Category Archives: politics

>Scalped

August 31, 2010 Indy Leave a comment

The American Indian reservations are the last chance for the survival of ancient traditions and ways of life. Yet the states drive Indians off their land (most of the Western Shoshoni people’s land, for example, was long ago confiscated for underground nuclear testing), claiming they can offer them a better life in the cities. However, the Indians will enter an American society where they will be cultureless people, bereft of just about everything.

The American Indians are forced to face a very old dilemma.

At the dawn of the fifteenth century, Spanish conquistadors and priests presented the Indians they encountered with a choice: either give up your religion, culture, land and independence, and swear allegiance to the Catholic Church, or suffer all the damage that the European invaders choose to inflict upon you.

To the conquering Spanish, the Indians were defined as natural slaves. Subhumans. That’s how they wanted to use them. The British and the Americans had little use for the Indians as slaves, so to justify their particular genocide they appealed to Christian sources of wisdom: the Indians were Satan’s helpers, they were murderous wild men of the forest, they were bears, wolves and vermin. They were beyond civil life. Hence, straightforward mass killing of the Indians was the only thing to do. They needed the land, not the humans.

Today is no different. The choice still stands: Surrender all hope of continued cultural integrity and effectively cease to exist as autonomous people and prepare yourself for even worse merciless inequality in our cities, or remain on the reservation and attempt to preserve your culture admist the wreckage of governmentally imposed poverty, hunger, ill health and the endless attempts of the state trying to rob you of your land.

The poverty rate on American Indian reservations in the United States is almost four times the national average. In Pine Ridge in South Dakota (where more than 60 percent of homes are without adequate plumbing, compared with barely 2 percent for the rest of the country) the poverty rate is nearly five times greater. The conditions on many reservations are no different from conditions that rule throughout the Third World.

The suicide rate for young Indian males and females aged 15 to 24 years is around 200 percent above the overall national rate for the same age group, while the rate for death caused by alcohol – another form of suicide – is more than 900 percent higher than the national figure!
American Holocaust.

This is the setting for Scalped, a grim graphic novel created by Jason Aaron and R.M. Guéra. As described on the back of the first volume, Indian Country: ”…a gripping mix of Sopranos-style organized-crime drama and current Native American culture”.

So, life and crime on ”The Rez”, then.

Dashiell Bad Horse ran away from poverty and despair on the Prairie Rose Indian Reservation (could very well be the above mentioned Pine Ridge) some fifteen years ago, and now he’s back, only to find that nothing has changed, except for ”the glimmering new casino and a once-proud people overcome by drugs and organized crime”. It is the eve of the opening of the casino. Welcome to violence.

It turns out that Dash is an undercover FBI agent, and he ends up infiltrating this web of criminality spun by tribal leader Lincoln Red Crow, a former ”Red Power” activist now turned crime boss and the most hated man on the rez, who before he ventured into the heart of darkness was the compatriate of Dash’s mother, Gina. How’s that for a complex and totally unruly sentence? Well, that’s how I felt about this multi-layered, uncomfortable and deeply gritty story in the first place. Unruly. At times I found it hard figuring out who was who, kind of like when I read Blood Meridian the first time. But it was worth the effort of hanging on.

Scalped has its fair share of people holding on to their many secrets, almost Twin Peaks-like, and as the back story is slowly being revealed I was deeply impressed. This is so much more than fights, trashy sex, Indian pride, split families, domestic abuse, mindless violence, scalpings, shootings, revenge, drugs, prostitution, racism, lies, sorrows, drinking and gambling. Much more. The hero and the villain are as crappy and dirty as the world they live in. Here is no peace. Only the lust for vengeance, flesh, profanity and power.

I cannot agree with the Sopranos comparison, though. Aaaron has stated he had The Wire in mind when creating Scalped, and that’s more like it. Like a mixture of Oz and The Wire, maybe. Deadwood? I haven’t even seen that series yet, so throw in some Frozen River and Gomorrah, and that should do it for most of you.

literature, politics

>The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating — Blood Meridian Pt. 3

July 6, 2010 Indy 2 Comments

Blood Meridian is Cormac McCarthy’s first historical novel, as well as his first ”western”, with its roots in the history of the West. Like Samuel Chamberlain’s memoir, My Confession: Recollections of a Rouge – a mixture of fact and fiction which forms the basis of Blood Meridian – McCarthy’s novel is peopled by both real and fictional characters. However, those memoirs are far from the only sources used by McCarthy to tell his tale of the macabre. Every page in this astonishing book is the result of intense studying of great historical works by novelists, dramatists, reporters, biblical scribes, scientists, historians… The list of works is virtually endless, which makes the novel even more fascinating.

I knew from reading McCarthy’s novels that he pays great attention to geography, but I had no idea that Blood Meridian was based on such sickening historical analogues, such as the Yuma-ferry massacre, until I started doing a bit of research myself. Indeed, the Yuma-ferry massacre was very real. And Judge Holden – Satan – does exist:
Whatever his antecedents he was something wholly other than their sum, nor was there system by which to divide him back into his origins for he would not go.

However much historical research McCarthy did, there is still the fact that history is very much characterized by chance. Who was there and why? Whom to trust if only the winners get to write history? Facts really are ”facts”. If you study the Holocaust, this fact couldn’t be more obvious.
It seems like McCarthy is well aware of this, thus blending fact with fiction in such a smooth way. The cruel thing is that what may come off as fiction because of its sheer brutality is often pure fact.

The first time that I read Blood Meridian I was captivated by the balance of beauty and violence, and the words that read like poetry. I had a hard time struggling with the language, though, so the second time I could concentrate more on the story, delving into the characters and experiencing the flow. After this session I began studies on the text and by the third time I knew a lot more about the building blocks, the background stories and stuff like that.

You may read Blood Meridian as a work of fiction, but knowing about the conditions of the time in which Judge Holden lived makes it even more amazing. For example, the conflicts existing in 1850 between Mexicans (both common people and military), US troops, Texans (both Ranger and civilian), Comanches, Apaches, gold-rush travellers… and the scalp hunters.

Getting an Indian’s scalp was the most certain way to prevent the Indian’s soul from reaching paradise. When the scalp is torn off, the body becomes useless, not even worthy of burial. Also, if the Indian is killed by strangulation, the soul can never escape but must always remain within the body, even after complete decomposition. Thus, to the Indians, to keep the scalp was more important than to keep the life, and so, when the scalphunters presented a scalp is was certain proof of the Indian’s certain death.
(The head photo of this blog depicts an Indian burial ground)

There was good money in the scalphunting business, and the scalps were the recipes for these business men – a tradition that exists in modern day warfare as well (for example, troops in the Vietnam war had ears tied to the antenna of their vehicles as trophies of the body count).
The government of Chihuahua paid scalp bounties, which was not uncommon. Many American states, counties and cities did this, although the government of the United States never bought hair. The governmental payment for one single scalp exceeded the amount that a common day worker who became a gang member could earn in a year.

John Sepich writes in Notes on Blood Meridian:
”Pay in the United States Army at about that time ran between seven and fifteen dollars a month when bonuses were included. A group of fifty Indian hunters paid two hundred dollars a scalp would have to bring only four scalps a month into Chihuahua city in order to exceed the army’s rate of pay, and for work not much more hazardous than the army’s. Kirker’s group was known to have killed as many as two hundred Indians on a single trip, bringing in one hundred and eighty two scalps. This approach yielded sixty times what the men would have earned in other employment. At one point, Chihuahua owned James Kirker $30,000.”

The government of Chihuahua was also willing to pay for the scalps of women and children. Also, the city was inhabited by mestizos, Latin American people whose hair was similar to the Indian’s, resulting in the slaughter of many Mexican citizens. The moral problem of scalphunting was not even a problem, since the scalphunters were licenced to do a job for the benefit of the state.
The American Holocaust in full effect.

To be continued in Part Four.
Insights reached with the help of Notes on Blood Meridian by John Sepich.

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politics

>The Israel Lobby: The Media

May 1, 2010 Indy Leave a comment

There’s this common old accusation that ”Jews control the media”. Not quite so. If they were, why would the Israel lobby work so hard to monitor and influence what the mainstream media says about Israel?  

However, by looking at mainstream media in the United States, it is clear that the lobby’s perspective is widely reflected there since most American commentators who write about Israel are themselves pro-Israel. The U.S. mainstream media has no Robert Fisk, so to speak. Neither Time nor the Washington Post – arguably the two most influental daily newspapers in America – employs any full-time commentator who even remotely favors the Arab or Palestinian side, or is critical of Israel. As is written in The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy by Mearsheimer and Walt: ”The point here is not that these individuals [Fisk et al] are always right and pro-Israel commentators are wrong; the point is that voices like theirs are almost entirely absent from major American newspapers.”

Fact is that whenever something is written about Israel that is not in favour of Israel (in the American mainstream, that is) the lobby organizes letter-writing campaigns, demonstrations and boycotts against these news outlets. In 2006, CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in the Middle East Reporting in America), one of the lobby’s most energetic media watchdog group, ran full-page advertisements in the New York Times and New York Sun criticizing Jimmy Carter’s book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. These ads included the publisher’s phone number and encouraged readers to call and complain. Likewise, one CNN executive has said that he sometimes gets six thousand e-mail messages in a single day complaining that a story is anti-Israel. Many papers, such as the Chicago Tribune and the Miami Herald, have faced boycotts over their Middle East reporting. The former spokesman for the Israeli consulate in New York, Menachem Shalev, once put it, ”Of course, a lot of censorship goes on. Journalists, editors and politicians are going to think twice about criticizing Israel if they know they are going to get thousands of angry calls in a matter of hours. The Jewish lobby is good at orchestrating pressure.”  

Huge organizations keeping a watchful eye on anything anti-Israel, dominating the public discourse, is nothing new, and is naturally not only restricted to media. In the early 1980s, AIPAC recruited students to help identify professors and campus organizations that might be considered anti-Israel. The findings were published in 1984 in The AIPAC College Guide: Exposing the Anti-Israel Campaign on Campus. This is an ongoing project which still exists today. Campus Watch, a website which invites students to report anti-Israel behavior at U.S. colleges, is probably influenced by the AIPAC project. This site started off by publishing dossiers on suspect academics in an attempt to blacklist and intimidate scholars. It’s still up and running, loving the word ”conspiracy theory”…

Note that these aren’t small organizations whose work go unnoticed. These are lobby groups with immense power. To be able to shut up the whole American mainstream media about controversial policies in Israel, you definitely need power. Management by fear.

movies, politics, religion

>Genocide Awareness Pt.2

April 10, 2010 Indy 4 Comments

We all know about ”the six million Jews” figure, we hear about that everyday (you hardly have to be a news junkie to catch that). The Holocaust certainly was unique. But so was the extermination of possibly as many as sixty million Africans during the African slave trade, and so was the near-total extermination of one hundred million American Indians. You don’t hear about that quite as often.
As for American Indians, this was about the total extermination of entire cultural, social, religious, and ethnic groups. When speaking of the Holocaust, we make fine distinctions among the different populations of Europe, but lump ”Africans” and ”Indians” into one single category. Maybe this is one reason why these genocides – which are far worse in terms of sheer numbers of people killed – are being ignored? And of course, the uniqueness of the Jewish people (the People’s Front of Judea!), Jews as the chosen people, makes the Holocaust so much more special and important. This is where the Holocaust religion comes marching in.

If you’re interested in the boundary between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, Defamation ought to be a movie worthy of your interest. It is directed by Yoav Shamir, an Israeli Jew, who also made the amazing Checkpoint documentary.
Shamir is interested in non-violence based on game theory. In game theory [quoted from an IMDB review], “the ‘Prisoner’s Dilemma’ states that the only concern of each individual player (or ‘prisoner’) is to try to maximize his own advantage, without any concern for the well-being of the other players. Both players will be tempted to harm the other player even though they would both ultimately benefit more by cooperation”.
This pretty much describes the situation in Israel.

Related posts:
Genocide Awareness Pt.1
An introductory video (featuring additional links to previous posts of interest)
The Israel Lobby – What it is
The Cash
The Israel Lobby 2009
The Israel Lobby 2009 – Part Two

Watch the introduction of Defamation here.

Watch the introduction of Checkpoint here.

philosophy, politics

>Earth Hour

March 28, 2010 Indy Leave a comment

Earth Hour makes me sick. It’s straight up hypocrisy, the masses being orchestrated by the media to turn out the lights for one hour once a year. Wow. Big deal. Everybody at the same time: We did it! We love life!
Earth Hour does practically nothing but speaks to our bad conscience.

Also, Earth Hour always starts at an hour where all big businesses are shut down. Instead of the big businesses taking responsibility for the destruction of the Earth and shutting down in the middle of the day, the joke’s on us: Turn out the lights on your free time, please, and welcome back to work tomorrow. Work, eat, consume, sleep.

Usually, I’m all for small actions leading to big change, but this, as well as the International Women’s Day and such manifestations, is like spitting in the face of real change. One hour, or one day, and then it’s all back to normal, i.e. the mindless egotistic destruction we always occupy our time with.
Mankind will never learn.

—

Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals
But then how did that other “gloomy business,” the consciousness of guilt, the whole “bad conscience” come into the world?—And with this we turn back to our genealogists of morality. I’ll say it once more—or have I not said anything about it yet?—they are useless. With their own merely “modern” experience extending through only a brief period [fünf Spannen lange], with no knowledge of and no desire to know the past, even less a historical instinct, a “second sight”— something necessary at this very point—they nonetheless pursue the history of morality. That must justifiably produce results which have a less than tenuous relationship to the truth. Have these genealogists of morality up to now allowed themselves to dream, even remotely, that, for instance, that major moral principle “guilt” [Schuld] derived its origin from the very materialistic idea “debt” [Schulden]? Or that punishment developed as a repayment, completely without reference to any assumption about freedom or lack of freedom of the will?—and did so, by contrast, to the point where it always first required a high degree of human development so that the animal “man” began to make those much more primitive distinctions between “intentional,” “negligent,” “accidental,” “responsible,” and their opposites and bring them to bear when meting out punishment? That idea, nowadays so trite, apparently so natural, so unavoidable, which has even had to serve as the explanation how the feeling of justice in general came into existence on earth, “The criminal deserves punishment because he could have acted otherwise,” this idea is, in fact, an extremely late achievement, indeed, a sophisticated form of human judgment and decision making. Anyone who moves this idea back to the beginnings is sticking his coarse fingers inappropriately into the psychology of older humanity. For the most extensive period of human history, punishment was certainly not meted out because people held the instigator of evil responsible for his actions, and thus it was not assumed that only the guilty party should be punished:—it was much more as it still is now when parents punish their children out of anger over some harm they have suffered, anger vented on the perpetrator—but anger restrained and modified through the idea that every injury has some equivalent and that compensation for it could, in fact, be paid out, even if that is through the pain of the perpetrator. Where did this primitive, deeply rooted, and perhaps by now ineradicable idea derive its power, the idea of an equivalence between punishment and pain? I have already given away the answer: in the contractual relationship between creditor and debtor, which is, in general, as ancient as the idea of “legal subject” and which, for its part, refers back to the basic forms of buying, selling, bartering, trading, and exchanging goods.

politics

>A Necrologue for the Elite

March 8, 2010 Indy 4 Comments

Many are governed by few. People are born free but are everywhere in chains. The power of the sword is the founder of all governments. Governors rule by force, not opinion. Society must be protected from unwanted truths, since the common person follows not reason, but faith. It is a fundamental human need – and hence a fundamental human right – to inquire and create, free of external force.

As we have seen over the past couple of years, with the FRA, IPRED, HADOPI etc. gone haywire, control of thought is far more important in free countries than it is in military states. A military state can control and submit its domestic enemy by force, but as the state loses this weapon, other devices are required to prevent the ignorant masses from interfering with public affairs. The public must be reduced to observers, not participants.
One of the most important tasks for the elite in a democratic society, a free society, is to govern and manipulate the organized habits and opinions of the masses. Population control is necessary to keep the public marginalized in the public arena. After work (work is, for the most of us, where we are turned into instruments for other ends, rather than acting as human beings fulfilling our inner needs), each person should be alone in front of the TV watching soap operas and “reality” shows, in order not to be able to think about what they believe in, not to formulate their own concerns and programs and not act to realize them.
Eduardo Galeano writes that ”the majority must resign itself to the consumption of fantasy. Illusions of wealth are sold to the poor, illusions of freedom to the oppressed, dreams of victory to the defeated and of power to the weak.”
These are the central themes of modern political culture.

The condition of revolt exists in women towards men, in oppressed nations towards their oppressors, and above all in labour towards capital.
Bertrand Russell

humour, politics