Our Solidarity is Our Strength

Woo-hoo! Legendary got Akira Takarada to do a cameo for the...

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 13:14:53 -0400

Woo-hoo! Legendary got Akira Takarada to do a cameo for the upcoming Godzilla film! Fabulous!

legendary:

Special photo from the Godzilla set. Thanks to all the Godzilla fans for your support.

The Film Canon: The Host (2006)

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 13:48:52 -0400

The Film Canon: The Host (2006) :

filmcanon:

The Host

directed by Bong Joon-ho

I decided to shake things up once again by not only introducing a new foreign film (South Korea in this case) and by going back into sci-fi, horror, comedy, and a genre I happen to enjoy quite a bit, the giant monster genre. “The Host” is a special…

Great stuff here!

80 Years on: A Retrospective on King Kong (by Jase Short)

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 12:59:43 -0400

theweeklyansible:

Every civilization produces mythologies suited to its particular historical situation for various purposes, whether it be for entertainment of the lowest common denominator of interests within the broadest population or some specific striving of an artist or group of artists for excellence. King Kong will forever stand out as the progenitor of an entire genre of myth making unique to the historical situation of global capitalism, the mythology of the giant monster.

Of course various and sundry giants populate more ancient mythic annals, from Cyclopes (whose very name has taken an adjectival form to describe massive architecture) to dragons and giants. Yet, the proliferation of these creatures in contemporary mythology surpasses previous incarnations of the gigantic if for no other reason than changes in the modes of artistic production have created great opportunities for the contrasting of scale, most notably in cinema.

Read More

The Weekly Ansible: Futurism and Ecology (by Jase Short)

Sat, 09 Mar 2013 09:49:45 -0500

The Weekly Ansible: Futurism and Ecology (by Jase Short):

A must read!!!

It is unfortunate that for many the global ecological crisis (global warming, toxicity of our environments, food crises, and so on) represents an inevitable consequence of human technical development and population growth. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is not the existence of…

The Film Canon: American Psycho (2000)

Sat, 09 Mar 2013 08:58:46 -0500

The Film Canon: American Psycho (2000) :

Excellent overview by a fellow Ansiblean at his own tumblr. Don’t just read this one, scroll down and read some more!

American Psycho

directed by Mary Harron

I was recently reflecting on this movie, and it only made sense that I should eventually consider canonizing this film. I’ve always found this to be a fascinating movie, because for the longest time I felt that it wasn’t filmed right. I think,…

Our Solidarity is Our Strength: Why We Mourn Chavez

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 08:21:00 -0500

Our Solidarity is Our Strength: Why We Mourn Chavez:

jaseshort:

“An infernal machine that produces every minute an impressive amount of poor, 26 million poor in 10 years are 2.6 million per year of new poor, this is the road, well, the road to hell.”-Hugo Chavez

Why We Mourn the Death of Hugo Chavez

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 08:21:00 -0500

“An infernal machine that produces every minute an impressive amount of poor, 26 million poor in 10 years are 2.6 million per year of new poor, this is the road, well, the road to hell.”-Hugo Chavez

It is necessary I think, given the deluge of posts about the death of Hugo Chavez to step back a moment and take account of why some mourn and others celebrate, while still others remain entirely indifferent.

As for the indifferent, either they 1) have next to nothing invested in political developments among Latin American and Southern hemisphere nations or 2) they are generally indifferent to politics or 3) they hold to some strict moralistic principle about the symbolism of leadership.

As for the hostile, they are either amongst the variety of right wingers who despise the self-determination of nations, or they are deeply misinformed about Chavez’s political project or they are “anti-authoritarians” who believe that any manifestation of leadership or public personality is a degeneration of the struggle for democracy.

To these “anti-authoritarians” I would retort: all movements, all revolutions, all struggles of great masses of people produce public personas; symbolic subjectivities tend to embody the hopes and dreams of the oppressed as a kind of short hand expression for their hopes, desires and their struggle against oppressive forces.

Whether it be Cesar Chavez or Malcolm X, whether it be Harvey Milk or “Che” Guevara, movements produce these persons, not the other way around. The role of charismatic leaders in movements has always been central, whether in benign forms or in malignant forms.

To identify all expressions of such persons as always-already authoritarian personality cults is to distort the specificity of situations with a generalizing rule that obscures more than it reveals.

It is true, in the case of Chavez, that in the end there emerged the trappings of a bureaucratic wing of the Chavista establishment. It was, after all, a government that lived within the confines of the capitalist system, it did not have a decisive break with private property, nor the authoritarian structures of the capitalist state.

But it was a project constructed collectively. For every speech Chavez gave that was highlighted in the Western media as an example of his “dictatorship,” there were a dozen projects focused on empowering the masses of people through popular literacy drives, public healthcare, popular education, public assemblies, public media projects in which state funding allowed people to form their own participatory media collectives, take back the land initiatives and so much more.

Many were and remain critical of the person of Chavez within the Bolivarian movement. The masses of social struggles even include some sections (rather small but no less important) who are outright opposed to the person of Chavez, and yet they still were able to see why it was important that he be elected and not representatives of the old regime.

Nobody has argued that we’ve seen an example of accomplished democractic socialism throughout Venezuela, we’ve instead said that the project in Venezuela has reinvigorated the global socialist project and given it new life.

There were of course struggles which, ultimately, the legacy of Chavez runs up against: workers’ democracy, ecology, etc. Though even in those cases, the record is contradictory. There were times he made terrible moves, and it is a good thing that many people used the avenues made possible by the Bolivarian struggle to stand up against these moves.

But to argue that Chavez, continually under siege in spite of widespread popularity, subject to a military coup and multiple recall elections all of which dissolved in the face of mass popular support, under constant attack from the vast majority of the media for everything from his identification with the poor to the color of his skin, was somehow authoritarian in the sense that, say, Saddam Hussein or Kim Il Sung were authoritarians is to participate in a bald faced lie, pure and simple. This is simply not the case. Would it have been the case had he lived to see 2023? Perhaps, but in none of the other cases has popular democracy and movement activity reached such a deep level in a society.

We are critical of leaders and leadership, but we are not so naive or utopian or dogmatic as to believe that such a thing as leadership can somehow be eliminated within the circumstances of our current world order with all of its vast, anonymity-imposing constraints.

Today, to refuse to mourn, at least for a moment, with the people of Venezuela shows that you simply have no heart. A great fighter for justice, for popular democracy, for the self-determination of the Third World, for the renewal of socialism, for Latin American solidarity, for the idea of a united Latin America, for Afro-Caribbean self-determination, and for world peace had just died, and the vultures of the empire are circling, waiting to strike at the carcass and unleash a wave of attacks against all the people have gained in these 15 long years.

But this is not 1989. No Caracazo will silence the masses today. They are too organized, too motivated, too experienced to give up the fight now. Now we will see the struggle fragment, but there will be a core of people who will continue the Bolivarian project. They are where we should look to today.

"Ray Bradbury being a racist, sexist ass: About two years ago, a letter arrived from a solemn young..."

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 13:52:50 -0500

“Ray Bradbury being a racist, sexist ass:

About two years ago, a letter arrived from a solemn young Vassar lady telling me how much she enjoyed reading my experiment in space mythology, The Martian Chronicles.

But, she added, wouldn’t it be a good idea, this late in time, to rewrite the book inserting more women’s characters and roles?

A few years before that I got a certain amount of mail concerning the same Martian book complaining that the blacks in the book were Uncle Toms and why didn’t I “do them over”?

Along about then came a note from a Southern white suggesting that I was prejudiced in favor of the blacks and the entire story should be dropped.

Two weeks ago my mountain of mail delivered forth a pipsqueak mouse of a letter from a well-known publishing house that wanted to reprint my story “The Fog Horn” in a high school reader.

In my story, I had described a lighthouse as having, late at night, an illumination coming from it that was a “God-Light.” Looking up at it from the view-point of any sea-creature one would have felt that one was in “the Presence.”

The editors had deleted “God-Light” and “in the Presence.”

Some five years back, the editors of yet another anthology for school readers put together a volume with some 400 (count ‘em) short stories in it. How do you cram 400 short stories by Twain, Irving, Poe, Maupassant and Bierce into one book?

Simplicity itself. Skin, debone, demarrow, scarify, melt, render down and destroy. Every adjective that counted, every verb that moved, every metaphor that weighed more than a mosquito—out! Every simile that would have made a sub-moron’s mouth twitch—gone! Any aside that explained the two-bit philosophy of a first-rate writer—lost!

Every story, slenderized, starved, bluepenciled, leeched and bled white, resembled every other story. Twain read like Poe read like Shakespeare read like Dostoevsky read like—in the finale—Edgar Guest. Every word of more than three syllables had been razored. Every image that demanded so much as one instant’s attention—shot dead.

Do you begin to get the damned and incredible picture?

How did I react to all of the above?

By “firing” the whole lot.

By sending rejection slips to each and every one. By ticketing the assembly of idiots to the far reaches of hell.

The point is obvious. There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist / Unitarian, Irish / Italian / Octogenarian / Zen Buddhist, Zionist/Seventh-day Adventist, Women’s Lib/ Republican, Mattachine/ Four Square Gospel feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse. Every dimwit editor who sees himself as the source of all dreary blanc-mange plain porridge unleavened literature, licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme.

Fire-Captain Beatty, in my novel Fahrenheit 451, described how the books were burned first by minorities, each ripping a page or a paragraph from this book, then that, until the day came when the books were empty and the minds shut and the libraries closed forever.

“Shut the door, they’re coming through the window, shut the window, they’re coming through the door,” are the words to an old song. They fit my life-style with newly arriving butcher/censors every month. Only six weeks ago, I discovered that, over the years, some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young, had, bit by bit, censored some 75 separate sections from the novel. Students, reading the novel which, after all, deals with censorship and book-burning in the future, wrote to tell me of this exquisite irony. Judy-Lynn Del Rey, one of the new Ballantine editors, is having the entire book reset and republished this summer with all the damns and hells back in place.

A final test for old Job II here: I sent a play, Leviathan 99, off to a university theater a month ago. My play is based on the “Moby Dick” mythology, dedicated to Melville, and concerns a rocket crew and a blind space captain who venture forth to encounter a Great White Comet and destroy the destroyer. My drama premieres as an opera in Paris this autumn.

But, for now, the university wrote back that they hardly dared do my play—it had no women in it! And the ERA ladies on campus would descend with ball-bats if the drama department even tried!

Grinding my bicuspids into powder, I suggested that would mean, from now on, no more productions of Boys in the Band (no women), or The Women (no men). Or, counting heads, male and female, a good lot of Shakespeare that would never be seen again, especially if you count lines and find that all the good stuff went to the males!

I wrote back maybe they should do my play one week, and The Women the next. They probably thought I was joking, and I’m not sure that I wasn’t.

For it is a mad world and it will get madder if we allow the minorities, be they dwarf or giant, orangutan or dolphin, nuclear-head or water-conversationist, pro-computerologist or Neo-Luddite, simpleton or sage, to interfere with aesthetics. The real world is the playing ground for each and every group, to make or unmake laws. But the tip of the nose of my book or stories or poems is where their rights end and my territorial imperatives begin, run and rule. If Mormons do not like my plays, let them write their own. If the Irish hate my Dublin stories, let them rent type-writers. If teachers and grammar school editors find my jawbreaker sentences shatter their mushmilk teeth, let them eat stale cake dunked in weak tea of their own ungodly manufacture. If the Chicano intellectuals wish to re-cut my “Wonderful Ice Cream Suit” so it shapes “Zoot,” may the belt unravel and the pants fall.

For, let’s face it, digression is the soul of wit. Take philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton or Hamlet’s father’s ghost and what stays is dry bones. Laurence Sterne said it once: Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine, the life, the soul of reading! Take them out and one cold eternal winter would reign in every page. Restore them to the writer—he steps forth like a bridegroom, bids them all-hail, brings in variety and forbids the appetite to fail.

In sum, do not insult me with the beheadings, finger-choppings or the lung-defiations you plan for my works. I need my head to shake or nod, my hand to wave or make into a fist, my lungs to shout or whisper with. I will not go gently onto a shelf, degutted, to become a non-book.

All you umpires, back to the bleachers. Referees, hit the showers. It’s my game. I pitch, I hit, I catch. I run the bases. At sunset I’ve won or lost. At sunrise, I’m out again, giving it the old try.

And no one can help me. Not even you.

”

- “There is more than one way to burn a book.”, Foreword to Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury. (via wyoh)

AHAHAHAHA WOW FUCK YOU BRADBURY

(via descartesthinksnot)

also, i am just now realising that he wrote the minorities chipping away at accuraate reliable and relevant information, censoring this that and the other until we were all stripped of any purpose or meaning….as if we are pro-erasing motherfucking history rather than pro-LET’S MAKE SURE WE NEVER FORGET OUR HISTORIES BECAUSE IMPORTANT.

(via green-street-politics)

theweeklyansible: Dany has Yoshi!

Tue, 22 Jan 2013 21:24:56 -0500

theweeklyansible:

Dany has Yoshi!

The sad truth.

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 13:34:26 -0500

The sad truth.

"One of the curious manifestations of Americanism is to try to bring control of every dynamic into..."

Mon, 31 Dec 2012 12:43:32 -0500

“One of the curious manifestations of Americanism is to try to bring control of every dynamic into its own circuit. The Tunisians and Egyptians rose up, and the establishment media in the United States wanted to give the glove to Facebook or Obama’s 2009 Cairo speech or the handbook by philosopher Gene Sharp—not the ordinary people of North Africa themselves. In Cairo, Obama said, “we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.” During the Tahrir Square standoff, protestors chanted, “we have extended our hand, why have you clenched your first?” Their words came as they foisted in the air tear gas canisters that read Made in the USA. They fully grasped the hypocrisy of imperial liberalism. Facebook certainly allowed for some creative organizational work amongst the literate, but it was not significant…
On January 28, Mubarak, along the grains of this kind of Americanism, hastily cut Internet and cellphone service. It had little impact on the protests. As Navid Hassanpour shows in a paper presented to the American Political Science Association meeting in 2011, “The disruption of cellphone coverage and Internet on the 28th excacerbated the unrest in at least three major ways. It implicated many apolitical citizens unaware of or uninterested in the unrest; it forced more face-to-face communication, i.e., more physical presence in the streets; and finally it effectively decentralized the rebellion on the 28th through new hybrid communication tactics, producing a quagmire much hard to control and repress than one massive gathering in Tahrir.” In face, the closing down of Facebook provided new opportunities to reach new constituencies and to broaden the movement. It would be a surprise to the workers of Suez or the cadre of the Muslim Brotherhood or even the students of Cairo’s universities that they were unwitting pawns of someone else’s dreams. This is was an Egyptian Revolution. It did not seek permission from elsewhere.”

- Vijay Prashad

mralove: wavesofnausea: Oscar serving up realness

Tue, 25 Dec 2012 10:15:50 -0500

mralove:

wavesofnausea:

Oscar serving up realness

Beware the Anti-Anti-War Left

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 09:57:00 -0500

Beware the Anti-Anti-War Left:

fuckyeahmarxismleninism:

By Jean Bricmont, Counterpunch

Ever since the 1990s, and especially since the Kosovo war in 1999, anyone who opposes armed interventions by Western powers and NATO has to confront what may be called an anti-anti-war left (including its far left segment). In Europe, and notably in France, this anti-anti-war left is made up of the mainstream of social democracy, the Green parties and most of the radical left. The anti-anti-war left does not come out openly in favor of Western military interventions and even criticizes them at times (but usually only for their tactics or alleged motivations – the West is supporting a just cause, but clumsily and for oil or for geo-strategic reasons). But most of its energy is spent issuing “warnings” against the supposed dangerous drift of that part of the left that remains firmly opposed to such interventions. It calls upon us to show solidarity with the “victims” against “dictators who kill their own people”, and not to give in to knee-jerk anti-imperialism, anti-Americanism, or anti-Zionism, and above all not to end up on the same side as the far right. After the Kosovo Albanians in 1999, we have been told that “we” must protect Afghan women, Iraqi Kurds and more recently the people of Libya and of Syria. …

A favorite theme of the anti-anti-war left is to accuse those who reject military intervention of “supporting the dictator”, meaning the leader of the currently targeted country. The problem is that every war is justified by a massive propaganda effort which is based on demonizing the enemy, especially the enemy leader. Effectively opposing that propaganda requires contextualizing the crimes attributed to the enemy and comparing them to those of the side we are supposed to support. That task is necessary but risky; the slightest mistake will be endlessly used against us, whereas all the lies of the pro-war propaganda are soon forgotten.

:( President Obama is assassinating people, carrying out mass...

Mon, 03 Dec 2012 13:14:23 -0500

:( President Obama is assassinating people, carrying out mass bombings of civilians in multiple countries from Pakistan to Yemen. This policy must end. Liberals freaked out (rightly) with torture under Bush, but they cheer Obama on with his policy of outright killing these people. We must end this madness.

Fantastic short introduction which has the virtue of showing us...

Thu, 29 Nov 2012 10:45:07 -0500

Fantastic short introduction which has the virtue of showing us that no, it’s not “too complicated” to take sides. Apartheid is wrong, settler states must be stopped in their tracks.

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

Thu, 22 Nov 2012 07:58:00 -0500

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

Video

Tue, 06 Nov 2012 14:16:45 -0500

Video

Tue, 06 Nov 2012 14:16:00 -0500

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

Tue, 06 Nov 2012 10:11:00 -0500

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”

For aspiring writers…

Thu, 04 Oct 2012 18:14:09 -0400

For aspiring writers…