Crude – the movie

“From the mid-1960s until the early 1990s, Texaco (now Chevron) dumped 18 billion gallons of oil and toxic waste into the Amazon rain-forest of Ecuador, creating a 1,700-square-mile “cancer death zone” the size of Rhode Island.”   –  from wikipedia

This movie is of the quest of activists to bring accountability and conscience to our world.  The plight of ecology and the people of the world who have not severed human relationship to earth and creatures, should not be something sensational but should be seen as something we have chosen or willed to forget, or do not understand as having been ‘forgotten out of us’ –meaning that sometimes our forgetting is not personal, so much as having been a strategy by larger forces, so that we may drive our cars and keep our lights on and party in all-hours of the night without a thought to the violence this attests to.

Our world, a neo-colonialist world, has made natural the exploitation. Of each other, of others, of ourselves.  We make the abusive corporatocracy unapproachable in our self-hatred.  Our ignorance is a child of self-hatred and ineptness.  We shrink and sometimes feel paralyzed and small.  That’s what many of the elites who are exploiting our earth and communities want us to do.  Are we that obedient?  Are the indigenous people just people with colorful clothes that we think are behind us in history?  I am certainly not.  I have Cherokee heritage.  All of us are indigenous.  The indigenous communities who still lived as linked with the earth thrived in all of Europe and Asia and the Americas and the Middle East.  Those ties have all been systematically severed in one way or another and at different speeds and intensities that usually mirror the amount of modernization that has accumulated.  The Irish and Welsh Celts and the Ainu and the indigenous of Okinawa and others continue to battle.  Are the indigenous people of the Americas indigenous?  All of us come from earth.  Why is it that the ‘brown people’ with colorful clothes are left to fend for a life on this planet that doesn’t equal plunder and genocide while the rest of us have ambivalence about all of it?  We are humanity, we are earth.  Do we ignore our mothers and foremothers and forefathers as a ‘progress,’ as some kind of maturity?  Who taught us these things?

Instead of guilt, there needs to be a reckoning.  A courageous facing, shifts in behavior, but not a reconstitution of a heavy punishment-as-morality, but a compassionate turn, a vigorous turn to actually care for our ancestors, for our planet.  Not just in our own recycling projects and moral superiority in not driving SUVs.  I’m talking more about working with those, like the gentlemen, women, children, ladies, lawyers, and all others who are struggling and need our creativity, alliance, knowledge, privileges.  Act.  And hopefully movies such as this, can inspire, inform, shift you and those you know, with a ruthless love of life and diversity.

French Hip-Hop: SOPRANO featuring South Asian singer Indila: HIRO

As in most first world national languages and from their former colonies and others, the French language showcases/expresses some great rap and hip-hop and what may be called ‘black’ urban music. On my blog, I have previously shown some from Japan and Korea and will continue to show my favorites from the world over.

Soprano is one of the best in present-day France. Here is a socially-conscious hip-hop song ‘Hiro’ (hero) which brings in the pride and heartache of black and non-white histories in the world and the wish to have changed history and what creates suffering today. Many of the persons and situations mentioned in this song/video are probably unknown to most Americans but we should know them as Americans. Do our research. There is more to the world than what we see in our small worlds. As such, the song mentions 9/11, Princess Diana, the making of African nations, Gandhi, Mohammed Ali, tragic airplanes that fly despots to their locations, etc. A character from the US television show ‘Heroes’ is a foundational character in the telling of this wish, this story. I love this song. In honor of knowing history and to be in the present to ACT!

Lyrics translated originally by 15 year-old French guy (SchezMusique) from Youtube.

I have modified as best I can. IF ANYONE CAN READ FRENCH and HELP with TRANSLATIONS– I will continue to modify…….

English translation followed by the French lyrics.

HIRO

If I had had the power of Hiro Nakamura
I would have left reliving the birth of Lenny and Inaya
I would have been in Sanaa
Boycott the takeoff of A310 from Yemenia
I would have been there to see my grandfather one last time
Say to him I’ll take care of his daughter, so don’t worry
I would have left seeing Martin Luther King
After his speech, show him the photo of Barack Obama
I would have been in the temple of Harlem
Push Malcolm from the scene before a bullet reaches him
I would have been in the prison of Mandela
To say to him ‘hold out, your ideas will be of a president of south Africa’
Lover of Lady Diana,
I would have created a gigantic cork under the bridge of the Alma
I would have been in the Bahamas
Not for the holidays but to empty the hold of the plane of Aaliyah

I would have liked travelling through time

I would have liked travelling through time

I would have liked travelling through time

If I had had the power of Hiro Nakamura
I would have been there for the fight from Mohamed Ali to Kinshasa
Then, I would have been there to celebrate the independence of my Comoros
In the arms of my grandfather before his death
Then, a small tour in the Paris-Dakar in full savanna
To boycott Daniel Balavoine’s copter
I like the truths of those who wear a red nose
I would have been there to burst the tires of Coluche’s motorcycle
I would have been there to meet Mahomet in Medina
Then go to see the Red Sea, let myself pass to Moses
I would have been for the birth of the son to Mary
Two hours later, take the walking of the salt with Gandhi
I would have been there to sit down with Rosa Parks
Then to Woodstock to see Jimmy Hendrix live
I would have been at the birthday of Motown
To see Mickael make the moonwalk

I would have been in New York
To activate at 7 am a bomb scare in 2 towers
I would have been in Iraq
Teaching the journalists to shoot better with their shoe
I would have been in Afghanistan
Throw the cameras of the last interview of commander Massoud
I would have been in Angola
To go to tell the team of Adebayor not do the trip
I would have been in Clichy-sous-Bois
Disconnect the transpo of EDF before Zyed and Bouna comes
I would have been at Kunta Kinte or on Gorée
To give them guns before the colonists came
I would have been there to see the African infantrymen
To say to them that we treat their children like nasty immigrants
I would have been in Austria,
I would have done anything so that the parents of Adolf Hitler never met

Even if I had the power of Nakamura
What would I have been able to do for Haiti, the tsunami or Katrina?
What would I have been able to do for Alaska?
Everything that nature gave us
Nature will take back
So these are things which I would have wanted to change or wanted to live
So these are things which I would have wanted to erase or to relive
But are all impossible my friend
Thus I inspire a big breath and I blow on my 30th candle…

I would have liked travelling through time
But we can live only the present
We can live only the present

Debate regarding the August-September 2010 ROMA evacuations in France

Political bodies arguing. States and nations being more important than people currently, increasingly.

Political bodies arguing that institutions and processes are in place in many European nations regarding ‘how to deal with’ the Roma.

The Roma, having to assimilate into the ‘civilized’ European, North American and Japanese colonial systems…..is already a violence, an exclusion, a globally-mandated assumption of obedient minorities having to create themselves into something they are not. It is already a set-up. The fascisms are not acceptable now. But there are residues of fascism in every state, in certain attitudes of many individuals, ourselves possibly. When things go underground, they adapt to the current milieu and operate with new tactics. It is easier to follow an ideology or a fundamental structure in our minds, families and neighborhoods. Many of the scientists and thinkers of fascist governments were paid by the so-called democratic states, to survive and thrive and continue to create in the name of the elites. They are everywhere. The residues show up in people’s attitudes. As I write this, some people have wanted me dead. It is not a surprise. Ethics, love, negotiation, difference, intensity, and struggle, are seen as unwanted. It’s so much easier if everyone just obeyed. It takes lots of obedience to be civilized. It takes lots of obedience to be many things. It is a struggle to think creatively about our issues and what it is we want.

There is little talk of getting programs and institutions together, providing counseling and educational change and other activities, to address the prejudice, racism, violence, brutality, impunity, and aggression of the dominant attitudes and behaviors against the Roma and other minorities. It is a set-up. But there are many who are privately setting up creative ways of resisting the dominant flow of treating minorities like something to do surgery on, to assimilate. The issue is dominance and resistance.

Apparently, much like some of the US Americans I know who are anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim (and whose families were probably anti-Japanese-American during WWII etc.), states have a right to keep the ‘other’ out. Who is ‘us’ and who is ‘them’?? The lines are often justifications for our psychological/social violences to be played out. It is that division, that demarcation, where we give permissions of violence. Nations and national systems are that place, an extension or perhaps where it begins through histories of developing from tribalism to ethnic/sexual/gender/racial/religious identity and national identity currently.

Now it all plays out in its failures. Violent nationalism internalized into safe havens and names such as ‘our state’ and ‘our city’ and ‘our people’. Tribalism continues as democracy fades. But democracy isn’t fading for many. It is enacted and seen everyday. There are thousands around the world, millions around the world, right next to us, who understand the difficult struggle for democratic ethics in our lives. We cannot confuse permissions without ethics with democracy. We cannot confuse the boundaries of identities as demarcations of democracy.

The Roma, the Kurds, the Jews, the Armenians, the Dahlit, the Ainu, the Mayans, and millions of other bodies are forced into the isolation called ‘minority’ and are treated like chess pieces and diseases in the national systems now global. We must make our way in the violent world structured by the dominant system and we are supposed to listen to these people and bodies that have somehow assumed precedence. Even as those in governments are for justice, the system requires you to be a strong state, complete with strong militaries and economies and secret hiding places and hidden tactics and lots of money to pay the secret operators to make the state into a certain self-image, leaving certain ideas, cultures, ways-of-thinking and acting, out of the equation of this imagined state.  It’s an imaginary of violence, playing out with hollow words such as ‘rights’ and ‘diversity’ and ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ in many cases.

There are many people in world government, such as can be seen in this video snapshot of politicians arguing about what to do with the Roma people, who actually care and want peace.  However, justice cannot come in states where peace is about obedience to laws, no matter how lofty.  Laws, in most powerful states, ignore the brutality of how that state came into being in the first place.  Law is not justice.  Neither is law about anarchic violence and tearing down of all.  Justice is more of an attention to history and creative processes of negotiation through differences. But in positions of privilege, where a person or a body of people ‘decide what to do with others’ is precarious when the rules of law are interpreted in different ways. What is worse, as Raphael Lemkin (1900-1959) himself, wrote the first writings on the term ‘genocide’ and watched about a third of the laws he proposed be left out when the genocide laws were implemented by the international body–because those laws that were too threatening to the so-called integrity of the state would make all states culpable and make the global national system criminal itself). The human rights system is a necessary group of policies, laws, and research and documentation bodies, do not get me wrong.  But no one can enforce them. There cannot be a human rights police.  So human rights are continually broken in the United States, the European Union, Japan and other nations.  All one can do is watch arguments or invasions.

What’s even more daunting is that the term ‘genocide’ has been coined as an event, a moment in time with a certain look, an obvious massacre and displacement and hatred. The issue is that genocides rarely happen as an event. Culminations in massacres happen, but the processes of cleansing in states and regions happen over long periods of time, due to intensifications of exclusion-wishing and creating our living spaces in certain ways that do not allow certain differences. Displacements may happen continually for centuries, making a certain group poor. Policies to exclude and keep them poor keep being passed, while institutions are set-up to ‘help’ these minorities. The help keeps that group in their particular circumstances and are designed to construct assimilation. Help is usually a form of surveillance and identity-making. It is created through the dominant’s will, not those who are marginalized. Propaganda can be created over decades, where racism and prejudice can strangle the look of a city or a state or a people into a  reality where certain people and communities and areas can only be seen through that lens of the constructed dominant instead of through a different lens. Criminalizating minorities and their actions is a tactic of killing the spirits and locking the men away, leaving vulnerable populations to fend for themselves. Since laws concern the privileged, what does survival look like for the already-vulnerable?  Genocide is not an event. The killing of spirits and ideas and lives happen over prolonged periods in all of the ways Raphael Lemkin has stated (in the complete version, not only in the edited version the international body has made public). So genocide may not look like genocide. For change in our world, we must intervene into these smaller structures of cultural killings before an event.  In fact, some philosophers have actually spoken to the everydayness of genocide. Our ignoring and going about our lives is an aspect of the killing of another community. Buying or not buying certain things can also play into killing ‘the other.’  We cannot wait for the ‘event’ that we recognize. By then it is usually too late.

These politicians can argue, but whoever has the biggest weapons currently controls whatever happens, regardless of human rights. States have more power than groups of persecuted peoples. States have become more important to maintain, rather than communities. Self-hatred begins to creep in as we think of ways to empower and resist. Making ourselves into ethnic groups, then wanting a state, seems to be a logical conclusion of ways to live, as the stronger states treat those within its boundaries that are not the dominant group, as well as weaker states and non-dominant peoples globally, as things to extract work from (exploit) and displace and make into problems at will. It is ugly. There is no secret. We all know individual people like this in our lives. But when it is larger, we may think they are nice people, but the structures will a certain pattern, a certain way for things to turn out. More and more people are no longer willing to take it, however.

Issues of dominance and dominant attitudes control the so-called ‘Roma issue’ and other minority peoples’ and stateless peoples’ living circumstances, continuing to be ‘cases,’ as can be seen in this video, in the early 21st century.  It brings up memories of World War II, fascism, and the current crisis of human, social, ecological systems at crossroads. They don’t fit it.  ‘They’ are nomadic, ‘they’ are communal and not individualistic, ‘they’ have ties to life-ways that are contradictory to the dominant globalizing state system. Where does difference come into play? What can be done? Must we/they obey to survive? Where is our creativity?

Imogene Heap sings ‘Wait it Out’ (acoustic version): For paralyzed activists…..

Where do we go from here?
how do we carry on?
i can’t get beyond the questions…

clambering for the scraps,
in the shatter of us collapsed.
it cuts me with every “could-have-been.”

pain on pain on play, repeating.
with the back-up make-shift life waiting.

everybody says,
that time heals everything.
but what of the wretched hollow?
the endless in-between?
are we just going to wait it out…?

there’s nothing to see here now,
turning the sign around,
we’re closed to the earth til further notice.
clambering for the scraps, clambering in the light.
we’re closed to the earth til further…

all-in-one, only one street-level miracle.
i’ll be an out-in-out, born-again from none more cynical.

everybody says,
that time heals everything.
but what of the wretched hollow?
the endless in-between?
are we just going to wait it out…?

…and sit here cold?
we could be long gone by then,
and lackluster.
and dust will layer on old magazines.
fluorescent lighting sets the scene,
for all we could and should be being,
in the one life that we’ve got…

everybody says,
that time heals everything.
but what of the wretched hollow?
the endless in-between?

are we just going to wait it out?
just going to sweat it out?
just going to sweat it out?

Nuclear War & the movies: a critique of ‘Countdown to Zero’: Robert Jensen

Robert Jensen is one of the cultural workers in the world that I respect tremendously, along with Angana Chatterji, Barry Lopez, Yuri Kochiyama, Judith Butler, Angela Davis, among many others.  He speaks to getting to the root of our issues in the contemporary world as far as oppression and social justice, ecological devastation and proliferations of violence, cultural wars, and identity formation in late capitalist patriarchal globalization.

I will post more of his works on topics such as racism, sexism and heterosexism, masculinity, and others later.  What I respect in this regard is his accountability to these topics and to what I believe is a core of the issue: the unequal distribution of power/wealth and the ‘isms’ such as racism and others as tactics of certain kinds of uses of power and violence.  His works are anti-oppression, centering on a national US and global imperialism centered on national, patriarchal and white-supremacist ideological formations which intensify greed and dominance as forms of governance.  Through this, our cultures are formed.  There is no fancy idealism in his views.  I also enjoy this fact.  He presents activism as not anything special but an everyday life of struggle, without romanticizing.  I love this approach.

In the videos I present here, he is at St. Andrews Presbyterian Church in Austin, Texas, in a discussion with attendees on the screening of the film entitled ‘Countdown to Zero.’  This movie is supposed to be released soon and is based with many accurate facts, from my own research, but along with Robert Jensen himself, I have critiques about.  The most glaring one is perhaps the most obvious, as you may have gathered from my postings throughout my blog.  It is the fact that the movie is a propaganda tool used to incite fear of the rogue states that the US government has ‘othered’ through its racist rhetoric, without giving historical facts along with an analysis of the power relations that inform the historical development of the present predicament.

Since the US has achieved almost total control of the world through its nuclear power, just by sheer numbers, through lies regarding Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs (that they were militarily necessary instead of the fact that over a million civilian Japanese were killed in the Second World War as a strategy against the Soviet Union, as one example); and that other countries must now want to not be controlled by the US by not having its own strong weapons as defense.  Constant subjugation through economic pressures, food and medical aid manipulation and stipulations, debt-making, not to mention the assassination of democratically elected leaders in many countries, would lead to countries needing nuclear power in order to equalize.  The movie presents these acts of survival as crazy and presents the US as the sole savior and rational peacemaker in the race for nuclear weaponry.

As Robert Jensen also states in the video, I do not want some of the leaders and groups to have weapons, but also the way we pursue nuclear non-proliferation must also be just and based on different accountabilities than the ones now pursued by the US.  The US continues to flaunt its domination and this will fail for all of us.  The US will not give up its monopoly of violence (i.e. nuclear weapons) so that is not something I wish to waste time on at this moment.  But  accountable, ethical non-proliferation actions which include actions that assure non-subjugation of other nations is a start.

Robert Jensen site:  http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/index.html

These videos are each about 10 minutes or so, with the total being 30 minutes or so.

Gunkanjima軍艦島 or Hashima 端島: Memory, Displacement & Exploitations

The uninhabited island colony Hashima 端島 is popularly called by the Japanese Gunkanjima 軍艦島 (Battleship Island).

From 1887 until 1974, it was an island packed with coal mine workers and their families. At one point, it was considered the most densely populated place in the world. Many urban poor Japanese and their families, were sent here to work during the Japanese government’s plan to increase their coal production. The workers on this island were to mine the coal underneath the ocean that surrounds the island. In addition, the Japanese used forced labor on the island between 1939 and 1945, forcibly bringing about 500 Koreans and their families to work on the island. Many of them died on duty there. For beginning information on this, see: http://english.donga.com/srv/service.php3?bicode=040000&biid=2007081567758

In 1974, as oil became the leading mineral source for energy around the world, including Japan, the need for mining coal from the oceans ceased. The workers were jobless. A percentage were offered jobs on a first-come/first-serve basis, while others were left without work. The buildings were left abandoned in a matter of one week, the entire population leaving. It is told that many of the families who were not offered work experienced hardships upon returning.

It is now being considered as a UNESCO heritage site, to be preserved. There are daily tours through which money is being made.

This story is unique in that it is this particular island. But the story of displacement and lack of care for workers is a very standard scenario when it comes to labor and governments. Any privileges that any of us have, are based on the workers such as these on the islands, where our parents and grandparents, and we ourselves, are using things that families such as these, risk their ‘happiness and comfort’ for, and perhaps die for. Coal mining and the shift to oil, has brought many displacements, suicides, and abuses throughout the world. Now, as we begin formulating a world without oil and towards something else, what do our ‘masters’–the governments and transnational corporations, have in mind for people? What communities and people are being exploited? For what?

Gunkanjima, is a great example of one such scenario, and a reminder of memory and how it lives. Whether we were there or not, whether we knew about it or not, our lives are touched in that we consume and use the technologies that drive our societies.

It is also interesting/sad to note, that when we look at many blogs and photographers’ sites pertaining to Gunkanjima, it is exploited as something for the photographers and artists to use, to take beautiful interesting pictures, to produce what they want. Also, some were drawn to the site and talk endlessly about how they felt about the island and drawn to it as an individual. But no connection to finding out or informing people of the lives there and what it means. Some of the pictures on the sites are wonderful, do not get me wrong about that. But what I do NOT like, is the approach. The colonial expansionist approach to memory. Many of these photographers and artists do not even mention anything of the lives of the people there and what happened there and afterwards. The dominant approach is that: “Hey, here’s this interesting desolate place that can allow ME to have beautiful shaded colors and present some startling images and it feeds my imagination……” To me, images may present incredible images but from a social justice point-of-view it’s sickening. At the same time, I love the fact that they have taken pictures. Otherwise, who would remember?

Our wonderful tourist sites where the privileged can go to at their beck and call for amusement, which Gunkanjima seems to be slated to become, are ways for us to ‘enjoy’ and perhaps make our violence a subject of museums and our sadness and whisfulness and feelings of regret channeled into this space, supposedly to remember. But what of remembering if we do not make it act in the present, now? It would be great if we thought about our responsibilities and participation in the world and to history. As we exploit, we need to question our privileges in our exploitation. As long as we are going to do it. I say that we begin to destroy the need to exploit. This doesn’t just mean our governments. We walk on the dust of dead communities, killed so that our present nations can continue to consume and glorify themselves.  All of us partake, so no one is immune.  Gunkanjima’s families spent years on an island partly because of necessity, while the Koreans were forcibly brought there.

In what ways can we honor our present? In what ways can we honor memory? Even at the same time, we may watch videos and view photos with mixed emotions, still appreciating the beauty, but also understanding that it may also contain brutalities. Do we actually think that this quality of our lives as built on violence is inevitable?  If not, how can we make it different?

Excellent blogpost by Brian Burke-Gaffney in CABINET magazine Issue 7 Summer 2002:

http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/7/hashima.php

Essay by Saiga Yuji, translated by Ogata Keiko: “Thoughts on Gunkanjima”:

http://www.ne.jp/asahi/saiga/yuji/gallary/gunsu/g-text-e.html

Overview at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashima_Island

Below is a wonderful short documentary video by Thomas Nordanstad with subtitles.

US Journalist Jake Hess Detained in Turkey

Human Rights abuses are looked upon as exceptions to the otherwise wonderful and peaceful nation, anywhere.  This kind of thinking is ridiculous, really.  The world map, and the nations we live in and that encircle the globe, have been created by hundreds of years of pillaging, destroying, killing, massacres, fires, bombs, genocide, criminalization, stabbings, rapes, forced displacements, creation of poverty and tortures.  The national boundaries have been drawn on indigenous lands, and often usually decided by people who do not live in those places where the boundaries fall.  All are made to comply with those rules.

In the US, the experience of the successful genocide of the Native American tribes, is spoken about as just a thing of the past.  It is politically incorrect to speak of any of the Global north nations as abusers of humanity.  Yet, in our hearts of hearts, in our quiet moments, when we reflect on what is happening globally; and if we have any scant awareness of how history has been developing since the 16th century, then we know that the techniques and tactics of RULING are largely unchanged.  What changes are how it LOOKS and the furthering of the role of smoke and mirrors, propaganda and formulations of ‘truths.’

Turkey has been a nation carved out of the World War One experience–a combination of elite Central Asian and Meditteranean peoples who fought hard enough to not be swallowed by the expansion and control of European colonial rule.  In its necessities to unite a people who were as diverse as one can imagine in the Ottoman Empire, there needed to be certain forms of killing.  Cultures, people, groups, villages, language, etc.   Much like the Native Americans in the boarding schools in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, who would dare speak their own language or sing a lullaby they remember that their mothers sung to them.  If they did, they were punished.  Bars of soap might be crammed down their throats and the child wimpered and cried out.  They were told it was ‘for their own good.’

Most nations did this.  The Australian whites toward their Aboriginal tribes, the Canadians and their native tribes, the Japanese and the Ryukyu people and the Ainu and the other countless peoples that used to reside as different in Japan.  Today, who even remembers such things about Japan.  Now we think “they’re one people.”  Propaganda has been largely successful.

Turkey, in its desperate attempt to fight the racism of the Europeans, had to eradicate and continue eradicating much of what has not been in its own image.  Whatever may appear to be ‘uncivilized’ would get in the way of Turkey’s acceptance into the Euro-American imagination.  It continues to do so.  As mentioned earlier, Partha Chatterjee’s notion of the ‘extinction of the peasant’ is not just speaking literally about peasants, but about certain looks, certain social classes, certain ‘lower’ forms of life that are deemed so by what the Europeans would call primitive.  What nation, under the thumb of the First World Nations at the UN meetings, would dare to be lesser?  After all, the first world nations have not understood those ‘lesser’ to even be human.  If they were human, they were ‘not yet like us.’

The USA has pushed and controlled much of what has happened since the British left off.  As an empire with far-reaching resources, the USA has also pushed my Kurdish friends working for justice, into the justice system, holding them up in courts, complicating their lives and keeping them hidden from public view.  The Kurds are expendable, much like the Roma, certain Jewish tribes, the Assyrian tribes, and thousands of others we do not hear about in our lives.  They are not invisible by accident.  The USA has spent billions and billions of dollars, working with Turkey, to make way for gentrification and modernization in these areas inhabited by people who everyone doesn’t know about.  This is not hard to figure out.  But even as many people know about the Kurdish people, there is still an ignoring.

Journalists, human rights workers, artists, singers, lawyers, and thousands of others who have been fighting for justice in Turkey, for the marginalized groups such as the Kurds, Alevis, Dersimians, and other groups, have endured not just a ‘Turkish’ form of control.  We must remember that much of Turkey’s justice system, prison industrial complex, the military, and technologies, are informed by the US since the 1950s.  Deep operatives have been in Turkey, helping to ‘transform’ them into the image of the acceptable ally for the USA.  First World technologies must be allowed and MADE to work in those countries.  In order for technologies to work in these places, the culture needs to be destroyed/changed.  Those locals who want power and wealth, most of them gladly want to get on board.  They become the first ‘leaders’ and are not chosen for their other qualities.  The USA ensures that these people, who want to work with US government and transnational corporations, stay in power.

Jake Hess has been detained in Turkey.  He has been reporting the abuses by the state and Turkish  cultural dominance of primarily Kurdish and Alevi people in southeastern Turkey.  Americans are hardly ever detained for their work in human rights work in Turkey.  Usually they are deported and barred from returning.  But  nowadays things have change, since the Patriot Act and Homeland Security technologies are being globalized.   The propaganda and also the positionings and the impunity of governments that goes along with this have also intensified.  US journalists who put their lives on the line, such as Jake Hess, are now in a more precarious position.

If you and I and everyone you know can help put pressure on our government and media, it would turn out alright.  But if no one cares, anything can be done with the resources at play. One never knows how long the tentacles are and the tactics of superiority.  Jake Hess has not been in the television news, save a mentioning.  There is a reason for this.  Even newscasters I know of in the past, have brought these news pieces to the attention of their bosses, in relation to the Kurdish issues, and they are told that they would NOT print or put on air.  Why?

I am hoping that there is enough action from around the world, to push for accountability and justice for Jake Hess, and all of the people working in Turkey and elsewhere, for a different world.

FOR ORIGINAL NEW STORY:   US Journalist Jake Hess Detained in Turkey.

Beginning overview of US covert operations in Turkey – wikipedia:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_activities_in_Turkey

Operation Gladio: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Gladio

STUNNING: “Absence of Time” – from Gregory Colbert’s Ashes and Snow Project

Ashes and Snow Project website:  http://www.ashesandsnow.org/

“Beyond” as a problem in Race & Difference work

What are the effects of our truths? – Michel Foucault

There is a statement I hear often, when the topic is social issues having to do with racism, especially, but other social oppression and justice-related identity and relations issues as well.  I have a problem with this:  “let’s get beyond the race issue” idea.  I also have a problem with a statement that I see in the trailer for the new movie: Harimaya Bridge. I am very excited by the movie, don’t get me wrong about that.  But it won’t stop us from thinking about certain things, assumptions, worldviews.  So I want to make a few inter-related points about this.

So there is the line in the movie:  ‘there are there are more important ways to identify with people than color of skin”  or something to this affect.

Now these statements about ‘getting beyond’ skin color and ‘getting beyond’ the ‘race issue’ etc.  are very very dangerous weapons that continue the problem of accepting difference.  The statement above sound as if they are going toward peaceful relations, but are actually couching the very problem itself–that which brings the reality of assimilation and colonialism to the fore, and acted out through the processes of globalization, of course.  The gentrifications of identity.

This gentrifying of identity, of supposedly moving beyond race, is a way to say that race/ethnicity are trivial or superficial trappings that hide the real human being underneath.  Usually, this real human being, that is presumed to be what is being pointed to, that is beyond the difficulties of conflict, looks very middle class, and very materialistic, and very homogenized.  There is an assumption that globally, people are the same:  the same values, the same concerns, the same experiences, the same worldviews and the same way of doing things.  Of course the ‘differences’ are just slight–you know–the way ‘they’ cook and the way ‘they’ wear different kinds of clothes, and the way ‘they’ laugh, and the way ‘they’ do their different religion.  It’s all the same God in different clothes, it’s all the same food with different colors and tastes, it’s all the same underneath.

In this way, there is an assumption of sameness.  The reason this sameness seems more ‘real’ is that our world today, is systematically destroying the different.  Usually, the ‘different’ are the ones that make things seem ‘poor’ and ‘uneducated’ and ‘have different values than the good values of individual pursuit of happiness.’   Partha Chatterjee, in his book The Nation and Its Fragments’ speaks eloquently about the system through which our PRESENT ARRIVES.  The present is not eternal.  The present is MADE from the past.  The past is this moment in the next moment.  Do we understand this?  What you are reading right now, is the past.  I wrote this before you wrote it.  In two seconds, two minutes, two hours, two days, two months, two years, two decades–it is already the past once we have read it, once we have uttered it.  IN THIS PRESENT, what is happening?   So Partha Chatterjee mentions that much of modernization and Europeanization of the world, comes with the effect of the ‘extinction of the peasant.’   What do you think of this statement?  Although he is speaking to India and South Asian history in the context of postcolonial realities, that idea which he speaks to, rings true for the entire global movement.  It is our historical present.  We will medicate, urbanize, nuclear-family-ize, middle-class-ize, and make the whole world UNDERSTANDABLE to us.  The other things that we don’t understand, we are just baffled by, and this is not neutral.  If we are baffled by it,  we seek to change it into a ‘higher’ form–we analyze it from our OWN POINT OF REFERENCES  (i.e. — our own cultural/racial/gendered/ and class realities).  The more privileged we are, let’s say–an American or German or Japanese, or Australian, or any region where there are urban and corporate elites participating in the global market, the more we are willing to ‘lend a helping hand’ for those less fortunate.  In order to make them fortunate, they must enter the MACHINE of globalization and the market system in operation today.

The poor nations were made more poor with the structural adjustment policies that require AID–be it for floods, earthquakes, typhoons, hurricanes, war–be ATTACHED to stipulations and loans and ways of changing the local ways.  So in keeping with this analysis, we have to look at the ways in which we think of racism, sexism, classism, anti-semitism, heterosexism, and the various social oppressions through which our present realities are created.

Getting beyond, means that a person’s ethnic/national/cultural heritage, has nothing to do with skin color?  And is race about skin color?  In the middle class and elite global structure it is very much so but not completely.  If one is educated in Oxford UK, and speaks in a certain way and dresses in a certain way, then they are more apt to be invited to the big boy’s table.  The same goes true for ‘fair-weather liberals’ who pretend to love diversity.  Their friends may be Chinese, Korean, West African, Aborigine, Swedish, Argentinian, Cherokee, Algerian Bedouin, and Finnish, yet they are most likely very much in the same social class, and act in certain ways that are palatable, and perhaps with the same politics and socio-economic level that is evident.  How does urban street African-Jamaican develop in the light of the globalizing world?  Is it ‘their’ culture?  Oppression has very much to do with it.  What has been ‘allowed’ and ‘accepted’ by the dominant is allowed and accepted.  How can one get beyond that which is a history?  A history is not just a bunch of events of the past, no longer alive right now.  Everything has to do with everything.   So a person’s diverse friends are made to prop up someone’s self-image as a ‘good person’ who has a lot of ‘diverse friends’ and therefore he/she is not a racist right?  All of these friends may reject an urban street Latino or African-American or Vietnamese from the ‘other side of the town’ even though his views may be similar to the group of diverse friends.  Of course, we are not supposed to be friends with everyone.  This is not my point.  The point is:  What are we AVOIDING, refusing in our goodness?

Many of us read the many things that are going on in this world, to stay informed, and to critically reflect, and to read things we’re not comfortable with, in order to get the fuller picture.  Many of us do the opposite.  We read what we like, then we believe it to be true, and we ignore the rest.  In addition, we add moral judgement to it.  That’s good and that’s bad or that’s neutral.  But most of the time, we don’t know much about it.  We only know ‘our’ version.  We want to be oh so Good.  And in this being ‘good’ we stay away from what we think is bad.  We are told that certain things are bad.  The school textbooks and many of our teachers and our judges and the police and our corporate managers, and our social work institutions, have already pre-determined what ‘good’ is, and we follow it.  Then we create our own moralities.   So everything is self-evident.  Except that there are many things we have ignored and built opinions and truths about, and form conflicts and evasions and silence about, that may need to be looked at more seriously.

In getting ‘beyond’ something, what assumptions are being carried?  Racial differences are bad, apparently.  If we ‘get beyond’ our racial difference, then we are truly arrived at ‘human.’  This is a big problem with a certain way of looking at ‘human.’  I have had friends who think that everytime I bring up racial/ethnic differences in perspective, and the history of oppression that informs the views and the difference, to call me someone who is ‘bringing up the race issue.’   As if it was not something that SHOULD be brought up.  When it is brought up, what happens?  Conflict.  Perhaps discomfort. Why?  From those friends’ perspective, if I would’ve never brought ‘race’ up, then there would not be any conflict.  They are dead wrong.  There is already a DIFFERENCE.  The conflict happens when there is a REFUSAL on their part, to accept, acknowledge, ADMIT, be concerned with, and be an ALLY to what I bring up.  These ‘friends’ will not accept MY RACE and all it has to say.  Isn’t this right?  The issue is not that I brought up race.  The issue is that these people REFUSE the DIFFERENCE it brings from a supposedly KIND and BENEVOLENT UNIVERSAL human being which is the CORE, apparently.  This CORE HUMAN seems to have No History, No acknowledgements of the power relations that go into decisions and marginalization and empowerments, No differences acknowledged.  The conflict stems from the structure of their assumptions.  It is LOADED with racism, sexism, etc.   It is not that these friends are hateful, or evil, or not nice.  But at the same time it is about that.  IT is because they have chosen to go to the COMFORTABLE location and position of the Universal.

The Universal human being is a tactic of assimilation.  At any moment, after all the poor blacks and homosexuals and mixed race people and the poor white hillbillies and the poor starving Indians and Africans and the reservations and the chemically-bombed and malnutritioned people and all the others, have been successfully annihilated through complete assimilation, that is when they would come after something else for complete control and dominance.  In the mean time, all of us in the DIFFERENCE camp will be thought of as terrorists and nuisances.

So, I refuse to move BEYOND in order to be judged by whom YOU might consider me NORMAL, GOOD, WHOLE and complete as a universal human being which we supposedly are ALL trying to get to (manifest destiny & Christian cultural dominance in our thinking).  Progress, Evolution, change, getting better, being better, evolving, growing, maturing.   These words are great words that I think are helpful and can move us.  However, most of the time, the above words are used to assimilate, destroy, belittle, talk down to, ignore, refuse, forget, and to commit genocide ultimately.  Getting OVER and MOVING beyond are tools for us to oppress ourselves into becoming that which we desire.  We have been made to desire so that will LIVE a CERTAIN way, and to buy certain things.  Nowadays, we’re not thinking it strange that the very people who run the world have gotten us to drink bottled water without a peep.  NO, I refuse their idea of whom I should be.   That would be a SMALL PERSON in my book.  For you….too.  We can become much bigger, more just and more powerful as communities when we do NOT accept difference as CONFLICT. Difference is not the source of conflict.  REFUSAL and ignorance is.

At the same time, I will acknowledge that many people who have been through lifetimes of identities and positions that are ‘underclass’ in this world, no matter where we are, have chosen to want to BECOME the master.  When we do this, we take on many of the masters’ behavior.  We put down, we annihilate difference, we subjugate difference, we assimilate others we think are ‘lower.’

I hope that the success of this model of having us–more and more in this world–internalize the larger and globalizing colonization of the mind, would be deterred and we can change course.  WE may, if we take steps to think, reflect, and watch how we can become more honest with ourselves in a context where history and RESPECT for DIFFERENCE could be struggled with.  In this struggle, we must figure out how to make relations that are ethical and not continually demand everything we want all of the time.  THAT also comes from living in the present system.  Greed and DEMAND and isolation are brothers and sisters of internalized colonization.

Let’s not move BEYOND.  Let us move WITH, struggling to look deeply and to agree to a better world.  We cannot wait for those governing us.  And those governing us are creating new realities for us to be more dependent on them.  Look at our ravaged planet, which is rapidly becoming uninhabitable.  Let us work together WITH difference, to welcome struggle, and to also ask for ethics.

Partha Chatterjee information: http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/chatterjee/

Commentary on Barry Lopez Post: On HOPE

Imagination.

I think that having a pre-determined imagination and then performing it in the world most-often leads to a colonizing of the imagination with another.

There are layers of justifying and claiming innocence in our will to control.

However, power is always being exercised. Whether one sits still or speaks or takes up arms or sleeps, this takes power.

Social power is the reality of social worlds. Since our social worlds are complex, we must learn to engage complexity.

So Barry Lopez asks us to welcome the ineffable, the unknown, wonder, diversity; to question loss and how it comes to be.

A different imagination begins with questions we must ask ourselves.  What, in our worldview, is assumed to be real, coherent and universal?

If we begin examining, we see that everything is fragile.

This fragility is feared in our present world.  Being fragile can be socially seen as weak.  This also comes into play when we work with identity, gender, and masculinity.  The assumptions of what is considered ‘strong’ and what is necessary to ‘hold things together’ and to ‘protect.’

Protection is something we must do sometimes.  But I feel that in the present realities, we protect way too much.  Often, we do not know that we are protecting anything.  On the other hand, an ‘everything is okay’ attitude is also a way of not committing, not making a mistake, and not being seen as one thing or another.  Often, we may even say we are ‘free’ when we say this to ourselves.  But it masks a value of non-commitment and intensifies alienation and brings nothing deep or lasting because that is what is desired.  It is a slavery to a certain moment when one decides that this is an effective strategy to resist something that has happened.  It is no more free than any other method.

To work with difference, to struggle with how we are complicit in the loss and violence in the world, would make us examine closely, our process of self-making as individuals and communities, and begin challenging our own assumptions and at the same time discovering new things.  These new possibilities may also not be new.  They are often ‘old’ or ‘ancient’ things that have been discarded and killed and excluded in the past.  Indeed, they may be things that have been twisted into something else through the passage of life.  As we begin working, I think that we begin to recognize these things, and to welcome the deepening of our lives.  The way we are now, as Barry Lopez points to, will lead to more loss.

Perhaps this will be a way of making a self-hatred and a misanthropy–a hatred of people, into a global reality for some.  They will be fulfilling their role in the world.  As we begin a journey to change our imagination and imagine anew, perhaps we may change directions.  In any case, it will be a struggle.  And I say that in my own experience, it will be a beautiful challenge for ourselves and we will make new friends on new paths.  We will no longer be colonized by the idea that it should be easy.  We will move with the ecologies of mourning, reflection, recognition, and natural movements of time and the trees and the planets.  It will not look one way.  It could be urban, it could be in a grain of sand.  We cannot know.  All that must be done is to take the steps.