Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.

— Partisan Review, 1967.

After coming under heavy criticism for this statement, Sontag eagerly recanted and revised it, saying that “it slandered cancer patients.”

As representatives and protectors of America’s white supremacist ethos, the current roster of Republican Party presidential office seekers demonstrates daily its steadfast determination to keep Black people at the absolute bottom of this republic’s racial, political, economic and social hierarchies.   Rick Santorum’s declaration and warning against giving “somebody else’s money” to Black people sums up the entire Republican Party’s “platform.”  He echoes Newt Gingrich, who has described the First Black President as “the food stamps president” and whose solution to Black youth joblessness is to turn them into janitors in their own deteriorating public schools.  Notice that he does not suggest putting Black students to work as student-clerks, teachers’ or principals’ aides, library attendants, shop or home economics helpers, or even hall monitors, but as menial laborers.  His default position for all problems black is a return to a kind of forced labor, a neo-slavery.  Willard (“Mitt”) Romney consistently decries “entitlements” for everybody except his fellow fat cats and their transnational companies while Ron Paul’s white supremacist past is rapidly catching up with him via his opposition to long settled civil rights legislation and blatantly racist tracts, pamphlets and newsletters.

But Santorum’s admonition is the clearest and most direct statement of just exactly where so-called “conservative” whites stand:   Who are the “somebody else’s” in his nostrum?  They are readily identified as the consistent opponents of all policies or programs which might even remotely help Black people, including Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, educational grants and loans, jobs and job training, housing assistance, and, God forbid, welfare.  (In the recent past – post-World War II – Santorum’s predecessor-“somebody else’s” even opposed giving Black military veterans benefits offered in the G.I. Bill of Rights).  In short, Santorum’s “somebody else’s” view all of these as “stealth”  forms of “reparations” to Blacks for centuries of slavery and subsequent racial segregation and discrimination. This the “somebody else’s” cannot – and will not — abide.

Why can’t Santorum’s“somebody else’s” and most so-called “conservative” (and many not so conservative) white folks come to grips with the fact that they owe Black people?  Here’s a short list of the most common arguments against reparations:

1)  Nobody in my family ever owned slaves; the corollary to this is that no Black person living today was ever a slave;

2)  My European ancestors didn’t even get to America until long after slavery ended;

3) Reparations have already been paid in the form of welfare, Supreme Court decisions, Presidential Executive Orders, civil rights laws,  affirmative action policies and programs, etc.;

4) Any white debt owed to Blacks was paid in blood by the 600,000 white men who died on both sides during the Civil War;

5) There is no consensus – even among Blacks – as to how reparations would be paid and to whom;

6) It was the Africans themselves who eagerly participated in, if not actually originated, the Atlantic Slave Trade.  The corollary to this is that there were actually many Black slaveholders – not to mention a significant number of Native Americans who likewise held Black slaves; and,

7) Finally….a completely new “rationale” against reparations has surfaced: the election of America’s First Black President “proves” that “white racism” is over and done with.  President Obama’s election canceled any debt owed by whites to Blacks, and thus obviated the need to pay Black people anything at all.

On the surface, these arguments appear reasonable, even compelling.  But as we dig just beneath the surface, each one of them fails both the “reasonable” and “compelling” tests.

“Nobody in my family owned slaves…..”  This argument renders slavery and the ongoing horrendous treatment of Blacks as a matter of individual acts and choices by long dead misguided white ancestors (and a rapidly diminishing number of live throwbacks to a bygone era).  It ignores the supportive and enabling role that kings, princes, elected and appointed legislatures, courts, and executives played in institutionalizing and maintaining a brutal slavocracy which benefitted all whites whether they did or did not own Black slaves.

This and the ”no living black people were slaves”, and the post-slavery European immigration arguments center around a general conservative and white America political myth that this nation-state was organized by,  and comprised of, only  “rugged individuals” who united for their own personal and “private” self-interest.  America, they argue, is not, never has been, and never will be a “society”  composed of disparate peoples who came together as a result of a “social contract”, a la’ John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government (1689) or Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Du Contract Social (1762).

The late arrival of European immigrants.    The late comedian Richard Prior and author Toni Morrison point out that a European immigrant’s entrance into American whiteness was expedited,  facilitated, and gauged by just how quickly and thoroughly he or she could learn, embrace, and express the most important word in the American socio-political lexicon:  “Nigger.” 

This was only the first step in embracing an American ethic and ethos of whiteness.  One’s Irish-ness, Italian-ness, German-ness, French-ness, Hungarian-ness, or…..were not shed completely, but firmly relegated into and served as a backdrop for a brand spanking new identity – American.

Next came the actual acceptance and use of one’s whiteness as not just a matter of privilege, but of right  — a God-given, if not Constitutional right.

Reparations have already been paid.  It was not until half way through the Civil War, when it looked as though the south might actually win, that Lincoln and the north decided that this really might be a war to end slavery rather than simply to “save the union.”  Yes, 600,000 white men died in that orgy of blood and bluster.  But the number of direct Black casualties has never been calculated, and is probably impossible to know.  How many of the almost 200,000 Black men who fought for the north were killed outright rather than taken as prisoners of war?  It is known that thousands of Black people (civilians and soldiers) died at the hands of civilian whites who objected to being drafted into the war and took their frustrations out on basically defenseless Blacks especially in the so-called more enlightened north.

General William Tecumseh Sherman’s Order No. 15, issued on January 16, 1865, granted 40 acres and a mule to those slaves who had been freed as the north neared its ever increasingly assured victory.   More than 10,000 people settled on 400,000 acres of their former slave owners’  lands as a result of this order.   After Lincoln’s assassination in April, however, the new president, Andrew Johnson, immediately rescinded Sherman’s order, expelled the new “freedmen”, and returned the land back to the self same former slave owners.

The “reparations have already been paid” argument also ignores the fact that immediately following the Civil War Blacks brought constant, numerous, well-argued claims to the courts and state legislatures, through the national congress, against the federal government, the states individually, corporations, and specific former slaveholders for payment of “services” rendered.  All such entreaties were denied.

Likewise, all efforts to compensate Blacks in the decades and now centuries following the war were also turned back.  Black people were specifically excluded from most provisions of President Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal.”  Harry Truman’s Executive Order  9981 on July 26, 1948 (desegregation of the military)  was the first such effort by any president since Lincoln to directly address the plight of Black people.  The landmark legislation of the 1960’s (the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Civil Rights Act of 1968) came into being not because of a change of heart on the part of Santorum’s “other people.”  Rather, it was the Civil Rights Movement beginning in the 1940’s and 50’s, the raised fist of the Black Power Movement of the late ‘60s and the concurrent  “Long Hot Summers” of revolution and riots in the major (and not so major) cities — all forced President Johnson’s hand to sign those bills into law.   So let’s be clear:  Each and every proposed bill, law, program, policy, ordinance, suggestion that Black people might need even a little extra help in order to “even the playing field” has been met with not just denial but scorn, ridicule, feigned disbelief, and, in many cases, violence.

The “some Black people owned slaves” argument.  Yes, a significant number of free Black people and Native Americans owned slaves.  In the case of free Blacks, it was more often than not a former slave husband who after years of moonlighting bought his still enslaved wife and children.  Yet, as with any other group, there were those who today would be described as “race traitors.”  These people were generally of “mixed” lineage and identified more with the white “majority” than with the enslaved Black laboring class/caste.

Africans enslaved Africans.  Slavery has existed in all societies in one form or another throughout recorded history – Africa included.  Whether in Africa, Europe, the Americas or Asia, capture as a prisoner of war usually led to enslavement by the victors.  Nell Irvin Painter’s 2010 book, The History of White People, is a fascinating and detailed look at the history of “white slavery”, beginning with the ancient Greeks. African kings and merchants participated in that slavery from the beginning; but at no point, in her chronicle does the scope, brutality and sheer evil manifested during the Atlantic Slave Trade come through.  For the most part, in Africa slaves were viewed as extended, if subservient, members of the slave owner’s family.  They were never considered as commodities or chattel in the European sense of those words.  They could marry, own property, and some even rose to positions of power as slaves within the system.  Thus, most African sellers of Africans thought that they were selling their war captives to be used in the African sense of term.   This is an essential difference and distinction.

As for Indians, by 1860 the Cherokees held 4,600 Black slaves; the Choctaws, 2,344, the Creeks, 1,532; the Chickasaws, 975; and the Seminoles, 500.  Some Indian slave owners were just as harsh and cruel as any white slave master and were often hired to catch runaway slaves.  Indeed, slave-catching was a lucrative business for some Indians, especially the Chickasaws.  Interestingly, the very last Confederate General to surrender at the end of the Civil War was Brigadier General Stand Watie, a Chief of the Cherokee Nation.  Now, Santorum’s “other people” will take this fact and determine that if they must pay Blacks for slavery, why also should Indians not be required to do so?  The answer, of course, is that compared to the not quite 4 million Black people held in bondage by white people, the less than 10,000 owned by Indians is but a drop in the proverbial bucket; and that, for the most part, slavery as practiced by Indians was never as institutionalized, wide-spread and deeply engrained into the Indian psyche as it was among whites in both the North and South.

The First Black President.    The majority of white folks in this country did not vote for Barack Obama.  And that has always been the problem.  Despite the John Browns, the Henry Lloyd Garrisons,  the Quakers, the Viola Liozzos, there has never been a majority of white Americans who supported anything “black.”   Yet, Obama represents a chance, perhaps a last chance, for many white folks to reclaim their humanity; to join the human race.  At once, his presence has allowed them to face and yet hide their sordid race history.  They know they are guilty.   Obama has allowed them to assuage some of that guilt.  He has allowed them to deflect some of that guilt onto his own persona.  The fact of his own “whiteness” has helped them immensely.  It is unlikely that he would have been elected had he not had a white parent.  So for him, and him alone, the “one-drop rule” has been suspended.

But this does not mean that white supremacy has ended, or even been suspended.  This First Black President’s policies and practices are virtually identical to every other “white” president who has preceded him save LBJ, FDR, and Lincoln.  That is, he not only supports white supremacy but has deepened and enhanced it to the point that Black people today are in a worse socio-economic position than at any time since the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Finally, there is really only one argument necessary to refute those who oppose reparations for Black people:  White people today still benefit from slavery while Black people still suffer from its devastating, lingering, ongoing, effects.

Reportedly employed by powerful landowners in Mato Grosso do Sul state, the gunmen are creating a climate of fear to prevent Guarani Indians from returning to their ancestral land.

Guarani leader Nísio Gomes was murdered by gunmen. © Survival

The tactics employed in recent incidents have been almost identical. Gunmen encircle vehicles transporting Guarani, force them to stop, and then verbally abuse and interrogate passengers about the names on the hit list.

One Guarani leader told Survival, ’They’ve pinpointed us and they’re set to kill us. We’re at great risk. Here in Brazil, we have no justice. We have nowhere left to run.’

On Sunday, around 100 Guarani returning from a meeting in the district of Iguatemi were targeted. Guarani witnesses told Survival one of the four men involved was a local mayor.

The Guarani said the men shouted insults such as, ‘We’re going to burn these buses full of Indians!’ Members of a government team were also present at the scene.

Continued threats have also forced the son of an assassinated leader to flee his community. Ranchers killed Marcos Veron in 2003 after he repeatedly tried to recover a small piece of his community’s ancestral land – his son Ladio is now being targeted.

Marcos Veron was killed in 2003 during an attempt to return to his land. © Joaó Ripper/Survival

Gomes’ killers have yet to be arrested, but last week Brazil’s Public Ministry said six men had been charged with the murder of two Guarani teachers in 2009.

The accused include a notorious Brazilian rancher who held the teachers’ community hostage, and local politicians.

Ten people are believed to have died when Indonesian security forces broke up the rally of independence activists last month.

Watch footage of the attacks (©SBS TV/West Papua Media, WARNING: DISTURBING CONTENT):

The video comes ahead of a visit to Bali by the US President and Secretary of State, for a regional summit. The US has applauded its ‘new partnership’ with Indonesia, but only last week Hillary Clinton criticized its human rights abuses.

The disturbing footage was smuggled out of West Papua exactly one year after scenes of Indonesian soldiers torturing Papuan men caused worldwide revulsion.

These latest clips allegedly show a local police commander giving the order to break up the rally on the outskirts of Jayapura – and the brutal and unprovoked violence that ensued.

Victim is found after Indonesia's violent crackdown on West Papuan Congress © Tapol/Down to Earth/West Papua Media

Indonesian security forces, many in plain clothes and wearing crash helmets, are seen randomly firing their weapons and arresting scores of people, many of whom are punched, kicked, beaten or forced to crawl along the ground.

Reverend Benny Giay from West Papua says violence has escalated since the Congress was dispersed. ‘I think maybe this is the Indonesian military and police’s response to the international pressure. The response is that they are being sent to Papua to kill, terrorize and abduct Papuans, but please do keep on the international pressure. Please tell people what is happening here for the sake of our future, our lives, our culture, our identity and our very existence.’

West Papua has been ruled by Indonesia since 1963, and more than 100,000 civilians are believed to have been killed during its occupation.

More clips are available for download from West Papua Media

Recently, Dictionary.com featured a question: “Why is it called America, not Columbusia?”:

But what about America itself? Why aren’t the continents of North and South America called “Columbusia” after Christopher Columbus? The word America comes from a lesser-known navigator and explorer, Amerigo Vespucci.¹

Maybe Vespucci is the source for the naming of the western hemisphere, but it is disputed by others. The historian and sailor Samuel Morison was sure the hemisphere’s continents are named after Welshman Richard Amerike, the man who financed John Cabot’s westward voyage in 1497.²

BBC History wrote, “… it is also probable that, as the chief sponsor of the Matthew’s voyage, and with Cabot’s wife and children then living, at his instigation, in a house belonging to a close friend, Amerike sought reward for his patronage by asking that any new-found lands should be named after him.”³

A weeks ago, I read a grade 10 Social Studies test. On it was a question: “Who discovered Vancouver Island?” The multiple-choice question offered the names of five Europeans. Even if the question had been posed as “Which non-Indigenous explorer first reached an island later to become named Vancouver Island?,” all five proposed names were wrong. It was a terribly worded and trivial question. People who are not blinkered by ethnocentrism today realize that it is incorrect to depict a place where human beings already reside as being discovered by human beings from another ethnic group.

Can it therefore be morally correct to append a colonial designation upon the land inhabited by another people without their consent?

Three major First Nations reside on Vancouver Island (immodestly named Quadra and Vancouver Island by seafarers Bodega y Quadra and George Vancouver): Nuu-chah-nulth, Kwakwaka’wakw, and Coast Salish. I have never been able to determine an Indigenous designation for the island. These nations each reside in their own section of the largest island on the west coast of Turtle Island.

Turning to the northern continent, how then should one refer to the landmass in deference to the Original Peoples? The eastern nations of the Haudenosaunee and Anishnabek both refer to the continent as Turtle Island – a name derived from folklore.

One Indigenous website, Mexica Uprising!, urges Indigenous peoples to “rise up against the illegal settler population whom continue to enslave us socially, economically, politically and spiritually.”⁴ It proffers another name for the landmasses of the western hemisphere.

The website complains, “Latin America is named after the White people of Latin descent who stole our land and claimed it as their own. The Europeans brand everything they ‘own’ with their name, it is no different with our land.” The proper name in Nahuatl is given as Ixachilan – “one mass of land united by the Eagle and Condor not two seperate [sic] continents.”

Mexica Uprising! implores Indigenous peoples, “It is time to de-colonize our minds and think as individuals. Don’t let the wasicu control your destiny, learn your true history and culture!”

Is de-colonization just meant for the minds of the colonized? Is it not about time for those who have profited from the actions of colonialist ancestors to reorient their thinking along a different moral path — a path that acknowledges and rejects past crimes against humanity and seeks to atone for past crimes, not committed by themselves, but from which they profit in some sense?

Or is aggressive Martian morality acceptable?

1. the hot word, “Why is it called America, not Columbusia?” Dictionary.com, 9 October 2011.
2. Samuel Eliot Morison, The European Discovery of America: The Northern Voyages, Oxford University Press, New York, 1971.
3. Peter MacDonald, “The Naming of America,” BBC History. Last updated 29 March 2011.
4. “Welcome to Mexica Uprising!” Mexica Uprising.

Recently I interviewed Christine about her new book, which details the plight of an Alaska Eskimo community struggling to save their land that is disappearing as a result of climate change.

Joshua Frank: Christine, what prompted you to investigate what is happening to the people of Kivalina?

Christine Shearer:  A few things. In 2007, I was part of this interdisciplinary research project at UC Santa Barbara, assessing the biggest “human impacts” to marine ecosystems. To do this we collected data from over a hundred scientists. And it really started to hit me how severe climate change is, particularly how quickly it is happening.

Also, I recently remembered this: we also went to get data from indigenous fishers, to include their traditional knowledge. So I went to a Native American reservation in the state of Washington and handed one of the fishers there this really complicated survey tool we had developed, and he was just kind of like, ‘What is this?’ And rather than fill it out, he walked me to the shoreline and showed me how the water was lapping at one of their buildings and said, ‘This is the biggest problem.’ He was talking about sea level rise.

And so one night I was in an environmental law class, and the teacher read a news headline about this lawsuit, this tiny Alaska Native village suing fossil fuel companies for damaging their homeland and creating a false debate about climate change, and I just knew I had to write about it.

JF: So you traveled up to visit these people? Can you tell us a little about their culture and history?

CS: They are Inupiat, tracing their ancestry to the northwest Arctic back thousands of years. They are fishers and whalers and live mainly off subsistence, and are pretty cued into the land and its rhythms, because they rely on it for their needs. So the changes in the Arctic have been pretty hard on them – making traveling and hunting more dangerous because the ice is thinning – let alone now that the small barrier island they are located on is eroding away.

I did not know much about the area before going, so I did a lot of reading in the Kivalina school library of their oral histories while there, and also asked questions. I was probably annoying, but they were always incredibly open and friendly, inviting me into their homes, happy to talk and share. When you think about how they live and have lived, it’s pretty amazing, and you can see how the strong social and community bonds would help them survive. The Arctic is not for wimps.

JF: You write about Kivalina’s grievances against ExxonMobil. What prompted it and where does the fight currently stand?

CS: Yeah, the reason the island is eroding is because of warming Arctic temperatures — sea ice now forms later and later in the year, leaving the shoreline vulnerable to erosion from storms. In 1992, Kivalina residents voted to move, and in 2003 and 2006, U.S. government reports said Kivalina had to be relocated within the next ten to fifteen years, due to erosion from warming temperatures.

Around the time of the government reports an environmental justice lawyer – Luke Cole – was working with Kivalina residents because their water was being polluted by a nearby mine. And that began the conversation about filing the climate change lawsuit, because Luke saw that the island was eroding, and the people had been trying to relocate for over a decade with little success or public attention.

So in 2008, Kivalina filed a public nuisance claim against ExxonMobil and 23 other large fossil fuel companies for their relocation costs. They also charged a smaller subset with conspiracy and concert of action for creating a false debate around climate change — Kivalina’s representation includes some lawyers that had been involved in both sides of the tobacco lawsuits.

In 2009 a judge dismissed Kivalina’s claim as a “political question” for the executive and legislative branches, and unsuitable for the judicial branch. The judge also denied Kivalina legal standing to bring the lawsuit. This meant that the secondary claims — which had to do with the climate change misinformation campaign — were thrown out without being commented on. The decision is being appealed, and Kivalina is waiting on that. In the meantime, they are still trying to relocate themselves.

JF: So who is actually to blame for what’s transpired in Kivalina? With the lawsuit against ExxonMobil, will you explain why are they being targeted here?

CS: Under public nuisance law, you can hold people or companies accountable that make a “meaningful” or “substantial” contribution to a harm. The 24 fossil fuel companies were chosen for being among the world’s top greenhouse gas emitters, while a smaller subset face claims of conspiracy and concert of action for going — in Luke Cole’s words — “above and beyond” in their efforts to try and mislead people about the science on climate change.

So, following the logic of the lawsuit: the companies are substantial contributors to the harm now facing Kivalina, and many of the companies knew of the harm they were creating, and tried to deal with it not by cutting back on emissions, but by misleading people to protect their business. Kivalina is therefore seeking damages – the cost of their needed relocation.

JF: Who is helping Kivalina relocate? What options do they have at this time to preserve their culture and integrity?

CS: There is no formal relocation policy in the U.S., and no U.S. government agency specifically tasked with helping communities relocate. So a lot of the efforts involved in trying to relocate have fallen on the people of Kivalina themselves, and they are working with different agencies at the federal, state, borough, and tribal levels to try and coordinate a relocation. Many government workers are doing what they can for Kivalina, like building a seawall, but they can only act within their prescribed roles and boundaries, which are becoming outdated with climate change.

The Government Accountability Office has recommended that a U.S. government agency be tasked with relocation — I think that would help Kivalina out immensely. But now you have Congressional representatives who don’t “believe” in climate change and are trying to cut funding for adaptation and even disaster management, which is incredibly dangerous.

JF: Is the Kivalina situation an anomaly, or is this something that is happening in other locations of the world as well, where people may also be displaced as a consequence of global warming?

CS: I think Kivalina is an anomaly in the sense that most of the discussion around the biggest impacts of climate change are usually focused on the Global South. Kivalina offers an example of how Alaska Natives in the U.S. are being heavily impacted as well, and also face inadequate resources and assistance.

But, yes, people around the world face displacement. There seems to be two types of impacts from climate change. One is the steady threat of displacement, like the people of Kivalina and other Alaska Natives facing erosion and flooding, and the small island states — although I used to think of the threat of erosion as slow, but now realize it can be quick and sudden, putting people in danger. The other type of impact is the increase in the number and severity of “extreme” weather events, like increased droughts, fires, and flooding, which may also make previously inhabited places unlivable, and cause migrations.

JF: What would you tell those who want to get involved in the issue? How can people reach out to the folks in Kivalina?

CS: Yeah, a reduction on greenhouse gas emissions — mitigation — is still very important, but communities like Kivalina show we also need to focus on adaptation policies.

I think the most important thing for Kivalina is that a government agency is tasked with relocation, and a relocation policy is put into place. This will give the people of Kivalina a blueprint for what to do and what they can do. The groups Native American Rights Fund and Three Degrees Warmer are trying to streamline the process of relocation, while human rights lawyer Robin Bronen is trying to institute a relocation policy at the international level grounded in human rights law – climigration. There might be more efforts out there. These groups could use help and support.

Also, we need to communicate to our political representatives that cuts in disaster management and adaptation — which are currently being debated — are unacceptable. The answer is smart policy, not none at all. Climate change is here, and we have to deal with it.

Since that particular court is the imperial court of the empire the question is really asking them to do a coup amounting to a counter counter-revolution. The revolution was in 1776 when America started the fight that led to the 1789 Constitution of the United States of America which gave birth to Constitutional Democracy. The counter-revolution was in 1871 when the United States Congress enacted an Appropriations Act with a rider tacked on at the last minute abolishing the Indian tribal sovereignty. Till then it had sheltered under the protection of the commerce, defence and treaty clauses interpreted by the US Court’s constitutionally constitutive precedents with regard to the constitutional relationship between the United States and “Indian Tribes and foreign Nations” within the meaning of the Commerce Clause Article I, §8, ¶3, that says Congress is: To regulate Commerce with Indian Tribes and foreign Nations subject to the Protection of their Sovereignty and Possession under the Treaty Clause Article II, §2, ¶2 that delegates to the President the “Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur,” and also subject to the Defence Clauses Article I, §8, ¶1 says “The Congress shall have power to…provide for the common defense…” ¶11. “To declare War [and] ¶15. “To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions.

The counter-revolution was perfected when the courts of the United States and Canada decided not to permit anyone to challenge the legality of the abolition of the previously established constitutional right of Indian tribes and foreign Nations to an Answer from the Supreme Court of the United States pursuant to the Original Jurisdiction Clause Article III, §2, ¶2 saying “In all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls…the Supreme Court shall have original Jurisdiction.”

No Indian tribe’s sovereignty received the Court’s Protection after 1871 although the constitutional question of and answer by the US Supreme Court prior to 1871 settled that the Treaty and Defence Clauses preclude the assumption the Commerce Clause jurisdiction To regulate Commerce with Indian tribes and foreign Nations really means To exercise “plenary power” i.e., sovereignty over Indian tribes and foreign Nations.”

The court record for the entire set of court systems sitting in North America remained a blank slate from 1871 until in United States v. Lara, 541 US 193, 214, 227 (2004), Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas out of the blue said:

In 1871, Congress enacted a statute [Appropriations Act of 1871] that purported to prohibit entering into treaties with the ‘Indian nation[s] or tribe[s].’ 16 Stat. 566, codified at 25 USC §71. Although this Act is constitutionally suspect (the Constitution vests in the President both the power to make treaties, Art. II, §2, cl. 2…), it nevertheless reflects the view of the political branches that the tribes had become a purely domestic matter. To be sure, this does not quite suffice to demonstrate that the tribes lost their sovereignty…Federal Indian policy is, to say the least, schizophrenic.…I believe we must examine more critically our tribal sovereignty case law. Both the Court and the dissent, however, compound the confusion by failing to undertake the necessary rigorous constitutional analysis. I would begin by carefully following our assumptions to their logical conclusions and by identifying the potential sources of federal power to modify tribal sovereignty …I do, however, agree that this case raises important constitutional questions that the Court does not begin to answer. The Court utterly fails to find any provision of the Constitution that gives Congress enumerated power to alter tribal sovereignty…I would be willing to revisit the question.

From 1871 through to 2004 this conflict of laws between the constitutional and the ordinary law went unnoticed in so far as the courts of North America are concerned. Of course, the Indians noticed it as did the settlers led by the lawyers, judges and police in the land rush into the Indian territories inaugurated by the ordinary legislation. The legal establishment preceded the settlers in order to open the registry offices to record the government grants to the settlers of the Indians’ lands. The lawyers certified titles to the private property created by the land grants.

The Indians who noticed themselves in the way of the crops, cows, sheep and fences,  of course, noticed the sudden absence of the constitutional protection formerly much promised by newcomer society from time out of mind. They knew the constitutions precluded entry of newcomers unto their land other than with their consent for the purpose of the mutually beneficial fur trade. The Indians were quite familiar with the newcomer government laws regulating this trade by prohibiting the newcomer traders selling alcohol or settling other than to the extent of fur trading posts agreeable to both cultures. Suddenly the fur trade was all but over and the lands were flooded with settlers.

Since the Indians had no money to speak of and since the Appropriations Act of 1871 and Indian Act of 1876 confiscated their lands and put in place of traditional Indian government, the government of the newcomers assisted by newcomer-created Indian band councils, the aboriginal government itself was confiscated along with the land it used to govern. Indians who went to lawyers were told they could either hang around town and beg or go to live on a reservation on some land the newcomer government could spare from settlement and live on handouts there. The aboriginal economy was dead as a means of survival. The lawyers were far too busy profiting from the conveyancing of Indian land to act on behalf of Indians to raise the constitutional question.

This went on the length and breadth of North America until 1972 when on February 11th five Indians came into my law office in Haileybury in northern Ontario, a town of three thousand people on the western shore of Lake Temiskaming. It’s a long narrow lake the center line of which defines the border between northern Ontario and northern Quebec. I’d been called to bar the year before and only just opened my office as a sole practitioner. The Indians were among my first clients. They hailed from Lake Temagami about forty five miles south west as the crow flies. Their lake was situate in the middle of the vast Temagami Forest Reserve of old growth white pines, sparkling rivers and crystal lakes. Their four thousand square mile ancestral homeland is about as close an approximation of the pre-Columbian natural order as exists in North America.

They complained to me that they’d just heard and read about an announcement by the government of Ontario that an 80 million dollar destination ski and summer holiday resort would be built on Maple Mountain, the 2nd highest elevation in Ontario and the crest of the height of land that defines the continental watershed between the waters flowing north to Hudson’s Bay from those flowing south to the Great Lakes St Lawrence drainage basin. What brought them out of the woodwork was the fact the resort was to be placed right at the highest point from the cave at which had emerged the mythic lynx and first people to inhabit the land exposed by the falling water level of the great flood.

Later anthropological and archeological research established a massive concentration of prehistoric rock pictographs throughout this region and unrivalled anywhere else. Similarly, linguistic analysis established this as the geographical centre of a dialectic chain of the Algonkian speaking linguistic family comprised of autonomous hunting bands organized in hereditary family fishing territories taking advantage of the finely networked riverine system that characterizes the northeastern North American woodlands. The waters were both the transportation highways and byways and the inexhaustible source of food complemented by hunting and gathering for variety. And, of course, some degree of quasi-cultivation in the sense of controlled burns that encouraged the important and reliable annual blueberry crops.

Adjacent bands were linked together to constitute the gene pool the minimum size of which has to be at least five hundred to avoid the complications of inbreeding. Also for political, commercial, religious and legal purposes were the aboriginal family, band, national and tribal entities closely linked and integrated by the water routes and intermarriage networks. Artifacts and natural products from one region in North America commonly turn up in the archeological record of the trade routes that the newcomers’ fur trade eventually was able to tap into and take advantage of, from the perspective of both cultures, at first, until the fur resource was depleted by over exploitation and the market collapsed as European fashion moved on from fur hats to the next fad and fashion. And then the settlement frontier leap-frogged the fur trade treaty frontier.

Quite early in my legal research prompted by the Indian clients from Bear Island in Lake Temagami I came across the rather famous Royal Proclamation of 1763. By no very great feat of scholarship I had learned by the summer of 1972 that it codified an agreement or consensus previously arrived at between all the European nations that had been involved in the great scramble to profit from “the discovery.” As early as 1493 the Catholic Church enacted ecclesiastical legislation that purported to bind Christian Europe as a matter of equity to respect Indian tribal sovereignty and exclusive possession to the extent of not just taking as if the right to do so were inherent, but instead to enter into treaties with the tribe, nation or band in occupation for the acquisition from it of the right to govern and possess.

Thus the papal bulla promulgated under reign of Pope Paul III and entitled Sublimis Dei of May 29, 1537 enacted:

To all faithful Christians to whom this writing may come, health in Christ our Lord and the apostolic benediction.

The sublime God so loved the human race that He created man in such wise that he might participate, not only in the good that other creatures enjoy, but endowed him with capacity to attain to the inaccessible and invisible Supreme Good and behold it face to face; and since man, according to the testimony of the sacred scriptures, has been created to enjoy eternal life and happiness, which none may obtain save through faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, it is necessary that he should possess the nature and faculties enabling him to receive that faith; and that whoever is thus endowed should be capable of receiving that same faith. Nor is it credible that any one should possess so little understanding as to desire the faith and yet be destitute of the most necessary faculty to enable him to receive it. Hence Christ, who is the Truth itself, that has never failed and can never fail, said to the preachers of the faith whom He chose for that office “Go ye and teach all nations.” He said all, without exception, for all are capable of receiving the doctrines of the faith.

The enemy of the human race, who opposes all good deeds in order to bring men to destruction, beholding and envying this, invented a means never before heard of, by which he might hinder the preaching of God’s word of Salvation to the people: he inspired his satellites who, to please him, have not hesitated to publish abroad that the Indians of the West and the South, and other people of whom We have recent knowledge should be treated as dumb brutes created for our service, pretending that they are incapable of receiving the Catholic Faith.

We, who, though unworthy, exercise on earth the power of our Lord and seek with all our might to bring those sheep of His flock who are outside into the fold committed to our charge, consider, however, that the Indians are truly men and that they are not only capable of understanding the Catholic Faith but, according to our information, they desire exceedingly to receive it. Desiring to provide ample remedy for these evils, We define and declare by these Our letters, or by any translation thereof signed by any notary public and sealed with the seal of any ecclesiastical dignitary, to which the same credit shall be given as to the originals, that, notwithstanding whatever may have been or may be said to the contrary, the said Indians and all other people who may later be discovered by Christians, are by no means to be deprived of their liberty or the possession of their property, even though they be outside the faith of Jesus Christ; and that they may and should, freely and legitimately, enjoy their liberty and the possession of their property; nor should they be in any way enslaved; should the contrary happen, it shall be null and have no effect.

By virtue of Our apostolic authority We define and declare by these present letters, or by any translation thereof signed by any notary public and sealed with the seal of any ecclesiastical dignitary, which shall thus command the same obedience as the originals, that the said Indians and other peoples should be converted to the faith of Jesus Christ by preaching the word of God and by the example of good and holy living.

This principle of equity was adopted as the positive constitutional law of each of the great maritime powers of Europe that took part in the New World adventure: France, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Russia, United Kingdom. And in due course it was saved and continued by their successors in North America Canada and the United States. That is why each of the those italicized names is identified as a defendant in the Case of Mahican Tribe and Rick Vanguilder and Mi’kmaq Tribe and Gary Metallic v. Canada, France, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Russia, United Kingdom and United States. That is the Case currently and criminally being stonewalled by William H. Suter, Clerk of the Supreme Court of the United States. It asks the constitutional question the answering of which by the Court will settle the matter Constitutional Democracy v. Unconstitutional Empire in favor of one or the other of those alternative modes of being.

In so far as British North America in particular is concerned, being the immediate predecessor to Canada and the United States of the preemptive right conferred by discovery to treat with the Indian aboriginal governments for the conveyance from them of their previously established jurisdiction and their Peoples’ corresponding possessory in the several hunting, fishing and gathering territories comprising the many ancestral homelands, as early as 1704 the Imperial Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (UK) in the reign of Queen Anne ruled, in the matter of Mohegan Indians v. Connecticut, that with regard to a constitutional question whether a newcomer government has yet acquired jurisdiction and power of disposition over real estate by treaty with the Indian government, that the Indian government is entitled to independent and impartial third-party adjudication.

The Mohegans petitioned Queen Anne in 1703 for appointment of such a third-party because they felt there was no point raising the constitutional question of Connecticut’s jurisdiction over a disputed tract in Connecticut’s court system, for the same reason Connecticut might be expected to be reticent to raise the question in the tribe’s court system. The Attorney General of the UK was commissioned to investigate the issue and in due course he recommended the commissioning of a Standing Committee of the Imperial Privy Council to serve as a trial level third-party adjudicator, subject to appeal ultimately to the Judicial Committee (UK) itself. This was adopted by the Queen and enacted into the colonial constitutional law by Royal Commission pursuant to the royal prerogative to legislate the colonial constitutional law, by means of this particular constitutional procedure. Connecticut repeatedly appealed over the course of the next seventy five years until, in 1775, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (UK), the Imperial Court of Last Resort affirmed the exclusive original jurisdiction as the independent and the impartial third-party adjudication of inter parties boundary disputes affecting competing sovereignties between crown governments, Indian tribes and/or foreign Nation or any combination thereof. The exclusive jurisdiction as third-party adjudicator of such disputes before 1789, as at 1789 devolved upon the Supreme Court of the United States pursuant to the constitution’s Original Jurisdiction Clause:

Article III, §2, ¶2 of the Constitution of the United States of America prevents any lapse of jurisdiction by saving and continuing the independent and impartial third-party jurisdiction formerly vested in the Judicial Committee in the Supreme Court of the United States. It enacts, “In all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party, the supreme Court shall have original Jurisdiction. In all the other Cases before mentioned, the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.”

This is the Article of the constitution upon which Rick Vanguilder and Gary Metallic rely to invoke the Court’s third-party jurisdiction to answer the constitutional question of jurisdiction law alone of competing sovereignties between constitutional governments, Indian tribes and foreign Nations. The case of Mahican Tribe and Rick Vanguilder and Mi’kmaq Tribe and Gary Metallic v. Canada, France, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Russia, United Kingdom and United States is currently left standing outside the Courthouse door by the Clerk of the Supreme Court Clerk’s chicanery. The legal consequence of the chicanery is that the US Supreme Court in consequence unconstitutionally is denied its right, jurisdiction and judicial duty to vindicate Constitutional Democracy in the case of Constitutional Democracy v. Unconstitutional Empire. Of record as: Mahican Tribe and Rick Vanguilder and Mi’kmaq Tribe and Gary Metallic v. Canada, France, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Russia, United Kingdom and United States.

Gary and Rick attest in the US Supreme Court documents they are ambassadors and public ministers duly appointed in the tribal way to deal with the newcomer governments and Peoples by means of raising the constitutional question of the conflict between the constitutions of the named defendants, on the one hand, and on the other the Appropriations Act of 1871 and Indian Act of 1876.

Since those two ordinary statutes are the basis of the federal Indian law that ostensibly, although allegedly unconstitutionally, governs the relationship for legal purposes between natives and newcomers, therefore the constitutional question really means turning back the clock one hundred forty years to a time when it was well understood by everybody that newcomer jurisdiction and possession was contingent upon proof of purchase.

Specifically, by production and filing in court of a certified copy of the Indian Treaty duly registered in a land registry or land titles office and establishing proof of purchase. Such land records relative to New York and Massachusetts where the historical events relevant to the case of Mahican Tribe and Rick Vanguilder and Mi’kmaq Tribe and Gary Metallic v. Canada, France, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Russia, United Kingdom and United States took place.

The land records were governed in each of those regions at all material times by one of two pieces of ordinary legislation enacted in compliance with the governing constitutional law. These are from New York and Massachusetts but the same law as identified there applies in all jurisdictions of the United States and Canada:

An Act concerning purchases of lands from the Indians, Stat. Prov. NY 1684, c. 9. Bee itt Enacted by this Gen’ll Assembly and by the authority of the same that from henceforward noe Purchase of Lands from the Indians shall be deemed a good Title without Leave first had and obtaineid from the Governor signified by a Warrant under his hand and Seale and entered on Record in the Secretaries office att New Yorke and Satisfaction for the said Purchase acknowlidged by the Indians from whome the Purchase was made is to bee Recorded likewise which Purchase soe made and prosecuted and entered on Record in the office aforesaid shall from that time be Vallid to all intents and purposes.

An Act to prevent and make void clandestine and illegal purchases of lands from the Indians, Stat. Prov. Mass. Bay 1701-02, c. 11. WHEREAS the government of the late colonys of the Massachusetts Bay and New Plymouth, to the intent the native Indians might not be injured or defeated of their just rights and possessions, or be imposed on and abused in selling and disposing of their lands, and thereby deprive themselves of such places as were suitable for their settlement and improvements, did, by an act and law named in the said colonys respectively many years since, inhibit and forbid all persons purchasing any land of the Indians without the licence and approbation of the general court, notwithstanding which, sundry persons for private lucre have presumed to make purchases of lands from the Indians, not having any license or approbation as aforesaid for the same, to the injury of the natives, and great disquiet and disturbance of many of the inhabitants of this province in the peaceable possession of their lands and inheritances lawfully acquired; therefore, for the vacating of such illegal purchases, and preventing of the like for the future,—Be it enacted and declared by the Lieutenant-Governor, Council and Representatives in General Court assembled, and by the authority of the same,
(1). That all deeds of bargain, sale, lease, release or quit-claim, titles and conveyances whatsoever, of any lands, tenements or hereditaments within this province, as well for term of years as forever, had, made, gotten, procured or obtained from any Indian or Indians by any person or persons whatsoever, at any time or times since the year of our Lord one thousand six hundred thirty-three, without the license or approbation of the respective general courts of the said late colonys in which such lands, tenements or hereditaments lay, and all deeds of bargain and sale, titles and conveyances whatsoever, of any lands, tenements or hereditaments within this province, that since the establishment of the present government have been or shall hereafter be had, made, gotten, obtained or procured from any Indian or Indians, by any person or persons whatsoever, without the licence, approbation and allowance of the great and general court or assembly of this province for the same, shall be deemed and adjudged in the law to be null, void and of none effect: provided, nevertheless,—…
(4). That if any person or persons whatsoever shall, after the publication of this act, presume to make any purchase or obtain any title from any Indian or Indians for any lands, tenements or hereditaments within this province, contrary to the true intent and meaning of this act, such person or persons so offending, and being thereof duly convicted in any of his majestie’s courts of record within this province, shall be punished by fine and imprisonment, at the discretion of the court where the conviction shall be, not exceeding double the value of the land so purchased, nor exceeding six months’ imprisonment.
(5). That all leases of land that shall at any time hereafter be made by any Indian or Indians for any term of years, shall be utterly void and of none effect, unless the same shall be made by and with licence first had and obtained from the court of general sessions of the peace in the county where such lands lye: provided nevertheless, that nothing in this act shall be taken, held or deemed in any wise to hinder, defeat or make void any bargain, sale or lease of land made by one Indian to another Indian or Indians.

Those two colonial statutes are the template for all the colonies and their successors — the States of the United States and the Provinces of Canada. All are based upon and in compliance with the colonial constitutional law eventually codified and reiterated by the first and only omnibus constitution applicable to all of British North America, superseding the same message previously expressed in the governor’s royal commissions and royal instructions for the governance of the several colonial governments, the Royal Proclamation of 1763. It enacted:

[Preamble] And whereas it is just and reasonable, and essential to our Interest, and the Security of our Colonies, that the several Nations or Tribes of Indians with whom We are connected, and who live under our Protection, should not be molested or disturbed in the Possession of such Parts of Our Dominions and Territories as, not having been ceded to or purchased by Us, are reserved to them, or any of them, as their Hunting Grounds—We do therefore, with the Advice of our Privy Council, declare it to be our Royal Will and Pleasure, that…
[1] no Governor or Commander in Chief…do presume, upon any Pretence whatever, to grant Warrants of Survey, or pass any Patents…upon any Lands whatever, which, not having been ceded to or purchased by Us as aforesaid, are reserved to the said Indians, or any of them.
[2] And We do further declare it to be Our Royal Will and Pleasure, for the present as aforesaid, to reserve under our Sovereignty, Protection, and Dominion, for the use of the said Indians, all the Lands and Territories not included within the Limits of Our said Three new Governments [Quebec, East Florida, West Florida], or within the Limits of the Territory granted to the Hudson’s Bay Company, as also all the Lands and Territories lying to the Westward of the Sources of the Rivers which fall into the Sea from the West and North West as aforesaid [i.e., all of British North America howsoever politically organized].
[2] And We do hereby strictly forbid, on Pain of our Displeasure, all our loving Subjects from making any Purchases or Settlements whatever, or taking Possession of any of the Lands above reserved without our especial leave and Licence for that Purpose first obtained.
[3] And We do further strictly enjoin and require all Persons whatever who have either wilfully or inadvertently seated themselves upon any Lands within the Countries above described or upon any other Lands which, not having been ceded to or purchased by Us, are still reserved to the said Indians as aforesaid, forthwith to remove themselves from such Settlements.
[4] And whereas great Frauds and Abuses have been committed in purchasing Lands of the Indians, to the great Prejudice of our Interests, and to the great Dissatisfaction of the said Indians: In order, therefore, to prevent such Irregularities for the future, and to the end that the Indians may be convinced of our Justice and determined Resolution to remove all reasonable Cause of Discontent, We do, with the Advice of our Privy Council strictly enjoin and require that no private Person do presume to make any purchase from the said Indians of any Lands reserved to the said Indians, within those parts of our Colonies where We have thought proper to allow Settlement: but that, if at any Time any of the Said Indians should be inclined to dispose of the said Lands, the same shall be Purchased only for Us, in our Name, at some public Meeting or Assembly of the said Indians, to be held for that Purpose by the Governor or Commander in Chief of our Colony respectively within which they shall lie.
[5] And we do by the Advice of our Privy Council, declare and enjoin, that the Trade with the said Indians shall be free and open to all our Subjects whatever. provided that every Person who may incline to Trade with the said Indians do take out a Licence for carrying on such Trade from the Governor or Commander in Chief of any of our Colonies respectively where such Person shall reside. and also give Security to observe such Regulations as We shall at any Time think fit. by ourselves or by our Commissaries to be appointed for this Purpose, to direct and appoint for the Benefit of the said Trade:
[6] And we do hereby authorize, enjoin, and require the Governors and Commanders in Chief of all our Colonies respectively, as well those under Our immediate Government as those under the Government and Direction of Proprietaries, to grant such Licences without Fee or Reward, taking especial Care to insert therein a Condition, that such Licence shall be void, and the Security forfeited in case the Person to whom the same is granted shall refuse or neglect to observe such Regulations as We shall think proper to prescribe as aforesaid.
[7] And we do further expressly conjoin and require all Officers whatever, as well Military as those Employed in the Management and Direction of Indian Affairs, within the Territories reserved as aforesaid for the use of the said Indians, to seize and apprehend all Persons whatever, who, standing charged with Treason, Misprisions of Treason, Murders, or other Felonies or Misdemeanors shall fly from Justice and take Refuge in the said Territory. And to send them under a proper guard to the Colony where the Crime was committed of which they stand accused, in order to take their Trial for the same.

The drafters of the Royal Proclamation of 1763 were quite superb at their job. They well understood the insidious political temptation under which the governors and the governments under them had to labor, so far from the mother country and exposed to the blandishments of the local gentry, land speculators, businessmen and settlers, all champing at the bit to get into constitutionally off-limits Indian territories. The proclamation heads off the lure of non-compliance in no uncertain terms, making it punishable without proof of guilty intent as “Misprision of Treason,” an absolute offence equivalent to a high contempt of court or treasonable act against the person of the monarch or counseling war upon the Crown’s dominions or home country.

Anyone doing any of the prohibited acts was to be hunted down and returned from the Indian territories if found there, to stand trial in whatever colony the crime had occurred in. This transportation for trial was, of course, necessary since the colonial courts had no jurisdiction in the Indian territories, since those territories remain under the exclusive jurisdiction of the original Indian tribal governments and courts. Until such time as the tribe should contract by Treaty agree to relinquish its territorial sovereignty and possession.

The proclamation anticipated “Pretence” and “Fraud” and “Abuse” in places both high and low in order to get at the Indians’ lands and resources without compliance with the constitutional law. That is why the breach of it was constituted a crime tantamount to treason but easier to prove than treason, since “Misprision” renders the “Treason” punishable upon mere proof of the prohibited act, whether it be an authorized grant of land patent by the Governor or Commander in Chief or the poorer farmer crossing the Treaty Frontier with a little herd of sheep to graze. The defence of ‘Who me?’ or ‘I got lost!’ or any such other thing going to the absence of criminal intent was not arguable.

That is very essence of the legal device of the Royal Proclamation. That rarely employed and peculiar kind of law is published and nailed up on every court house door and every political chamber. It is quite literally “proclaimed” throughout the land much in the same way as in pre-literate England a Town Crier would cry out the message all around each town and village before nailing it with its big red seal in some prominent public place, to remind all and sundry of the law of which all persons in the realm irrebutably are presumed by operation of law alone to have had actual notice.

This is law that section 109 of the Canadian constitution in 1867 saved and continued as the supreme law constitutionally protecting the Indian tribal sovereignty and possession pending treaty when it enacted that the constitutional delegation to the Provinces of Canada of jurisdiction over “Property and Civil Rights” is subject to the Indians’ previously established constitutional “Interest,” rather than the other way round. Thus in 1875 the Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada filed a Report in the Privy Council (Canada) recommending the Public Lands Act of British Columbia be disallowed on the ground of conflict with the Royal Proclamation of 1763 in so much as it purported to have dispositive power over Indian lands for which no Indian Treaty surrendering Indian sovereignty and possession had been registered. That is, the province was asserting original as opposed to derivative jurisdiction to grant lands within the geographical boundary of the province regardless of the Treaty Frontier. The Minister’s recommendation was adopted by the Privy Council by Minute in Council which then in turn was signed and sealed into law by the Governor General of Canada. The Report was as follows:

Canada Minute in Council of 23 January 1875. The 40th article of the treaty of Capitulation of Montreal, dated 8th September 1760, is to the effect that: “The Savages or Indian allies of His Most Christian Majesty shall be maintained in the lands they inhabit if they choose to remain there.” The Proclamation of King George III 1763 [enacts] “…such parts of our dominions and territories, as not having been purchased by Us, are reserved to them, or any of them as their hunting grounds;…or upon any lands whatever, which not having been ceded to or purchased by us, as aforesaid, are reserved to the said Indians, or any of them…And we do further strictly enjoin and require all persons whatsoever, who may have either wilfully or inadvertently seated themselves upon any lands within the Countries above described, or upon any other lands, which not having been ceded to or purchased by us, are reserved to the said Indians as aforesaid, forthwith to remove themselves from such settlements…” The Undersigned would also refer to the BNA [British North America] Act 1867 Sec. 109, applicable to British Columbia, which enacts that, all lands belonging to the Province shall, belong to the Province “subject to any trust existing in respect thereof, and to any interest other than the Province in the same.” The Undersigned [Minister of Justice for Canada], therefore, feels it incumbent upon him to recommend that this Act [the British Columbia Public Lands Act] be disallowed [as unconstitutional in virtue of purporting to apply to Hunting Grounds reserved for the Indians].

The Minute in Council was not, in fact, implemented. Instead, in a complete about face the government of Canada the following year chose instead to ignore section 109 of the constitution constituting that government subject to section 109. Rather than respect the proclamation the Prime Minister who at one time was also Superintendent of Indian Affairs led his colleagues into passing the Indian Act of 1876 which itself was modeled upon the American Appropriations Act of 1871.

The Indian Act provided that the only Indians with legal status are those individuals who are listed on the band lists maintained by the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development. Bands are defined as bodies politic incorporated pursuant to the Indian Act and exercising the municipal powers (dog bylaws, garbage collection and so on) authorized under that statute and approved by the Superintendent of Indian Affairs who has discretionary power to disallow any band council resolution.

As under the Appropriations Act of 1871 the Indian Act of 1876 introduced a regime of federal law profoundly in conflict with the previously established constitutional law.

This, of course, was and remains unquestionably unconstitutional. In rule of law theory all the Indian tribes had to do to protect their sovereignty and possession from this usurpation and dispossession was to deliver a Notice of Constitutional Question requiring the Court to answer by declaring the Appropriations Act of 1871 the Indian Act of 1876 null and void.

That is easier said than done. In complementary ordinary legislation it became a criminal offence for a lawyer to represent Indians without the consent in writing of the Superintendent. Not that any lawyers applied. The profession was too busy doing the land deals in consequence of the unconstitutional dismantling of the Treaty Frontier Wall. It is very hard for a lawyer to break ranks with his profession. Especially since the members of the bench are drawn from it.

Not only was it hard, but pragmatically it was impossible. The clerks of the courts who are appointed to office and subject to removal from office by the judges of each court were — and are — under permanent instructions to reject any document filed by or on behalf of an Indian tribe claiming constitutional protection for its sovereignty and possession. No Indian accused of a criminal offence could, or can, get heard in court to raise the constitutional defence of tribal sovereignty.

Prior to 1871 Indian tribal sovereignty was a commonly referenced topic in hundreds of recorded court cases. After 1871 there are no references. The previously established judicial confirmations of the constitutional law in every generation since 1789 suddenly stopped. The Indian tribal sovereignty court record from 1871 to 2004 is a blank slate.

This is not surprising given that access to the civil courts is barred by the court clerks who refuse to permit the filing of the constitutional question and of the criminal court judges who cannot see or hear the issue. The question is not a part of any court record or reasons for judgment because the legal profession and judiciary do not permit it.

Prior to 1871 everybody, and not only lawyers and judges, knew perfectly well the federal government has jurisdiction to regulate the Indian trade pursuant to the commerce clause subject to the treaty and defence clauses that protect the tribes from invasion, occupation, usurpation and dispossession “on any Pretence whatever.”

What the constitutions attempted to do but did not succeed in doing was to guard against the counter-revolution that eventually did overthrow Constitutional Democracy and replace it with Unconstitutional Empire. The counter-revolution was created and implemented from within the society rather than from the outside. The constitutions placed their People’s trust in the guardianship of the legal profession and the judicial branch of government.

Theirs was duty to implement the rule of law specifically by upholding the principle of the supremacy of the constitution upon which the existence of Constitutional Democracy entirely depends.

The framers of the constitutions, the same as the drafters of the Royal Proclamation of 1763, were not wet behind the ears. They knew of the proclivity of governments to exceed and abuse the powers entrusted to them and they sought to forestall the risk by putting the court system in the position of guardianship of the public trust to safeguard Constitutional Democracy. After all if you can’t trust the judges, who can you trust?

For the past forty years I have been persisting in trying to get into courts, on behalf of Indian tribal governments, the constitutional question of the conflict of laws between the constitutions’ amendment, commerce, defence, judicial oath respecting the supremacy of the constitution and treaty clauses and their interpretive precedents on the one hand, and on the other the federal Indian law introduced by the Appropriations Act of 1871 and the Indian Act of 1876.

In 1999 a judge convicted me of criminal contempt of court and in due course I was disbarred as a convicted criminal from practicing with regard to the law of Ontario, on the basis of the bare faced lie that every judge before whom I had raised the question carefully and patiently had addressed it and discounted it with cogent reasons for judgment. If that were true, there necessarily would be a court record to prove it. Not that the law of Ontario is relevant other than that it is one of the many bodies of law that unconstitutionally is applied in criminal willful blindness by the courts of the Canada, France, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Russia, United Kingdom and United States.

The crimes go beyond mere ‘Misprision of Treason” and most importantly today consist in war and genocide, the prevention of which is the objective of the case of Constitutional Democracy v. Unconstitutional Empire carriage of which now has been picked up by the case of Mahican Tribe and Rick Vanguilder and Mi’kmaq Tribe and Gary Metallic v. Canada, France, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Russia, United Kingdom and United States.

What that case does is present an answer to the same old constitutional question that the legal system of the Unconstitutional Empire of the responding nations, with the cooperation of the International Court of Justice, International Criminal Court, Human Rights Committee of the United Nations and Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (UK), have managed successfully to make invisible and unheard-able ever since 1871.

Suddenly, in 2004 US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas took judicial notice, on his own motion, for the Court to address the manifestly unconstitutional status of the Appropriations Act of 1871 and the Indian Act of 1876 in the light of the Commerce, Treaty and Defence Clause precedents read as a set. This was the first time in 133 years that a North American judge opened his eyes to see the conflict and, therefore, the urgency of the Court answering the constitutional question of jurisdictional law alone of Indian tribal sovereignty.

He did this on his own initiative, since the system is set up to block litigants who raise the question from reaching the Judges. Out of the blue Justice Clarence Thomas of the Supreme Court of the United States in the Case of United States v. Lara, 541 US 193, 214, 227 (2004) said in compliance with the Judicial Oath Clause Article VI ¶3 :

In 1871, Congress enacted a statute [Appropriations Act of 1871] that purported to prohibit entering into treaties with the ‘Indian nation[s] or tribe[s].’ 16 Stat. 566, codified at 25 USC §71. Although this Act is constitutionally suspect (the Constitution vests in the President both the power to make treaties, Art. II, §2, cl. 2…), it nevertheless reflects the view of the political branches that the tribes had become a purely domestic matter. To be sure, this does not quite suffice to demonstrate that the tribes lost their sovereignty…Federal Indian policy is, to say the least, schizophrenic.…I believe we must examine more critically our tribal sovereignty case law. Both the Court and the dissent, however, compound the confusion by failing to undertake the necessary rigorous constitutional analysis. I would begin by carefully following our assumptions to their logical conclusions and by identifying the potential sources of federal power to modify tribal sovereignty …I do, however, agree that this case raises important constitutional questions that the Court does not begin to answer. The Court utterly fails to find any provision of the Constitution that gives Congress enumerated power to alter tribal sovereignty…I would be willing to revisit the question.

Well, the cat is out of the bag. No way does she want to be jammed back in there. William K. Suter, Clerk of the Supreme Court of the United States, is doing his level best to serve as the Honorable Cat Catcher to the Unconstitutional Empire. Suter has refused to let Gary and Rick file thec case of Mahican Tribe and Rick Vanguilder and Mi’kmaq Tribe and Gary Metallic v. Canada, France, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Russia, United Kingdom and United States. Suter’s ground of refusal is, the federal legislation whose constitutionality itself is in question does not allow constitutional challenges to itself. And that is where the matter presently stands. To all intents and purposes the cat is back in the bag, notwithstanding Justice Thomas. The most recent of the very many painful attempts to escape the prison built and maintained by the judicial branch of the Unconstitutional Empire to contain and restrain the constitutional question is the following letter to each of the individual Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States:

In our previous article, “The Real Delusion Part I,”¹ we argued that, despite their emphases on religious skepticism and open scientific inquiry, the New Atheists² * have betrayed the spirit of the Enlightenment and have instead veered toward an obdurate and uninspiring offensive against superstition that blames most of the world’s current ills on irrational religious belief. Enlightenment thinkers assailed religious superstition because it was part and parcel of a powerful institutional framework that most found abhorrent; furthermore, most Enlightenment thinkers believed that religious toleration was a noble desideratum.³ The New Atheists, on the other hand, believe that religious toleration is potentially destructive.⁴,⁵ More importantly and dangerously, they have promulgated the idea that religious belief imperils Western society, convincing myriad people that such concerns are dire and distracting attention from other, more urgent political issues.

We also noted that human political nature could be usefully understood with the aid of two important concepts: reverse hierarchy egalitarianism and coalitional competition. Using these concepts, we traced the rise of the modern state, noting that legitimation narratives are an important component of state formation and maintenance. Although the earliest legitimation narratives were religious, growing skepticism and secularism gradually eroded the efficacy of religious narratives in the West. This led to the development of secular narratives and eventually to the neoliberal nationalist narrative that is predominant today. Finally, we argued that Harris’ contentions about the nature of Islam and its effects on believers are often erroneous, unempirical, and dangerous because they could potentially contribute to Western Islamophobia.⁶ *

In this article, we will continue our analysis of the Enlightenment and its tradition, specifically focusing on Noam Chomsky. We will first situate Chomsky historically, noting that he is profitably viewed as perhaps the most representative intellectual of the Enlightenment heritage. His radical critique of power and ideology, exposure of moral hypocrisy, and praise for intellectual integrity, represent the true spirit of the Enlightenment and will inform our criticism of modern power and the narratives it uses to cloak its machinations. This will be accomplished by focusing on three domains: the mainstream media, domestic policy, and foreign policy. We will conclude by completing our critique of the New Atheists in light of the previous analyses.

Continuing the project of the Enlightenment

According to the Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant, enlightenment is humankind’s emergence from a self-created cocoon of immaturity and ignorance; and the Enlightenment, the age that finally began to offer the freedom needed to thus emerge.⁷ The most important obstacles to this desired freedom were powerful institutions and the narratives they propounded; the institutions because they coerced behavior and the narratives because they encumbered and enslaved reason. An important and instructive example of this spirit is found in the works of Thomas Paine, particularly in his two major treatises: The Rights of Man (1791), ⁸ and The Age of Reason (1794-1807).⁹ In The Rights of Man, Paine excoriated corrupt and tyrannical forms of government and the narratives used to justify them. Monarchy, he asserted, was an affront to reason and human dignity, and he endlessly attacked the pomp and pageantry used to mystify it. Paine believed that illegitimate forms of government were based on either superstition or power–the former government based on priestcraft and the latter on conquerors. The only legitmate government arose from the consent and reason of the governed. The age of Reason, like The Rights of Man, was a sustained attack on power and privilege, this time aimed at the “adulterous” nexus of church and state. Paine believed that the institutions of the church were iniquitous and that priests lusted power and wealth rather than human betterment. As Paine acerbically put it, “the Christian theory is little else than the idolatry of the ancient Mythologists, accommodated to the purposes of power and revenue.”¹⁰ Paine also panned the doctrines of Christianity, but it is important to remember that churches wielded a significant amount of political power at the time he was writing and that his chief concern was social justice.* This concern permeates his writings and is the fount of both his bitterness and his optimism.

The legacy of the Enlightenment, then, is a healthy skepticism of power and of the narratives propounded by the powerful. It is true that Enlightenment thinkers also sought to advance scientific thinking and to dispel various kinds of superstitions, but most were satisfied with a “non-overlapping magisteria”¹¹ arrangement: science tackled empirical problems, and religion tackled existential issues.¹² (It is useful to remember that some of the most brilliant embodiments of the Enlightenment were quite religious–Newton, for example.) Viewed from this perspective, no one better encompasses the spirit of the Enlightenment than Noam Chomsky, who has tirelessly attacked powerful and unjust institutions, intellectual hypocrisy, erroneous political narratives, and the moral laziness that leads to a passive acceptance of power no matter how grievous the consequences. Perhaps Chomsky’s most general statement of the appropriate task of intellectuals is found in his essay “The Responsibility of Intellectuals.”¹³ The first and most obvious responsibility, Chomsky argues, is “to speak the truth and to expose the lies” of powerful institutions like corporations and governments; this burden is placed on “intellectuals” because Western democracies “provide” them “with the leisure, the facilities, and the training” to pierce the patina of distortion that cloaks the operations of power. The intellectual does not mock doctrines that have little influence on social injustice, or those held by official enemies (say, in many cases, Islam), but rather confronts, first and foremost, the image in the mirror.¹⁴ For a citizen of the United States, that means focusing on the policies of our own government rather than self-righteously lampooning the ignorance or stupidity of the beliefs of “official enemies or those designated as unworthy in the prevailing political culture.”¹⁵ These are responsibilities that Chomsky has taken seriously for more than 40 years, working indefatigably to dismantle the narratives and ideologies of the powerful. His work offers the modern activist a fruitful heuristic for combating the myths, lies, and distortions that obscure the machinations of powerful coalitions and the institutions they control. This critique, not the New Atheists’ criticisms of religious faith, represents the true spirit of the Enlightenment.

Once again with human political nature and coalitional conflict

In our previous article, we argued that humans possess a suite of behavioral propensities that interact with the environment to give rise to political systems [see reference 1]. We focused on two of these tendencies: egalitarianism and coalition formation. The first manifests itself in a hatred of despotism and in the formation of reverse hierarchies in order to thwart despotic upstarts;¹⁶ the second, in the creation of unified coalitions of people who divide the world into “us” and “them,” granting moral status to ingroup members that is denied to outgroup members. For this article, we will also focus on a third fundamental component of human political nature: the motivation to control.¹⁷ * According to cognitive and educational psychologist, David Geary, the motivation to control is “an evolved disposition and is implicitly focused on attempts to control social relationships and the behavior of other people, and to control the biological and physical resources that have historically covaried with survival and reproductive prospects in the local ecology.” [page 24] Put more colloquially, the motivation to control is a biological tendency to desire control over people and resources. Politically, this essentially reduces to a desire for power, although it does not always need to manifest in a reprehensible form. For example, an activist concerned with inequality desires the ability to implement policies that will alleviate America’s inequitable economic distribution; the activist desires, in other words, the power to control economic policy.

The combination of these propensities leads to nearly incessant conflict between coalitions over finite resources. (The conflict need not be violent. Much of it is ideological, for example, and amounts to arguing with friends, groups, and large coalitions about how resources should be distributed.) In complicated, industrialized states, human egalitarian tendencies are often no match for the power of integrated coalitions; however, the combination of egalitarian proclivities and the motivation to control leads to anger and moral outrage from people and coalitions that do no reap the benefits of the institutional and coalitional arrangements (for example, women or minorities who were/are discriminated against in the labor market or victims of the financial machinations of Wall Street.).¹⁸ This necessitates some form of population control. In more democratic societies, the bludgeon is not an effective instrument and some attention must be paid to popular sentiment.¹⁹ The control of this popular sentiment through propaganda (political narratives) is therefore vital for the power elite. It is vital because it 1) limits the domain of thinkable thoughts and 2) limits the domain of acceptable debate. In the United States, the power elite (which consists of the corporate community, the upper class, and the policy planning network),²⁰ although only a tiny fraction of the entire population, controls a staggering proportion of the country’s available resources. This inequitable distribution of resources requires justification: it will not do for the power elite to simply assert, “we are better than the rest of you and therefore we own a significant proportion of the country’s wealth.” In the United States, as we argued in part I, the current political narrative is the neoliberal nationalist narrative. Because the mainstream media are an important conduit* of this narrative, it is important for a politically conscious person to analyze and criticize the media. Probably the most powerful framework for such a task comes from Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent.²¹

Power nexus 1: The mainstream media (obscuring institutional analysis)

In Manufacturing Consent, Herman and Chomsky offer a compelling institutional analysis of the media. Instead of tramping down the well worn and distracting trail of liberal versus conservative analysis,* Herman and Chomsky ask a simple question: what are the media? The straight forward but illuminating answer: “…the major media–particularly, the elite media that set the agenda that others generally follow–are corporations ‘selling’ privileged audiences to other businesses.”²² That is, the media are enormous, profit seeking corporations that raise revenue by selling space for advertisers. They can charge more for such space if their readership includes the proper demographics–so, in essence, they are “selling” their audience to other businesses (namely, advertisers). In a certain functional sense, the “news” is simply a lure to attract audiences, which are the primary product that the media offers on the market.

Before continuing, it seems profitable to make a few remarks on institutional analysis. Perhaps one of the more impressive accomplishments of modern propaganda is effectively to eliminate this kind of straight forward analysis from mainstream consideration. In a famous scene from the documentary Manufacturing Consent, for example, the author Tom Wolfe calls Herman and Chomsky’s observations about the operations of the media “patent nonsense,” and conflates them with a conspiratorial view of the media, complete with elites in a “beige room” deciding what can and cannot be distributed. This is stunning because Herman and Chomsky explicitly assert the opposite: there are no central control stations or informational bureaus; rather, there are institutions functioning exactly as one would expect them to function. Wolfe, like most of the population, is almost certainly unfamiliar with the style of analysis Herman and Chomsky use and probably honestly confuses it with the picture he presents in the documentary–a confusion that is common and prevents such analysis, although obvious and highly informative, from becoming common place. Since we are surrounded by powerful institutions, this dearth of institutional analysis is particularly pernicious. For those not properly acclimated to our intellectual environment, it might seem risible that a number of intellectuals (the New Atheists) assail the “irrationality” of religious belief and fulsomely praise the virtues of skeptical inquiry while utterly ignoring the functions of the institutions that dominate modern society (and therefore greatly shape the lives of people on the planet), but such protestations of open skepticism have often been coupled with unquestioning acceptance of contemporary institutional structures and in this the New Atheists have ample company. Nevertheless, if one wishes to be serious about skeptical inquiry, one should extend its reach beyond relatively obvious belief structures and into domains of real power.

Herman and Chomsky’s basic institutional framework led to their propaganda model of the media. The propaganda model is a theoretical description (Chomsky calls it “virtually just an observation”²³ ) of the forces that shape the content of the media; it also describes the type of content one would expect given the structure of those forces. According to the model, there are five basic filters that affect the content of the media: ownership, sources of funding, sourcing, flak, and fear mongering (anti-communist or anti-terrorist ideologies). Of these, the first three are the most important.

–Ownership. The media are large corporations; therefore the content is owned by large, profit seeking institutions.* Through interlocking directorates, the corporations which own the major media outlets are linked to the corporate community in general. This shapes the content of the media because it is in the interest of corporations to instill a consumerist mentality and subservience to power. And it is certainly against the interests of corporations to teach institutional skepticism.

–Sources of funding. The media “sell” audiences to other businesses. It follows that the elite media wishes to attract affluent readers and to convey a consumerist message so that businesses will desire advertising space. A newspaper, for example, that is highly critical of corporations and profit seeking in general cannot attract advertisers and is at a serious funding disadvantage. In a very real sense, the function of the “news” is not to provide trenchant analysis of the political world, but rather to attract affluent audiences or distract the less affluent*; the news, in other words, is not the primary product. (This does not mean that individual journalists are conscious of this; rather, it means that the news functions as a lure for audiences.)

–Sourcing. The media require sources of information and individual reporters desire access to “privileged” insider information. This makes the media highly dependent upon official sources, like the pentagon or the central government. If a reporter writes a story critical of some aspect of foreign policy, for example, she might lose her source. Since reporters compete for sources, such a loss can be devastating. In a larger sense, each media outlet is dependent upon information from official sources because an outlet cannot possibly put reporters all over the globe. Reporters are concentrated in informational areas: the pentagon or the White House, for example.

This institutional arrangement leads to the propagation of a corporate friendly narrative in the same way that the institutional arrangement of ESPN leads to the propagation of a sports friendly narrative. Doubtless, many journalists within the framework earnestly feel that they are “free” to publish and discuss what they desire, and visible evidence of censorship is kept to a minimum (although it is certainly not non-existent²⁴ ). Overt censorship is rare precisely because it is not necessary. Individual journalists and reporters who succeed within the establishment do so because they have either 1) internalized the neoliberal nationalist narrative or 2) have not desired to directly confront it in any meaningful way. Those who challenge the framework, like Norman Finkelstein, Noam Chomsky, Jack Rasmus, et cetera, are weeded out well before they reach elite centers of news distribution.

Perhaps one of the most pernicious effects of the mainstream media is the creation of an illusory boundary of reasonable debate. Subjugating thought to a manufactured framework with narrow limits, this boundary determines what can and cannot be discussed, even contemplated, in the United States. If one does transcend the boundary and attempt to criticize institutional structures, one is reduced to speaking an incomprehensible language. For example, asserting that the United States is the largest purveyor of terrorism in the world is not just considered erroneous, it is considered insane–it is virtually a meaningless sentence in the English language (at least in the U.S.). Most people would react to that and other similar statements in the same manner they would react to a person asserting that the home sports’ team should pull its best player so that it can lose as many games as possible–with bemused indignation. Let us consider a concrete example.

While “cool” and “rational” pundits like Jon Stewart* bemoan the increasing polarization of media outlets in America, the real polarization between the rich and the poor continues at an alarming rate.²⁵ This was shockingly evinced in the media’s coverage of the budget battles of 2011. Representative Paul Ryan, a self-styled votary of the mythological Reagan, unveiled his budget plan on April 5 to a prodigious amount of media hype. Many fulsomely praised the unflinching “seriousness” of Ryan’s plan, which managed to manhandle reality “with both hands” and forced “everybody else to do the same.”²⁶ Meanwhile, the progressive congressional caucus also forwarded a budget (April 13) that would balance the budget while leaving in place the legacy of the New Deal. While the “People’s Budget” received praise from some notable economists, including Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, who called the plan “genuinely courageous,”²⁷ it was not widely discussed in the mainstream media,²⁸* apparently lacking the “seriousness” of the Ryan plan, despite the fact that it managed to balance the federal budget within a decade (the People’s Budget projected a $30.7 billion dollar surplus in 2021²⁹ ) without eviscerating important social programs. What condemns the media more forcefully than this disparity in coverage, however, is their utter disregard for the opinions and desires of the majority of the United States’ population. While David Brooks and others continue to praise the boldness, seriousness, and courageousness of robbing the poor to fund the rich (for example, while the Ryan plan cuts $4.3 trillion dollars in spending, it offset this with $4.2 trillion in tax cuts, at least two thirds of which come from programs for those of moderate means. See analyses of the Ryan plan³⁰,³¹ ) the majority of the population believes that income should be more equally distributed (on the level of Sweden) and, in fact, believes that it is already much more evenly distributed than it is–a great success of the propaganda system no doubt.³²

It is important to note that the Ryan plan, the People’s Budget, and other proposed fiscal policies have enormous concrete effects on normal citizens. While the New Atheists deploy witty one liners about the follies of faith, write books about why god is not great, and lament the irrationality of religious belief, millions of people are unable to perceive the reality of important political policies that will, to a significant degree, determine the future state of our society. The first and most salient reason is the shameful content of the mainstream media, something that those who desire a more “rational” world should focus their energy on combating and correcting.

Power nexus 2: Domestic policy and power (in praise of mythical markets)

The media are, in a very real sense, an extension of the centers of domestic power; therefore, it is important to understand and criticize these domestic power centers. Significantly, domestic power and policy has shifted dramatically since the 1960’s, leading from the Keynesian era to the triumph of neoliberalism (or, what has been aptly dubbed ‘the Age of Greed’ by Jeff Madrick.³³ This shift has profoundly impacted society, drastically increasing inequality (see figure 1²⁵ ), while concomitantly decreasing investment in social programs and infrastructure. In other words, an increasingly small fraction of society (a small coalition) has appropriated more of the resources. Noam Chomsky has been a leading critic of this trend, consistently pointing out the astonishing disconnect between the narratives used to justify this pattern of appropriation (“free markets dispassionately distributing resources”) and the reality behind it. In a society where narratives often serve the function of the bludgeon, it is important to escape one’s voluntary servitude by increasing one’s knowledge of 1) economic and political reality and 2) the content of the narratives used to justify the underlying reality.

Domestically, neoliberalism can be conceptualized as a set of policies aimed at increasing profitability while stripping away the foundations of the New Deal settlement (e.g., constraining upper class incomes, pursuing full employment, increasing labor’s share of the national income, etc.³⁴ That is, these policies are designed to enrich the oligarchical power elite, who are, in Chomsky’s words, “vulgar Marxists, with values and commitments reversed.”³⁵,³⁶ These policies include liberalizing trade and finance while promoting macroeconmic stability, privatization, and deregulation.³⁷* The monetary outcome of these policies, as indicated by a plethora of data, is continually increasing inequality and economic insecurity;³⁸ psychologically, there are plausible but still controversial interpretations of data that claim these policies have led to increases in antisocial behavior, including narcissism, and in potentially serious mental illnesses like depression and anxiety.³⁹ If our general outline on human political nature is correct, the increasing prevalence of these conditions is entirely understandable. Humans desire control and some form of egalitarianism. Just as a dearth of food leads to predictable physiological responses and pain, so a dearth of control leads to predictable psychological ailments.⁴⁰,⁴¹ However, because of the power of the neoliberal nationalist narrative and the increasing popularity of libertarian philosophies, many people are ignorant of the causes of inequitable resource distribution and the many troubling symptoms it causes. It may turn out that many of us are suffering from a curable disease but are unable to discern its cause. Furthermore, there is good evidence that inequality promotes religiosity where as religiosity does not promote inequality–in other words, there is good evidence that inequality causes increases in religious belief (at least in the United States).⁴² Those who desire that religion disappear might want to pay some attention to such recalcitrant facts as they recommend a strategy much different from the currently fashionable activity of denigrating the beliefs of religious adherents.

Because the policies of neoliberalism would be repugnant to most citizens, they are justified with narratives about the efficiency and fairness of free markets.⁴³,⁴⁴ In fact, it would be difficult to find another mythical entity that provokes such effusive praise and elicits such unthinking devotion. As Chomsky points out, many miracles are imputed to the creative efficiency of free markets that were actually the result of careful social planning and federal investment: the internet, aeronautics, pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, the high tech industry in general,… the list is nearly inexhaustible. In fact, one of the vital roles of the pentagon in the United States’ economy is to fund high tech industry, a simple fact that should be known by every citizen but is safely hidden by the propaganda system. The basic argument that “free market fundamentalists” (a truly scary form of fundamentalism) make thus rests upon a false premise. Consider one representative example. In a 20/20 episode on free market health care,⁴⁵ John Stossel argues against Michael Moore’s concerns about the free market, noting that free markets have created all kinds of brilliant things like cell phones, computers, and helpful medicines. Unfortunately, Stossel does not bother to note the incredible amount of federal funding that went into creating these technologies, the patent monopolies that drug companies use to boost profits and thwart competition, or the direct investment line from the enormous corporations that produce these goods into politicians who doubtlessly return the favor with friendly policies. (Corporations aren’t investing in politicians so that they will increase competition and lower profits.)

Like most fundamentalists, free market votaries almost invariably misrepresent the ideas of their supposed ancestors. A particularly illustrative example is Adam Smith, the nearly flawless and peerless demigod who begat the notion of the ‘invisible hand,’ and supposedly showed how a laissez faire system could, as if through some form of economic alchemy, change the base metal of selfishishness into the gold of economic prosperity for all. As Chomsky has noted numerous times,⁴⁶ the phrase “invisible hand” appears exactly once in Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (it appears one other time in his other works⁴⁷), and Smith does not use it to describe how selfish humans behaving for profit unknowingly but ineluctably bring prosperity to others; rather, Smith uses it to assuage fears of capital flight, arguing that people will prefer to invest in domestic markets rather than foreign markets.⁴⁸ Smith’s arguments were subtle and sophisticated, but he generally favored market policies because he believed that they would produce economic equality. He had nothing but scorn for the “masters of the mankind,” who lived by the “vile maxim” of “all for ourselves, and nothing for other people.”⁴⁹ Like most enlightenment thinkers, he assailed the established powers of his time: the merchants and the policies that favored them. Had he lived to see the modern corporate revolution, he undoubtedly would have execrated the corporations that eventually supplanted the merchants that he so effectively attacked.

In a country with a reasonable educational system and tolerable media content, the above would be recognized for what it is: a series of facts and truisms. Since the myths that disguise these truisms actively promote the interests of the “masters of mankind,” however, they are eagerly promulgated and the truths that they hide are relegated to the margins of scholarship. Again, those who desire to liberate the mind from the shackles of irrational mythologies, especially when those mythologies have serious repercussions, should actively attack and encourage others to attack the neoliberal nationalist narrative and the myths it promotes. To consider just one example of the seriousness of the repercussions of neoliberal policies concretely, it is worth contemplating the following: the September 11 attacks (of which more below) tragically killed 3,000 individuals. However, an estimated 45,000 Americans die every year due to a lack of health insurance.⁵⁰ This is an astonishing number that is absolutely preventable, unlike the deaths that result from the actions of official enemies. It may comfort us to focus on those crimes while ignoring our own, but it does not improve our society. Although, as Noam Chomsky notes in a related context, it is not surprising that we often choose to ignore these inconvenient facts “given our principled exemption from moral truisms.”⁵¹

Power nexus 3: Foreign policy and power (noble intentions)

The neoliberal nationalist narrative promotes a consistent picture of American foreign policy: it stems from “benevolent” intentions and “clear moral purpose.”⁵² Sometimes, in fact, the intentions become so altruistic that it is appropriate to assert that “America is going through a noble phase” in foreign policy, one shrouded in a “saintly glow,” and committed to ideals that might actually be injurious to American interests because of their utter beneficence.⁵³ Although the language here might be a bit hyperbolic, it is not anomalous. In a 2002 article by Dinesh D’Souza, for example, we learn that America is “the most magnanimous imperial power ever,” an “abstaining superpower” that could “conquer” the world but has not interests in doing so.⁵⁴ In fact, the idea that the United States is the single greatest force “for peace and freedom, for democracy and security and prosperity” is a virtual truism.⁵⁵ Attempting to find assertions to the contrary in the mainstream commentary poses an enormous challenge. If one veers to the extreme left of mainstream debate, one might find arguments that American intervention across the globe is wrong, not because it is criminal, but because it is too costly or because America is not “winning.” More often the focus is turned toward our “kindergarten” allies and their inability to cooperate.⁵⁶ The function of the narrative is clear. It dissuades criticism, refuting counterarguments not with logic but with a simple tautology algorithm: if America intervened, it did so from noble intentions. Statements to the contrary are simply not allowed to register in the minds of most citizens; therefore, even on the rare occasions that such arguments are broadcast, they are nearly incomprehensible. A hypothetical Martian might be forgiven for wondering why a group of “free thinkers”* finds it so necessary to demolish the relics of irrational religions, while sedulously ignoring (or underplaying) the horrific brutality of American foreign policy and leaving the basic narratives that support it untouched. Again, to find a trenchant analysis of the exercise of institutional power (this time, in the realm of foreign policy) that preserves the spirit of the enlightenment, one should turn to Noam Chomsky.

According to Chomsky, the basics of inter-state relations are simple and are captured to a first approximation by the maxim of Thucydides: “the strong do as they wish, and the weak suffer as they must.”⁵⁷ Because the United States has been the most powerful country on the planet since World War II, it has done what it wishes, and its victims have suffered as they must.* The important thing, then, is to understand what America wishes; or, in other words, to understand its goals and how they lead to the particular interventions it has engaged in. The most basic goal “is to ensure a favorable global environment for U.S. based industry, commerce, agribusiness and finance.”⁵⁸ Countries that do not cooperate with this motive are punished through the two basic weapons America has at its disposal: military might and economic leverage. The examples of Chili and Indonesia are highly informative in this respect.

In 1970, Chile (democratically) elected Salvador Allende, a nationalist and Marxist, president. American policy planners were horrified. According to a 1975 Church Commission Report,⁵⁹ Washington had spent millions of dollars campaigning against Allende in prior elections even carrying out “spoiling operations” to prevent an Allende victory.⁶⁰ In 1970, however, he won by a narrow margin and policy planners immediately scrambled to undermine his regime. Nixon feared that Allende might become another “Castro,” meaning someone who refused to take orders from Washington, an overwhelming fear of policy elites. Two basic plans were designed: a Track I strategy that relied on political sabotage and economic warfare (making the “economy scream” according to the notes of DCI Helms.⁶¹ Nixon believed this would have “one hell of an effect.”⁶² ); and a Track II strategy that involved the CIA initiating a coup to prevent Allende from taking office. Both strategies failed to prevent Allende from taking over, but the economic warfare did have a serious, deleterious effect on the country. Eventually, General Augusto Pinochet was able to organize a bloody coup and overthrew Allende on September 11th, 1973 (now sometimes called “the first 9-11.”⁶³ ). Although there is no evidence that the CIA was directly involved in this coup, they were quite aware of it, and the Nixon administration was privately delighted (this was somewhat disguised in public).The death toll of the coup was over 3,000, and the horrors of the tortures implemented during Pinochet’s regime are ghastly.⁶⁴,⁶⁵ Not unsurprisingly, little time was wasted by policy elites ruing these tragedies. Today, the Pinochet regime is often remembered for being “tough,”⁶⁶ but for creating an “economic miracle”–one orchestrated by the “Chicago Boys,” who were “inspired” votaries of Milton Friedman’s “free market” principles. As Chomsky notes, this “miracle” is more mirage than substance, as the economy under Pinochet actually floundered, and the state had to take over much of the banking system to save the falling fragments of a failing economy. This is sometimes sardonically called “the Chicago road to socialism”–an apt phrase, although one not ordinarily encountered in mainstream literature on the topic.

In Indonesia in the 50’s and 60’s, after briefly expressing tepid support for him, America worried that president Sukarno was a dangerous “neutralist” and decided to take covert action to oust him. This attempt failed, so America decided to build up the Indonesian military, hoping for a coup. In 1965, there was a bloody coup and a subsequent “purging” of “communists” in the Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI).⁶⁷ Suharto ascended to power and an estimated half a million people were killed.⁶⁸ While America was not directly involved in the coup, policy elites supported it, desiring to extirpate the PKI.⁶⁹ This support went as far as providing lists of thousands of “communists” to the Indonesian military.⁷⁰ In 1975, Indonesia invaded East Timor and overthrew the Fretilin headed government. They continued to occupy the island until 1999, when Clinton finally noticed that some bad things had happened and “informed the Indonesian military that Washington would no longer directly support their crimes.”⁷¹ Although the exact number of dead in East Timor is unknown, it is estimated that at minimum 102,800 East Timorese perished; while a higher end “speculation” of the number dead due to “conflict related hunger and illness” reached 183,000 (the CAVR report, from which these numbers are taken, did not issue a maximum estimate).⁷² Staggering numbers made even more heinous because they could have been easily prevented: Without direct support from Washington, as is clear from later events, the massacres would not have happened.⁷³ * As noted by Chomsky, what is astonishing about all of this is that it has been converted into a proof that America had entered a “noble” phase of foreign policy.⁷⁴ Meanwhile, most citizens remain unaware of the horrific tragedy, another impressive achievement of the propaganda system.

What the examples in Chili and Indonesia (the cases could be multiplied ad nauseam) incontestably illustrate is that American foreign policy is not about high moral values, benevolence, altruism, or other idealistic phantasms; rather, it is about the exercise and continuation of power. In Latin America, the U.S wanted to guarantee itself access to important resources while concomitantly allowing for a continued corporate presence in the region. Allende threatened these goals; consequently, the people of Chile had to suffer while their economy “screamed.” In Southeast Asia, the goals were the same, and the people of Indonesia, regrettably, were just some of the hapless victims. The horrific invasion of South Vietnam, saving it from “internal aggression” (against U.S. military and an U.S. supported regime), and near destruction of North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, follows the same pattern. Importantly, U.S. foreign policy is not the manifestation of a “national interest,” unless one conflates the small coterie of elites who control foreign policy with the American population. Indeed, foreign policy follows the same basic pattern as domestic policy: a group of elites controls and benefits from the policies, while the vast majority of the population either suffers or reaps marginal rewards (and massive consequences from “blowback.”⁷⁵ It should be sobering to recognize that these terrible crimes, with prodigious and horrendous body counts, occur with the implicit consent of American intellectuals who, although granted unknown luxury and freedom, seldom rise from the comfort of their positions in academic institutions or branches of the government to protest against them.

Terrorism: Theirs and ours (intentional ignorance)

The events of 9-11 were, in many ways, the catalyst for the development of the New Atheism. Prior to 9-11, America had enjoyed almost absolute immunity from the kind of horrifying crimes it regularly doles out around the world. On 9-11, that changed. Understandably, many people were confused and emotionally disturbed by the tragedy and looked for answers to George W. Bush’s poignant question “why do they hate us”⁷⁶ * (Although, as Chomsky notes, the question is improperly phrased. “They” do not hate “us.” They hate the crimes that are perpetrated by the government, which should not be confused with the population of America.⁷¹ ) As Chalmers Johnson notes, this is a part of the blowback phenomenon.⁷⁵ Civilians, unaware of their government’s machinations in the affairs of other countries, suffer the consequences without knowledge of the reasons. Into this vacuum, a number of intellectuals provided a simple answer: they hate us because they are “simply evil” adherents of a “kind of death cult” religion,⁷⁷ a religion of a failed civilization that despises Western freedoms and values. And the attacks, so Richard Dawkins informs us, were made possible by the alluring image of 72 virgins in a paradisaical afterworld.⁷⁸ This, Dawkins also notes, is the source of the “underlying divisiveness in the Middle East which motivated” the attacks in the first place. In light of the grisly consequences of the 9-11 attacks, these intellectuals asseverated that it was no longer morally proper or decent to remain taciturn in the face of irrational belief systems, supposedly sacred or not. A number of subsequent bestsellers were penned and published, including Harris’s The End of Faith, Dawkins’ The God Delusion, and Hitchens’ God is not Great, that assailed religion and the supposedly heinous crimes it can compel believers to commit.⁷⁹,⁸⁰,⁸¹ One of the consistent themes of these books is that religion, at least the Abrahamic religions, is a barbaric relic of the middle ages and should be eschewed by rational and enlightened adults in an enlightened society (“the delusions of our ignorant ancestors,” according to Harris⁸² ). It is also implied, both implicitly and explicitly, that without religion, the horrific 9-11 attacks would not have occurred. (This is spelled out quite clearly in the rather unfortunate posters that read “Imagine a world without religion” and show the twin towers standing in front of a glistening sun.)

The New Atheists, then, systematically ignore or downplay the importance of politics. Specifically, they ignore the legitimate rage that many around the world feel because of years of suffering from American atrocities and cast blame at a more palpable (because easily known) target: religion. Harris, for example, goes so far as to say that we are at war “with precisely the vision of life prescribed to all Muslims in the Koran.”⁸³ (It is hard to tell if Harris is aware of the last 60 plus years of Middle Eastern history.) This trajectory of thought is often presented (in tone and rhetoric) as a continuation of the Enlightenment, a desire to use reason to slay the bogeyman of superstition and promote the values of skepticism and science. We have no disagreement with the second part of this desire. However, the most noble traditions of the Enlightenment would recommend a rather different course of action: acutely analyze political reality–the nature of the institutions and power structures that dominate the world today, the effects of foreign policy interventions, past and present, and the struggles of those who have not benefited from the “values” and “freedoms” of the West–and contextualize the behaviors of others in light of this analysis. Moral decency also offers another simple recommendation: look in the mirror before excoriating official enemies. In the political arena, this is often called “liberal masochism,” but in everyday life it is recognized as a noble virtue.

There were edifying responses to the events of 9-11, responses that followed the better spirit of the Enlightenment. Of the responses, Chomsky’s stands out for its lucidity and moral integrity*. Instead of using the tragedy to foment hatred, attack religion, or clamor for revenge, Chomsky sought to contextualize the event, noting that “we have a choice: we may try to understand, or refuse to do so, contributing to the likelihood that much worse lies ahead.”⁸⁴ That is, we may imitate Nietzsche’s portrait of the powerful and ignorantly persevere, paying no attention to the myriad legitimate grievances of those we regularly victimize, or we may behave like enlightened citizens and attempt understand the causes of the almost global antipathy against the U.S., antipathy that does not justify senseless murder, but that remains, in itself, reasonable given the history of U.S. foreign policy. Germane to the topic of terrorism are many polls, pointed out by Chomsky in his initial responses, that demonstrated that the majority of Muslims were (and still are) angered by U.S. policies, especially toward Iraq and Israel/Palestine. Further concerns included the U.S. role in propping up oppressive regimes and appropriating the great wealth of the region.⁸⁵ This is a view shared by Supervisory Special Agent James Fitzgerald, who, in testimony before the 9-11 commission, asserted that “[Al Qaeda and other ‘terrorist’ groups] identify with the Palestinian problem, they identify with the people who oppose repressive regimes and I believe they tend to focus their anger on the United States.”⁸⁶ This is a conclusion that stems back to the Eisenhower presidency. Eisenhower was concerned about a “campaign of hatred” against the United States–a concern apparently elicited by NSC explanations that majority of Arabs believe that the U.S. is concerned with protecting its oil interests by supporting the status quo, a status quo that stultifies economic and social progress.⁸⁷ Recent psychological research supports this general outline, and indicates that coalitional commitment, not religious belief, is a strong predictor of support for suicide attacks.⁸⁸,⁸⁹, ⁹⁰ If one is committed to a coalition that is regularly victimized, it is not difficult to understand why one might desire some form of violent revenge. Suicide bombers, then, are not psychologically different from average humans nor are they “misguided missiles” who are mindlessly infected by extremist religious memes.* Rather, they are committed members of a coalition they feel is existentially threatened by the actions of the U.S.. Although their actions may be barbaric, their motivations, contra Hitchens, are not. It might not be palatable, but it is true that the same basic psychological forces that lead to suicide terrorism also lead to some of the most noble behaviors humans are capable of. The goal is to guide humans to the noble path and away from the destructive.

Conclusion

The general desideratum of the Enlightenment was, we believe, a noble one. Skeptical thinking and science are undeniable virtues. It is tragic, then, that the New Atheists actually betray these virtues by expending their cognitive resources in an obstinate battle against religion–without citing or apparently consulting important scientific research on the topic–while ignoring the more powerful institutional structures and narratives that shape and will continue to shape the social life of humans on this planet for years to come. We believe that the motivation to control provides the “best guess” at the puzzle of human (political) nature and that, combined with the other sources of human political nature we covered (reverse hierarchy formation, and ingroup/outgroup propensities), it should provide a starting point for a basic analysis of political phenomena. These (psychological propensities) interact in important ways with institutional structures and political narratives and give rise to the multifarious political behavior manifested in the world. In order to create a just, moral, and decent society, one should focus on the effects of these institutions and narratives on human well-being. There is good evidence that the current structure of society does not promote human flourishing; and there is incontrovertible evidence that the current structure leads to terrible consequences across the globe. The responsibility of intellectuals, to rephrase Chomsky, is to remain as impervious as possible to the propaganda of power and to criticize the shortcomings of institutional structures. This was a consistent theme of Enlightenment authors and we should honor their legacy by continuing that task. To this end, the New Atheists represent a betrayal of the Enlightenment and Chomsky, one of its most productive offspring. The planet will remain replete with apologists for power, no matter how grievous its crimes; we should honor the few who resist this all-too-human propensity and fight to promote the always precarious inheritance of skeptical inquiry.

* “New Atheists”: The term was first used in Wired magazine⁹¹ to refer to people who are not just atheists but who believe that irrational religious belief should not be tolerated and should be impugned by science and reason. Wired specifically cited Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett as examples of New Atheists. More recent members of the informal group include Victor J. Stenger and Christopher Hitchens. Whether or not there is anything “new” about the New Atheism is debatable. Frederich Nietzsche, to name one example, had nearly endless scorn for religion (although for different reasons than the New Atheists adduce) and did not believe “tolerance” was an appropriate reaction. It is perhaps unfortunate to lump a number of intelligent people into one group; however, for the purposes of our articles, the lumping is not terribly unfair and makes exposition much easier. Where appropriate, we attempt to single out particular scholars. At times, we are also more interested in the cultural idea of “New Atheism” than the actual people referred to by the term.

* “Islamophobia”: Sam Harris has argued that “Islamophobia” is a concocted “psychological disorder” used by “apologists” of Islam to protect it from legitimate criticism.⁹² We do not believe–and in fact, few people who use the term do believe–that Islamophobia is a disorder. It is, rather, the result of an ugly but “natural” proclivity toward demonizing the beliefs of outgroup members. Harris also argues that it is not possible to be “Islamophobic” because Islam is a set of ideas and practices that one can attack like any other set of ideas. This ignores two important facts. First, religion is not just a set of beliefs or practices; it is, rather, a system of sacred values that is often essential to a person’s sense of identity. Attack the beliefs and practices too vitriolically and you inevitably attack “the person.” This is not always illegitimate–but it should be approached with caution and civility. (We can see a person legitimately attacking Nazism, for example, or the ideas of Jihadis–and many Muslims do.) And second, what is objectionable in Harris’ writings (what contributes to Islamophobia) is not his abstract criticism of Islam, but rather his insistence, often absent of evidence, on blaming Islam for everything from terrorism to genital mutilation. We note that the great theologian, Hans Kung, offers pointed criticisms of specific aspects of Islam while presenting a historically grounded and balanced appraisal and no reasonable scholar would accuse Kung of Islamophobia.⁹³ John Esposito has written an excellent article on Islamophobia and contends that it consists of these beliefs:

1. Islam, not just a small minority of extremists and terrorists, is the problem and threat to the West
2. The religion of Islam has no common values with the West
3. Islam and Muslims are inferior to Judaism and Christianity
4. Islam is an inherently violent religion and political ideology rather than a source of faith and spirituality
5. Muslims cannot integrate and become loyal citizens
6. Most mosques should be monitored for embedded cells
7. Islam encourages its followers to launch a global jihad against all non-Muslims but in particular against the West.⁹⁴

As with any term that can be misused (e.g., anti-Semite, racist, misogynist), one should be careful when using it.

* “…was social justice.”: We have not and do not wish to argue that it is inappropriate to pen a book about the silliness of certain religious doctrines. What we object to, instead, is the strident tone, the unempirical assertions, the intolerance, and the unfair and inflammatory attacks against a specific religion (Islam), found in the books of the New Atheists (particularly in Sam Harris’ books). The rest of our objections–the main substance of our argument–is found in part I and the end of this article.

* “motivation to control.”: This was assumed but never explicitly articulated in our previous article.

* “Because the mainstream media is an important conduit…”: We note that the mainstream media is only one part of a larger “opinion-shaping network” that includes public relations/affairs institutions, think tanks, academia, etc.

* “…liberal versus conservative analysis…”: Debates about political bias in the media are not only a complete distraction but are often astonishingly removed from empirical reality. For example, self proclaimed media watchdog and president of the Media Research Center, Brent Bozell, in a review of the media’s performance in assessing Barak Obama’s first 100 days, plaintively asserts the following: “None of the three broadcast networks aired a single story on whether the new president’s economic policies were driving America towards European-style socialism. Not a single network news reporter used the term “socialist” to describe how his policies are shifting economic authority to the federal government. On only four occasions was the word “socialist” used on-camera at all – all by outside sources.”⁹⁵ We have yet to confirm if Bozell’s spaceship is set to return from his long sojourn on Neptune.

* “…owned by large, profit seeking institutions.”: As of 2009 there were six major media corporations: General Electric, Walt Disney, News Corp., TimeWarner, Viacom, and CBS. These massive corporations own and control output in the television, publishing, film, and internet industries.⁹⁶

* “…but rather to attract affluent audiences or distract the less affluent”: Chomsky, for example, makes a distinction between the elite “agenda setting” media which attract the most privileged audiences (business managers, professors, political managers, etc.) and the “mass media” proper which attract the rest of the population. As Chomsky puts it: “The real mass media are basically trying to divert people. Let them do something else, but don’t bother us (us being the people who run the show). Let them get interested in professional sports, for example. Let everybody be crazed about professional sports or sex scandals or the personalities and their problems or something like that. Anything, as long as it isn’t serious. Of course, the serious stuff is for the big guys. ‘We’ take care of that.”⁹⁷ Since 1997, when these lines were written, the awesome ability of the mass media to distract the population has substantially increased.

* “…pundits like Jon Stewart”: Despite Stewart’s facility with humor, his analysis of the media is unenlightening. The “rally to restore sanity” and other subsequent interviews illustrate the virulence of the neoliberal nationalist virus.

* “…it was not widely discussed in the mainstream media”: A google search of the terms “the Ryan plan” and “The People’s Budget” brings up 224 million and 69 million hits respectively. Thus, the Ryan plan has received 3.24 times as many linked pages as the People’s Budget. This is obviously not a a scientific survey but it is telling.

* “…and deregulation.”: We note that the precise causes of these policies are hotly debated, complex, and would take a great deal of space to explicate. See the referenced sources for more thorough analyses.

* “…group of ‘free thinkers.’”: Christopher Hitchens certainly addresses foreign policy issues, but a conversation about his political beliefs would require another article. Harris and Dawkins generally stick to more parochial concerns about the deleterious effects of religion on foreign policy (theirs, not ours). Dennet, so far as we can tell, does not bother much with politics. Many campus groups, inspired by “free thought” movements, exist and few, to our knowledge, seriously challenge current political narratives save for when they are directly related to religious issues.

* “…and its victims have suffered as they must.”: For an extensive, though partial, list of the victims one can do no better than read William Blum’s Killing Hope.⁹⁸

* “…massacres would not have happened.”: Kissinger noted somewhat cryptically that these events had taken place not willingly but “illegaly and beautifully.”⁹⁹ It is unclear which “events” in particular Kissinger is referring to. However, the illegal component rings true enough.

* “…George W. Bush’s poignant question ‘why do they hate us.’”: These plaintive questions and the jejune answers, which almost invariably support elite interests, are reminiscent of debates about Spanish policy toward the native inhabitants of the New World. Bartolome de las Casas described the treatment of the indigenous peoples of Hispanolia in graphic detail:

“The Spaniards first assaulted the innocent Sheep, so qualified by the Almighty, as is premention’d, like most cruel Tygers, Wolves and Lions hunger-starv’d, studying nothing, for the space of Forty Years, after their first landing, but the Massacre of these Wretches, whom they have so inhumanely and barbarously butcher’d and harass’d with several kinds of Torments, never before known, or heard (of which you shall have some account in the following Discourse) that of Three Millions of Persons, which lived in Hispaniola itself, there is at present but the inconsiderable remnant of scarce Three Hundred.”¹⁰⁰

It is not difficult to understand why the indigenous people were angered by such brutal treatment–allowing for the fact that de las Casas utilized hyperbole for effect. However, rather than comprehend the obvious, apologists for the colonialists and landowning elite, such as Jaun Gines de Sepulveda, argued that the Spaniards were simply superior to the “Indians” and had no option but to declare war against them, enslave them, and, ultimately, Christianize them.¹⁰¹ If the native Hispanolians had succeeded in a stunning and brutal attack against innocent Spaniards, Sepulveda could certainly have been counted on to explain that the indigenous people practiced a barbarous type of paganism that instructed them to eat human flesh and that this superstition was both the necessary and sufficient cause of the attack. If de las Casas mentioned the brutality of the colonial project as a contributing factor, he could be dismissed as an “apologist for terror” and Sepulveda could wax about Spanish freedom and benevolence. He could even dub the attack “simply evil” and attempt an hermeneutic of the “Indian mind” to better explain their hatred of freedom. While we rightly scoff at the notion of books explicating the “Indian mind,” it is worth noting that there are many books about the “Arab mind.”¹⁰²,¹⁰³,¹⁰⁴

This is not to say that the events of 9-11 were not a terrible atrocity. They certainly were. It is only to underscore the point, using a detached, historical example, that it is important to understand the grievances that lead to terrorism rather than bloviate about how “good” we are and how “evil” they are.

* “…lucidity and moral integrity.”: This is not to compare the value of the responses, but to note that Chomsky’s response was particularly compelling and worth contemplation.

* “…mindlessly infected by extremist religious memes.”: While studies on the motivations of suicide bombers can elucidate and potentially have salubrious purposes, there is something rather distasteful in the obsessive quest for fundamental motivations. As Chomsky notes, “[e]veryone’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s an easy way: Stop participating in it.”¹⁰⁵ That is, as American citizens, we have a responsibility to stop the terrorism perpetrated by our government. In other words, instead of attempting to penetrate the supposedly unfathomable depths of the “terrorist mind,” perhaps we should worry about our own global atrocities. We have yet to see a book on the “Depraved soul of the American: Explaining global terrorism that emanates from Washington.” To paraphrase G.W. Bush’s favorite philosopher, we should examine the log in our own eye before we criticize the sliver in another’s.

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I agree with his depiction of the utter immorality of Zionist dispossession and occupation of Palestinians. However, I know from our previous conversations that we differ markedly on the Canadian state’s dispossession of its Original Peoples.

He is the author of The Host and the Parasite and his latest book is Exploding Middle East Myths: 15 Years of Fighting Zionist Propaganda. Exploding Middle East Myths reveals that Zionists formed common cause with Nazis, disabuses the notion that all Jews are Semites and historically tied to a Holy Land, argues that Hamas is a legitimate resistance, portrays Israel as rejectionist, describes how Israel fought the 1967 War on pretext, details how the United Nations Partition Plan is without UN Security Council approval, and hence, Israeli statehood is dubious,¹ especially relevant given that Palestine is currently seeking recognition of its statehood in the UN, which would seem a concomitant outcome of Jewish statehood.

Kim Petersen: You reveal many myths about Israel and Palestine. Why are such myths not more widely known, and how can the genuine facts be made more widely known?

Greg Felton: These myths aren’t widely known because they are actively censored in our schools, universities and media. The subjugation of Palestine is so intricately bound up with deeper, official beliefs about the treatment of Jews under the Third Reich and the creation of Israel that a rational investigation of the subject would necessarily expose these beliefs as fraudulent. So much of our power structure owes its existence to these beliefs that the lies they harbour must be defended at all costs.

Unless we debunk these false beliefs, we will continue to be enslaved by them. The best way to do this lies in reading and supporting independent media, and challenging historical fallacies as much as possible. That’s why the Internet is the last bastion of free speech. Of course, net neutrality is under attack from armies of myth defenders.

KP: You wrote, “For the U.S., aiding and abetting Israel’s subjugation of Palestine and its neighbours supplanted oil security as the prime determinant of Middle East policy from 1980 onward. In the services of this foreign entity, the U.S. government freely squandered, and continues to squander, American lives, resources and self-respect.” You conclude the United States is not in control. If this is the case, why do you think the US government relinquished control?

GF: The U.S. did not “relinquish control” in any formal sense; the country was subverted from within by the Israel Lobby. This is the thesis of my first book The Host and the Parasite—How Israel’s Fifth Column Consumed America. Without recapitulating the entire book, a shorthand answer traces this subversion to 1980, when the U.S. public voted for religion over reason. Under President Ronald Reagan, Zionist Jews would infiltrate policy-making levels of government and proliferate like a cancer. When combined with the growing constellation of influential propaganda “think tanks” like AEI and WINEP, Zionists and evangelical Christians proceeded to turn the U.S. into a servant of Israel. Congress is now so thoroughly colonized that it cannot act in the U.S. interest.

KP: You state that myths used to prop up ideologies and false histories will ultimately tear a country apart. If true, should this deter the use of myths for ulterior goals? Given that the Zionists are creating facts-on-the-ground, could it not be that such myths will ultimately secure that dispossessed from others? And since some Zionists have been forthcoming about the dispossession (as Exploding Middle East Myths gives ample examples of), why do you believe it will tear Israel apart?

GF: If all Jews in Israel were rabid Zionists, I might agree, but the illusion of Israel as a legitimate, democratic country is at odds with its behaviour. Every country needs to have a governing ethos in which all citizens can see themselves. The disconnect between theory and practice, once deniable during the Cold War and the farcical Oslo “negotiations,” is now unbridgeable. Israel is now reduced to repudiating any pretence to democracy and even attacking Jews who support democracy and right for Palestinians. If Israel purports to be a Jewish state, it cannot long continue to be a living contempt of that idea.

KP: You apparently are against the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. You say that many Iranians consider him to be a “needlessly provocative buffoon.” You accuse him of something that many people would accuse you of: “anti-Israel bombast.” What is the difference between your opposition to Israel and that of Ahmadinejad?

GF: In fact, I support Ahmadinejad. He is a rational, well-spoken man who understands the Middle East better than most Westerners. Many Iranians may find him unnecessarily provocative, but I don’t. Our attitudes toward Israel are, in fact, similar but by no means could I be called bombastic or buffoonish. My writing is carefully researched and even my detractors cannot find fault with my facts. That’s why they have to resort to character assassination. My writing may at times be theatrical and satirical, but only a Zionist would dismiss it as bombastic.

KP: You criticize James Petras for not having looked at the 2009 Iranian elections from the “public’s point of view.” To substantiate this claim, you cite Richard Haass from the Council on Foreign Relations (arguably, an extreme establishment organization). With all due respect, I found such reasoning uncompelling, comparing the sources. Why should the views of the CFR be believed over that of Petras?

GF: I did not cite the views of the CFR. I cited a view that belonged to Richard Haass. It does not matter to me in the least who a person is or what agency he may belong to. All that matters is the accuracy and believability of the argument. If we judge the accuracy of an argument based on the arguer’s résumé or political affiliation we “credentialize” truth and fall into irrationality.

KP: You compare the “official” narrative of 9-11 to the Iranian government’s reactions to the protests of the 2009 elections and conclude that “it is logical to conclude that Ahmadinejad’s election might well be a fraud.” With all due respect, my logic did not come to such a conclusion. Second, you asked how an economist, Mark Weisbrot, “deemed himself competent to write on Iranian politics.” So I respectfully inquire how do you deem yourself more competent to write on Iranian politics than Weisbrot?

GF: I do not deem myself more competent than Wesibrot to write on Iranian politics. He may in fact be competent, but he gave no sign of it in his analysis of the Iranian election. In short, he had no evidence to back up his charge that the election was legitimate. He resorted to the same lazy guesswork that defenders of the official narrative of Sept. 11 did. Instead of making a case, he hides behind the hypothetical mood. To give the illusion that it was logistically impossible. “Indeed, if this election was stolen, there must be tens of thousands of witnesses—or perhaps hundreds of thousand—to the theft. Yet there are no media accounts of interviews with such witnesses.” An honest arguer cannot deny the validity of a cause by denying its effect, yet that is what Weisbrot did, and what numerous apologist for the official narrative of Sept. 11 do.

Regarding Petras, he offers no evidence to support his claim that Ahmadinejad’s opponents were pro-Western, or that there are Western protégés in Iran. Mir-Hossien Mousavi, who many argue really won the election, is in fact more liberal, but he is not about to undo the Islamic nature of Iran. Petras’s arguments seemed more reflexive than researched.

KP: You note that in 1947 the United Nations voted to establish an Arab and Jewish state in Palestine. Given that it has already been established by a UN vote, what effect do you think this will have on the current Palestinian attempt for UN re-recognition of statehood?

GF: First of all, the UN did not establish Israel. That is a popular myth. The 1947 Partition Plan that ostensibly carved out a Jewish State out of Arab Palestine was never ratified in the Security Council, and therefore does not exist. Israel has never had legal, moral or political legitimacy, and this is the reason that Israel and its client states are so desperate to sabotage UN recognition of Palestinian statehood. Inasmuch as the Partition Plan was illegal—the UN has not right to take land from one people to give it to another—there was much reference made to an Arab state. The very idea of partition implies two parts, yet Israel has never recognized Palestine’s right to exist. To do so would expose the utter criminality, not only of the incessant Jewish colonization, but the illegitimacy of Israel itself. As I said in my first column on this topic: “We can have peace in the Middle East or we can have Israel; we cannot have both.”

KP: You write that overseas media like BBC, the Guardian, Al Jazeera (the latter accused by many critics of disinformation abetting the NATO coup in Libya) as keeping Canadians “well informed about the Middle East,” contrary to what many independent journalists contend, e.g., Media Lens and other writers at Dissident Voice. Should readers regard such corporate/state media sources as reliable, especially compared to independent media sources?

GF: All media should be judged critically. The British and Arab sources mentioned above do a comparatively better job than North American sources, but have their own particular problems. Al-Jazeera has lost some credibility since the Saudis bought into it and the station got into North America, and the BBC is largely zionist house-trained; however, it is more likely to broadcast an intelligent Palestinian perspective than anything over here. The Guardian is by far the best of the lot, and I would place it in the first rank along with Le Monde Diplomatique and Press TV’s international service. Generally speaking, independent sources are more reliable because they are not as vulnerable to financial and political pressures. But what matters the most is the way the news is reported, not who reports it.

KP: Anarchist professor Noam Chomsky holds (and I agree) that people should focus on the actions of their own states: “My own concern is primarily the terror and violence carried out by my own state, for two reasons. For one thing, because it happens to be the larger component of international violence. But also for a much more important reason than that; namely, I can do something about it. So even if the U.S. was responsible for 2 percent of the violence in the world instead of the majority of it, it would be that 2 percent I would be primarily responsible for. And that is a simple ethical judgment. That is, the ethical value of one’s actions depends on their anticipated and predictable consequences.” [Noam Chomsky, On Power and Ideology: The Managua Lectures (South End Press, 1987.)]

Your focus, however, seems to be very much on criticism of Zionist crimes against Palestinians and criticism of Canadian government complicity in Zionist crimes. If there is substance to what Chomsky says, why do you not write more frequently about colonialist crimes against Canada’s Original Peoples, given that non-Indigenous Canadians (similarly to Ashkenazi Jews) live on a land gained through war crimes and dispossession?

GF: I dissent very strongly from Noam Chomsky. He is of the opinion that the U.S. is the dominant partner in the U.S. relationship, and for this reason he directs so much of his criticism towards the U.S. However, I find no support for this position. In fact, the ease with which Israel humiliates U.S. presidents and causes deliberate harm to U.S. interests should be enough to show Chomsky has it backwards. He does not appreciate that the U.S. has no government; Congress and the White House has been so thoroughly colonized by Israel that any discussion of U.S. national policy is a polite joke. I see little merit in the quote you cite. Given the overwhelming zionist influence on U.S. (and Canadian) policy, protesting the actions of one’s national government makes as much sense as treating the symptoms of a disease rather than the cause.

Since I find no substance in what Chomsky says, I see little reason to write about colonialist crimes against Canada’s original peoples. In fact, I go out of my way not to conflate this issue with the zionist destruction of Palestine.

First, I reject the parallel between Ashkenazi Jews and European Canadians. Though there are superficial similarities, the magnitude, duration and sadistic ferocity of Jewish war crimes against Palestine are orders of magnitude beyond what Europeans did to the natives.

Second, the European colonial period is history, and cannot be changed; the Jewish colonial period is current, and can be changed. (I think Chomsky would appreciate this point.)

Third, zionists use Canada’s colonial past to deflect criticism of Israel, such as: “Why criticize Israel when you did the same thing to your natives? You’re nothing but a hypocrite!”

Fourth, Canada’s native leadership is only too happy to suck up to the Israel Lobby and identify the persecution that they suffered with Jewish persecution. This puts Canada’s natives in the position of giving propaganda cover for zionist atrocities.

1. I wrote almost 6 years ago: “Nonetheless, in 1950, the UN General Assembly granted membership to Israel but under certain conditions. UN General Assembly Resolution 273 decreed that Israel must implement UN General Assembly Resolution 181 that defines the borders of Israel and Palestine and Resolution 194 that recognizes the right of return for Palestinian refugees. Israel has so far refused. UN General Assembly Resolutions, however, are not binding under international law.” “Anti-Israel?” Dissident Voice, 27 October 2005.

I would tell you that this mountain that the settlers named the San Francisco Peaks is tethered to my heart if I didn’t worry that you would then dismiss my words as those of a wannabe flake. I would tell you that I once had to fly to Manila for a wedding, and the further the plane took me from the silhouette of this mountain the thinner that cord stretched until I was sure it would break and I would be lost forever. I would tell you that I once drove back from dances on the Hopi reservation north of these mountains, came round a curve in the highway, saw that silhouette and knew in an instant that the Hopi and the mountain they call Nuva’tuk-iya-ovi are clasped as two warm hands might be clasped. I would tell you that I stood on this mountain that the Dine call Dook’o'oosÌÌd and watched a Navajo apprentice healer touch a boulder as tenderly as he might have touched his child, but I worry that you might relegate me to the long-gone New Age. And if I tell you that I heard a Dine woman say that disrespecting the Mountain is a form of genocide, “because the health of the Dine men is linked with the Mountain; and the health of the Mountain is linked with their health.” I hope you would listen with an open heart.

It is a bright July morning in Northern Arizona. White clouds drift above the road. It is monsoon season, but there is no hint of storm on its way. I drive on a winding two lane that goes up to Snowbowl, a small ski resort on this desert mountain. A mile or so of the road is reduced to one lane because the ski resort is dynamiting and gouging a trench in which they plan to lay pipes in which treated wastewater will be carried to make fake snow. Thousands of Native Americans, their supporters and environmentalists have battled the Snowbowl’s plan for at least ten years — in the courts, on the streets, in the parking lot of the resort, in front of Flagstaff’s local newspaper office, on-line and, most recently, by locking themselves down to the equipment that is now lacerating the face of the mountain. A week ago, a group of activists set up an encampment and invited others to join them. They set up a central Cook Shack and information tent. (During slavery in America, the Cook Shack was the place slaves would meet to plan their escapes to the North. There, they were safe from the master and the master’s spies.) And today we will gather in a circle and pray.

I pull into the Snowbowl parking lot. One of the encampment’s organizers takes me up to the Snowbowl’s clear-cuts where acres of old growth fir and pine have been leveled. My gut twists. I tell Ned that I had stood in the Hopi village of Shungopavi a few days earlier and watched the Katsinas dance. Each of the dancers wore a ruff of fir twigs around their necks — fir that had been gathered in a manner no less reverent than the dances. The Katsinas and the watchers were in ceremony for the mountains upon which the Katsinas make weather. For a human to make snow from wastewater on Nuva’tuk-iya-ovi is the same as a person taking a leak on the main altar of the Vatican or in the Holy of Holies in a synagogue.

“So the Snowbowl has killed these fir,” my friend said. “Sacrilege.”

When we returned to the parking lot, the circle was gathering. I stepped into place and waited. Klee Benally, Dine (Navajo) musician and activist picked up his drum. His voice rose bright as obsidian into the huge sky. I felt my heartbeat slow, saw the others in the circle seem to settle more fully into their bodies. We had begun.

One by one, each of us spoke. We were Dine, Anglo, Mexican, South American, old and young, women and men, a tiny baby, a family down from the Rez, a tall, dark, dreadlocked man with his son at his side. When it was his turn to speak, he spoke of his wish for his son to know the mountain as he did. Then he told us what had happened when he and Klee had been waiting for the rest of us to arrive: “Klee was waiting with his drum. I was walking toward him. Some white guys were walking toward the trail. I overheard an older white man loudly say, ‘Look at that Indian playing his drum, don’t they know that they were all exterminated? Get over it.’ Another friend confronted the guy and asked him to say it to Klee’s face. The man declined and denied that he said anything.”

There was absolute silence in the circle, then the sound of muffled sobbing. The dreadlocked man’s face was wet with tears. A young woman next to me had buried her face in her hands. I remembered the February 2005 summit meeting between tribal elders, leaders and medicine people and Nora Rasure, who was then Forest Supervisor. Middle-aged Native American men, sombre women and elders had talked with tears streaming down their faces about the life-essential threads that weave between their people and the Mountain. I’d heard Nora Rasure say after four hours of testimony, “Well, skiers have their rights too. I have to protect them as well.”

The young woman took her hands from her face, looked up at the Mountain and said, “I am part of the encampment. I want to talk about the environmental effects of the contaminants in treated wastewater.” I listened to her words, but my thoughts were with Klee and the angry white man. I remembered standing years earlier along the highway just before the Snowbowl Road, holding a sign that said, “Why no snow-making? — stop and learn why;” and the enraged faces of the skiers on their way up the mountain, the curses, the foul insults. I remembered the genuine question I heard again and again from friends who skied or snowboarded, “What’s the big deal about snowmaking?”

And, as I stood in a circle of people on the slope of the Mountain, I knew the answer. The big deal about snow-making with treated wastewater on the San Francisco Peaks (Nuva’tuk-iya-ovi/Dook’o'oosÌÌd) is cultural extermination. It is genocide.

For more information: www.indigenousaction.org or www.truesnow.org.

Part 1. The Vision

Hai-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya,
Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya. …
Hai-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya,
Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya. …

            (to be chanted until the Spirit is with one)

Where the horses dance like mad on Paha Sapa;
Where the mountains flow like rivers in the sun,
Turning watery golden under the reddening sky;
Where the clouds assume a human, spectral form,
Flowering with faces of the still unborn:
There the Grandfathers of our people called me,
Smiling behind their wild cloud beards.
Their eyes were holes where the sky entered in,
And their hands were the ashes of hands.
Opening their mouths, hawks soared from them,
Fluttering, turning in the glistening air.
A reed they smoked from bade me have no fear.
To each the reed was handed as a friend.

Then the Grandfathers bade me follow.
They grew young before me like boys.
And we hooted and shouted and rode on the wind,
Our hair like black fire behind us.
The hooves of our ponies kissed the sweet prairie grass,
And the air all around us rumbled with storm.
As far as eyes saw, the bison stampeded.
“Hoka-hey!” cried the Grandfathers.
Locusts of arrows rained on the prairie.
“Hoka-hey!” cried the women.
Red meat hung in the cottonwood branches.

Over the Greasy Grass we rode,
Over the tipis of nations:
The fires of the tribes lit up the hills,
The tipis of Minneconjous flapped in the wind.

Oglala and Shyela, Hunkpapa and Lakota,
Santee and Yanktonai camped by the icy stream.
The stars burned bright in the hair of the Great Father.
The blue river ran swiftly past the tribes.

All night the Bear Men dance round the fires,
All night their shadows dance on the tipis
Where the children dream; white smoke drifts in the sky.

Morning, red sun peeks through grey clouds.
Higher and higher, rising in the air,
The horses neigh wildly, the Grandfathers shout,
And the women dance round and round and round, clapping.
Hundreds of bluecoats bloom in their blood
Like hundreds of violets scattered on the hills.

All this I saw before my springs were ten.
And after, many times, flew with the spirits
To the other world, shedding the skin of shadows.
The people showed me honor with their eyes.
Great feasts we had, and battles,
With many victories over our enemies,
The rumbling thunder-beings making the bad ones crazy.

Then we were the first men of the Earth:
The faces of our children shone with morning;
Summer and winter the world was rich with heroes.
But now, all’s past; the hoop of the world lies broken.
Whirlwind and hailstone pummel the prairie.
Hungering dogs howl in the bitter air.
The wandering spirits hide.

Hai-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya,
Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya. …
Hai-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya,
Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya. …

            (let the silence linger)

Part 2. The Hope

Where are you now, Tashtunka Witco?
The sacred buffalo wallows in his grave.
Washita maggots swarm on the prairies.
Where are you now, Tashtunka Witco?
Tongueless carcasses rot in the red sun.
Human vermin murder holy land.

Now let us moan, my brothers!
The long-wailing coyotes will not out-grieve us.
The prairie dogs will look at us in pity.
All over the Earth the beasts will tell our story.
Gather now in the long grass, ghosts of my people.
Let your heart-felt cries rend heaven!
The Great Spirit weeps and culls us to His bosom.
We must leave this Earth we loved.
Never shall we walk these hills again.

Where are you now, Tashtunka Witco?
The clouds blot out the sun; the morning wanes.
The prairie flowers die while still in bud;
The cries of tortured bison scorch the air.

You saw your children hunted down like dogs,
Your women butchered, whittled into bone.
You could not bear the fire-watered eyes
Of braves who rode against the Long Hair foe.
You walked into the woods and lived alone.

You whom the Spirit loved as His own son,
Whose eyes, they say, held fire in their core,
Who saw the horses dancing in the clouds,
Who danced above the rattling Gatling guns–
Now you are gone; no more will you walk before us,
And the long night of our land comes on.

Hai-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya,
Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya. …
Hai-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya,
Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya. …

Part 3. The Sabers

The bluecoat sabers come! The thunderous drum
Of horses beats the plains!
The wagon guns are coughing at the hills!
Look! It is just meat here which had a name.
The lips that kissed a lover’s kiss the flies.
The innocent die with music,
Cruel music of the Gatling guns,
While snow shuts closed forever mouths that sang to God.

O, Sun that endures forever, men must die!
O, Earth that endures forever, men must die!
Great Spirit, spread Your wings above us,
Hover, Falcon, over Your lost children.

The snow falls in the valley of our graves.
Bones stiffen; dumb mouths sing with wind.
The long night of our land comes on.

Where are you now, Tashtunka Witco?
At night, in the disemboweled bodies of horses,
Of bison, you slept in howling caves
While bluecoats fell with the snow.

Never would you be free again.
Never would you walk above the clouds.
Staring at embers with your brittle eyes,
You saw the bison skeletons stampede.
Dancing, you fell; dreaming, you could not rise.
At last, your own tears froze you to the ground.

O, Sun that endures forever, men must die!
O, Earth that endures forever, men must die!
The innocent die with music, cruel music,
And the long night of our land comes on.

Where are you now, Tashtunka Witco?
Cuffed and shackled, a beast with human eyes–
They shoved you to the prison door, they beat you down.
You watched them throw raw beef
To chiefs who ate off floors.

The vision gnawed; you reeled and cried;
You danced and groaned;
The hot steel flashed inside of you;
You fell like empty sackcloth to the ground.

Which of them knew you, warrior, spirit–
Raging with politics, God, greed and guns?
Which of them saw the poet inside you,
Brutal and lusting, with their teeth full of gold?
The old chiefs wept, and sang,
And shook their heads, remembering, when told.
The sky fell down and cracked the shoulders of the young.

Hai-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya,
Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya. …
Hai-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya,
Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya. …

Part 4. The Song

A man who lived beneath the hot sun’s thumb
Said that if we danced the rains would come
And white men would grow small and drown.
In every tribe we heard the throbbing drum
And saw men dance until their feet were numb,
And heard the crackle of the white man’s gun.

Now let us make the long march home, my brothers.
The river is frozen with the blood of our warriors.
Our chiefs are slain, our daughters have the eyes
Of old women, our sons have forgotten who we were.

While the twilight comes, pull down the tipi poles!
Let the ponies step quietly
Over the puddles of the moonlit snow.
Let the infants make no crying in their nested sleep.
Only the prairie wind will be talking.
Let each one linger in his thoughts.

Great Spirit of the Wind and Waters,
Thunder and roses dwell within Your arms!
We have heard the prairie groan beneath the iron rail.
We have seen the engine streak the clear blue sky.
Buffalo is gone, and, now, we, too, must go.

Let the prairie dogs trace our footsteps.
Never again will Earth be young for us,
Never again hold out her warm, green arms.
Never again will Sky throw back his head
And laugh until the stars are shaken down.
Men’s lives are warm breath mingled with the cold.
Men’s lives are footsteps in the snow.

Now let us make the long march home, my brothers.
Never shall we find rest among these mountains.
Our Great Grandmother waits in the Valley of Skulls.
Only she will embrace us hereafter.
Never shall we roam from her again.
With her only shall we find peace.

Now brothers, do not weep;
Your tears will never melt the snow.
Now ponies, step quietly through this dark land.
The branches of the saplings hold the moon
As in a spider’s silvery web.
Our Grandfather’s chant to us beyond this snow.
Listen… listen… listen… listen. …
See where the moon spills from the trees on them?
O, they are white upon the whiteness of the snow.

Hai-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya,
Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya. …
Hai-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya,
Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya. …

(“The Song of the Hoop” won the Stephen Vincent Benet Narrative Poem Prize in 1972. It was published in Poet Lore in 1973.)

As the date approaches I can’t help but contemplate what all of this should mean to the original people of Louisiana and to my tribe, the Houma, specifically. What should our view be of American statehood? What can we learn from the history behind this event and how is that history relevant to us today?

Trade, Commerce, and Profit

At the end of the eighteenth century the enfant American empire set itself on a path that would come to be articulated as Manifest Destiny. As it sought to expand its economic base and political influence the newly United States quickly set their sights on the economic jewel of the continent, New Orleans.

The geographical location of the “Isle of Orleans” gave New Orleans control of the commerce of the lower Mississippi River and access to the vast markets of the Caribbean.

In 1795 the United States and Spain (who had controlled Louisiana since 1763) signed the Pinckney Treaty that gave the American merchants the “right of deposit” in the city, allowing them to store their goods for export. The treaty also gave them the right to navigate the Mississippi. With these rights in place the fledgling American economy expanded and the wealthy business class began to consolidate its base.

For almost three years the merchant class saw their fortunes rise to new heights till 1798 when new Spanish officials suddenly slammed the door by revoking the Pinckney Treaty. Though Spain would restore the treaty in 1801 the U.S. would not soon forget the economic price paid for its inability to control New Orleans and the trade that flowed through its port.

Thomas Jefferson would see an opportunity when he learned that Spain had transferred Louisiana back to France with the Third Treaty of San Ildefonso in 1801. He quickly sent a representative to Paris to begin negotiations with Napoleon’s government for the purchase of New Orleans. To the surprise of many, after months of talks, Napoleon offered to sell not just New Orleans but rather the entire Louisiana Territory.

The process would come to a close on April 30th, 1803 when the Louisiana Purchase Agreement was signed in Paris. For fifteen million dollars the United States acquired over eight hundred thousand square miles, effectively doubling the physical size of the American empire.

For the population of Louisiana the visible reality came in December when the French tri-color was lowered for the last time in the Place de Arms and in its place was raised the stars and stripes.

American Indians?

The original colonial claim on Louisiana was made by France in 1682 when Rene-Robert Cavalier Sieur de La Salle, standing on the banks of the Mississippi near its mouth, expressed ownership in the name of his king. When the United States wrote a fifteen million dollar check for the same piece of real estate one hundred and twenty-one years later there would be one common denominator between the two events; nowhere in the process were the people of the land, the indigenous people of Louisiana consulted or their opinions or concerns considered.

For the Houma the early territorial, period brought a new colonial reality and new challenges. In 1806 and 1811 Houma chiefs met with W.C.C. Claiborne, the U.S. Territorial governor. Gifts and pleasantries were exchanged but the Americans would make no guaranties of Houma sovereignty or land rights.

Attempting to navigate the new colonial system the Houma sought to secure their survival through a variety of efforts. While Houma warriors were fighting with the privateer Jean Lafitte to defend New Orleans against a British invasion force in 1815 the tribe was also fighting its way through the American territorial bureaucracy.

Houma leaders understood that the Louisiana Purchase Agreement obligated the United States to respect the relationship between the tribe and the colonial governments that preceded the Americans. So in hopes of securing the land base that had been respected by both the French and Spanish the Houma filed a claim for twelve sections of land adjacent to the village at Pointe Ouiski (located near the modern city of Houma, Louisiana). The response of the federal land office was a refusal to recognize the tribe’s rights to the land. There would be no federal protection of those rights, a status of non-recognition that continues to the present day.

Louisiana statehood did little or nothing to secure the rights of the Indigenous Peoples of Louisiana; for the Houma those ghost of colonialism would to haunt the present and the future.

The Cost of Colonialism

In 2005 the Houma community was impacted by two major hurricanes, Katrina and Rita. Over half of the tribes 17000 citizens were affected by one or both of the storms. As the tribal government struggled, without direct federal assistance, to aide their people in recovery one question was asked of us over and over again by people unfamiliar with the tribe and its history.

“Why do your people live in communities so at risk from the forces of nature?”

The answer is both simple and complex; the simple answer is that the effects of coastal erosion have left the Houma communities along the south Louisiana coast at risk from any storm that enters the Gulf of Mexico. Louisiana, as a whole, has lost nearly 2000 square miles of coast since 1930 and a large part of that has come from the lands of the Houma.

The complex answer goes to the root causes of this dilemma and examines the motivating forces that continue to perpetuate the problem. Much of this has been debated for years and the blame has been categorized and fractionalized but for the Houma the answer is quite clear. Our homeland has been subjected to a century of unchecked economic development. The pursuit of profit that motivated the American traders at the end of the eighteenth century energized itself with twentieth century technology and began to devour the resources of the land.

Neo-colonialism is a twentieth century term used to describe the relationship of former colonial powers to their former colonies. The term examines how resource colonies continue to be subjected to imperial aggression and control even after their declared independence. The term has great resonance here in the fast disappearing marshlands of coastal Louisiana.

The result of neo-colonialism is that foreign capital is used for the exploitation rather than for the development of the less developed parts of the world.

– Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism, 1965

The early years of statehood saw the Houma forced out of their village at Pointe Ouiski by the expanding settlement that would become the town of Houma in 1834. Ironically the settlers would name the town after the band of Indians living at Pointe Ouiski while they were in the process of forcing them to surrender their land.

The Houma moved south to their seasonal villages in the lower bayous and found a degree of security in the swamps and marshlands along the coast. In relative isolation the tribal population rebounded and they grew strong as hunters, trappers and fishermen. The twentieth century would dawn on a Houma tribe occupying settlements from Mauvais Bois in the west to lower Bayou Lafourche in the east, all with a twenty-five mile radius of the central settlement at Point Barre.

With the twentieth century came first the academics (ethnologist, anthropologist, etc.), then Protestant missionaries, followed by land speculators, and finally the oil companies. The economic exploitation that would come to be defined as neo-colonialism was as much at home in south Louisiana as it was in post-colonial Africa and the Middle East. The second century of statehood would continue to see coastal Louisiana more closely resemble the neo-colonial resource colony rather than an equal member of the United States.

This exploitation would quickly establish the earliest causes of coastal erosion. Seeking to enhance commerce and protect rich plantation lands along the lower reaches of Bayou Lafourche it was dammed at its source in 1904. This effectively shut off the natural land-building flow of sediment laden fresh water that had replenished the swamps and marshlands for centuries.

By the 1930s the exploration of oil had begun and the industry began to dig a massive network of canals into the south Louisiana coast to facilitate access for their drilling equipment.

The effect was predictable; the loss of fresh water and sediment along with the introduction of marsh-killing salt water which poured in from the Gulf through the access canals began to eat away at the fragile estuaries. Added to this toxic combination was the industry pulling billions of barrels of oil and trillions of cubic feet of gas from beneath those same estuaries. This caused a level of subsidence that scientist have only recently began to acknowledge. For the Houma the result is the land beneath our feet is literally washing away as the days go by.

We’ve lived in our coastal settlements for generations; most of our people still make their living as commercial fishermen. When the land speculators and oil drillers came to our lands they found an indigenous population that was illiterate in English and uneducated in the ways of American society. Indeed local governments had made a concerted effort to maintain that imbalance by refusing to allow Indian children to attend public school in the parishes of LaFourche and Terrebonne (home to the majority of the Houma people). A lawsuit and the Civil Rights movement finally opened the door to public education for the tribe but it was not until 1964 that the first Houma student breached those barriers.

College educated leaders were generations away; with few rights and little resources the effects of oil fueled neo-colonialism were beyond the ability of the tribe to stop. It continues into the present and is easily seen if anyone cares to look.

Coastal Louisiana provides nearly thirty percent of U.S. energy production and transports nearly forty percent with its network of pipelines, transfer stations and refineries. A large portion of this infrastructure sits atop the Barataria-Terrebonne estuary, the estuarine system between the Mississippi and Atchafalaya River basins that has been the homeland of the Houma for centuries.

The price paid for this resource extraction can be easily calculated with the nearly 500 square miles of land lost in this estuary alone in the last eighty years, an area of land comparable to the size of New York City.

With the loss of land comes increased vulnerability to the effects of tropical storms and hurricanes. Healthy marshlands that had once protected Houma settlements from storm surges are now gone and the people now exist on the edge of the Gulf of Mexico. Storm centers that pass a hundred miles away can still bring catastrophic flooding. Since 2005 the Houma have been impacted by four major storms.

This situation also leaves portions of the oil industry exposed as well. In 2005 hurricanes Katrina and Rita damaged pipelines and platforms and caused numerous spills totaling millions of gallons of oil. The industry claims the loss, collects their profits and rarely pays any compensation to the people of the land.

This would be amply illustrated on April 20th, 2010 when the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig would explode off the Louisiana coast initiating the largest oil spill in U.S. history.

BPs World

For those who take the time to look and examine carefully the words and actions of the U.S. Government and the oil industry during the heated days of the summer of 2010 the reality of “colonial Louisiana” in the 21st century is easily seen and understood.

Louisiana politicians were in quite a dilemma in those days. With the effects of the BP spill multiplying by the minute and the population of Gulf Coast becoming more desperate, state and local leaders were caught in between opposing camps. They had to face up to the real needs of their constituency without alienating the largest source of campaign funding available to them.

If you lived outside of the region you may have had some difficulty understanding the scope of their problem. Most people in this country have a basic understanding of an elected official’s responsibility to those whom they are tasked with representing. What is hidden from sight is the other side of the equation, the level of influence and control that big oil exerts on the Louisiana political structure. If we lived in an open and honest society then Louisiana politicians would be forced to decorate their clothing to the level of their corporate sponsorship, with some of them looking a lot like NASCAR drivers.

In the real world they go out of the way to disguise their financial motivators which, in turn, give us some interesting mental exercises and verbal acrobatics. Watching politicians who both opposed and defended big oil simultaneously was quite a show.

Consider the rhetoric of Michel Claudet, President of Terrebonne Parish. As the tentacles of oil slowly crept into the bayous below Houma threatening the fishing grounds and settlements of the Houma People his major focus seemed to be on the economic impact of the drilling ban proposed by the Obama administration. According to Claudet commercial fishing accounted for only 20 % of the parish economy while oil and gas brought in 60%. In the press he was adamant about the economic benefits brought to the parish by big oil.

This of course was an interesting point of view expressed by an administration that filed suit against 29 oil companies in August of 2009. The suit alleged that the companies failed to report the ownership of tens of millions of dollars of property resulting in a loss of tax revenue to the parish. The parish is seeking the payment of delinquent taxes as well as penalties and interest accrued.

The parish had also filed suit against BP for projected damages from the Deepwater Horizon spill. Any awards from the suit were slated to be split between the State Conservation Fund and the Terrebonne District Attorney’s Office.

Despite the expressed appreciation of the oil economy there seemed to exist a great degree of mistrust and animosity between the industry and local government.

On the state level we were subjected to an unending string of photo ops and press conferences by Governor Bobby Jindal. He had been from Venice to Grand Isle and back extolling his own ability to understand the severity of the problem and the Obama administrations ineptitude. From helping to deploy oil boom to operating an oil suction truck he endeavored to prove he was a “hands-on” guy. Walking that same political tight rope his sound bites were full of condemnation for democratic opponents and light on real criticisms of big oil. Indeed most of his venom was reserved for the proposed ban on offshore drilling.

On the federal level we witnessed an American administration providing an amazing amount of cover to a “foreign” company. To the extent that Homeland security personnel were physically restricting press access to contaminated area not in the interest of U.S. security but because BP wanted to protect its public relations front.

As to the drilling moratorium, the truth of the matter was there was some substance to all of their economic arguments concerning the ban. It had a detrimental effect on employment in the local oil industry but the story is not as simple as it was portrayed.

The American Petroleum Institute (API) estimates that nearly 50,000 people are directly or indirectly employed by the offshore drilling industry on the Gulf Coast. U.S. Government figures were estimating that as many as 150,000 people nation-wide could be effected in some form by the proposed moratorium on offshore drilling.

The other side of the argument was that the federal government wanted a six month moratorium to determine if the industry was in compliance with current safety regulations in hopes of preventing another Deepwater Horizon-type accident.

Beneath the surface of this supposed conflict between government and industry lies the reality of neo-colonialism in the heart of Houma Indian territory for almost a century.

Like all poor and indigenous communities dealing with economic exploitation the magic cure for everything is money and jobs. Living amidst a depleted ecosystem we are cautioned to value the employment the oil industry brings. Politicians like Claudet, Jindal and others, both Democrat and Republican extol the economic benefits the state enjoys from big oil.

We must understand that to the neo-colonial politics of big oil we are pawns, a tool in their efforts to control government influence of corporate finance. Every attempt made by government to control the industry is met by the same response; it will cost jobs and raise fuel cost. The moratorium was a perfect example of this principle; though it affected only a fraction of the activity in the Gulf there was disproportionate layoff of personnel and heighten gas prices. This, of course, was not people employed directly by Exxon, BP, Shell, etc. but rather it was primarily support industries and lower paying jobs for the most part. This is not to say that there was no real economic downside to the moratorium but rather that the industry did its best to magnify the affect for political gain and cover its real neo-colonial relationship to coastal Louisiana. So for the families dependent on a job at the fuel dock or in a fabrication yard their financial stability could fail because of an ongoing power struggle between Washington, Wall Street and the Energy Corporation boardrooms.

A year after the spill corporate profits were in the stratosphere and the propaganda machine was telling the world that the oil is gone, a neo-colonial economic happy ending. For the Gulf Coast and the Houma communities the reality is, of course, not so neat and tidy.

The Endgame

For the Houma People this is more than just an academic exercise or a political critique, this is a sober assessment on where we are as a people and what does this century have in store for us.

We have survived three centuries of colonization and we still exist as an indigenous community despite all that we have endured. I have the greatest confidence in the strength and tenacity of Houma People which fuels my hope for the future. But to face that future we have to acknowledge the harsh realities of the present so that we may clearly see the path ahead. We must face the consequences of neo-colonialism and understand what it has done to our homes, our families, our communities, our homeland, our tribe.

After decades of oil exploration and production the 3rd Congressional District (in which all of the major Houma settlement reside in2010) ranked 403rd out of 436 U.S. Congressional districts according to the Human Development Index. The American dream or the colonial reality? It would seem that for all of the billions of dollars extracted from the land there is not much trickling back down to the people of the land.

And as the resources continue to be consumed the land is leaving with them, washing away at an ever increasing rate. A couple of years ago coastal scientist drew a horizontal red line across south Louisiana and proclaimed that everything south of that line was endanger of disappearing in the coming decade if the economic and political will could not be produced to tackle the problem of coastal erosion in the next ten years. This statement drove deep into the heart of the Houma People, every major Houma community is below that red line.

What about the industry at the center of the coastal erosion controversy, has the BP spill and the drilling moratorium it inspired shown a more critical light and highlighted its responsibility to the land and people? If we are to look to the recent past there is little to inspire hope. Less than four percent of the oil and gas permits issued require the companies to perform any mitigation to offset the damages caused by their activities. Between 2005 and 2009 some 4500 permits were applied for and not a single one was declined, indeed over one hundred were issued after the fact. Neo-colonial resource extraction continues unabated.

For the Houma who continue to live in the traditional communities existence becomes more difficult as time goes on. The penalties for coastal erosion are not allocated to the industries that bare most of the responsibilities but rather to the people of the coast who can little afford to pay them.

They come in the form of ever increasing insurance rates, the inability to get financing for a new home or the cost of elevating an existing home all of which continue to rise above the means of a Houma fishing family. Though the Houma have done nothing to cause the ecological devastation that surrounds them and have not profited from it they must continually absorb the cost.

Houma communities are edging towards extinction as businesses leave and local governments transfer resources north, effectively abandoning the Houma families. Between 2000 and 2010 the town of Dulac, which has the largest concentration of Houma people, has lost 40% of its population.

Houma fishermen contend with ever decreasing prices for their catch and ever increasing cost for fuel and supplies. Added to this is the lingering effects of the BP spill and the unknown long term damage the five million barrels of oil released into the Gulf has had and will have on the already fragile coastal estuaries that are the foundation of the Houma life ways.

The parameters of the Houma situation has a closer resemblance to the predicaments faced by the Indigenous Peoples of the Nigerian delta or the Ecuadorean Amazon than to those on the list of tribes seeking federal recognition from the U.S. Government.

The answers for the Houma will be found when they begin to acknowledge this common ground with international indigenous struggles and stop looking for salvation from the potential largess of the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

After two centuries of living within the borders of the American state of Louisiana they are still on the outside looking in. The Houma exist today in the same state of federal non-recognition that they were assigned to in the early years of the nineteenth century. They would do well to heed the admonition of the great anti-colonial theorist Frantz Fanon.

“He who is reluctant to recognize me is against me.”

Mark & Olly: Living with the Machigenga was shown on the Travel Channel in the US, and on the BBC last year. In the show Mark Anstice and Olly Steeds lived in a Matsigenka¹ village for several months to show the ‘reality’ of life among the tribe.

But now two experts on the tribe have gone public with a string of highly damaging accusations. Dr. Glenn Shepard is an anthropologist who has worked with the Matsigenka for 25 years and speaks their language fluently.² Ron Snell, the son of US missionaries, grew up with the tribe and and is also fluent in the Matsigenkas’ tongue.³

A Matsigenka hunter returns with wild pig. © G Shepard/ Survival

Just some of Shepard’s accusations, published in the highly-respected journal Anthropology News,⁴ are:

• In order to present a ‘false and insulting’ portrayal of the tribe as sex-obsessed, mean and savage, many of the translations of what the Indians are saying are fabricated.

• Many events presented as real in the show must have been ‘staged’.

• A key scene in the show in which Olly is subjected to painful ant stings, since “according to Matsigenka tradition he must be cleansed” and “endure the ancient punishments” for buying deer meat is denounced by Shepard as ‘fabricated and [with] no basis in ethnography.’

Ron Snell, in an article on his blog, accused the film-makers of ‘paying the Machiguengas to perform for them, saying things the Machiguengas wouldn’t ordinarily say and doing things the Machiguengas wouldn’t normally do.’

Matsigenka girls, Peru. © G Shepard/ Survival

After interviewing two of the Indians in the series, Snell reported, ‘Our suspicions were correct. They [Mark and Olly] entered the village on a well traveled path and only veered a few feet off the path to film themselves ‘hacking their way through the jungle.’ They contracted someone to make new cushmas [cotton tunics] so everyone would be wearing one. They staged the whole drama about one of the guys being accepted and the other treated as a lazy outsider…

‘The translator quickly became disillusioned with the whole thing, but kept going because of the money. He is ashamed and embarrassed that he had anything to do with it.’

The series was previously at the centre of a media storm when a scouting expedition for the show was accused in Peru of provoking a flu epidemic among isolated Indians which caused the deaths of four of them. The show was eventually filmed a short distance from this incident.

The Matsigenka were repeatedly mistranslated in the series. © Cicada

Cicada, the production company responsible for the series, has made no comment on the accusations.

Stephen Corry, Director of Survival, said, ‘Mark & Olly: Living with the Machigenga was a depressing example of the way tribal people are routinely portrayed on TV. One stereotype followed another, with the Matsigenka variously portrayed as callous, perverted, cruel, and savage. Is this what the film crew really thought of those whose guests they were? Broadcasters wouldn’t dare to make similarly false claims about other such minority groups: imagine the same descriptions applied to any ethnic minority in the industrialized world. Sadly this is all too common – TV is now getting away with portrayals which wouldn’t be out of place in the Victorian era.’

In response to a worrying trend to portray tribal peoples in a negative manner, Survival is drawing up a code of practice for documentary makers to follow when filming with them.

A background briefing with further examples of mistranslations and inaccuracies in the show is available to download here.

1. The tribe’s name is today usually spelt Matsigenka. Previously, Machiguenga was more common. Machigenga, as used in the Mark and Olly TV show, is incorrect.
2. Dr. Glenn Shepard is an ethnobotanist and medical anthropologist who specializes in the indigenous peoples of the Amazon. He has published more than 50 scientific papers and is currently a researcher in Indigenous Ethnology at the Museu Paraense Emilio Goeldi in Belém, Brazil.
3. Ron Snell grew up with the Matsigenka, where his parents were missionaries. He is the author of several books about his childhood there, and still visits the area regularly. He is now the director of a homeless people’s shelter in Nebraska, USA. His mother, who has also watched the series and corroborates the accusations, is the author of a 900-page Matsigenka dictionary.
4. A longer version of Dr. Shepard’s article can be found on his blog.

Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper defended Israel, saying: “But when Israel, the only country in the world whose very existence is under attack, is consistently and conspicuously singled out for condemnation, I believe we are morally obligated to take a stand.”

Out of the conference gave rise to Parliamentary committee called the Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Anti-Semitism (CPCCA). In July the CPCCA presented its final report.

The CPCCA report provided examples where criticism of the state of Israel is held to be anti-Semitic:

• Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.
• Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.
• Using the symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism (e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to characterize Israel or Israelis.
• Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.
• Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the State of Israel.

What if Israel is the only state committing breaches of law and morality? The examples given by the CPCCA are logically and morally challengeable on many fronts. Nonetheless, there is an out: where criticism of Israel is similar to that leveled against any other country it cannot be construed as anti-Semitic.

Philosophy professor Deborah Cook found the report flawed “by its very nature, fundamentally opposed to the foundational values of Canada, including its multicultural identity, its Charter guarantees of freedom from discrimination, as well as the values of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” [italics added]²

Cook points out a contradiction:

The report also makes the contradictory claim that criticism of Israel both is and is not anti-Semitic. Criticism of Israel is not anti-Semitic when it is “similar to that levelled against any other country,” but it is anti-Semitic when it singles ‘Israel out for selective condemnation and opprobrium.’ This is an invidious distinction; it can be used to silence all criticism of Israeli policies in Gaza and the West Bank because such criticism necessarily singles Israel out for condemnation given that these policies are unique to Israel.²

The CPCCA points out was has been emphasized starkly by Canadian prime ministers in recent times. Harper has pledged that his party and government would always stand by Israel.

Harper stated, “Those who threaten Israel also threaten Canada.”³

In stating so, Harper is trying to go one better than the Liberal Party, whose former leader and prime minister, Paul Martin, told delegates at the annual United Jewish Communities General Assembly in Toronto: “Israel’s values are Canada’s values — shared values — democracy, the rule of law, and the protection of human rights.”⁴

Clearly both parties are tying Canada and Israel together: Israel’s values are Canadian values, and Canada will always stand by Israel. So what are these identical values that Canada will always stand for?

1. Is fear of love a Canadian value?

Does Canadian society take a stand against romantic mixing between religious or ethnic groupings? Would a Catholic cashier dating a Protestant grocery bagger raise eyebrows and undue concern in Canada?

In Palestine – specifically, the Gush Etzion colony — a romance between a Jewish cashier and Palestinian bagger led to a separation of workers. Workers at the supermarket and a leading local rabbi say the Palestinian worker was fired, but the supermarket owner denied it saying the bagger had gone to Jordan. The cashier quit on her own. ⁵

Rabbi Gideon Perl demanded that the supermarket owner prevent a re-occurrence of mixed pairings.

2. Is boasting of assassinations (and assassination per se) a Canadian value?

In Israel, boasting of assassinating Palestinians is TV fare.⁶ Would Canadian TV show Canadian intelligence officers bragging about killing other human beings?

3. Is the killing of unarmed protestors a Canadian value?

The Canadian security apparatus is becoming increasingly dismissive of the right to protest, and many Canadian police abused their authority as recently as the 2010 G8 Summit in Toronto.⁷ The security forces, however, did not slaughter the protestors. If only Israeli forces were so restrained.⁸

4. Is depriving one group of rights to education a Canadian value?

In Canada, rights to an education have also been abused as a tool to try and assimilate the Original Peoples (i.e., disappear a minority into a majority population). The government finally offered an apology in 2008, although what that apology was worth is questioned by many.⁹

The educational situation is different in Gaza, but similarly terrible. Life under occupation has made education most difficult for Palestinians according to the Minister of Education and Higher Education, and international bodies such as the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), and the United Nations relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).¹⁰

5. Are Christian-only roads a Canadian value?

In Israel, and in occupied Palestine there are Jew-only roads.¹¹

Even in Apartheid South Africa, one never heard of any White-only roads.

6. Is building a humongous wall between peoples (in violation of the International Court of Justice ruling) a Canadian value?

The Apartheid Wall, as it is commonly known, cuts off Palestinians from Israelis and from each other, imposing all kinds of oppression on Palestinians.¹²

7. Is siphoning off the money owed to a particular ethnic group and laying siege to the destitute and hungry people a Canadian value?

Israeli journalist Amira Hass tells of $105 million stolen from Palestine at border crossings under Israeli control.¹³

8. Do Canadian values prohibit discussion of a genocidal takeover by Europeans of Canada?

The genocide in Canada is documented if not widely discussed in the corporate or state media.¹⁴

Israel, however, seeks to shut down discussion of the Nakba. A bill was passed by the Israeli Knesset to deny government funding to any organization that commemorates the catastrophe that Jews inflicted on Palestinians.¹⁵

One could go on and on citing Israeli values that if stated as an item only, no Canadian politician would embrace. Racism is the quintessential non-value for progressives, and while many Canadian politicians will deny Israel is an apartheid state, the evidence of Zionist Israeli racism is voluminous.¹⁶

To be fair, however, Canada does share sordid background with Israel. It has racism, even arguably institutionalized. For example, as with Israel’s high rates of incarceration for Palestinians¹⁷ there are also much higher rates of incarceration for Original Peoples than White Canadians.¹⁸

9. Is displacement of one ethnic group a Canadian value?

In Israel, Palestinian residency is being revoked to allow Jewish families to move in.¹⁹

That couldn’t happen this day and age in Canada, could it?²⁰

It would appear so, although the government will avoid owning up to it. After all, Canada is a territory where the Original Peoples were killed, displaced, discriminated against, and to this day many live in Bantustans/reserves.

It is a “value” shared by Israel and Canada, and it is despicable.

Where the steadfast supporters of Israel or any state err is in their unrelenting support of a geopolitical entity. The steadfast support should be to the principles that all principled states must adhere to — for example, peace, human rights, respect for diversity, good neighborliness, egalitarianism, and social justice. Solidarity with states that share and uphold fundamental values is where fealty and allegiance should reign. A steadfast friendly state speaks out when an ally state strays from a principled path.

Of course racism directed at Jews is odious and wrong; but racism directed by Jews against other humans is also odious and wrong. Dispossession, occupation, and oppression are wrong; they are the antithesis of progressivist values. Canada should forcefully renounce such anti-values in any state that upholds them, but Canada should first hold the mirror up to itself and deal ethically with its own dispossession, occupation, and oppression.

1. Gloria Galloway, “Harper pledges ‘relentless’ stand against anti-Semitism,” Globe and Mail, 8 November 2010.
2. Deborah Cook, “Anti-Semitism report contradictory,” Toronto Star, 23 July 2011.
3. See Al Jazeera video-report on Canada’s one-sided support for Israel.
4. Press Release, “Canadian prime Minister Paul Martin Addresses Delegates at Opening of United Jewish Communities 2005 General Assembly,” UJC.
5. Chaim Levinson, “Israeli grocery store keeps Arab baggers and Jewish cashiers apart,” Haaretz, 26 July 2011.
6. “Israeli undercover agents boast of killing Palestinians on TV,” Ma’an News Agency, 19 June 2011.
7. See “Is There a Right to Protest in Ontario?” TRNN.com, 26 June 2011.
8. “Bloody Sunday: Israeli Forces Kill Protesters,” ICH, 15 May 2011.
9. Mike Krebs, “‘Sorry’ For Genocide?” The Dominion, 18 July 2008.
10. Al Bawaba, “Palestinian children deprived of basic rights to education,” uruknet, 15 September 2010.
11. Shulamit Aloni, “This Road is for Jews Only: Yes, There is Apartheid in Israel,” Counterpunch, 8 January 2007.
12. Gabriel Ash, “Another Brick in the (Apartheid) Wall,” Dissident Voice, 8 June 2006.
13. Amira Hass, “The robbery is going off without a hitch,” Haaretz, 11 May 2011.
14. E.g., Robert Davis and Mark Zannis, The Genocide Machine in Canada: The Pacification of the North (Black Rose, 1973).
15. Jillian Kestler-D’Amours, “Israel criminalizes commemoration of the Nakba,” Electronic Intifada, 29 March 2011.
16. Writing colleague BJ Sabri and I tackled Zionist racism in a 12-part Dissident Voice series: Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, & 11, and 12.
17. Email from Adam Keller “Israeli security forces practice suppression and mass detention of Israel’s Arab citizens, in implementation of Lieberman’s ‘population exchange’ program,” Gush Shalom.
18. See Kim Petersen, “Land and Jail,” The Dominion, Part I, Part II, and Akiva Eldar “Erekat: Israel’s cancelation of Palestinian residency is a ‘war crime’,” Haaretz, 1 May 2011. http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/erekat-israel-s-cancelation-of-palestinian-residency-is-a-war-crime-1.361079
19. See Kim Petersen, “The Ethnic Cleansing of Africville,” Dissident Voice, 29 March 2004.

Leaders of the tribe, some of whose members are still uncontacted, have written to the UN Global Compact saying they are ‘concerned and frustrated’ by the inclusion in it of a controversial Brazilian ranching company.

The company, Yaguarete Porá, was charged and fined for illegally clearing the Ayoreo’s forests, and concealing evidence of uncontacted Ayoreo living there. The Ayoreo have asked that it be expelled from the Global Compact.

The UN Global Compact was designed for companies ‘committed to aligning their operations with ten universally accepted principles,’ including respect for human and environmental rights.

A bulldozer clears forest belonging to Ayoreo-Totobiegosode, Paraguay

In its reply, the Global Compact has admitted that it has ‘neither the resources nor the mandate to conduct investigations into any of our participants’.

Yaguarete Porá won Survival International’s ‘Greenwashing Award’ in 2010 for ‘dressing up the wholesale destruction of a huge area of the Indians’ forest as a noble gesture for conservation’.

While some Ayoreo have been contacted by missionaries, a number remain hidden in the forest. But their land is being quickly destroyed to make way for cattle farming.

Yaguarete has angered the Ayoreo by promoting its membership of the UN Global Compact on its website, which the Ayoreo believe promotes a false image of corporate responsibility.

However, I wholeheartedly dissent from the language and the implications of the language. I know that Willers is aware of the dispossession and considers it wrong. He is focused on the now and future.

Oren Lyons, elder of the Onondaga Nation said, “Empires are built on language. When we speak their languages, we come under their empire.”²

Whether of the past or present, language is important. It is a means of communication to describe the world around us. British writer George Orwell held that language is often used to obscure reality. ³

For colonialists or their progeny to call the lands in the US (or “Canada,” or any other colonized territory) “ours,” is morally incorrect.

If land can legitimately be owned, then it belongs to the Original Peoples of Turtle Island. Ergo, to regard or refer to the lands as “ours” is to justify colonialism, imperialism, and dispossession.⁴

Acquiring the Land Where Original Peoples Live

The land was acquired by force, spread of disease from outsiders to Indigenous peoples – often with genocidal intent.⁵ Out of the genocidal miasma of Turtle Island appeared an entity formed originally from 13 colonies that expanded southwards and westwards to eventually become a hyper-power. Self-bestowed with a manifest destiny, the militaristic power would manipulate the geographic and political destinies of many countries.

Although there was treaty-making, it was of dubious legality, and observance by the White men.⁶

In Canada, treaties west of Ontario were not treaties in strict sense because they were not negotiated; Indigenous land title extinguished.⁷

The Original Peoples were outnumbered and outgunned at the time of Canadian confederation, and they were not allowed to buy land.⁸ The Original Peoples were dispossessed and placed on reserves not big enough to sustain them. In the case of the colony of least British Columbia (BC), there was a concerted attempt “to reduce the Indian to a society and land-holding non-entity.”⁹

The colonialists were imbued with a sense of racial superiority that no doubt justified for them the usurpation of land where Indigenous people lived. In BC, Scottish-born government agent Gilbert Malcolm Sproat considered the English as “a dominant race” among dominant races.¹⁰

Sproat knew the Indigenous people of the area did not want to part with their land. Sproat quotes an elder of the Sheshaht:

We do not wish to sell our land nor our water, let your friends stay in their own country…

We do not want the white man. He steals what we have. We wish to live as we are.¹¹

The acquisition of the Sheshaht land was likeliest underhanded, as there is evidence that Sproat fictionalized the purpose and account of the seizure.¹²

This was despite Sproat being aware that “colonization on a large scale … practically means displacing and extinction of the savage native population.”¹³

In his doctoral dissertation, Daniel Clayton wrote, “Native-Western interaction was circumscribed by the capitalist logic of creative destruction.”¹⁴

“Native ‘depredations’ on colonial land [sic] and life were not tolerated.” Vancouver Island colonial governor James Douglas would subject Indigenous peoples to “summary jurisdiction and military violence that was designed to give them ‘a proper idea of our capacity for inflicting punishment…’”¹⁵

Was the colonialist morality a product of the times, a common excuse proffered for sins of one’s ancestors? In 1790, Alexander Dalrymple wrote:

…common sense must evince, Europeans, visiting Countries already inhabited can acquire no right in Such Countries the Good will of the Friendly Inhabitants, or by Conquest of Those who are the Aggressors in Acts of Injury: nor can the right of Conquest be justly extended when Acts of injury, in the Natives, can be construed to proceed from fear of the Strangers, or from mistake: In either case, Both Parties being equally culpable, through no criminality in either; the European is not sufficiently explaining his Peaceable intentions and the native is not readily apprehending those intentions¹⁶

Indigenous Perspectives on Land Ownership

Shawnee warrior and renowned orator Tecumseh¹⁷ argued,

No tribe has the right to sell, even to each other, much less to strangers…. Sell a country! Why not sell the air, the great sea, as well as the earth? Didn’t the Great Spirit make them all for the use of his children?¹⁸

Historically, warrior-nations who wield preponderant force have determined borders. In modern history, European states through much warring came to develop “advanced” war technology. Advanced weaponry combined with masterly divide-and-conquer tactics against designated enemies, allowed Europeans and their progeny to determine many of the borders of much of the present-day world.

The French anarchist Pierre Joseph Proudhon argued compellingly in his classical treatise — What is Property? — that property was theft. Proprietorship of property, according to Proudhon, was anathema to equality because it established an inequality in conditions. To the assertion that inequality is a necessary evil, Proudhon responded that so then must be isolation since society and isolation are contradictory.¹⁹

Proudhon averred that there must always be an equal right to land:

One hundred thousand men settle in a large country like France with no inhabitants; each man has a right to 1/100,000 of the land. If the number of possessors increases, each one’s portion diminishes in consequence.²⁰

Ownership of land is a recent capitalist invention. The famed late Renaissance Dutch jurist and philosopher Hugo Grotius said: “Originally, all things were common and undivided; they were the property of all.”²¹ The scholar Karl Polanyi elaborated much more on the original commonality of land and resources in early cultures and also argued that land could not be a commodity.²²

Ongoing Battles for Land

Near the town of Caledonia in Ontario, Canada, warriors of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy have been occupying land since February 2006 that they claim the Canadian government, contrary to treaty, has stolen and sold for real estate development.²³

The invaders’ courts have been a biased arena in which to pursue nation-to-nation border grievances.²⁴

What do the Haudenosaunee and other Original Peoples want? The Haudenosaunee state:

Land is envisioned as Sewatokwa’tshera’t, (the Dish with One Spoon); this means that we can all take from the land what we need to feed, house and care for our families, but we also must assure that the land remains healthy enough to provide for the coming generations. Land is meant to be shared among and by the people and with the other parts of the web of life. It is not for personal empire building.

… Second, according to our law [Kaianerekowa (Great Law of Peace)], the land is not private property that can be owned by any individual. In our view, land is a collective right. It is held in common, for the benefit of all. The land is actually a sacred trust, placed in our care for the sake of the coming generations. We must protect the land.

… We want the land that is ours. We are not interested in approving fraudulent dispossessions of the past. We are not interested in selling the land. We want the Crown to keep its obligations to treaties, and ensure all governments — federal, provincial and municipal — are partners in those obligations. We want an honorable relationship with Canada.

That relationship, however, must be based on the principles that were set in place when our original relationship with the Crown was created. That is the rule of law.²⁵

The Haudenosaunee consider themselves a confederacy of nations. Treaties with European colonizing states recognize this nationhood. The Haudenosaunee use their own passports for international travel. Their special national status is exemplified by Article III in the Jay Treaty that grants (what is a natural right of) Original Peoples unimpeded passage across the border between Canada and the US.

Conclusion

Land is common. Few people enjoy border delays and checks when visiting other lands. While security and economic concerns are usually cited as reasons for passports and border controls, in a stateless and, therefore, borderless world, equality of conditions through equitable sharing of wealth would obviate security fears. There is nothing to be gained from violence or terrorism in an egalitarian world except by a gang of thieves seeking to reimpose property and statehood so that the thieving class can luxuriate through re-enslavement or wage-enslavement of others in society.

1. Bill Willers, “On Track to Lose Our Public Lands,” Dissident Voice, 27 May 2011.
2. Quoted from Leroy Little Bear, Menno Boldt, and J. Anthony Long (Eds.), “Spirituality, Equality, and Natural Law,” in Pathways to Self-Determinism: Canadian Indians and the Canadian State (University of Toronto Press, 1985): 7.
3. George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (London: Penguin Books, 1990). George Owell, “Politics and the English Language” in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Vol. IV: In Front of Your Nose 1945-1950 ed. Sonia Orwell and Tan Angus (London: Sewcker and Warburg, 1968). W.F. Bolton, The Language of 1984: Orwell’s English and Ours (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984): 11-73.
4. This is something that escapes many critics of Jews who are dispossessing Palestinians in historical Palestine. The citizens of Canada and the US, and other colonized states, are Zionists of a type living in apartheid states wrought by genocide. For criticism of Zionism to have moral legitimacy, that criticism must apply equally, and firstly, to ourselves.
5. David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (London: Oxford University Press, 1992). “[B]y focussing almost entirely on disease, by displacing responsibility for the mass killing of invading microbes, contemporary authors increasingly have created the impression that the eradication of those tens of millions of people was inadvertent” xii.
6. See Vine Deloria, Jr., Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties: An Indian Declaration of Independence (University of Texas Press, 1985.). Robert V. Remini, Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars (Toronto: Viking, 2001).
7. Forrest E. LaViolette, The Struggle for Power: Indian Cultures and the Protestant Ethic in British Columbia (University of Toronto Press, 1978): 7. I will focus primarily on the Pacific Northwest First Nations because that is where I was born, but the similar history and criticism holds pretty much everywhere on Turtle Island.
8. Ibid, 11.
9. Ibid, 142.
10. Christopher Bracken, The Potlatch Papers: A Colonial Case History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997): 3. Sproat claims the white skin of Europeans made them superior: 16.
11. Ibid, 15.
12. Ibid, 14.
13. Charles Lillard (Ed.), The Nootka: Scenes and studies of savage life (1868) (Victoria: Sono Nis, 1987): 183. Cited in Daniel Wright Clayton, Islands of Truth: The Imperial Fashioning of Vancouver Island (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2000): 55.
14. Ibid, 153.
15. Ibid, 230. The Encyclopedia of British Columbia [sic] writes: “Douglas had a strong temper and was not always diplomatic with his FIRST NATIONS customers [sic].” In the ultimate capitalist rendering, the Indigenous peoples are described as “customers”! See entry for “James Douglas,” Ed., Daniel Francis, Encyclopedia of British Columbia (Madeira Park, BC: Harbour Publishing, 2000).
16. Greg Dening, Performances, (1996) 109 cites Alexander Dalrymple, The Spanish Pretensions Fairly Discussed, (1790) 6-89. Cited in Clayton, op. cit., 187.
17. See R. David Edmunds, Tecumseh and the Quest for Indian Leadership (Toronto: Little, Brown and Company, 1984). Edmunds uses some questionable wording; e.g., he calls Tecumseh “anti-American.” What would one expect of an enemy who is dispossessing you and wiping out your people? Carl F. Klinck, (Ed.), Tecumseh: Fact and Fiction in Early Records (Eaglewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall Inc., 1961). Quotes Governor Harrison: “I wish I could say the Indians were treated with justice and propriety on all occasions by our citizens; but it is far otherwise. They are often abused and maltreated; and it is very rare that they obtain any satisfaction for the most unprovoked wrongs.”
18. Theodore Steinberg, Slide Mountain: Or, The Folly of Owning Nature (University of California Press, 1996).
19. Pierre Joseph Proudhon, What is Property? Or, an Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government (Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library): 60-61.
20. Ibid, 67.
21. Ibid, 55.
22. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957).
23. Hillary Bain Lindsay, “Home On Native Land,” The Dominion, 19 April 2006. See Backgrounder on Six Nations Solidarity.
24. Bruce Clark, Justice in Paradise (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999).
25. The Council of Chiefs of the Haudenosaunee, Grand River Territory “Haudenosaunee Confederacy Land Rights Statement,” Six Nations Land reclamation information, As adopted in council 4 November 2006.

Having hope is not, of course, sufficient. Action is also necessary, and the question that arises is: Action of what sort? The abstract answer to this question, of course, is societal system change (of the right sort). But that answer—because of its abstractness—is not a very helpful answer. What’s needed is an answer—or answers—that is (are) more specific.

In “Our Primary Problem,” I suggested—as “practical” ideas—moving our society in a homesteading and/or intentional community direction. I added, however, that the likelihood of our society moving in such a direction was minuscule. In part because no leadership for such a movement existed, in part because few were likely to find either of those options attractive. Those currently involved in homesteading and intentional community living seem more interested in their own particular needs than the society’s.

In “A ‘Meaningful’ Solution,” I suggested an institution—the Structured Interaction Group (SIG)—as a vehicle for generating ideas regarding societal system change,¹ and added that various consequences likely would be associated with SIG participation in addition to “actionable” ideas. I would now add to that discussion that I anticipate two important changes in particular—changes in perceptions and changes in motivations. I believe that many, if not most, of our societal problems are rooted directly in the perceptions and motivations that are common in our society, so that if these could be changed, and in the process good (and “actionable”) ideas are generated, a process of societal system change could occur.

What would be the “shape” of that change? I have no idea! My expectation is that creative ideas regarding change would be generated, so that it is impossible to predict the nature of those ideas—and, indeed, foolish to try!

As to perceptions and motivations changing, I have been reading Rupert Ross’s Returning to the Teachings: Exploring Aboriginal Justice (1996), and that book has helped me realize that all of us see “reality” through a certain lens, without “seeing through” that fact—i.e., without realizing that that lens is affecting what we see. To survive within a given society, one must acquire a certain lens, and virtually all of us do—for we acquire that lens simply as a result of growing up in the society.

If one implication of so doing is that it contributes to one’s survival in the society (under normal circumstances; an unemployed person might challenge this statement!), another implication is that it virtually forces one to take one’s societal system as a “given.” That is, because the societal system one is living in is the only one that one knows, one finds it difficult to conceive of a different sort of societal system—so that the thought of societal system change never enters one’s mind.

Not only is it extremely difficult to grasp the fact that one is seeing “reality” through a certain lens—and that, e.g., an Indigenous person (unless contaminated by white exposure) sees a different “reality” (one that is closer to reality, some physicists might add). It is also difficult to grasp the fact one’s motivations are not rooted in “human nature” but, rather, are an integral part of the societal system of which one is a part. So that the continued existence of that societal system is dependent in part on its “inmates” having certain perceptions, and also certain motivations.

Some would claim that their motivations come from their religion, and that their motivations, therefore, are in opposition to “worldly” ones. And although their motivations might deviate from conventional ones in some respects (e.g., they may eschew the use of tobacco, alcoholic beverages, the use of “vulgar” language, etc.), likely they are as “possessed” by the dominant “success” mentality of our society as are “worldly” people. In fact, many of them may be even more “possessed” by that mentality than is the typical “worldly” individual!

The question that arises regarding perceptions and motivations is: Is it possible for individuals to (a) change their perceptions and motivations while (b) remaining in the societal system, but then (c) acting on their new perceptions-motivations in a way that can contribute to societal system change? It would seem that the answer to this question is “No,” but I would like to think otherwise. I would like to think that any societal system is “loose” enough that it can accommodate some variety in its “inmates.” That, in fact, it is this “looseness” which enables the society to change.

Our society has, of course, changed over time (enabled to do so because of this “looseness”); the problem, however, has been that this change has been “progressive” in the wrong sense: increasingly discrepant with reference to our “design specifications.” It almost seems, in fact, that there has been a certain inevitability about that direction of change: one thing has led to another in a seemingly natural way, so that changing that direction seems to be an impossibility.

Perhaps there is an inevitability regarding our direction of change—so that our situation is hopeless. But we must not allow a belief that our situation is hopeless result in acquiescence to the “inevitable.” Rather, we must recognize that the “looseness” inherent in societal systems—including ours—provides us with a possible window for escape.

That “escape” may take several forms, but I would recommend the Structured Interaction Group in particular. For among the possible consequences of SIG participation are positive changes in perceptions and motivations, which changes can result in actionable ideas regarding societal system change.

In “A ‘Meaningful’ Solution,” I identified the three influences on my thinking in developing the SIG. I should add that the “circling” involved with a SIG, although perhaps unique in its particulars, is currently being practiced in some form by many in North America. As noted on the Living Justice Press web site, “During the 1990s, members of First Nations in Canada began teaching the Circle practice to non-Native people. They chose to do this because First Nation communities were seeking alternatives to the mass incarceration of their people, which was—and remains—another form of genocide.” Thus, it appears that circling was introduced to whites in an effort to change white ways of treating Native “offenders.” And that circling has been used by whites primarily to solve a limited range of “social” problems.

A review (by Frederick and Mary Ann Brussat) of Peacemaking Circles: From Crime to Community, by Kay Pranis, Barry Stuart, and Mark Wedge (2003) quotes Pranis et al. thusly: “Circles aren’t about performance or saying the right thing or making a good show. They’re not about coming up with ‘the answer’ and certainly not about getting others to think as we do. They’re not about forcing anyone to change. These are all techniques of conquering a situation—taking charge and fixing it. Instead, Circles are about getting to the roots of our being, searching our hearts, souls, and truths, and rediscovering the values that help us express how we most want to be.”

I agree with much in this statement, but would add that circles can be used not only to address interpersonal problems, but problems on a larger scale. Indeed, unless circling does so expand its scope, I fear for the human future.

1. In “But What Should We Discuss?,” I made some suggestions regarding what might be discussed during SIG sessions.

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.

I was not, of course, happy about that fact, and reacted to that feeling by recalling some words written by someone for whom I have tremendous admiration, Philip Slater: “… there is no particular reason why the United States could not become the center of the most beautiful, benign, and exciting culture the world has ever known.”¹ I then put together “A ‘Meaningful’ Solution,” a brief essay in which I offered, not a solution per se, but a means to solutions, a special sort of discussion group—what I called the Structured Interaction Group (SIG). In that essay, I stated that the Leader for a particular session should start the discussion by saying whatever s/he felt “led” to say (whether or not it concerned either of the two above-named problems), and I continue to hold that position.

I realized, however, that it might be helpful to supply those interested in initiating SIGs having the specific intent of addressing the two above-mentioned problems with some “raw material” that might help stimulate the release of their creative juices while participating in a SIG session. Not wanting to present the ideas of just one person, I have therefore collected together summaries of ideas that several others have developed relative to a topic that is especially close to my heart—that of our “design specifications” as humans—and present them in the pages that follow. For reasons of length, however, I present these summaries in three separate essays.

In this first essay I begin by summarizing relevant ideas presented by George B. Leonard, Gordon Rattray Taylor, Edward Goldsmith, and Jean Liedloff. In Part II the ideas of George Edgin Pugh, Philip E. Slater, and Melvin Konner (et al.) are given attention. And, finally, I discuss relevant ideas of Paul Shepard and Dacher Keltner in Part III. I follow the discussion of Keltner with a summary of my own ideas as to what our “design specifications” are, and then offer some concluding remarks.

The amount of space that I devote to a given author should not be interpreted as indicating the importance of that author’s contribution. If anything, the opposite is true, for in the case of several of the authors, I restrict myself simply to a listing of contents, and encourage the reader to pursue those authors further.

I suppose that I should apologize for limiting my attention here to a discussion of “design specifications” (and ignoring the topic of “runaway”). This limitation might be interpreted as meaning that I have changed my mind regarding “our primary problem” (that of the possibility of “runaway”). But such is not the case. I justify my avoidance of that problem here, first, because my knowledge regarding “global warming” and technological developments “in the offing” to develop “safe” alternatives² is limited—and I have no particular interest in expanding my knowledge in those areas. Second, however, I believe (on the basis more of “faith” than hard evidence, I’ll admit) that if we give priority to developing a new way of life that is centered on realizing our “design specifications” as humans, in the process of doing so we might, very possibly, simultaneously solve our pollution and alternate energy problems.

Given my reference to “faith” in the above paragraph, let me begin here by identifying what are believe are the primary “articles of faith” that govern thought and action in our society (to repeat here somewhat from my “Obstacles to the Good Society”):

• Happiness comes especially from the consumption of goods and (more recently) services.

• One will “naturally” attempt to maximize one’s happiness.³

• There is no upper limit to happiness—more is always better.

• Given that acquisition must⁴ be by purchase rather than theft,⁵ one will “naturally” attempt to maximize one’s income.

Given that individuals vary in their abilities, personalities, interests, values, etc., the pursuit of income by some individuals in the society undoubtedly has an impact on other members of the society—it being highly likely, given what “drives” this society, that that impact is primarily negative. However, my intention here is not to pursue that (very real!) possibility but, rather, to question the “conventional wisdom” of our society as stated in the above four precepts—using as my point of departure the concept of “human design specifications.”

The concept of “human design specifications” could not arise until evolutionary thinking came to the fore—which occurred during the latter half of the nineteenth century, propelled especially by the publication of Charles Darwin’s [1809-1882] The Origin of Species in 1859. However, Darwin himself made absolutely no contribution to the concept. If anything, his contribution to the concept was of a negative nature (specifically in that it gave rise to Social Darwinian thinking)!⁶

My purpose is to give individuals interested in initiating a Structured Interaction Group (SIG) something to read and think about either before they establish a SIG or while they are involved in participating in one. My hope is that I have provided enough “raw material” in this paper for interesting discussions, and that those SIG discussions result in some creative ideas regarding how a way of life can be created—here and elsewhere—that will enable people to live in accord with their “design specs” as humans. Ideas that will generate excitement on participants’ parts, so that they will want to publicize them and work for their realization.

The concept of “human design specifications” has its basis in the thesis that a mutual development occurred, over a long period of time, between (a) humans as biological entities and (b) their way of life (i.e., their sustenance—and other—activities). This development was not mutual merely in the sense of simultaneous occurrence, but mutual in the sense that a “fit” developed as an integral part of this development. That is, humans came to “fit,” biologically, a certain way of life, and simultaneously developed a way of life that “fit” that biology.

Although there was no “purpose” associated with this mutual development,⁷ a “product” of it was a high level of well-being—both physical and psychological—for humans. Thus, the “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” existence claimed by Thomas Hobbes [1588-1679] for early humans had absolutely no merit when it was promulgated—and has even less merit today. Hobbes’s “conclusions” were based on a total absence of empirical support, and were likely invented to serve ideological ends rather than intended as historical statements. Given that possibility, it is unfortunate that Hobbes’s views on early humans have been accepted as “gospel truth” by so many over the past few centuries.

It is the facts that (a) the “fitting” of humans to a certain way of life occurred over a long period of time and (b) associated with that “fitting” was a high level of well-being for humans that allows me to assert that humans developed certain “design specifications” during that period of mutual “fitting.” The question that arises is: What are those “specifications”? I have no intention of supplying a definitive answer to that question here (for the reason stated above), and instead will provide some “food for thought.” What the reader does with these ideas, of course, is up to the reader.

My early intellectual life consisted of listening to parents, teachers, and preachers; reading textbooks and novels (such as Tom Sawyer and Ivanhoe); and watching television. Little of what I was exposed to was of an unconventional nature; and even when, in my later youth, I was exposed to “deviant” works such as Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, George Orwell’s 1984, Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener, or Everett Knight’s The Objective Society, such works had little impact on my thinking. For, after all, my orientation had to be to getting on with my life, and that required that I acquire an “education” that would prepare me for some sort of career.

Not until my late 30s—when I entered a somewhat unsettled period in my life—did I pay serious notice to societal critiques, and at present I can’t even remember what particular works especially caught my attention. It seems to me that the first societal critique that I read that made me take notice was George B. Leonard’s The Transformation: A Guide to the Inevitable Changes in Humankind.⁸ Although this book was published in 1972, I don’t think that I read it until the late 1970s.⁹

Introduction: George B. Leonard’s The Transformation

Leonard made a number of striking statements in this book, such as:

• “Actually, there is nothing essentially human or natural in our present situation.” (p. 11)

• “I consider how often the moments of bliss in my life have been associated with rhythmic activities—dancing, running down a long mountain trail, playing drums, paddling a canoe for hours—an affirmation, perhaps, of the essentially rhythmic nature of the universe.” (p. 16)

• “Only humanity under the conditions of Civilization has dared try to step outside the pulsing flow of nature.”¹⁰ (p. 18)

• “It has been consumers and components, unaware and out of tune with nature, that our culture has for the most part needed and produced.” (p. 24)

• “A space capsule is not a very good escape vehicle. We cannot escape ourselves.” (p. 29)

• “… every American knows (he is repeatedly reminded, in countless subtle ways) of his inalienable right, not to be happy, but to be unhappy in style.” (p. 34)

• “ … it is doubtful that anyone, including ourselves, can long tolerate the peculiarly deprived consciousness that prevails over most of this nation. Suffice it to say that the life of the [“primitive” African] Bushman … clearly contains more power and intensity, more laughter, more music, more challenge, more joy than does that of a typical American.” (p. 35)

• “In terms of how it feels to be alive, we have a very low standard of living indeed.” (p. 35)

• “The repeated use of ‘why?’ with young children constitutes one of our most effective ways of insuring that they not endow objects with vital force… . there are no real ‘whys’ in nature, and all the ‘hows’ are strictly provisional.” (p. 41)

• “Perhaps the basic, unacknowledged purpose of every zoo is to distort our children’s perceptions, to show them that living things can be ripped from their biofields and held, still “alive,” prepared for what Civilization, through a more complex series of manipulations, is going to do to them. It is interesting to note that zoos are prominently featured in those societies that mask their almost paranoid anxieties behind powerful machines of war—the Aztecs, the Assyrians, the Romans, the modern megastates.” (p. 165)

• “[Our] ponderous and complex material culture is actually a millstone around the ordinary citizen’s neck.” (p. 51)

• “Higher technology … seems to go along with social stratification—the proliferation of classes and castes and the decline of a sense of single community.” (p. 56)

• “Religion, ever more priestly and separate from daily living, validates caste and class, and sanctions formal codified punishment as a means of social control.” (p. 60)

• “All religions that promise specific, significant rewards in an afterlife are agricultural adaptations.” (p. 63)

• “… we know that, in order to achieve success, every child of Civilization must have at least one physical or mental deformity, one Gift from the culture.” (p. 69)

• Etc., etc.

Much in the book lends itself to commentary, but I will here focus on just one of the topics that he discussed. In his Chapter 5 (“The Gift”) he noted that neuroses, diseases, and just plain discontents are associated with Civilization, and that rather than discussing the causes and consequences associated with each separately, he would lump them all together and give them the name NDDs. He then offered (p. 71-72) a series of theses regarding NDDs:

• “Civilization’s most indispensable nonmaterial endowment to its children is some type of neurosis/disease/discontent.”

• “The best way of gaining temporary relief from dis-ease lies in forgetfulness of existence. This is generally achieved either by drugs or by the relentless getting and building that has characterized much of human life since the success of agriculture [10,000 years ago].”

• Individuals need to be “afflicted with dis-ease in order for Civilization’s work to be done.” Despite what Sigmund Freud taught, the “NDDs do not necessarily result … from a conflict between humankind’s sexual and aggressive instincts and the realities of social life.” Rather, Civilization per se is the culprit.

• “An NDD is more effective the more its origin is veiled. When one mode of programming dis-ease is widely revealed in a particular society, that mode loses much of its power.”

• “Up to a certain remarkably high breaking point, the NDDs are not maladaptive for the civilized individual but highly adaptive. A pre-ulcerous condition makes for success in this society; ulcers are a bit too much.”

• Every NDD is of both a physical and psychological nature… every NDD leaves some physical scar. To that extent we are all maimed and we are maiming our children.”

• “The NDDs are essentially incurable in any civilized society and perhaps in any society that has advanced as far as agriculture. Symptoms may shift and particular forms of dis-ease may be exchanged for others. The basic condition remains[, however]. Transformation of society is the only real cure.”

Note this last statement: “Transformation of society is the only real cure;” it is a statement with which I concur; indeed, in a sense I offered some ideas relative to that matter in my “Our Primary Problem” (i.e., self-sufficient homesteads and self-sufficient “intentional” communities).

Leonard’s argument, in brief, seemed to be:

• World history since the “fall” into agriculture,¹¹ rather than being a story of continual, even accelerating, progress, has been one of continual, even accelerating, regress.

• In arguing (p. 3) that “most of our current troubles … can be traced ultimately to the lack of a vivid unifying principle or belief system [“vision”],” Leonard seemed to state that what initiated this process of regress was the loss of a “vivid unifying principle or belief system … .”

• Leonard’s reference (p. 235) to “these fading days of Civilization” suggests that he believed that the period of regress was coming to an end, to be followed by some sort of Golden Age.

• On p. 3 Leonard asserted that “the Transformation [of our society], despite surface similarities, is neither utopian nor millenarian, … it is not only possible but inevitable, …it is, most significantly already, well under way, … it proceeds out of historical necessity, amenable to validation both by intuition and by reason.” On p. 236 he repeated his claim: “I know that the Transformation is possible because it is already so well under way.”

I agree with parts of Leonard’s argument, but disagree with other parts:

• I agree that world history since the Agricultural Revolution has been, in important respects, a story of regress—the criterion that I am using here being the “general welfare.”

• Whereas Leonard seemed to think of the cause of this regress as being the loss of a “vivid unifying principle or belief system,” my explanation is The Discrepancy (discussed briefly above). As one reads in the book, one may “read” my explanation into the book (i.e., one may infer such an explanation from the contents of the book); however, Leonard’s explicit (apparent) explanation does not agree with such an inference.

• I assume that this Discrepancy was not chosen. Humans made certain choices, true, but could not foresee all of the ramifications of their choices—could not anticipate that a Discrepancy would arise and grow in magnitude. But it did; and—following the “one thing leads to another” principle—once a process of societal-cultural change got underway, it gained the appearance of being a “natural” process. And, in fact, was labeled “progress”—and embraced by most.¹²

• Although Leonard ostensibly perceived a “fading away” of Civilization, and the dawn of a glorious future, he failed to present an explanation for that turnaround. I, in contrast, see no reason to believe in such a turnaround; what appears to be more likely is James Lovelock’s¹³ prediction that by the end of this century few, if any, humans will be alive!

• Perhaps in 1972 (when Leonard’s book was published) there seemed to be evidence of a change in “consciousness,” so that it was then reasonable to project the expansion of that “consciousness” throughout the civilized world. But if a change in consciousness was detectable at that time, I would interpret this not as an independent development with great (and positive) causal potential but, rather, as just another effect of a growing Discrepancy!

• A belief that positive change began to occur around 1972 seems terribly naïve today.

• I agree with Leonard that the “cure” for our problems is societal system change (rather than electing a new president, developing a new curriculum for the schools, etc.), but do not believe that it will “just happen”—or happen in the way that Leonard apparently thought.

• Rather, I believe that societal system change will occur only as the result of (1) the development of plans, (2) plans capable of implementation, and (3) the actual implementation of those plans.

• I agree with Leonard’s statement (p. 3) that “the biblical dictum that where there is no vision the people perish is by no means merely metaphorical.” But where “vision” needs to enter the picture (I’m convinced) is in developing plans for societal system change. For if plans are developed that are easily understood and that capture people’s imaginations, the enthusiasm generated by the plans can result in people becoming actively—and energetically—involved in implementing the plans.

• Plans that are developed must have an orientation to bringing genuine well-being to as many as possible, while simultaneously ensuring ways of life that are sustainable. The focus of this paper, however, is “only” on the first subject.

In the next series of sections, I summarize (or at least list, in some cases) ideas that a number of writers have published relative to human “design specifications” and then conclude (in Part III) by presenting my own (tentative) thoughts on the matter. I begin with a book by Gordon Rattray Taylor [1911-1981], Rethink: A Paraprimitive Solution.¹⁴ As the title of this book suggests, its contents bear a fairly strong resemblance to those of Leonard’s book—and the book was also published in 1972.

Taylor’s “Rethinking”

Taylor begins by noting that (p. 7) in the “developed” countries, at least, “the suspicion seems to be crystallizing that somewhere down the line we took a wrong turning.” And that although most of those having this “suspicion” likely do not realize it, there is good reason to conclude (p. 8) that “the future cannot be, must not be, simply an extension of the past: a radical rethinking of the whole system is needed.” Taylor noted (p. 17) that the “primitive” societies that have been studied by anthropologists in general do not exhibit the signs of stress (e.g., alcoholism, suicide), common in “advanced” societies, which fact suggests strongly that “such stresses are the product of an unsuitable way of life.” That is, if one becomes an alcoholic, this is not the result of a weak personality, poor choices, etc. but, rather is attributable to the nature of the society that one lives in. Given this conclusion, Taylor looked to “primitive” societies to see what can be learned from them that would be applicable to modern “advanced” societies. Taylor realized that it would not be either possible or desirable to “go back” to the sort of sustenance system of the “primitives” (i.e., a gatherer-hunter way of life). Yet he observed (p. 13) that the technological developments that have occurred in the “advanced” societies have been a mixed blessing: they have made life easier but have not necessarily made life better. In fact, Taylor baldly declared (p. 19) that “we live in a psychological slum.”

Taylor noted (p. 10) that “material advance” has been a primary characteristic of the “developed” countries, but that this has not been accompanied by an increase in people’s level of satisfaction. And he asked: Do we need to reconstruct society to achieve this end? His answer, of course, is that we do; and he establishes as the primary goal (p. 15) improving mental health: “we must think in terms of improving mental health, creating sound basic personalities and the matching of social institutions to them.” That is, our goal should be especially to have a society within which all members have “sound basic personalities,” and to achieve that goal we must establish institutions that will conduce the emergence of such personalities. If we allow technological development to continue to occur without any thought as to its impact on how institutions, and thus basic personalities, are affected, we will simply intensify our problems—make our societies even worse psychological slums than they already are.

Taylor contended (p. 12) that there are three ways of living:

• Service to others.

• The manipulation of materials.

• Having an intellectual life.

And he evidently perceived these three ways of living as mutually exclusive. Regarding these three “ways” Taylor argued that a problem arises “when a society offers a range of choices which differs from the range which its members demand … .” I assume that what he meant here is that there are several “natural” personality types, and that it is important for a society to recognize this, and ensure that the society is structured in such a way that all of these types can readily find expression. Taylor added (p. 22) that a society must offer a range of challenges to its members, and even (p. 57) satisfy a need to have some mystery in life. One might argue, Taylor notes (p. 89), that the psychological needs that people have can be satisfied during leisure time if they are not satisfied during one’s “work” time. But Taylor insisted that the answer, rather, lies in striving for the sort of wholeness that characterizes (and presumably has characterized) the lives of “primitive” peoples.

This conclusion led Taylor to offer a list (p. 149) of the characteristics of a society “fit” for human habitation:

• The rate of social change would be small.

• Members of the society would live in communities.

• The society would have an improved political system.

• Members of the society would live in the country.

• A consumer mentality would be rejected by the members of the society.

• Bureaucracy would be simplified in the society.

• “Busyness” would not be valued.

• Reflection, however, would be valued.

At a slightly later point (p. 153) Taylor noted, “A sensible person would choose to live in a society whose other members were also sensible.” He adds that “it is precisely the creation of a sensible populace which constitutes the problem.” Yes, indeed!

I find it difficult to disagree with the eight points listed by Taylor—nine, if “sensible people” is added. However, how does one reduce the rate of social change? What is the nature of the communities that Taylor envisions? What would an “improved political system” look like? Is the goal of living in the country consistent with the goal of living in communities? How does one eliminate a consumer mentality from the society? How does one accomplish simplification of bureaucracy? How does one get people to become less busy, and more reflective? How does one get a society of sensible people?

Given all of the questions that Taylor’s list causes one to ask, one might feel it necessary to conclude that Taylor himself was not a very sensible person! For one is forced to ask of his list: Of what value is it to develop a list of goals worth achieving if one does not also provide some worthwhile ideas regarding how those goals might be achieved?! I suppose that lists such as those provided by Taylor are of some value in that they can cause others to think of the goals that they would put forth which, in turn, might lead them to develop ideas regarding how their goals might be achieved. Still, it is not very satisfying to read a list of goals without also being given at least some ideas regarding how those goals might be realized. However, if a list such as the one that Taylor offered would be used as the basis for a group discussion, the list might prove to be of value precisely because of its lack of specificity! That’s my hope, at any rate.

Goldsmith’s “Blueprint”

Edward Goldsmith [1928-2009], founder (in 1969) of The Ecologist, devoted the entire January 2 issue (1972) to a long article entitled “A Blueprint for Survival,” later that year published as a book.¹⁵ In that book, he advocated the creation of a stable society ecologically, but also made a few comments regarding human well-being. Let me begin my summary of his discussion of that topic by quoting a statement that he made at the end of the book: “… if we are capable of ensuring a relatively smooth transition to it [i.e., a stable society], we can be optimistic about providing our children with a way of life psychologically, intellectually and aesthetically more satisfying than the present one. And we can be confident that it will be sustainable as ours cannot be, so that the legacy of despair we are about to leave them may at the last minute be changed to hope.”¹⁶

In “The Goal” portion of the book (the final of four) Goldsmith made these comments that pertain to human well-being:

• “A society made up of decentralized, self-sufficient communities, in which people work near their homes, have the responsibility of governing themselves, of running their schools, hospital, and welfare services, in fact of constituting real communities, should, we feel, be a much happier place.” (Sect. 312) This indicates that Goldsmith put a premium on subjective feelings of well-being, and was convinced that having an ability to play a major role in decision-making that affected them was a vital factor underlying such a feeling.

• Goldsmith added that if people lived “in these conditions, [they] would be likely to develop an identity of their own, which many of us have lost in the mass society we live in. They would tend, once more,¹⁷ to find an aim in life, develop a set of values, and take pride in their achievements as well as in those of their community.” Sect. 313) Here Goldsmith’s emphasis was psychological and ethical.

When I read this passage, the Cheers television program theme song came to my mind “Where Everybody Knows Your Name,” by Gary Portnoy and Judy Hart Angelo), three verses of which are:

Making your way in the world today
Takes everything you’ve got;
Taking a break from all your worries
Sure would help a lot.
Wouldn’t you like to get away?

All those nights when you’ve got no lights
The check is in the mail;
And your little angel
Hung the cat up by its tail;
And your third fiancée didn’t show.

      Sometimes you want to go
      Where everybody knows your name,
      And they’re always glad you came;
      You want to be where you can see,
      Our troubles are all the same;
      You want to be where everybody knows your name.

In the next section I discuss a book by Jean Liedloff that recounts her experiences with the Yequana Natives of Venezuela. Ironic here is that the characters in the once-popular Cheers program were trying to emulate the Yequana but had no idea that they were; and that the song’s composer likely also had no idea that he was writing as if he were a Yequana! Cheers, of course, was set in the “Cheers” bar in Boston (which I had occasion to visit a few years ago, as my older daughter was a student at Boston University at the time), and I feel it necessary to “ask”: Isn’t it a pathetic commentary on our society that to have some semblance of a “natural” life—for a time at least—one must go to a bar?! Not that all bars will “do the trick,” of course; but it almost seems that only bars will! (Which is not to say that I am a frequenter of bars—for I most decidedly am not!)

• Goldsmith’s interest in having psychological needs met was made explicit in Sect. 314, in which he asserted that the absence of “these things” (identified in the previous point) is what results in “rendering our mass society ever less tolerable to us and in particular to our youth and to which can be attributed the present rise in drug-addiction, alcoholism and delinquency, all of which are symptomatic of a social disease in which a society fails to furnish its members with their basic psychological requirements.”

• In Sect. 315 Goldsmith presented a long quotation from John Stuart Mill’s [1806-1873] Principles of Political Economy, Vol. II (1857), one excerpt being: “Nor is there much satisfaction in contemplating a world with nothing left to the spontaneous activity of nature …” This suggests a conviction, on Goldsmith’s part, that because we humans developed “in Nature,” we evolved with a need for close contact with Nature. In Sect. 123 Goldsmith noted that “Industrial man in the world today is like a bull in a china shop, with the single difference that a bull with half the information about the properties of china as we have about those of ecosystems would probably try and [sic: to] adapt its behaviour to its environment rather than the reverse.” Implicit here is the conviction that if we are to live in a harmonious manner with Nature, it is not enough to collect ever more scientific knowledge about Nature. Doing that has great importance, to be sure, but equally (perhaps more) important is to experience Nature. For doing so can not only help one gain knowledge about Nature, but help one gain a sense of oneness and respect-reverence for Nature—which feelings will make one reluctant to despoil Nature in any manner.

Although both Edward Goldsmith and (especially) Gordon Rattray Taylor wrote admiringly about “primitive” peoples, their knowledge of such people was based on what they had read (by, e.g., anthropologists). Jean Liedloff, in contrast, wrote her The Continuum Concept¹⁸ on the basis of her personal experience with “primitives” in South America.

Liedloff’s “Continuum”

While in Florence, Italy, on her first trip to Europe (from New York City) Liedloff met, and became acquainted with, two Italian explorers (p. 3), and was invited by them to accompany them on a diamond-hunting expedition to the Caroni River (a tributary of the Orinoco River) in Venezuela. She accepted the invitation (but does not comment on why she did so in her book¹⁹ ).

The group then traveled to Venezuela (which means “little Venice,” after the Italian city with that name), and proceeded (p. 6) up the Orinoco, and then the Caroni and, finally, the Carupi River (a tributary of the Caroni). While on the expedition she encountered Tauripan Natives; and although on this trip made no effort to study these Natives, she was struck by the fact that (p. 8) they were all evidently happy and (p. 9): “The children were uniformly well-behaved: never fought, were never punished, always obeyed happily and instantly; the deprecation ‘Boys will be boys’ did not apply to them; but I never asked myself why.” These observations made her curious about the Natives she encountered, but as the purpose of the expedition was other than to observe Natives, she lacked motivation to satisfy her curiosity.

Later (she did not specify how much later—or even when the initial expedition occurred), she went on a second expedition (p. 12-13) this time led by another Italian, the destination being the upper Caura River basin near the Brazilian border. Not only did she not indicate when this second expedition occurred, she did not even comment on its purpose. Evidently she believed that such details were not important for her story, for she only wrote about her contact with members of the Yequana and Sanema tribes.

Her comments about those Natives suggest that the purpose of the expedition was to learn about “natives” in Venezuela, for she made a number of comments (p. 13-16) about the Natives she observed on this trip:

• All of the men, women, and children had strong personalities—each was an individual in his/her own right. Meaning that no pressures for conformity existed with these Natives.

• The people seemed unreal to her because of the “absence of unhappiness, a large factor in every society familiar to me.” “The ‘rules’ of human behavior did not [seem to] apply to them.”

• There didn’t seem to be any word for “work” in the Yequana vocabulary. This is not to say that they failed to engage in sustenance activities—for obviously they did: their survival depended on it. But when they engaged in activities necessary for their continued survival, they did so as members of a group, and in doing so engaged in gossiping and joking while “working.” Indeed, “a party mood prevailed.” That is, they had learned to do the “work” necessary for their continued survival in such a way that it was enjoyable; they got their “work” done, but the “work” itself was almost secondary to their other activities while “working.” In a sense, the “work” they engaged in was simply an excuse for being, and interacting, with other members of their tribe, which interaction they made enjoyable for themselves. They had learned to interact one with another in a manner that all parties involved found enjoyable, and by combining this mode of interaction with those activities necessary to their survival they had “hit” upon a mode of living that (1) made them all happy, (2) resulted in their necessary “work” getting done, and (3) helped give cohesiveness to their group. Given this, is it any wonder that (p. 15) “They … had no motive to progress,²⁰ as they felt no need, no pressure from any quarter, to change their ways.”

• Liedloff could detect no tendencies for competition in their behavior—suggesting that cooperative behavior is what we humans are programmed for. (Note that one of Darwin’s first important critics was Russian Prince Peter Kropotkin [1842-1921], who wrote a book—Mutual Aid (1902)—based in part on his research in Siberia; Kropotkin argued that, contrary to Darwin, cooperation was the “law of life.” Were he alive today, I feel confident that he would find Liedloff’s book not only highly important, but a joy to read.)

Liedloff’s expeditions three and four (p. 18) were under her own leadership, and presumably had the purpose of studying the Yequana (specifically) more intensely—for she referred to her journals, and noted that they “reflect that the unlearning technique was becoming second nature to me …,” but was having difficulty letting go of the notion that unhappiness was not a “legitimate … part of experience …” When she returned to New York City after her fourth trip, she stated (p. 18) that by then she had developed “a point of view so stripped of presuppositions that the effect was like arriving after a long haul at zero.” For a time (she did not specify how long) she had a jumble of ideas in her head concerning the “primitives” that she had been observing, but after an editor of the New York Times asked her to elaborate on a statement that she had made earlier that was quoted in the Times, she “began to reverse the tearing-down process, and, bit by bit, to perceive the order that underlay not only my South American observations but also the naked fragments into which I had broken my experience of civilized life.” She admits that at this point she was “innocent of [any] theory,” but that “After about a year” she came to recognize “the evolutionary origins of human expectations and tendencies that began to explain the high state of well-being of my savage friends compared with the civilized.” Clearly her use of the word “savage” here should not be interpreted as indicating that Liedloff thought of the Yequana as her inferiors—for most certainly she did not!

Even after coming to see the Yequana in an evolutionary light, however, Liedloff did not feel that she was ready to write a book about her experiences. Thus, she made (p. 19) a fifth expedition “to see whether my observations, only rallied retrospectively into a body of evidence, might be usefully augmented by deliberate study.” She learned a few additional facts about the Yequana during the course of this trip, “But in the main, Expedition Five served to assure me that my interpretation of their behavior, constructed from my recollections of it, was supported by the reality. Indeed, the once-unaccountable actions of Indians of both tribes [Yequana and Sanema], viewed in the light of continuum principles, became not only understandable but often predictable.”

Liedloff’s Chapter 2 is entitled “The Continuum Concept” (p. 21-28), but nowhere in that chapter did she clearly define “continuum concept.” On p. 25 she stated, “The human continuum can also be defined …,” which implies that “continuum concept” had been defined earlier in the chapter—but it wasn’t. Let us, however, attempt to infer the meaning she intended for “continuum concept” from what she wrote in Chapter 2.

She began by claiming that during our first 2 million years (p. 21) “man²¹ was a success. He had evolved from apehood to manhood as a hunter-gatherer [I prefer “gatherer-hunter,” following Richard Leakey] with an efficient life style [I prefer “way of life.”²² ] which had it continued, might have seen him through many a million-year anniversary. As it is, most ecologists agree, his chances of surviving even another century are diminished with each day’s activities.”

“But,” she continued, “during the brief few thousand years since he strayed [with the Agricultural Revolution] from the way of life to which [processes of] evolution adapted him, he has not only wreaked havoc upon the natural order of the entire planet, he has also managed to bring into disrepute the highly evolved good sense that guided his behavior throughout all those eons.” I agree that the Agricultural Revolution has proven to be a disaster for humankind, and also agree that humans had become adapted to a certain way of life (that included gathering and hunting—and fishing, snaring in some locales—as sustenance activities). However, I would add (using Liedloff herself as my source!) that child-rearing practices also had an impact on adult behavior, as well as habits developed while one was young, and growing up with other youngsters in a common environment.

Liedloff implied that the change in ways of living associated with the Agricultural Revolution was accompanied by a change in the role of the human brain in human affairs (p. 21): “Ever more frequently our innate sense of what is best for us is short-circuited by suspicion while the intellect, which has never known much about our real needs, decides what to do. It is not, for example, the province of the reasoning faculty to decide how a baby ought to be treated.” What she could have added at this point—but didn’t—was that prior to the Agricultural Revolution the human brain had acted as a servant to one’s total being, but that after that Revolution got underway, it began to assume the role of a master ever more. As Joost A. M. Meerloo has stated (p. vii in his Foreword to A. T. W. Simeons’s Man’s Presumptuous Brain: An Evolutionary Interpretation of Psychosomatic Disease),²³ “the brain of human animals in the pre-cultural period of evolution was well-adapted to its environment. It served adequately to master the dangers of the world. But man is born like a monkey foetus, naked and unprotected, with a freakish brain, an overgrown computer, far too advanced for its body. Such a presumptuous brain gradually leads to an overgrown censorship. Man, the helpless baby … begins at the dawn of culture to build a new artificial environment which makes many of his animal reflexes nearly obsolete.” That is, for whatever reason(s), with the onset of the Agricultural Revolution the brain began to “interfere” with the “instincts.” This not only led to a mismanagement of child care (Liedloff), but the onset of various psychosomatic disorders (Simeons).

Liedloff continued (p. 22): “We are now fairly brought to heel by the intellect; our inherent²⁴ sense of what is good for us has been undermined to the point where we are barely aware of its working and cannot tell an original impulse from a distorted one.” The “conscious mind, by its [very] nature, can only consider one thing at a time, while [sic: whereas] the unconscious can make any number of observations, calculations, syntheses, and executions simultaneously and correctly. ‘Correct’ in this context is a tricky word. It implies that we all agree on what we want the results of our actions to be, when in fact our intellectual ideas of what we want vary from person to person. What is meant here by ‘correct’ is that which is appropriate to the ancient continuum of our species inasmuch as it is suited to the tendencies and expectations which we have evolved.”

We find in this passage the first discussion²⁵ of “continuum” that occurs in the book, and it would appear from the discussion that precedes its mention here (on p. 22) that she means by “continuum” the absence of a Discrepancy²⁶ —the existence of accordance, “fit,” between the way of life for which we became “designed” prior to the Agricultural Revolution and the ways of life that we humans have been forced to live ever since. Perhaps, however, it would be more accurate to say “way of life that we had” rather than “way of life for which we had become designed,” given that the behaviors that Liedloff observed with the Yequana likely could be attributed partly to genetics, partly to the nature of their child care, and partly to learning and the development of habits.

On p. 23 Liedloff asked (after her reference to “tendencies” and “expectations” on the previous page: “How do the forces that put him [i.e., humans] together know in advance what a human will need? The secret is experience. The chain of experience that prepares a human being for his time on earth begins with the adventures of the first single-celled unit of living matter. What it experienced in the way of temperature, the composition of its surroundings, available nourishment to fuel its activities, weather changes, and bumpings into other objects or members of its own species was passed on to its descendants.” This is a somewhat odd claim on her part, because in her prior discussion she seemed to suggest that evolution occurred by selection processes, and now she seemed to be saying that she believes in Lamarckian inheritance—i.e., the possibility that acquired traits can be transmitted to progeny. Perhaps she was here alluding to epigenetic research (such as has recently been undertaken by Swedish scientist Lars Olov Bygren), but she made no reference to such research.

She next made (p. 24) a glib reference to “the stabilizing principle” without presenting any reasons for expecting a situation of non-change. In the case of humans prior to the “Fall” (into agriculture) I have noted (earlier in my discussion of Liedloff) that our ancestors (if the Yequana can be taken as a modern example) had a way of life that they found so satisfying that they would have had no desire to introduce changes in it. That doesn’t mean that they could not have made certain decisions whose consequences would have brought change to that way of life—change that appeared to be of a positive nature, but turned out otherwise (the Agricultural Revolution!)—but such decisions were either absent or of a negligible nature until 10,000 years ago. Liedloff, however, offered no explanation for the “stabilizing principle” that she posits.

She continued (p. 24): The “design” that emerged for our species “was a reflection of the experience it expected to encounter. The experience it could tolerate was defined by the circumstances to which its antecedents had adapted.” I dislike her use of the word “expectations” here because it suggests conscious awareness—although I’m sure that it was not her intention to suggest that. I assume that what she meant in using the word “expectations” is that the human develops—for whatever reasons—with certain needs and certain behavioral tendencies, and that if those needs are not met and those behavioral tendencies are denied expression, only negative results will be forthcoming—both for the individual involved, and for others with whom s/he comes in contact.²⁷

We finally encounter a definition of sorts of “continuum concept” on p. 25: “The human continuum can … be defined as the sequence of experience which corresponds to the expectations and tendencies of the human species in an environment consistent with that in which those expectations and tendencies were formed.” I’m not sure what she was trying to say here, but she appears to have been saying that our needs and behavioral tendencies are not a “given” at birth, so that they remain unchanged over the course of our lives, but, rather, change as we age. If that’s what she meant, why didn’t she just say it?!

I have devoted a considerable amount of attention to the first few pages of Liedloff’s book, because I thought it necessary for providing a background to her “real” message. In her lengthy Chapter 3 (“The Beginning of Life,” p. 29-75) she noted (p. 36): “For millions of years newborn babies have been held close to their mothers²⁸ from the moment of birth.” She argued (p. 37): “The state of consciousness of an infant changes enormously during [this early] … in-arms²⁹ phase.” “Step by step, as his central nervous system develops, he becomes more particularly Homo sapiens [i.e., s/he realizes his/her potential as a human being].” “What he feels before he can think is a powerful determinant of what kind of things he thinks when thought becomes possible.” The sort of care that a child receives will likely have a decisive influence on the sort of person s/he becomes. In addition, the social environment one finds oneself in as a youth can also be a significant factor; and I agree with Trigánt Burrow that even one’s “experience” while in the womb can have importance.

Liedloff noted (p. 39) that: “Man, more adaptive still [than a woolly monkey] to his own experience, can cope with variations in his surroundings that would extinguish a less ingenious species.” I agree, but would add that our superior ability to adapt has negative as well as positive consequences. For example (and I believe that Liedloff would agree with this point), since the Agricultural Revolution we humans have developed ways of life that have been progressive in the sense of progressively Discrepant! Most of us have become somewhat adapted to (or at least resigned to) our Discrepant way of life, although some of us have “adapted” by acquiring heart problems, lung cancer, diabetes; some have “adapted” by becoming drug addicts or alcoholics; some have “adapted” by turning to crime; some have adapted without acquiring (or becoming) any of the above, but dislike the fact that we must adapt for the sake of survival; etc.

In a conclusion of sorts to her discussion (that occurs, however, in the middle of the chapter, on p. 43!), she stated: “The conscious mind is not what it seems to itself to be, nor does it have access to the programming secrets of the continuum it is evolved to serve. To make of the intellect a competent servant instead of an incompetent master must be a major goal of a continuum philosophy.” What we need today is not just an understanding of the Discrepancy concept, and the problems that it is causing for us, but ideas on “whither we should tend” and how to get there. I have already addressed the first of these topics earlier in this chapter, and shortly will list Liedloff’s contribution.

Before proceeding to Liedloff’s list, however, I would like to note that on p. 49-56 she presented a detailed discussion of child-rearing practices of the Yequana, followed by a discussion of the contrasting infant experiences of Western-raised children. What that presentation suggests is that Liedloff believes that the primary need we “advanced” peoples have is a need to revolutionize our child care methods. I concur with this view but would add that our society, as currently constituted, requires its members to be “maimed” (as George Leonard, quoted earlier, put it); and that it is also true that in our society (as Thorstein Veblen noted over a century ago): “All classes are in a measure engaged in the pecuniary struggle, and in all classes the possession of the pecuniary traits counts towards the success and [indeed very] survival of the individual.” ³⁰ The point is, then, that rather than encouraging people to adopt the child-rearing practices that Liedloff advocates, with the expectation that societal system change will eventually follow, we must build, within the Larger Society, a New Society that has all of the features that we desire (including for sustainability), and work for its continual expansion—until it entirely replaces the Old Society. Liedloff claims (p. 138): “It is sadly impractical, unrealistic, utopian to describe a culture to which ours could be changed in order to fill our continuum requirements.” I do not concur with that judgment, however, and believe that societal system change in some form is a necessity. So that the point is not whether we need societal system change but, rather, how to get it and what form it should take.

At an earlier point (p. 105) Liedloff—who had been bemoaning our “presumptuous brains”—declared: “We have no choice but to find our way back to that knowledge common to the Yequana and our own ancestors, through the use of the intellect.” I would add only that in our “voyage of return” we recognize that we are not alone on this planet—which fact has at least two implications:

• We must strive not only to bring change to our society, but to others as well—but eschewing the use of the “heavy-handed” procedures that we have tended to use with “inferior” other peoples.

• We must recognize that we will continue to have enemies (largely of our own making, as a result of our mistreatment of other peoples!), and therefore must continue to have defense capabilities in proportion to the threats “out there.” We have long had a Defense Department, but must make it into a department that matches its name: to date it has been rather offensive—in both meanings of the word!

Let us, then, identify (and comment upon, where appropriate) Liedloff’s proposals—beyond her key one, the need for a revolution in our child-care practices:

• A culture that desires to return to “continuum principles” needs (p. 138) “a language in which the human potential for verbalizing can grow.”

• Children need (p. 138) to be able to “hear adults speaking to one another,” and “should have contemporaries with whom to communicate” on their own “level of interest and development. It is also important that … [the child] always have associates slightly older than himself so that he can have a sense of where he is going before he gets there.”

• The (p. 138) “activities of a child need both companionship and example. A society that does not provide them will lose in the efficiency of its members as well as in their well-being.”

• A (p. 139) “generation gap” should not exist. “If the younger generation does not take pride in becoming like its elders, then the society has lost its own continuum, its own stability, and probably does not have a culture worth calling one, for it will be in a constant state of change from one unsatisfactory set of values to another.”

• (p. 139): “The constant promise of a ‘better tomorrow’ … is of no interest to the members of an evolved, stable, proud, and happy society.” “An unchanging way of life is called for which requires the work and cooperation of its members in amounts not excessive to their natures.” When I read this last passage, the Amish came to my mind. Although I have admiration for the Amish—and am glad that they are in our midst, for they demonstrate to the world that “there’s another way”—I don’t see much resemblance between them and the Yequana—for whom I have infinitely more admiration. It seems to me that because it is impossible for us to “go back” literally, it is foolish for us to think that we can re-create a society that—like that of the Yequana—will be unchanging. We can only be vigilant so that before we adopt something new, we carefully think through the implications of its adoption before doing so (as the Amish do now), to ensure that the goals of universal well-being and sustainability will not be affected adversely. It is, of course, always possible that those goals will be enhanced by the adoption of new ideas and practices, and for that reason we should not reject the new out of hand. (I am sitting here typing this on my computer, and would not give up my computer for anything! Well, that’s not quite true.)

• (p. 139): “Families should be in close contact with other families, and everyone, during his or her working life, ought to have the opportunity for companionship and cooperation.”

• (p. 140): “Children ought to be able to accompany adults wherever they go.”

• (p. 140): “In a continuum-correct society the generations would live under the same roof.” Inspired by the ideas of Charles Fourier³¹ [1772-1837], who proposed the creation of “phalanxes” (i.e., “grand hotels”), I would go even farther than Liedloff in arguing for the desirability of multi-family structures. Not only for the interactional possibilities that they open up, but for their contribution to sustainability goals.

• (p. 141): “Leadership would emerge naturally among the members of a society, very much as it does among children, and confine itself to taking initiatives only when individual ones are impractical.” I expect that on those occasions when leadership was called for, different individuals would emerge as temporary leaders, depending on the situation. In general, however, decisions would be made by consensus, so that leaders would simply not be needed—or even desired.

• (p. 141): “The number of people who [would] live and work together would vary from a few families to several hundred people, so that the individual would be interested in maintaining good relations with all the people with whom he deals.” Although we humans have certain needs in common, each one of us is also unique in our needs. What this means from the standpoint of nature of residence is that some people have a desire to live “in nature” with just a few others nearby, others prefer to live in much larger agglomerations. The Good Society would have few if, any, cities, larger than the size of, e.g., Des Moines, Iowa—for the simple reason that there would be no justification for larger agglomerations.

• Although (p. 143) conformity in behavior is common in “advanced” societies (for whatever reasons), in a “continuum-correct” society there would be “freer expressions of innate characteristics, since the society has no need to fear or try to suppress them.” (Note that Liedloff had observed a high degree of individuality with the Yequana, but this was combined with a universal cooperative spirit.)

• A “continuum-correct” society would be characterized (as Yequana society is) by a (p. 144) “supreme desire not to create tension.” Liedloff then went on to describe the “gentlemanliness” of the Yequana exemplified “when she had business to transact with Anchu, the Yequana chief.” After describing the nature of her relationship, in this case, with Anchu, she concluded (p. 145): “He was, one could say, trying to disengage my continuum sense from the innumerable interferences my own culture had imposed upon it.” That is, Anchu had such tremendous insight into the “mindset” of Liedloff, that he was able subtly guide her in the direction that she needed to go; and Liedloff gave the impression that all Yequana developed such a talent as a matter of course!

• We all need (p. 146) a variety of stimuli—our current way of life not satisfying that requirement. Liedloff added (p. 148): “A great part of our tragedy is that we have lost the sense of our ‘rights’ as members of the human species. Not only do we accept boredom with resignation, but innumerable other infringements upon what is left of our continuum after the ravages of infancy and childhood.” It’s not that we “accept” boredom but, rather, become “resigned” to it—while, however, maintaining, somewhere deep inside, a strong desire for a different way of life. A desire that we are forced to suppress in our current society, but a desire that can be drawn upon if the right sort of New Society Movement were to get underway.

Parts II and III are available from the author upon request.

1. Philip E. Slater, The Pursuit of Loneliness: American Culture at the Breaking Point. Boston: Beacon Press, 1970, p. 144. Dr. Slater has a web site.
2. For a recent example, with avionics relevance.
3. A corollary here is that if someone is to be rewarded, the reward should be monetary—so that the recipient can increase his/her level of consumption, and thereby become happier.
4. What is the rationale behind this “must”? Could it be that people are more readily exploited in a society within which there is “law and order”? A fact, however, which must be hidden from public view lest its knowledge leads to an overturning of the social order!
5. Thus, redistribution efforts, whether performed in the manner pioneered by Robin Hood, or by “legal” means, are typically perceived as constituting theft.
6. Robert C. Bannister is one scholar who would deny this. But also see Richard Weikart’s web site which has links to a number of works by Prof. Weikart on the subject.
7. Either one chosen by those involved in these developments or one imposed upon them by a Higher Power.
8. New York: Dell Publishing Company, Inc., 1972.
9. Leonard was born in 1923, and died on January 6, 2010. He had, e.g., been the editor of Look magazine for a time.
10. Spending several hours on a golf course does not constitute getting close to Nature—for one’s mind is on the game, not the surround. Besides, the well-tended grassy surround isn’t even natural!
11. “The Biblical legend of the expulsion from the Garden of Eden seems clearly to describe the invention of agriculture.” Warren Johnson, Muddling Toward Frugality. Boulder, CO: Shambhala, 1979, p. 43.
12. After all, one has little choice on this matter—for heroic efforts are needed to “buck” the ways of the society that one was born and raised in.
13. Lovelock is most noted for being the originator of the “Gaia” hypothesis.
14. New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, Inc., 1972.
15. He left this position in 1990, at the urging of Norwegian “deep ecologist” Arne Naess, to write the lengthy The Way: An Ecological Worldview, published in 1992. An updated version was published by the University of Georgia Press in 2008.
16. I am quoting from the online version, section 354. Given that the book (presented in four sections, plus appendices) is organized into a series of short numbered sections, it will be convenient to refer to those sections numbers rather than page numbers.
17. Goldsmith’s “once more” here seems to be an allusion to the fact that prior to the Agricultural Revolution all humans (and their ancestors) were “hunter-gatherers” (Sect. 238). As such, they had a high standard of living—if not in a material sense, in senses that are much more important.
18. New York: Da Capo Press (a member of the Perseus Books Group). 1977 (revised edition). First published in 1975. Liedloff has a web site. (Given that she died last month, it is not clear whether this web site will be continued.)
19. Was it, e.g., out of a sense of boredom—a sense that she needed some adventure so that she could feel alive? We don’t learn from the book what was going through her mind.
20. I wish that Liedloff had not used the word “progress” here—or at least had put it in quotes. For how can one label any movement away from what these people had “achieved”—but certainly not as a result of conscious choice—as anything but regress?! We Westerners are so used to equating technological development as “progress” that we have difficulty being critical of such development. It’s as if Gaia has been guiding our history since the Agricultural Revolution: Gaia realized, shortly after this “Revolution” got underway, that it had made a mistake in allowing humans to appear on the scene, and “fixed” historical development in such a way that humankind would unwittingly bring about its own destruction; and that via “global warming” would accomplish that “goal.”
21. I am somewhat surprised by Liedloff’s use of sexist language in this passage, given that she is not a male (to the best of my knowledge).
22. A given society can be said to have a certain “way of life,” but that different individuals in the society may have different “lifestyles”—based on income, education, age, etc. That is, certain general characteristics will tend to prevail in any given society, but the particularities of how one lives will vary from person to person. In a sense, the “lifestyle” of each person is unique, but there are enough similarities between different individuals that it is possible to identify types of lifestyles.
23. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1961.
24. It is easy to overemphasize the role of genetics here at the expense of epigenetics, learning, and the development of habits.
25. The word is first mentioned on p. 20.
26. The next (and last) major section in this essay will focus on The Discrepancy.
27. In the modern world such “others” can live at a great distance away! As Brook Larmer points out in his National Geographic article “The Big Melt,” the glaciers in the “high heart of Asia, which supply meltwater to the great rivers in that part of the world, are disappearing—which fact is likely to be disastrous to the 2 billion people who depend on that water. Who is responsible for this melting? Western countries such as the United States, of course!
28. My recollection of the 1975 (original) edition of Liedloff’s book—which I read about 30 years ago—is that she placed far more significance in early child care than she did in the 1977 edition. I haven’t gone back to check the 1975 edition, so I may be wrong on this point.
29. Ashley Montagu’s Touching: The Human Significance of Skin (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1986, third edition) develops—but rather poorly—this subject.
30. The Theory of the Leisure Class. Introduction by Robert Lekachman. New York: Penguin Books USA, Inc., 1994, p. 241. Originally published by The Macmillan Company in 1899.
31. See, e.g., Jonathan Beecher, Charles Fourier: The Visionary and His World. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986.

This assault led three of the local campesinos from Intag, Ecuador to file a lawsuit against the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX) and Copper Mesa Corporation, the Canadian mining company responsible for hiring the “security firm” that sent the paramilitaries to intimidate the anti-mining residents of the region.

“I ask the noble people of Canada,” said Ramírez when she filed the lawsuit in March 2009, “that you demand from your elected authorities significant changes in your national legislation so that what has happened with Copper Mesa in Intag will never happen again, not in Intag nor in any other part of the world.”

John McKay, a Liberal Member of Parliament from Canada, actually introduced legislation that would have been a concrete first step in holding Canadian mining companies accountable for their behavior overseas. Bill C-300 would have sanctioned the Canadian federal government to investigate human rights and environmental complaints filed against companies with the authority to cancel any governmental funding if found guilty. While some activists and NGO’s leveled criticism against the bill for being too tepid, most supported the legislation. Unfortunately the Canadian government, largely perceived to be in the pockets of the mining industry, did not and the bill was voted down. Catherine Coumans, research coordinator for MiningWatch Canada, has charged the government with “aiding and abetting” the industry’s inhumane, if not criminal, behavior.

Injustice and Impunity Continues

Last month, when three judges at the Court of Appeals in Canada ruled against the three Intag residents, a lot more than a lawsuit was lost. The court basically said that people overseas have no right to sue a Canadian institution or company for human rights violations in Canadian courts. Their statement to the world reaffirmed what many communities effected by Canadian mining projects in the developing world already know: institutions like the TSX and Copper Mesa will never be held accountable for human rights abuses and environmental destruction they fund and carry out.

“Do Canadians really want to have their legal system on the one hand authorize Canadian mining companies to go abroad to developing countries, and then on the other hand totally absolve the directors in Canada of any responsibility whatsoever for human rights abuses those companies may perpetrate there?” asked Murray Klippenstein, legal counsel for the Ecuadorians, who is also legal counsel for a widow in Guatemala whose husband was murdered by the head of security of a Canadian mining subsidiary because of his outspoken concerns about the activities of the company.

But the ruling also produces another very unsettling effect, or better put, reinforces a widely-held belief in the extractive industry resistance movements overseas: that it is a waste of time, energy and funds to try to use the judicial system in order to have their rights recognized and communities protected. The implications are troubling.

One example to illustrate this point is the infamous Chevron-Texaco case where 18 long years had to pass before the 30,000 Ecuadorian indigenous and campesino plaintiffs got a favorable sentence in an Ecuadorian court for their lawsuit based on the grave health impacts from years of petroleum extraction- and contamination- in the Amazon. The destruction has been such that it’s been labeled a “Rainforest Chernobyl”. But even now the case could be held up in courts for an additional decade from appeals, meaning that many of the plaintiffs will have died before the possibility of collecting what is due them.

Canadians don’t hear too much about the environmental destruction and social upheaval their oil, gas and mining industries are spreading overseas. In spite of countless reports of human rights violations all over the world, Canadian corporations have been very successful at greenwashing the news back home and replacing it by images of the “socially responsible” Canadian corporate citizen bringing wealth and development abroad.

However, if the lawsuit contributed to the company being expelled from the TSX, as it was on February 2010, leads to its bankruptcy, and as a result pressures the judicial system in Canada to open itself up to legitimate lawsuits brought by communities overseas against their extractive industries, then it was very much worthwhile. If, in the long run, it will contribute to bringing about legislative reforms that will effectively reduce or stop the murders of anti-mining activists, like what happened in El Salvador and Mexico, and other human rights, social and environmental abuses, then it will have been a major victory. Much depends on how much information is able to filter through to the average Canadian, and what it will take to get them outraged to demand such changes.

Added to this failing of the justice system in Canada, the same week saw the superior court in Quito throw out my (Carlos Zorrilla) lawsuit against film producers working for Ecuacorriente for criminal libel. Unfortunately, this was also no major surprise given the state of the judicial system here. I had initiated a criminal lawsuit against Chinese-owned Ecuacorriente for a 45-minute documentary film paid for by the company where they falsely linked me to anti-mining violence in the south of the country.

The question that begs answering is: When the judicial system so utterly fails to guarantee minimum justice in cases of clear abuses by transnational corporations, or when the litigation is economically so out of reach for the majority of effected people, what other route is there for communities to seek justice? (The costs of the Canadian case was over a $100,000, although luckily it was all pro bono thanks to the law firm Klippensteins in Toronto.)

Communities understand, not only at a gut level but also through experience, that they are politically and legally outmatched by powerful corporations with deep pockets and decades of experience thwarting justice by manipulating the court systems. Rulings such as Ramirez vs. Copper Mesaonly reaffirm this belief.

Therefore, many communities could read into the defeat of the lawsuit that their only practical (and affordable) solution to the threats that mining and other extractive industries pose on their rights, land and cultures lies in physically standing up to these projects – even at the risk of being labeled terrorists or saboteurs. Ramirez vs. Copper Mesa will reinforce the idea that direct, physical resistance is the only way to prevent community members from being murdered, indigenous cultures from being annihilated, and the environment from being decimated. This, at a time when special laws are being enacted in countries rich in natural resources, such as Ecuador, to judicially categorize acts of civil disobedience as terrorism. As of today, there are nearly 300 activists in Ecuador facing terrorism and sabotage charges for standing up to mining and other extractive activities that threaten the livelihood, or well-being of communities and the environment. Over half of these targeted activists are indigenous, including the leaders of the most important indigenous groups in the country. Ironically enough, this happens in the context of Ecuador’s progressive Constitution, which recognizes that nature has rights, and that Ecuadorians have the right to a good life (Sumak Kawsay). Take away the only effective tool that communities and indigenous people have to protect these rights from transnational corporations and you have the making of a major, and sustained, human rights nightmare supported by the State.

This is why the court decision in Canada matters, not just in Ecuador, but throughout the world.