Our Solidarity is Our Strength

Beware the Anti-Anti-War Left

A Humble but Firm Giving of Thanks (by Jase Short)

It should not be in question that all communities require holidays. We need time to have community celebrations, to take time off of work and to enjoy fellowship with one another. Further, we need to commemorate important events that define us as a people, because this is just part of what goes into being a society of human beings whether you live in 5th century Tokyo or 21st century Kinshasha.

The problem that many of us have with Thanksgiving is not that we are sour grapes who want nothing more than to work year round and scorn any positive flourishing of fellowship among our community members—far from it. On the contrary, what makes Thanksgiving so difficult for us as a people is the uncritical celebration of the results of a successful genocide on the North American continent.

Thanksgiving as a holiday was instituted to bring national unity during the socio-political conflicts that culminated in the American Civil War. It made official practices that were carried out without the cloak of official sanction in an attempt to reconcile white Americans in the northern and southern states through a re-affirmation of our common narrative of Manifest Destiny. According to this national ideology, all white people were destined to spread their Protestant society across the North American continent, eliminating the indigenous population on the one hand while subjugating rival states in Canada and Mexico on the other. In the midst of this, African slaves were to be utilized as a means of expanding white power and wealth by displacing class conflicts between white farmers and white landowners onto a racial struggle that unified the white population.

There was no contradiction in the eyes of the dominant sectors of US society between calls for freedom and the realities of white supremacy. Indeed, freedom was initially seen as a freedom of white male property owners to control the state apparatus whose principal goal was to expand settler communities west of the Alleghenies after the end of British rule. The Declaration of Independence includes sections which lament the lack of a free hand in dealing with the problem of the native population who had the gall to remain alive, occupying land that white men were destined to control.

White supremacy, patriarchy and settler-state capitalism were the substance behind the formal celebrations of Thanksgiving. By the end of the Civil War, the conflict within the settler-state camp had been settled: a new white supremacy took shape, industrial capitalism began to determine the economic future of the former colonies and the native population was slated for extermination.

Over the course of the next half century, the remaining native populations were wiped out, turned on one another, expelled, placed in large concentration camps, swindled and duped into forms of economic servitude and eventually locked away firmly on reservations. Their children were abducted through official policy, subjected to indoctrination and cultural genocide. Native peoples would bravely struggle through this long nightmare, but after the Wounded Knee massacre, serious armed struggle mostly ceased among the various groups.

Much more could and needs to be said about the continuing struggle, the development of the American Indian Movement, the Turtle Island occupation and the second “battle” of Wounded Knee, the Pine Ridge Reservation, the accumulated insults of Mount Rushmore and the federal agencies who dealt with “Indian Affairs.” Indeed, more needs to be said about the ecological consequences of displacing a people whose way of life had remained in a state of relative equilibrium within their ecosystem over many generations versus a people whose economic madness generated ecological disasters like the Dust Bowl and the accumulated horrors of the last 50 years. Much more needs to be said, but there is not enough space here to truly do justice.

What is important is that we put the standpoint of the indigenous peoples of the Americas at the forefront of our concerns. We must come to terms with the reality that we live in a settler-state which came to maturity, settled in its occupied space until most forgot it was an occupation. Now we are a people who commemorate this crime against humanity with a feast day. This is abhorrent, but not a call to disregard other struggles and the fellowship of people. Authentic anti-racism requires that we listen to the voices of the oppressed and not presume to speak for them. No one, from the most radical representatives of the American Indian Movement on, believes that this genocide can somehow be reversed and the land “returned” to the native peoples via an absurd exodus of people from the North American continent. This is not the in the cards. The genocide has been too complete, the cultures’ too intertwined and the native identity too fragmented for some mythical return. The only people who put forward this absurd formula are whites dedicated to discrediting and belittling the struggle for justice among the indigenous people of the Americas.

But that does not mean we do not have a responsibility to own up to the truth, to learn from native struggles and to become the best allies we can in order to achieve justice for them in their current struggles. All struggles are intersectional—the struggle against white supremacy, patriarchy, class oppression, gender and sexual repression all are linked. We cannot pretend that someone living in a toxic environment, facing a Sheriff’s notice of eviction and harassment from racist state politicians can somehow section off those portions of their lives and deal with each struggle as separate.

We do have much to be thankful that we do not owe to the inheritance of the genocide of the Americas. We have the civil rights and liberties secured by continual grassroots struggle. We have some economic benefits gained by the monumental struggles by the labor movement for workers’ safety, adequate living and rights to assembly. We have legislation undermining sexual harassment and more from the feminist movement. The queer movements have brought us awareness of the intimate oppressions of heteronormativity, homophobia and so on, as well as some serious gains. Various ecology movements have prevented us from descending into the worst horrors of industrial pollution across the board.

These struggles are not over. Nothing gained up to this point can ever be perpetually secure for the very reason that human beings are malleable and embedded in a continuous flow of historical becoming. Regardless, we must be thankful for all of the ancestors who came before us and struggled in the street, in the home and in the workplace to win for us the concessions from our ruling class and their government machinery that we enjoy today. We cannot sit idly by while those concessions are stripped away in the name of bi-partisan “Grand Bargains” or in the name of protecting “the homeland” from the ever-elusive “terrorist threat.”

To be truly thankful we must learn our history, own it, appreciate the struggles for justice and liberation, and finally learn to care for one another in communities of struggle. Our real family is the family we make through comradely struggle for a new America, a new world and a better tomorrow. The road ahead will not be easy, but we should not feel guilty if we stop along the way and break bread with comrades because, after all, isn’t that the community we seek to protect and make better? Our long term goal to live in harmony with our environment, each other and ourselves cannot be attained if we never stop to really enjoy the fruits already ripe for our consumption. So this Thanksgiving, let us discard the dreams of white supremacists, drop the celebrations of genocide and truly own up to what has happened and what is happening.

Let us appreciate one another and the struggles of those who came before us rather than fall on platitudes about how we have so much because of some divine favor given to our nation-state that has not been extended to others. The hard work of liberation is a never-ending process in which the very people we seek to become are created in the struggle itself. Remember the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement’s encouragement to “be humble yet firm” with those around us at the dinner table who hold bigoted views and live in ideological fantasies.

Regenerating the bonds of family and community is a step in the direction of liberation that we cannot afford to skip, and this requires that we be neither cowards nor hotheads, but rather examples of why our movements deserve the solidarity and support we give them. Finally, let us hope that a day is coming, not many days hence, in which a truly democratic and diverse community of persons will break bread without all the baggage of oppression, exploitation and domination in order to give thanks for the beauty of living on this beautiful planet with its beautiful people.

USEFUL LINKS:

The American Indian Movement

Native Blood: The Myth of Thanksgiving

Criminalization of Indigenous People

United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

A Native American and Civil Rights’ View

Free Leonard Peltier, Native American Held Prisoner by US Government

Kill the Indian, Save the Man: The Genocidal Impact of American Indian Residential Schools by Ward Churchill

Election Day Thoughts: Who Really Struggled for Our Voting Rights & Our Responsibility (by Jase Short)

I’ve heard many folks on the right say things like, “Think of all the men and women who died to get you the vote,” and they are undoubtedly referring to soldiers in the US military who they erroneously suppose have struggled for our right to vote. This is, in fact, false.

The outcome of the Revolutionary War was not universal male suffrage (then the standard for universal voting rights, sadly), but rather suffrage only for white male property owners—the “responsible” few who owned the wealth and thus could be called upon to make the right decisions to safeguard that wealth with the power of the state.

As for the War of 1812 and the Mexican-American War, its quite obvious that none of this had to do with extending voting rights to more Americans. In the former case, in fact, a component of the war was an attempt to militarily conquer Canada, and in the latter case a successful invasion of Mexico ended with annexation of large swaths of territory.

The case of the Civil War is more complicated, but in the end the material fact is that it was a struggle by, on the one hand, the Confederate insurgents, who sought to maintain a system of slavery and a racial caste system, and, on the other hand, masses of soldiers who were fighting to preserve the Union…whatever the costs. The end result of a general strike among slaves, riots by poor whites and Union military success ended in a system that did in fact involve soldiers enforcing the right to vote for former slaves and whites who sided with the Republican Party, but in time even this would be stripped away and the long terror of Jim Crow descended on the South.

Soldiers certainly did not fight for the rights of Cubans, Puerto Ricans and Filipinos to vote in the 1898 Spanish-American War, nor did they take up arms to involve themselves in the final days of the imperial melee called World War I for the right to vote.

World War II? Well, it is clear that, in the long term, the victory of the Axis powers would have meant the end of electoral democracy for the losers, but in truth only US colonies like Hawaii (it was not a state at the time) were really under physical threat. As for those “liberated” by the Americans, a considerable amount of voting fraud was enforced after the war to ensure the Communists did not win control of the Italian and French governments, and in the case of Greece an out and out violent suppression of left-wing dissidents with US and British backing followed “liberation,” so that is a hard case to make.

One would have to be profoundly ignorant of history to look at the Cold War and say the US brought the right to vote to its satellites, even serious right wingers recognize that this was not the case, what with the obvious cases of military dictatorships in South Korea and South Vietnam with major US backing, as well as the numerous local authoritarianisms supported by the US government in the name of “containing the USSR.”

So who has died for our right to vote? Well, everyone who struggled for expanding that right, for starters. The poor farmers and other poor whites whose agitation led to the extension of suffrage to all white men in the early 1800’s, the abolitionists, left-wing Republicans and black activists of the Reconstruction era, the suffragettes at the turn of the century through World War I, the Freedom Riders and countless black Southerners who struggled to win the right to vote for black people in the Jim Crow system.

In other words, the real people who have fought and died for the right to vote are the very progressives, leftists, oppressed and so forth who have been so derided by right wingers as “anti-American” or “un-patriotic.” Today there are those in the liberal and oppressed communities who are documenting cases of voter intimidation, of various passive means utilized by various local and state governments to make voting difficult including understaffing precincts of predominately African-American communities and voter ID laws.

Today, in response to a case brought to the United Nations by the NAACP and the ACLU, UN observers are observing election irregularities in the US, though without the kind of extensive infrastructure that exists in other “troubled” places around the world. The US, for all of its talk of democracy and human rights, does not consider the right to vote a human right in its own borders and regularly subjects people to various hoops whose end result in disenfranchisement, including the states were former felons are permanently disenfranchised.

Florida is the most egregious case. There, the Democratic Party has brought a suit against the government and the Justice Department has had to intervene in order to push back against the extreme voter suppression undertaken by that state’s Republican leadership. Things got so bad in Miami, for instance, that voters swamped the election headquarters and chanted outside, “LET US VOTE! LET US VOTE!”

Our entire voting system is in need of desperate and extensive reform. The patchwork of local and state regulations for voting has created a Frankenstein’s monster of a system that does not serve the electorate, but rather serves the short term interests of political opportunists who seek to game the system and push for various forms of disenfranchisement. This is the very system that allowed the chaos of the 2000 Florida debacle, one that was ended with the absurd prospect of the right wing of the Supreme Court ruling to stop the constitutionally-mandated vote recount, thereby giving the Presidency to George W. Bush.

The electoral college, once a system devised to defend the interests of various “state republics” has now become another means for pushing undemocratic outcomes on the electorate. We no longer live in a system of mini-republics, the states are firmly subordinate to the national government, and the population routinely shifts from one state to another. The time has come for the abolition of the electoral college.

The time has also come for a national voting system in which the right to vote is indeed recognized as an inalienable civil and human right, not a liberty to be tampered with for the sake of opportunistic political machines. We need a single system for the entire country, extended early voting for all, international oversight of our elections, poll monitors documenting the procedures and vote counts, a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to vote, an end to discrimination against former felons, and Election Day must be declared a national holiday in which private businesses—with the exception of the most vital elements of infrastructure—are required to let their workers go vote.

But more than anything else, we need to put a stop to the private funding of our elections and replace it with a national system of public financing. Money ought not to be allowed to speak in place of actual voters, rather the realm of democracy must be free and open to the public on equal grounds—those with more money do not need a greater voice than the rest of us.

This system is clearly not designed in the interests of the vast majority and so it is our duty, as it has been in the past, to struggle to change that equation. Only with a massive effort in the streets, in the workplaces and neighborhoods by ordinary people standing up to power can we hope to bring about these necessary changes to our electoral system.

Will that be the end of our struggle? If we achieve these goals, will we then be able to elect true representation and call it a day? Never. Getting the right people into office will never solve our social problems or bring us authentic democracy, but it is a step in the right direction, and one that we have a duty to take on.

The blood of all of those oppressed who came before us to just get us these limited concessions in a system of structural inequality cries out to us, compels us to take action. It is not too late. The die has not been cast, we still have avenues that much of the rest of the world struggles to achieve. Let us not regard them with cynicism and incredulity, rather let us lay hold of what we have in order to struggle to achieve something greater.

The whole world is watching our elections. We’ve nothing to lose but our own apathy and disempowerment. We’ve much to win.

LINKS FOR TODAY:

http://www.solidarity-us.org/site/node/3738 ”JILL STEIN, GREEN PARTY4PREZ”

http://www.solidarity-us.org/site/node/3715 ”THE NEXT 4 YEARS”