Bush and Vice President Cheney were ‘oil men’ before coming to the White House. But, as noted earlier, George W. Bush was never more than an ineffective minor oil prospector and Dick Cheney was never really an oil man; he headed the notorious Halliburton company that sold (and still sells) services to oil companies and the Pentagon.

But the major reason for the persistence of this pervasive myth seems to stem from certain deliberate efforts that are designed to perpetuate the legend in order to camouflage some real economic and geopolitical special interests that drive U.S. military adventures in the Middle East. There is evidence that both the military-industrial complex and hard-line Zionist proponents of “greater Israel” disingenuously use oil (as an issue of national interest) in order to disguise their own nefarious special interests and objectives: justification of continued expansion of military spending, extension of sales markets for military hardware, and recasting the geopolitical map of the Middle East in favor of Israel.

There is also evidence that for every dollar’s worth of oil imported from the Persian Gulf region the Pentagon takes five dollars out of the Federal budget to “secure” the flow of that oil! This is a clear indication that the claim that the U.S. military presence in the Middle East is due to oil consideration is a fraud .

While anecdotal, an example of how partisans of war and militarism use oil as a pretext to cover up the real forces behind war and militarism can be instructive. In the early stages of the invasion of Iraq, when the anti-occupation resistance in Iraq had not yet taken shape and the invasion seemed to be proceeding smoothly, two of the leading champions of the invasion, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, often boasting of the apparent or pre-mature success of the invasion at those early stages, gave frequent news conferences and press reports. During one of those press reports (at the end of an address to delegates at an Asian security summit in Singapore in early June 2003), Wolfowitz was asked why North Korea was being treated differently from Iraq, where hardly any weapons of mass destruction had been found. Wolfowitz’s response was: ‘Let’s look at it simply. The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically, we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil.

Many opponents of the war jumped on this statement, so to speak, as corroboration of what they had been saying or suspecting all along: that the war on Iraq was prompted by oil interests. Yet, there is strong evidence - some of which presented in the preceding pages - that for the last several decades oil interests have not favored war and turbulence in the Middle East, including the current invasion of Iraq. Nor is war any longer the way to gain access to oil. Major oil companies, along with many other non-military transnational corporations, have lobbied both the Clinton and Bush administrations in support of changing the aggressive, militaristic U.S. policy toward countries like Iran, Iraq and Libya in favor of establishing normal, non-confrontational trade and diplomatic relations. Such efforts at normalization of trade and diplomatic relations, however, have failed time and again precisely because Wolfowitz and his cohorts, working through AIPAC and other war-mongering think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Project for the New American Century (PNAC), and Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) oppose them.

These think tanks, in collaboration with a whole host of similar militaristic lobbying entities like Center for Security Affairs (CSA) and National Institute for Public Policy (NIPP), working largely as institutional façades to serve the defacto alliance of the military-industrial complex and the pro-Israel lobby, have repeatedly thwarted efforts at peace and reconciliation in the Middle East - often over the objections and frustrations of major U.S. oil companies. It is a well established fact that Wolfowitz has been a devoted champion of these jingoistic think tanks and their aggressive unilateral policies in the Middle East. In light of his professional record and political loyalties, his claim that he championed the war on Iraq because of oil considerations can be characterized only as demagogic: it contradicts his political record and defies the policies he has been advocating for the last several decades; it is designed to divert attention from the main forces behind the war, the armaments lobby and the pro-Israel lobby.

These powerful interests are careful not to draw attention to the fact that they are the prime instigators of war and militarism in the Middle East. Therefore, they tend to deliberately perpetuate the popular perception that oil is the driving force behind the war in the region. They even do not mind having their aggressive foreign policies labeled as imperialistic as long as imperialism implies some vague or general connotations of hegemony and domination, that is, as long as it thus camouflages the real, special interests behind the war and political turbulence in the Middle East.

The oil and other non-military transnational corporations’ aversion to war and military adventures in the Middle East stem, of course, from the logical behavior of global or transnational capital in the era of integrated world markets, which tends to be loath to war and international political convulsions. Considering the fact that both importers and exporters of oil prefer peace and stability to war and militarism, why would, then, the flow of oil be in jeopardy if the powerful beneficiaries of war and political tension in the Middle East stopped their aggressive policies in the region?

Partisans of war in the Middle East tend to portray U.S. military operations in the region as reactions to terrorism and political turbulence in order to ’safeguard the interests of the United States and its allies.’ Yet, a close scrutiny of action-reaction or cause-effect relationship between U.S. military adventures and socio-political turbulence in the region reveals that perhaps the causality is the other way around. That is, social upheavals and political convulsions in the Middle East are more likely to be the result, not the cause, of U.S. foreign policy in the region, especially its one-sided, prejudicial Israeli-Palestinian policy. The U.S. policy of war and militarism in the region seems to resemble the behavior of a corrupt cop, or a mafia godfather, who would instigate fights and frictions in the neighborhood or community in order to, then, portray his parasitic role as necessary for the safety and security of the community and, in the process, fill out his deep pockets. [End of excerpts]

One of the myths floating around is that the attack on Iraq was part of an operation intended to ’seize the oilfields’. This is preposterous from the point of view of oil company interests. Past experience, and the current situation in Iraq, prove that the only sensible way to obtain access to the oil is to have local officials run the situation. ‘Seizing the oilfields’ is a pure Zionist notion, first suggested by covert Zionist Henry Kissinger in the early 1970s, and is intended not to obtain American corporate access to the oil, but to remove the ‘oil weapon’ from the Arabs.

The article is inaccurate in putting responsibility for the attack on both Zionists and military contractors. Of course, military contractors want war. They always want war. If the desires of military contractors were determinative, we would always have war. There needs to be another, primary, reason for war. Military contractors just latch onto, and reinforce, the primary motivators. I reject all conspiracy theories based on some kind of James-Bond-style, super-Evil villains, running the world in order to arrange for a war of everybody against everybody. The world doesn’t work in this cartoon fashion. There was one and only one reason for the attack on Iraq: Zionism.

The American Paradox

by Shannon Joyce Prince

“The Founding Fathers were the most powerful and privileged people in their society and had suffered no real human rights abuses.”

When a nation declares its independence by stating that “whenever any Form of Government” abuses the rights to “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” that it’s the “right” and the “duty” of the people “to alter or to abolish it” and pledges that it provides “liberty and justice to all,” one has to be perplexed when that nation’s people suffer the most egregious human rights abuses over the course of centuries.  Native American genocide as well as black slavery and the anti-minority discrimination in housing, employment, health care, education, and many other arenas that continues to the present day mock the radical promises of the Declaration of Independence.

I believe that discrimination remains a problem and that the anti-discrimination fight is impeded due to what I call the American Paradox.

In severing ties with England, a move that was considered treasonous, the Founding Fathers realized they would have to carefully explain their act.  As white land-owning males, the Founding Fathers were the most powerful and privileged people in their society and had suffered no real human rights abuses - especially in comparison to indentured and poor whites, women, and non-whites.  Even their claim that they were suffering taxation without representation was fallacious because in English society all regions paid taxes but no region’s concerns were considered separately from any other.  Because the American colonies’ issues were considered part and parcel of all English issues and not singled out for special attention, the Founding Fathers claimed they were being ignored.

The main concern of the Founding Fathers was minor and fiscal - the enforcement of trade laws that had previously been laxly monitored and taxes they found inconvenient.  But how could the most powerful people in society demand more power still?  By portraying themselves as downtrodden.  By using language promising rights to the masses yet securing privileges only for the few, the Founding Fathers mobilized people from all segments of American society to fight for rights that would be given only to the most elite.  After the United States of America became a nation there were and remain two competing views of its status.  The first view, that of the masses, expected America to live up to its promises and grant all people the rights the Declaration affirmed their Creator had endowed them with.  The masses believed that if such rights were not granted, they were not only entitled but compelled to follow the example set by the Founding Fathers and described by the Declaration of Independence: to alter or abolish the government.

“The Founding Fathers mobilized people from all segments of American society to fight for rights that would be given only to the most elite.”

The second view of America, however, was that of the elite.  This view of America insisted that the Revolution, having consolidated the rights of the privileged, meant that the United States had finished its job.  Since the elite conceived of revolutionary rhetoric as a way to secure rights for the privileged, any movement for rights among the masses was considered unpatriotic.  In this way, everything from abolitionism to women’s suffrage to Civil Rights, in short, any movement that attempted to alter the government in order to grant the masses the rights promised to them by the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, the Constitution, or the Pledge of Allegiance, was considered a threat to the nation.  To fight for life, liberty, justice, or equality, was framed as being un-American and anti-patriotic.

The hypocrisy of the American paradox was not only noted by the slaves being beaten to death and the Native Americans being hunted down like wild animals, but even to other elite white people.  Thomas Paine, whose political ideas led him to be called the father of the American Revolution, noted in his article “African Slavery in America” “that many civilized, nay, Christianized people should approve, and be concerned in the savage practice, is surprising; and still persist, though it has been so often proved contrary to the light of nature, to every principle of Justice and Humanity, and even good policy, by a succession of eminent men, and several late publications.”

Thomas Paine said that, “One would almost wish” that Africans would enslave thousands of whites to teach them how horrific slavery was.  He called American slave-owners “pretended Christians” and mocked the hypocrisy of Americans framing themselves as slaves of the British with the following words, “With what consistency, or decency they complain so loudly of attempts to enslave them, while they hold so many hundred thousands in slavery; and annually enslave many thousands more, without any pretence of authority, or claim upon them?…How just, how suitable to our crime is the punishment with which Providence threatens us? We have enslaved multitudes, and shed much innocent blood in doing it; and now are threatened with the same. And while other evils are confessed, and bewailed, why not this especially, and publicity; than which no other vice, if all others, has brought so much guilt on the land?”

By fearing what Providence would do to a slave-owning country, white, wealthy 18^th century Thomas Paine said the same thing as Jeremiah Wright - that a nation that practiced racial oppression risked the damnation of God.  Paine labeled slavery the greatest of all sins and passionately condemned those who would bemoan the inconveniences faced by the elite before the unfathomable cruelty of slavery.  Despite the fact that many of the Founding Fathers were slave-owners, Paine called pro-slavery individuals “enemies to their country.”  He used incendiary language to emphatically state that a country that wanted to be civilized and Christian must not own slaves.

“Any movement that attempted to alter the government in order to grant the masses the rights promised to them was considered a threat to the nation.”

Paine was not alone in his sentiments.  Abigail Adams, wife of President John Adams and mother of President John Quincy Adams, wrote this to her husband in a letter: “It always seemed a most iniquitous scheme to me to fight ourselves for what we are daily robbing and plundering from those who have as good a right to freedom as we have.”

Founding Father, Secretary of the Treasury, and signer of the Constitution, Alexander Hamilton, was an officer in the New York Manumission Society that fought for the abolition of slavery in New York, the right of slave children not to inherit permanent slave status, the end of the slave trade, opposition to forced exportation of blacks from America, and education for former slaves and their children.  The New York Manumission Society boycotted pro-slavery newspapers and businesses and even provided free legal service to free black people illegally claimed as slaves.

Another member of the society was John Jay, Secretary of Foreign Affairs and Secretary of State.  In fact, all the members of the society were white men, most of whom were wealthy and extremely powerful.  While highlighting American hypocrisy was a practice eschewed by most of the privileged, it often, incorrectly, was and continues to be seen as the illegitimate whines of the trifling or the empty rhetoric of the politically correct. But even in early America there were privileged whites who noted the country’s despicable double standards.  As white abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison put it, “If men are justified in striking a blow for freedom, when the question is one of a three­penny tax on tea, then, I say, they are a thousand times more justi­fied, when it is to save fathers, mothers, wives and children from the slave-coffle and the auction-block, and to restore to them their God-given rights.”

Of course, most of those who fought for universal civil rights were among the powerless.  One such warrior is Daniel Shays, the leader of Shays’ Rebellion.  Daniel Shays was a white small time farmer, who, like other small farmers were paying outrageous taxes to subsidize the Revolution.  Unable to pay the taxes, such farmers were frequently locked in debtors’ prisons and had their land seized.  Since land ownership was tied to suffrage, a farmer who lost his land because he couldn’t pay taxes that funded a revolution supposed to bring democracy to all ironically lost his right to vote.  Since the Declaration of Independence unequivocally stated that when a government was unjust, it was the duty of men to alter or abolish it, Daniel Shays led his fellow farmers in non-violent protest, but to no avail.  So then Shays, an officer during the American Revolution who retired rewarded for his distinguished service, led his peers in an armed attack on a local armory.  Their rebellion was quickly put down.  Shays was bewildered.  He said that his rebellion was the exact same thing as the American Revolution, but he quickly learned that the rights the Founding Fathers considered essential for themselves would be denied to the poor - and that anyone who took the Declaration of Independence seriously was going to be considered guilty of treason.  Shay barely escaped the death penalty.

“The rights the Founding Fathers considered essential for themselves would be denied to the poor.”

As Founding Father Samuel Adams said, “in monarchy, the crime of treason may admit of being pardoned or lightly punished, but the man who dares rebel against the laws of republic ought to suffer death.”  Adams had just articulated a dangerous sentiment.  Because the American government called itself a republic it was unimpeachable - despite the fact that the Declaration of Independence requires the alteration or abolition of any form of abusive government.  The fact the government wasn’t really a republic and had entrenched racist, sexist, and caste systems was irrelevant.  The American government could abuse any right it chose and still call itself a republic - and any would-be patriot who sought to make America live up to its promises risked paying with his life.  In other words, the most anti-American crime someone could commit was to take the core documents of America seriously, follow their advice devotedly, or demand fulfillment of the promises listed therein.  Adams had put into words the American Paradox.

The American Paradox is the reason that a country that promises justice for all can refuse reparations to the descendants of slaves.  The American Paradox is the reason that the same Americans who fight for democracy abroad have contempt for the efforts of people fighting against voting irregularities, voting impediments, or uncounted/miscounted votes in this country.  It’s the reason that a country that guarantees the right to life to all can allow the murder of unborn children.  It’s the reason that one of the gravest insults that can be hurled at any one who stands up for universal American rights - from abolitionists to suffragists to union leaders to Civil Rights and post-Civil Rights activists, is that they are being divisive - that they are agitators or rabble rousers who threaten unity as though unity were more important than moral goods.

Never mind that the Founding Fathers were divisive when they took the steps that created the nation.  It is better to be unified and accept what’s wrong than to take a stand and make people choose whether they want to defend what’s right.  The American Paradox is the reason that when Martin Luther King Jr. was challenged as being bad for the nation, he had to remind the amnesiac nation of its own core document.  The most radical thing Martin Luther King Jr. could say to challenge the American government’s own laws during his speech at Holt Street Baptist Church was, “If we are wrong, the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong.  If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong.”

“The most anti-American crime someone could commit was to take the core documents of America seriously.”

The American Paradox is the reason that when researchers stopped random people on the street with untitled copies of the Declaration of Independence and asked for their opinion of it, person after person told them that the Declaration was treasonous and must have been written by people who hate America.  At the beginning of this nation’s history, the Revolution was already seen through bifurcated lenses.  The powerful saw it as a way to create a nation that would make the privileged even more privileged, while the powerless saw it as making promises towards all people that would eventually be fulfilled.  For that reason there is a strange definition of the patriotic/unpatriotic dichotomy.  For the powerful, and the powerless swayed by them, a patriot is someone who affirms the status quo and its inequities, and to demand change so that citizens can receive the promises guaranteed them by America’s core documents is un-American.  Those pleas for justice are seen as anachronisms or demands for handouts - as unreasonable, unfounded, and worthy of contempt - risible at best and dangerous at worst.

In order to be considered good citizens, Americans are required to unquestioningly worship the Founding Fathers (even when some of the Founding Fathers themselves found them their peers to be hypocritical) as well as to accept the status quo with all its inequity and injustice.

“For the powerful, and the powerless swayed by them, a patriot is someone who affirms the status quo and its inequities.”

In order to justify a revolution, the Founding Fathers, a group of educated, wealthy, white men described themselves as the pitiable slaves of the British.  But no one says of them - but why didn’t they focus on the good in their society?  There’s no Obama who asks of them why they focused on what was bad about being part of Britain as opposed to what was noble.  No one tells the Founding Fathers “love it or leave it” that if they didn’t like life in the British Colonies they should have gone elsewhere - and then proceed to name a host of poorer or more violent places.  For protesting their three penny tax on tea, no one says that the Founding Fathers should have stopped whining, moved on, taken responsibility for their actions, or pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and simply succeeded in spite of it.  Yet everyday, women and people of color who face a host of more serious and more legitimate problems hear those exact words.  I note though, that women and non-whites have never demanded a revolution - the only group to ever declare its independence from the United States were slave-owners, another group of privileged people trying to secure their privilege at the brutal expense of others - women and non-whites don’t even want to abolish the government even though they have more reason to do so than the Founding Fathers did.  They simply want to alter the government to reflect the promises made in the documents that created it.

In order to win a revolution, the Founding Fathers needed the support of the masses to fight for the rights of the few.  In order to create a country born of revolution, they had to use language that guaranteed rights to all and insisted upon a duty to end unjust governments.  And in order to preserve their privileged status in that country, they had to start a tradition of punishing everyone who took them seriously.  It didn’t matter that people like Shay who fought for the revolution and were impoverished by its taxes didn’t get to benefit from it.  It didn’t matter that slaves whose labor made the country wealthy didn’t receive its protections.  It doesn’t matter that women and non-whites still suffer to this day.  Being a good American means defending America as it is instead of fighting so that it can blossom into what it was promised to be.  It means that people who every day create and defend inequality or simply stand passive before it, refraining from engaging in socially conscious practices, can still wear a flag pin and be considered patriots.

The American Paradox means that the most anti-American, unpatriotic thing a citizen can do is to fight for American values.

[Source: BAR]

[Excellent article, and I am surprised to find it from Le Monde diplomatique. It covers alot of the issues Obama's campaign propagandises; among others racial division, why Obama was chosen to embody the overcome of colour line and why this picture is false ("because that progress has not made American society more open or equal. In fundamental respects it is less open and equal today than it was in the days of Jim Crow when racism was not only prevalent but was state-sponsored."), on affirmative action and why it to applies to elites. gess]

Some Democrats are more equal than others

By Walter Benn Michaels

There have been two defining moments related to race in the Obama campaign, and more generally in United States progressive politics. The first was in January on the night of the Illinois senator’s victory in South Carolina when, in response to comments by Bill Clinton about the size of the black vote, the Obama crowd started chanting: “Race doesn’t matter.” (more…)

The blood thirsty war warriors and propagandist due are back! Spielberg’s and Lucas’:

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

A pathetic but an effective tool to dehumanize Non-Europeans.

And there is Iron Man film, a Pentagon Blockbuster.

Read the superb article by Nick Turse

Found another way to embed this short video. Hope it will work.

Go here for more information.

One of the most powerful speeches.

Which I can’t download.

Click the picture or here.