Thursday, May 23, 2013

 

Too Big To Jail

As the Financial Services Forum gathered recently at the White House, Tom Burghardt runs down the ongoing criminal enterprise of President Obama's friends like JP Morgan Chase.

Wednesday, May 22, 2013

 

False Victimhood

The Far-Right in the US has long relied on false victimhood to fuel indignation and mobilize resentment into electoral support. With the emergence of the Tea Party, the sense of rage based on false victimhood went steroidal. As Devin Burghart at the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights reports, false victimhood promoted by the Tea Party Patriots is a standard political organizing tactic.

Thursday, May 16, 2013

 

Indigenous Diplomatic Traditions

Politics based on justice, diplomacy based on love is the subject of a recent article by Mississauga Nishnaabeg author Leanne Simpson in briarpatch magazine. "Even in a modern context," says Simpson, "treaties are a storied political relationship, consolidating sacred bonds between peoples. They are not about the cession of land or the surrender of Aboriginal title, nor do they assimilate Indigenous law into Canadian law. They are not a bill of sale. They are not a policy discussion. Whether the treaty-making process is historic or contemporary, treaties are not termination agreements."

Thursday, May 09, 2013

 

Anti-Democratic Movement in Washington State

In my recent article White Power on the Salish Sea, I take a look at the Wall Street/Tea Party convergence against treaty rights in Washington state. As a lethal threat to both endangered species and human rights, this bipartisan, anti-democratic movement targeting Indian tribes should be roundly opposed by moral authorities and organizations devoted to defending democracy.

Wednesday, May 08, 2013

 

Survival in the American Southwest

Writing at Censored News, Gary Witherspoon recounts the history of Water and Energy in the American Southwest, and the politics of mining on the Navajo and Hopi nations.

Monday, May 06, 2013

 

Many Will Suffer

As Ray A. Youngbear wrote in Black Eagle Child, "So that a few of us will celebrate and walk the full course of this gift called life, many will suffer." This NBC video on the indigenous people of the Ecuadorian Amazon -- whose destiny is wrapped up in our murderous demand for endless supplies of oil -- is heartbreaking.

Sunday, May 05, 2013

 

White Supremacy Factions

There are two major threads to white supremacy: revolutionary and mainstream. The skinheads, neonazis and Klan are revolutionaries. That is the smallest faction. The mainstreamers are far more numerous and their rhetoric is strongly reflected in the Minutemen (anti-immigrant groups) and Tea Parties. The main difference between the two factions is their approach to electoral politics.

The revolutionaries reject electoral politics and the mainstreamers embrace it.

Zeskind's book, Blood and Politics is framed around an analysis of the revolutionary/mainstreamer factions.

There is a third faction, the separatist anti-government survivalists known as the Christian Patriots. They propose withdrawal from society and creation of isolated areas under their own law and authority. These were the groups behind the militia violence of the 1990s. They draw on a mixture of revolutionary and mainstream propaganda and ideology. The hard core of the Christian Patriots are racist Christian Identity believers who rejected the overtly revolutionary approach of Aryan Nations under Richard Butler. John Trochmann of Montana, now a fairly obscure character, was the paradigmatic leader of Christian Patriot militias in the 1990s. Pat Buchanan's political persona was a fusion of mainstreamer and Christian Patriot influences.

All three groups have adopted a core ideology of white racialist nationalism. The core to this is an idea of distinct racial classes to citizenship and the separation of races by both law and custom.

The sunlight v shunning debate is an old one. Every time there has been a crisis, the sunlight approach wins. The key to defeating reactionary racist politics is education and exposure. They work mostly by deception, infiltration and subversion and these tactics are impossible when they are subject to scrutiny and exposure leading to confrontation and rejection. Shunning them actually give them additional cover.

The worst setbacks to the Tea Party have been due to exposure, not people trying to ignore them.
--Paul de Armond, MetaFilter, October 1, 2010

Friday, May 03, 2013

 

A Crumbling Social Contract

The collapse of the modern state in terms of providing adequate social structure to meet basic human needs creates in turn numerous psychoses: economic panic, religious hysteria, and various dissociative symptoms. Within this scenario of a crumbling social contract, fear and anger -- mobilized into hate and revenge -- are perhaps most disconcerting, but communities living in denial about the waxing political power of such moral aberrations as the Tea Party, anti-Indian movement and Christian Patriots cannot long continue breathing their own exhaust if they want to avoid normalizing hate. Responses in the form of moral theatrics are fine for careers in political theatre, but they do not affect the political change that can only come about by contesting political power as exercised through research, education and organizing. Watching the anti-democratic movement -- exemplified by the Tea Party -- conduct candidate trainings and activist workshops on a daily basis, while horrified liberals merely sign petitions protesting the latest outrage, is not encouraging.

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