A few months ago I told the American people that I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that is true, but the facts and evidence tell me it is not.

— President Ronald Reagan, 1987¹

On April 23, speaking at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, President Barack Obama told his assembled audience that as president “I’ve done my utmost … to prevent and end atrocities”.

Do the facts and evidence tell him that his words are not true?

Well, let’s see … There’s the multiple atrocities carried out in Iraq by American forces under President Obama. There’s the multiple atrocities carried out in Afghanistan by American forces under Obama. There’s the multiple atrocities carried out in Pakistan by American forces under Obama. There’s the multiple atrocities carried out in Libya by American/NATO forces under Obama. There are also the hundreds of American drone attacks against people and homes in Somalia and in Yemen (including against American citizens in the latter). Might the friends and families of these victims regard the murder of their loved ones and the loss of their homes as atrocities?

Ronald Reagan was pre-Alzheimer’s when he uttered the above. What excuse can be made for Barack Obama?

The president then continued in the same fashion by saying: “We possess many tools … and using these tools over the past three years, I believe — I know — that we have saved countless lives.” Obama pointed out that this includes Libya, where the United States, in conjunction with NATO, took part in seven months of almost daily bombing missions. We may never learn from the new pro-NATO Libyan government how many the bombs killed, or the extent of the damage to homes and infrastructure. But the President of the United States assured his Holocaust Museum audience that “today, the Libyan people are forging their own future, and the world can take pride in the innocent lives that we saved.” (As I described in last month’s report, Libya could now qualify as a failed state.)

Language is an invention that makes it possible for a person to deny what he is doing even as he does it.

Mr. Obama closed with these stirring words; “It can be tempting to throw up our hands and resign ourselves to man’s endless capacity for cruelty. It’s tempting sometimes to believe that there is nothing we can do.” But Barack Obama is not one of those doubters. He knows there is something he can do about man’s endless capacity for cruelty. He can add to it. Greatly. And yet, I am certain that, with exceedingly few exceptions, those in his Holocaust audience left with no doubt that this was a man wholly deserving of his Nobel Peace Prize.

And future American history books may well certify the president’s words as factual, his motivation sincere, for his talk indeed possessed the quality needed for schoolbooks.

The Israeli-American-Iranian-Holocaust-NobelPeacePrize Circus

It’s a textbook case of how the American media is at its worst when it comes to US foreign policy and particularly when an Officially Designated Enemy (ODE) is involved. I’ve discussed this case several times in this report in recent years. The ODE is Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The accusation has been that he had threatened violence against Israel, based on his 2005 remark calling for “wiping Israel off the map”. Who can count the number of times this has been repeated in every kind of media, in every country of the world, without questioning the accuracy of what was reported? A Lexis-Nexis search of “All News (English)” for for the past seven years produced the message: “This search has been interrupted because it will return more than 3000 results.”

As I’ve pointed out, Ahmadinejad’s “threat of violence” was a serious misinterpretation, one piece of evidence being that the following year he declared: “The Zionist regime will be wiped out soon, the same way the Soviet Union was, and humanity will achieve freedom.”² Obviously, he was not calling for any kind of violent attack upon Israel, for the dissolution of the Soviet Union took place remarkably peacefully. But the myth of course continued.

Now, finally, we have the following exchange from the radio-TV simulcast, Democracy Now!, of April 19:

A top Israeli official has acknowledged that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad never said that Iran seeks to “wipe Israel off the face of the map.” The falsely translated statement has been widely attributed to Ahmadinejad and used repeatedly by U.S. and Israeli government officials to back military action and sanctions against Iran. But speaking to Teymoor Nabili of the network Al Jazeera, Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor admitted Ahmadinejad had been misquoted.

Teymoor Nabili: “As we know, Ahmadinejad didn’t say that he plans to exterminate Israel, nor did he say that Iran policy is to exterminate Israel. Ahmadinejad’s position and Iran’s position always has been, and they’ve made this — they’ve said this as many times as Ahmadinejad has criticized Israel, he has said as many times that he has no plans to attack Israel. …”

Dan Meridor: “Well, I have to disagree, with all due respect. You speak of Ahmadinejad. I speak of Khamenei, Ahmadinejad, Rafsanjani, Shamkhani. I give the names of all these people. They all come, basically ideologically, religiously, with the statement that Israel is an unnatural creature, it will not survive. They didn’t say, ‘We’ll wipe it out,’ you’re right. But ‘It will not survive, it is a cancerous tumor that should be removed,’ was said just two weeks ago again.”

Teymoor Nabili: “Well, I’m glad you’ve acknowledged that they didn’t say they will wipe it out.”

So that’s that. Right? Of course not. Fox News, NPR, CNN, NBC, et al. will likely continue to claim that Ahmadinejad threatened violence against Israel, threatened to “wipe it off the map”.

And that’s only Ahmadinejad the Israeli Killer. There’s still Ahmadinejad the Holocaust Denier. So until a high Israeli official finally admits that that too is a lie, keep in mind that Ahmadinejad has never said simply, clearly, unambiguously, and unequivocally that he thinks that what we historically know as the Holocaust never happened. He has instead commented about the peculiarity and injustice of a Holocaust which took place in Europe resulting in a state for the Jews in the Middle East instead of in Europe. Why are the Palestinians paying a price for a German crime? he asks. And he has questioned the figure of six million Jews killed by Nazi Germany, as have many other people of various political stripes. In a speech at Columbia University on September 24, 2007, in reply to a question about the Holocaust, the Iranian president declared: “I’m not saying that it didn’t happen at all. This is not the judgment that I’m passing here.”³

Let us now listen to Elie Wiesel, the simplistic, reactionary man who’s built a career around being a Holocaust survivor, introducing President Obama at the Holocaust Museum for the talk referred to above, some five days after the statement made by the Israeli Deputy Prime Minister:

How is it that the Holocaust’s No. 1 denier, Ahmadinejad, is still a president? He who threatens to use nuclear weapons — to use nuclear weapons — to destroy the Jewish state. Have we not learned? We must. We must know that when evil has power, it is almost too late.

“Nuclear weapons” is of course adding a new myth on the back of the old myth.

Wiesel, like Obama, is a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. As is Henry Kissinger and Menachim Begin. And several other such war-loving beauties. When will that monumental farce of a prize be put to sleep?

For the record, let it be noted that on March 4, speaking before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Obama said: “Let’s begin with a basic truth that you all understand: No Israeli government can tolerate a nuclear weapon in the hands of a regime that denies the Holocaust, threatens to wipe Israel off the map, and sponsors terrorist groups committed to Israel’s destruction.”⁴

Postscript: Each time I strongly criticize Barack Obama a few of my readers ask to unsubscribe. I’m really sorry to lose them but it’s important that those on the left rid themselves of their attachment to the Democratic Party. I’m not certain how best to institute revolutionary change in the United States, but I do know that it will not happen through the Democratic Party, and the sooner those on the left cut their umbilical cord to the Democrats, the sooner we can start to get more serious about this thing called revolution.

Written on Earth Day, Sunday, April 22, 2012

Two simple suggestions as part of a plan to save the planet.

1. Population control: limit families to two children

All else being equal, a markedly reduced population count would have a markedly beneficial effect upon global warming, air pollution, and food and water availability; as well as finding a parking spot, getting a seat on the subway, getting on the flight you prefer, and much, much more. Some favor limiting families to one child. Still others, who spend a major part of each day digesting the awful news of the world, are calling for a limit of zero. (The Chinese government announced in 2008 that the country would have about 400 million more people if it wasn’t for its limit of one or two children per couple.⁵

But, within the environmental movement, there is still significant opposition to this. Part of the reason is fear of ethnic criticism inasmuch as population programs have traditionally been aimed at — or seen to be aimed at — primarily the poor, the weak, and various “outsiders”. There is also the fear of the religious right and its medieval views on birth control.

2. Eliminate the greatest consumer of energy in the world: The United States military.

Here’s Michael Klare, professor of Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College, Mass. in 2007:

Sixteen gallons of oil. That’s how much the average American soldier in Iraq and Afghanistan consumes on a daily basis — either directly, through the use of Humvees, tanks, trucks, and helicopters, or indirectly, by calling in air strikes. Multiply this figure by 162,000 soldiers in Iraq, 24,000 in Afghanistan, and 30,000 in the surrounding region (including sailors aboard U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf) and you arrive at approximately 3.5 million gallons of oil: the daily petroleum tab for U.S. combat operations in the Middle East war zone. Multiply that daily tab by 365 and you get 1.3 billion gallons: the estimated annual oil expenditure for U.S. combat operations in Southwest Asia. That’s greater than the total annual oil usage of Bangladesh, population 150 million — and yet it’s a gross underestimate of the Pentagon’s wartime consumption.⁶

The United States military, for decades, with its legion of bases and its numerous wars has also produced and left behind a deadly toxic legacy. From the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam in the 1960s to the open-air burn pits on US bases in Iraq and Afghanistan in the 21st century, countless local people have been sickened and killed; and in between those two periods we could read things such as this from a lengthy article on the subject in the Los Angeles Times in 1990:

U.S. military installations have polluted the drinking water of the Pacific island of Guam, poured tons of toxic chemicals into Subic Bay in the Philippines, leaked carcinogens into the water source of a German spa, spewed tons of sulfurous coal smoke into the skies of Central Europe and pumped millions of gallons of raw sewage into the oceans.⁷

The military has caused similar harm to the environment in the United States at a number of its installations. (Do a Google search for <"U.S. military bases" toxic>)

When I suggest eliminating the military I am usually rebuked for leaving “a defenseless America open to foreign military invasion”. And I usually reply:

“Tell me who would invade us? Which country?”

“What do you mean which country? It could be any country.”

“So then it should be easy to name one.”

“Okay, any of the 200 members of the United Nations!”

“No, I’d like you to name a specific country that you think would invade the United States. Name just one.”

“Okay, Paraguay. You happy now?”

“No, you have to tell me why Paraguay would invade the United States.”

“How would I know?”

Etc., etc., and if this charming dialogue continues, I ask the person to tell me how many troops the invading country would have to have to occupy a country of more than 300 million people.

Yankee karma

The questions concerning immigration into the United States from south of the border go on year after year, with the same issues argued back and forth: What’s the best way to block the flow into the country? How shall we punish those caught here illegally? Should we separate families, which happens when parents are deported but their American-born children remain? Should the police and various other institutions have the right to ask for proof of legal residence from anyone they suspect of being here illegally? Should we punish employers who hire illegal immigrants? Should we grant amnesty to at least some of the immigrants already here for years? … on and on, round and round it goes, for decades. Every once in a while someone opposed to immigration will make it a point to declare that the United States does not have any moral obligation to take in these Latino immigrants.

But the counter-argument to the last is almost never mentioned: Yes, the United States does have a moral obligation because so many of the immigrants are escaping situations in their homelands made hopeless by American interventions and policy. In Guatemala and Nicaragua, Washington overthrew progressive governments which were sincerely committed to fighting poverty. In El Salvador, the US played a major role in suppressing a movement striving to install such a government, and to a lesser extent played such a role in Honduras. And in Mexico, although Washington has not intervened militarily in Mexico since 1919, over the years the US has been providing training, arms, and surveillance technology to Mexico’s police and armed forces to better their ability to suppress their own people’s aspirations, as in Chiapas, and this has added to the influx of the impoverished to the United States. Moreover, Washington’s North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), has brought a flood of cheap, subsidized US agricultural products into Mexico and driven many Mexican farmers off the land.

The end result of all these policies has been an army of migrants heading north in search of a better life. It’s not that these people prefer to live in the United States. They’d much rather remain with their families and friends, be able to speak their native language at all times, and avoid the hardships imposed on them by American police and right-wingers.

1. Washington Post, March 5, 1987.
2. Associated Press, December 12, 2006.
3. President Ahmadinejad Delivers Remarks at Columbia University, Transcript, Washington Post, September 24, 2007.
4. Remarks by the President at AIPAC Policy Conference, White House Office of the Press Secretary, March 4, 2012.
5. Washington Post, March 3, 2008.
6. The Pentagon v. Peak Oil, TomDispatch.com, June 14, 2007.
7. Los Angeles Times, June 18, 1990.

Minister Kenney said in the prepared Press Release that “Canadians take great pride in the generosity and compassion of our immigration and refugee programs. But they have no tolerance for those who abuse our generosity and seek to take unfair advantage of our country.”

The new bill, is titled “Protecting Canada’s Immigration System Act” and proposes extensive changes to Canada’s refugee protection process that build on the changes to the asylum system passed in June 2010 as part of the Conservative government’s Balanced Refugee Reform Act.

The Coalition for Justice for Refugees and Immigrants, composed of nearly 60 national organizations across Canada, including Amnesty International (AI), the Canadian Council for Refugees (CCR) and the Canadian Association of Refugee Lawyers (CARL), and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA), however, have attacked the proposed changes. They state the changes are “Unconstitutional” and undermine “Canada’s Humanitarian Traditions” and violate “Canada’s International Obligations.”

The Coalition, in a Press Conference held in Ottawa on March 26, 2012 said, “Bill C-31 is Bad Policy and Creates a Manifestly Unfair System That Will Fail to Protect Refugees in Canada.”

Peter Showler, a former Chair of the Immigration and Refugee Board and Director of the Refugee Forum at the University of Ottawa, characterized Bill C-31 as “a bill that fundamentally changes Canada’s immigration and refugee system and it is a bill that violates the Canadian Charter of Rights, international law and, frankly, common sense as well.”

On the behalf of the Coalition Showler stated, “this is not simply a matter of standing on the sidelines and criticizing the current bill, that we actually do believe that it is necessary to reform Canada’s refugee system but it’s important to do it in a way that has features that are fast, fair and effective. None of these features are contained in Bill C-31.”

Criticisms leveled at Bill C-31 by Nathalie Des Rosiers, of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and also the former Dean of the University of Ottawa Law School Civil Section, include the fact that the “bill gives the power to a minister to designate a group and incarcerate them for 12 months without judicial review. On its face, this violates the Charter. It also violates the Convention on the Rights of Refugees, and it will be challenged. The ability to challenge detention in front of a court is at the heart of a judicial process and the rule of law. It is the right to habeas corpus. To have denied this to anyone on Canadian soil is a mistake. It’s an infringement of the rights and it is wrong.”

Des Rosiers also noted, “The Auditor General has come to the conclusion that this will cost at least $70,000 per person that will be incarcerated and that doesn’t cost – that doesn’t take into account the social cost and the cost to the proper integration of immigrants that will be incarcerated for 12 months.”

“The Minister has said well, that he will release them at his good pleasure if and when their circumstances warrant it or if people have their refugee status determined and refugee status accorded, but this is wrong. In a democracy, we cannot leave an unfettered discretion powers in a government to incarcerate people. We shouldn’t do it and we shouldn’t do it for people that come to Canada,” said Des Rosiers.

Heather Neufeld, a member of the executive of the Canadian Council for Refugees and a practicing immigration and refugee lawyer in Ottawa, offered the following critical comments on the provisions for family re-unification in the proposed Bill.

“Currently, individuals who are granted refugee status in Canada can immediately apply for permanent residence for themselves as well as for their dependants abroad. Now, under Bill C-31, individuals who are detained and who are granted refugee status are required to wait five years before they even become eligible to apply for permanent residence. The consequences of this restriction concerning family separation and family reunification are unthinkable,” Neufeld said.

The result of the proposed changes, according to Neufeld, are prolonged family separation that may mean: “Spousal relationships may break down. Children may arrive to parents they no longer even know and some children become too old to even bring to Canada.”

“So forcing anyone granted refugee status to wait five years before they even become eligible to being the process of family reunification is not only unconscionable, it is likewise cruel” said Neufeld.

Alex Neve, who is the Director General of Amnesty International Canada and a lawyer and a recognized expert on international human rights, also criticized Bill C-31. He said, “Among the many troubling provisions in Bill C-31 is the power given to the Minister of Immigration to designate a list of countries of origin that are supposedly safe. Refugee claimants who are nationals from these so-called safe countries will be treated very differently from all other refugee claimants and they will face discrimination and unequal justice in a number of very worrying ways.”

Neve stated, “First, their claims will be fast-tracked for processing, sending a clear signal to decision-makers that their cases are assumed to be doubtful and dubious.” Second, if turned down, claimants from designated safe countries of origin will have no access to an appeal before the Immigration and Refugee Board’s new Refugee Appeal Division — a crucial safeguard for people whose lives and liberty may be on the line.”

Neve continued, “And finally, even the last resort option of turning to the Federal Court for a review of a negative decision on technical grounds is rendered nearly meaningless as claimants from safe countries will almost always be deported before the court decides before – before the court decides whether or not they will even be granted a hearing.”

The representative for Amnesty International also further attacked the Bill for, “Introducing the safe countries of origin concept into the Canadian refugee system is unfair and problematic for so many reasons. First, there is simply no reliable, objective way to distinguish safe and unsafe countries when it comes to human rights protection. Where does the line get drawn? Human rights violations, unfortunately, occur in virtually all countries around the world — countries considered to be democratic, countries which have close economic, tourist and other ties with Canada, countries that may be safe for most people but countries which nonetheless may also be dangerous and discriminatory for many others.”

Neve added, “This is certainly the case with many countries commonly thought to be at the top of Minister Kenney’s safe list such as Mexico where a deepening human rights crisis has been the subject of a growing number of alarming reports from Amnesty International and others. Or the Czech Republic and Hungary where countless human rights experts have documented deep and longstanding violence and discrimination against Roma people.” Minister Kenney has frequently characterized Roma refugees as “bogus.”

The Federal Court of Canada, not known to be a bastion of judicial activism, has recently over turned two negative decisions involving Roma refugee claims. In one decision the Federal Court stated that, “there has been a severe upswing of extremism directed against Roma and further that there is extensive evidence of the government’s shortcomings in actually preventing violence against Roma.” In the second Decision, the Federal Court ruled that, “the evidence is overwhelming that Hungary is unable presently to provide adequate protection to its Roma citizens.”

Neve commented that, “Against that reality, it is particularly problematic that the decision to designate safe countries will rest entirely in the hands of the Minister, making it open to all manner of inappropriate political considerations. Tellingly, an earlier proposal to set up an expert committee to advise the Minister on this list has been scrapped.”

Neve further stated, “This approach also undermines one of the most fundamental principles of refugee protection, namely that refugee claimants should have their cases assessed individually, not on the basis of sweeping generalizations such as the countries from which they come from.”

The Representative from Amnesty International continued, “And finally, at its very core, it is discrimination — discrimination in something so essential as access to justice and the quality of that justice, justice meant to ensure that people will be kept safe from serious human rights violations. No justice for you because of where you come from.”

“The concept of safe countries of origin is a wrong-handed fiction. It contravenes the fundamental principle that refugee claims should be assessed individually. And it constitutes indefensible discrimination. It does not belong in Canada’s refugee system and should be abandoned” said Neve.

Mr. Lorne Waldman, President of the Canadian Association of Refugee Lawyers and widely recognized as one of Canada’s leading experts on immigration and refugee law, also addressed what he described as “one of the most alarming features of the new legislation which is the time frames.” Waldman stated, “I want to make it clear: as a refugee lawyer who sees the harm that delays in the process have brought upon my clients, I support an expeditious process. I support a process that gives refugees a reasonable period of time to present the case and results in quick, fair decision-making.”

“But the new refugee procedure,” Waldman stated, “has created time frames that are so completely unrealistic as to make a facade of due process in the refugee determination system. Refugees will have 15 days from the date they make a claim — the date of their arrival — to file a form which sets out the basis for their case. And, as we all know, these forms then form the foundation for their entire claim. And if they make omissions, these omissions will be held against them. It will be impossible for refugees to obtain legal advice and to get counsel to prepare the forms in most cases given the very short time frames.”

The President of the Canadian Association of Refugee Lawyers continued, “If a refugee is on the designated country of origins list, he will then have to have a hearing within 30 days. As we know, refugees are required and expected to bring corroborating evidence. Given the time frames — be it 30 days for the expedited cases or 60 days for the unexpedited cases — it will be virtually impossible for refugees to get legal representation and for them to be able to get corroborating evidence. The time frames are so absurd and so unrealistic as to make the system completely devoid of any fairness.”

According to Waldman, “The appeal process is laughable. For years, refugee advocates have called for an appeal system and indeed when the refugee system was amended two years ago with the consensus of all the political parties, we rejoiced that the Conservative government was going to introduce an appeal. But the time frames that are now included in this new appeal process as so ridiculous as to make the appeal process a joke. Fifteen days to file a perfected appeal is virtually impossible. No one can file an appeal, obtain counsel, obtain the transcript and be able to realistically comply with those time periods.”

Continuing his critique, Waldman said, “The appeal is also made absurd by the fact that so many different groups are now being excluded from the right to have an appeal. You don’t get an appeal if you’re on one of the designated country lists. You don’t get an appeal if you’re designated as an irregular arrival. You don’t get appeal if they find your case has no credible basis. There are … six [grounds] for denying persons access to the appeal process. So in the end it’s doubtful that there will be very many people left who will be able to obtain access to an appeal and so one wonders why the government is going to the expense of creating an appeal process that will be used by and available to so many.”

Another serious criticism raised by Waldman is “the impact of this bill on permanent resident status for persons who’ve already been accepted as refugees. Under the new legislation, the Minister will be able to apply for cessation. What this means is the Minister will be able to apply for an order that a person is no longer a refugee because the conditions in their country have changed. This provision exists in the current legislation. But the significant change is under the new law if the Minister applies and if the Minister is successful in obtaining an order of cessation, that will immediately strip the person of their permanent resident status.”

Waldman gave the following example: “A refugee comes from Kosovo, a genuine refugee, accepted and brought to Canada by the Government of Canada as a refugee from Kosovo. Now we know that the situation in Kosovo has changed. Under the current legislation, the Minister can apply for an order saying that they’re no longer a refugee, but it doesn’t have any effect on their permanent resident status. Under the new legislation, the Minister applies for such an order and if the order is granted by the Board — which it will be because there’s no longer a dangerous situation in Kosovo — then that person immediately loses their permanent resident status, is inadmissible to Canada, and is subject to immediate deportation.”

“There are tens of thousands of people in Canada who came to Canada as refugees, and genuine refugees, have not done anything wrong and their status is now at risk because of this change in the legislation” said Waldman.

The Conservative Government has a majority in Parliament and can readily pass the legislation. Opponents of the Bill C-31 are calling for substantial revisions. In the end these issues may be determined in the Courts.

I recall the sorrow and discrimination provoked by Arizona’s SB 1070 when numerous Native American elders were suspected of being “illegals” because they could not produce birth certificates to prove otherwise. Imagine that: natives seen as “illegals” and deemed subject to deportation under the state of exception for failure to provide documentation of their right to live on their native land. A deeper injustice and more banal contradiction is not possible, since the authors of 1070 arrived in Arizona but a mere night ago and are now dictating the legal status of peoples inhabiting the bioregion for tens of thousands of years.

This is what it means to be a stranger in your native land. This is what it means to be denied your indigeneity under the policing of borders and citizenship instigated by the telluric partisans who are allied with the fear-driven state of exception.

What the history of U.S. immigration policy reveals is that the politics and policies of white resentment and racialization were — and continue — to constitute a failed response born of the perception that Native peoples (including Mexicans) are a demographic and biopolitical threat: The difference we represent has had to be managed and eradicated precisely because of our continuously illustrated resilience and long-term “reproductive fitness.”

Of course, it is too late for that game despite the militarization of the border, criminalization of immigrants, and alienation (really self-estrangement) associated with the neoliberal trap of identity politics that has always accompanied the state of exception. This is the exact same fearful logic that drives the law seeking to render our collective wisdom and cultural traditions as forbidden knowledge in the attack on Chicana/o and Ethnic Studies in Arizona under the unconstitutional HB 2281.

Miner’s insightful poster speaks to an issue that has been on my mind for some time and that of many fellow sojourners: What is an indigenous policy or traditional view of immigration and naturalization? What can we learn from such policies and traditions? And how might we rekindle and assert these traditions in practice?

This poster, created in the best tradition of political poster art in the Chicana/o movement (I am reminded of the work of countless artists associated with Self-Help Graphics) teaches us an important principle: Regardless of the direction and presumed legitimacy of U.S. immigration law, there are much deeper traditions that Native American and MesoAmerican peoples have practiced and are starting to embrace once again as they negotiate their experience of trans-border citizenship, regardless of the state of exception that seeks to suspend the rule of law and declare the undocumented flow of Natives as the moral equivalent of terrorists and drug runners.

A study by social scientist Fiona Nicoll examining aboriginal rights in Australia offers an observation that is certainly relevant to our own context in North America:

When non-Indigenous people are welcomed to [a] country by the Indigenous owners, we acknowledge not only the traditional ancestors but also their living descendants as bearers of a sovereignty that exists within and beyond the [settler's] nation…. The legacy of Terra Nullius sticks to our shoes with the dirt as we walk over Indigenous sovereignties everyday.

This is the supreme irony of U.S. history: if not for Native people warmly and generously welcoming the Mayflower’s itinerants; if they had not fed them and showed them how to grow crops, these newcomers would have died off. The settlers then returned the favor not with thanksgiving but with murder, genocide, and displacement of the Natives so they could imagine their right to a land rendered void and empty of the original people.

Because of laws like SB 1070, today this problem is further complicated when Indian [sic] people become dupes and accomplices of immigration and border control as has some times occurred along the U.S,-Mexico Border. As one critic has noted, ”anti-immigration policies are ultimately about asserting U.S. sovereignty over and against indigenous sovereignty. By instituting repressive immigration policies, the U.S. government is asserting that it, and not indigenous nations, should determine who can be on these lands.”

It is therefore not a surprise that the mass media has often featured stories of Native Americans serving as agents of border control, which reinforces the idea that Natives support U.S. sovereignty over indigenous autonomy.

Indigenous solidarity with the struggle for immigrant rights is important because many, if not most, immigrants from Mexico and Central America are displaced Native peoples; they are relatives, cousins of northern Native Americans. Chinantca, Chontal, Hña Hñu, Maya, Mixteca, Nahua,  Raramurti (Yaqui), Seri, Totonaca, Triqui, Zapoteca, and many others are part of the post-NAFTA MesoAmerican Diaspora.

Indeed, many tribal nations are divided by our politically-imposed borders as illustrated by the cases of the Raramuri and Tohono O’odham in Sonora-Arizona on the southern border; the Tlingit and Haida First Peoples along the Alaska-Canada border; and the Ojibwe, Salish, Mohawk, and Blackfeet who are now negotiating the northern borderlands between the U.S. and Canada.

Finally, there is a largely hidden but long and complicated history that reveals how indigenous polities have long asserted the right to grant naturalization status to newcomers in their midst. One of the best-known examples of non-Natives being “naturalized” is the case of Mary Jemison, who wrote of her experiences in a book first published in 1824. A commentary on this narrative provides insight on the effects of the practice of naturalization among the Seneca:

In 1753, fifteen year old Mary Jemison was captured by Indians along the Pennsylvania frontier during the Seven Years’ War between the French, English, and Indian peoples of North America. She was adopted and incorporated into the Senecas, a familiar practice among Iroquois and other Indian peoples seeking to replace a lost sibling or spouse. Mary married and raised a family in the decades before and after the American Revolution; many captives, once adopted and integrated into an Indian community, refused the opportunity to return home, finding life in Indian society more rewarding.

This is a truly profound example of the type of humane and just immigration policy our country should adopt. Native peoples have long accepted strangers in their communities and indeed have deeply grounded cultural traditions for the integration of these newcomers. This is why today we have children born at Neah Bay with Makah mothers and Zapotec fathers; this is why there is a “Mexican” clan in the Dine [Navajo] Nation; this is why the Tlingit in Canada’s west coast villages are welcoming Mixteca, Zapoteca, and Maya brothers and sisters as new members of their communities.

We would do well to learn from this example; better, we need to embrace a social movement that creates an autonomous track to citizenship based on the indigenous traditions that integrate newcomers into the community based not on some paranoid fear of the other but on the ability to judge people based on the content of their character. This is presumably a basic ideal of American democracy from the ice flows of Inupiat to the rocky pine barrens of Tierra del Fuego.

•  This article first appeared in New.Clear.Vision

Unfortunately, this year the United States’ treatment of migrants has been dismal.  Nearly 400,000 people have been deported, often without adequate due process. Anti-immigrant and xenophobic laws have been passed in state legislatures of Alabama, Arizona, South Carolina, and Utah.  The US has increased fear and isolation in our migrant communities.

Last week the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division (DOJ), to its credit, made public the findings of its investigation, initiated in March 2009, into civil rights violations in Arizona by the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office (MSCO) headed by the notorious Sheriff Joe Arpaio. The investigation uncovered what many local advocates have suspected for years: that Sheriff Arpaio and his subordinates engaged in a pattern and practice of racial profiling against Latinos and also unlawful retaliation against individuals critical of the Sheriff’s policies.

Shortly after the DOJ’s findings became public, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) ended its agreement allowing certain Maricopa County deputies to act as immigration agents on behalf of the federal government, a step community leaders have demanded for years.  These agreements with local law enforcement, called 287(g) agreements, are authorized by Congress under section 287(g) of the Immigration and Naturalization Act to allow local police to act as immigration officers.  In ending the agreement with Maricopa, DHS acknowledges that abuse of authority will occur when law enforcement agencies, especially those like Arpaio’s, get in the immigration business.

However, while DOJ’s investigation and DHS’ suspension of the 287(g) agreement with Maricopa are steps forward, a hugely problematic situation remains.  DHS continues to have a relationship with the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office through another program, Secure Communities, the federal deportation dragnet program, which will continue its legacy of mass deportations and destruction of communities.

Through Secure Communities, local law enforcement agencies automatically provide immigration authorities fingerprint information for every person arrested. After comparing the fingerprint information with its own databases, ICE can either try to deport the person or store the information in a massive database for future use. Secure Communities is already used in 1882 jurisdictions and 44 states, even in places where local officials and organizers have asked not to have any part in the program and in jurisdictions with human rights records as horrific as Maricopa County.

Think about the consequences of such a widespread program. With Secure Communities, immigration agencies automatically learn the identity of any non-citizen in the custody of local police and can initiate deportation. This is the case even if the arrest was illegal and even if the charges are dropped or never prosecuted.

Secure Communities Through a Human Rights Lens:

First, a central norm in human rights is proportionality: the punishment must fit the crime. With Secure Communities, we have witnessed record deportations and detentions, often for minor offenses where the criminal courts don’t even seek jail time.

Second, even though human rights standards require freedom from all forms of discrimination, Secure Communities is plagued with racial and ethnic profiling. Anti-immigrant jurisdictions use it to hide illegal and race-based arrests, and the federal government allows places like Maricopa County, Los Angeles, New York and New Orleans, places with well documented histories of racial profiling and abusive cops, to use Secure Communities without meaningful oversight.

Third, human rights principles require full and fair hearings and urge release from detention over incarceration, but in localities with Secure Communities, immigration holds prevent release of thousands of non-citizens at the expense of local jailers and with the consequence of coercing criminal pleas and deportation.

Fourth, human rights treaties provide special protections to women, children and victims of violence, but Secure Communities is criticized for placing trafficking and domestic violence survivors at risk of removal.

Fifth, a common thread in human rights is the idea of engagement. A government should listen and engage with the people it represents and allow us to have a real voice in setting policy. But Secure Communities, despite heavy resistance and requests by states and localities to end the program, has been forced on us.  Even though the people and officials of places like San Francisco, Santa Clara, and Arlington, and entire states such as New York, Illinois and Massachusetts have said they don’t want anything to do with Secure Communities, it’s being implemented anyway.

The Center for Constitutional Rights has the honor and privilege of representing one of the national leaders in the movement towards immigrant justice – the National Day Laborer Organizing Network – in a lawsuit against federal agencies for information about Secure Communities. Through this lawsuit we have uncovered literally thousands of pages of internal documents that expose a record of the federal government’s deceit and misrepresentation.  These documents have been used in a national campaign to uncover the truth behind police and ICE collaborations. Advocates around the country have questioned the government’s policy, educated local police and state officials and created a groundswell of resistance against merging the criminal and immigration systems.

Secure Communities is now a symbol of government dishonesty and deception. The Obama administration was not transparent with Congress about Secure Communities’ true purpose when it asked for over $2 billion for the program; it tricked state and local officials into believing they could limit or opt out of the program; and worst of all the government sold untruths to the public to get this program launched at any cost.

Kofi Annan, former Secretary-general of the United Nations, once said: “Human rights are what reason requires and conscience demands. They are us and we are them. Human rights are rights that any person has as a human being. We are all human beings; we are all deserving of human rights. One cannot be true without the other.”

The United States has failed to recognize the universality of human rights for migrants, rights we are all entitled to just because we are human.

As we begin a new year, let’s take a step forward toward recognizing the fundamental human rights of all people. The United States must change course. DHS should recognize the complete failure of programs like Secure Communities that put local police at the center of immigration enforcement.  Terminate them immediately, especially in cities with open DOJ investigations or historic records of police misconduct, and start to honor our commitment to human rights for migrants.

The nativists, xenophobes, racists, and Republican Party activists and legislators who support the harsh new immigration bill (HB 56) targeting undocumented migrants in the state are delighted.

The flight of thousands of Latinos from the state regardless of legal status is not an unforeseen consequence of the legislation — it’s the entire point. As Lindsey Lyons, the mayor of Albertville, Alabama, put it in an interview with National Public Radio: “[W]e’re going to see an exodus of those moving to other states that don’t have any pending legislation.” The point is not immigration reform; the point is to make the growing Latino population go away.

For the law’s authors and backers, the state of Alabama is living a fantasy they have long wished, and worked, to see play out on a national level. Importantly, the fantasy of a vanishing Latino population is not strictly a legal one. It is, in fact, a cultural project, and it has a long history.

Culture, Power and Illusion

How do you make tens of millions of Latinos disappear from the national public sphere? This is a spectacular trick, on the order of illusionist David Copperfield making the Statue of Liberty vanish in front of a live television audience. Copperfield’s 1983 deception relied on the cover of darkness and strategic manipulation of the audience’s perspective. The trickery that seeks the relative public invisibility of Latinos in the U.S. is performed in broad daylight using a combination of rhetorical manipulations and legislative measures.

We are all familiar with the rhetoric by now. The constant, drum beat-like association by anti-immigrant nativists of the terms “illegal” and “Mexican” and “immigrant,” amplified and reproduced in the news media and in demagogic political discourse, has created a semantic cloud obscuring the presence, in plain view, of diverse millions of Latinos in American public life.

A restaurant owner in my Minneapolis neighborhood who had emigrated (legally) from Ecuador told me about being questioned by police while taking a summer walk with his son. The police officers’ dogged assumption was that he was Mexican, and they seemed to believe that he had entered the U.S. illegally.

“I am from Ecuador,” he told me, “but all they could see was an illegal Mexican.” The Statue of Liberty, one might say, disappeared before his very eyes.

The public illusion in this instance results from cultural messaging that denies Latinos full cultural citizenship – the right to be different and to bring that difference into the public process. Theoretically, all citizens have equality under the law. In practice, however, public cultural norms are structured by an often unspoken hierarchy of values that privileges some citizens over others.

Think about how in a public meeting the fellow citizen who speaks an English accented by non-English phonetics might carry less moral authority with her audience than the fluent English speaker, despite being equally understandable and possessing the same legal rights. Or think of how a man wearing a West African dashiki might be assumed by many in a U.S. audience to be a non-citizen. Social hierarchies of race, class, gender, and age are reflected in recognition, or denial, of full cultural citizenship to different social groups.

Markers of cultural difference in the body politic can be, and often are, converted into signs of second-class status. This is an important intersection of culture and politics in the U.S., and one exploited actively by those who would make Latinos disappear from the public sphere.

The targeting of immigrants with the rhetorical hammer of “illegal,” pounds into place a chain of equivalences in the public mind. Where Latinos are concerned, the anti-immigrant anvil and hammer of “illegal” and “Mexican” seek to remake brown skin, the Spanish language, and other markers of Latino visibility as signposts of the outer boundaries of American public life. “They,” non-Latinos are being told, are not like “us.”

Behind the media sensationalism and electoral campaign posturing lays a politics of cultural containment and subordination, and of civic divisiveness. As the facile external markers of Latino identity are transformed into the civic equivalent of scarlet letters, Latinos are implicitly rendered less legitimate as public actors, and less visible as fellow citizens. In the process, any resources particular to their cultural heritage that they might bring to the national project are categorically segregated and expelled from the public sphere.

Spanish is preempted as a language of legitimate civic engagement. Regions of the country are subtly (and not so subtly) dispossessed of their rich Hispanic heritage in the minds of many Americans, who are encouraged to forget the pluricultural history etched into Spanish-language place names like Arizona, Nevada, and Florida.

The U.S. public’s ignorance about Puerto Ricans — who are born United States citizens since passage of the Jones Act in 1917, although without the right to vote in U.S. elections — is deepened and extended to another generation. Bilingualism becomes suspect, rather than being recognized as a tremendous national economic and cultural resource and a civic virtue. Important forms of public culture — murals, corridos, pachangas — are marked as Other. Voices critical of U.S. foreign policy — with personal experience of the human rights implications for Salvadorans, for Guatemalans, and others, of military funding or trade agreements — are silenced.

And my Ecuadorian-American neighbor finds himself caught up in a mass cultural deception that denies him full cultural citizenship, despite his undeniable legal rights. He is denied the power to define his own public presence, his own identity as a fellow citizen, and to be recognized as fully American.

Laws, Politics, and Culture

The dark magic worked by manipulative public rhetoric has its limits, thankfully. People can endure, and respond to, name-calling. And public discourse is never a one-sided affair. My Ecuadorian-American neighbor, for example, has undoubtedly told his story to many of his fellow local citizens, generating a retail-level awareness that counterbalances in some measure the wholesale misrepresentation of national realities by anti-immigrant sensationalism. Educators continue to teach Spanish, and student interest in the language has grown alongside the growing number of Americans who understand the political and economic and cultural value of bilingualism.

And at some point, the anti-immigrant talk begins to say more about the speaker than about the object of the speaker’s rancor. Of the 308 million heads counted by the 2010 Census, more than 50 million, or greater than 16%, identified themselves as Hispanic or Latino. At some point, talking as if 16% of the nation doesn’t (or shouldn’t) exist becomes a fool’s strategy.

This is where the policy mechanisms of the cynical anti-Latino vanishing act come into play. A confluence of xenophobic, nativist and Republican Party interests — having watched demographic changes unfold over the past two decades, and their electoral consequences begin to take hold — see an even greater need to contain Latino culture and subordinate Latino public involvement. They have learned that rhetoric alone will no longer do the trick.

Predictably, after the 2008 elections resulted in convincing victories for the Democratic Party with sizable margins of support among Latino voters, several Republican state legislatures have approved laws targeting undocumented immigrants in several states.

The Arizona state legislature in 2010 approved SB 1070, a law that criminalizes the failure to carry immigration documents and allows police to detain anyone suspected of being an undocumented migrant. (In order to make clear that the political and cultural target included Latino citizens, the Republican majority also passed a law banning the teaching of Ethnic Studies in the public schools.) In 2011, Georgia, Indiana, Utah, and South Carolina subsequently passed their own versions of the Arizona law, similarly promoting racial profiling and criminalizing social and economic interaction with undocumented immigrants.

Not to be outdone, Alabama passed HB 56, a law that, among other things, bars undocumented immigrants from attending state colleges, criminalizes “transporting, harboring, or renting property” to them, and requires public schools to verify the legal status of their students.

The laws bring state power — in the form of racial profiling — to bear on the cultural messaging that subordinates and marginalizes Latinos’ presence in the public arena. One measure of the cultural effect of the Alabama law: those Latino children who haven’t disappeared from the public schools now report they are bullied for being “illegals.”

All of these states share two key elements: First, state government is controlled by the Republican Party, and second, the 2010 Census found a dramatic growth rate among the Latino/Hispanic population that sooner or later could jeopardize Republican political dominance in the state.

Georgia, South Carolina, and Alabama saw eye-popping growth rates for the Latino/Hispanic population, 96.1%, 147.9%, and 144.8%, respectively. Indiana’s growth rate for the Hispanic or Latino category was 81.7%, and Utah’s was 77.8%, nearly double the national growth rate for that sector of the population. In the case of Arizona, population growth among Latinos/Hispanics was a “mere” 46.3%, but what was likely more troubling for Republicans, racists and xenophobes, the Latino/Hispanic population had grown to represent approximately 30% of the state population.

It is difficult not to view these states’ anti-immigrant legislation as a preemptive effort to change the demographic facts for future elections, and prior to the inevitable moment in which comprehensive federal immigration policy reform provides a path to citizenship for an estimated 12 million or more undocumented immigrants nationwide, principally from Mexico and Central America.

At the same time, the state-by-state anti-immigrant legislation can be viewed as a desperate effort to use the law to leverage an extended life for the cultural politics that has long sought to subordinate and diminish Latino participation in the public sphere.

Redefining America

The stakes of the present conjuncture are not just electoral and legal. The cultural parameters of U.S. public life are also in play. The long-term stakes are nothing less than the means and meaning of democratic public life in America, i.e., the question of who is allowed to speak, and how, and about what.

It is important to remember (and remind) that the cultural politics that denies Latinos equality in American public life has a long history. Current efforts to drive Latinos out of public life find common parentage in the assaults on Mexican-Americans that occurred after the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which officially ended the U.S.-Mexico war and called for Mexico to relinquish roughly half of its national territory to the U.S.

The 1848 Treaty included an option for U.S. citizenship for the many Mexicans who suddenly found themselves living in U.S. territory, but xenophobic and racist sentiment conspired with economic interests to drive Mexicans off their land throughout the region, and to strip them of their mining stakes in California. One of the myriad ways these interests operated on the social body to excise the Mexican-American presence was the passage of legislation that directly targeted these would-be citizens.

The “Greaser” laws (as they were called by their proponents) included an 1855 anti-vagrancy statue in California that explicitly applied to “All persons who are commonly known as ‘Greasers’ or the issue of Spanish and Indian blood… and who go armed and are not peaceable and quiet persons.” This legislative assault on the public presence of Mexican-Americans and Native Americans was preceded by the 1850 Foreign Miner’s Tax, which levied an exorbitant monthly license fee on the mining claims of the foreign-born, with the practical effect of driving Mexicans and Latin Americans (and French and Germans) off their claims in the context of the Gold Rush. Of course, the xenophobic hostility stoked against Spanish-speakers made no distinction between native-born Californios and Mexicans.

The cultural politics that aims to make Latinos disappear cannot overcome the blunt object reality of a growing population. David Copperfield could make the Statue of Liberty seem to disappear, but when the sun came up the next morning, there it was. The difference is that Copperfield wasn’t attempting to change the meaning of Liberty.

Recent nativist attempts to update the 19th century “Greaser laws” for the 21st century will not, ultimately, make Latinos literally disappear. But the trickery in this instance changes the potential meaning of America, diminishes democratic possibilities, preempts current and future potential dialogue and social relationships. Cultural resources and perspectives that Latinos could bring to the common table are diminished and sidelined. Efforts to counter the inequality these laws promote must systematically engage the cultural dimension of the struggle over American democracy.

The Tea Party decided that this was not just a soft underbelly showing, but possibly a full blown line of mammary glands all just waiting to spray milk. The horror of a newly benevolent (and wimpy) Rick Perry filled them with concern. First the illegals would line up to suckle, then in mere moments, the welfare mommas would arrive (who, of course, by now includes welfare great-great-great grandmas by Teabagger minority reproduction math). Probably the next logical step would be Abortionists joining in. Rick’s soft underbelly would nourish them all! The radical right was not impressed by Rick’s lactation potential. They know it’s a slippery slope, that word “empathy”.

I’m sure damage control sessions were rapidly organized after the debate.  Perry probably explained that, of course, he has to placate the Hispanic demographic in his state, but given the chance at the National level, he would drop that particular compassionate ideal faster than he’d drop a potassium filled needle into a mentally challenged guy’s arm. But the damage was done.

It’s a strange, sad time when you’re only a real man if you state that you don’t ever lose sleep over executions, but mention that you are okay with handing out some tuition that isn’t quite punitive enough…well, that’s unforgivable. Even taking some time out to boo the gay soldier wasn’t enough to make them forget Perry’s lapse.

Mitt Romney, the other leading contender, had been deemed unspongeworthy before he even showed up. By unspongeworthy, I mean he’s a Mormon. The radical right, overwhelmingly in the Evangelical Christian camp, knows that this is a faith that has no relevance to them. If Romney had any sense, he’d be planting some gold plates of a prophetic nature in the backyards of the Tea Party leaders. Upon unearthing, these plates could indicate that it’s necessary for Evangelical Christians to support Mormons, all because of an eventual battle set to take place in Utah. The bees will buzz, blood will flow and the devil will show up riding an All Terrain Vehicle with a gay sidekick. During the battle, many of the Mormons will change their faith and the others will conveniently die. I’ve heard that sort of thing has worked for other groups needing supportive dupes. But alas, Mitt hasn’t resorted to anything creative like that, so he will remain unspongeworthy for the duration.  He will continue to give stilted, embarrassing speeches calling everyone “my friend” as the sheen of his plastic blinds the crowds.

I see these candidates, the “frontrunners”  of their party, and I am taken aback by what the proper course of action should be. Community activism? Voting for the least worst scoundrel? Updating the passport? I’ve come to the conclusion that the answer is Versed. This is a medication which causes memory loss, often used during unpleasant medical procedures. Some guy won’t remember telling the doctor during a colonoscopy that he had a similar experience at his frat house (but your doctor remembers). The drug is quite useful for erasing an entire event and this seems to be the only solution after witnessing these debates or any speech given on the campaign trail. Well, at least a solution for those of us who still feel pain upon realizing we are the same species as all of these clowns.

I’m not forgetting about Obama from planet Mendacity in all of this.  He’s simply been fairly quiet during the Republican freak show. I’m sure we will soon be treated to his newly discovered Populism (but only available in verbal flavor) soon enough. I have noticed that Obama supporters seem to have the ability to produce copious amounts of endogenous Versed, forgetting the promises and purported values of their disappointing suit.

In summary, we’re gonna need an awful lot of Versed to get through this.

In contrast, in Northern and Central Europe the hard right and neo-fascist movements have made significant inroads among workers and the lower middle class at the expense of the traditional center-left and center-right parties. ¹ The relative stability, affluence and stable employment of the Nordic working class has been accompanied by increasing support for racist, anti-immigrant, Islamophobic parties. ²

In the case of the United States, with a few notable exceptions, the working class has remained a passive spectator in the face of the right turn of the Democratic Party and the hard right’s capture of the Republican Party.  There are no left wing street politics in the US, unlike Southern Europe, and only a passive rejection and repudiation of the hard right policies of Congress and the White House.

Rather than solidarity, the economic crisis highlights working class fragmentation, disunity and internal polarization.

The Right/Left Polarizations

One of the key reasons for the growth of right wing appeals to Northern European workers is the demise of working class-based ideology, parties and leaders.  The Labor and Social Democratic Parties have initiated and administered neoliberal programs while promoting multi-national corporation-led export strategies.  They have embraced regressive tax ‘breaks’ for big business; they have participated in imperialist wars of aggression (Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya); they have embraced the so-called “war on terror” mostly against Muslim countries while tolerating the growth of the neo-fascist, far-right Islamophobes who practice “direct action” to expel immigrants in Europe.

The European governing parties of the center-left (social democratic and labor) and the center-right (Sarkozy, Cameron and Merkle) have been outspoken in their assault on “multiculturalism” code-word for Muslim immigrant rights. Their tolerance and exploitation of Islamophobia serves as a cheap vote getter among their xenophobic electorate and as a justification for their involvement in US-Israeli wars of aggression in the Middle East and South Asia. As a result the “mainstream” regimes have weakened working class solidarity with immigrant workers and undermined any concerted effort by the state and civil society to actively counteract the neo-fascist racists who ply a more virulent version of Islamophobia embracing the Zionist ideologues’ vision of ethnic cleansing.

The trade unions have lost membership due especially to the growth of ‘contingent or temporary workers’ who are especially susceptible to far-right appeals. Equally important, trade unions no longer engage in political education aimed at strengthening class solidarity among all workers.  While in Northern Europe wages may increase, the trade unions collaboration with the corporate elite has left workers vulnerable to anti-immigrant and Islamophobic propaganda.  In this context a perverse “class struggle” pits the unorganized workers against those “below”, the immigrants.  The neo-fascists gain by promoting and exploiting cultural and chauvinist beliefs which trade unions and social democratic parties no longer actively combat through worker education and class struggle.  In other words, the neoliberal practice and ideology of the “center-left” parties and unions undermine class political identities and open the door for right wing penetration and influence.  This is especially evident when center-left and trade union leaders no longer bother to consult or debate policies with their members:  They impose policies from above, providing the ‘far right’ with a formidable weapon to attack the ‘elitist nature’ of the center-left political system.

In contrast, in Southern Europe the profound economic crisis,  due in large part to the harsh conditions imposed by Northern and Western European bankers and their local center-left and right-wing politicians, has strengthened and sharpened class consciousness and politics.  Right-wing appeals to anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim politics has little resonance among Southern European workers in the face of skyrocketing unemployment and brutal wage and pension cuts.

Northern European workers have allied with the right, and their own politicians and bankers, in demanding the imposition of greater austerity measures against Southern European countries, buying into the racist ideology that Mediterranean workers are lazy, irresponsible and on permanent vacation.  In fact, Greek, Portuguese and Spanish workers work more days per year, enjoy less vacation time and much less secure pensions.  The same racist sentiments pitting Northern workers against immigrants also promote chauvinist stereotypes against militant Southern European workers and fuel right-wing sympathies.

Creditor Northern European bankers and political leaders squeeze their own working and middle class taxpayers in order to bail-out their counterparts among the Southern European debtor elites, who, in turn, agree to squeeze their workers and public employees to meet the debt payment demands of the North.  The Northern workers in the imperial countries have been convinced that their living standards are threatened by the irresponsible and indebted South, and not by the speculative activity and irresponsible lending of their own bankers.  In the South, the workers have to shoulder the double exploitation of the Northern European creditors as well as their own local elites; hence, they have greater class awareness of the injustice of the imperial and local capitalist system.

To the degree that Northern workers make common cause with their own creditor ruling class and shift their resentments toward workers abroad and immigrants below, they become vulnerable to right wing appeals.  They openly express resentment against striking Greek, Spanish or Portuguese workers’, whose militant struggles might disrupt their planned vacations to the Mediterranean islands and seashore resorts.  The ideological battle which should pit the workers of Northern Europe against their own state creditors and speculator financial elite is transformed into hostility towards Southern European workers and immigrants.  Overseas bailouts, imperial wars and cuts in social programs lead to greater competition over shrinking social expenditures and conflict between employed and unemployed, ‘native’ and ‘immigrant’ workers’.

International workers solidarity has been severely weakened and replaced, in some cases, by the proliferation of international far-right networks propagating virulent anti- immigrant (and anti-socialist)  propaganda and, as in the case of the massacre of almost 70 left-wing youth, mostly teenage, activists of the Norwegian Labor Party,  poses a direct murderous threat to progressive supporters of immigrant rights.  The extreme-right began its assault on immigrants and Muslims and has now moved against the local left and progressive movements which support them.  This has taken on an even more complex dimension with the marriage of rabid pro-Israel, Zionist ideologues (mostly based in the US) and the neo-fascist Islamophobes attacking supporters of Palestinian rights, an issue repeatedly stressed by the Norwegian fascist mass murderer, Anders Behring Breivik. The problem is that the ‘respectable’ liberal, social democratic and conservative parties, in their electioneering, have pandered to the anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim appeals of the far-right in order to attract workers rather than embarking on far-reaching class reforms which would lessen inequalities, financing them via increases in progressive taxes and greater public investments to unify all workers (local and immigrant) against capital.

Lacking working class solidarity, the sons and daughters of immigrants, especially the disproportionately unemployed young workers, engage in forms of direct action such as the pillage of local business, confrontations with the police and general mayhem, as was evident in the nationwide riots in England in the “hot August” of 2011.  The demise of working class politics thus has produced violent right-wing extremism, racial-immigrant riots and pillage.  The labor elite are spectators, confined to condemning extremism and violence, calling for investigations, but without any semblance of self-criticism or any programs for changing the socio-economic structures that produce the right turn and violence among workers and the unemployed.

The United States:  The Rise of the Right

Unlike Europe, the extreme right is at home within the US established order.  Brutal anti-immigration policies have led to the expulsion of nearly 1 million undocumented workers or family members in the first three years of the Obama regime (a three-fold increase over the George W. Bush years).  The Tea Party has elected Congress members in the Republican Party who promote massive cuts in the social safety net with the collaboration of the White House.  The mass media, Congress, the White House, mass-based Christian fundamentalist politicians and leading Zionist personalities and organizations actively promote Islamophobia and lead virulent campaigns against Muslims by fanning public insecurity. The US ‘establishment’ has pre-empted the racist agenda of the far-right in Europe.  The far-right has turned its guns directly on the social programs of the poor, the working class and public employees (especially school teachers).

Moreover, their assault on debt financing and public expenditures has led to conflicts with sectors of the capitalist class, who are dependent on the State.  In the course of the recent Congressional ‘debate’ over raising the debt ceiling, Wall Street joined in a selective struggle against the far-right:  calling for “compromise” involving social cuts and tax reforms while supporting their anti-public union offensive.

Unlike in Europe, the mass of the US working class and poor are passive. They have been neutered: neither engaging in the street riots of England, nor taking the sharp right turn of their Northern European counterparts, nor participating in militant workers’ strikes of Southern Europe.  The US trade unions, with the exception of the public employees union in Wisconsin, have been totally absent from any of the big confrontations. The American trade union bosses concentrate on lobbying the corporate Democratic Party and are incapable of mobilizing their shrinking membership.

The Tea Party, unlike its Northern European counterparts, does not attract many workers because of their virulent attacks on popular public programs, like Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment insurance and especially Social Security – all of the programs most likely to benefit American workers and their families.  On the other hand, the economic crisis in the US has not led to Mediterranean-style mass action because American trade unions either don’t exist (93% of the private sector is not unionized) or are compromised to the point of paralysis.

So far the US working class is a spectator to the rise of the extreme right, because its organized leaders have tied their fortunes to the Democratic Party, which, in turn, has adopted significant parts of the far right’s agenda.

Conclusion

The US, in contrast to Europe, is experiencing a peaceful transition from neoliberalism to far-right politics, where the working and middle class are passive victims rather than active combatants for either the left or the right.  In Europe, the current crisis reveals a deep polarization between the radical left turn of workers in the South and the growing shift to the far right among workers in Northern Europe.  The ideal of international worker solidarity is being replaced, at best, by regional solidarity among the workers of Southern Europe and, at worst, by a network of rightist parties in the Northern European countries.  With the decline of international solidarity, chauvinist and racist tendencies are rampant in the North, while in the South workers’ movements are joining with a broad range of social movements, including the unemployed, students, small business people and pensioners.

While the electoral right is capitalizing on the disenchantment with the center-left in Southern Europe, they still face formidable resistance from the extra-parliamentary workers and social movements.  In contrast, in Northern Europe and the US, the far-right faces no such conscious opposition – in the streets or in the workplace.  In these regions only the breakdown of the economic system or a prolonged severe economic recession, combined with devastating cuts of basic social programs and protections, may set in motion a revival of working class movements. and hopefully it will be from the class-conscious left and not from the far right.

1. According to a study of workers support for far right wing parties in Western Europe, “workers have become their core clientele”. See Daniel Oesch, “Explaining Workers’ Support for Right-wing Populist Parties in Western Europe: Evidence from Austria, Belgium, France, Norway, and Switzerland”, International Political Science Review 2008: 29; pp. 350 -373
2. While some of the motivations of the workers vary, the far-right wing parties are the beneficiaries

Captain America offers spectator-consumers the chance to yet again sit back and be taken for a phantasmagorical ride. The new Hollywood film is another forces of good versus the forces of evil production, where the goodest good guy is a white superhero whose scrawny body is technologically transformed into the perfect muscular male. Moral, good, manly, just, brave, caring, altruistic — all in a physical package that buckles women at the knees. He might as well be God.

Is there anything realistic about the film? Is it the American propaganda tool that the Russia media venue Russia Today (RT) has portrayed it as? Look at the comments that follow this short RT Captain America video and you see that people question Russia Today‘s motives — rejecting it as a flagrant example of ugly Americana.

Here’s one example. “Can’t anyone just enjoy a movie?” said a guy, DaveSquibbSr, who seems to display some rather hysterical patriotic fervor about how the mass media lies to the people and falsely demonizes private enterprise.

Another example: “Dear RT News: Fuck You. By the way, Saving Private Ryan and Apocalypse Now are without a doubt anti-war movies. And the others mentioned contain anti-war messages too,” wrote Austionous, who lists his favorite video as Glen Beck’s patriotic cheer-lead The Real Story: Iraq.

The real story is that the Pentagon’s military adventurism in Iraq and Afghanistan — never mind Somalia, Congo, Ethiopia, Libya, Rwanda or any of the other sites of U.S. covert operations — has cost U.S. taxpayers more than $1,228,000,000,000 since 2001, and the ticker is ticking, and the United States economy and all social services are in collapse. The real story is that more than 1,000,000 Iraqi people and at least 4000 US troops have died, with scores of thousands of U.S. veterans wounded and traumatized. Remember Iraq war veteran Timothy McVeigh?

But here’s the best RT Captain America comment of all, replete with the threat of violence that differs little from the threat of violence advanced by Norwegian freedom fighter Anders Behring Brievik — label and segregate, kill the multiculturalists amongst us, and purify Europe by forcibly repatriating all Moslems.

“Anyone who points at Hollywood and accuses them of doing anything other than making entertaining movies for profit,” says acircleoflight, “needs a tattoo on their forehead that says, ‘I’m too stupid to understand fiction’. And then when we have all these people properly labelled, kill them and send their meat to a starving country. Nothing that comes out of Hollywood is nonfiction. Movies based on ‘real events’ or ‘based on a true story’ are still Fiction. Its never actually what happened.” This guy or gal self-identifies as a ‘pagan’ whose “spirituality is based in logic and reason.”

And that’s a death threat against, well, against your humble correspondent. Alas, I’ll have to go into hiding now, hunker down and secure my own little heavily armed fortress in preparation for the Christian crusaders, soon to come my way, as this story gains readership.

Hmmm. I wonder if that’s what Moslem immigrants or Rwandan Hutu refugees feel like? I mean, the mass media, governments, and plenty of the common people hold these awe-fully biased and ugly stereotypes about Moslems, you know, towel-headed camel jockeys and all that, and about people of color (niggers, spicks, chinks, gooks), more generally, and every Rwandan Hutu is considered a genocidal machete-wielding savage. How did these stereotypes and mythologies of persecution become so deeply seated in the mass psychology?

What is it about multiculturalism that people find so scary? The idea that we should share? Do unto others as we want others to do unto us?

Anti-Islamic fervor is whipped up by governments, corporations and individuals to provide an excuse for state terror and rationale for weapons proliferation. Such fervor is alive and thriving in the white power economies of the U.S., Canada, England, Italy, Japan (though this is changing), and, well, Norway. When stories about the twin Oslo attacks first broke, the mass media immediately launched into their private inquisition about Islamic jihadists, grounded in nothing but speculation and fear-mongering. Russia Today was no different and just as bad as the British and U.S. press.

Your correspondent, a bit too quick to speak (several friends were quite correct about this) but also caught off guard, was stupid enough to get caught up in it, and missed the chance to say, “Hey, wait, it’s a blond-haired blue-eye white man who looks more like the Viking comic book superhero THOR… This is no Osama bin Laden recruit, so please kick your Islamophobia, and stop perpetuating war against innocent people…”

Too Stupid to Understand Fiction

It seems that Norway’s self-proclaimed savior decided to launch his own personal revolution, hoping to inspire Christian Holy War against non-white immigrants who are, in somebody’s mind, soiling the blood of virile white men and defiling their (the white man’s) virgin white women. This sounds like a Neo-Nazi screed about Aryan blood purity. In fact, he has been labelled a Nazi, and saddled with all kinds of other labels, which people and organizations — who seem to have a lot in common with Breivik — have used to distance themselves from him.

Did Breivik act alone? Did he independently flee the proverbially chicken coop of Norwegian normality and privately hatch his personal ideology and revolutionary intent? Christian purity, dirty Arabs, the imminent destruction of Israel? I don’t think so. I think there are other cells, and plenty of them, or movements, and militias, spread over Europe and North America, who are quite pleased with Breivik’s as-yet simmering revolution.

I think Breivik knows perfectly well that his ideas are embraced, and that’s what gave him the sense of entitlement to do what he did. He expects to see Europe “burn”. They are also shared by plenty of North Americans. In fact, the celebrated American Islamophobe Robert Spencer was cited 64 times in Breivik’s ‘Manifesto’. Spencer co-founded the hate group Stop Islamization of America (SIOA) and Jihad Watch. The latter was funded (2003) by the David Horowitz Freedom Center (Center for the Popular Study of Culture), a “conservative” group that set out to influence Hollywood and spread their ideas about freedom.

“Some of the ideas [Breivik] expressed are good, barring the violence.
Some of them are great,” Italian official Mario Borghezio reportedly told British press. Borghezio is a member of the European Parliament’s Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs. How does a guy like that defend civil liberties? It brings a whole new meaning to the words. “Christians ought not to be animals to be sacrificed,” he said. “We have to defend them.”

The xenophobic hatred of non-white people is written all over the walls of Fortress Europe and Fortress America and Fortress Canada and Fortress Israel. Who could miss it? Kill the Moslems. Kill the Libyans. Kill the Somalis. Kill the Yemenis. Kill the Iraqis and the Afghans and the Iranians. And kill every last Rwandan Hutu — the fact that they are Christian doesn’t matter, since their spirituality was void and null after they, according to the standard mythology, chopped off their own sisters’ heads. Kill the Palestinians. To justify, to win popular support, the same people who advance these racist sentiments, and generally the ones who take action on them, are the ones who secretly produce and secretly disseminate much of the supposed ‘hate’ propaganda (Kill the Christians, Kill the Americans, Kill the Jews) that is directed at their own ethnic demographic (Christians, Americans, Jews).

Hollywood plays a huge role. Films like Captain America… well, tattoo my forehead “I’m too stupid to understand fiction.”

Kill the Arabs in Sudan — another rallying cry — and arrest Omar Al-Bashir, the Arab Islamic president of Sudan: He’s committing genocide says the powerful Jewish ‘Save Darfur’ lobby, and he’s enslaving good Christians the Christians redouble. Hollywood actors and the mass media say so, it must be true. This rhetoric spews forth from think tanks and universities and ‘human rights’ agencies and from the Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Empire operates in a curious manner. Take Smith College, Northampton Massachusetts, where English professors like Dr. Eric Reeves sit in their quaint offices, surrounded by Shakespeare and Milton (and by eugenics professors like Seymour Itzkoff), worshipped by starry-eyed bleeding heart liberal elite women, and they hatch political screeds on genocide informed by intelligence operatives — you know, Central Intelligence Agency types — who are fomenting the Pentagon-backed guerrilla insurgencies on the ground in those far off places like Sudan.

Harvard University’s Samantha Power has confirmed that this is our problem from hell: America has entered the age of genocide. Of course, we don’t have anything to do with it, and poor Lady Liberty has to drag her allies with her, kicking and screaming, and stepping on the tails of her gown dragged through the mud on the rocky road to freedom. Of course, we sell ‘em the humvees, missiles, tanks and fighter-bombers to get there.

The Rise of the Macro-Nationalists

What’s a guy gotta do to get a little recognition in the world? It was only a few days after his shooting spree in Oslo and the former nobody Anders Behring Breivik already had a huge Wikipedia entry with 164 references — and it’s expanding by the day. Obviously, he didn’t create it. Is this capitalism? Or education? No one has created a page for me. Not a single word!

I mean, Rwandan government agents like Tom Ndahiro, who spin the lies for President Paul Kagame, have labeled me a “notorious Tutsi genocide denier” and such praise for my work is not restricted to Rwandans. Canadian academic Dr. Gerald Caplan, who is often seen at the side of dictator Paul Kagame, has published articles deriding me and the other “genocide deniers who drink the each other’s putrid bath water.” (Seems Caplan forgot to have his work peer-reviewed: its rather hysterical.) Meles Zenawi, the dictator in Ethiopia was a bit nonplussed by my exposure of genocide there. You’d think someone would create a Wikipedia page for me.

What’s wrong with this picture? Do I have to become an elite warrior of the Christian Knights Templar? Embrace Zionism? Steal a few million diamonds from Congo and get away with it? Plagiarize the Unibomber’s manifesto and then re-enact the Crusades by massacring a bunch of kids at summer camp? Or should I dress as a soldier and have my picture taken like King Leopold II? Leopold is still celebrated in Belgium, his crimes covered up. Is this the future historical situation of Mr. Breivik — our modern day THOR?

“The recent killings in Norway were horrific,” said British rock star Steven Morrissey (former Smiths singer). “As usual in such cases, the media give the killer exactly what he wants: worldwide fame. We aren’t told the names of the people who were killed — almost as if they are not considered to be important enough, yet the media frenzy to turn the killer into a Jack The Ripper star is… repulsive. He should be un-named, not photographed, and quietly led away.”

Does the coverage around this one Norwegian guy at all remind anyone of a guy named O.J. Simpson? Like the twin World Trade towers demolitions in New York City on September 11, 2001, did the twin Breivik attacks provide the corporate media system with the perfect topic to whip up hysteria and manufacture mass distraction? The media is now turning over every rock they can find in the hunt for clues to Breivik’s madness. Imagine if they investigated the crimes of the big mining or military or pharmaceutical corporations, or the kickbacks to government officials?

Breivik’s most favorite movie was the vaingloriousy bloody Roman war flick Gladiator. No. 2 was 300, an American comic fantasy action thriller marketed by Warner Brothers. No. 3 was independent film Dogville, with Hollywood stars James Caan, John Hurt, Lauren Bacall and, especially, Nicole Kidman — who has the townspeople killed for sexually and emotionally abusing her.

Dogville is under attack. Danish director Lars Von Trier, a self-proclaimed Nazi, stated that he’s “sorry for having made it” [the film] whose machine-gun massacre at the end might have inspired Breivik’s armed assault on the little Norwegian island Utoya. While advocates of Nazism might want to look at themselves in psychotherapy, at the very least, the film Dogville is a harsh critique on American ‘society’ and there is absolutely no reason for Von Trier to apologize for making it. Why is an independent filmmaker bullied and shamed into apology? Filmmaker Quentin Tarantino applauded Dogville; does that make Tarantino culpable in mass murder? Why isn’t director George Lucas under attack for making Star Wars now that killer robotic drone technologies are deployed against innocent people all over the world?

Why isn’t Steven Spielberg under attack — if not arrested — for his alliance with the Pentagon in the war production Saving Private Ryan, for which he was awarded the Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Service by Secretary of Defense William Cohen at the Pentagon? The award honored Spielberg for making “a historic contribution to the national consciousness.” Stephen Speilberg also has the unprecedented distinction of producing mass hysteria about sharks through the one film — Jaws — responsible for demonizing sharks as ruthless killers and, in large part, for the ongoing decimation of shark species and the uncertain fate of our oceans. What kind of national consciousness does such cinematography contribute to? How is Cohen’s ‘national consciousness’ any different from the disease of nationalism?

William Cohen was Secretary of War under President William Jefferson Clinton at the height of the U.S. invasion of Central Africa. He was also deeply involved in the Iran-Contra affair. Cohen has been involved at the deepest levels of secrecy and denial in, for example, intelligence, torture, and special operations.

Saving Private Ryan provokes deep psychological sentiments and emotions based in the standard constructions and discourses of nationalism, patriotism, democracy and freedom. “Ryan, I must be quick to point out,” Secretary of War Cohen disingenuously declared, “is not a recruitment promotional for the Pentagon. It speaks to us, however, about the importance of values, discipline, determination and sacrifice.”

Who is “US”? It doesn’t speak to me that way. It speaks to me of war, blood, private profits and deceptions that have ripped apart millions and millions of people’s lives, and for no good reason, and that have exterminated entire nations of people. How are Cohen’s important characteristics — values, discipline, determination and sacrifice — different from the patriotism and nationalism that the Pentagon uses to conscript and recruit young people to do its dirty work? Under the Nazi regime, all music had to ‘fit’ within certain standards defined as ‘good’ German music — and censorship was ruthless. How does that differ from the Pentagon’s approval or or rejection of films?

Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen escorts Steven Spielberg through a military honor cordon into the Pentagon (1999).

The Pentagon routinely influences the scripts and the direction of Hollywood films. Plot-lines have been changed, history altered, and scripts modified to meet the Pentagon’s approval. If the Pentagon doesn’t like the direction, plot, themes or characters of pre-production films they won’t support them, and don’t.

In keeping with the privatization of war, the Pentagon’s interests are often served by civilian firms packed with ex-military who maintain tight ties to the war room. Professional soldiers with long service records in covert and psychological operations — Navy Seals or 10th Mountain Division Rangers or Green Berets — are often hired as consultants to enhance war films.This way, the Pentagon and U.S. officials can ‘plausibly deny’ involvement in a film’s direction or production — but the links, ideologies, patriotism and emotional hooks all satisfy the ideals of the American fighting machine.

Captain Dale Dye, a retired Marine who earned three purple hearts in Vietnam, has worked in Hollywood as an actor, producer, writer, and consultant, with major credits for Saving Private Ryan and Platoon. “We are fighting Islamo-fascists who will not tolerate the existence of non-Muslims — infidels — on this earth,” Dye said in a Los Angeles Times article. “These are folks who are told they cannot rest until every infidel is driven from this earth…. They aren’t people you can negotiate with.”

Dye’s consulting company is Warriors, Inc., but he works three days a week to influence mass media reportage on wars the U.S. is involved in. He is a frequent ‘independent expert’ cited in corporate media stories. Dye worked as a reporter for Soldier of Fortune magazine, and he has run his own radio program. Dye’s record in Vietnam raises questions about his involvement in illegal operations like the Phoenix Program. Later, during the Reagan administration’s terrorist covert guerrilla wars Latin America, Dye worked “reporting and training troops in guerrilla warfare techniques” in Nicaragua and El Salvador. The Reagan projects in Latin America were meant to subvert democracy, institute dictatorship and further U.S. corporate interests; hundreds of thousands of people died from massacres, beheadings, dismemberment and disappearing.

Who says violence in cinematography has no connection to the real world? In Captain America we find some fascinating themes that should inspire anyone to question the motives of the corporate enterprises and the star-studded casts — Hollywood, the Pentagon, Viacom, Paramount, Walt Disney, Marvel Entertainment — that bring such phantasmagorical extravaganzas to the public’s pleasure.

Isn’t Empire the main theme of Captain America? Military superiority in a we-are-the-forces-of-good-they-are-the-forces-of-evil narrative that never threatens our sensibilities or ever makes us squirm in our fifteen-dollars-a-shot-plus-popcorn-and-soda seats? Is the film aimed at indoctrination for war and the manufacture of consent for our participation in elite military imperatives premised on private profit and power?

What about Hollywood’s presentation of ideas about the manipulation of the human body achieved by modern science through genetic engineering, pharmaceutical products, (breast implants, plastic surgery, liposuction), hormones and steroids? Are there any references to these scientific advancements?

What about the theme of patriarchal male domination and the ideologies of the sexual control of women and male supremacy? Come on, can’t anyone just sit and watch a movie?

Not Just a Soldier, a Good Man

“We’re gonna make a new breed of super-soldier,” one of the military grunts proclaims. “Stay the way you are,” the slightly mad scientist with the German accent tells the scrawny un-superized-soldier, prior to his physical transformation to glossy super-chested hero. “Not just a soldier, but a good man.”

A good man. “I’m just a kid from Brooklyn,” the as-yet-unsuperized hero says. Could be anybody from America. The mythology is that any one of us can rise to great heights if we set our minds on it. Isn’t this the great American dream?

The soldier is a good man. The goodness projected by our Captain America savior translates directly to the commonly held belief in the goodness of the average U.S. soldier who, of course, is spreading truth and democracy around the world. This is not a guy who tortures or massacres innocent people, he is a very principled and very ethical hero — like the great white American savior Jake Sully in the blockbuster 3-D emotional sensation Avatar. The projected image of the good soldier in these films maps directly onto U.S. forces deployed at Camp Lemonier in Djibouti, or the heroes “defending American values” in Afghanistan through Operation Enduring Freedom. America’s soldiers are not unprincipled killers — the kind of sociopath that some people are portraying Anders Behring Breivik out to be — they are good men. Right?

Of course, Hollywood has its way with reality. Camp Lemonier is a Pentagon outpost for so-called ‘snatch-and-grab’ terrorist operations run by covert forces, in Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti and Somalia, with secret CIA torture centers. These illegal operations and covert guerrilla wars involve violations of international humanitarian law, including war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. The U.S. backs bloody dictatorships and nasty warlords all across the region. Such facts are obscured by Hollywood and its propaganda films, aren’t they?

Survivors of U.S.-backed state-sponsored genocide in Ethiopia; the government of Meles Zenawi is committing massive atrocities against numerous indigenous tribes. (© Keith Harmon Snow, 2006)

We Take the Brain

The new Captain America film is packed with action adventures and high technology war weapons. Consider the film’s presentation of the secret weapons of the HYDRA — the Nazi deep science division presented as the ominous evil enemy. It sure looks a lot like the Pentagon’s billion dollar boondoggle the Northrup-Grumman Corporation B-2 bomber. Coincidence?

Well, in the film this stealth bomber has a different name altogether, and its not our name for the thing, its the Nazi’s name for it. Like the choice of the language that the Allied scientist speaks with — a decisively Germanic accent — the choice of the stealthy ‘flying wing’ resembling the Pentagon’s B-2 bomber is no coincidence, but an intentional choice based in the hidden history of allied war crimes of WW-II.

Modern aerospace programs and technologies had their genesis in the secret aerospace programs of the Nazi-American war machine. On April 12, 1945, having crushed the last bastion of Nazi military resistance, U.S. forces under General Dwight D. Eisenhower secured Thuringia, the heart of the Nazi secret weapons research and development programs in Germany. Eisenhower led the charge to transfer superior and futuristic Nazi weapons technologies to the United States before the weapons facilities were turned over to the allied invading Soviet army on July 4, 1945. The Soviets, of course, drew the iron curtain over Thuringia and Eastern Germany for the next 43 years (until 1989).

General Eisenhower personally oversaw the removal of futuristic aerospace ‘assets’, including the Fi 103 ‘flying bomb’ (propaganda name ‘V1′), the A4 rocket (‘V2′), and the world’s first deployable jet turbine aircraft, the Messerschmidt Me 262 (which as a fighter could attain speeds of over 800 km/h). At least five Me 262 planes were assembled under the direction of U.S. forces in control of the Messerschmidt Me 262 production factory from April to July 1945.

The biggest and most secretive catch was an intact prototype of an all-wing, single engine, single-seater jet plane, type named the Horten Ho IX or Go 229 V-3. The futuristic Northrup-Grumman Corporation ‘stealth’ bomber — the flying wing — unveiled in the United States (circa 1989) bears a striking similarity to the Nazi Go 229 V3. It is widely unknown that at least one complete Go 229 V-3 plane and a large number of finished parts of the prototype fell into U.S. hands and disappeared into supra-governmental ‘black’ programs in the secret weapons complex post WW-II.

Who ran this weapons complex? John Foster Dulles was Secretary of State under President Dwight D. Eisenhower from 1952-1959. Allen Dulles ran the Central Intelligence Agency, until recently known as the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (O.S.S.). The Dulles brothers had ties to Nazi Germany in the 1930′s and into the war. Most interesting was the Sullivan and Cromwell — Dulles brothers’ law firm to a guy with a mustache named Adolf — one of their clients. So began the post WW-II era in secrecy and denial, the Cult of the Atom, and the mythology of the comic strip superhero, Captain America.

“While watching the trailer for this movie I spotted a number of what-if planes and tanks,” posted a guy named ‘Nick” on a specialized military technology Internet forum. “The main one is a giant Nazi flying wing bomber that looks like an overgrown Ho-229 [sic] and it was being chased by what looks like an XP-55 Ascender. There were also some Nazi armoured cars that looked rather slick and streamlined, only on screen for a few seconds so not too sure. This should be a fun summer movie to switch off the brain and enjoy!”

Allied intelligence ascertained well in advance the locations of the supreme Nazi weapons facilities, including the exact factories and their production capabilities but the Allied bombing campaign did not target the weapons complex. For example, while bombs fell in an ostensible attack on the V2 rocket production facilities near Nordhausen on April 3, 1945, the V2 centers were entirely spared: some 8,800 civilians instead died when the bombs hit the town. There was no military significance to these killings, merely eight days before the American troops arrived. This is yet another example of U.S. government war crimes that went unchallenged.

General Eisenhower personally oversaw the exfiltration of over 2000 Nazi scientists — experts in biological warfare, rocketry, munitions, intelligence and psychological operations (torture and propaganda) — to U.S. military and intelligence bases, mostly, but not exclusively, in the continental United States. This mass and secretive recruitment and exfiltration occurred under highly classified programs of the O.S.S. — and continued under its later incarnation, the Central Intelligence Agency. These O.S.S./CIA programs were called Project Paperclip and Project 63. Through the defense and intelligence establishment’s then “Operation Sunshine,” Nazis belonging to the elite ‘Gehlen Org’ — named for Nazi intelligence chief Reinhard Gehlen — were exfiltrated into the CIA.

The U.S. Combined Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee (CIOS) was set up early in WW-II and tasked with collecting scientific data on the level of research attained by the Germans in select technical fields and weapons — primarily, at first, concerned with the atom bomb. Some 3000 researchers and engineers wearing U.S. Army and Air Force uniforms were attached to General Patton’s Third Army solely for this purpose, and they converged en masse on the Nazi secret underground weapons complex in Thuringia after the Allied invasion.

Their slogan was: “We take the brain.”

Taranis, an unmanned combat aircraft prototype unveiled in Britain in 2010.

Taranis, designed and manufactured by Northrop Grumman with assistance from Boeing, the B-2 ‘Spirit’ bomber aircraft each averaged US$737 million in 1997 dollars ($1.01 billion today). Total procurement costs averaged $929 million per aircraft ($1.27 billion today), while the total program cost (development, engineering, testing) averaged $2.1 billion per aircraft in 1997 dollars ($2.87 billion today). In 2010, Britain’s scandal-ridden BAE Systems unveiled a new unmanned stealth bomber prototype of its own, Taranis, funded by the people of Britain to the tune of 143 million pounds.

The B-2 has been deployed in Serbia, Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan and in the recent illegal war against Libya, yet Hollywood films glamorize weapons of mass destruction, and they inspire young people to want to operate them, no matter the moral or ethical questions, which are never asked. Raining bombs down from the sky is as immoral as sitting in a remote office somewhere far from the actual war theatre pulling some joystick which rains UAV-deployed weaponry down on innocent men, women and children. Pakistan offers an egregious example which has only slightly scratched the surface of the impenetrable western mass media propaganda system.

The film Top Gun offers the premier example of western technological war propaganda and nationalism, completely stripped of all moral and ethical conundrums cast as another contest of good (US) versus evil (them). Captain America (Tom Cruise), to the rescue. Of course, he always gets his girl. It’s not just a job, it’s an adventure.

The Brain Drain

The military-entertainment complex comprises a lot more than the sleek propaganda and psychological mind-melts plastered across the big screen in such films. Often there are direct ties between current or past Pentagon or intelligence officials. For example, Captain America is a Paramount Films, Viacom Industries, Marvel Studios, Walt Disney Corp. production (the exact relations between these industrial giants are opaque and fluid).

One Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer director for some 19 years, who  directed the interests of the corporation, was former U.S. General Alexander Haig — the former vice chief of staff of the U.S. Army (1973), White House chief of staff under Presidents Nixon and Ford (1973-74), Supreme Allied Commander of NATO Forces (1974-79), and secretary of state under President Reagan (1981-82). While serving MGM, Haig was also a director of the multinational defense contractor United Technologies International (UTI), the parent company of Sikorsky Helicopters, the maker of the Blackhawk choppers of the Pentagon’s Somalia propaganda film Black Hawk Down.

Other highly leveraged corporate ties proliferate. For one example, one of the directors of aerospace and defense giant GE Company, Barbara Scott Preiskel, is also a director of the Washington Post, and she is Senior Vice-President of the Motion Picture Associations of America, New York, NY. You see the Motion Pictures of America cited on every pre-preview trailer. For another example, consider that Lucille S. Salhany sits on the Hewlett Packard board of directors with Philip M. Condit, Chairman and CEO of The Boeing Company, and that Lucille S. Salhany was President of United Paramount Network (1994-1997); Chairman and Director of Fox Broadcasting (1993-1994); and Chairman of 20th Century Fox Television (1991-1993).

Directors of Viacom Corporation (the parent company of numerous other media entities) include media magnate Sumner Redstone, a 1944 Harvard University and 1947 Harvard Law School graduate who served in the “Military Intelligence Division” during World War II. ” While a student at Harvard, he was selected to join a special intelligence group whose mission was to break Japan’s high-level military and diplomatic codes. Mr. Redstone received, among other honors, two commendations from the Military Intelligence Division in recognition of his service, contribution and devotion to duty, and the Army Commendation Award. Mr. Redstone served in the Military Intelligence Division during World War II.”

Redstone’s 2010 annual compensation for Viacom was $35.3 million, while Viacom CEO received the largest annual compensation in America — $84.5 million — while Viacom’s No. 2 director received $64.7 million in 2010.

The U.S. government’s Joint Intelligence Committee, established soon after Pearl Harbor, had the dual mission of providing intelligence advice to the joint Chiefs of Staff and representing the United States in combined Military Intelligence matters with its British counterparts; they were also involved in interrogation operations (torture) against Japanese and German war prisoners. The Military Intelligence Division was also used to coordinate and implement various international ‘deception operations.’

The film Pearl Harbor only advanced nationalistic and patriotic sentiments meant to further indoctrinate and recruit warriors. Starring great white hope Ben Affleck, the 2001 production is rife with inaccuracies and devoid of any serious geopolitical context. The oversimplified plot was purely based on emotion and jingoisms. Even U.S. military historians agreed.

One of the great cover-ups of the World War II era was the U.S. government’s advance knowledge of an impending Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. However, it seems that U.S. taxpayers needed to be coaxed into another blood-drenched war that would claim the lives of so many aspiring Captain Americas.

But that was not the only big World War II whitewash that Hollywood has massaged for the Pentagon and its corporate allies. While the blockbuster film Schindler’s List also helped recast the hidden history of World War II, it serves other propaganda purposes — favorable to capitalism and the elites who benefit most from it.

Schindler’s List fits neatly into the narratives about the Holocaust that have become industries unto themselves. Remember the wealth that ghetto refugees carried along with them in the film? Diamonds, easily concealed: the state of Israel was born out of the blood diamonds plundered from the Congo (Africa). While the suffering of the Jews in Europe was very real, it is their ‘victim’ status that has been used and abused to shield them against all charges of war crimes, crimes against humanity, or genocide being perpetrated by Israeli interests in the Congo, Angola, Sudan, Uganda, Rwanda, South Africa, Botswana — its a long list — and the Palestinian territories. (Of course, the same ‘victim’ status has been used, falsely, by the elite Tutsi dictatorship ruling Rwanda today.) But Jewish film director Stephen Spielberg has played a major role in creating war propaganda that suits his personal preferences and private interests in real life. Exemplifying his deep anti-Arab sentimentality, Spielberg was boycotted by the Arab League for having secretly donated $1,000,000 to Israel in 2006 during the second War on Lebanon.

The ‘good versus evil’ dichotomy is often used to inculcate emotionally seated ideas about patriotism and nationalism, and to indoctrinate subjects and citizens, and this dichotomy was profoundly advanced by the Nuremberg war crimes tribunals and the post-WW II Cold War propaganda.  Nuremberg and the formation of the United Nations  were nothing more than sham dress rehearsals for the victor’s justice of the international criminal tribunals on Yugoslavia (ICTY), Rwanda (ICTR), the Special Court for Sierra Leone, and the International criminal Court. The fire-bombings of the city of Dresden and Nordhausan (Thuringia), and the atomic atrocities at Nagasaki and Hiroshima all warranted investigation and prosecution for war crimes. Had the American and British and Belgian and French military officials and the monopoly capitalists that backed them been tried in an international court of law by a truly international League of Nations, the world would most likely be a far different place today.

Instead, the prevailing establishment narratives about genocide — born out of the Nazi Holocaust — set the stage for the evolution of deeply manipulative and hegemonic discourses that politicized the international human rights and war crimes arenas. These politicized doctrines have transformed all reasonable definitions and applications of international ‘humanitarian’ law into tools that the most powerful nations use against their ideological, political or economic enemies. Schindler’s List quite neatly fits into the political economy of genocide and the financial and political imperatives of the Holocaust industry, and it’s no surprise to find that corporate executives from Hollywood film enterprises — like Viacom director Sheri Redstone — and are deeply connected to powerful Jewish and Zionist organizations.

And the weapons procurements, productions, proliferation and profits continue to rise.

Norway is a key partner in the ongoing and illegal “War on Terror.” Norway provides a base station (on its home turf) for the U.S. Missile Defense program intelligence and reconnaissance gathering against Russia and its neighbors. Norway is the 14th largest arms importer in the world, and a major exporter, with the highest military expenditures per capita of any country in Europe.

In 2002, Norway sent 18 F-16 fighter-bombers to support the Pentagon’s illegal ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’ and the illegal coalition attacks against Afghanistan. Norwegian Armed Forces are involved today in covert ‘counterterrorism’ [read: terrorism] operations with U.S. and British Special Forces in Afghanistan: between 2001 and 2010, Norway had sent over 6938 soldiers who participated in the illegal International Security and Assistance Forces (ISAF) occupation of Afghanistan.

Norway is also part of the international coalition that attacked Libya, in contravention of international law, on March 17, 2011. Norway has six General Dynamics F-16 Fighting Falcon fighter jets, and two Lockheed Martin C-130 J-30 tactical transport aircraft, operating against Libya from an air base in Crete. By April 26, 2011, Norwegian F-16s had dropped over 200 bombs on the people of Libya.

The people of Norway are not innocent spectators to the wars their government and troops and intelligence apparatus are involved in. The anti-Arab sentiments in the country are reflected by their global position vis-a-vis the U.S., Canada, Britain, and Israel — the predominant purveyors of Empire. The Norwegian government’s recent shift to stand up against Israel’s war crimes is certainly something to watch.

Imagineering War

In 1999, the University of Southern Califonia was awarded a $42 million grant by the U.S. Army to establish the Institute for Creative Technology (ICT). The ICT “was created to combine the assets of a major research university with the creative resources of Hollywood and the game industry to advance the state-of-the-art in training and simulation.” The ICT is an Army University Affiliated Research Center (UARC). The contract is managed by the U.S. Army Research, Development and Engineering Command’s Simulation Training Technology Center (RDECOM STTC).

“At USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT), high-tech tools and classic storytelling come together to pioneer new ways to teach and to train. Our goal is to create engaging and effective immersive experiences that shape the future of learning. With applications for leadership, and decision-making, ICT also seeks to redefine the range of skills these experiences can address.”

Sound pretty benign? Check out the page where this text appears and you will see that it revolves around U.S. military agendas. The graphics openly display soldiering and military hardware. One of the main thrusts of interactive simulations is war gaming, a billions of dollars a year industry.

The Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) has enlisted film studios and video game designers and it reflects the extensive overlap between Hollywood and the Pentagon. Officers from the Special Operations Command (SOCOM) sector of the DoD play an integral part in developing these simulations. ICT video games Full Spectrum Command and Full Spectrum Warrior use the Xbox and Sony Playstation platforms. Pac Man, Game Boy and DOOM were all used by the military as training simulation programs.

It is important to truly appreciate the subservient role that the mass media and entertainment industries play in further institutionalizing the American addiction to war and space. It is no anomaly that the Pentagon has sponsored hi-tech ‘brainstorming’ sessions with some of Hollywood’s most celebrated science fiction writers and producers. With a five-year, $45 million dollar contract with the U.S. Army, the Institute for Creative Technology in Marina del Rey (CA) has been tapping the creative genius of John Milius (co-writer: Apocalypse Now), David Ayer (writer: Training Day), Ron Cobb (creature designer for Star Wars films). Hollywood consultants are paid anywhere from $500 to $1,000 a day to dream up new high-tech military gizmos — coming to an Army near you.

It doesn’t take the brawn or brains [sic] of Captain America to figure out that this Pentagon research and development institute facilitates advanced robotic and simulation warfare systems. Drones. That is, robotic killing technologies such as Unmanned Aerospace Vehicles (UAVs) and Unmanned Undersea Vehicles (UUVs) and a whole fleet of related warfare technologies.

Early in 2002, U.S. Secretary of War Donald Rumsfeld added over $1 billion to the fiscal 2003 defense budget request to develop certain Unmanned Aerospace Vehicle (UAV) programs. The DOD invested more than $3 billion in UAV development, procurement and operations between 1996 and 2001; invested $2.3 billion more by 2005 and another $4.2 billion before 2009. According to the so-called UAV Roadmap produced several years ago, the UAV inventory of all the military services was expected to grow to 290 vehicles by 2010. How many are really out there now?

The deployment of drone technologies with bombing and strafing capabilities represents the most egregious American immorality and cowardice — the opposite of everything the Captain America supposedly stands for. There’s no courage involved in the war games environment where some G.I. Joe operates a joystick — hardly any different than masturbation — in some isolated control room far from the killing fields.

Contrary to the propaganda of assurance and accountability ever touted by the Obama administration, the drones are every day deployed to spy on, terrorize, strafe and bomb innocent civilians from Pakistan to Iraq to Darfur to the Mexican border of the U.S.

Farmers working in poppy fields in Balakh, Afghanistan. (© Keith Harmon Snow, 2006)

“Al Qaeda seeks to bleed us financially by drawing us into long, costly wars that also inflame anti-American sentiment,” John Brennan, President Barack Obama’s Office of Homeland Security counter-terrorism adviser. “Going forward, we will be mindful that if our nation is threatened, our best offense won’t always be deploying large armies abroad but delivering targeted, surgical pressure to the groups that threaten us.”

America will pursue war “in the shadows” Brennan said, “relying heavily on missile strikes from unmanned aerial drones, raids by elite special operations troops, and quiet training of local forces to pursue terrorists… No civilians are ever hurt… And by that I mean, if there are terrorists who are within an area where there are women and children or others, you know, we do not take such action that might put those innocent men, women and children in danger.”

“In the past year there hasn’t been a single collateral [civilian] death, because of the exceptional proficiency, precision, of the capabilities we’ve been able to develop,” said good soldier John Brennan, lying through his teeth. According to a British investigative journalism agency, and countless witnesses on the ground, civilians are routinely killed by drones. Brennan is a veteran CIA operative with a distinguished career in deception and death for profit.

Never explained are the direct connections between drone attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan and the poppy (opium) growers who are not on the Central Intelligence Agency’s list of approved growers. The opium trade is used to fund covert operations all over the world — to back our Captain Americas in their pursuit of freedom and truth.

In 2005,  Secretary of War Donald Rumsfeld appeared in a Pentagon press conference with Marvel superaction heroes Spiderman and Captain America. The purpose of the Pentagon photo op was to launch a new domestic war propaganda program aimed at active duty troops dubbed “America Supports You.”

Under Donald Rumsfeld and his successor, the Unmanned Aerospace Vehicle sector has grown exponentially, exceeding its own expectations, and the military roles, uses, launch platforms, control rooms and payloads of UAVs — like government expenditures on research, development and acquisition — are out of sight. In 2005, tactical and theater level unmanned aircraft alone, had flown over 100,000 flight hours in support of Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom. The United States, Belgium, France, Germany and Israel are the leading producers of UAVs and related weaponry.

These are the Predators and other UAV drones being deployed by the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon to bomb and strafe “insurgents” in remote Afghan villages, to patrol and surveil national borders in Israel and Texas, and to “stop genocide” in places like Sudan, where NATO alliance forces — especially the US, Canada, Britain and Israel — are deeply involved in perpetrating war crimes.

For example, instead of offering anything close to the truth about Sudan, the military-entertainment complex’s “Save Darfur” (a province in Sudan) narrative has been based on flagrant propaganda channeled from the Pentagon and intelligence operatives in Sudan, and onto the western English-language press, through mouthpieces like National Security Council operative John Prendergast or the Holocaust Memorial Museum or Smith College English professor Eric Reeves. The ‘Save Darfur’ and ‘Never Again’ sloganeering advances by these propagandists relies accusations (e.g. Reeves) of a “genocidal war against African people’s” ostensibly being committed by President Omar Al-Bashir, whose government is under a Pentagon ‘regime change’ attack.

May the Force Be with You

Today’s battle-fighting environments — often cast in jungles, like Apocalypse Now or Rambo or the post-apocalyptic Mad Max genre films or Predator — are awash in weaponry and mythologized storylines that destroy the links between state-sponsored terrorism and domestic violence, between war propaganda and our complicity in war crimes, environmental destruction and terrorism. The ugly truth is that the ‘universal American soldier‘ is indoctrinated to kill, and to kill ruthlessly, and is not some aberration who went astray of the pack and lost his sense of ‘goodness’.

We see this lone aberration soldier gone awry in the Rambo films, and it is most starkly personified by Marlon Brando’s caricature of Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. The film is packed with references to Central Africa, culminating in the bloody death where Kurtz (Brando) exclaims, “the Horror, the horror,” right out of Joseph Conrad’s famous novel on Belgian atrocities in the Congo, Heart of Darkness.

Apocalypse Now is no anti-war film. Captain Benjamin L. Willard (Martin Sheen) is a Special Operations assassin with the Pentagon’s Military Assistance Command, Vietnam – Studies and Observations Group (MACV-SOG). Captain Willard is sent up the Mekong River to deep territory to assassinate a rogue U.S. Special Forces Colonel Walter E. Kurtz, who has gone ‘native’. There’s that theme of rogue U.S. commando again. In fact, MACV-SOG was responsible for covert operations, and sometimes these actually were against U.S. military — but probably against officers and soldiers who opposed the illegal Pentagon or CIA operations and had become ‘liabilities’ that needed to be ‘neutralized’.

The MACV-SOG operations supplemented a ruthless CIA ‘counterinsurgency’ program called ‘Phoenix‘ — an instrument of terror, accountable to no one, a psyop gone mad — that cut like a scalpel deep into the hearts and minds and bodies of Vietnamese civilians in violation of the Geneva Conventions and all reasonable codes of war. Tortures, assassinations, kidnappings, detention for years without trial or survival — ‘neutralizations’ of soldiers, fathers, mothers, supporters, innocent bystanders, friendly agents, entire families and entire villages, that occurred late at night after people went to bed. “Such horrendous acts were, for propaganda purposes, made to look as if they had been committed by the enemy.” And everything occurred behind the smiling faces and democratic assurances — standing up in front of the patriotic Western mass media for photo-ops — of intelligence and defense officials’ lies.

Hollywood cinematography introduced robotic technologies to the general public through the Hollywood Star Wars trilogies — everything from the 1970′s hit TV series The Six Million Dollar Man to the Schwarzennegger Terminator films. Thus we can say for certain where the language and public introduction of the new Unmanned Aerospace Vehicles (UAV) technologies came from — language like ‘drones’, names like Predator and StrikeStar and DarkStar. These films habituated U.S. citizens to an increasingly militarized environment, the physical and social environments of every day life now characterized by rapid technological changes that are occurring at a rate far more accelerated than the rate of human adaptability, and beyond the capacity for any organized social protest.

These major Hollywood productions clearly facilitated the military objectives of “turning science fiction into fact” and it is in the context of the popularity of these films, and the hundreds of millions of dollars dedicated to their production and proliferation, that we can situate the realities of the “death-and-destruction” technologies that were developed behind them. Indeed, the technologies did not appear overnight: the Hollywood Star Wars type films were the chronicles of death foretold. Drones, droids and other ‘futuristic’ robotic systems employed in war zones today include sophisticated gadetry like Robotic Vehicle Trainers and these, in turn, revolve around simulation and gaming technologies.

“The robotic vehicle trainer teaches Soldiers how to operate robots like the Talon, SWORDS and PackBot,” reads the US Army RDECOM Research Laboratory description, “using a virtual environment in the ‘America’s Army’ video game.” RDECOM is the U.S. Army’s Research, Development and Engineering Command, another war-making agency that has a direct relationship to Hollywood.

Simulation centers create the means for remotely piloted killing machines to perpetrate atrocities (war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide) on innocent civilian populations in places where the Pentagon seeks to limit soldier (human) casualties.

While the text explaining what the Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) is supposedly about makes laudable (I’m being very sarcastic) attempts to classify their activities as civilian — there is always some civilian benefit, like the peaceful atom and the medical uses of biological weapons — there is no attempt to cover up the fact that this “university research center” is highly militarized and serves the Pentagon’s war-making agenda: it is written all over the ICT web site.

For those traumas and casualties that do occur, the survivors can try to piece themselves — and their relations with their significant others — back together and lead semi-productive lives with the support of Bill Ford — one of the ICT’s trauma recovery simulation coaches. Retired Sergeant Major and Vietnam war veteran Bill Ford is a virtual human who is “based on the personality and experiences of real soldiers and marines.”

Remember that rush of emotion that overwhelmed your body when watching the 3-D simulation of the decimation of ‘Home Tree’ in Avatar?

Hollywood, in conjunction with academic and military research institutions, has honed in on subliminal psychology and ways to more deeply impact and influence human emotion. Avatar was no progressive film, but a deeply compromised narrative with all the same old stereotypes and ideologies of white supremacy and patriarchy, and contrary to commonly held public beliefs, the film helps to inculcate deeply insidious messages that actually enhance the western imperial project of Empire.

That is, Avatar facilitates conquest, and resource plunder, it does not challenge it. It does not challenge the destruction of the earth, and it facilitates the ongoing genocides of indigenous peoples, everywhere. Like Captain America, already is, or King Kong, Avatar became an industry unto itself — complete with Na’vi action superheroes, books, costumes, T-shirts, and other materialistic paraphernalia peddled by Toys R’ Us and other garbage producers.

Enter scientists like Jonathan Gratch, a member of the ICT research and development team, whose research focuses on virtual humans and computational models of emotion. He studies the relationship between cognition and emotion, the cognitive processes underlying emotional responses, and the influence of emotion on decision-making and physical behavior. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, DARPA, AFOSR and RDECOM. DARPA is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and AFOSR is the Air Force Office of Scientific Research — two of many amongst the most secretive military-intelligence entities on earth.

ICT’s Associate Director Dr. Stacy Marsella has lead research efforts on a number of technologies, but his most recent work includes “modelling beliefs about others (Theory of Mind) plays in multi-agent based social simulation and the design of virtual humans, software-artefacts that look like, act like and can interact with humans within virtual environments.” Doctors Gratch and Marsella’s accomplishments include development and implementation of the Pentagon requisitioned MRE/SASO warfare systems: the “Mission Rehearsal Exercise” [play MRE Movie Clip] and the Stability and Support Operations [play SASO Movie Clip] training prototypes.

ICT Associate Director Dr. Albert Rizzo’s latest project “has focused on the translation of the graphic assets from the Xbox game, Full Spectrum Warrior, into an exposure therapy application for combat-related PTSD with Iraq War veterans.” ICT director Randall Hill graduated with a bachelor of science degree from the United States Military Academy at West Point and subsequently served as a commissioned officer in the U.S. Army for six years with assignments in field artillery and military intelligence before getting an advanced degrees in computer sciences (artificial intelligence).

No connection between Hollywood and the Pentagon?

The Marvel Universe

The Pentagon’s public web pages — for all these agencies — are awash in public relations, greenwashing (the Pentagon is the top global environmental polluter) and propaganda (read: perception management) whitewashing their true missions, agendas and record. Hollywood sets the stage by programming the minds of entertainment consumer-spectators.

While Hollywood continues to falsify the consciousness of consumer-spectators through the bombast of 3-D film extravaganzas like Captain America, the other forms of mass media — the information overload of “news” productions, advertising and military-corporate whitewashing — are sure to help finish the job.

Walt Disney Corporation purchased Marvel Entertainment in 2009. Hollywood’s Walt Disney productions are legendary, of course, with such animation films as The Lion King, Madagascar, and Pocahontas — each with its own subliminal themes dedicated to the indoctrination of youth in service to the entrenchment of capitalist interests (values, desires, associations) at a young age.

The indoctrination of children to serve the military-entertainment complex in its operational war theaters begins at an early age. It’s not just the films. Amongst the many commodities being mass marketed by Marvel Industries are a whole line of superhero action apparel for children. You can also get your superaction hero dolls and fleece blankets and T-shirts and underwear.

That’s right, for just $16.50 you can order your superaction hero pajama tops and shorts set on line today and tuck your tiny tot into bed in his Captain America pajamas for a restful night of superhero action associations — influencing the developmental character structure at a deeply subconscious level through dreams — which translate into early childhood indoctrination for weaponry, war and patriarchy. The Lion King, for example, has a deeply anti-immigration message, this crafted over and above the more obvious racial stereotypes and patriarchal themes of male power and dominance that serve the ongoing evisceration of resources from Africa, and the depopulation that attends these. Such animation shorts are filled with mythologizing themes and images that distort the spectator-consumer’s perceptions of reality, underscoring the supposed supremacy of the white societies (the light-skinned lions) and the supposed sociopathologies of people of color (the dark-skinned lion plotting with sniveling and drooling hyenas to leave the ‘spoiled’ badlands and take the good lands).

Never mind the elderly ape with walking stick being the closest thing to a human. While the Pentagon and multinational corporations are engaged in exercises to depopulate landscapes in Africa, we have co-existent and simultaneous the production and mass consumption of racialized animation imagery of The Lion King or Madagascar — and it’s not a whole lot different with Out of Africa either, it’s just different — that inculcates the white consciousness with the un-peopled Africa. This is yet another debasing projection of savagery and bestiality onto African people — and the blotting out of indigenous tribes of East Africa in favor of the mining and tourism interests of white western capitalism, backed by the Pentagon’s new Africa Command, AFRICOM.

Curiouser and Curiouser

Along with these primary western agents of disinformation come the Pentagon’s ‘humanitarian’ entourage, Hollywood actorvists like George Clooney, Mia Farrow, and Don Cheadle, our Captain Americas for Sudan, and Ben Affleck, Angelina Jolie and now Emile Hersch, our Captains America for Congo. Hollywood films that disinform consumer-spectators and whitewash the historical and contemporary realities of western military and multinational corporate interventions in Sudan, Uganda, Rwanda and Congo are spread around the globe through the global cinema distribution complex. These films include The Devil Came on Horseback (Darfur, Sudan); Hotel Rwanda; Black Hawk Down; The Last King of Scotland; King Kong and Blood Diamond.

In the late fall of 2005, the Hollywood film King Kong opened to sellout crowds everywhere. The high-action cinematography and special effects combined with the racy recycled story of Beauty and the Beast to bring home a walloping fortune for everyone involved. Behind the film, however, is a dark forest of conservation organizations, primatologists and public relation firms peddling billions of dollars in so-called ‘conservation’ programs for Central Africa. Behind these conservation organizations, funding them, or working with them directly, are some very interesting corporate species. As you penetrate deeper and deeper into this jungle of surprises, the landscape gets curiouser and curiouser.

The King Kong industry and Kong paraphernalia was peddled at Starbucks and Burger King, but there’s a whole jungle of Kong-related products on sale out there. The King Kong media machine pumped articles into many print magazines, including WIRED, Rolling Stone, and Vanity Fair. Turner Broadcasting (CNN/TBS/TNT) ‘scooped up’ the rights for the television network premier of King Kong from owner-producers NBC/Universal and Universal Studios Home Entertainment peddled the King Kong DVD and King Kong computer games.

Remarkably, there are many real life parallels to the characters and events in the King Kong epic. Included in these are interests connected to Universal Studios. One interesting entity cashing in on the King Kong frenzy is the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International (DFGF-I). Behind or partnered with them are a whole troop of multinational corporations whose interest in gorilla conservation appears to be a front for the control and exploitation of Banana Republics — Rwanda, the two Congos, Uganda, Central African Republic, Gabon.

One of these secretive firms, ESRI (Earth Sciences Research Institute), has worked in the defense sector for years, initially focused on supporting defense mapping organizations and advanced terrain analysis and other cartographic military necessities for military base development. “Now as a result of Congressional mandate,” said expert John Day in Military Geospatial Technology, “technology is being deployed into a wide range of warfighter, intelligence and base support programs; and ESRI is playing a leading role in that transformation.”

At the heart of the King Kong tale is the white damsel in distress. Like the Tarzan myth, the sassy white female makes the adventure, and her sexuality is the central draw. Ann Darrow (actress Naomi Watts) makes her Kong debut in a flimsy nightgown and she closes the film in an equally seductive dancing gown. The seductress captures the imagination of the viewers, adding a titillating energy of subliminal sexual desire, but her white femininity is situated in a subordinate role, and her sexual availability is advertised most clearly when the big beast pokes at her. For the spectator-consumer, the titillating advances provoke subliminal sexual emotions.

Like Tarzan‘s Jane, Kong‘s Ann Darrow offers a metaphor for the real life femme fatales of the primate conservation community involved in the imperial enterprise of ‘conservation’ in Africa. A central character is Dian Fossey, the primatologist whose pioneering research on the mountain gorillas of Rwanda led to her murder in 1985. Another is Sigourney Weaver, the Hollywood star who played Dian Fossey in the late 1980′s Hollywood film Gorillas in the Mist. And then there is Jane Goodall, the internationally renowned chimpanzee specialist. More recent femme fatales to enter the fray are Daryl Hannah and Madison Slate.

The buck doesn’t stop there. The Jane Goodall Institute (JGI) has a base in an out-of-this-world place called Walikale, in South Kivu province, Congo. The JGI has been involved with militias and land theft, and is indirectly backing extortion, war crimes and genocide in Eastern Congo.

Of course, like the place itself (Walikale), such stories appear completely off the map of establishment media reality — an so they appear as crazy as the people of color, portrayed as drooling tribal zombies, in King Kong.

Black Hawk Down

“And ah, can someone explain to me how Hollywood was dishonest with Black Hawk Down?” said DaMarlboroMan3, commenting on RT’s Captain America video. “We were there to help people and they tried to kill us and we killed a lot of them to defend ourselves. Somalia has no resources we would want unless dust becomes the next big thing on wall street.”

And, ah, DaMarlboroMan3 watches too many Hollywood movies (or smokes too much). Black Hawk Down was an outrageous war propaganda production that completely falsified the story of western occupation and plunder of Somalia. Scandalous corporate entities like Save the Children, and the deceptive spin on the Pentagon’s war machine there, were chronicled in journalist Michael Maren’s expose The Road to Hell.

The early 1990′s crises in Somalia had its roots in the invasion of Western humanitarian aid organizations that occurred steadily as big money and big relief flooded into Somalia from 1981 onward. By the mid 1980′s the aid machine had crippled the local economy and Somalia could not feed its own people.

After a furious political scramble involving Royal/Dutch Shell, Agip and other petroleum vultures, all oil concessions were granted (1989) to Conoco, Chevron, Amoco (BP) and Philips Petroleum. The Pentagon’s Operation Restore Hope was never a “humanitarian” mission: that was the cover story.

U.S. forces killed scores of thousands of Somali people — and a few Captain America wannabees were dragged through the streets to ridicule our American arrogance. The Israeli-American-Ethiopian-Ugandan mission in Somalia today is far more nasty, involving U.S. Covert Ops in war crimes qualifying the US and Israel for the International criminal Court, and the western powers are equally culpable in the massive ongoing famine. So, oil in Darfur, covert operations in Somalia? This is the new, old, ‘humanitarian’ warfare in Africa and Hollywood covers it all up.

Like the representations of the females in Avatar, in the Indiana Jones series, in The Lion King Pocahontas and the many King Kong flicks, the typical Hollywood propaganda film casts females either in weak or subservient roles, or as lusty sex-craved female fatales out to eat every good man alive. In both cases the stereotypical females are overshadowed by dominant male roles, protectors and saviors of all that is good, out to rid the world of the scourge of evil.

The White Male Savior-Slaughterer

Sigourney Weaver appears in Avatar as an older woman scientist who can hardly trot for the scenes where she appears in human form, and so she is recast as a young, nubile, sexually attractive Na’vi avatar. Weaver can’t accomplish what she wants, nor can the other non-white minorities (Latino helicopter pilot), until their dominant white male Jake Sully comes along and saves the day. The crippled Jake Sully is portrayed as an impotent soldier who, like the Six Million Dollar Man, can be made whole again through the technological transformation to an avatar. But even as a paraplegic, Jake Sully retains his white male superhero savior status and all the privileges that come with it, and this status is enhanced and reconfigured — just as Captain America is physically reconfigured — when he embodies a Na’vi, the people his occupying imperialist other-worldly corporate-dominated (earth) society has come to conquer.

Many Hollywood propaganda films promote technological utopia: science and technology are presented as a religion we should all (continue to) worship. The scrawny weakling but omnipotent moral soldier in Captain America is marvelously transformed into a spectacle of masculinity. Not only is he smart, and moral, now he is the super athletic man. In Avatar, Jake Sully goes native with the help of the futuristic technologies of the conquerors (that would be you, me, US). Here is the glorification of science, and the real-time corporate influence (aligned with Hollywood) provides the impetus behind the higher ‘moral’ purpose to save and not bomb ‘Home tree’. Weaver’s scientist character facilitates this medico-pharmaceutical-academic narrative which, translated, means biopiracy and theft of indigenous people’s traditional knowledge, intellectual property, and ways of life. Sounds a lot like genocide, but the film does not leave ANYONE with any greater awareness of the actual genocides against indigenous people’s that are happening while we sit in the theater watching the film.

The story is only slightly different in District 9. The weaponry is futuristic, to the average spectator-consumer’s eye, but the Pentagon has already created weaponry which the general public is almost totally unaware of: directed energy weapons; advanced artificial intelligence systems; nanotechnology; biological weapons; and weather as a weapon. These things don’t just appear out of the blue. District 9 is another film with a deep, dark anti-immigration message, but now the ‘illegals’ and ‘refugees’  are actual aliens from elsewhere in the universe. I saw in District 9 a depiction of a present day state, South Africa, which had fallen from black control under the unseen hand of white corporate control in the near future,” says anthropologist Dr. Enoch Page. “That white control was exemplified in that film by a white male corporate executive who superficially seemed to be a racist bungling idiot, but in exercising his racism against the aliens he got infected with their genetic material and began to morph himself into the physical form of that oppressed alien population. As the man morphs into the other he is, of course, rejected by his own who deem him crazy or at least lost in battle. Consequently, he can only gain safe haven among the oppressed and begins to assist their liberation (but only with the thought of being healed so he can return to his white wife and white life). The total completion of his metamorphosis probably will be the basis for a sequel to that film. So we are seeing in recent films venues for projecting an imagined future in which the strategy of appropriating the physical form of the oppressed becomes the vehicle for a white male hero.”

District 9 builds tension in the spectator-consumer by playing on deep-seated psychological anxieties about bodily fluids and primordial origins of existence. This tension is mapped over all the standard racial stereotyping where the whites — the forces of good — are superior, civilized, educated and rational, and they (we) must protect them (our) selves. In contradistinction, the non-whites — the mixed up crazy forces of evil fighting amongst themselves — are disgustingly irrational, violent, drug-dealing crack-addicted savages (the African warlords in the films) out to get us, or disgustingly insect-like alien prawns, whose biological material is infectious and dangerous to our society, mimicking the Africa disease narratives about ebola and malaria and HIV/AIDS spreading to the uninfected global north. “It is important [to note] that we are seeing in both these films images of formerly colonized people of color who are aiding and abetting the white invasions as fellow Americans,” says Dr. Page. “In District 9 we never see them come to the aid of the aliens. Even the raunchiest Africans engaged in the lowest of trade and behavior racially despise the aliens, while at the same time seeking to gain parts of their bodies to enhance their own sexual and physical powers. In Avatar people of color are positioned more centrally in support of the hero and defect from the cause of the invasionary force along with him but not on their own.”

Avatar went on to become the highest-grossing film of all time, grossing more than US$2.730 billion ($2.8 billion adjusted for inflation) in box-office receipts worldwide. It should be no surprise to find out that Sam Worthington (Jake Sully) also stars in Call of Duty: Black Ops a first-person shooter video game released worldwide on November 9, 2010 for Microsoft Windows, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3 consoles, with a separate version for Nintendo DS. Within 24 hours of going on sale, the game sold more than 7 million copies, 5.6 million in the U.S. and 1.4 million in the U.K.

Talking about immigration and plunder of resources and human trafficking, note that Marvel Entertainment director Morton Handel is also a director of American Uranium Mining and Trump Entertainment Resorts. The Trump casinos in Atlantic City exploit Mongolian students, lured into the United States through a U.S. State Department affiliated program, in hopes of experiencing the American Dream, and then forced to accept horrendous working conditions, to engage in survival sex, to be subject to rat infested living conditions and drug dealers and armed gangs. This is the trafficking and slavery side of the war on immigrants, refugees and people of color.

The film Blood Diamond also stars a muscular great white male (Leonardo DiCaprio) and a seductive white female (Jennifer Connelly) who assumes a subordinate role. Here the white savior warrior is again the savior of the other protagonist subordinates [1] first, the white female; [2] second, the African negro and freed diamond mine slave (Djimon Hounsou) who found the big diamond everybody is killed for.

Blood Diamond is packed with overt and covert racial codings that further entrench white superiority and the discourses that proclaim the need for white economic, political and military deployments to rescue/save Africa. “It’s my teekit to geet out of thees God-forsaken continent,” the white South African mercenary hero (DiCaprio) tells his soon-to-be-lover girl.

Blood Diamond appeared at precisely the same time as the diamond industry was whitewashing its bloody operations through the Harvard University-sponsored development of the Kimberley Process — another faux mechanism shielding the true agents of warfare and plunder in Africa through a hegemonic protection mechanism — conquerors policing themselves — that criminalizes anyone who cuts into the profits of the big diamond cartels.

Blood Diamond ends by informing the reader that the Kimberley Process has sorted it all out, when in reality it merely rinses the blood off the diamonds sold in western luxury boutiques. The happy Hollywood ending arrives when the freed slave succeeds in testifying at some faux international court — another euphemistic ‘United Nations’ reference — and the journalist chick (Connelly) gets her story. Both of the subordinate role (white female, freed negro slave) successes relied on the supreme white warrior savior muscle male (De Caprio) who, in the end, is presented as a reformed and moral man, a good man, a martyr.

The Captain America of the savage jungles — themes of darkness portrayed in such films as King Kong — is our Hollywood hero Tarzan, another white Marvel comic action hero of stellar repute, and a popular fixture around Hollywood since the 1950′s. Of course, every Tarzan has his seductive and easily seduced sidekick, Jane.

Tarzan and the Lion Man was set in the Ituri forest in Congo. “It has the makings of a good story,” the publisher wrote, on the book jacket of the 1934 Edgar Rice Burroughs classic. “A motion picture company in the wilds of Africa, two beautiful girls, ruthless Arabs [emphasis added], a half-maniacal scientist, a tribe of gorillas that he has taught to speak English, a coward who looks like Tarzan, and Tarzan himself.”

The whole Tarzan genre set the stage for the historical and ongoing conquest of Africa — led by the Central Intelligence Agency, the French and Belgian and Israeli (Mossad) secret service, the Pentagon and the French Foreign Legion, and the rapacious multinational corporations that have long been plundering and killing on the continent.

In this 2009 AFRICOM image screen-captured from a 'Operation Lightning Thunder' video, the Pentagon forgot to expunge the white pilot.

Hollywood and the Holocaust in Central Africa

Hotel Rwanda covers up the United State’s invasion of Central Africa. From the very first words, where the image has yet to appear and the screen is completely black, the film Hotel Rwanda sets up viewers to think a certain way about what happened in Rwanda in 1994. Here is a story about good versus evil. An ominous African voice is heard, clearly the announcer on a radio program, and he is describing the Tutsis as ‘cockrrrRRROACHES.’ The voice is black and the cataclysm unfathomable, as anyone will tell you, and the black screen underscores the evil darkness of Africa. This voice of terror returns throughout the film to haunt the innocent Tutsi refugees, on screen, and the viewers gripping their seats.

The good guys are the Tutsis, the victims of genocide. They are not killers in the movie: they are never killers. At the end of the film, when a well-attired guerrilla force is shown — the “rebels” of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) — they are rescuers. They are disciplined, organized. They keep a tidy United Nations camp safely behind their lines. They don’t kill Red Cross nurses, or orphaned children, in the film: they reconnect them to their families. They are good men — the forces of good fighting the forces of evil. The Hutus in the standard Rwanda genocide stories are always the bad guys, and they are all bad guys. Every Hutu is a genocidaire. These are Hollywood’s forces of evil.

“Speaking as an Englishman I am often appalled by the blatant propaganda that comes out of Fox News,” said randomsamno9, commenting on Russia Today’s Captain America video. “But on an equal level or perhaps even more so RT is pure propaganda… RT just spends all day bitching about the US rather than giving you actual news. Also ‘The Last King of Scotland‘ may have been a fictionalized account but that doesn’t change the fact that Amin was a real mass murderer rather than a fictional one.”

Oh really? Back in the late 1960′s the big imperialists were alarmed by Ugandan President Milton Obote’s socialist shift. Imagine the audacity of an African leader — who was supported by Israel — actually taking care of his people at the expense of foreign interests! In a new alliance with Sudan, Obote challenged the Israeli backing of southern Sudanese guerrillas from Uganda, armed by Israel to punish Sudan for backing Arabs in the Six-Day War (1967). Everywhere derided as a nasty dictator today, Obote was a truly great African leader who was saddled with false accusations of genocide and war crimes, these actually committed by his enemies.

Idi Amin Dada received training in Israel after Ugandan independence. As one of Obote’s generals, Amin maintained Israeli supply lines to the Sudanese rebels. Backed by Colonel Bar-Lev, the Israeli Defense attache, Amin’s army overthrew Obote in 1971 and restored relations with Israel (severed in 1967). In 1972 Israel refused Amin’s request for tanks, and so Amin expelled Israeli residents from Uganda, severed relations, and forged a pact with Libya. Well, we all know how Washington and the Israelis feel about Muammar Gaddafi — the supreme commander of the Islamic forces of evil, and so Israel and the west blockaded the Amin government, which overnight became a ‘dictatorship’ in western news reportage. Enter and the falsified narrative in Hollywood’s Last King of Scotland.

The real mass murderer is Yoweri Museveni, Uganda’s president for the past 25 years, but this is the Pentagon’s man. The Last King of Scotland deflects public attention away from the ongoing Acholi and other genocides committed by the Museveni dictatorship, and Museveni is far more bloodthirsty and ruthless than Idi Amin ever was. The early 2009 US-Israeli-Ugandan ‘Operation Lightning Thunder‘ was a massive military failure that led to thousands of civilian deaths in the border areas of South Sudan, northern Uganda and eastern Congo. But I am not even scratching the surface on the Museveni apparatus of terror in Uganda, Sudan, Rwanda, Somalia or Congo. The prisons in Uganda are packed, the people starving, with high maternal death rates, after 25 years of “a model African success story”. All “development” aid to Uganda has been converted into weapons and war.

All of the documentary films about the Uganda/Sudan/Rwanda region — The Devil came on Horseback, Shake Hands with the Devil, Lost Boys of Sudan, Invisible Children — serve a one-sided and essentialized agenda: the advancement of Empire. Enter the Pentagon’s PR machinery — each year pumping thousands of “news” stories into the New York Times and Washington Post and National Public Radio — and the pictures of U.S. troops holding smiling African children orbuilding  schools in desert villages. Enter the great white actorvist hero Ben Affleck and the corporate sustained catastrophe in the Congo that his debonair Hollywood image and sleek Stars-and-Stripes privileges shield us from seeing.

Do western war superhero films like Captain America influence children? Exit the matrix, jump back to the most deadly conflict in the world: Congo. The western human rights nexus likes to shake its trigger-happy fingers at foreign armies, rogue militias and uncooperative governments, and the Pentagon and State Department, with the help of USAID, are quick to accuse them of everything and anything the US, NATO and Israel are also doing. Massacres, torture, mass rape, spreading land mines across the land, and, of course, child soldiers. Well, look at the image of the child soldiers below, a photo snapped by your soon-to-be-killed foreign correspondent in eastern Congo. There’s no mistaking the red-white-and-blue superhero graphic splashed across one soldier’s T-shirt, and the twelve year-old children with AK-47′s and cigarettes didn’t pick these fruits of western progress out of the trees of the King Kong forests nearby.

“The recruitment of young people to military service in African conflicts has provoked a unanimous moral outcry from the West,” writes Danish academic Dr. Kasper Hoffman. Child soldiering is by no means new or restricted to Africa, Hoffman notes, since children aged 16 can bear arms in U.S. military, and the West engages in a disingenuous hegemonic discourse where the use of child soldiers is always equated to disorder and moral corruption in Africans. But Hoffman found that child soldiers in Congo were heavily influenced by Hollywood superaction hero films.

The West likes to point its trigger-happy fingers at African conflicts, like the wars in Congo, where many child soldiers — called ‘kadogos‘ — joined militias of their own accord to defend their country against foreign invaders. The West use accusations of child soldiering, immorality, tribalism and irration spirit magic to demonize the highly organized and nationalist Mai Mai militias, and most all violence is blamed on the Mai Mai or the remnants of the Hutu Forces for the Democratic Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) that fled the illegal RPA invasion in 1994. Mai Mai do not fight with any sense of purpose or morality, according to arrogant Western agents and the corporate mass media, themselves complicit in plunder and genocide in Congo — the Mai Mai worship spirit mediums and they rip out and eat the bloody hearts of their victims and they walk backwards into battle wearing bathroom fixtures on their heads (Newsweek, 1996).

Hoffman found that Mai Mai militia members fight out of a sense of pride, nationalism and a highly ethical sense of home-defense. They have seen entire villages wiped off the face of the earth by the U.S.-backed Rwandan (Kagame) and Ugandan (Museveni) troops and they know very well that clandestine cells of the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) and Uganda People’s Defense Forces (UPDF) are perpetrating terrorism there. The RPA/UPDF employ ruthless and unaccountable false flag operations and pseudo operations (covert psychological operations developed by British Maj. Frank Kitson during the Mau Mau insurgency on Kenya) to disguise their origins and intent.

The Global War on _____  (please fill in the blank).

Western governments and United Nations, and the human rights, development and ‘humanitarian’ industries — the merchants of death that profit off violence — all play along with Western media reports that generally whitewash reality to exonerate Rwanda and Uganda and the corporations involved in eastern Congo (Banro, Moto Gold, DHL International, OM Group). More expedient to the mass media whitewashing of war in Congo, every Congolese Mai Mai and Hutu soldier is accused of mass rape, this offering another essentialized narrative convenient for conquest, and one that is peddled by tabloids from the New York Times to Wired to the BBC, from CNN to OPRAH to Democracy Now. Even the rape of men is excluded by the international discourse which confines all discussion about war in eastern Congo to the manipulative discourse about rape of women.

“The influence of Western action films emerges clearly in the care of the self among the kadogos Mai Mai,” reports Dr. Hoffman in The Ethics of Child Soldiering. Popular culture influences the forms of violence, slang, gestures, and body language of the militia members that re-enact the attitudes and actions of ‘freedom fighter’ heroes. They aren’t just mimicking Captain America: the kadogo internalize the deeper ethical constructs of freedom and resistance and apply them to the formation of their self and strength of purpose. The Rambo (Stallone) and Commando (Schwartzenegger) films were especially important in offering a sense of purpose and ethical direction to sustain their unending struggle.

“In these films the heroes are subject to grave injustices and are made to suffer immensely before they vanquish their enemies against all odds through the use of spectacular violence,” wrote Hoffman. “The sublime qualities of the hero such as manliness, bravery, initiative, innate sense of justice, strength, speed, power, muscularity, warrior-skills, tactical abilities, etc., insure him of victory in the end.”

Of course, the heroes in these films are the white saviors, the good men, the super-ethical-anything-in-the line-of-duty-goes-soldiers, the Captains America and Captains Norway.

Breivik in a Navy Seal type scuba diving outfit pointing an automatic weapon.

“I grew up in the 80′s and read a lot of comics — not Captain America but i know the story line,” says CasinoHijack, another commenter on the Russia Today Captain America propaganda video. “Looking back at my old comics I saw a ton of guns, violence, and every woman superhero looks like a stripper. Now that I’m older and more aware of the world we live in I see the propaganda in those comics and how it helped getting young men to fight for something they are not truly aware of. I educate kids all the time of the negative side of comics and superheros. Now I’m their super hero.”

Super heroes, super heroines. We have become saturated by media that seeks to create super duper dumbed-down spectator entertainment warfare consumer conquerors who plead ignorance, rationalize our supposed non-participation in war, and even fight back against all who suggest that we might be more culpable than we want to believe. Kill them and feed their bodies to the starving masses in Somalia…

“The military-industrial complex, contrary to initial expectations, did not fade away with the end of the Cold War,” wrote Tim Lenoir, in the excellent research paper All But War is Simulation. “It has simply reorganized itself. In fact, it is more efficiently organized than ever before. Indeed, a cynic might argue that whereas the military-industrial complex was more or less visible and identifiable during the Cold War, today it is invisibly everywhere, permeating our daily lives. The military-industrial complex has become the military-entertainment complex. The entertainment industry is both a major source of innovative ideas and technology, and the training ground for what might be called post-human warfare.”

Sadly, post-human warfare prosecuted by western military institutions and their highly armed proxy forces involve real human beings on very real battlefields. What has not evolved to match the technologies themselves are the moral and ethical standards by which these post-human battles can be seen to be inhuman, fostered by machine thinking, cold warrior killing. This is the all-too-omnipotent man that the military-entertainment complex has created — the man whose psyche is grounded in absolutes about god versus evil themselves informed by nationalistic propaganda themes based in fear, hatred, difference and the false beliefs about superiority.Nationalism, patriotism, subliminal sexuality, female sexual control, and the destruction of matriarchal power all go hand in hand, as this translates to the anchoring of authoritarian beliefs in the basic character structure of the human beings in everyday technological society.This is fascism. “‘Fascism’ is the basic emotional attitude of man (sic) in authoritarian society,” wrote Dr. Wilhelm Reich, in his potent 1933 work, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, “with its machine civilization and its mechanistic-mystical view of life…. It is the mechanistic mystical character of man in our times which creates fascist parties, and not vice versa.”We can name several of the most egregious manifestations of this post-human fighting man. We saw him in Avatar — no, not Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), he was the ‘good soldier’ of the Captain America variety whose goodness and humanity is projected into the consciousness of the masses by the military-entertainment complex and its video games and other industrial war-making offshoots. It is the antagonist, Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), the supreme destructor who takes out ‘Home Tree’ and everything else that gets in his way.

We can be sure that Quaritch will be back, more lethal than ever, along with the corporate world government Imperial earth forces — Avatar 2 and Avatar 3 are already in production and, as we have seen over and over, imperialist forces never die, they only come back to finish the job. The early (white) conquistadors to arrive in the Philippines were slaughtered after the indigenous people were abused and their goodness exhausted. Ditto the first (white) Puritans to land on Turtle Island (North America) and the first (white) settlers who became the subjects of umpteen Cowboys and Indians films.

Dances with Wolves was no radical critique of western military conquest and genocide: the narratives about ‘good’ soldier / ‘bad’ soldier, ‘good’ white man / ‘bad’ white man, and whitey-goes-native all reared their ugly heads. The white hero also saves a white woman in this film — though she too first had to undergo a transformation to native. The good-versus-evil / savior-versus-savage films all entrench racial (white) superiority and they are coexistent with the overwhelming racialized propaganda about Christians versus Pagans, Christians versus Moslems, Christians versus Arabs, Israelis versus Arabs, Jews versus Arabs, Arabs versus black Africans, civilized people versus savage others, Christianity versus Islamic Fundamentalism.

So what are the real life consequences of all this warfare gaming, warfare simulation, warfare propaganda, racial propaganda, anti-immigration propaganda, technological propaganda, and weapons proliferation?

Well, most of the actual atrocities occur out of sight of the western media, because the media corporations are directly tied to the profits and perks of the power structure and the imperial project falsifies our consciousness about victims and killers. Soldiers do what they do because they can. They can get away with it because they are taught to. Their training, their education, the dynamics of the groups they are surrounded with, the messages in the mass media, the entire process of enculturation within and from a society premised on the supposed permanence and necessity of war, conquest and private profit.

The international legal term thrown around by ‘human rights’ and ‘responsibility to protect’ doctrines is impunity. People are not being held to account for their wrong actions. Wrong actions come from wrong thinking, wrong education, wrong messages about virulence and domination and entitlement encoded in a zillion different ways in the mainstream cultures of technological civilization. Such wrong thinking infects and grows in the minds of people increasingly isolated and disconnected from their true inner nature, their loving and compassionate selves and from the earth. Every now and then somebody is called out for their white supremacy — some Bronx Catholic Seminary principal or other — but most of the racial profiling and extrajudicial executions committed by police go unchecked by the system, unnoticed by the (white) public, and the perpetrators are often enough rewarded or celebrated.

The fears and insecurities are compounded by the many forms of class warfare and structural violence that We The People are increasingly subject to. Meanwhile the very same elites producing and disseminating the disturbing propaganda — disguised as harmless entertainment — are benefiting from the manufacture of consent and the structural violence that insures their elite economic status. More and more ordinary people, all over the world, are watching as their lives and loves are being stolen from them. We can see the contradictions that surround us, and we are many.

While presenting good versus evil narratives to justify bombing the coasts of North Africa, there is little discussion of why there are so many people, mostly people of color, seeking refuge and survival in the economically advantaged countries of North America and Europe. Refugees are presented as aliens, devoid of context or agency, people who ostensibly seek to steal our jobs and steal our land and steal our sons and daughters and steal everything that we have worked so hard to build. There is little discussion or awareness of why or how the rich First World countries got so rich or came in ‘first’.

At its roots, the film engages in class warfare against the average middle and lower class spectator-consumers of the United States, and it facilitates imperialist conquest against people everywhere else, based on a hierarchical order of ethnicity that values white people and devalues people of color by degrees and categories and labels.

On immigration and refugees and displaced peoples, the military-entertainment and their corporate ‘news’ partners inculcate emotional and irrational beliefs grounded in fear, confusion, associations, falsified history, stereotypes and simplifications. The manufacture or production of ‘refugees’ and ‘displaced peoples’, or the political economy of the misery industry that feeds on them, are never examined. These things falls under the rubric of charity and philanthropy and… with all the ‘good’ things we are doing for those people over there, the least they could do is stay put and show some appreciation.

That is: “I think RT is stretching on this one” said MarcFaust. “The REAL story is the fact that it was renamed “The First Avenger” to other parts of the world because the USA is SO fucking horrible. How dare the US do whatever it takes to quell terrorism and donate billions across the world with aid… fucking Americans!”

These films distill the context and truth of the world down to nothing of value, save to perpetuate suffering and further institutionalize injustice. It is all summed up by that moment in Avatar when the white conquerors are force-marched (very politely!) onto their aerospace weapons platforms and sent back to earth sans unobtanium. The losers look for sympathy. It’s as if they expect more privileges, even as losers.

Of course, almost every Hollywood film has some brand recognition and product placement. For example, how many products do you see advertised in the ‘anti-war’ film Across the Universe? And what about product placement and brand recognition in The Matrix? How many products do you see there? Neo gets a cell phone delivered by Fed-X. But what else? Take a hard look, and then look again, and then again. How many?

So, coming to the end of this little not-so-comic tale, we can at last examine the violence perpetrated within the dominant cultures themselves — in North America, Europe, Japan, South Korea, Norway — the so-called thriving democracies. The psychic propaganda assault — of patriotism, nationalism, xenophobia, racial superiority, male domination, subliminal sexuality, consumerism, individuality and desire — saturates our society with irrational emotional beliefs and psychological insecurities. Fear is a driving force, and testosterone its sidekick. These are the effects inculcated by the propaganda films of the military-entertainment complex.

When the story of the Oslo massacres first broke, mass media outlets of all stripes, including Russia Today (“Oslo-Terrorist-Norway-Jihadist“), were quick to broadcast the typical western fear-mongering propaganda about Islamic jihad.

Naturally, the global assault on our consciousness, where everything Islam is suspect, where Israel is above reproach, has not spared Norway. Not every Jew is a victim, and many are perpetrators. Not every Christian is a fundamentalist, and many are. Not every Hutu is a genocidaire; many Tutsis are. Not every Tutsi is a victim; many Hutus are.

Of course, the killing sprees perpetrated by individuals are no different then those perpetrated on the battlefield. In one case the mass murder is sanctioned by society, and in the other case society is victimized by it.

You get what you pay for. We get what we pay for. Perhaps that’s why we have more killing, more bloodshed, more conquest, more rape, more white supremacy of the Anders Breivik and Tim McVeigh variety. These men are products of the societies in which they lived. Both men apparently believed themselves to be superheroes, called to rid their societies of the scourge of evil, to assault a tyrannical federal government out of control, and both brought other innocent human lives to a definitive end.

And so we have Timothy McVeigh, who appears to be a fine example of what our society teaches people they can do. Norwegian nationalist Anders Behring Breivik — now described as an aberration, a Christian fanatic, a psycho, fascism behind a mask of morality — appears to be another. McVeigh might have been part of a government conspiracy; he claimed to be a martyr in defense of U.S. government tyranny, but he was a Gulf War veteran socialized by our permanent warfare society and he probably suffered from serious post-war traumatic stress disorder. Breivik saw himself as a martyr who would spark a revolution, “a real European hero”, “the savior of Christianity” and “the greatest defender of cultural-conservatism in Europe since 1950,” and he called for a patriarchal revival. The two men held some similar beliefs. They are very much not alone in their fanaticism. They are Captains America, by any other names.

Make Love, Not War

Why did Anders Breivik target the young people? Vulnerability, for one: they were an easy target and the most vulnerable to attack. He targeted them for political currency: they symbolized multiculturalism and waved flags calling for Palestinian liberation and truth and equality. If I had any heroes in this story, it would be these kids. They didn’t do anything wrong. Were these kids naive? I don’t think so. They stood up for what they believed is right, and good, and just. They believed in working for a better world. I guess they believed in love, and advocated for it. They had something going for them: the bluebird of consciousness.

I mean, just look at these kids — really look at them — and weep.

Some of the younger victims of the Breivik massacre in Oslo, Norway, 2011.

And if you can’t weep, then you are moving too fast, watching too many Hollywood movies, drinking too much coffee, consuming too much New York Times or Economist, chasing after some addiction or other, caught up in meaninglessness, in denial, suffering from collective amnesia or the mass psychology of fascism, and stuck.

Stuck. Are you stuck?

These could be your friends, or your kids. They are not just someone else’s kids, they are now part of our collective responsibility to wake up and stop the violence. To show compassion and tolerance, to sacrifice and to share, to organize for the betterment of all. There’s plenty of information out there on how this needs to be done. What is lacking is the courage and the initiative. What is needed is love, more love, and more love.

Gosh, I can’t think of a single Hollywood movie where love is the motivation for superheroism. We see plenty of love nonsense in the Hollywood war films, white male white female protagonists fall in love, blah blah blah, and in sit-com films like City of Angels or Beyond the Universe, films that ostensibly have nothing to do with war, blah blah blah, but where do we ever get propaganda that peddles love? Where is our U.S. Government Department of Peace? Why isn’t the Dalai Lama speaking out for state-sanctioned acts of love in Iraq, Libya, or Afghanistan, achieved through an immediate U.S. military withdrawal?

After Obama reversed his decision to end military tribunals and release the pictures of US torture, and the Democrats refused to close Guantanamo, liberal and progressive pundits in the media began wringing their hands asking how this could be. After all, they say, this is the neocon agenda, not the agenda for change that Obama got elected on. How can we change this? What kind of hold do Dick Cheney, Newt Gingrich and the rest of the rabid right-wingers have on the liberals we voted for? The question none of these hand-wringers have asked is a very simple, indeed, a very radical one. That question is, is the foreign policy of Washington the same no matter which party is in power? The reason why this question isn’t asked is as simple as the answer (which is of course, yes) — it is not a policy, it is an economic and political system that incorporates both political parties, the media, the educational system, and the commercial life that is the US.

The accepted understanding since September 11, 2001 is that the events that day changed everything in the world. The truth is the opposite. Nothing changed at all. Nothing, that is, except for the justification used by the Pentagon and Wall Street to continue their rigged game against the world. Instead of communism or the yellow hordes, it became terrorism.

The war on drugs. This exercise in futility (if one accepts its premise that it is being fought to end the influx of illegal drugs into the US) hasn’t ended illegal drug trade and its accompanying murder and mayhem, but it has put US bases in regions where there were none. It has also been used as part of the imperial struggle against national liberation and indigenous movements that are contrary to US interests — Sendero Luminoso in Peru back in the 1980s and 1990s to the narco-traffickers in Mexico of today.

The global war on terror hasn’t ended terror but has put bases in places where none were before–with the added attraction that they are in areas rich in resources and also encircle Russia and China — potential capitalist rivals. In addition, it has strengthened Israel’s position in the Middle East, leading to further and more brutal oppression of the Palestinians while increasing the possibility of war with Iran. On top of that we now have the selective bombing of various Muslim and Arab countries in the name of supposed freedom struggles whose very alignment with Washington and its NATO surrogate make the possibility of real freedom less likely with each “Made In USA” bomb dropped or missile fired. Meanwhile, Israel, that supposed beacon of freedom in the Middle East, continues to shoot Palestinian protesters at will.

The control of WMD. If nothing else has shown the vacuity of this policy, the war on Iraq has. Initially undertaken to find and destroy WMD in Iraq, it soon became apparent in the weeks after March 20, 2003 that there were no such weapons. Indeed, the previous administration had already forced the elimination of any such weaponry via its regimen of deadly sanctions, illegal flyovers and bombings and occasional missile attacks on Iraq. Although US policymakers were concerned about WMD in Hussein’s Iraq, this concern had a lot more to do with the challenge they represented to Washington and Tel Aviv’s dominance in the region than they had to do with concern for proliferation of said weapons. This is the case in the ongoing campaign of half-truths and threats against Teheran’s nuclear power endeavors. In the 1990s, northern Korea went along with the program to end its nuclear weapons development with an understanding that the US and other nations would help them develop power that could not be converted into weapons. Washington failed to uphold its end of the bargain under Clinton and Bush put the nation into Washington’s axis of evil. Now, Pyongyang is testing the right wing government in Seoul while keeping DC at a distance. The hypocrisy of this policy against WMD is laid bare by the complete and total refusal of Washington to address either the US or Israel’s nuclear weapons program at all.

The immigration battle. US capitalism requires cheap labor. An economy that exists because of its early dependence on slavery can not readily give up labor that comes cheap. Since the end of slavery, immigrants have historically filled the lowest positions in the labor pool. They have also been subject to some of the worst violations of their rights since the time of slaves. Indeed, today a whole system of prisons exist solely to lock up immigrants primarily because they are essentially excess labor. As prisoners, they prop up another domestic part of the Empire: the prison system.

I am of the opinion, like many other folks, that prisons are the present day embodiment of the system of chattel slavery. An unneeded and unwanted part of the population is put in chains and forced to work for meals and a minimal stipend, oftentimes because they have been convicted of a crime that was written with their demographic in mind. Do the differences between the original penalties for crack cocaine and its powdered version ring any bells? The other aspect to this labor arrangement is that it is the taxpayers who make up the difference. Yes, even when the prisons are privately owned (a situation that creates another form of injustice), the taxpayers pay through the nose even while the owners make a profit.

There’s an argument that says the State needs enemies to justify its existence and, if it doesn’t have nay, it will create them. The preceding list is a clear indication of that as far as the United States is concerned.

Crossing With the Virgin: Stories From the Migrant Trail, by Kathryn Ferguson, Norma A. Price, and Ted Parks (University of Arizona Press, 2010), paperback, 240 p.

The Death of Josseline: Immigration Stories From the Arizona-Mexico Borderlands, by Margaret Regan (Beacon Press, 2010), paperback, 256 p.

Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol, by Kelly Lytle Hernández (University of California Press, 2010), paperback, 336 p.

Using the courts to condemn part of Eloisa Tamez’s land, the authorities put an 18-foot-high steel barrier in her backyard, a wall justified in the name of the political black hole called national security. In doing so, they effectively cut off access to the rest of the university professor’s property. Her family has held legal title to the land, originally more than 10,000 acres in size, since 1767, long before the land-hungry state and its colonists arrived on the scene. Since then, various factors—settlers and local officials’ legal chicanery, the distribution of subdivisions to heirs, and land sales—have shrunk it to a narrow, three-acre strip that extends from Tamez’s house all the way to the internationally recognized boundary about one and a half miles away.

Although this saga sounds as if it could have taken place in occupied Palestine, the Tamez family actually hails from thousands of miles away—in the Rio Grande Valley, near Brownsville, Cameron County, Texas, along the U.S.-Mexico boundary. Like many of their neighbors, the Tamez family gained title to their property from Spanish colonial authorities, but their Lipan Apache ties to the area’s land go back much farther. In the era of so-called Homeland Security, however, such roots mean little. As of January 2010, when the Tamez family was profiled in The Texas Observer, the federal government had seized land from 199 of the Tamez’s fellow county residents and bulldozed some of their citrus orchards, in order to make room for new border barriers.¹ Such developments, predicted Margo Tamez, Eloisa’s daughter, in testimony to the Organization of American States in 2008, will cut off Apache families from their sacred sites across the Rio Grande and undercut their ability to subsist on the land, forcing them to move elsewhere.²

Just as the Jewish-only settlements and what Israel calls the security fence are intended to inhibit mobility in Palestine, so, too, are the barriers that increasingly scar the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. In both settings, mere walking—and other forms of everyday mobility—can be threatening to the authorities who seek to control the land and to keep out those deemed permanent outsiders. This dynamic is vividly described by the lawyer and human rights activist Raja Shehadeh, a native of Ramallah, West Bank, in his Palestinian Walks. In this simultaneously beautiful, painful, and instructive book, Shehadeh recounts six long walks, or sarhat (the plural of the Arabic term sarha), which he describes as a kind of aimless wandering, “not restricted by time and place,” in which a hiker goes “where his spirit takes him to nourish his soul and rejuvenate himself.” Not a term applicable to just any walk, a sarha “implies letting go,” he writes. “It’s a drug-free high, Palestinian style.”

In relating the walks, which took place in the West Bank between 1978 and 2006, Shehadeh movingly explores the splendor and power of the area’s landscape and offers a sobering look at how Israel’s occupation has tragically transformed it so as to deny basic dignity to the Palestinian population. A key goal is to try and “record how the land felt and looked before this calamity” with the “hope to preserve, at least in words, what has been lost forever.” Among what has been lost is open space and the right “simply to walk and savor what nature has to offer … without anger, fear or insecurity … without the fear of losing what they’ve come to love.” In the context of Israel’s ongoing land theft, Shehadeh feels “like one who is told that he contracted a terminal disease,” with his time to live—to walk—“running out.”

Open space and the ability to simply walk are also increasingly under siege in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, as compellingly illustrated by two recent collections of stories from the U.S.-Mexico borderlands—Crossing With the Virgin, co-authored by three members of the migrant humanitarian aid group Samaritans, Kathryn Ferguson, Norma A. Price, and Ted Parks; and The Death of Josseline, by the Tucson-based journalist Margaret Regan. Traversing the borderlands, these works make clear, is often a death-defying undertaking for those who enter the United States “illegally” from Mexico. The arduous terrain and other environmental factors, combined with the distances that must be traveled to circumvent the ever widening policing apparatus, lead many to perish before they reach their destination. With more than 2,000 migrant corpses recovered in southern Arizona alone since the late 1990s, death has become a way of life in the borderlands region, which Regan calls a “killing field.”

The names and stories of these human beings who meet their untimely demise in the borderlands are largely invisible in mainstream U.S. debate on immigration issues. They include Lucresia Domínguez Luna, who perished in the arms of her 15-year-old son, Jesús, as they tried to reach a husband and father living and working in the United States, and whose story Norma Price poignantly recounts; also among them is Josseline Jamileth Hernández Quinteros—a 15-year-old girl from El Salvador who died of hypothermia in southern Arizona while trying to unite with her family in Los Angeles—whose tragic plight Regan movingly narrates.

These deaths speak to the inherent flip side of “security” in a world of dramatic socio-economic inequalities. Security for those within requires insecurity for those defined as outside the sociopolitical-geographical boundaries of the planet’s relatively privileged portions, an insecurity produced by the very presence of the enforcement apparatus.

The policing of immigrants and regulation of territorial boundaries in the United States are hardly new. Yet it was mostly individual states, not the federal government, that policed human mobility—of citizens and non-citizens alike—until the 1870s. At that time Washington began passing laws restricting immigration on the basis of social, political, economic, and ethno-racial criteria. The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act—together with successful efforts by Chinese migrants and their supporters to circumvent Exclusion-related controls by, among other means, entering through Canada and Mexico—led to the first policing of migrants along U.S. territorial boundaries.³

The novelty of the present is the extent and depth of the exclusion and control apparatus. The Border Patrol, now the federal government’s largest law enforcement body, for example, has grown massively since the 1990s: In 1994, the agency had roughly 4,200 agents; today it numbers about 21,000. During that time, the number of immigration detention beds grew from 5,000 to 33,000, manifested by a network of about 350 federal, county, and local facilities where the Department of Homeland Security jailed about 380,000 migrants in 2009, according to the Detention Watch Network. The most visible manifestations of this growth are in the U.S.-Mexico border-lands, where the length of walls, fences, and barriers have increased from a few dozen miles’ worth in the mid-1990s to more than 600 miles today. And it is in this region where about 18,000 of all Border Patrol agents are deployed.

The Southwest was not always the agency’s geographical focus, as Kelly Lytle Hernández reports in her insightful history of the Border Patrol, Migra!. In the early years of the agency (established in 1924), the Canadian and Mexican border regions were assigned roughly equal weight—at least as indicated by the allocation of officers. But such relative parity quickly disappeared as federal authorities began to focus the lion’s share of enforcement on the U.S.-Mexico divide and people of Mexican origin.

What explains this shift, among other factors, is that unlike the part of the United States that abuts Canada, all of the U.S. Southwest, except a small portion comprising southern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico, was gained through war (1846–48). (In 1853, Mexico surrendered that small portion, in a land-and people-grab euphemistically called the Gadsden Purchase, in response to Washington’s threats to militarily take the resource-rich territory.) And the region’s southern boundary divides two countries whose dominant ethno-cultural composition and socio-economic levels diverge profoundly. The associated differences have long facilitated Mexico’s role as a source of low-wage and disposable labor for the United States. Mainstream U.S. society has historically framed these as racial distinctions, with all the inequalities and injustices they inevitably entail.

While the intensity of fear and loathing has ebbed and flowed, low-income Mexicans, and Latinos more broadly, have long been represented as the embodied antipathy of all that is hegemonically perceived as good. What has changed are the labels attached to them—“Communist,” “illegal,” “criminal,” and “terrorist” among the most socially marginalizing—and the related ideological smokescreens used to legitimize their exclusion, one of the most powerful being “the rule of law,” which in this case provides ever fewer protections for those caught up in the endlessly widening web of policing. As one Border Patrol agent jokes to Regan, the U.S. Constitution has an “asterisk” for the border region. Whereas the Bill of Rights prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures, Regan explains, the Border Patrol can enter anyone’s land (but not buildings) within proximity of the international divide, and set up checkpoints along roads to stop drivers—without probable cause.

The border zone is expanding, with the federal government now defining it as a 100-mile-wide strip that abuts the country’s edges. This definitional generosity allows the Border Patrol to establish highway checkpoints near White River Junction, Vermont; to conduct sweeps in the Greyhound bus station in West Palm Beach, Florida; or to board east-west-bound passenger trains in Havre, Montana—creating a policing area that includes nearly two thirds of the U.S. population in what the American Civil Liberties Union calls a “Constitution-Free Zone.”⁴ For proponents of such “thickening,” the federal government’s perceived failure to prevent unauthorized migrants from entering or residing in the United States necessitates ever more intense enforcement of the country’s perimeter. It also compels growing policing of migrants within: The federal government has exiled millions of people since the mid-1990s—fiscal year 2010 saw a record 392,862 deportations—and thus the separation of hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizen children from one or more of their parents.

Still, the changes are most profoundly felt in the locales that abut the U.S.-Mexico divide—which, despite its violent origins and the fact that migrants have long faced myriad forms of violence negotiating passage, allowed for relatively fluid movement between U.S. border towns and the “twin” population centers in Mexico until fairly recently. Those days seem quite distant, given the overlapping wars on drugs, “illegals,” and terror waged in the borderlands—the Border Patrol today says that it focuses on “preventing terrorists and terrorists’ weapons, including weapons of mass destruction, from entering the United States,” according to its website.

It is in this context that the wall-building spree arrived in Eloisa Tamez’s backyard. “I feel like we live in an occupied zone now,” the 17-year military veteran told The Texas Observer. Onetime mayor of Douglas, Arizona, Ray Borane echoes this characterization in a quote from Regan. He describes Douglas as “an occupied town”—with 453 Border Patrol agents stationed there in 2000, an almost eightfold increase over 1994—while likening it to “a militarized zone.” Regan later cites Mike Wilson of the Tohono O’odham Nation, whose traditional lands are bisected by the international boundary, and who likens the Border Patrol on “the Rez” to “an occupying army.”

Speaking of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands more broadly, Crossing With the Virgin contributor Kathryn Ferguson describes the area as a “low-level war zone where there are men with guns—Border Patrol, National Guard, thieves, Minutemen, ranchers, hunters, helicopters, ATVs, horse patrols, and Humvees.” She later reports on a particular encounter: One night, while she and a friend drove northward from the international divide, stadium lights suddenly blinded them. They had encountered “a Border Patrol checkpoint, rigid-faced men with guns telling us to stop.” Despite being in southern Arizona, “I had to remind myself that this was my country,” she writes. “I was not in foreign occupied territory.”

It is easy to label such characterizations hyperbole. But to draw parallels between what transpires in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands and conventional cases of occupation—as in, say, Palestine—is not to assert sameness so much as it is to highlight significant parallels. Most palpable is the systematic dehumanization they both involve, from depriving the indigenous populations of their resources and ways of life to the hunting down of human beings for the “crime” of entering national territory without sanction of the sovereign power.

The inhumanity is not always lost on its immediate producers. Lytle Hernández quotes from a 1978 interview with a Border Patrol agent: “If you look at the human aspects,” the agent said, referring to his work, “we are stopping starving people from coming in to work, [and] it is not pretty to look at.” Or as another agent explained in 2007, “It’s very hard to make this job look pretty. We’re fortunate enough to live in a country where there are lots of opportunities. And most of the people who we run into out here want to make that dream happen. Unfortunately, it’s our job to stop that dream. That’s what we do on an everyday basis.”⁵

Israel has its own Border Police, whose duties include apprehending and expelling unauthorized workers who are often, but not exclusively, Palestinian. In a collection of testimonies of female soldiers who served in the occupied territories released in 2010, a Border Policewoman spoke with regret about her work enforcing the boundary between the West Bank and Israel proper: “In half an hour you can catch 30 people without any effort.” As to what then happens to these “illegal aliens”—women, men, children, and elderly—she explained: “They would have them stand, and there’s the well-known Border Guard song (in Arabic): ‘One hummus, one bean, I love the Border Guard’—they would make them sing this. Sing, and jump … and if one of them would laugh, or if they would decide someone was laughing, they would punch him.” Such abuse, reportedly commonplace, “could go on for hours, depending on how bored [the guards] are.”⁶

While all relatively wealthy countries stymie the hopes, dreams, and livelihoods of the unauthorized migrants they capture, it is the deeply rooted nature of the ties between the supposed “us” and “them” in the case of Mexico and the United States, and Palestine and Israel, that distinguish the practices of control and exclusion. And it is their overlapping historical and contemporary geographies—which defy simple notions of “here” and “there,” despite the efforts of the boundary makers—that raise pronounced ethical issues. In an overt sense, Israel’s occupation is particularly harsh in policing mobility.

As part of its efforts to undermine Hamas and further its dispossession of the Palestinians by fragmenting their territory, Israel prohibits Gazans from pursuing university studies in the nominally Palestinian-governed West Bank, and has arrested and deported numerous students back to Gaza.⁷ At the same time, Israel seeks to control Gaza’s perimeter, in part by widening it, and violently enforces its will. Israeli soldiers frequently fire on Palestinians, including children, scavenging for construction materials among the ruins created by Israel’s January 2009 military assault on Gaza, for instance. In 2010, according to Save the Children, 26 such children were shot near the boundary with Israel, including 16 who were beyond the Israeli-imposed 328-yard no-go zone that extends into the Gaza Strip.⁸

Such levels of violence are not manifest in today’s U.S.-Mexico borderlands—the worst of it having been carried out in the 1800s and early 1900s by U.S. and local authorities, as well as Anglo settlers, as they subjugated and dispossessed the Native and pre-conquest Mexican populations. Nonetheless, recent years have seen numerous incidents of U.S. authorities, like the Israelis, firing upon alleged rock throwers or shooting unarmed border-crossers. Crossing With the Virgin contributor Norma Price describes the autopsy of 16-year-old Juan de Jesús Rivera Cota, killed by a Border Patrol bullet in 2005, for instance. But, as is normal for situations in which the system of control is strongly institutionalized and thus largely invisible as violence—at least to those who embrace it—so, too, are the dominant expressions of injustice and the accompanying brutality, migrant deaths being the most obvious one.

Another is Operation Streamline. Begun in 2005, the now border-wide program (minus California) processes hundreds of apprehended Mexican border-crossers on a daily basis through the federal court system and convicts them of the misdemeanor of illegal entry. Upon pleading guilty (which they invariably do), defendants receive sentences of anywhere from time served to six months and then are formally deported, thus making it a felony if they return and making them liable for anywhere from two to 20 years in prison.

I witnessed this scene in a Tucson courthouse in March 2009 as a federal magistrate convicted the afternoon’s 69 defendants, all with their hands chained to their waists and feet shackled. Afterward, the judge, a woman of Mexican descent born and raised in the border town of Nogales, Arizona, spoke to a group of university students visiting the courtroom. In response to a question about the program’s effectiveness in dissuading would-be unauthorized migrants, she characterized it as a complete waste of resources. When asked why she continued to do such work, the judge explained that she had kids to put through college. She later described her hometown as “like occupied territory.”

That the judge serves the very occupation she decries is unsurprising. It speaks to the contradictions and complexities that human beings embody, and is also a manifestation of how regimes of occupation can co-opt critics. To the extent that the regime has normalized the occupation—so much so that it is not visible as such—it additionally displays the success with which the occupiers have nationalized the mindsets of many: Today more than half of Border Patrol agents are Latinos, the vast majority from the border region. It thus also illustrates how the dispossession narrows the options for the land’s inhabitants, the borderlands including some of the poorest areas of the United States, with socio-economic indices for broad swaths of the Mexican-origin population especially dire. In the case of Palestinians, many perform construction jobs and labor in the very settlements in the West Bank and greater Jerusalem that exacerbate their plight.

In such contexts, the line between occupier and occupied, guard and policed, is often blurry at best: On January 10, U.S. authorities arrested Marcos Gerardo Manzano Jr., a Border Patrol agent, for allegedly harboring unauthorized immigrants at his home, one of them being his twice previously deported father. Some of his neighbors, almost all of whom are of Mexican descent, in the San Ysidro section of San Diego expressed sympathy for Manzano. “What could he do?” one neighbor was quoted as saying, adding in reference to Manzano’s father: “He’s family.” For U.S. authorities, such allegiance is the core of the problem: “His loyalty to his father was stronger than the loyalty to the Border Patrol,” one official stated condemningly, “and that’s the sad reality of it.”⁹

Supporters of occupation regimes justify the injustice in various ways, one being the invocation of the rule of law established by the conquering power. In this regard, the original injustice of colonization is perpetuated and obscured by what historian Arno Mayer has called a “violence of conservation”—physical and institutional brutality deployed to counter, and made necessary by, the individuals and groups who resist the social order that was violently brought about by an earlier wrong (a “violence of foundation” for Meyer).¹⁰

A second justification of occupation invokes “might makes right”: As one Israeli settler says to Shehadeh in defending his country’s presence in what is, according to international law, Palestinian land: “There was a war and we won.” His words made me recall a rally I witnessed in Los Angeles on July 4, 1997. The demonstrators were calling for a crackdown on unwanted immigration and for increased militarization of the U.S.-Mexico boundary. Among them was a woman carrying a sign directed at people of Mexican descent that read, “1848: You lost, we won. Get over it.”

What was lost to the pre-conquest populations and their descendants in both cases was not only land but, for those now cut off from territory to which they previously had access, all the associated rights, like the right to move, live, and work within the area. And for those members of the subjugated populations caught within the boundaries of the expanding entities or (in the U.S. case) who would later migrate to it, their rights in the new country would prove to be conditional and restricted. The theft was an inextricable part of the process to Americanize what is now the U.S. Southwest, and to make an Israel whose territory continues to expand.

What should give hope in the face of such injustices is that occupations are by definition temporary—or at least they are supposed to be. The United States has the advantage over Israel of having its ill-gotten territory legitimated by an international treaty, albeit one effectively realized at gunpoint, while having a considerable amount of time to dispossess and discipline the indigenous and Mexican populations it inherited and establish effective control. As such, the U.S. “occupation” is seen—at home and abroad—as something else, and certainly not temporary (at least in the foreseeable term). Hence, the conquest truly seems past, at least to many. In the case of Palestine, by contrast, the past visibly lives on, thus the international outrage directed at Israel and the direct resistance by Palestinians living under occupation.

Nonetheless, the distinct perceptions of the two situations speak, perhaps, more to the conventional nature of our definitions of occupation than they do to the depth and significance of the differences between the two sites. While Raja Shehadeh is clearly preoccupied with occupation of a conventional sort, his conception and critique of occupation concern much larger matters. In his book’s last sarha, he encounters an Israeli settler—one of the hundreds of thousands of colonists he despises for “the aggressiveness of their intentions and behavior toward my land.” In addition to stealing land and wastefully devouring the area’s fragile water supply, the settlers are an integral part of the Israeli system of control that stymies mobility. Shehadeh does not hide his rage from the settler. Yet, at the same time, he is able to see a connection with the young man due to a shared attachment to, and respect for, the land.

“I love these hills no less than you,” the settler asserts in response to Shehadeh’s challenge. “I was raised here. The sights and smells of this land are a sacred part of me. This is my home.” Shehadeh accepts the settler’s invitation to join him in smoking a water pipe of hashish. While Shehadeh feels a certain discomfort—“I began to feel guilty at what I was doing, willingly, sharing these hills with this settler”—he also is able to see beyond the clash between occupied and occupier: “But then I thought: these are still my hills despite how things are turning out. But they also belong to whoever can appreciate them.”

Here becomes apparent Shehadeh’s full critique of occupation, and of the two-decade-old “peace process,” which has served to further Palestinian dispossession and render a two-state solution almost unimaginable, given the breadth and depth of Israel’s presence in Palestine. What is at stake above all is how human beings behave toward the land and one another. In this sense, the problem is principally those who see the land as a blank canvas, one that they can carve up and fill without any regard for the flora, fauna, and physical landscape, and who show contempt for its human inhabitants and their ties to it.

In many ways, Shehadeh embraces practices that precede the very creation of the state of Israel. They include those of his paternal grandfather, a man who lived humbly in Ramallah while moving seasonally between the town and his fields in the nearby hills, and the semi-nomadic Bedouin, a people whose presence in the region goes back centuries. They had, Shehadeh writes, “a different vision of the land,” one that “saw it as an integral whole.” And then there are the Greek Orthodox monks who lead lives of contemplative seclusion in a centuries-old monastery near Jericho, an oasis of “tranquility and peace” where they do not “bother with the worldly events taking place outside their door.” Shehadeh wants to draw “inspiration from this long tradition, and search for a tranquil place” where he “could take refuge and sit out the bad times” and nurse his “despair about Israel’s unbridled power” as a “time comes when one has to accept reality, difficult as that might be, and find ways to live through it without losing one’s self-esteem and principles.”

By continuing to engage in the struggle to free the land, but in a way that goes beyond simple dichotomies of friend and foe and that embraces a belonging to something far beyond the here-and-now, Shehadeh leaves the reader with a vision that transcends the seemingly intractable conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Acknowledging the land’s permanence and the transient nature of any human construct, Shehadeh allows for a peaceful and just coexistence for all who reside in, and have a selfless, love-like claim to the contested land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River.

Today’s U.S.-Mexico borderlands is also one of despair in many ways, but, like any place, it is also one riven with contradictions and instabilities. It is a region deformed by rapacious development, with threatened water supplies, the prospects of long-term drought exacerbated by climate change.¹¹ It is also one blanketed by a U.S. policing apparatus that harms the region’s landscape, flora, and fauna. Yet countless migrants continue to challenge the regime of exclusion and overcome it to varying degrees.

As Crossing With the Virgin co-author Ted Parks insists, “The migrants will come as long as the forces are in place” that drive them. For these reasons and more, it is thus hard to imagine the settler status quo’s long-term survival. However, given the growing intensity of occupation in the form of the ever hardening enforcement regime, it is also difficult to envision its end in the foreseeable term. Nonetheless that need not lead to an acquiescence to the unacceptable in the name of realism.

“Even if we take [unjust social arrangements] as givens for purposes of immediate action in a particular context,” writes political theorist Joseph Careens, “we should not forget about our assessment of their fundamental character. Otherwise we wind up legitimating what should only be endured.”¹² And given the fundamental character of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, any just solution to the ongoing, multifaceted war there must challenge its foundational violence, and the contemporary manifestations of that violence.

Perhaps a similar vision to that of Shehadeh provides the resources to enable us to carry on and to imagine and produce a world beyond occupation. It is a vision that respects the land’s power and embraces its beauty, and allows for fluidity in terms of passage and residence. It also appreciates that the land will far outlast the relatively short lifespan of human conflicts and injustices, and will ultimately endure despite the associated destruction.

1. Melissa del Bosque, “All Walled Up,” The Texas Observer, January 20, 2010.
2. Wendy Kenin, “Tamez Stronghold: Indigenous Response to the U.S. Border Wall,” Green Pages, July 17, 2009.
3. See Erika Lee, At America’s Gate: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943 (University of North Carolina Press, 2003).
4. ACLU, “Are You Living in a Constitution Free Zone?” December 15, 2006.
5. Maria Politzer, “ ‘It’s Our Job to Stop That Dream’: The Endless, Futile Work of the Border Patrol,” Reason, April 2007.
6. Amir Shilo, “Female Soldiers Break Their Silence,” YNetnews.com, January 29, 2010.
7. Kevin Flower, “Israel Court: Deported Palestinian Court Can’t Return,” CNN.com, December 9, 2009.
8. Save the Children, “Dying to Work in Gaza,” January 19, 2011.
9. Richard Marosi, “Border Patrol Agent Is Charged with Harboring Illegal Immigrants,” Los Angeles Times, January 14, 2011.
10. Arno Mayer, The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions (Princeton University Press, 2002).
11. Lauren Morello and Climatewire, “Desert Southwest May Be First U.S. Victim of Climate Change,” Scientific American, December 14, 2010.
12. Joseph Carens, “Open Borders and Liberal Limits: A Response to Isbister,” International Migration Review 34, no. 2 (2000): 636.

In El Salvador, the US provided over $300 million a year in arms and training for almost a decade. The Pentagon through its advisory missions, in collaboration with local landlords and generals, financed and forcibly recruited thousands of peasants into death squad ‘civilian militias’ to assassinate local movement activists and terrorize farm workers’ movements and trade union organizations. Under imperial military pressure the leaders of the major Central American guerrilla organizations signed on to a peace agreement. The “peace accords” retained the US collaborator regimes in power and the promised social reforms were never implemented. As a result, the homicide rate skyrocketed. The discharged guerrilla militants and unemployed right wing militia members, armed and trained, and with no future, became the bases for gangs, drug and people traffickers, kidnappers and extortionists. The number of people who were annually killed in violent crime (1991-2011) exceeded the number who died each year during the revolutionary struggle (1979-1990). Having successfully blocked the prospects of positive socio-economic transformations in wealth, land ownership, the judicial system and allocation of public investments, the US pushed for neo-liberal ‘free trade agreements’ which further decimated small farmers and retail commerce. Mass outmigration and crime became the ‘roads out of poverty’ in the aftermath of imperial intervention. Violent crime became so pervasive that the business elites of the US and Central America were hesitant to invest and profit from the low wages and the unemployed who crowded the labor market. The cost of hiring private security armies to protect upscale neighborhoods, business operations, country clubs, and exclusive restaurant and leisure centers became prohibitive.

Faced with the “unfavorable climate for business” created by the very same pro-business Pentagon intervention, after two decades of murder and mayhem, the World Bank intervened. The World Development Report (WDR) for 2010 (published in 2011) focuses on the theme of “conflict, security and development”. The Report proposed a series of measures to lessen what it calls “mass violence”. The Report was taken up and elaborated in the Financial Times (4/27/11, p. 9) by Martin Wolf in an article titled “Remove the scourge of conflict”. The Report and Wolf provide time series data between 1999-2009 showing the vertical growth of “criminal violence after civil wars”; time series data show that countries with high poverty rates based on the (percent of population with income below $1.25 per day) have experienced greater violence than those with low poverty rate; time series data show that greater ‘violence’ reduced real GDP growth.

Both the WB Report and the Financial Times fail to identify the true nature of the ‘violent conflict’, the principle source of violence and the foreign and domestic elite economic policies which deepen and prolong ‘violence’.
In the case of Central America, particularly El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Honduras, the WB and Financial Times resort to vacuous generalization to avoid discussing the massive military role of US imperialism in promoting large scale, long term violence in the countries. Instead the FT strikes a phony philosophical note “man is a violent animal” (Alas). In fact imperialist rulers are violent animals; especially with regard to poor countries attempting to free themselves of US backed oligarchies. To their discredit the WB and FT obfuscate the data by claiming that the deaths were a product of “civil wars”.

Throughout the 1970’s and 1980’s the US and Israel provided arms, advisers, technical capacity to the murderous Guatemalan regime which slaughtered over 300,000; mostly Indians and wiped off the map over 420 villages. During the US decade long proxy war against the progressive Sandinista revolutionary movement via the Somoza dictatorship (1969-78) and the decade long Contra terror war against the Sandinista government (1979-89), over 50,000 people were killed, hundreds of thousands maimed and displaced and productive farms, factories, infrastructure, clinics and schools and co-operatives were targeted by US counter-insurgency advisers.

As mentioned earlier, El Salvador’s social movements and their supporters throughout civil society were targeted by US backed military and paramilitary groups forcing hundreds of thousands to flee to urban squatter settlements or across borders and overseas. Similar outcomes occurred during the US counter-insurgency campaign in Honduras and invasions of Grenada and Panama in the 1980’s.

Imperial backed invasions, counter-insurgency campaigns and the subsequent imposition of corrupt oligarchs led to the total disarticulation of local social networks and the bankruptcy of small scale farms because of the importation of subsidized US foodstuffs. These led to the presence of a deadly combination: thousands of automatic rifles, tens of thousands of unemployed displaced rural youth living in urban slums and an economy geared to enriching elite importers, exporters and US bankers and creditors. The WB Report in all of 301 pages and numerous tables does not contain a single phrase about the nature, consequences and the profound and lasting impact of imperial intervention on the out of control homicide rates in Central America or elsewhere. Instead we are told it’s all about a “civil war”.

The mendacious cover-up proceeds to the current decade. The WB Report and the FT sound an optimistic note claiming that annual battle deaths have “fallen to 42,000 in the 2000’s”. First, calling the US-NATO invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan a “civil war” is a travesty to common knowledge; and then falsifying the over 1 million Iraqi deaths into a few thousand, flies in the face of independent surveys published in the prestigious British medical journal the Lancet.
What is striking about the imperialist interventions and most relevant to the growth of violent crime, is the fact that the subsequent client rulers, are themselves deeply enmeshed in international criminal networks. Drug dealing and large scale theft of billions in aid funds and public revenues is the hallmark of Central American clients who are most intimately tied to Washington. The same is true in Iraq and Afghanistan: tribal clans and ethnic gangs who pledged allegiance to the US occupiers run billion dollar heroin enterprises. They murder civil society activists and undermine the bases of community based organizations.

Policy Proposals

Based on a diagnosis that ignores the imperial causes of social breakdown and the subsequent spiraling violent crime rate, the WB Report and the FT propose “lessons” for a “successful transition to ending high rates of violence”.

Since their diagnosis of the historical roots of crime is deeply flawed, the prescriptions fail to come to terms with the political and economic transformations necessary to reduce spiraling homicide rates.

The WB Report proposes (1) “inclusive coalitions” for change, (2) impact programs that produce quick results and impress people, (3) reforms of the security and justice institutions, (4) a pragmatic perspective of several decades to bring about change. In other words the WB Report recognizes that its policies, allies and agencies are so embedded in the current system that its “reform proposals” are at best designed to co-opt local leaders in coalitions, to pursue incremental changes, which will not reverse homicide rates for several decades.

The WB Report proposes to create bottom-up “links” between the neo-liberal state and civic society: an impossible task when “the state” is the principle agency undermining employment via its free market policies. Their proposal to act against corruption and to reform the police and judicial system overlooks the fact that the past and present closest political and judicial collaborators of US counter-insurgency and dominance are precisely those corrupt officials willing to repress popular movements and provide military bases. The WB Report calls for greater intervention by “external institutions” (like itself and US AID) to “deliver support”, when it was precisely external intervention which short circuited changes fought for by “bottom up” grass roots movements.

The point of departure for a reduction of violent crime is precisely to reduce or eliminate external intervention by the US: the need to eliminate military aid and training programs which block and repress social movements and organize coups; to eliminate WB programs promoting agro-export elites and to promote agrarian reforms led by and for co-operatives and family farmers; to end free trade and the saturation of local market with subsidized US food exports to allow peasants to produce for local markets with subsidized US food exports, to allow peasants to produce for local markets. Above all there is a need for the US and WB to pay $ multi-million dollar compensation for the destruction caused by the counter-insurgency war and neo-liberal policies, as a way of creating alternative employment for young people tempted by the drug gangs. Because of the long term destruction resulting from imperialist wars, the process of decriminalizing society will require a profound revolution in institutions and culture, one which will by necessity need to root out the current crop of generals, oligarchs and World Bank trained economists who perpetuate the conditions which spawn crime. Those changes will require supporting social movements independent of the state; immediate positive impacts to attract popular support will result from movements engaged in direct action – like occupying large rural estates. Police and security reforms can only be instituted as part of a process of regime changes in which ties to repressive overseas experts are replaced by links to community councils. Crime will be reduced in direct relation to greater independence from the regional policemen and with greater freedom to pursue an alternative economy based on social solidarity.

The film has been awarded the Lola, the German equivalent of an Oscar, for best picture, and Kekelli has been awarded the Lola for best actress. Kekilli performs with a grace and beauty that is truly timeless. Capable of drawing the viewer into a secret inner-world of breathtaking emotional depths, brutally crushing heartache, and deeply disturbing cultural contradictions – Kekilli is unforgettable.

In the beginning of the film, Umay, who has been wedded to a Turkish man and has moved to Turkey to live with him, suffers emotional and physical abuse under his tyrannical roof, and when he turns on her son, Cem (Nizam Schiller), in a similarly despotic manner, she flees and returns to Berlin.

Umay’s father, played with impressive emotional depth and nuanced acting by Settar Tanriogen, initially believes his daughter is simply homesick and warmly greets her. When he and the rest of the family learn that she has left her husband and returned for good, they grow increasingly upset with her, feeling that she is bringing an unspeakable act of shame and humiliation upon the family, threatening their standing both with the in-laws and with the Turkish-German community.

Umay’s mother, Halima (Derya Alabora), and her deeply possessive older brother, Mehmet (Tamer Yigit), who is even more patriarchal and inclined towards medievalism than his brother-in-law, are both adamant that she return to Turkey immediately, or destroy the good name of the family forever.

Umay’s younger sister, Rana (Almila Bagriacik), and younger brother, Acar (Serhad Can), are initially sympathetic, however this changes when they begin to feel the hostility of the Turkish-German community bearing down on them. In the end, Umay is tragically and hopelessly alienated from those she loves.

One of the subtler mysteries of When We Leave is how Umay has managed to assimilate into German society far better than the rest of her deeply segregated family. She continues to believe until the bitter end that her family will forgive her, and that it will somehow be possible to strike a reconciliation and peaceful marriage between these two diametrically opposed cultures.

The film is filled with marvelous subtleties and nuances, such as when Umay speaks Turkish to her parents one moment, and German to her younger siblings the next.

When Umay initially pleads with her father for understanding, he refuses to take her side, even when she tells him that her husband has beaten her. “The hand that strikes is also the hand that soothes,” he tells her. However, as the drama unfolds, Umay’s father reveals himself to be a man of conflicting emotions and profound complexity.

When We Leave may also force the more intellectually astute in the audience to consider the implications of a government bringing foreign workers into a Western country so as to exploit them as cheap labor, while simultaneously doing everything in the power of the state to see to it that they stay as segregated and ghettoized as possible.

For innocent souls like Umay, who grow up in the West, yet are taught from the earliest possible age to not integrate, the clash of cultures that invariably ensues is often terribly tragic, and not the romantic utopia that liberals are always promising it will be.

The film’s German title translates as “strangers.” Indeed, Umay’s family have become strangers to Germany, alienated from the land of their birth, and in the end, most tragically, strangers to each other.

Devastating, somber, and gripping, When We Leave is a heart-wrenching tale of globalization in the throes of darkness, and a people lost in a world of terrifying and dehumanizing barbarism.

Written and directed by Feo Aladag; director of photography, Judith Kaufmann; edited by Andrea Mertens; music by Max Richter and Stéphane Moucha; production design by Silke Buhr; costumes by Gioia Raspé; produced by Feo Aladag and Züli Aladag; released by Olive Films. In German and Turkish, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 59 minutes. This film is not rated. WITH: Sibel Kekilli (Umay), Settar Tanriögen (Kader), Darya Alabora (Halime), Florian Lukas (Stipe), Nizam Schiller (Cem), Ufuk Bayraktar (Kemal) and Tamer Yigit (Mehmet).

Often, xenophobia is expressed through words and not through action. Every now and then there are assailants who want to take the matter into their own hands. This is what has happened in Sweden.

In the course of one year or so, fifteen suspicious shootings took place in Malmö, killing one and wounding eight people. The police concluded that the same weapon had been used in several of the shootings (including the lethal one). Another pattern quickly became obvious: all but one of the fifteen victims were of immigrant background.

The shooter became known as “the New Laser Man.” His predecessor, a man named John Ausonius, ravaged Stockholm in 1991-1992. Initially equipped with a rifle and a laser sight — which he later exchanged for a revolver — Ausonius’s profound hatred for immigrants drove him to shoot eleven people. One died. Ausonius, who himself had been bullied in school for his dark hair and appearance (his parents were immigrants from Germany and Switzerland), is serving a life sentence for his crime. A Swedish journalist of Assyrian origin recalled that as a pupil in Sweden of the early 1990s, some of her classmates would wear a t-shirt with the writing: “The Laser Man – A Luminous Point in The Everyday Life.”

So when shootings targeting immigrants started taking place in Malmö, it brought back some bad memories. People who matched the profile were afraid of going out in the evenings, worried that they would be randomly selected by the New Laser Man.

In November, a 38-year-old man was finally arrested on suspicion for the attacks. In court, Peter Mangs has thus far shown no sign of remorse. The case is still pending and the evidence brought against him seems to be strong.

This is a maniac who acted on his own, but in what context? His predecessor, John Ausonius was at work in the early 1990s when a right-wing populist party calling itself New Democracy managed to enter the Parliament on an anti-immigration platform (the party suffered from internal issues and it did not get to keep any seats in the following election). Coincidentally, as the New Laser Man haunted Malmö, the elections of 19 September, 2010 had an unpleasant outcome. The Sweden Democrats received more than the needed 4% of the vote and now holds the balance of power in the Parliament.

The Sweden Democrats party was founded in 1988 and several of its early leading members had a past in neo-Nazi and other types of extremist right-wing organisations.¹ One of them, Anders Klarström, who was the party’s chairman between1989 and 1995, was convicted in 1986 after threatening a famous TV personality, well-known for his anti-racism activism, with death by leaving a message on his answering-machine. Klarström’s phone message read: “We’re gonna burn you, you [f......] Jew swine! Damn it, you disgusting little Jew swine! Be careful! We’re gonna come and kill you!” But that was in 1980s.

Today the party stands removed from the most extreme elements. They have now reorganised and rebranded themselves. The new image seems to be successful. But even if their outright hate rhetoric is rare these days, their racist outlook is not hard to locate. If Sweden Democrats are to be believed, virtually all of Sweden’s problem can be traced to its liberal immigration policies. Party Chairman Jimmie Åkesson keeps reiterating that immigration costs Sweden “huge” sums of money, though Åkesson is careful to avoid an exact figure. Other party members claim that immigration costs 300 billion Swedish Krona, or 10% of GDP. Economists who have examined the issue on the other hand, give an estimate ranging between 20 and 40 billion kronor. Nonetheless, we need to choose, Åkesson and his party argue, between immigration or welfare.

In October of 2009, Åkesson was allowed to express his party’s opinions in an article in Sweden’s largest daily. While immigration is seen as the general problem, it is evident that a certain group is identified as the single biggest threat. Åkesson complained that “today’s multi-cultural Swedish power elite is so completely blind of the dangers posed by Islam and Islamisation.” Islam differs from Christianity, Åkesson went on explaining, “for example in terms of making a distinction between spiritual and worldly power, and in its view of the use of violence. Islam has no equivalence to the New Testament and no universal commandment of love.” He continued that Islam is “our biggest foreign threat since World War Two.”² In the election a year later the Sweden Democrats won 5.7% of the votes.

Sadly, Åkesson is not the most ardent Islamophobe among the party’s prominent figures. The party’s spokesperson for international affairs, Ted Ekeroth, does not even pretend to cover his anti-Muslim prejudice. Last year, Ekeroth and his twin brother Kent Ekeroth launched “The Anti-Islamisation Fund”. It was founded “as a part of the struggle against Islam” and collects money in order to stop the supposed “Islamisation” of Sweden.

Ekeroth first became known to the public a few years ago when a newspaper revealed that he, a leading figure within the Sweden Democrats party, was one of the 2006 recipients of the Herzl Award, handed out by the World Zionist Organisation. The motivation read: “Each of these young people has shown outstanding leadership and devotion to Israel and Zionism through their exceptional volunteer efforts on behalf of Israel and the Zionist cause in their respective countries.”³

The World Zionist Organisation is said to have regretted its decision after finding out about Ekeroth’s party affiliation. The recipient, however, sees nothing contradictory in being Jewish and working for a Swedish nationalist party: “If you’re a Zionist, then you’re a Jewish nationalist. And in such a case you also need to respect Swedish nationalism.” For Ekeroth, Israel and Sweden have a common enemy.

SAME OLD, SAME OLD

In many ways, Swedish Islamophobia resembles anti-Muslim prejudice in other parts of the Western world. The importance of the 9/11 attacks must not be underestimated. Sure, the Western audience did not have an all too positive image of Muslims prior to the attacks. What has changed is that even the world’s only superpower has proven to be vulnerable to “the Muslim threat.” The subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq have only led to higher tensions.

Most dangerous however, is the attempt to equate pious Muslims with violence. Muslims abiding by their religion are commonly framed as “radicals” whilst those who are less interested in religious life are labelled “moderates.” This is dangerous, because if religious Muslims are seen as posing a threat to the safety of others, then actions need to be taken to stop them.

Violence is not the only negative stereotype associated with Islam. A common argument used by Islamophobes is to point to human rights violations and repressive regimes in Muslims countries as proof of what domestic Muslim populations would like to introduce in Sweden while at the same time choosing to ignore that many Muslims left their homelands precisely because of repressive regimes.

A way of “proving” that the Muslim minorities does not value democratic rights has been to use provocations. When the Danish newspaper published the disgraceful cartoons of prophet Muhammad in 2005, newspapers in different countries, including Sweden, responded by following Jyllands-Posten’s example and published similar defamatory cartoons which were further supported by, leading journalists, lawmakers and others, who quickly argued for the protection of freedom of speech.

Less known is the fact that Flemming Rose, the cultural editor at Jyllands-Posten who was responsible for publishing the cartoons, in the following year — probably in an attempt not to be seen as being biased — said that his newspaper planned on publishing cartoons from the “International Holocaust Cartoon Competition”, which had been announced by an Iranian newspaper in response to the Danish publication. Jyllands-Posten’s editor-in-chief, Carsten Juste, was not pleased with the idea and assured that such cartoons would never appear in his paper. The following day the cultural editor went on a leave for a few months. For a paper purporting to stand up for freedom of speech, Jyllands-Posten certainly failed.

IN A GLOBALISED WORLD, THE MIDDLE EAST IS NOT FAR AWAY

With a strong focus on the Middle East, tensions between Western countries and their Muslim minorities is understandable. The situation is not helped by the fact that many Muslim leaders have a limited understanding of Swedish society, and therefore have difficulty in countering Islamophobic propaganda. Most imams speak no or little Swedish. Swedish authorities are working on establishing a programme for educating future imams. Religions always adjust to their environment to some extent, which gives hope to the possibility of seeing a more ‘Swedishised’ Muslim community in the future, which will be more successful in giving the community a better reputation.

As I write this, Stockholm has experienced its first suicide bombing. A car was set on fire in central Stockholm and shortly after a suicide bomber blew himself up three hundred metres away from the car. Fortunately, most of the explosives the man was carrying around his waist did not detonate, and he was the only one who died in the attacks.

Ten minutes before the attacks the media and the security police got an e-mail containing audio files in Swedish and Arabic with the name and picture of the suicide bomber, now identified as Taimour Abdulwahab. The files contained chilling messages such as: “Our actions will speak for themselves, as long as you do not end your war against Islam and humiliation of the Prophet and your stupid support to the pig Vilks” (who drew Muhammad cartoons) and encouraged other Muslims to join the fight.

The police said that the failed suicide bombing was “amateurish” and they were unsure whether he was operating on his own. But no matter if this turns out to be the acts of one disturbed Muslim individual or a small group, it will inevitably have very negatives consequences for the Muslim community. In the eyes of the ordinary Westerner, Abdulwahab blew himself up for Islam. Very few people are able to decipher that the bomber’s frustrations and grievances most likely emanate from a victim mentality seeing the daily attacks and killing of Muslims in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan.

Furthermore, they justify attacks on Western targets on the basis of asymmetrical warfare, as was made articulated clearly by the Stockholm bomber: “Now your children, daughters and sisters will die like our brothers and sisters and children are dying.”⁴ I believe Abdulwahab partly wanted to change the way we think about these wars, to make us understand that if we fight wars abroad it will strike us back at home. For too long we have lived with the illusion that the Swedish military presence in Afghanistan will not have any domestic consequences.

The general public has reacted to the Stockholm bombings with fear, which extends to the Muslim community too. For the latter, they know that more people will now look upon Muslims with greater suspicion. The imam of the grand mosque of Stockholm, Shaykh Hassan Mussa, was quick to denounce “all forms of attacks, violence, fears and threats against innocent people, whatever the motive or pretext.” Other Swedish-Muslim leaders have joined him in condemnation of the attack. But will it have any affect?

Thankfully, the mainstream media in general have been responsible in reporting this incident, emphasising that a whole community cannot be held responsible for the actions of an individual. However, the same could not be said about the Internet, where many people are flooding sites with comments about how Islam encourages terrorism and that it must be stopped. The claim that Muslims support suicide bombings is particularly ironic since the greater majority of the victims of such attacks are Muslims. But then again, fear is a powerful feeling that is seldom based on logical arguments. We can only hope that in the end common sense prevails.

1. “Bakgrund: Bakom den demokratiska fasaden,” EXPO 19, April, 2003.
2. “Muslimerna är vårt största utländska hot,” Aftonbladet, 19 October, 2009.
3. “Herzl Award Recipients 2006,” World Zionist Organisation.
4. Nyberg, Per. “Explosions in Stockholm Believed to be Failed Terrorist Attack,” CNN, 12 December, 2010.

Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB) introduced the new policy on Tamils who seek political asylum in Canada on the grounds that although the refugee board adjudicators are not forced to follow the new guidelines, for the IRB such notes “are offered to members as models of sound reasoning that may be adopted in appropriate circumstances.”  This is really a frightening decision of the IRB as it demonstrates that the Canadian government led by Stephen Harper has made such a hasty decision without knowing what is really happening on the ground in the Tamils areas in Sri Lanka.

The new policy, no doubt, could affect refugee claimants who arrived in Vancouver in 2009 and 2010 aboard the Ocean Lady and MV Sun Sea.  The 76 Tamils who arrived in 2009 applied for refugee status, but the refugee board has not taken any action on their files.  The 492 Tamil refugees who arrived last year have applied for political asylum, but their cases are also pending.  It is worth mentioning that one-fourth of the refugees who arrived last year have been detained in detention centres in British Columbia and two of the asylum seekers have been branded as being affiliated to the militant LTTE.

Canada wants precedence to reject Tamils’ claims for refugee status

In this context, the case cited in the new IRB policy involved a 25-year-old Tamil male from Sri Lanka. It is worth mentioning that this youth arrived in Canada by air.  This particular claimant had told the refugee board that he had been, and would be, persecuted by the Sri Lankan army, government officials, and paramilitary agents associated with the Sri Lankan government if he returned to Sri Lanka.

The claimant also told the board that he was arrested by Sri Lankan forces in 2006, interrogated, hit in the stomach and pushed against a wall. He moved to a different location with a friend soon afterwards, but was detected by government forces the next year. He said his friend was eventually executed. The claimant fled to Malaysia in 2007 before arriving in Canada in 2009.

The IRB tribunal rejected his refugee claim in November. It was cited in the persuasive decision four weeks later on December 17, 2010.  The ruling said: “The claimant is not a person in need of protection in that his removal to Sri Lanka would not subject him personally to a risk to his life.”

The IRB said: “The reasons cite the documentary evidence which relates to changes that took place in Sri Lanka recently and conclude with a finding that the changes are meaningful and durable and that the claimant’s fear of persecution based on his particular social group, perceived political opinion and nationality is not well founded.”

How does Canada not know what is happening?

It is unfortunate that Canada employs dozens of diplomats in Sri Lanka at the Canadian High Commission in Colombo who do not know the ground reality in the North and East of Sri Lanka, which are the traditional homeland of Tamils where over 150,000 Sri Lankan armed forces have been deployed despite that the government claiming that it has crushed the Tamil Tigers in May 2009.  The situation worsens by the day. The Sri Lankan government has been deploying more and more armed forces into Tamil villages to build new military residences with China’s assistance.

Another shocking story is that the Sri Lankan army is going to be deployed on the islets off the shores of Jaffna where already the Sri Lankan naval bases and the paramilitaries supporting the government have been put up.  The Canadian High Commissioner, along with senior officials, paid several visits to the Tamil areas after the LTTE silenced their guns in 2009.  It is shocking evidence that the Canadian High Commissioner and senior officials who are being paid from Canadian tax-payers money have not updated the ground reality in the North and East of Sri Lanka where human rights abuses are on the rise daily.

Kidnapping for ransom, murder, rape, robbery, and disappearances are increasing in various places in the North and East, especially Jaffna, in spite of it being a military garrison. There is not a day that passes without a report on crime. Many events can be cited to demonstrate the current situation in Tamil areas.  There are many untold stories taking place despite the fact that many people fail to report to the police or any other officials due to the fear that they will be prosecuted by the armed forces who are wandering around the streets of Tamil villages, towns, and cities with military uniform and arms. Even President Rajapaksa, whose agents commit these crimes, has stated publicly, while in Jaffna, that these criminals underground would not show their heads anymore.

A few of the shocking events are: A Hindu priest was shot dead, using a gun owned by the military, for performing rites for tsunami victims. A government education officer was shot dead because he objected to the national anthem being sung in Sinhala only in Jaffna. An environmentalist was murdered for exposing a Sri Lankan minister and India’s favourite, Douglas Devananda, for making millions of rupees by removing sand and causing environmental damage. So the list goes on.  It is indeed frustrating that Canada falls victim to the Sri Lankan government’s false propaganda.

Senior government officials acknowledge law and order worsen

The Government Agent of Jaffna, Ms Imelda Sukumar, the principal civil representative of the government in Jaffna, spoke to media personnel when they raised questions about the law and order in Jaffna, suggesting the police should be replaced by the military, as if Jaffna is not militarized enough.  It is surprising that over 150,000 Sri Lankan armed forces are wandering in the streets of North and East, but the irresponsible statement of Sukumar demonstrates that the law and order cannot be returned soon.  She claims that more armed forces should be deployed to return the areas to normalcy.

Sukumar, for reasons well known to her, shifted the blame on to another government agency instead of holding the government wholly responsible for the complete breakdown of the justice system and the collapse of law and order in Jaffna.  Jaffna is a veritable jungle, a mini police State where State terrorism remains.

The residents in northern Jaffna and Vavuniya were advised by two senior Police superintendents in leaflets, widely distributed, to wear only imitation jewellery and take extra steps to protect their homes. They were advised not to leave their door keys hidden under door rugs or flower pots, but to have a spare key if another family member needed one. When leaving home, lock the doors properly and inform the neighbours about their departure. They were told not to travel alone when wearing gold jewellery, as criminals may trick and rob their jewellery.

The people were told to beware of strangers or strange vehicles coming to their areas and to note down the numbers and other details. This is just a usual story to hoodwink them to show that robbery is the motive for such crimes and to sidetrack the issue from the real situation and the political and racist undertones.

Unnumbered white van kidnapping is a common occurrence. Once they come in a group armed with guns, there is nothing anyone can do about it.  No unnumbered vehicle is permitted to move around in any civilized country, let alone a militarized area, such as Jaffna. So it is the security forces that have to do the prevention and not unarmed civilians.

Parents were advised not to send children out of their homes alone. The question is how do the parents go about their work if they have to follow their children to school?

The police also advised people to number the valuable goods at home or label them and to do the same for electric equipment, motor bikes, and so forth.

The police have also advised the residents to keep their doors and windows closed, even during the day time if there is only one person in the house. At night, they are advised to make sure the doors and windows are closed and to keep a bulb switched on.

The public was told that if any member of the defence force comes for inspection, they should ask for their official identity cards before opening the door and ensure they are accompanied by a police officer from the area. This is a guaranteed recipe for violence and death, as most of the uniformed personal are thugs and they themselves commit the robbery. Moreover they carry false identity cards with government patronage.

Shop owners have been advised to leave a light on outside their shops after their closure and to keep someone inside the shop. The police say the people have a right to protect their lives and property in such instances. If the criminals attempt to flee, they have a right to take them into custody and then inform the village officer or the police.

What logic!  How do unarmed civilians arrest fully-armed criminals? All the above recommendations can be carried out only by the police as they are the only ones empowered by the law to do so. They are also paid to do their job.

This is Sri Lanka’s version of maintaining ‘law and order’.  One of Wikileak’s revelations was that the American Ambassador, Patricia A. Butenis, was of the view that the para-military groups were given the liberty to raise their own funds by whatever means — kidnapping, robbery, prostitution, and child-trafficking — as the government was no longer able to finance their maintenance. The military has also joined in this multi-million rupee business, so how could the police act?

Crime is a money making business for the armed forces. Moreover, the best means of silencing people who oppose government policies is to eliminate them. Only the international community can get the Tamils of Sri Lanka out of this culture of impunity by imposing sanctions.  The US and EU, who have awoken to the realities of the situation, may be willing to do so, but India and China will continue to support Rajapaksa and Company of brothers and close relatives.

The current situation in the Tamil homeland shows that there is no protection for the Tamils whatsoever. They are exposed to the worst of crimes. The human rights situation has gotten worse.  When the LTTE was in action militarily, the enemies thought a second before conducting any violation against the Tamils, but after the LTTE entered into ceasefire agreement with the Sri Lankan government in 2002 with the facilitation of Norwegian government, the atrocities of Sri Lankan armed forces ran rampant against Tamils.  With the complete silence of the LTTE guns, human rights abuses have worsened.

Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Board’s (IRB) new policy is dangerous and violates its own Charter and the international convention.  Unless the Tamil Canadians wake up and rise to the level where they can exert pressure upon the Canadian government to intervene in altering the new policy introduced by the IRB, many other countries will follow suit with the Canadian policy not to acknowledge the Tamils who are lacking protection in Sri Lanka and will help to deteriorate the efforts of countries which are taking steps to bring the perpetrators of the war crimes to book.

It’s called parachute journalism.

The whole country is exposed to, or gets a glimpse of, Arizona, and then it’s off to the next rampage. Blood and gore sells, but it only has a shelf life until the next crisis.

What will the country have learned from the saturated and instantaneous coverage (much of it unverified, expectedly wrong or exaggerated)? They will have learned that there’s a lot of hate in Arizona. That the inflammatory and incendiary political rhetoric with subliminal and even blatant calls to violence from the right and left have to be toned down, that we all need to be civil and we all need to be positive.

Nice try. But that is not a description of Arizona, nor the nation. With very few exceptions, only the right wing engages in this constant talk of targeting and taking out their opponents and of 2nd Amendment solutions.

The rampage is/was the rampage. It was carried out by what appears to be a right-wing lunatic. He may have had a co-conspirator. His target appears to have been first, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, and, secondarily, with his weapon of choice, anyone else who was in the vicinity. Giffords, a conservative democrat, was literally in the crosshairs of the Tea Party and the Sarah Palin wing of the conservative movement. Everyone knows that.

Yet in Arizona, most of the hate here is directed specifically at
Mexicans/immigrants. That cannot be left unsaid by all those who have discovered Arizona overnight. All the hate that Arizona is famous for emanates not simply from right wing hate radio but from the state capitol itself.

Here, Mexicans/immigrants and Indigenous peoples are fair game for the loudmouth talk show hosts and their cult followings, but also from the highest officials in state government. Here, Mexicans/immigrants are daily demonized. The viciousness and dehumanization here has become normalized.

There’s a consensus that everyone is conscious that we need to be civil, that we need to respect each others’ rights except when talking about illegal aliens. Racial profiling (read Indigenous) is a way of life here in Arizona and truthfully, when it comes to brown peoples, it has been normalized across the country. That’s what sb 1070 is about. But it’s also about hb 2281, the effort to kill ethnic studies.

There is no left wing equivalent to the Rush Limbaughs and Glen Becks of the world and there’s plenty local ones in Arizona who revel perversely every time their names are mentioned. They preach unadulterated hate because ‘illegal aliens’ are not human to them. It is not uncommon to hear people talk on the radio about killing Mexicans along the border as if they were speaking of flies or cockroaches.

The hate here is deafening. We have been sending signals for years now and the hate continues. It is relentless, whether from minutemen, hate-radio loudmouths or from state legislators.

To the parachute journalists and all those that have discovered Arizona overnight, don’t forget that. Long after you leave, long after this massacre has ceased to be headline news, we will continue to have to contend with the normalized bigotry and hate against brown peoples that continually comes out of the state capitol and that is nowadays prevalent throughout the state.

Please remember this and look at your own communities to see if all this hate is already festering there. I can almost guarantee you that it is. Bring it to light before the next massacre. Perhaps you will prevent the next massacre.

* Click here for an in-depth look into the Arizona hate.

Some people say that as Arizona’s top leaders, you are actively engaged in an unprecedented ethnic cleansing campaign against the red-brown peoples of this state.

No doubt you not only disagree, but you take umbrage because you perhaps consider yourself part of a movement that is concerned primarily with national security, with sealing the porous U.S./Mexico border, with mounting campaigns against illegal immigration, and lastly, with promoting the virtues of U.S. culture, a culture that you fear is being eroded daily by invading and uncontrolled hordes from south of the border. On top of this, you most likely believe that this invasion is bankrupting the nation, financially, culturally and spiritually.

And yet, I’m sure you are aware that on Dec 31, one of you, outgoing state schools superintendant of schools, Tom Horne, is set to declare Tucson’s K-12 Mexican American Studies program to be out of compliance with HB 2281, Arizona’s anti-ethnic studies law that goes into effect the very next day.

Despite this, you cannot see how this can be interpreted as being part of an ethnic cleansing campaign? Let me offer each of you a pair of huaraches or mocatzin. This might permit you to understand why many of us believe this is so. You have no interest in wearing huaraches or mocassins? That’s OK. Keep your boots on while I offer an explanation.

Part of the problem in debating these issues is that we utilize different vocabularies and we also live different realities. Yet the problem is actually beyond language. You need to walk in our shoes or you need to have the experience of being singled out because of our red-brown skin to be able to understand why we view the world differently and why we interpret your movement to be inimical to our very existence.

Let me offer alternative terminology for what you are doing. I would argue that what you are engaged in is not so much ethnic cleansing, but a continuation of the colonial policies of reducciones – a project carried out by the Spanish empire in the Americas during the 1500s-1800s. This included the region that is today called the U.S. Southwest.

Never heard of it? They were akin to this nation’s Indian Removal policies of the 19th century. Tied to them were the Indian Boarding Schools. Indian Removal either constituted outright genocide or forced migrations. This resulted in land loss and the de-rooting of peoples that had been living in what is today the United States for many thousands of years. The philosophical foundation for the boarding schools was: “kill the Indian, save the man.” Translated, it amounted to both Christianization and Americanization. It was predicated on the idea that American Indians were savage and godless and needed saving.

The policy of reducciones was something similar: “Kill the Indian; create a Christian.”

This project was also predicated on the idea that Indigenous peoples were savage, godless… and demonic. A debate raged throughout the 1500s as to whether Indigenous peoples had souls, whether they were actually human and whether they were entitled to full human rights. Not coincidentally, the debate is reminiscent of the one we hear today about “illegal aliens.” The stark difference was that then, most Europeans taking part in it were convinced that the culture(s) of the peoples of the Americas were literally derived from the devil.

Along with genocide and land theft, the primary objective of the reducciones was to generally wipe out all vestiges of Indigenous culture, history and memory and convert the people into Christians. This included physically destroying temples, schools, murals, libraries etc. It also included massive book burnings – because books, along with knowledge of the calendars (math, science and astronomy), plants and foods, were thought to be “things of the devil.”

From this sordid history came a system of European jurisprudence that determined what was legal/legitimate, what constituted knowledge, who was human (even who/what was beautiful) and who was entitled to full human rights. Despite rosy accounts written by Europeans, the same or similar dynamic has been in play on this continent for these past 518 years, involving: who is entitled to full human rights and who is welcome. At different times, the answer has been Christians, Europeans, Caucasians, human beings, the civilized, the pure bred, those with reason/intelligence, literate peoples and nowadays, citizens. Those cast outside of this net have been: Indigenous peoples, so-called pagans, savages and mongrels, non-Europeans, the uncivilized, the racially, culturally and spiritually impure, the “illiterate” and always the “foreigners.” It is these peoples whom have historically been denied their basic human rights and freedoms.

Unlike those who think that what has been happening in Arizona is an aberration, it is actually in line with the history of the continent over the past 500 years.

Racial profiling? That is the history of this continent. Denial of history and culture? That too is the norm.

Embedded in the memory of Mexican Americans (Central and South Americans also) is always the continual need to prove our humanity. In the eyes of the law, we have never been human enough. Not American enough. Not loyal enough. Not pure enough. Not legal enough. Not legitimate enough. Even in the realm of language, neither our English or Spanish have ever been good enough.

And how can we forget; despite our color, and despite our 7,000-year maiz-based culture that can be traced to this very continent, we neither are Indigenous enough.

So when you enact laws that require us to prove our citizenship, when you enact laws that forbid us from learning our thousands-of-year cultures from this very continent, then you give us but one clear message: the need to once again prove our humanity. You also send out another message: not welcome. But you seem not content with sending that message either. Next is the Arizona nullification of birthright citizenship and the 14th amendment. And subsequently, you now want children to also turn in their own parents.

You question our humanity? Step back and examine what it is you are doing. Your attacks are relentless, but very much in line with what we are accustomed to. You want our souls? You can’t have them. You seem to be obsessed with completing that imperial project begun some 518 years ago. But not even a thousand laws can wipe out our memories and no amount of demonization and no amount of misinformation or miseducation can sever our connection to this land. And thus we see the frustration in your faces and hear your message about trying to get rid of as many of us as possible and about keeping our history and culture at home.

We already did that for many hundreds of years. What is it about knowledge that you fear? Do you fear another narrative – a narrative much older than the Pilgrim story? Why do you fear us and our ancient Indigenous knowledge?

Do you fear the maiz-based philosophical concepts of In Lak Ech, Panche Be and Hunab Ku?

Do you actually fear that we teach our kids to see themselves in everyone else – a philosophy that promotes love, justice and equality, not hate and inequality? Do you actually fear that we teach kids to pursue the truth – critical thinking – as opposed to blind acceptance of oft-repeated myths about this continent and this country? And do you fear that we teach our children that they are no less or no better than anyone else – that we are all created equal – as opposed to teaching them that they have savage and demonic roots?

Why indeed do you fear this program? Because it graduates 97.5% of all of its students? Do you fear that if this success is replicated nationwide, that there will be no one left to pick the crops? You seem to want us in a permanent state of subservience, if you want us at all. You seem to want us to lose our memories and to lose our identities and our connection to this land as the price of admission to this society. You seem to want us, fear us and despise us all at the same time. And still, we love this land. Does this puzzle you?

I appeal to your conscience and your own humanity: Why not welcome us as peoples with open arms. And why not embrace this program; it creates top-notch students and beautiful human beings. Is that not the purpose of education?

Then the DREAM Act came unraveled. The Senate vote was postponed for a week. The vote to vote on it fell five votes short. And Lopez, the former student-body president of Rex Putnam High School of Portland, Oregon suddenly felt the air sucked out of his hopes.

“But the failure of the Senate to pass the DREAM Act in no way changes the status of the dreamers,” insists immigrant advocate, Ralph Isenberg, who has been working on the Lopez release full time for several weeks. “This is not a time to panic. Instead, we need to make certain that our national policy of not deporting students like Hector remains intact.”

Isenberg is referring to widely publicized statements made earlier this year by President Barack Obama and federal immigration authorities promising that they would cease spending tax money on efforts to deport children who had been brought to the US as children.

I am absolutely certain that Hector Lopez will be released,” says Isenberg on the Sunday before Christmas. “He meets all the criteria for dreamers. He has lived in the US for all but a few weeks of his life. He has been an exemplary student. And if the President’s words are any good, he said dreamers are not to be deported. I have not found another case where a dreamer with Hector’s qualifications and background has been deported.

Encouraged by what he calls a “sincere tone” in his communications with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) authorities in Arizona, Isenberg has promised to meet all expenses involved in the bonding, release, transportation, and supervision of Lopez so that he can spend the holidays at home with his mother.

Isenberg says he is thankful that ICE officials conducted an interview with Lopez last Wednesday exploring claims that Lopez has a “credible fear” of being re-deported to Mexico. After two full months of life as an American exile in Mexico, Lopez came back across the border in mid-November carrying written appeals for asylum. Officials have reportedly promised a speedy evaluation of the claims in the coming week says Isenberg. Yet despite hopeful signs of sincere treatment in Arizona, Isenberg claims that the past week was stressful for Lopez.

“Hector had a very bad week,” says Isenberg. “He was shocked by the DREAM Act failing in the Senate.” And he was informed that on Human Rights Day, December 10, an immigration judge in California ruled that the Lopez deportation case could not be reopened at this time.

“Hector is starting to show signs of extreme stress that I fear could lead to depression,” wrote Isenberg in a weekend communication to ICE officials in Arizona. “I also understand the facility psychologist met with Hector. I sincerely hope Hector will be released soon and know that he will most likely suffer from post traumatic stress upon his release. He will get the love and attention he needs from his family and friends. It is imperative that we get Hector released to minimize the amount of mental trauma he has suffered and allow him to resume his position in our society.”

As for the immigration judgment coming out of California, Isenberg points to a passage in the ruling where the judge appears to be appealing to some common sense that cuts through the rigid legalism of the immigration codes.

“The Court notes that were the Government to agree to joint reopening of Respondent’s proceedings . . . [Lopez] is eligible to pursue relief in the form of suspension of deportation,” wrote the judge in his concluding remarks.

Respondent has apparently lived in the United States since his entry in 1989 . . . and therefore accrued the requisite physical presence. Respondent has presented voluminous evidence of his good character, contributions to society, and accomplishments. His affidavit also provides evidence of the hardship he has faced upon removal to Mexico.

While the Court would be amenable to granting Respondent’s Motion sua sponte so that he could pursue his application for suspension of deportation, it is prevented from doing so due to lack of jurisdiction.

As Isenberg sees it, ICE authorities in Arizona have the sua sponte discretion to release Hector Lopez immediately and return him to his American life by Christmas.

“I told Hector on the telephone this weekend not to give up,” says Isenberg. “He is still on track for being released this week. It would be cruel and unusual punishment not to release this kid.”

Post-quake, their aid was some of the first to arrive. After cholera struck, Chavez sent a Ministry of Health team with medications, intravenous drips and rehydration tablets. He promised more as needed for “our Haitian brothers and sisters (exploited) by savage capitalism and imperialism.”

Since 1998, Cuba’s had hundreds of doctors, nurses, and other medical specialists in Haiti to help. Post-quake, it sent more, and after cholera struck, more still with supplies to set up new facilities and deliver heroic services under the most adverse conditions, including in hard to reach rural areas.

Dr. Lorenzo Somarriba, Cuba’s Medical Brigade (BMC) coordinator, said the team numbers 908, including Cuban-trained professionals from 19 other countries, mostly Latin American, Carribbean and African ones, serving with its own staff. Included are doctors, nurses, technicians and logistics experts. They speak Creole, know the terrain, provide more aid than other nations by far, and stand ready to send more as needed.

On December 16, Granma International’s Juan Diego Nusa Penalver headlined, “Cuban volunteers establish important cholera treatment center,” saying:

“In record time,” Cuba’s BMC established a 100-bed treatment center in Carrefour for its 400,000 residents, 20 km from Port-au-Prince. Its “comprehensive cholera treatment areas” have 32 doctors and staff. In tents, 38 units are operating. “(H)ospitals adapted to confront the disease….which through December 12 had treated 34,309 patients” with a mortality rate of 0.75%.

In total, Cuba plans 20 Treatment Centers throughout the country, including in Mirebalais, Hinche, Saut-d’eau, L’Estere, Plateau-du-Nord, Belladere, Plaisance and Carrefour. “Work is (also) underway to find space and mount an additional 11 facilities of this type….The philosophy of unity (is committed) to defeat an enemy as powerful as cholera….”

On December 19, Granma said additional medical team members arrived, increasing the total to 1,160, including 62 from the Henry Reeve International Contingent for Emergency Situations in Disasters and Epidemics.

Official reports say over 2,500 died. Another 115,000 are ill. According to Operational Biosurveillance, these figures way understate the problem by a factor of four. A recent update said:

In many areas of Haiti, we are documenting outbreaks that are not being accounted for in the official statistics. We therefore estimate the upper bound of estimated total (subclinical and clinically apparent) case counts to be one million. From a practical operations point of view, these estimates are academic, and we….believe (a more accurate total is) closer to 500,000….The bottom line is the epidemic continues to spread without restraint.

In addition, infected health care workers have been reported, and “more cases (are expected) in the United States. We (already) believe it likely (that) more cases are inside the US unreported. Implications for the United States are non-significant,” given the ability to treat them.

On December 15, Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said its 4,000 Haitian staff and 315 international employees treated 62,000 patients, continues to treat another 2,000 daily, and increased its mission in Northern and Southern areas. While some locations have stabilized, others show continued spread, including in Northern cities and rural locations. “Despite the significant logistical challenges involved in reaching isolated parts of both departments, MSF teams are expanding the number of units, treatment centers, and rehydration points in both areas.”

“Meanwhile, the epidemic has (also) increased sharply in the South.” New facilities were set up in Pignon, St. Raphael, Ranquitte (Nord), Gaspard (Nord Ouest), and Jeremie (Grande Anse). “However, as the epidemic continues to spread, the response by local and international organizations remains inadequate.”

Resolving Haiti’s Electoral Fraud Delayed

On December 18, AP reporter Jonathan Katz headlined, “Haiti election results could be delayed for weeks,” saying:

OAS chief Jose Miguel Insulza “asked (Preval) to delay announcing election results until an international panel of experts can review the vote, officials said Saturday.” However, “the panel of up to five electoral, legal and information-technology experts has not even been formed, and waiting for its review could drag into the new year….Preval’s office could not be reached for comment….”

On December 20, Al Jazeera headlined, “Haiti poll results delay rued,” saying:

“The proposed delay….has been met with fierce criticism from some of the candidates. (Haiti’s electoral commission) plans a recount of tally sheets in the presence of the three main candidates, although” first place winner Mirlande Manigat and third place one Marcel Martelly won’t participate.

Final results were due out December 20. Most candidates, including Martelly, want the fraudulent election re-held with all 19 candidates participating. Washington, Preval and the OAS may be delaying to “run out the clock,” defuse public anger, and show only token recount changes to legitimize a bogus process.

Haiti’s Provisional Electoral Council (CEP) said disputed results will be rapidly reviewed. Rapidity is now delay. In addition, disgruntled candidates got until December 15 to appeal. Verification of preliminary results hasn’t happened. On December 14, the OAS/CARICOM (MOEC) Joint Electoral Observation Mission learned that establishing the commission was postponed.

On December 19, a CEP statement said:

Until the end of the litigation stage of the electoral process, the arrival and the completion of the work of an expert mission to the OAS….the PRC has decided to postpone the publication of final results of the first round. No new date (was) specified. However, depending on what we have learned, Opont Pierre Louis, the Director General of the PRC, reportedly (said) ‘we gather on (December 20) to fix a new date. A date that is safe and good for the country.’

Perhaps so for its oligarchy, Obama officials and complicit OAS/UN functionaries. Not at all for ordinary Haitians to be exploited, left out, betrayed, and bludgeoned if they complain.

Obama Orders Diaspora Haitians Deported

Announced earlier in December, The New York Times noticed on December 19 in Kirk Semple’s article headlined, “Haitians in US Brace for Deportations to Resume,” saying:

“The Obama administration has been quietly moving to resume deportations of Haitians for the first time since” the January quake. US diaspora ones aren’t amused, saying “an influx of deportees will only add to the country’s woes,” never mind the injustice.

After Congress established Temporary Protection Status (TPS) in 1990, Washington granted 260,000 Salvadorans, 82,000 Hondurans, and 5,000 Nicaraguans protection, then extended it on October 1, 2008. It lets the Attorney General grant TPS to undocumented residents unable to return home because of armed conflict, natural disasters, or other “extraordinary and temporary conditions.”

Past recipients also included Kuwait, Lebanon, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Guinea-Bissau, Rwanda, Burundi, Liberia, Montserrat, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan and Angola. Haitians never got it, yet granting it is the simplest, least expensive form of aid so Port-au-Prince can concentrate on its crisis, while diaspora Hatians help through remittances back home.

No matter. In recent weeks, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents began rounding up Haitian immigrants ahead of resuming deportations in mid-January. According to ICE spokeswoman, Barbara Gonzales, only those convicted of felonies or two or more misdemeanors, who’ve served their sentences, will be affected, “consistent with our domestic immigration enforcement priorities.”

Founded in 1996 in Haiti, Alternative Chance is “a self-help peer counseling program….challeng(ing) the injustice of US immigration policies and assist(ing) immigration attorneys in fighting against deportation.”

On December 16, it expressed shock about announced deportations. Pre-quake, it saw firsthand how criminal deportees are treated “in Haiti’s DCPJ police administrative building and in other police stations or prisons in and around” Port-au-Prince. Uncharged in Haiti, “their detention is illegal under Haitian law and international standards.”

Yet, in grossly overcrowded conditions, they’re denied “due process, a release date or an attorney.” Many may face indefinite detention for months, in 24-hour lockups, without “food, treated drinking water, medical or mental health care.” They have no toilets, sinks, lighting, or room to lie down. Instead, they “must lay directly on insect, rat infested cement floors” in sweltering heat.

Post-quake, conditions are even worse. No matter. Washington-ordered deportations will resume. In a December 16 letter to Obama, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) also objected after 100 Haitians got final orders, were rounded up, and transferred to Louisiana. Outraged, CCR said:

“Sending people to Haiti under these circumstances will end up being a death sentence for many. Sending additional people from the US into the Haitian prison system will also further stress the resources available to the impoverished” already there.

CCR wants deportations halted on humanitarian grounds. Since taking office in January 2009, Obama officials showed Haitians no compassion, in spite of dire post-quake conditions, raging cholera, and the aftermath of the fraudulent election they engineered.

Contemptuously, they now want minor offenders returned to hellish conditions so bad it may kill them. It’s a shocking indictment of a criminally unjust administration, planning anguish, human misery and exploitation, not aid, for desperately needy people. Mass outrage is needed to stop them. The lives and welfare of everyone sent back are at stake.

If he could address the US Congress when it votes on the long-lost DREAM Act, 21-year-old Hector Lopez would ask for freedom from a “106-day nightmare” that started in late August when American immigration authorities ripped him out of his tax-paying, college-going, hard-working life and deported him to Mexico.

He would happily save American taxpayers the money they are now spending on his room and board in a lockup built for migrants near Florence, Arizona.

What I’ve said the whole time is that people like us – the college dreamers – didn’t have any choice. We were brought to this country as children and now we’re your future doctors, lawyers, and neighbors. We’re the future of this country and they’re trying to kick us out. Here you have people who are willing to fight for this country and all we’re asking is permission to call this country our home for the rest of our lives.

“Congress could enable so many productive people by passing the DREAM Act,” says Lopez. “And they would be foolish not to.” With all the things that Lopez has to worry about on Tuesday night, the main thing that keeps his mind busy is how to manage the expectations of what Congress will do with the DREAM Act on Wednesday. “The DREAM Act is finally being voted on,” he says. “I’m trying not to think about it, but it’s making me a nervous wreck.”

Hope is a serious thing to contend with when you’re locked up in Arizona thinking about holiday food. If Congress passes the DREAM Act, Lopez has been advised by attorneys that he would be made a free man. The DREAM Act would make it legal for young folks like him to return to college, get back to work, and make a future in the hometowns of America.

“We could ask for my immediate release,” he says, letting his hope build up momentarily. “So I’m hoping for the best. But on the other hand, I’m trying to stay pessimistic, too.” After all, it’s the US Congress we’re talking about here. They have had good days in history. Maybe even enough good days to make up for the bad.

Whichever way the DREAM Act goes this week, Lopez has backup plans. It’s been three weeks since he crossed the border from Mexico with papers in hand requesting a hearing for “credible fear.” The hearing is usually done in two parts, says immigrant advocate Ralph Isenberg. Lopez is still waiting for part one.

“If people have to wait a long time for the hearing process to begin, that’s a problem in itself,” argues Isenberg from the office of his real estate business in Dallas. “ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) has the discretion to release Hector to his home immediately.” Alongside the effort to free Lopez, Isenberg is also working for the return of another college dreamer, Saad Nabeel, who was deported from Texas in 2009 during the first semester of his freshman year.

If Congress and ICE continue to harass Hector, Saad, and the millions of college dreamers that they typify, then Isenberg will sponsor a civil rights delegation to visit Hector on Friday.

Rev. Peter Johnson was born into a civil rights family in Plaquemine, Louisiana. He was at the Freedom Rock Baptist Church the night state troopers rode their horses right up to the pulpit. That was the night James Farmer had to be smuggled out of town alive in a coffin.

“I want to tell Hector that he is not alone,” says Rev. Johnson over speaker phone. “There are people all over the world who believe in dignity for all human beings and who have a problem with America when it sets out to destroy families.

“There is a long history of America destroying families,” says Johnson. “Under slavery, they would send the father to Georgia, the mother to Alabama, and the children to Virginia. Today America is literally destroying families. I know of cases where a mother puts her kids in school for the day. The mother is picked up by immigration and sent to Haskell (Texas) prison. And when the children get out of school their mother is gone. They are literally destroying families.”

Johnson plans to take books by Gandhi and King as gifts for Lopez. He has a Gandhi book on nonviolence and a favorite by King, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?  Destroying families is chaos, not community. Where will we go from here?

“Look here,” says Isenberg jumping into the conversation. “I’m reading the inscription in Rev. Johnson’s copy of Where Do We Go from Here? It says: ‘Peter, Read this book. There will be a test. In fact, now that I think about it, life will be a test for you, (signed) Martin.’”

“That’s right,” says Rev. Johnson, “and when Dr. King gave you a book to read you made sure you read it because you knew he was going to question you about it.  Where Do We Go from Here was a book written in preparation for the Poor People’s Campaign (of 1968).  The Poor People’s campaign was going to unite Black and White and Hispanic people so they could confront the trap of poverty and unemployment.”  It was a handbook for a movement to come.

“King specifically talked about people South of the border. He said it was America’s moral obligation to help them find a better life.” The timing of Friday’s visit to Florence, Arizona will have three dimensions of significance for Rev. Johnson. It’s nearly a month away from the annual celebration of King’s birthday. The holiday season is coming, which is “a season of forgiveness and atonement.” And finally, December 10 will be the 62nd Anniversary for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

“Fundamentally, the case of Hector Lopez is a question of human rights,” says Rev. Johnson. “America is punishing a man who was brought here only weeks after he was born. In our treatment of Hector Lopez, we need to remember the human rights values of dignity and respect for all.”

Two weeks ago you’re riding with your father in a rickshaw along a jam-packed street in Dhaka, Bangladesh when you see a few street children half naked, starving, skeletons dressed in skin. At once the rickshaws around you rustle with murmurs and shouts at the policeman beating the children on the head.

So you jump out of the rickshaw and say to the policeman, “Stop beating those children!”

You’re a foot behind the cop who turns to demand that you stop speaking English. “Speak Bangla!” commands the cop. But you can’t speak Bangla or understand what else is being said all around you as the policeman harangues you while the crowd harangues the cop.

Then thwack. That bamboo cane smacks a bruise on your arm, just below the left shoulder. There is no time to sort anything out. Your father tugs you by the arm and you run with him as fast as you can, escaping into the inexorable crowds of Dhaka.

If you are asked a question about why you did it, you reply with a question: “On what planet is it okay to beat children on the head because they are begging to stay alive?” But mostly nobody asks. You are an exile — a deportee — and you usually try to stay anonymous before the eyes that come near you.

As Ralph Isenberg tells you via cell phone from Dallas: “You may not be an American citizen yet, Saad Nabeel, but you are an American teenager.” And who expects an American teenager to sit quietly when he sees a cop beating a starving child on the head? None of the American teenagers you know.

And yet, how is it possible to make sense of all this? Even now, two weeks after the cop caned Nabeel, and after he grabbed a tourist visa and fled from Bangladesh, he hesitates to tell people in his new place of residence that he lived as an exile in Bangladesh because he was deported from America for no crime whatsoever.

“There’s so many things that don’t compute,” says Nabeel, speaking into his headset through the beat-up Sony Vaio that he somehow put back together after it was tossed back to him by American immigration. “I’ve been trying to put it together in my head but it doesn’t make any sense to me.”

Patiently he tries to find the right words to express what it’s like to be two or three countries away from the life he grew up with and the dreams that keep flying away.

“My dream is to go to Stanford,” he explains. “But there is no Stanford over here. And how do I get to Stanford when I have been barred from America for the next ten years.”

Friends in America know the facts of Nabeel’s case. How he was brought by his parents to America at the age of three or four. How his parents applied for asylum because of politics in Bangladesh. How asylum was denied to his family when he was six years old.

Nabeel’s parents were tenacious in their determination to stay in America. They moved from L.A. to Texas. By late 2009 they were finally within reach of approved green cards and legal residency. Then the whole game board was thrown over. One month the young Nabeel was working on becoming a straight-A freshman engineering student at the University of Texas at Arlington. The next month he was separated from his parents and locked up. For what? For nothing he did. He was ordered to sign a ten year bar, then he was deported.

Friends of Saad Nabeel don’t think the facts make any sense. “I probably feel just like everyone else does — hurt,” says Liberty High School student, Samantha Jarrell, of Frisco, Texas. “Just look at it like this, one of your best friends is in a strange country he knows nothing about and the one place he wants to return to is the same place that put him where he is. His family paid taxes. It’s not like they were out causing havoc on the streets of America.”

As Nabeel wrestles with so many dead-end traumas of life uprooted, another American college student, Hector Lopez, is working to keep hope alive. The circumstances for Lopez don’t look too good at first glance. He’s locked up by immigration authorities in Florence, AZ. But his voice over the phone is upbeat, as if this student of marketing were showing you a pair of shoes back at the Nike store where he used to work in Portland, OR.

Like Nabeel, Lopez was pursuing a college degree when he was abruptly uprooted and tossed out of the country by American immigration authorities. Like Nabeel, Lopez was brought to America at a very young age. Like Nabeel, Lopez was deported first, before the father who brought him here. Julianne Hing has covered the story nicely for Color Lines, and Lopez is looking forward to more press coverage this week.

What’s different for Lopez is that he was deported to the neighboring country of Mexico and was able to walk back up to the US border with letters and documents in hand, requesting readmission. He’s in detention awaiting his interview for a “credible fear” hearing which he doesn’t want to discuss in detail yet. Suffice it to say that Lopez feels safer in Arizona detention than he felt as an American deportee in a country far from home.

On scraps of paper in his pocket, Lopez keeps notes about his life, his memories, the things he recalls growing up as an American kid. Like in 2008, he remembers the gold-edged packet that he received from the White House inviting him to a meeting of youth leaders. There was no way he could afford the $5,000 expense at the time, so he passed on the opportunity.

“I just think it’s kind of funny,” says Lopez over the phone. “One moment I’m invited to the White House for a leadership conference and the next moment they are kicking me out of the country. Of course, looking back, I wish I would have gone to the White House back then.”

Lopez was picked up by immigration authorities on August 23 of this year, a full two weeks after President Barack Obama famously declared in a speech at the University of Texas — backed up by a report in the New York Times — that his administration was not deporting college students who had lived in America most of their lives. In Texas, the White House got downright choosy about who they weren’t going to let the President see that day, so Dallas immigrant advocate, Ralph Isenberg, was handed back the $10,000 ticket he bought for the purpose of telling the President about Saad Nabeel.

On Thanksgiving Day, 2010, Nabeel was packing to flee Bangladesh. At Facebook he scrolled through Thanksgiving pictures that he was not in. He had eaten with the Anderson family on Thanksgiving 2007. In 2008, he had gone over to Shamir’s. But in 2009, Thanksgiving Day arrived with the sound of his mother crying at a border station in New York. He would spend the next 40 days and nights detained. “Yeah, my friends knew that Thanksgiving was my one-year anniversary of going to jail.”

Nabeel has been out of Bangladesh for a week. He has joined an exiled uncle who many years ago fled Bangladesh to avoid political detention. For the time being, Nabeel is restarting his college education at a campus where 90 percent of the students are from out of country. But what should he tell them about where he is really from and all the places he can’t belong? “The main difference between me and the other students here is that they can go home, but I can’t.”

Ralph Isenberg is not giving up on the idea that Nabeel can and should be allowed to come home to America. Meanwhile, he is also helping Lopez. “These two kids are showing all of us what the American Dream is all about,” says Isenberg. The sooner that Nabeel and Lopez can resume their college educations in America the better for everyone he says.

“Maybe it’s because I’m only a teenager, but I like to believe in people,” says Saad’s friend Samantha. “I like to believe that when given the chance people will do the right thing. I don’t know much about how revising immigration errors goes, but whoever has the power to remove this bar should review Saad’s case and bring him home. He isn’t asking for anything more than to return to his real home in the United States. To me, at least, it doesn’t sound like that’s requesting too much.”

Is it too much to ask the President of the United States to do what he promised before the election? To stop throwing good kids and their families out of America? Surely the teenage test that Samantha applies to her friend Saad also applies to Hector. Surely by the time Human Rights Day arrives on December 10 it wouldn’t be too much to ask what Hector Lopez hopes for. To be home in America with his family for the holidays.

On what planet is it okay to pretend that you haven’t got the power to help teenagers dream free?