The week started and ended with the simultaneous events of open hostility and racism in Arizona and the environment-choking catastrophe in the Golfo de Mexico. Both events brought aggressively into existence by the same colonial occupiers who invaded this land more than four centuries ago. This violent force declared all men equal while commiting genocide against the indigenous peoples of this hemisphere from Artic to Tierra del Fuego all the while buying, selling and trading enslaved Africans.
Interestingly, today 2010, there are more African-American/Black men in prison than were enslaved in 1850.
Meanwhile, on Latino USA, Maria Hinojosa’s guests including 9500 Liberty director Eric Byler, and Linda Valdez, member of the editorial board of The Arizona Republic discussed Arizona law (SB 1070).
Eric Blyer’s documentary looks at the alarming but not unexpected racism playing out across the nation. Much of the hate is the product of the laughably misnamed, FAIR, a hate group that poses as a source of public policy.
The world according to FAIR would rid this nation of people who had been here for millennia before the forebears of FAIR had managed to develop a language just a short thousand years ago.
Those same European terrorists now bring a pogrom of sorts to this land, five centuries after the first European “illegal aliens” arrived. Arizona has a long history of racial intolerance. Arizona, alone among the 50 states refused to accept Martin Luther King Day as a federal holiday until the effects of a nationwide, some say worldwide, boycott helped the folk of the state to change their minds.
Linda Valdez for her part echoed the discussion Terry Gross (Fresh Air) had with journalist Howard Fischer last week. Fischer is a journalist who has covered events in Arizona for years. The state is indeed a world apart.
None of this is new. In a Playboy interview in 1979 William Colby, then head of the CIA, was asked what the greatest threat facing America was (at that time). Colby’s response may surprise many since in 1979 we were locked in the Cold War with the Soviet Union and wary of China---Colby’s response, “Latin America and in particular Mexico.” Adding, “We don’t have enough bullets to stop them all.”
On the other side of the nation this past Thursday 6 May 2010 Diane Rehm discussed this week’s U.K. elections with delightful guests one of whom described America’s presidential elections perfectly as “parasitic decadence.” It is, of course. We spend billions on our elections an outcome neither invisioned nor intended by the founders. It is a sad, perhaps unmendable misfortune that after all that money we get less “democracy” by way of arcane convoluted machinations of “party” owned in large part by the oligarchy/plutocracy that run this republic and much of the world. The only clear winners are those participating in the fleecing of Americans---political action committees, the two major parties, the broadcast companies, those behind political commercials and those airing them. The recent Supreme Court decision will only exacerbate an already egregious condition.
Of course, that is not to say that England’s parliamentary system is any more democratic, it isn’t. Of the many forms of “democracy” Proportional Representation comes closest to giving constituents a voice but this is not the form England employs nor is it a common form of governance.
The first of its kind debates in the U.K. presented Nick Clegg to the world. Clegg spoke things that no American politician could ever state and hope to have the chance of an ice-cube in Hell of securing votes. Such an outspoken candid would be shunned or shot in this country. Clegg declared that he does not believe in God, but that he has great respect for people of faith. Don’t forget that our own Constitution specifically states that belief in God is not a requirement for office---no doubt much to the chagrin of the aforementioned group that would have us believe “we were founded as a Christian nation.”
On another topic that would be taboo in America, the First Amendment notwithstanding, “Nick Clegg announced that the “special relationship” between America and Britain was over. He criticised British leaders for their “slavish” devotion to Washington.” I understand.
Among other guests on the PBS’s Diane Rehm Show this week was Chilean-born writer, Isabel Allende. Her latest work, Island Beneath the Sea, is the culmination of four years’research. It is a work of fiction that bases the events of the book on the very real history of Haiti and the culturally accepted abuses of Haiti’s European colonizers, including the enslavement and exploitation of people of color.
Lest we forget the rules of enslavement chronicled in Allende’s book were practiced here as well. People of color were simply not thought of by 18th and 19th Century European terrorist-colonizers as people. To the European colonizers people of color were simply chattle. Thus the raping of women of color was not a crime nor was raping offspring resulting from the initial rape incest, much less a crime.
Somali pirates seem a constant presence in the news. Much is made of their practices. Admittedly, the notion of piracy is not so attractive and so begs the question then why it is this republic still reserves the right to use it---by its Constitution?
Forty years since Kent State? It seems like yesterday. So much hate spewed forth from the mouths of those said to be the “greatest generation” on that day and the days that followed. Many of that generation, parents to the generation protesting, stated that the only problem with the killing of students by the National Guard that day in April 1970 was that any students had been left alive.
A would-be New York car-bomber is in custody. He is a naturalized citizen possessing a graduate degree and seemingly someone who had bought into the “American Dream” lock, stock and barrel---if you’ll pardon the expression. Why? Indeed. If the foregoing doesn’t quite explain it---I am unlikely.
This nation through its public policy has us occupying Iraq, Afghanistan and for all intents and purposes Kwait, Qatar and bullying Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia---to say little of how we treat Iran and any other country that dare oppose our supreme authority. At the same time for almost two generations we have facilitated and enabled the bullying of Palestinians and most of the Middle East by Israeli’s. And still many need to ask, “Why do they hate us?” Please.
This brings us back to Arizona and the unscrupulous raping and exploiting of the people of color of the Americas as well as the oppression of the entirety of what those same Europeans coined, the Third World.
To the detriment of the “Third World” America, its elitist office holders and transnational corporations have raped pillaged and plundered most, if not all the Third World, throughout the entire history of this nation. That is a fact unlikely to change. My quest is to keep it in your face, to keep it at the fore-front of your awareness. Maybe then people might start to give a damn.
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