Image: researched and produced by @tibettruth
This post was originally published on TIBET, ACTIVISM AND INFORMATION.
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A roundup of the coverage on struggles for human rights and freedoms, from Chile to Cambodia
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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By Guyon Espiner, investigative reporter, RNZ In Depth
New Zealand Labour MP Louisa Wall has accused China of harvesting organs from political prisoners among the Uyghur and Falun Gong populations.
The MP, who is part of a global network of politicians monitoring the actions of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), also says her own government needs to do more to counter what she calls the slave labour trade in China.
“Forced organ harvesting is occurring to service a global market where people are wanting hearts, lungs, eyes, skin,” Wall said.
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China expert Professor Anne-Marie Brady of the University of Canterbury, describes the New Zealand government’s political strategy on China as something close to a cone of silence.
“Our MPs seem to have a pact that they’re not allowed to say anything at all critical of the CCP and barely mention the word China in any kind of negative terms.”
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta refused to do interviews for the new Red Line podcast, which examines the influence of the CCP in New Zealand.
But Wall has broken ranks.
‘Used as slaves’
“I’m concerned that there appears to be a million Uyghurs being imprisoned in what they call education camps, but essentially, used as slaves to pick cotton.”Wall, along with National’s Simon O’Connor, is one of two New Zealand MPs in the International Parliamentary Alliance on China, a network of more than 200 politicians from 20 parliaments, set up to monitor the actions of the CCP.
She thinks New Zealand should be doing much more to counter the slave labour trade from Xinjiang, in the north west of China.
“What the UK and Canada have done is they’ve got modern slavery acts and they want to ensure the corporates who are taking those raw materials, actually ensure that the production of those raw materials complies with the modern slavery act. I like that mechanism.”
She says the government also needs to pass new laws to stop New Zealanders getting organ transplants sourced from China or from any country that cannot verify the integrity of its organ donor programme.
A 31 May 2019 photograph of a complex in Xinjiang believed to be a “re-education camp”. Image: RNZ/AFP China sources some organs from political prisoners, she said.
“The Uyghur population, and also the Falun Gong population, both have been designated as prisoners of conscience,” she said. “We know that they are slaves. We also know that they’re being used to harvest organs.”
Tribunal finding
She bases that on findings from a recent independent tribunal chaired by Sir Geoffrey Nice, a British QC, who previously worked with the International Criminal Court (ICC).His 600-page report, called the China Tribunal, says the killing of political prisoners for organ transplants is continuing in China and that many people have died “indescribably hideous deaths” in the process.
“Based on a report from Lord Justice Nice from the UK, we now know that forced organ harvesting is occurring to service a global market where people are wanting hearts, lungs, eyes, skin,” Wall said.
The Chinese embassy in New Zealand ignored requests to talk about this issue.
China announced back in 2014 that it would no longer remove organs from executed prisoners and when the China Tribunal report was released in 2018 the CCP dismissed it as inaccurate and politically motivated.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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In his “What, to the slave, is the Fourth of July” speech, Black abolitionist Fredrick Douglass highlighted the gross contradictions of a country that claimed to celebrate freedom and independence while embracing slavery. Douglass, however, took solace in America’s age. “There is consolation in the thought that America is young. Great streams are not easily turned from channels, worn deep in the course of ages,” Douglass said in his speech on July 5, 1852. The country was 76 at the time.
Today, the settler-colonial nation-state of the U.S. turns 245 years old. Yet the underlying problems of white supremacism that Douglass addressed in his famous speech persist. Among the contradictions of today’s Independence Day observations will include the honoring of the armed forces for “keeping America safe” and “defending our freedoms,” despite the prevalence of white supremacy in the ranks and the fact that many current and former service members participated in the January 6 breach at the U.S. Capitol, which sought to violently disrupt the certification of a legitimate presidential election.
On April 1, the Department of Defense “completed” a 60-day stand-down to address the growing problem of white extremism in the military. The review was prompted by the fact that 20 percent of those facing charges from the January 6 events have a background in the armed forces. The stand-down centered around conversations with rank-and-file soldiers that would allegedly “reinforce the military’s values.” The information gleaned from these discussions would be sent up the chain of command. What would happen next is unclear, at least from what we’ve been told by Pentagon Press Secretary John F. Kirby.
The lack of clarity on next steps is likely due to the fact that no official data would be collected during these conversations. The top brass in charge of coordinating the discussions believe that conversations that reinforce values of the military would be enough, and that data collection would be unnecessary. Pentagon Press Secretary John F. Kirby said the stand-down would also be a chance to listen to service members [about] their own feelings about extremism. Such a policy is counterproductive, according to the chief of staff at the Southern Poverty Law Center, Lecia Brooks, who has been calling for more data collection on the scope of right-wing extremism in the military. As Brooks said in a March 25 interview with Democracy Now!, the day after she testified at an Armed Services Committee hearing on extremism in the Armed Forces, “data drives policy.”
In May, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin created an “extremism task force.” This task force has a July deadline to make “recommendations on potential changes to military justice.” Again, any recommendations will be based on scant official data because the military is notorious for not wanting to acknowledge or document the problem of white supremacism in the ranks.
This is what we do know: Veterans make up 25 percent of all militia members in the U.S., according to a recent report from The New York Times. In early 2020, one in three active-duty service members reported to the Military Times that they saw evidence of white supremacism in the ranks. An August 2020 poll conducted by the Military Times reported that 57 percent of troops of color have personally experienced some form of racist or white supremacist behavior.
In 2018, Brandon Russell, a member of the Floridian National Guard, was sentenced to a five-year prison sentence for harboring explosives. It was revealed during the trial that Russell had founded a violent neo-Nazi group. In May 2020, an Air Force sergeant who belonged to a boogaloo extremist movement was accused of murdering a federal security agent. In June 2020, an active-duty soldier named Ethan Melzer was charged with plotting a mass casualty attack in collaboration with his neo-Nazi group.
Nonetheless, far right Republican leaders like Rep. Pat Fallon from Texas, who was on the post-January 6 committee to address white supremacism in the ranks, was particularly dismissive of the 60-day stand-down, calling it “political theater.” More liberal-minded politicians like House Armed Services Committee chairman Rep. Adam Smith (D-Washington) acknowledge that these problems exist but seem unwilling to push for serious changes in policy.
If the military’s handling of sexual assault is any indication of how the “task force” to confront right-wing extremism will go, then we can assume that there will be plenty of talk without much action to root out the problem.
One in three women are sexually assaulted in the military. This problem has been acknowledged for many years. Yet the number of women who are assaulted in the military continues to increase.
In 2020 there were 7,825 reports (a large number of cases go unreported) of sexual assault in all branches of the military, a 3 percent increase over 2019. A number of hearings on sexual assault followed the release of the 2012 Academy Award-nominated documentary “Invisible War.” “Invisible War” exposed the depth of the sexual assault epidemic and resulting cover ups in the U.S. military. Nearly a decade later, promises from generals and politicians to solve the issue have clearly proven empty.
Very little has been said about the results of the 60-day stand-down since it concluded on April 1. Silence is exactly what top brass and politicians count on because fixing the problem would pose a threat to their first priority — a strong empire that requires violence and oppression to achieve its goals. From the earliest days of supporting the colonization of Turtle Island to the use of the national guard against Standing Rock and Black Lives Matter protests — and from the wars on Japan and Vietnam to the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan — the armed forces needed to dehumanize others as irredeemably violent, dangerous and uncivilized in order to encourage its soldiers to treat them as an enemy.
The U.S. isn’t young anymore. One can’t help but wonder what Fredrick Douglass would say if he were to give a speech on the country’s 245th birthday. The “great streams” of American racism, white supremacy and sexism have indeed worn deep. A full 169 years after Douglass’s speech, the U.S. is still bogged down by many of the same contradictions. Any progress that has been made wasn’t due to benevolent rulers or a compassionate state apparatus, but came as a result of courageous people coming together to shine light on and resist intolerance and oppression.
As American flags are posted on porches and fill front lawns across the U.S., let’s not let them block the light of justice. This Fourth of July, let’s not hide behind empty promises, cover-ups and manipulative patriotism. Let’s continue to expose what the military and other American institutions want to hide. Let’s fight against empire.
It’s well past time that we damn the river of hate that continues to run through this country.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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During the recent G7 summit the corporate media went into pro-US propaganda overdrive. The BBC’s Global News channel – or UK global propaganda outlet – has spent the years since the Iraq War spinning the US Military’s assault on the Black and Brown homelands of the world as ‘America spreading democracy’. Media Lens has responded to the brutal consequences, condemning BBC Paul Wood’s misrepresentation “The coalition came to Iraq in the first place to bring democracy and human rights” (22 December 2005). Previously, BBC defence Correspondent Jonathan Marcus also historically spun American Military aggression as “the promotion of democracy throughout the Muslim world” (5 December 2002). In the near two decades since Iraq, consecutive BBC Political Editors Andrew Marr and Nick Robinson have also regularly spouted this propaganda position. And this ongoing orthodoxy was parroted ad-infinitum during the summit by the rest of the corporate media. The other trope repeatedly invoked was that of a supposed transatlantic ‘special relationship’.
Even leaving aside the death toll and victims of torture resulting from historically recent US militarism, for America to actually spread democracy it would have to be one itself. Reflecting the genealogical critique of Philosopher-Historian Michel Foucault – that the mechanisms of power rarely disappear but instead evolve – the US reality is that much of its slavery-era anti-democratic oppressions are still intact, albeit in mutated form.
In the aftermath of the Civil War, African-Americans were driven out of the public sphere by a violent campaign of lynching, torture and intimidation known as ‘disenfranchisement’. This deliberate political exclusion persisted into the 1960s in the practice of murdering voter registration activists, some of which was fictionalised in the pro-federal establishment film Mississippi Burning (1988). Currently, this agenda manifests itself in ‘Voter Suppression’ tactics. Poll Stations are closed down in Black and Latino areas, resulting in reports of 6+ hour waits, to cast a ballot – as exampled in the infamous experience of 102 years-old Desline Victor. Impediments to voting are also created by new regulations which refuse to recognise forms of ID common among Black and Latino groups, therefore blocking their attempts at voting.
In the academic publication The New Jim Crow (2010), Michele Alexander documents a similar oppressive continuity, recording that there are more Black Americans in the US penal apparatus than were held in slavery in the 1850s. Given the privatisation of US Prisons, much of this captivity is for profit, and can also similarly involve prisoners being used as cheap labour. In most US states prisoners lose the right to vote, so once again they can’t take democratic action, even against their own caged exploitation.
There is also the issue of taking Black lives with impunity of which the Black Lives Matter movement rightly complains. Much of this begins with the historic lynching tradition. Given often the complicity of authority figures – sheriffs, police officers, local judges, handing victims over to lynch mobs – this practice has historically been relabelled as supposedly respectable ‘extra-judicial killing’. Building on this, in recent years many states have passed ‘Stand Your Ground, Shoot First Laws’. There have been attempts to excuse current killings of many Black youths such as, Trayvon Martin and Jordon Davis on just this legal provision.
Those wondering about the relevance of these practices for foreign policy need only reflect on why examples of the US historic lynching postcard resemble so closely the human trophy photography to come out of Abu Graib and Guantanamo Bay. One of Guantanamo’s interrogators was “Lieutenant Richard Zuley, a Chicago police detective in the Navy Reserve… During his career with the Chicago Police Department, Zuley conducted police interrogations primarily on Black Chicagoans. These interrogations involved the use of torture techniques similar to those he would later use at Guantánamo Bay.” Again echoing the issue of institutional continuity, the American Military’s practice of assassinating those globally, whose arguments of US racist-imperialism it finds too inconvenient to put on trial, is similarly once again spun as merely ‘extra judicial killing’.
Neither claims of ‘America spreading democracy’ or the ‘special relationship’ stand much scrutiny, given that for generations Britain has been welcoming those seeking refuge from US racial and political oppression. Therefore the real predominant special relationship that the British general public actually embraced has been with Americans, who were the US establishment’s victims.
The singer, actor and activist Paul Robeson enjoyed his time in the UK in the early 20th C, whereas in his own country he was subjected to racial and political persecution, predominantly by Federal authorities.
Post-war footage of African-American Rhythm-&-Blues performers freely plying their trade in Britain, shows the artists in occasional off-stage anxiety as this was the first time they’d been in un-segregated spaces, sharing train carriages and the like with white citizens. Some of this footage can be found in the first episode of a previous BBC arts documentary Blues Britannia (2011), which demonstrates the ongoing self-conscious lengths the BBC’s Global News channel attempts in re-branding American establishment traditions as ‘democratic’.
Also, many American artists objecting to working-class exploitation and oppression came to Britain fleeing the political persecution of US McCarthyism. The composer and harmonica player Larry Adler was one of these. While here he produced the score for the popular UK film Genevieve (1953). Two decades later he told the New York Times how even his foreign work was treated under McCarthyism.
Remember the film ‘Genevieve?’ I composed and played the music for that. Six weeks before it opened at the Sutton in New York a print was requested without my name. My music was nominated for an Oscar. As no composer’s name was on the credits they nominated Muir Mathieson, who conducted the orchestra. I made the fact known to the Academy but no correction was made and my name never restored.
The Adventures of Robin Hood was one of UK television’s most successful exports of the late 50’s and early 60’s. However, its producer Hannah Weinstein and previously successful Hollywood writing team including Ring Lardner Jr. (a joint Oscar recipient), Ian Hunter, Robert Lees, Waldo Salt, Adrian Scott and Editor Howard Koch (another joint Oscar recipient), were fleeing the McCarthyite Black List. In 1990 a fiction film – Fellow Traveller (1990) director Philip Saville, starring Ron Silver, Daniel J Travanti – was made largely inspired by their situation. The production company back then was ‘Screen Two’ a division of the BBC.
While largely hated by large parts of America, in the 1960s and 70’s Muhammad Ali, similar to Robeson, enjoyed respite in the UK. Part of Ali’s fondness for Britain was that when stripped of his World title by US authorities, a little known Oxfordshire based Irish former bareknuckle fighter Paddy Monaghan, put together a petition demanding his reinstatement. Even though only publicised by a working-class, unknown, un-resourced figure, this petition got 22,224 signatures in the UK. You’d hope given Ali’s relationship to Britain, and that images of the resulting friendship that occurred between the two men can be found in the BBC’s photo-archive, that this alongside the history of McCarthyism, would inform BBC News/Current-Affairs spin on US democracy. Sadly not!
Significantly the UK has now gone from the country that used to welcome those seeking refuge and relief from American oppression, to one that on US government insistence imprisons and – according the UN’s Special Rapporteur Nils Melzer and medical journal The Lancet – tortures Julian Assange (Assange is now an absented non-person in corporate media coverage). This turnaround has occurred due to the elitist subversion of Party democracy in the UK, and because the corporate news media – as demonstrated by BBC News output – is willing in the Orwellian manner of Winston Smith at the Ministry of Truth, to absent and rewrite, its own Arts, Historical, and Archive material.
The origins of the constructed ‘special relationship’ narrative, owes much to the correspondence and occasional friendship between a retired Winston Churchill and President Kennedy. And also to the fact, that Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher launched their attacks on the post-war consensus in their countries, from largely shared agendas and at around the same time. Actually UK Labour was historically to the Left of even US Democrats. Labour’s 1960s Prime Minister Harold Wilson could not expect his Party to accept following America into Vietnam – so there was no all across the political spectrum ‘special relationship,’ and very few instances where Britain has ever been able to say to the US ‘don’t do x…”
The notion of a ‘special relationship’ was infamously remanufactured when Neoliberal New Labour Foreign Secretary Jack Straw tried to market the war on the Iraqi people on the basis of the heady days of world war alliances. This was quite a reboot. America aided Britain’s fight against the eugenicist Nazis by providing racially segregated regiments. Historian Graham Smith (When Jim Crow met John Bull – 1987), notes than when American forces arrived in Britain they attempted – thankfully unsuccessfully in some cases – to impose segregation on the UK social spaces that GIs might visit. Owners/landlords of pubs, dance halls and cafes were often appalled both by the racism and the threat of being posted off-limits to service personnel, at a time of great economic hardship, if they refused. This was not new. Smith cites similar diktats in WWI given to French Authorities about not ‘Spoiling the negroes” (Ibid., page 10).
Race issues also threatened the judicial independence of British sovereignty. During the Second World War, 11 African-American GIs were executed for rape on UK soil. And rape was not a death penalty crime under British law. It’s questionable how many – if any – of these soldiers committed this crime because American authorities of the time viewed relations between black men and white women as a sex crime in itself. The case of Leroy Henry particularly incensed the British public. He’d been having a relationship with a local white woman before being arrested for rape and having a confession beaten out of him, resulting in a death sentence. Indicative of the British low opinion of American justice and the solidarity later to be shown Muhammad Ali decades later, the people of the city of Bath put together a 30,000-strong petition, which got his sentence commuted.
White Americans also brought racial violence and lynching practices to UK shores. The wartime memory of many British Tommies is fighting in UK dance halls and elsewhere alongside Black GIs against White American racists. Victims of violence also included British Colonial Servicemen and volunteer Colonial Technicians (recognition of this in some BBC archives does not impact on its ‘US spreading democracy’ news narrative). West Indies cricketing legend Learie Constantine was in charge of the Caribbean technical volunteers, and was subsequently given a peerage for his war service and sporting achievements. He wrote the following letter of complaint to the British government.
I cannot lay sufficient emphasis on the bitterness being created amongst the technicians by these attacks on coloured British subjects by white Americans … I am … loth to believe that coloured subjects of the Empire who are here on vital work could be attacked at random and at will and pleasure of these white American soldiers without the means of redress … I have lived in this country for a long time and claim many friends among the white population and I shiver to think that I am liable to attack by these men if I am seen in the company of my friends. I suggest something be done urgently, as I can foresee a crisis.
Corporate media apologists might question how much this experience was part of public consciousness. However, the middle section of the film Yanks (1979, director John Schlesinger) features an attempted dance hall lynching of a Black GI who’d been seen dancing with a white woman. And this film is primarily a wartime set romantic vehicle for Richard Gere, not a piece of political agit-prop. There were also similar phenomena internationality, including the Battle of Manners Street, in New Zealand where white American servicemen attempted to violently segregate a Services Club to the exclusion of local Maoris. Race and the US wartime presence were also believed to be contributing factors to the two days of rioting in Australia known as the Battle of Brisbane.
Post-war even in America it was impossible to sell in the cultural market place, the US establishment as a credible site of authority. The Black figure offered as an idealised son-in-law of a middle-class white family in the film, Guess who’s coming to dinner (1967) is not a member of the US establishment but a doctor working for a UN based organisation. Marvel Comics when starting the title Nick Fury, Agent of Shield, originally made Shield a UN based organisation, rather than US. The central protagonist of The President’s Analyst (1967) is on the run from the world’s intelligence agencies, the worst of which are the CIA and FBI. Indicative of the fear of oppression of US authorities the producers did not even feel safe in using the actual acronyms of US intelligence agencies.
When Tony Blair threw his weight behind America’s foreign wars, he did so flying in the face of this history and the cultural sensibilities it generated. He also threw into reverse Britain’s position as a post-war decolonising power. He subverted the Labour Party’s historical identity as a pro-workers organisation with a socialist agenda by aligning it with the right wing US Republican Party. He also subverted Labours’ historic anti-imperialist sensibility, which kept Britain under Harold Wilson’s Labour out of Vietnam. Perhaps most shocking for older Labour traditionalists and Black Britons, he took the UK’s intelligence and military sectors and forced them into relations with the US security services, that had historically tried to break the Civil Rights Movement, drive Martin Luther King to suicide, fed details of his sex life to the right wing press, and which had an assassination programme of American Black Liberationists entitled COINTELPRO.
Blair chose to support America’s Iraq War 5 years after arguably the worst lynching in US history – in 1998, James Byrd, “a Black man in Jasper, Texas was ‘lynched by dragging‘,” behind a pick-up truck until his body disintegrated. Three years after the start of the Iraq War, in Jenna, Louisiana “whites responded to black students sitting under the ‘white tree’ at their school by hanging three nooses from the tree.” And America’s post-war civil war Black Lives Matter crisis has still continued to manifest itself. As for Presidential and federal authority, this was also 5 years since Bill Clinton bombed a medical manufacturer in Sudan. 9/11 resulted in 3000 American deaths and many more injured. Clinton’s bombing is credited with “several tens of thousands of deaths” of Sudanese civilians caused by a medicine shortage” by German Ambassador Werner Daum and others.
Just as no one in the corporate media questions the death toll and torture of current US-led imperialism, no one also scrutinises the nature of just what has been unleashed on the world, or the massive ideological reboot needed to sustain it. Instead, we get ‘America spreading democracy’ and the ‘special relationship.
The post The G7 and the Orwellian Twin Tropes Propagandising US Global Domination first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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Juneteenth (June 19) has finally become a national holiday in the United States. Malik Miah looks at its origins and what it represents in the struggle for Black liberation.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
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On the very same day last week that President Biden signed legislation declaring Juneteenth a national holiday, the conservative-dominated Supreme Court effectively declared in Nestle USA, Inc. v. DOE et al. that slavery was morally acceptable, and U.S. capitalists could continue to profit from it, as long as it occurred outside U.S. borders.
While self-congratulatory celebrations proliferated in the wake of the new Juneteenth holiday, we are reminded of the wide gulf between symbolism and substance. Of course, symbols are extremely important. They draw attention to history and offer a frame for understanding it. They provide opportunities to affirm values and educate one another about how we got to where we are. Conversely, symbols of racism are mechanisms of continued trauma and insult. So, far be it for me to diminish the importance of symbols and historical markers.
That said, this week there was a churning in my gut as I listened to commentaries and condemnations of the evils of slavery, and discussions of how unjust it was that our ancestors in Texas were enslaved for two and a half years beyond the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment before they could free themselves. What got less attention and should have triggered widespread outrage was the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to side with the world’s biggest chocolate producer against former child slaves working on cocoa plantations in West Africa: On June 17, the Supreme Court ruled that the formerly enslaved children could not sue the Nestle and Cargill corporations, because their cocoa suppliers were based in Ivory Coast.
West Africa’s booming cocoa industry supplies Virginia-based Nestle Corporation and Minnesota-based Cargill with ingredients for chocolate products that make these companies billions in profits. Nestle boasted over $26 billion in revenue in 2015. In contrast, the young litigants, originally from Mali, told horrific stories of being forcibly transported to work sites, beaten, kept in locked rooms overnight and compelled to work 14-hour days for little or no pay. Some testified that they were terrorized, tortured and tied to trees as punishment for attempts to escape. A U.S. Labor Department Report from 2015 estimated that more than 2 million children work under such conditions in cocoa-growing regions of West Africa.
The lawsuit, which has meandered through the courts, was based on the Alien Tort Statute, a nearly obsolete law that has been used in recent years by foreign nationals seeking redress from U.S.-based multinational companies for human rights abuses.
But in a painful reminder that neoliberalism’s “free market at all costs” philosophy is still alive and well, the Supreme Court justices in effect looked the other way. Ultra-reactionary Clarence Thomas led the way, writing for the majority, determining that since Nestle and Cargill had essentially outsourced the abuse and feigned ignorance, it was not their fault. Lawyers for Nestle and Cargill argued for a level of immunity that enables companies to continue to operate globally with impunity, when it comes to labor abuses.
Democratic Party insider Neal Katyal — a former Obama Justice Department appointee (as acting solicitor general) — was defense counsel for the chocolate magnates. The scurrilous argument that Katyal made in front of the court back in December cited as a worthy legal precedent the fact that the firm that supplied Zyklon B gas to Nazi death camps in the 1940s was not held liable at Nuremberg tribunals. Therefore, he argued, Nestle and Cargill should not be held accountable for their complicity in child slavery today. Katyal went further to argue that holding U.S. companies responsible for overseas atrocities would put them at a “competitive disadvantage” relative to other countries. He delivered this morally bankrupt argument seemingly without shame and with a veiled and spurious sympathy for the enslaved children. According to Katyal and company, child slavery is not the fault of rich U.S. companies that incentivize these practices, but rather it is simply what Africans are doing to each other.
So, as we mark our calendars for a yearly federal commemoration of the time when Black people in Texas finally achieved at least some modicum of freedom from bondage in the 19th century, let us also organize to mark Juneteenth with protests against ongoing 21st-century manifestations of slavery, from the heinous treatment of unfree child laborers on West African cocoa plantations working in service of U.S. corporate profits, to the slavery-like conditions that are the bedrock of the prison industrial complex in the United States.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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Known in the US as Juneteenth, 19 June will now be a nationwide holiday to celebrate the end of slavery. President Joe Biden signed a bill on 18 June which formalised the annual event. But some say the move is being used as a stand-in for measures that would actually help African American communities today.
It marks the moment in 1865 when the last slaves were freed. The actual date of the Abraham Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation was several years earlier. But Texas held out – and maintained slavery – until Union troops advanced into the state and read the declaration in the town of Galveston.
Painful moments
At a ceremony at the White House, Biden said:
Great nations don’t ignore their most painful moments. Great nations don’t walk away. We come to terms with the mistakes we made. And remembering those moments, we begin to heal and grow stronger.
I’ve only been president for several months, but I think this will go down for me as one of the greatest honors I will have had as president.
Kamala Harris, the first Black US vice-president, said:
We are gathered here in a house built by enslaved people. We are footsteps away from where President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.
And we are here to witness President Joe Biden establish Juneteenth as a national holiday. We have come far, and we have far to go, but today is a day of celebration.
Emancipation?
Despite the generally positive reception, some were critical of the Biden administration for the measures they haven’t taken
One Twitter user pointed to the Biden government’s record on other important matters. He seemed to think the move was purely symbolic.
They painted BLM instead of defunding the police, clapped for essential workers instead of raising the wage, and made Juneteeth a holiday instead of making sure Black folks can vote. Always a symbolic victory instead of a material change.
— Read Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler (@JoshuaPotash) June 16, 2021
Another called the move an act of “perfomative liberation”.
The Senate unanimously passing Juneteenth as a federal holiday – and the Biden admin's championing of the cause – while actively obstructing raising minimum wages, student debt forgiveness, & gun reform is a reminder that performative liberation/resistance won't do a damn thing.
— D. Danyelle Thomas (@UnfitChristian) June 16, 2021
Writer Clint Smith told Democracy Now that the announcement was moment of “cognitive dissonance” which was “reflective of black experience as a whole”.
Biden’s move to make Juneteenth a federal holiday reflects the "marathon of cognitive dissonance" around the experiences of Black people in the U.S., says writer @ClintSmithIII. "We recognize that as a symbol, Juneteenth matters … but it is clearly not enough." pic.twitter.com/KGpjt7u9tm
— Democracy Now! (@democracynow) June 18, 2021
It seems that while Juneteenth is understandably important to a great many people, it’s being seen by some as a largely symbolic measure. And it doesn’t come close to addressing the still existing inequalities faced by many black Americans.
Featured image via Wikipedia/Nafsahd
By Joe Glenton
This post was originally published on The Canary.
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As Black Lives Matter continues to flourish in the United States and beyond, many activists within the movement are calling for renewed internationalism and collaboration among people across the African Diaspora. In this exclusive interview, author, activist and Black radical scholar Kehinde Andrews issues the call: “We need to get back aligned with the revolutionary version of Pan-Africanism.”
Andrews is founder of the Harambee Organization of Black Unity and professor of Black Studies at Birmingham City University in Birmingham, England. A son of first-generation Black British immigrants (African-Caribbean), he is now credited as the first Black Studies professor in the U.K. Co-editor of the book series, Blackness in Britain, Andrews is director of the Center for Critical Social Research and co-chair of the U.K.’s Black Studies Association.
His 2018 book, Back to Black: Retelling Black Radicalism for the 21st Century, was published by Zed Books in London and is still widely celebrated by Black activists, artists and intellectuals worldwide. A frequent contributor to The Guardian, Kehinde’s commentary has also been featured in The Washington Post, CNN, The Independent and Ebony Magazine. In this interview, Professor Andrews discusses the road forward for the Black radical diaspora and his new book, The New Age of Empire: How Racism and Colonialism Still Rule the World.
Lamont Lilly: What called you to Black Studies as an intellectual discipline?
Kehinde Andrews: I was a child of the British Black Power movement. Both my parents were heavily involved. We also had the Saturday Schools, which were formed as supplemental learning because the racism was so bad, even in elementary school. It was not until the mid-1960s that Britain started to have large numbers of Black children in the schools here. But since the educational setting and curriculum were so colonial in their views and teachings — so anti-Black, anti-Caribbean and anti-African — we made our own schools on the weekends.
These supplementary schools were not just for Black history and culture. Those same schools also included math and English because a lot of Black children weren’t receiving any education at all. The Saturday Schools are definitely where my calling first began. Black Studies may be new here in the formal sense, but our resistance has always been present.
You recently published a new book called, The New Age of Empire: How Racism and Colonialism Still Rule the World. What was your purpose in writing this?
The New Age of Empire is really an extension or deepening of my 2018 book, Back to Black. The goal is to help informing our community that this system is at a dead end now. It’s not for us and never has been. But with The New Age of Empire, I wanted to start with the very beginning of this thing called the West in 1492. This period marks the start of the largest genocide in human history, which in turn led to the enslavement of Africa and the evolution of colonial violence.
One of the things I wanted to drive home is this connection of colonial violence that makes capitalism possible. Without this history of colonial violence, not only is capitalism not possible, neither is white supremacy and the industrialization of Europe as we currently know it. I also wanted to show how this history still shapes what the West is today. To our oppressors, the same Black life that was disposable 500 years ago is just as disposable in 2021 — from the U.K. to the U.S., from the Caribbean to the continent of Africa.
We’re still having protests in the 21st century chanting “Black Lives Matter” because to the ruling elite, they never have. So that was the purpose of the book, to not only show this history and reflect upon it, but to essentially state that revolution is our only answer if we’re serious about our collective liberation.
In the U.S. South, the cotton industry is a major part of the historical landscape here. But you highlight how there in England, Manchester was a part of King Cotton too, as was London, Liverpool, even Glasgow in Scotland. You also draw a direct correlation to cotton money financing Europe’s industrial revolution. Interesting!
One of the things that Britain prides itself on is that it abolished slavery a few years earlier than the U.S. It was officially abolished here in 1838 versus 1865 in the United States. But while Britain may have abolished slavery, it was certainly still happy to bring in cotton from the U.S. South. One of the reasons that Britain’s slave trade ended early though was because it was sugar-based. The British were also fighting off more and more rebellions from native populations who never desired to be British colonies — present-day Jamaica and Barbados, for example. So, Britain’s abolishment of slavery was largely for economic reasons. It certainly was not out of morality.
Cotton was hugely important to the development of the British economy. Liverpool, along with Bristol, might get mentioned at times because they were port cities. But Manchester? No. People never talk about Manchester in relation to slavery, nor its role in the Triangular Trade. Manchester only becomes a vibrant urban center after a canal was built from Liverpool to Manchester. That’s where the cotton factories were located.
The city was built on cotton production. It would come in through Liverpool by way of New Orleans, then onto Manchester for processing. The U.S. South was their direct source. There was such a direct link that during the U.S. Civil War, the city of Liverpool was an open and avid supporter of the U.S. Southern confederacy. The industries in Liverpool wanted to keep slavery. Liverpool raised the equivalent of like 20 million pounds and sent it to the confederacy as a show of their support. This relationship meant a lot to Britain, and to multiple cities here. Since Britain was no longer the center of empire and production, it needed “the states” as a financial partner to help build itself back up. This is the history that brings us to today.
Sounds like a transfer of power from the old “mother country” to the new “mother country.”
That’s true. If we think about it, the U.S. became an even more important trading partner after its independence from Britain. This is one of the key shifts in the new age of empire. Britain no longer needed to have direct imperial control of foreign territories for it to still depend on those places. While Britain evolved in the name of diplomacy, U.S. ambition stepped forward as the new face of Western empire.
Colonialism found new forms. Today we have institutions like the World Bank, United Nations (UN) and International Monetary Fund (IMF) posing as friends while continuing to exploit, particularly throughout Africa and the Caribbean. Colonialism literally adapts to new conditions and new generations.
One of the British-based multinational conglomerates you mention in your book is Unilever. Unilever manufactures Lever 2000 and Dove soaps, produced from African oil palm from countries like Nigeria, Liberia and Sierra Leone. Are these kinds of economic agreements for natural resources equal in value? What does Africa gain?
Africa isn’t gaining much of anything in these kinds of agreements. Corrupt presidents or heads of state might be gaining something, but if you’re a rural farmer of oil palm, your life hasn’t changed much at all over the last 100 years. Many of the old colonial cash crops based on the African continent have still remained. Some have even predicted that by 2050, the West will need an additional plot of land the size of Germany specifically for oil palm farming. That’s because African oil palm is such a vital ingredient to so many of the products we consume.
In reference to Unilever, by resources, Africa is the richest continent in the world, which is why everyone is there. Companies like Unilever still rely on their extractions from African soil. If these companies had to pay a proper or fair amount for the oil palm that produces their wealth, there wouldn’t be as much profit for them. These corporations want Africa to be poor so they can continue extracting and exploiting.
One of the things I did not mention about Unilever was the recent controversy and backlash from its skin lightening product called Fair & Lovely. Unfortunately, there are Black people, Africans who are still using this stuff. It’s really a mental and psychological holdover from European colonization, this internalized anti-Blackness. However, after concerns and protests from the local Black Lives Matter movement here in Britain, Unilever decided it needed to rebrand to reflect more so-called racial justice. So, it changed the word “fair” to “glow.” Now it’s Glow & Lovely.
Different name, same colorism. Different name, same exploitation. It’s so ridiculous you almost have to laugh. Except the long-term effects of these dilemmas aren’t so funny.
In Chapter 6, “The Non-White West,” you state that “by 2100 the majority of Africa’s natural resources will have been depleted by foreign interests and its farmland either overused or in the hands of offshore investors.” How do we prevent your prediction from coming true?
The answer to that question belongs to Africa itself. What has allowed for this process of economic stripping to take place for so long is Africa’s lack of unity. If Africa united, none of this would be happening. The fact that we’re missing that strong sense of mass consciousness only fuels that division.
A strong sense of Black consciousness is what connects us, not only on the continent, but throughout the entire African diaspora. As much as we don’t like the West and its many forms of white supremacy, we should be taking notes. On the basis of white supremacy, Britain, Germany, France, the U.S. — these countries have all agreed to set their differences aside and work together. They all win, and Africa loses. We have to match that with a unified Black consciousness that speaks for the best interests of Africa and Africa’s global diaspora. If we’re going to prevent such a prediction from coming true, our time is right now.
Winnie Mandela, Kwame Nkrumah, Patrice Lumumba, Thomas Sankara, Amílcar Cabral … are these Pan-African freedom fighters and their teachings still relevant today?
These leaders are definitely still relevant and so is Pan-Africanism. They’re probably looking down on us right now, with love, saying, “We told you so.” But even though people like Thomas Sankara and Winnie Mandela may be gone, their ideas are still living and breathing with us.
In relation specifically to the ideology, I think people should understand that Pan-Africanism is more than just African people liking each other. Within Pan-Africanism, there are actually two different distinctions or schools of thought. There is the radical Pan-Africanism of Kwame Nkrumah and Patrice Lumumba, which is based on the idea of African socialism, unity forged beyond borders, and a collective sense of Black consciousness and self-determination. This Pan-Africanism is fully committed to anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism and women’s liberation.
The other form of Pan-Africanism is a bit more bourgeois and conservative. This form discards the idea of continental unity in favor of the nation-state model. This particular lineage is also open to supporting a kind of pseudo-Black capitalism. And although well-suited in Blackness, this form also tends to borrow from the West in hopes of reforming it versus being an antithesis of the West. The problem is that it is the latter more compliant version that is often uplifted and force-fed to the global African masses from Western figureheads.
We need to get back aligned with the revolutionary version of Pan-Africanism. This applies to the entire African diaspora because the continent needs the diaspora just like the diaspora needs the African continent. It only does us an injustice to see ourselves in the context of Britain or the United States. As Black and African people, our true power, base and hope is in organizing ourselves globally. This doesn’t just apply to the independence struggles of the 1960s. This also applies to today. We have to pick up the blueprint and push it forward.
Although he wasn’t based on the African continent, I think the work of Malcolm X’s Organization of Afro-American Unity offers a prime example; so does the work of Claudia Jones, who was exiled to Britain after being imprisoned and deported from the U.S. Some of us may have forgotten, but these revolutionary ancestors have never left us. Their teachings are living inside of us. The work now is bringing these ideas to life. I believe we can, my brother, because I believe in the Black radical diaspora. We can do this! We must.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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In a Memorial Day event held in Ohio by veteran’s organization American Legion, retired Army Lt. Col. Barnard Kemter was in the middle of a speech when his microphone was cut off, right after he began talking about Black peoples’ role in the history of the holiday.
Kemter kept going, telling reporters later that it was merely a malfunction. But, as the Akron Beacon Journal found, the event organizers turned off his microphone on purpose during the two minutes that he began discussing the origins of Memorial Day, which some attribute to celebrations organized by freed Black enslaved people in the 1860s.
“Throughout history, there has been a lot of claims about who actually performed the first Memorial Day service,” Kemter told The Washington Post. “With this speech, I chose to educate people as to the origin of Memorial Day and why we were celebrating it.”
“A lot of people viewed this as a healing speech and paying a tribute to the African Americans that started Memorial Day,” he went on.
Event organizers with the American Legion were apparently displeased with this portion of Kemter’s speech. Leaders of the local American Legion chapter asked the audio engineer for the event to turn off his microphone. When the engineer refused, one of the leaders reportedly did it themself.
Kemter soldiered on, speaking louder so that the audience could hear him. He talked about an event in the 1800s where formerly enslaved Black people commemorated Civil War veterans by exhuming the remains of several hundred Union soldiers to give them “a proper burial,” writes the Akron Beacon Journal.
Later, when the portion of the speech about Black people’s role in the history of the holiday was over, the microphone came back on.
“I find it interesting that [the American Legion] … would take it upon themselves to censor my speech and deny me my First Amendment right to [freedom of] speech,” Kemter told the Akron Beacon Journal. He said he was disappointed that the speech was cut off and that it was received well.
The local American Legion chapter president Cindy Suchan said that they had wanted the part of the speech in question to be eliminated, saying it “was not relevant to our program for the day,” because the “theme of the day was honoring Hudson veterans,” according to the Akron Beacon Journal.
Event organizers had told Kemter ahead of the event that they wanted him to “leave out the part of history of it,” even though he says Suchan told him he could write the speech about whatever he wanted, according to The Washington Post. However, the organizers failed to specify which paragraphs exactly, so Kemter left the speech intact.
According to historians, this isn’t the first time that the freed Black enslaved peoples’ story has been left out of history. Evidently, the ceremony in Charleston, South Carolina, is likely the first recorded Memorial Day commemoration. But it is virtually unknown in local and national history.
The Ohio American Legion apologized for the incident after Rep. Casey Weinstein (D-Ohio) called attention to it on Twitter. “We sincerely apologize for any harms caused and will hold those accountable once the facts are investigated,” the organization said.
But the American Legion, the world’s largest veteran’s organization, evidently has a history of racism within its national headquarters in Indianapolis and in some of its local chapters.
As Jasper Craven pointed out for The New Republic, the organization had spurned many World War I veterans of color and still “remains exceedingly white and exclusionary” to the point of hostility for Black veterans. The leadership for the organization is almost entirely white, Craven writes, despite the fact that a growing number of veterans are Black.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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As the nation grapples with fighting for racial justice and against police murders of Black Americans, Republicans have evidently found a different cause worth fighting for: making racist, seemingly unprompted defenses of slavery.
On Monday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) said that he doesn’t believe that 1619, the year that enslaved Africans first arrived in the U.S., is an important date in history. People have “exotic notions” about important points in U.S. history, and 1619 isn’t one of them, McConnell said.
“I just simply don’t think [racism is] part of the core underpinning of what American civic education ought to be about,” McConnell continued, speaking at the University of Louisville. McConnell has gone on a tirade against The New York Times’s 1619 Project about slavery in the U.S. and Democrats’ anti-racism agenda — though anti-anti-racism, as commentators have pointed out, is simply just racism.
Nikole Hannah-Jones, who headed the 1619 Project on slavery that has Republicans up in arms, spoke on CNN about McConnell’s comments. “This is not about the facts of history — it’s about trying to prohibit the teaching of ideas they don’t like,” she said.
Indeed, many Republicans have long embraced racism but have been emboldened by Donald Trump’s style of being openly and brazenly so — to the point that some political journalists have noted that the GOP wants to be called racist so that they can play the victim and claim to be silenced by anti-racists.
Perhaps that’s why Tennessee Republican state Rep. Justin Lafferty on Tuesday suggested that the Three-Fifths Compromise, which counted enslaved people as less than one whole person in population counts, was actually a good thing because it helped to end slavery. But it didn’t; it only further “sanctioned slavery more decidedly than any previous action,” as historian Staughton Lynd wrote.
Or maybe it’s why Colorado Republican state lawmaker Rep. Ron Hanks also defended the Three-Fifths Compromise last month, saying that it “was not impugning anybody’s humanity” to count an enslaved person as less than one human being.
Republicans evidently don’t believe that it was just some elements of slavery that were positive, however; Louisiana Republican state Rep. Ray Garofalo Jr. last week said that schools should teach “the good” of slavery alongside the bad. “If you are having a discussion on whatever the case may be, on slavery, then you can talk about everything dealing with slavery: the good, the bad, the ugly,” Garofalo said.
There is, of course, no “good” to slavery, and it’s abhorrently racist to suggest as such. Garofalo later retracted his statement, but only after Democrats circulated a video of him speaking on the “good” of slavery that now has nearly a million views.
Regardless of the GOP’s intentions, it’s no coincidence that they are raging an attack on anti-racism just as rallies and protests for Black Lives have swept the country. Though the GOP’s overt defenses of slavery all happened in recent weeks, the right has been waging racist attacks prominently in the past year.
For months, the right has been railing against critical race theory — scholarly work with the goal of dismantling oppression and white supremacy — despite lacking a clear understanding of what it is. They are claiming that racism has been eradicated in the U.S. even as Black Americans face death at the hands of the state simply for walking down the street or while sleeping in their homes.
It’s evidently not enough for the GOP that racism is alive and well in the U.S. — the party seems to be operating on a mandate to enshrine racism in the nation forever — and normalizing defenses of slavery appear to be part of that strategy.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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A new four-part documentary series, Exterminate All the Brutes, delves deeply into the legacy of European colonialism from the Americas to Africa. It has been described as an unflinching narrative of genocide and exploitation, beginning with the colonizing of Indigenous land that is now called the United States. The documentary series seeks to counter “the type of lies, the type of propaganda, the type of abuse, that we have been subject to all of these years,” says director and Haitian-born filmmaker Raoul Peck. “We have the means to tell the real story, and that’s exactly what I decided to do,” Peck says. “Everything is on the table, has been on the table for a long time, except that it was in little bits everywhere. … We lost the wider perspective.”
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: Republican lawmakers are continuing their attack on schools for teaching students about the true history of the United States, from the genocide of Native Americans to the legacy of slavery. Last week, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell wrote a letter to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona criticizing what he described as the Department’s promotion of revisionist history including The New York Times 1619 Project, which reexamined the pivotal role slavery played in the founding of the United States.
In his letter, McConnell wrote, “Americans never decided our children should be taught that our country is inherently evil,” he said. New York Times reporter Nikole Hannah Jones, who created the 1619 Project, responded by saying ” “Republicans across the U.S. are pushing laws to mandate ‘patriotic’ education & to prohibit the teaching of the #1619Project and about the nation’s racist past.”
Well, today, we spend the hour looking at an epic new series that delves deeply into the legacy of European colonialism from the Americas to Africa. The documentary is titled Exterminate All the Brutes. It’s directed by the Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck. It has been described as an unflinching narrative of genocide and exploitation, beginning with the colonizing of indigenous American land. This is the documentary’s trailer.
RAOUL PECK: There is the story we have been told. In Columbus’ travel journal, they were discovered. But there is no such thing as alternative facts. There is something we need to talk about. Three words that summarize the whole history of humanity. Civilization, colonization, extermination. This is the origin of the ideology of white supremacy. This is me in the middle, and I just want to understand, why do I bring myself into this story? Because I am in immigrant from a [beep] country. Neutrality is not an option.
It’s time to own up to a basic truth. The story of survival and violence. We know now what their task truly is. Exterminate all the brutes. It is not knowledge we lack. We already know enough. What is missing is the courage to understand what we know. Who are we? What if from the beginning the story was told the wrong way? The nightmare is buried deep in our consciousness, so deep that we do not recognize it. And over the centuries, we lost all bearings. Because the past has a future we never expect.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s the trailer for the HBO documentary series Exterminate All the Brutes which is available on HBO and HBO Max. Time Magazine said the series, quote, “may well be “the most politically radical and intellectually challenging work of nonfiction ever made for television.” We are joined by the Oscar-nominated Raoul Peck who joined us from France. He was born in Haiti, grew up in the Democratic Republic of Congo after his parents fled the Duvalier dictatorship. His past films include I Am Not Your Negro about James Baldwin, Lumumba about the Congolese Prime minister, the founding leader of Congo, Patrice Lumumba, and The Young Karl Marx.
Raoul Peck, it is great to have you back on Democracy Now! This is an epic masterpiece, this four one-hour documentary series. Can you talk about how you went from I Am Not Your Negro, which was the story of James Baldwin, to creating this masterpiece?
RAOUL PECK: Well, basically after I Am Not Your Negro, I went throughout the world with the film. I was fortunate to be able to see how the film was received in many different places. And one of the common threads through that was the type of reaction that you just mentioned, like Senate Leader Mitch McConnell. This denial is somehow a sign that they feel that they are entrenched now, they are attacked. There is great fear about some sort of civilization going overboard.
And for me it is a symbol that the type of lies, the type of propaganda, the type of abuse that we have been subject to during all these years. I am old enough to have heard many other people like Rick Santorum and Mitch McConnell and many others throughout the years. The only difference now is that we have the means to counter them. We have the means to tell the real story.
And that is exactly what I decided to do, to once and for all put everything on the table without any semblance of holding back my punches. Everything is on the table and have been on the table for a long time, except that it was in little bits everywhere. Because science, sociology, anthropology, et cetera, politics, have been cut up in little pieces, so we lost the wider perspective. And the film does exactly that, to bring us to the core story, to have the whole matrix of the last 700 years of basically Eurocentric ideology and narrative.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Raoul Peck, in providing this broader historical context, you trace the origin of contemporary modern forms of biological racism to the Spanish Inquisition and the so-called purity of blood statutes — that is limpieza de sangre — that was a means of distinguishing old Christians from conversos, that is Jews but also Moors, from the pure blood of Christians. These laws, you say, are the antecedents of the ideology of white supremacy. For the first time in the world, the idea of race based on blood was enshrined into law.
So how should we understand the continuities between the purity of blood statutes and the forms of racist violence we witness today? Because the entire argument of this truly magnificent work is that the past is not really past. It is, as you say, the past has a future that we can’t anticipate.
RAOUL PECK: Well, the thing is that we are accustomed to not see history as a continuity, as you say. And we came from a very specific history. We are not some sort of tribalist tribe that came out of nowhere. Today’s civilization is basically embedded in the capitalistic societies. And that story started around the 10th and 11th century with the first accumulation of riches, accompanied by the killing and exiling of Jews, killing Muslims, trying to go all the way to Jerusalem. Those first Crusades were able to create a lot of — or not create, to basically extract a lot of riches that allows the monarchy to be able to finance trips to discovering new roads to the east.
And the accident, which it was, of the so-called discovery of the new continent was not something they planned. And when it happened, they basically created a totally new concept, which is the concept of discovery. And from that day on, you could just go somewhere, put a flag, deploy military [INAUDIBLE] and say, “This is mine,” no matter who was on the land before.
And I remind you that at the time of Columbus, there were basically 100 million people on both continents in America. So you can imagine what it meant. Within 100 years, more than 90% of them were totally annihilated. So it is a very specific moment in the history of the modern world. For the U.S., it seems like it’s the beginning of a new world, but it’s not. It’s a continuity of a lot of action that have been the source of European civilization, basically.
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go to a clip from Exterminate All the Brutes, where you explain settler colonialism.
RAOUL PECK: From the beginning, the extension of the United States from sea to shining sea was the intention and design of the country’s founders. Free land was a magnet that attracted European settlers. This particular form of colonialism is called settler colonialism. But as a system, it requires violence. It requires the elimination of the natives and their replacement by European settlers.
AMY GOODMAN: And this is another clip from your series Exterminate All the Brutes. In this dramatized scene, a white man, played by the actor Josh Hartnett, engages in a standoff with a Native American woman leader.
WHITE MAN: I do not want to spill Seminole blood, kill Seminole children, Seminole women. Give us back the American property you stole from our good fellowman planters and settlers and I will let you move to the Injun territory the U.S. government has provided for your people.
NATIVE AMERICAN LEADER: You call human beings your property?
WHITE MAN: They’re slaves.
NATIVE AMERICAN LEADER: You steal land. You steal life. You steal humans. What kind of species are you?
AMY GOODMAN: We were listening to Abi Osceola [sp] or the woman who plays her, of the Seminole nation. You say her story goes deep into the history of this continent. Talk about who she is and why you choose to center her and the Seminole Nation in the first part of your series, including their solidarity with enslaved Africans.
RAOUL PECK: Well, the whole vision of the film is based in changing totally the point of view of who is telling the story. And in particular because this story not only center from Europe but also center in the bottom or in the middle of the United States of America, I had to start the film from that particular point of view of this woman who is the head of her tribe, of her nation.
And basically the Seminole have been one of the rare tribes who were never really — who did not really obey to the enforcement of leaving their territories. They were called the Invisible Tribe for a reason. So it was important for me to start it from a point of resistance, from a point of an individual, of a woman. And watching this invader basically telling her to leave her land and to deliver the slaves that were — and of course, that’s a story that is not really well-known, that a lot of slaves who escaped were welcomed by Seminoles and other tribes. And I wanted to start with that symbolic moment of resistance and also of solidarity, and from there, deploy the whole rest of the story.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Raoul, that is in one of the forms of continuity that you point to. The story of Native Americans is absolutely critical and the erasure of this genocidal history, in particular in the United States, is evidenced, as you show, in the perverse use of Native American names and designations for military weapons from Blackhawk to Apache, as well as military operations, the most recent and proximate of which was the May 2011 operation named Geronimo to assassinate Osama bin Laden. So could you talk a little bit more about that, the way in which Native American history has been distorted, if not entirely erased, and the uses to which it has been put in contemporary U.S. politics?
RAOUL PECK: Well, it is clear that — and you see that throughout the film through different type of device or type of stories, level of stories in the film, is how everything is somehow connected. The history of the Native American, which is for me the core story, whether it has been pushed out and erased sometimes or told the wrong way, it is like a phantom. It is already there. You can’t get rid of it. There are so many skeletons in those boxes, that they come up. And they are more and more coming out.
And it’s ironic that the very powerful U.S. Army who was basically at its core created not only to fight the British at the beginning but after independence was basically used to kill Indians and to keep Black slaves on the plantations. So basically, the U.S. Army at the beginning was the militia. So this story continues. It is basically a story of 200 years, which in the whole history of humankind is nothing. So as long — you can try to repress that story, but it is coming out there. As long as there will be Native American or there will be Black life, they will continue to tell that story. There is no escape from it.
And that’s why what I was saying at the beginning — when you see people like Rick Santorum saying that, “Well, when we came, there was nobody on this land” — what did you do with the 100 million people? You have to explain that. So it becomes more and more absurd that Republican leadership at that level are capable of such ignorance. It’s mind-bending [sp]. So for me, it is just the logic of the whole story. And that is what we try to explain and to tell in this story of Exterminate All the Brutes. My objective is really to make sure that that kind of ignorance cannot be voiced anymore.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Raoul, another possible form of repression, another idea that has been repressed, is something that Sven Lindqvist in his extraordinary book Exterminate All the Brutes, from which your film substantially draws, he shows how closely intertwined the idea of progress is with racism and even genocide. And in the film, you explain Darwin’s central if unintended role in providing scientific validation for racial prejudice and hierarchies with his notion of natural selection, saying in fact that genocide came to be regarded as the inevitable byproduct of progress. You show in the film as well the iconic late 19th-century painting by John Gast titled American Progress. But of course, this idea of progress remains central to the way in which global society and American society are organized. What alternatives do you see to this ideology, and where do you see it, if at all, taking shape?
RAOUL PECK: Well, it is a very complicated question to answer. And I don’t really go by that way in assessing what the future will be or what are the solution. I think any solution will first have to start with the real story. We need to sit down around the same table and agree on the diagnostic. We have to agree on the genocide. We have to agree in the whole line of history that has been going on for more than 700 years. Otherwise, there is no conversation possible. So I am not and we are not, if I can speak for many others, it is not about revenge. It is about let’s see the world as it is and let’s name all of the things that happened and bring us to what the world is today. That is what it is about. It is not about showing how culprit you are or not. It is about acknowledging the past and the present because they are strongly connected.
So for me, it’s the same thing as democracy. As long as we accept democracy as our mode of communication, if we want to come out of that situation, it is implied that we have to sit down and have a real conversation, an honest conversation. But unfortunately, we see that the dominant narrative is not ready for that. They’re totally with the back on the wall and can’t let go of their huge inequality that is actually in those last 30, 40 years that have never been as extreme as it is.
January 6th is also another sign of a democracy which is in a dire situation, that this country which had been seen as the forefront of democracy and justice was able to attack the very center of that democracy. So the confusion is just huge. And it is difficult for me to acknowledge any type of solution. I think the solution should come from us, from all of us, and a collective decision. That is the only vision I can have.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Raoul Peck, the acclaimed Haitian-born filmmaker who then grew up in the Democratic Republic of Congo as well as the United States. He is the director of the new HBO four-part documentary series Exterminate All the Brutes. We continue our conversation after break.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: “American Dream” by J.S Ondara, one of the songs featured in the series Exterminate All the Brutes. This is Democracy Now!, Democracynow.org, the Quarantine Report. I’m Amy Goodman with Nermeen Shaikh. If you want to get our daily email digest of news, headlines, stories and alerts, send the word “democracynow” — one word, without a space — to 66866. Text the word “democracynow” — one word, without a space — to 66866.
We are continuing now with our conversation with Raoul Peck, the Haitian-born director of the new HBO four-part documentary series Exterminate All the Brutes. I want to go to another clip from the second episode in the series, where Raoul Peck — he is the narrator of this series — explains what happened after Columbus arrived in what is now Haiti, where Raoul Peck was born.
RAOUL PECK: Instead of the bustling ports of the East Indies, Columbus came upon a tropical paradise populated by the Taíno people, what is now Haiti. Then from the Iberian Peninsula came merchants, mercenaries, criminals and peasants. They seized the land and property of indigenous peoples and declared the territories to be extensions of the Spanish and Portuguese states. These acts were confirmed by the monarchies and endorsed by the papal authority of the Roman Catholic Church. That’s more or less the official story. And through that official story, a new vision of the world was created, the doctrine of discovery.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s a clip from Exterminate All the Brutes, the 18th century known as the Age of Revolutions. But we often associate this time with the American Revolution or the French Revolution, not the Haitian Revolution, which was led by Black slaves, the first country in the Western Hemisphere to be born of a slave uprising. You say, Raoul Peck, the only revolution that materialized the idea of enlightenment, freedom, fraternity, and equality for all.
Haiti becomes a republic and the U.S. Congress would not recognize it for decades, fearful that the fact that Haiti was born of a slave uprising would inspire the enslaved people of the United States to rise up as well. Can you talk about the erasure of the Haitian Revolution, your own country, Haiti, its significance for you, and how the U.S. dealt with Haiti all of these years?
RAOUL PECK: The best words for this is what Michel-Rolph Trouillot have written about silencing the past. It was key for the U.S. and all the other European powers to silence the Haitian Revolution because it was in their eyes worse than Cuba in the 1950s. We were under a strict embargo because all of them had economy that still relied on slavery. And Haiti was the worst example they could have. And Haiti was also beating them in terms of their own ideology of enlightenment, because Haiti, the first constitution of Haiti, basically stated any man or woman or person who set foot on the island is a free person. And none of the other revolutions dared go so far, because they were totally involved in slavery and were profiting from it. So there was no way the Haitian Revolution could be accepted.
So when people say that America is the first democratic country in the Western Hemisphere, it is not. It is Haiti. And the story continue until today. We have a history of being attacked, of being invaded, of many of our leaders come to power with the acceptance of the U.S. government. And it continue until today. Basically, the last two presidents we had came into power thanks to the support of the U.S. government. So we are unfortunately a long story of abuse from the United States and also of resistance. Because one thing that we can say is that the Haitian people were always, whether it take 30 years, five years, or two years, they always make sure that they can get rid of those corrupt leaders.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: I want to ask about one of the critical issues that you raise in the last part of the film, a critical question. You talk about your own experience living in Berlin where you lived for 15 years and were also a film student, where you made a film on a Nazi torture compound. You say when you were there that you thought a lot about how a country that has produced some of humanity’s best philosophers, scientists and artists also operated one of the most devastating scientifically run and engineered killing machines.
Now, many people have reflected on this question and the seeming contradiction in this fact by concluding that the Holocaust was some kind of historical aberration. In other words, that it stands very much outside the history of the Enlightenment and the ideas of humanism and universalism on which it apparently stands. But even as this is raised as a question, your film suggests that other conclusions could be drawn. Could you talk a little bit about that?
RAOUL PECK: Well, it’s nothing new. In fact, there are many scholars that have worked on that specific question for the last 50, 60 years. And of course there is resistance to say that the Holocaust was a very special moment in the life of Western civilization. But it’s not. It’s a continuity of a will [sp] of genocide, the will [sp] of eliminate people that are deemed inferior. The structure of genocide are always the same.
The person who invented the word “genocide” in 1943, Raphael Lemkin — we went to the New York Public Library, and in that library, in his file, there is a list of something around 42 previous genocides before the Holocaust. And he include in it of course the genocide against the Native American people. So trying to make any type of genocide special I think is a really not correct way of seeing the history of humankind. They all copied from each other.
They are all of course specific. You can’t directly compare the genocide in Rwanda with the genocide in Cambodia and with the Holocaust. They have different ideological reason. They have different historical reason. They have different people involved. But as the structure, as the system of genocide, they all obey the same pattern of first pinning down a special category of person, of people, and then start saying that we are superior to them, and they are insect. And as soon as you come to the point where they are animals or they are savages, or they are insect, you are allowed to kill them. And that is the excuse that was always needed for every imperialist, for every conqueror in order to eliminate whoever was in the land they wanted to conquer. So it’s similar. It happened similar throughout the history of humankind. And it became more specific within the concept of the capitalistic society because then it was also linked to profit. It was also linked to make bigger territories in order to exploit large communities. So I have had that discussion many years ago, back ago, including in Germany.
But today, I think we should move past that what I would call the confrontation between who got the biggest pain. Do we put slavery confronted to the Holocaust or the [INAUDIBLE] pain? It is not about that. We are all from the same human family. It is not about who has suffered more. I think we have to acknowledge every piece of history that happened on this planet, and we have to give responses to them. And we have to explain why they happened. Because it is the only way that eventually we can prevent them to happen again and again.
AMY GOODMAN: We want to talk more about that after this last clip from the series Exterminate All the Brutes.
RAOUL PECK: Trading human beings, what sick mind thought of this first? Brought by force and pushed to death — slavery, or the trade, as they they referred to it euphemistically. A state-sponsored genocide. What does this say about the civilized world?
AMY GOODMAN: So if you could talk more about what this does say, and going back to the beginning, talking about genocide, the term coined by Raphael Lemkin, colonization, as well as civilization, and how you find hope today in the discussions, if this is all acknowledged, though you are saying just acknowledging this is not enough.
RAOUL PECK: Yes. Of course. But acknowledging it is a big step, and that is what I wanted to say before, is that even for me as a filmmaker, telling that story, it took a lot of thinking in order to tell a story where for the first time you tell the story of the genocide of Native American and then you tell the story of slavery and then you tell also one of the major extermination story, which is the Holocaust. And for the first time I think, at least on film, you can see the connections between them.
And for me, it is a huge step. It is taking all those atrocity in a different context. And for me, it can only be the beginning of a wider conversation. Instead of each part keeping their own [INAUDIBLE], keeping their own death, their own pain, and sometimes being used against each other, you know? And that is a divide that has been used for many, many years. For me, the film is also a step to break that separate narrative. There is not many different stories. There is one historical knowledge. And we need to access it.
And to your question, that’s the [INAUDIBLE] in the series. We already know enough. The problem is, what do we do with that knowledge? Because everything I say in the film, everything that Sven Lindqvist tells the story about, or Michel-Rolph Trouillot, or Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, those are fact. Those are highly competent scholars who spent their life documenting the horror. And my use of their work with them was exactly that, to force the conversation to a more sovereign [sp] type of discussion and to push aside the blurring of history, push aside the ignorance that still reign in the discussion.
I’m not going to name them again, the two politicians I named, but I think the population are more and more interested in learning where they come from. There’s a reason why everybody now wants to have their DNA analyzed. Because there is some sort of feeling of connection, you know? And it’s our job as filmmakers and U.S. journalists as well to lay that in plain sight. And then we can say, “Okay, what do we do with this?”
NERMEEN SHAIKH: That’s exactly — we just have a minute. What do we do with this? Your film begins and ends with the same line that Sven Lindqvist says again and again-”It’s not knowledge that we lack. What is missing is the courage to understand what we know and draw the conclusions.” How does your film and the work of these other authors enable that courage?
RAOUL PECK: I was primarily educated by Jesuit. [laughs] And one thing, maybe from that, that I believe in the notion of knowledge. I believe in the notion of learning the truth. And the film for me is the first step. My wish is that every school, every university is able to watch the film and have discussion around it. Because you cannot go further if you don’t know your own history, whatever the side you are on. But you need to know. It is not about accusing you of anything. It’s about facing your reality. Because you can’t understand what is going on. You can’t understand why policeman are still killing Black kids and Black men and Black women in this country if you don’t know where it comes from.
And it’s unfortunate, we are in a time where we have a huge instrument for communication, and huge instrument for learning. You can go on the Internet and learn about everything. But we lack a very condensed matrix of those histories that we have been built by. And each one of us needs to do our homework, otherwise I don’t see any nonviolent outcome out of this.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, you have given us a remarkable assignment and an epic work to watch for all. Raoul Peck, acclaimed Haitian-born filmmaker, director of the new HBO four-part documentary series Exterminate All the Brutes. Visit democracynow.org to watch our 2018 interview with Raoul Peck, about his films The Young Marx and I Am Not Your Negro about James Baldwin.
That does it for our show. A very Happy Birthday to Denis Moynihan! I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh. Thanks so much for joining us. Stay safe.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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Australia accused of being slow to respond to human rights abuses in China’s Xinjiang region because of fears of trade sanctions
The Australian government has left the door open to toughening up the nation’s laws against modern slavery amid concerns about human rights abuses in China’s Xinjiang region.
Officials also revealed at a Senate hearing on Tuesday that the government was in regular discussions “with all China-facing businesses” and had used those conversations to highlight the risks of forced labour in supply chains from Xinjiang.
Related: ‘We will respond in kind’: China’s ambassador warns Australia not to join Xinjiang sanctions
Related: Home affairs secretary Mike Pezzullo urged to ‘tone it down’ after ‘drums of war’ speech
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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(Recorded at Carnegie Hall on June 19, 2019) Juneteenth marks the day in 1895 when slaves in Texas learned they were free. Abraham Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation two and a half years earlier, but many states ignored it, … Continue reading
The post Juneteenth: America’s Other Independence Day appeared first on BillMoyers.com.
This post was originally published on BillMoyers.com.
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Slavery is our nation’s original sin; the treatment of people of color a blot on the history of a country “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Those who might have thought that … Continue reading
The post Our Racist Past appeared first on BillMoyers.com.
This post was originally published on BillMoyers.com.
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Today, Republicans talk about “election integrity,” but their end game is the same as that of the former Confederates after the war: to keep Black and Brown Americans away from the polls to make sure the government does not spend tax dollars on public services. Continue reading
The post Silencing Black Voters, Again appeared first on BillMoyers.com.
This post was originally published on BillMoyers.com.
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March 26, 2021 Georgia Governor Brian Kemp signed his state’s new voter suppression law last night in a carefully staged photo op. As journalist Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer pointed out, Kemp sat at a polished table, with six white … Continue reading
The post The Southern System appeared first on BillMoyers.com.
This post was originally published on BillMoyers.com.
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A new report has found that tuna fishing companies in the Pacific are doing little to stop slavery on their boats.
The canned tuna industry is rife with allegations of modern slavery in its Pacific supply chains, with little protection for workers from forced labour.
The Business and Human Rights Resource Centre report, All At Sea: Modern slavery in Pacific supply chains of canned tuna, surveyed dozens of the world’s largest canned tuna brands.
While more than four in five of them have public commitments on workers’ human rights, this doesn’t translate into efforts to end slavery in their supply chains.
The covid-19 pandemic has also heightened the risk for workers of experiencing modern slavery.
New Zealand and other countries have been urged by the centre to legislate against products made using forced labour.
“Too many Pacific tuna fishermen that put food on our tables face abuse and confinement every day,” said Phil Bloomer, the executive director of the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre.
Failing to provide duty of care
“Put simply, the brands who put the cans on their shelves are failing to provide adequate duty of care to these workers who furnish their products.”According to Bloomer, when the centre first approached these brands two years ago, many had made paper promises to improve their approach to human rights.
“Yet, two years on, the laggard companies have done next to nothing.
The All At Sea fisheries industry slavery report. Image: BHRRC “This is not inevitable. A handful of companies – Tesco, Thai Union and Woolworths (Australia) – have shown it is both commercially viable and a moral imperative to emancipate workers caught in modern slavery.”
Only six companies of the original 35 surveyed by the centre have revised their human rights due diligence processes over the last two years: Ahold Delhaize, Coles, Conga Foods, Kaufland, REWE Group and Woolworths.
Bloomer said other brands must catch up and take urgent action to protect workers.
“Investors should also note that the laggards not only run major reputation risk, but also imminent legal risk as new laws in 2021 will leave their negligence exposed to legal challenge.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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A new report has found that tuna fishing companies in the Pacific are doing little to stop slavery on their boats.
The canned tuna industry is rife with allegations of modern slavery in its Pacific supply chains, with little protection for workers from forced labour.
The Business and Human Rights Resource Centre report, All At Sea: Modern slavery in Pacific supply chains of canned tuna, surveyed dozens of the world’s largest canned tuna brands.
While more than four in five of them have public commitments on workers’ human rights, this doesn’t translate into efforts to end slavery in their supply chains.
The covid-19 pandemic has also heightened the risk for workers of experiencing modern slavery.
New Zealand and other countries have been urged by the centre to legislate against products made using forced labour.
“Too many Pacific tuna fishermen that put food on our tables face abuse and confinement every day,” said Phil Bloomer, the executive director of the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre.
Failing to provide duty of care
“Put simply, the brands who put the cans on their shelves are failing to provide adequate duty of care to these workers who furnish their products.”According to Bloomer, when the centre first approached these brands two years ago, many had made paper promises to improve their approach to human rights.
“Yet, two years on, the laggard companies have done next to nothing.
The All At Sea fisheries industry slavery report. Image: BHRRC “This is not inevitable. A handful of companies – Tesco, Thai Union and Woolworths (Australia) – have shown it is both commercially viable and a moral imperative to emancipate workers caught in modern slavery.”
Only six companies of the original 35 surveyed by the centre have revised their human rights due diligence processes over the last two years: Ahold Delhaize, Coles, Conga Foods, Kaufland, REWE Group and Woolworths.
Bloomer said other brands must catch up and take urgent action to protect workers.
“Investors should also note that the laggards not only run major reputation risk, but also imminent legal risk as new laws in 2021 will leave their negligence exposed to legal challenge.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
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March 15 is the day in 1820 that Maine, the Pine Tree State, joined the Union. With the Missouri Compromise, which involved Maine’s free state status, the conflict over slavery became all the hotter. Continue reading
The post As Maine Goes, So Goes the Nation appeared first on BillMoyers.com.
This post was originally published on BillMoyers.com.
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White supremacists spread a myth of the plight of ‘Irish slaves’. Now academics and authors are bringing the true history to light
It was one of the most shocking chapters in Britain’s long, bloody subjugation of Ireland: the buying, selling and transportation of Irish chattel slaves to the colonies in America.
Manacled and brutalised, they filled the bellies of ships that crossed the Atlantic and were put to work on plantations in the Caribbean and North America, sweating till they died in service of empire and profits.
Related: Activists target removal of statues including Columbus and King Leopold II
I don’t really know what to say. An “Irish slaves” meme posted on Facebook on the 21 June by a member of the Norristown Republican Committee has racked up almost 900,000 shares in less than a week thus potentially appearing on approx 300 million timelines. pic.twitter.com/7NhD6B3MSj
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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A trial date has been set for four people charged with criminal damage in relation to the toppling of a statue of slave trader Edward Colston.
The bronze memorial to the 17th century slave merchant was pulled down during a Black Lives Matter protest on 7 June last year, before being dumped in Bristol Harbour and later recovered by Bristol City Council.
Charges allege that the four defendants, without lawful excuse, jointly and with others, damaged the statue of Edward Colston, a listed monument belonging to Bristol City Council.
It is claimed that the defendants committed the offence “intending to destroy or damage such property or being reckless as to whether such property would be destroyed or damaged”.
All four defendants pleaded not guilty to the charge against them during the hearing at Bristol Crown Court.
Judge Peter Blair QC, the recorder of Bristol, said he would preside over a trial of the case.
He told the defendants: “You have pleaded not guilty and therefore I am fixing a trial date of December 13 for you which you must attend without fail on that day and the subsequent days.
“We estimate that it will go into a second week. I am suggesting probably setting aside seven to eight days so you need to make sure that your diaries are so arranged.
“There will be a hearing on November 8 to take stock of the case and make sure that everyone is working successfully towards your trial date.
“You don’t have to attend but you may attend if you wish. Your counsel may attend by video link.
“You are on unconditional bail and that will continue, so you are free to leave.”
Ahead of the hearing, the legal firm representing three of the four defendants released a statement.
Raj Chada, head of criminal defence, and Laura O’Brien, associate, at London-based law firm Hodge Jones & Allen, said they would fight the charges “vigorously”.
“We are committed to defending them and their right to a fair trial in this important case. We ask that their privacy is respected,” they said.
The next hearing in the case will take place on November 8 at Bristol Crown Court.
By The Canary
This post was originally published on The Canary.
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The Biden administration is reviving the legal and moral case for slavery reparations. Continue reading
The post The Incalculable Debt That America Owes Black People appeared first on BillMoyers.com.
This post was originally published on BillMoyers.com.
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Inde etiam habitus nostri honor et frequens toga; paulatimque discessum ad delenimenta vitiorum, porticus et balinea et convivorum elegantiam. Idque apud imperitos humanitas vocabatur, cum pars servitutis esset.
(They adopted our dressing fashion, and begun wearing the togas; little by little they were drawn to touches such as colonnades, baths, and elegant talks. Because they didn’t know better, they called it ‘civilization,’ when it was part of their slavery.)
— Tacitus, Agricola
Introduction
The general problem of culture today is its ability to facilitate and support negative aspects of society through encouraging escapism, diversion and ignorance regarding many important issues of contemporary life, such as economic crises, repressive legislation, poverty, and climate chaos. Or worse still, the use of culture to promote elite views of society regarding power and money, as well as imperialist agendas through negative depictions of a targeted ethnic group or country.
In this, some would call a neo-feudalist age, we see echoes of an earlier feudalism with its abuse of power and wealth that the philosophers of the Enlightenment tried to deal with and rectify. The Enlightenment was an intellectual and philosophical movement that dominated the world of ideas in Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries.
It was led by philosophers such as Cesare Beccaria, Denis Diderot, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, John Locke, Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, Hugo Grotius, Baruch Spinoza, and Voltaire. Their concerns about injustice, intolerance and autocracy led to the introduction of democratic values and institutions, and the creation of modern, liberal democracies.
A painting of the 1840 Anti-Slavery Conference. The Anti-Slavery Society Convention, 1840, by Benjamin Robert Haydon (died 1846), given to the National Portrait Gallery, London in 1880 by the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. Oil on canvas, 1841. 117 in. x 151 in. (2972 mm x 3836 mm). This monumental painting records the 1840 convention of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society which was established to promote worldwide abolition.However, a new movement in the arts and literature arose in the late 18th century, Romanticism, which emphasized inspiration, subjectivity, and the primacy of the individual. Romanticism was a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, aristocratic society and politics, and the scientific rationalization of nature. Romanticism became the basis of many subsequent cultural movements whose common feature has been anti-science and individualism.
The Romanticist influence can be seen in ‘mainstream’ mass culture and high culture in terms of its emphasis on formal experimentation or emotions over sociopolitical content. Romanticist reaction stressed “sensibility” or feeling, and tended towards looking inwards. It was a movement whose ideas have come to dominate much of culture today.
Weighing scales, planets, and fractals
Romanticism is portrayed as having left and right aspects. If we picture a weighing scale with opposing ideas, for example, we can have the radical opposition to fascism (Romanticist Expressionism) on one side and the radical right of National Socialism on the other side. However, what if this weighing scale was on one side of an even bigger scale? On the other side of that bigger scale would be Enlightenment ideas.
Little weighing scale on one side of an even bigger scaleWe rarely get to see the Enlightenment side of the larger scales. We live in a society where we are generally presented with the small scales two sides to everything (the bi-party system, good Nazis [only following orders] v the bad Nazis [gave the orders], this ‘good’ person v that ‘bad’ person, good cop v bad cop) but the reality is that they are usually different sides of the same coin. Similarly, on the smaller scale, the left and right aspects of Romanticist ideas are also two sides of the same coin, because what they both have in common is their rejection of science and reason.
Yet, on the big scales, the Enlightenment side we find progressive politics, the left opposition who were the first to be put into the concentration camps in the 1930s, the community workers, writers, and activists who work diligently today for change in the background are all squeezed out of the large, dominant media-controlled picture.
The problem with this skewed picture is that understanding what is going on becomes as difficult to ascertain as the movements of the planets were to the ancients. Seeming to go in all sorts of strange directions, the ancient Greeks called the planets ‘planeta’ or ‘wanderers’. The movements of the planets were perplexing in a geocentric (earth-centered) universe. It was only with the application of modern science, putting the sun at the center of a solar system, that the odd movements of the planets suddenly fell into place and made sense. We have the same experience of ‘revelation’ or understanding when science is applied to many different difficult problems in various aspects of history, philosophy and society itself.
‘Planets appear to go in one direction, take a looping turn, and then go in the opposite direction. This appears because of the differences of our orbits around the Sun. The Earth gets in an inside or outside track as we pass them causing a planet to look as if it had backed up and changed direction. They wander around the sky.’The word ‘science’ comes from the Latin word ‘scientia‘ meaning ‘knowledge’ and is a systematic exploration that allows us to develop knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe. The development of science has allowed us to determine what is truth and what is falsehood. Truth is defined as the property of being in accord with fact or reality and the application of science allows us to verify truth in a provable way.
In this sense truth is like a fractal. Fractals are geometrical shapes that have a certain definite appearance. When we magnify a fractal we see the same shape again. No matter how much we magnify the shape, the same geometrical patterns appear infinitely. Truth is similar to a fractal in that whether the truth of something is held by one person, a group of people, a community or a nation its essence remains the same on a micro or macro level.
‘Fractals appear the same at different levels, as illustrated in successive magnifications of the Mandelbrot set. Fractals exhibit similar patterns at increasingly small scales called self-similarity, also known as expanding symmetry or unfolding symmetry.’The heliocentric view of the universe remains true even if only one person believes or many believe, even in the face of powerful forces. For example, Galileo’s championing of heliocentrism led him to be investigated by the Roman Inquisition in 1615, where he was found guilty of heresy and spent the rest of his life under house arrest. The truth eventually came out and Galileo was pardoned by the Roman Catholic church (359 years later).
Contradictions and falsehoods
It has often been said that the truth will set you free. We live in a society of contradictions and falsehoods where lies, cheating and deception contradict reality. However, many refuse to see the truths of modern society, while others are actively involved in creating the deceptions that maintain the status quo. We know that people are ‘unfree’ and we accept many different levels of this condition: captivity, imprisonment, suppression, dependency, restrictions, enslavement, oppression.
We may even see this condition as applying to others and not to ourselves. But if we examine closely and truthfully our own position in the societal hierarchy we may recognize our own powerlessness: the contradiction between our view of ourselves and the reality of our situation. Although we vote and we recognize the social contract by rendering taxes to the state, the fact is that very little of substance changes and generally things seem to get worse.
As I have written elsewhere, the fact is that we are triply exploited: we are taxed on wages, alienated from wealth created (profits), and we pay interest on the money borrowed from the wealthy to pay for the capital and current expenditure needed for the maintenance of society and fill in the gap created by the wealthy in the first place.
How is this system of exploitation maintained? Aside from the obvious threat of imprisonment for nonpayment of taxes, and the existence of police and army to enforce the laws of the state: the most influential, and sometimes most subtle tool, is through culture.
The culture of slavery
Culture has a long history of use and abuse, from the bread and circuses of Roman times to the social media of today.
In modern society mass culture helps to maintain this system of exploitation and keeps people in general from questioning their position in the societal hierarchy. The middle classes are lulled into thinking they are free because of better wages making for an easier life, while the working class work ever harder to achieve the benefits of the middle class: higher education, higher status, higher wages. (It has been suggested that the middle class are essentially ‘working class people with huge debts’; e.g., large mortgages.)
However, in general, people work in a globalized system of exploitation in states that support and maintain it thus making wage slaves of the 99 percent.
Slaves in chains during the period of Roman rule at Smyrna (present-day İzmir), 200 CE.The traditional definition of slavery is ‘someone forbidden to quit their service for another person and is treated like property.’ Modern slavery takes on different forms such as human trafficking, debt bondage, and forced labour:
Experts have calculated that roughly 13 million people were captured and sold as slaves between the 15th and 19th centuries; today, an estimated 40.3 million people – more than three times the figure during the transatlantic slave trade – are living in some form of modern slavery, according to the latest figures published by the UN’s International Labour Organization (ILO) and the Walk Free Foundation. Women and girls comprise 71% of all modern slavery victims. Children make up 25% and account for 10 million of all the slaves worldwide.
While this may apply to the most extreme cases in modern society, the majority of workers have no control over the wealth they produce:
One of the defining features of the employment relationship in all capitalist countries is that the worker’s will is, by law, “subordinate” to the employers. The employer has the right, within broad bounds, to define the nature of the task, who performs it, and how. This shows up in all kinds of surveillance, control, and submission — also known as maximizing productivity and extracting profit.
The investors and the shareholders benefit the most, while the employees receive wages of varying levels according to the demand for their particular skill-set.
We are encouraged to accept this way of life and there are plenty of different state methods to make sure that we do. However, culture is an important tool of soft power, in particular, mass culture.
The role of mass culture is absolutely essential for the creation, maintenance, and perpetuation of a broad acceptance of the ever-changing forms of technological ‘progress’ and geopolitical shifts in modern capitalist societies, particularly as the global financial crisis (corporate and national debt) deepens.
Culture on three levels
To do this, modern mass culture operates on three different levels. The first level is creating acceptance through diversion and escapism and turning people into passive consumers. Secondly, through the overt representation of elite ideology. Thirdly, and more controversially, through covert manipulation of mass culture to benefit the agenda of elites.
In the first case, consumption becomes inseparable from the ideas of enjoyment and fun. Earlier twentieth century theorists of the Frankfurt School saw consumers as essentially passive but later theoreticians such as Baudrillard saw consumption as an unconscious social conditioning, consuming culture to achieve social mobility by showing awareness of the latest trends in mass culture.
Secondly, overt representation of elite ideology is evident in mass culture that glorifies the upper classes and promotes racism and militarist imperialism. In particular, mass culture depicting historical and contemporary events can be portrayed from an elite perspective.
Thirdly, conscious manipulation of the masses using psychological means, and more controversially, predictive programming. In the 1930s Edward Bernays was a pioneer in the public relations industry using psychology and other social sciences to design public persuasion campaigns. Bernays wrote:
If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it? The recent practice of propaganda has proved that it is possible, at least up to a certain point and within certain limits.
‘For Adorno and Horkheimer, the culture industry creates false needs to keep us purchasing products we do not actually need by manipulating our psychological impulses and desires.’Another form of mass manipulation is the concept of predictive programming. Predictive Programming is the theory “that the government or other higher-ups are using fictional movies or books as a mass mind control tool to make the population more accepting of planned future events.” It is by its nature hard to prove yet the many extraordinary coincidences between events depicted in mass culture and later actual events is, at the very least, disconcerting. For example, the film The Manchurian Candidate depicting the son of a prominent U.S. political family who is brainwashed into being an unwitting assassin for a Communist conspiracy, was released in 1962, a year before the assassination of J F Kennedy in 1963 by Lee Harvey Oswald, an emotionally disturbed ‘communist sympathizer’ who declared his innocence and believed he was being used as a ‘patsy’.
Thus, these three levels allow elites to control how the past, the present, and the future is depicted in mass culture, according to national and geopolitical agendas.
Cultural producers
In their defense, the role of cultural producers has never been easy, and the more money or support that is needed for a cultural project, the harder it is to maintain an independent position.
While with modern production methods and technology it is easier to produce books, films and music independently of the major producers and distributors, in the past elite pressure, censorship, and imprisonment were common.
Pushkin, for example, in his Ode to Liberty, exclaimed with indignation:
Unhappy nation! Everywhere
Men suffer under whips and chains,
And over all injustice reigns,
And haughty peers abuse their power
And sombre prejudice prevails.However, later during the time of Nicholas I, he changed and ‘adopted the theory of art for art’s sake’:
According to the touching and very widespread legend, in 1826 Nicholas I graciously “forgave” Pushkin the political “errors of his youth,” and even became his magnanimous patron. But this is far from the truth. Nicholas and his right-hand man in affairs of this kind, Chief of Police Benkendorf, “forgave” Pushkin nothing, and their “patronage” took the form of a long series of intolerable humiliations. Benkendorf reported to Nicholas in 1827: “After his interview with me, Pushkin spoke enthusiastically of Your Majesty in the English Club, and compelled his fellow diners to drink Your Majesty’s health. He is a regular ne’er-do-well, but if we succeed in directing his pen and his tongue, it will be a good thing.” The last words in this quotation reveal the secret of the “patronage” accorded to Pushkin. They wanted to make him a minstrel of the existing order of things. Nicholas I and Benkendorf had made it their aim to direct Pushkin’s unruly muse into the channels of official morality.
Pushkin’s contemporaries, the French Romanticists, were also, with few exceptions, ardent believers in art for art’s sake, the idea of the absolute autonomy of art with no other purpose than itself.
In the twentieth century, Ars Gratia Artis (Latin: Art for Art’s Sake) would become the motto for the American media company Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, to designate art that is independent of political and social pressures.
Of course, while some believe that art should not be politicized, others think that if art was not a social endeavor, then it would be used as a commercial item only available to the rich; e.g., a profitable escapist product while simultaneously maintaining and promoting a conservative mindset.
‘During the Cold War period, films were an important factor in the persuasion of the masses. They would be used in various ways, to present the ideal image of their country and to distinguish a national enemy, to name a few.’However, any thoughts of art as a progressive tool were soon quashed by the HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee) in the USA, a body which was set up in 1938 to investigate alleged disloyalty and subversive activities on the part of private citizens, public employees, and any organizations with left wing sympathies.
Dialectic of Enlightenment
Not long after, a theoretical analysis of consumerist mass culture was published in a book by Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) and Max Horkheimer (1895–1973) in 1947 entitled Dialectic of Enlightenment in which they coined the term the Culture Industry. For Adorno and Horkheimer “the mass-media entertainment industry and commercialized popular culture, which they saw as primarily concerned with producing not only symbolic goods but also needs and consumers, serving the ideological function of diversion, and thus depoliticizing the working class.”
They believed that the production of culture had become like a “a factory producing standardized cultural goods — films, radio programmes, magazines, etc.— that are used to manipulate mass society into passivity.”
Thomas Hart Benton, Hollywood 1937-38 oil on canvas; 56×84 in. (142.2×213.4 cm)More significantly, Adorno and Horkheimer also believed that the scientific thinking the Enlightenment philosophers had developed “led to the development of technologically sophisticated but oppressive and inhumane modes of governance.”
Adorno and Horkheimer believed that because the rationalization of society had ultimately led to Fascism, science and rationalism provided little optimism for future progress and human freedom.
However, this view of the history of science and its relationship with human emancipation is, according to Jeffrey Herf in ‘”Dialectic of Enlightenment” Reconsidered’, one that ignores many progressive movements and changes brought about by Enlightenment ideas, and that Horkheimer and Adorno’s view of modern society and politics simply reduced modernity to technology, science, and bureaucracy. Herf outlines many of the events, institutions, laws, rights, treatments and other human benefits that Adorno and Horkheimer (and others) had ignored:
In Weber’s sociology, Heidegger’s philosophical ruminations, or Dialectic of Enlightenment, the panoply of ideas and events associated with the 1688 revolution in Britain, the moderate wing of the French Revolution, and the ideas and institutions that emerged from the American Revolution, and then from the victory of the North in the American Civil War, are simply absent. As a result of this paucity of historical specificity, Horkheimer and Adorno’s view of modernity during World War II was a very German caricature that did not include ideas about the extension of citizenship, British antislavery, American abolitionism, feminism in Europe and the United States, and the rule of law. Theirs was modernity without liberal democratic ideas and institutions, the rule of law, and the freedom of speech, of assembly, of the press, and of religion or unbelief. […] Dialectic of Enlightenment presented modern science as primarily an exercise in the domination of nature and of human beings. Theirs was a view of the history of the scientific revolution that left out Galileo’s challenge to religious authoritarianism and Francis Bacon’s liberating restatement of the role of evidence in resolving contentious issues. From reading Horkheimer and Adorno — as well as Heidegger and Baumann — one would conclude that modern science was first and foremost a source of control, and would have no idea of how modern medicine, unthinkable without the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution, had come into existence.
Thus, Adorno and Horkheimer’s view leaves us with an almost Nietzschian nihilism, that knowledge is impossible, and life is meaningless because to try and improve society will fail and ultimately only increase oppression. Without action, Nietzsche predicted a society of ‘the last man’, the “apathetic person or society who loses the ability to dream, to strive, and who become unwilling to take risks” and slave morality characterized by pessimism and cynicism. A society which has not only lost its ‘will to power’ but also its will to revolt.
The culture of resistance
Throughout history, oppression has been met with resistance in many forms such as uprisings, rebellions, and insurrections.
‘Richard II meeting with the rebels of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381.
(The Peasants’ Revolt, also named Wat Tyler’s Rebellion or the Great Rising, was a major uprising across large parts of England in 1381. The revolt had various causes, including the socio-economic and political tensions generated by the Black Death pandemic in the 1340s, the high taxes resulting from the conflict with France during the Hundred Years’ War, and instability within the local leadership of London.’)
The resistance often starts with strikes, boycotts, and civil disobedience, leading to mass movements of people who ultimately reject the old system of governance and change it for a new system which can be anti-colonial, anti-imperialist or anti-capitalist. The rise of resistance seems to generally develop in three stages, each affecting culture in very different ways. These different stages could be called criticism, substitution and implementation.
Irish Citizen Army group outside Liberty Hall. Group are lined up outside ITGWU HQ under a banner proclaiming “We serve neither King nor Kaiser, but Ireland!”. Photo taken in early years of WWI.Resistance often begins as criticism of the policies or nature of government, or the state. This can be aesthetic or intellectual resistance appearing, for example, in various art forms. Critiques can be of an ideological nature, or simply to highlight social problems and issues. Resistance can take the form of criticism of officially sanctioned culture through demonstrations and boycotting.
It may also take a violent form, for example, the blowing up of colonial statues in Ireland (see my comprehensive list of statues blown up in my blog post here). The blowing up of Nelson’s Pillar in Dublin in 1966 was celebrated subsequently in two different ballads which became immensely popular, an aesthetic critique arising out of a violent ‘critique’.
On a formal level resistance can also be ‘form-poor’ as struggle without help from educated or trained professionals is left to amateurs.
Substitution
Gradually, a new ideology, a different reading of history, a new set of artists and writers produce culture which eventually substitutes the old culture with a new culture as the movement gathers momentum.
The less costly forms like art, music, ballads, books etc. can become very popular and important elements of the resistance itself. The more expensive cultural forms are difficult to produce in the new culture; e.g., cinema, theatre, opera, TV etc., (unless, of course, if the format is changed like in community theatre substituting for state theatre). Digital equipment can be vastly cheaper to use for the making of movies for mass viewing assuming that the outlet for presentation, the internet, is not closed off through censorship.
Implementation
The final stage is implementation, whereby popular resistance takes control of the state and is able to implement progressive culture as state policy. This is particularly important for the most costly art forms which also gain access to state finance and auditoriums. It allows movies, for example, to cover ignored themes such as histories of resistance, or to show past events from more radical perspectives than the previous elite mindset and agendas.
These different levels of cultural change: criticism, substitution, and implementation can be a long process or all come together in a short span of time.
The storming of the Bastille, 14 July 1789, during the French Revolution.I have tried to show in my previous examination of ten different art-forms (see: art, music, theatre, opera, literature, poetry, cinema, architecture, TV, and dance articles) that since the Age of Enlightenment there has been a strong vein of radical ideas relating to social progress. Over the centuries radical culture has looked at the plight of the oppressed using different forms such as naturalism, realism, social realism, and working class socialist realism.
The philosophers of the Enlightenment believed that advancements in science, technology, economic development and social organization would have universal application globally. They also believed in the idea that empirical knowledge should be the basis of society and that with these ideas political and societal change would strengthen civilization itself. While social progressivism, as a political philosophy, is reformist in nature, it also has the potential to snowball into more radical action through discussion around questions as to who runs the state and ownership of the means of production.
The form and content of the culture of resistance has many aspects. Some emphasize change on the community level, developing the skills, community spirit, and artistic sensibilities of the community members whether they be producers, creators or observers. An important element of this strategy for social change is encouraging critical thinking through participation in active dialogue. General themes for discussion have been, for example, gender equality, human rights, the environment and democracy.
The Bash Bush Band musical protesters at Bush’s 2nd inauguration, Washington DC.Others have taken a more radical approach of examining human conflict and its sources. They look at human conflict from a social perspective and see society in terms of conflicting economic classes. By portraying economic classes in conflict they hope to evolve or expand a working class consciousness or at least an understanding of, and empathy with, oppressed groups. Radical artists, writers, composers etc are encouraged to take a scientific approach and work against superstitions and blind practices. As radical cultural producers they try to present the truth and inspire wide-ranging social and political activism.
Future of culture?
Modern resistance, often in digital form on the internet today, is now subject to a creeping censorship as big tech tries to slow down the efficacy of the internet at making widely available different perspectives on many different issues. At the same time, big tech tries to portray technological progress as social progress, and is at the forefront of liberal campaigns for individual rights at the expense of mass movements for collective or group rights. Such group rights allow for organizations to speak for, and negotiate on behalf of, trade unions, trade associations, specific ethnic groups, political parties, and nation-states.
However, internet censorship and the gradually increasing power of the state (through police, courts, and prisons) using current and new legislation will be able to continue unabated, that is, unless the slave culture that facilitates it is shaken off and a new culture of resistance is born.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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Inde etiam habitus nostri honor et frequens toga; paulatimque discessum ad delenimenta vitiorum, porticus et balinea et convivorum elegantiam. Idque apud imperitos humanitas vocabatur, cum pars servitutis esset.
(They adopted our dressing fashion, and begun wearing the togas; little by little they were drawn to touches such as colonnades, baths, and elegant talks. Because they didn’t know better, they called it ‘civilization,’ when it was part of their slavery.)
— Tacitus, Agricola
Introduction
The general problem of culture today is its ability to facilitate and support negative aspects of society through encouraging escapism, diversion and ignorance regarding many important issues of contemporary life, such as economic crises, repressive legislation, poverty, and climate chaos. Or worse still, the use of culture to promote elite views of society regarding power and money, as well as imperialist agendas through negative depictions of a targeted ethnic group or country.
In this, some would call a neo-feudalist age, we see echoes of an earlier feudalism with its abuse of power and wealth that the philosophers of the Enlightenment tried to deal with and rectify. The Enlightenment was an intellectual and philosophical movement that dominated the world of ideas in Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries.
It was led by philosophers such as Cesare Beccaria, Denis Diderot, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, John Locke, Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, Hugo Grotius, Baruch Spinoza, and Voltaire. Their concerns about injustice, intolerance and autocracy led to the introduction of democratic values and institutions, and the creation of modern, liberal democracies.
A painting of the 1840 Anti-Slavery Conference. The Anti-Slavery Society Convention, 1840, by Benjamin Robert Haydon (died 1846), given to the National Portrait Gallery, London in 1880 by the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. Oil on canvas, 1841. 117 in. x 151 in. (2972 mm x 3836 mm). This monumental painting records the 1840 convention of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society which was established to promote worldwide abolition.However, a new movement in the arts and literature arose in the late 18th century, Romanticism, which emphasized inspiration, subjectivity, and the primacy of the individual. Romanticism was a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, aristocratic society and politics, and the scientific rationalization of nature. Romanticism became the basis of many subsequent cultural movements whose common feature has been anti-science and individualism.
The Romanticist influence can be seen in ‘mainstream’ mass culture and high culture in terms of its emphasis on formal experimentation or emotions over sociopolitical content. Romanticist reaction stressed “sensibility” or feeling, and tended towards looking inwards. It was a movement whose ideas have come to dominate much of culture today.
Weighing scales, planets, and fractals
Romanticism is portrayed as having left and right aspects. If we picture a weighing scale with opposing ideas, for example, we can have the radical opposition to fascism (Romanticist Expressionism) on one side and the radical right of National Socialism on the other side. However, what if this weighing scale was on one side of an even bigger scale? On the other side of that bigger scale would be Enlightenment ideas.
Little weighing scale on one side of an even bigger scaleWe rarely get to see the Enlightenment side of the larger scales. We live in a society where we are generally presented with the small scales two sides to everything (the bi-party system, good Nazis [only following orders] v the bad Nazis [gave the orders], this ‘good’ person v that ‘bad’ person, good cop v bad cop) but the reality is that they are usually different sides of the same coin. Similarly, on the smaller scale, the left and right aspects of Romanticist ideas are also two sides of the same coin, because what they both have in common is their rejection of science and reason.
Yet, on the big scales, the Enlightenment side we find progressive politics, the left opposition who were the first to be put into the concentration camps in the 1930s, the community workers, writers, and activists who work diligently today for change in the background are all squeezed out of the large, dominant media-controlled picture.
The problem with this skewed picture is that understanding what is going on becomes as difficult to ascertain as the movements of the planets were to the ancients. Seeming to go in all sorts of strange directions, the ancient Greeks called the planets ‘planeta’ or ‘wanderers’. The movements of the planets were perplexing in a geocentric (earth-centered) universe. It was only with the application of modern science, putting the sun at the center of a solar system, that the odd movements of the planets suddenly fell into place and made sense. We have the same experience of ‘revelation’ or understanding when science is applied to many different difficult problems in various aspects of history, philosophy and society itself.
‘Planets appear to go in one direction, take a looping turn, and then go in the opposite direction. This appears because of the differences of our orbits around the Sun. The Earth gets in an inside or outside track as we pass them causing a planet to look as if it had backed up and changed direction. They wander around the sky.’The word ‘science’ comes from the Latin word ‘scientia‘ meaning ‘knowledge’ and is a systematic exploration that allows us to develop knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe. The development of science has allowed us to determine what is truth and what is falsehood. Truth is defined as the property of being in accord with fact or reality and the application of science allows us to verify truth in a provable way.
In this sense truth is like a fractal. Fractals are geometrical shapes that have a certain definite appearance. When we magnify a fractal we see the same shape again. No matter how much we magnify the shape, the same geometrical patterns appear infinitely. Truth is similar to a fractal in that whether the truth of something is held by one person, a group of people, a community or a nation its essence remains the same on a micro or macro level.
‘Fractals appear the same at different levels, as illustrated in successive magnifications of the Mandelbrot set. Fractals exhibit similar patterns at increasingly small scales called self-similarity, also known as expanding symmetry or unfolding symmetry.’The heliocentric view of the universe remains true even if only one person believes or many believe, even in the face of powerful forces. For example, Galileo’s championing of heliocentrism led him to be investigated by the Roman Inquisition in 1615, where he was found guilty of heresy and spent the rest of his life under house arrest. The truth eventually came out and Galileo was pardoned by the Roman Catholic church (359 years later).
Contradictions and falsehoods
It has often been said that the truth will set you free. We live in a society of contradictions and falsehoods where lies, cheating and deception contradict reality. However, many refuse to see the truths of modern society, while others are actively involved in creating the deceptions that maintain the status quo. We know that people are ‘unfree’ and we accept many different levels of this condition: captivity, imprisonment, suppression, dependency, restrictions, enslavement, oppression.
We may even see this condition as applying to others and not to ourselves. But if we examine closely and truthfully our own position in the societal hierarchy we may recognize our own powerlessness: the contradiction between our view of ourselves and the reality of our situation. Although we vote and we recognize the social contract by rendering taxes to the state, the fact is that very little of substance changes and generally things seem to get worse.
As I have written elsewhere, the fact is that we are triply exploited: we are taxed on wages, alienated from wealth created (profits), and we pay interest on the money borrowed from the wealthy to pay for the capital and current expenditure needed for the maintenance of society and fill in the gap created by the wealthy in the first place.
How is this system of exploitation maintained? Aside from the obvious threat of imprisonment for nonpayment of taxes, and the existence of police and army to enforce the laws of the state: the most influential, and sometimes most subtle tool, is through culture.
The culture of slavery
Culture has a long history of use and abuse, from the bread and circuses of Roman times to the social media of today.
In modern society mass culture helps to maintain this system of exploitation and keeps people in general from questioning their position in the societal hierarchy. The middle classes are lulled into thinking they are free because of better wages making for an easier life, while the working class work ever harder to achieve the benefits of the middle class: higher education, higher status, higher wages. (It has been suggested that the middle class are essentially ‘working class people with huge debts’; e.g., large mortgages.)
However, in general, people work in a globalized system of exploitation in states that support and maintain it thus making wage slaves of the 99 percent.
Slaves in chains during the period of Roman rule at Smyrna (present-day İzmir), 200 CE.The traditional definition of slavery is ‘someone forbidden to quit their service for another person and is treated like property.’ Modern slavery takes on different forms such as human trafficking, debt bondage, and forced labour:
Experts have calculated that roughly 13 million people were captured and sold as slaves between the 15th and 19th centuries; today, an estimated 40.3 million people – more than three times the figure during the transatlantic slave trade – are living in some form of modern slavery, according to the latest figures published by the UN’s International Labour Organization (ILO) and the Walk Free Foundation. Women and girls comprise 71% of all modern slavery victims. Children make up 25% and account for 10 million of all the slaves worldwide.
While this may apply to the most extreme cases in modern society, the majority of workers have no control over the wealth they produce:
One of the defining features of the employment relationship in all capitalist countries is that the worker’s will is, by law, “subordinate” to the employers. The employer has the right, within broad bounds, to define the nature of the task, who performs it, and how. This shows up in all kinds of surveillance, control, and submission — also known as maximizing productivity and extracting profit.
The investors and the shareholders benefit the most, while the employees receive wages of varying levels according to the demand for their particular skill-set.
We are encouraged to accept this way of life and there are plenty of different state methods to make sure that we do. However, culture is an important tool of soft power, in particular, mass culture.
The role of mass culture is absolutely essential for the creation, maintenance, and perpetuation of a broad acceptance of the ever-changing forms of technological ‘progress’ and geopolitical shifts in modern capitalist societies, particularly as the global financial crisis (corporate and national debt) deepens.
Culture on three levels
To do this, modern mass culture operates on three different levels. The first level is creating acceptance through diversion and escapism and turning people into passive consumers. Secondly, through the overt representation of elite ideology. Thirdly, and more controversially, through covert manipulation of mass culture to benefit the agenda of elites.
In the first case, consumption becomes inseparable from the ideas of enjoyment and fun. Earlier twentieth century theorists of the Frankfurt School saw consumers as essentially passive but later theoreticians such as Baudrillard saw consumption as an unconscious social conditioning, consuming culture to achieve social mobility by showing awareness of the latest trends in mass culture.
Secondly, overt representation of elite ideology is evident in mass culture that glorifies the upper classes and promotes racism and militarist imperialism. In particular, mass culture depicting historical and contemporary events can be portrayed from an elite perspective.
Thirdly, conscious manipulation of the masses using psychological means, and more controversially, predictive programming. In the 1930s Edward Bernays was a pioneer in the public relations industry using psychology and other social sciences to design public persuasion campaigns. Bernays wrote:
If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it? The recent practice of propaganda has proved that it is possible, at least up to a certain point and within certain limits.
‘For Adorno and Horkheimer, the culture industry creates false needs to keep us purchasing products we do not actually need by manipulating our psychological impulses and desires.’ Another form of mass manipulation is the concept of predictive programming. Predictive Programming is the theory “that the government or other higher-ups are using fictional movies or books as a mass mind control tool to make the population more accepting of planned future events.” It is by its nature hard to prove yet the many extraordinary coincidences between events depicted in mass culture and later actual events is, at the very least, disconcerting. For example, the film The Manchurian Candidate depicting the son of a prominent U.S. political family who is brainwashed into being an unwitting assassin for a Communist conspiracy, was released in 1962, a year before the assassination of J F Kennedy in 1963 by Lee Harvey Oswald, an emotionally disturbed ‘communist sympathizer’ who declared his innocence and believed he was being used as a ‘patsy’.
Thus, these three levels allow elites to control how the past, the present, and the future is depicted in mass culture, according to national and geopolitical agendas.
Cultural producers
In their defense, the role of cultural producers has never been easy, and the more money or support that is needed for a cultural project, the harder it is to maintain an independent position.
While with modern production methods and technology it is easier to produce books, films and music independently of the major producers and distributors, in the past elite pressure, censorship, and imprisonment were common.
Pushkin, for example, in his Ode to Liberty, exclaimed with indignation:
Unhappy nation! Everywhere
Men suffer under whips and chains,
And over all injustice reigns,
And haughty peers abuse their power
And sombre prejudice prevails.However, later during the time of Nicholas I, he changed and ‘adopted the theory of art for art’s sake’:
According to the touching and very widespread legend, in 1826 Nicholas I graciously “forgave” Pushkin the political “errors of his youth,” and even became his magnanimous patron. But this is far from the truth. Nicholas and his right-hand man in affairs of this kind, Chief of Police Benkendorf, “forgave” Pushkin nothing, and their “patronage” took the form of a long series of intolerable humiliations. Benkendorf reported to Nicholas in 1827: “After his interview with me, Pushkin spoke enthusiastically of Your Majesty in the English Club, and compelled his fellow diners to drink Your Majesty’s health. He is a regular ne’er-do-well, but if we succeed in directing his pen and his tongue, it will be a good thing.” The last words in this quotation reveal the secret of the “patronage” accorded to Pushkin. They wanted to make him a minstrel of the existing order of things. Nicholas I and Benkendorf had made it their aim to direct Pushkin’s unruly muse into the channels of official morality.
Pushkin’s contemporaries, the French Romanticists, were also, with few exceptions, ardent believers in art for art’s sake, the idea of the absolute autonomy of art with no other purpose than itself.
In the twentieth century, Ars Gratia Artis (Latin: Art for Art’s Sake) would become the motto for the American media company Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, to designate art that is independent of political and social pressures.
Of course, while some believe that art should not be politicized, others think that if art was not a social endeavor, then it would be used as a commercial item only available to the rich; e.g., a profitable escapist product while simultaneously maintaining and promoting a conservative mindset.
‘During the Cold War period, films were an important factor in the persuasion of the masses. They would be used in various ways, to present the ideal image of their country and to distinguish a national enemy, to name a few.’However, any thoughts of art as a progressive tool were soon quashed by the HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee) in the USA, a body which was set up in 1938 to investigate alleged disloyalty and subversive activities on the part of private citizens, public employees, and any organizations with left wing sympathies.
Dialectic of Enlightenment
Not long after, a theoretical analysis of consumerist mass culture was published in a book by Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) and Max Horkheimer (1895–1973) in 1947 entitled Dialectic of Enlightenment in which they coined the term the Culture Industry. For Adorno and Horkheimer “the mass-media entertainment industry and commercialized popular culture, which they saw as primarily concerned with producing not only symbolic goods but also needs and consumers, serving the ideological function of diversion, and thus depoliticizing the working class.”
They believed that the production of culture had become like a “a factory producing standardized cultural goods — films, radio programmes, magazines, etc.— that are used to manipulate mass society into passivity.”
Thomas Hart Benton, Hollywood 1937-38 oil on canvas; 56×84 in. (142.2×213.4 cm) More significantly, Adorno and Horkheimer also believed that the scientific thinking the Enlightenment philosophers had developed “led to the development of technologically sophisticated but oppressive and inhumane modes of governance.”
Adorno and Horkheimer believed that because the rationalization of society had ultimately led to Fascism, science and rationalism provided little optimism for future progress and human freedom.
However, this view of the history of science and its relationship with human emancipation is, according to Jeffrey Herf in ‘”Dialectic of Enlightenment” Reconsidered’, one that ignores many progressive movements and changes brought about by Enlightenment ideas, and that Horkheimer and Adorno’s view of modern society and politics simply reduced modernity to technology, science, and bureaucracy. Herf outlines many of the events, institutions, laws, rights, treatments and other human benefits that Adorno and Horkheimer (and others) had ignored:
In Weber’s sociology, Heidegger’s philosophical ruminations, or Dialectic of Enlightenment, the panoply of ideas and events associated with the 1688 revolution in Britain, the moderate wing of the French Revolution, and the ideas and institutions that emerged from the American Revolution, and then from the victory of the North in the American Civil War, are simply absent. As a result of this paucity of historical specificity, Horkheimer and Adorno’s view of modernity during World War II was a very German caricature that did not include ideas about the extension of citizenship, British antislavery, American abolitionism, feminism in Europe and the United States, and the rule of law. Theirs was modernity without liberal democratic ideas and institutions, the rule of law, and the freedom of speech, of assembly, of the press, and of religion or unbelief. […] Dialectic of Enlightenment presented modern science as primarily an exercise in the domination of nature and of human beings. Theirs was a view of the history of the scientific revolution that left out Galileo’s challenge to religious authoritarianism and Francis Bacon’s liberating restatement of the role of evidence in resolving contentious issues. From reading Horkheimer and Adorno — as well as Heidegger and Baumann — one would conclude that modern science was first and foremost a source of control, and would have no idea of how modern medicine, unthinkable without the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution, had come into existence.1
Thus, Adorno and Horkheimer’s view leaves us with an almost Nietzschian nihilism, that knowledge is impossible, and life is meaningless because to try and improve society will fail and ultimately only increase oppression. Without action, Nietzsche predicted a society of ‘the last man’, the “apathetic person or society who loses the ability to dream, to strive, and who become unwilling to take risks” and slave morality characterized by pessimism and cynicism. A society which has not only lost its ‘will to power’ but also its will to revolt.
The culture of resistance
Throughout history, oppression has been met with resistance in many forms such as uprisings, rebellions, and insurrections.
‘Richard II meeting with the rebels of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381.
(The Peasants’ Revolt, also named Wat Tyler’s Rebellion or the Great Rising, was a major uprising across large parts of England in 1381. The revolt had various causes, including the socio-economic and political tensions generated by the Black Death pandemic in the 1340s, the high taxes resulting from the conflict with France during the Hundred Years’ War, and instability within the local leadership of London.’)
The resistance often starts with strikes, boycotts, and civil disobedience, leading to mass movements of people who ultimately reject the old system of governance and change it for a new system which can be anti-colonial, anti-imperialist or anti-capitalist. The rise of resistance seems to generally develop in three stages, each affecting culture in very different ways. These different stages could be called criticism, substitution and implementation.
Irish Citizen Army group outside Liberty Hall. Group are lined up outside ITGWU HQ under a banner proclaiming “We serve neither King nor Kaiser, but Ireland!”. Photo taken in early years of WWI. Resistance often begins as criticism of the policies or nature of government, or the state. This can be aesthetic or intellectual resistance appearing, for example, in various art forms. Critiques can be of an ideological nature, or simply to highlight social problems and issues. Resistance can take the form of criticism of officially sanctioned culture through demonstrations and boycotting.
It may also take a violent form, for example, the blowing up of colonial statues in Ireland (see my comprehensive list of statues blown up in my blog post here). The blowing up of Nelson’s Pillar in Dublin in 1966 was celebrated subsequently in two different ballads which became immensely popular, an aesthetic critique arising out of a violent ‘critique’.
On a formal level resistance can also be ‘form-poor’ as struggle without help from educated or trained professionals is left to amateurs.
Substitution
Gradually, a new ideology, a different reading of history, a new set of artists and writers produce culture which eventually substitutes the old culture with a new culture as the movement gathers momentum.
The less costly forms like art, music, ballads, books etc. can become very popular and important elements of the resistance itself. The more expensive cultural forms are difficult to produce in the new culture; e.g., cinema, theatre, opera, TV etc., (unless, of course, if the format is changed like in community theatre substituting for state theatre). Digital equipment can be vastly cheaper to use for the making of movies for mass viewing assuming that the outlet for presentation, the internet, is not closed off through censorship.
Implementation
The final stage is implementation, whereby popular resistance takes control of the state and is able to implement progressive culture as state policy. This is particularly important for the most costly art forms which also gain access to state finance and auditoriums. It allows movies, for example, to cover ignored themes such as histories of resistance, or to show past events from more radical perspectives than the previous elite mindset and agendas.
These different levels of cultural change: criticism, substitution, and implementation can be a long process or all come together in a short span of time.
The storming of the Bastille, 14 July 1789, during the French Revolution.I have tried to show in my previous examination of ten different art-forms (see: art, music, theatre, opera, literature, poetry, cinema, architecture, TV, and dance articles) that since the Age of Enlightenment there has been a strong vein of radical ideas relating to social progress. Over the centuries radical culture has looked at the plight of the oppressed using different forms such as naturalism, realism, social realism, and working class socialist realism.
The philosophers of the Enlightenment believed that advancements in science, technology, economic development and social organization would have universal application globally. They also believed in the idea that empirical knowledge should be the basis of society and that with these ideas political and societal change would strengthen civilization itself. While social progressivism, as a political philosophy, is reformist in nature, it also has the potential to snowball into more radical action through discussion around questions as to who runs the state and ownership of the means of production.
The form and content of the culture of resistance has many aspects. Some emphasize change on the community level, developing the skills, community spirit, and artistic sensibilities of the community members whether they be producers, creators or observers. An important element of this strategy for social change is encouraging critical thinking through participation in active dialogue. General themes for discussion have been, for example, gender equality, human rights, the environment and democracy.
The Bash Bush Band musical protesters at Bush’s 2nd inauguration, Washington DC.Others have taken a more radical approach of examining human conflict and its sources. They look at human conflict from a social perspective and see society in terms of conflicting economic classes. By portraying economic classes in conflict they hope to evolve or expand a working class consciousness or at least an understanding of, and empathy with, oppressed groups. Radical artists, writers, composers etc are encouraged to take a scientific approach and work against superstitions and blind practices. As radical cultural producers they try to present the truth and inspire wide-ranging social and political activism.
Future of culture?
Modern resistance, often in digital form on the internet today, is now subject to a creeping censorship as big tech tries to slow down the efficacy of the internet at making widely available different perspectives on many different issues. At the same time, big tech tries to portray technological progress as social progress, and is at the forefront of liberal campaigns for individual rights at the expense of mass movements for collective or group rights. Such group rights allow for organizations to speak for, and negotiate on behalf of, trade unions, trade associations, specific ethnic groups, political parties, and nation-states.
However, internet censorship and the gradually increasing power of the state (through police, courts, and prisons) using current and new legislation will be able to continue unabated, that is, unless the slave culture that facilitates it is shaken off and a new culture of resistance is born.
- Jeffrey Herf, Dialectic of Enlightenment Reconsidered, Source: New German Critique , FALL 2012, No. 117, Special Issue for Anson Rabinbach (FALL 2012), pp. 81-89 Published by: Duke University Press [p84] Stable URL.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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John Morrison and Sam Watson on Dominic Raab’s commitment to fine businesses over modern-day slavery in supply chains
The commitment made by Dominic Raab, the foreign secretary, to strengthen businesses’ supply chain requirements under the Modern Slavery Act are welcome, if overdue (China’s treatment of Uighurs amounts to torture, says Dominic Raab, 12 January).
For him to choose the situation facing the Uighurs in China to do so also seems appropriate, but it represents a blunt instrument for the task in hand. Fines for companies that refuse to issue modern slavery statements will increase the number of statements, but not necessarily their quality.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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UK-based security firm faces calls to repay charges made by recruitment agents for jobs in Gulf states and conflict zones
Migrant workers working for the British security company G4S in the United Arab Emirates have collectively been forced to pay millions of pounds in illegal fees to recruitment agents to secure their jobs, the Guardian can reveal.
An investigation into G4S’s recruitment practices has found that workers from south Asia and east Africa have been made to pay up to £1,775 to recruitment agents working for the British company in order to get jobs as security guards for G4S in the UAE.
Forcing workers to pay recruitment fees is a widespread practice, but one that is illegal in the UAE, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. The practice allows companies to pass on the costs of recruitment to workers from some of the poorest countries in the world, leaving many deep in debt and vulnerable to modern forms of slavery, such as debt bondage.Related: ‘We’re poor people’: Middle East’s migrant workers look for way home amid pandemic
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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Professor and family face up to eight years in prison for their treatment of woman given to them as a child
A Brazilian woman enslaved as a maid from the age of eight for almost four decades and forced into marriage has been rescued in a rare crackdown on domestic slavery.
The 46-year-old was found living in a small room in an apartment in Patos de Minas, in the south eastern state of Minas Gerais. She had worked for the family for most of her life without pay or any time off, according to labour inspectors.
Related: Brazil ordered to pay $5m to workers formerly enslaved on cattle ranch
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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The Civil War ended more than 150 years ago, but the Confederacy didn’t completely die with it. Monuments, shrines and museums are found throughout the South. We teamed up with Type Investigations to visit dozens of them and found that for devoted followers, they inspire a disturbing – and distorted – view of history: Confederate generals as heroes. Slaves who were happy to work for them. That twisted history is also shared with schoolchildren on class trips. And you won’t believe who’s funding these sites to keep them running.
Plus, the story of New Mexico’s great monument controversy. In 1998, the state was set to celebrate its cuarto centenario: the 400th anniversary of the state’s colonization by the Spanish. But a dramatic act of vandalism would turn the making of a monument in Albuquerque into a fight over history the city didn’t expect.
This show has been updated with new reporting, based on a show that originally was broadcast Dec. 8, 2018.
Don’t miss out on the next big story. Get the Weekly Reveal newsletter today.This post was originally published on Reveal.
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In 1996, Eddie Wise, the son of a sharecropper, purchased a farm with a loan from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Twenty years later, the USDA foreclosed on the property and evicted him. Reveal investigates his claim that he was discriminated against because of his race.
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*Don’t miss out on the next big story. Get the Weekly Reveal newsletter today.This post was originally published on Reveal.
